Windows on the World

by Frédéric Beigbeder

  One morning, at 9:26 AM, I realized that I was incapable of loving anyone except myself. The day was my mirror. In the morning, I thought about what I was going to say on TV. In the afternoon, in front of the cameras, I said what I had to say. In the evening, I watched myself on TV saying it. Sometimes I’d see myself four times because it would be repeated three times. The night before, I watched the rough edit of a different program for seven hours on the trot. I spent all my time admiring my own face on a color screen, but even that wasn’t enough. I called my friends before the show to remind them when it started; I called them afterwards to make sure they’d watched it. I organized drinks parties where I left the TV on so that we could—as I said with feigned irony—”watch me in concert.”

  I blame the consumer society for making me what I am: insatiable. I blame my parents for making me what I am: vague.

  I blame other people to avoid blaming myself.

  No memories of my childhood. Fragments, an image or two. I’m jealous of people who can recount every detail of their life as a baby. I remember nothing, a few flashes which I copy down here in no particular order, nothing more. I believe that I didn’t begin to exist until 1990 when I published my first book: a memoir, coinciden-tally. Writing restored my memory.

  For example, there’s Verbier, my father’s chalet, in 1980. It is a man’s house. I like our vacations together, just guys skiing. Every night we pig out on fondue and there are no chicks around to complain about our diet. I light the fire in the hearth, Charles skis until it’s dark, Dad reads the American papers. And every morning he wakes us, my brother and me, by tickling our feet which stick out from under the Ikea duvet, trying to make up for the fact that for the first fifteen years of our lives he wasn’t there to do it.

  And another one: when I was ten I started keeping a travel diary on a beach in Bali between water fights with my big brother while Dad hit on sun-drenched girls at the hotel bar. I didn’t know that I would never stop putting my life down on paper. That little green notebook: a gear still grinding inside me.

  I decided to research myself. Rather than wait for Proustian flashes of “involuntary memory,” I become a reporter, I retrace my steps.

  I have no memory of Neuilly-sur-Seine. Nonetheless, I was born there. In a small white private hospital. I’m from the well-heeled suburbs. That’s probably where I get my expensive tastes. I like cleanliness, neat gardens, soundless cars, nursery schools where they shoot the first hostages straight away. German governesses whom we refer to, however, as “nurses.” I see childhood as something pristine, sleek, and, for the most part, boring as hell.

  I was born with a silver spoon up my ass. I’d love to tell you about the anguished childhood of an accursed artist. I envy Dave Pelzer: my life wasn’t tragic. It’s tragic how little tragedy there was.

  I wasn’t a wanted child. Born seventeen months after my brother I’m one of those cases—common at the time—of an unplanned second pregnancy. The boy who arrives too early. It’s hardly a news story: the pill wasn’t legal in 1965, most children arrived unplanned. But two children make a lot more racket than one. I have to admit that in my father’s shoes, I’d have done exactly what he did: get the fuck out and fast! In fact, thirty-three years later that’s precisely what I did.

  I wasn’t on the agenda, that’s how it goes, no big deal, human beings coped with such things for thousands of years. Anyway, when I finally did show up, I was lucky: I was pampered, mollycoddled, spoiled rotten, it would be churlish to whine. It’s either too much love or not enough. I’m not going to go and do a Romain Gary and complain about how my mother loved me too much! It’s very important to be traumatized by one’s parents. We need it. We are all traumatized children who traumatize our own. I’d rather be traumatized by my parents than by someone I didn’t know.

  Anyway, there I was, just the same, squatting my own life. I’d invited myself to this planet. Someone had to set another place at the table for me, sorry, there’ll be less dessert for everyone. For a long time I’ve had the feeling that I am a burden to others. Hence my taste for parasitism: my life is a party where I showed up without an invite.

  I discovered that television was a way to make myself desired. I wanted crowds on their knees begging me to exist. I wanted hordes of fans pleading with me to show up. I wanted to be chosen, celebrated, a celebrity. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it, the little twists of fate that make us work flat out instead of being normal?

  9:27

  The great thing about Candace was her “hasbian” side: an ex-lesbian knows her body better and knows exactly how to touch it to make her come. Women who haven’t slept with other women are not nearly as good in bed, same as men who aren’t bi. What am I doing thinking about sex instead of how to save our asses? Because it is a way of saving our asses. As long as I am a sex maniac, I am. When I stop thinking about sex, I will cease to be. Jerry looks at me the way he looks at life in general: with a benevolence that is, however, belied by the facts. Is that what love is? Kindness that is completely unjustified?

  “What are we gonna do, Dad?”

  “I don’t know. Wait here, there’s no point going back down.”

  “Any minute now,” says Lourdes, “they’re gonna land rescue teams on the roof. They’ll break this door down and we’ll be the first ones out of here.”

  “Really? Maybe there’s too much smoke for them to land?”

  “They don’t need to land no helicopters, just drop a couple of cops and firefighters and their gear onto the roof at the end of a rope, Chrissakes, they’re trained for this kinda thing…”

  Lourdes has found hope again, that’s the most important thing. At least one of us has to muster some self-assurance at all times in this cramped claustrophobic hole. Hope is like a witness, like a tank of oxygen which we pass round among ourselves.

  “Are they gonna jump down onto the roof in, like, those black suits and balaclavas and all?” Jerry asks.

  “Well, duh!” says David. “They’re not gonna come dressed as Mickey and Donald and Goofy.”

  “A good team with a blowtorch, they’d have this door open in less than three minutes, even with the lock broken.”

  “Maybe they’ll be able to hack into the security system and unlock it, like Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible.”

  “Wow, yeah, like suspended on cables upside down. Too cool!”

  We need something to believe in. Lourdes and Jerry start praying, droning, “God save us, please save us,” hands joined, looking up at the filthy ceiling of our prison. For now, at least, we’re still alive.

  9:28

  Disasters have an upside: they make people want to live. New York in the noughties is like Paris in the twenties after the slaughter of the First World War. The roaring twenties were a riot of champagne, and Americans came to Paris to live it up. Since September 11, the wild times are in New York and the French come here to be insulted. In fact, I put on a Spanish accent so people will leave me alone: “Olé! Está magnífico! Muy muy caliente! Si si si Señorita.”

  Dazed New Yorkers mistake me for an ally. The Big Apple is the forbidden fruit into which every Eve sinks her perfect white teeth. The planes have created a huge brothel. Am I being overoptimistic? The city is still in mourning; maybe that’s why everyone is wearing black. Only a handful of resistance fighters drown their sorrows in parties and live as if nothing has changed. But everything’s changed, as I’ll soon realize. It’s just that I only hang out with ornery people.

  For example, by 9:28 PM on the Lower East Side at Idlewild boys and girls are dancing topless. The girls have flowers painted on their breasts. This is something they call “swinging lite”: There’s a lot of caressing, kissing, fondling, but no penetration. There are lots of such parties: “Cake” being the most famous.

  “It’s not an orgy!” says the mistress of the house, “just an erotic soiree.”

  Often, a couple will leave with someone of random gender and you can’t get them on the phone for t
wo days…But there are also lots of guys who just get off on watching their girlfriend French-kissing another girl, and nothing more. To hook up with these parties: www.cake-nyc.com, or there’s www.elegupnyc.com which is more hard-core (the password for their last party was “Eat me.”) Cover charge: $50 for a couple, $ 15 for a woman on her own. Warning: the parties tend to finish early so everyone can head off somewhere else to fuck. The aim of these new parties is to move beyond fidelity, to think outside the couple, to invent different ways of loving without sacrificing desire.

  New York is the only place in the world where you can still find that rarest of creatures: girls wearing sandals in winter drinking pink cocktails from triangular glasses and swaying to Craig David. Recipe for a “Cosmopolitan”: Absolut Citron, Cointreau, cranberry juice and lime served in a martini glass. This treacherous tipple reminds me of the “Tonios” of my youth in Inún (gin, vodka, grenadine, orange juice): ghastly memories of my first drunken outings, some sugary mixture in my veins. I have a drink or five. Bin Laden wishes these girls harm. I wish them well, with their nipples hard in their tight crop tops. And it’s at this point that I have an epiphany. Today’s INTERNATIONAL PLAYBOY is a woman. It’s Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw (the heroine of Sex and the City). These are the people the fanatical Muslims are scared of, and I can understand why. They scare me shitless too, with their heavy artillery: mascara, lip gloss, oriental perfumes, silk lingerie. They’ve declared war on me. They terrify me because something tells me that I’ll never be able to seduce them all. There’s always another one on the horizon, heels higher than the last. It’s an impossible task. If they crashed a charter plane onto the city every day, they still wouldn’t succeed in eradicating the bevy of dangerous beauties; the sexual imperialism of these sumptuous sluts in their I ESCAPED THE BETTY FORD CLINIC T-shirts; the supremacy of their devastating necklines and their eyelashes which flutter as they contemptuously write you off:

  “You’re not on my to-do list. Stop hitting on me, man. I do the hunting tonight. Scram! Beat it!”

  “Coffee and a taxi please.” (I suppose you think your tits and your legs do something for me. Apart from giving me a boner, zilch. So shut the fuck up, you and your sandals. Not even close.)

  Does pleasure replace fear? Fanatics are hitting the fan. Their terrorization has produced precisely the reverse of what they had hoped. Hedonism is at its peak. Babylon lives again! Women aren’t veiling their faces; on the contrary, they’re stripping off in restaurants, playing blindman’s buff, making out with coworkers and kissing strange boys at “speed-dating” evenings. A new jazz age gets under way in an excess of debauchery while we bomb foreign countries. People teasingly make out, and terrorism falls to pieces. Terrorism terrorizes no one: it shores up freedom. Sex dances with death. There are no winners, only losers like me. As I walk into a transsexual Chinese cabaret (Lucky Cheng), they burst into a song to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You”: “Happy blow job to you! Happy blow job to you!”

  Polygamous, dope-smoking beardy-weirdos want to give us lessons in morality? Okay, guys, you win, we’ll all live like you: we’ll all be polygamous and smoke dope. There’s time enough later to be disillusioned. We laugh ourselves silly one minute, next minute we’re miserable. That’s how we live.

  9:29

  For three-quarters of an hour now there’s been a plane under our feet, when suddenly Jerry says he’d like to be a fly.

  “Doofus!” says David. “Ever see a fly against a window? They fly around like crazy and never find the way out.”

  “He’s right, Jerry. You don’t need to become a fly, you’re already a fly and so am I, and Dave here is a mosquito. C’mon, lets go buzz buzz against the windows.”

  And I start buzzing like a wasp running around in all directions. Lourdes looks worried. Jerry looks flabbergasted. Finally, I’m rewarded: David laughs and starts twisting his napkin into little feelers on his head. Lourdes claps as Jerry joins us and we all buzz around bouncing off the windows. Anthony picked a good spot. This room is relatively sheltered from the rest of the tower as long as we keep the doors sealed. Lourdes presses her ear against the door to the roof. She tells us to shut up on a regular basis, so that she can listen for helicopters dropping firefighters on the roof. But all we hear is the screeching of the girders as they buckle, the screams of the burning and the dull, oppressive rumble of the fire. David the mosquito starts the buzzing again, stinging his brother with his finger, and off we go again.

  Another minute killed.

  9:30

  The American “Grand Tour” has been a great French tradition since Chateaubriand and his nephew (by marriage) de Tocqueville. We enjoy contemplating the vastness of America with sardonic fascination. In the nineteenth century it was romanticism and squaws. In the twentieth century, the birth of global capitalism and the consumer society (the New York of Morand and Celine). In the twenty-first it’s clear that the system no longer runs smoothly, that if we want to understand our own annihilation, we have to walk back up Broadway in the rain. Overstressed executives sit on the sidewalk slumped on wooden frames in the shelter of movie posters, having their shoulders massaged. The sex shops have been replaced with Disney stores. The LCD Coca-Cola billboards are on the blink: the blood-red logo flashes nervously like a broken strobe. What is this sodden crowd searching for? Money is no longer their God. Louis-Ferdinand Celine walked this same boulevard in 1925; he evokes it in 1932 in Voyage au bout de la nuit: “It’s a district filled with gold, a miracle, and through the doors you can actually hear the miracle, the sound of dollars being crumpled, for the Dollar is always too light, a genuine Holy Ghost, more precious than blood.” It’s not the same anymore, we no longer worship hard cash, people are sick and tired of it but they don’t know any other way of living, so they get a neck rub, stretch out on couches, cheat on their wives with their mistresses and on their mistresses with guys, they search for love, buy vitamin tablets, step on the gas, honk their horns—yeah, that’s the universal sign of despair, they honk their horns so people will know they exist.

  The history between France and America is long dormant. Perhaps it’s time to wake it up. France can still help, my country could be useful for something for once. France is not America’s mother—that’s England—but it could claim to be America’s godmother. You know, the crusty old aunt with the facial-hair problem who you only see on big family occasions, her breath stinks, you’re a bit ashamed of her, more often than not you forget she exists but who reminds you of her existence from time to time by giving you a beautiful gift.

  Walking down Madison Avenue, I meet a girl with a black cross outlined on her forehead. Then another. Then two bankers bearing the same cross on their foreheads. I begin to think I’m seeing things, but I didn’t have anything to drink at lunch. There are dozens of them now, tall and short, VPs and secretaries, all walking round with a cross tattooed on their foreheads in soot. I’m convinced there’s some madman a couple of blocks away distracting their attention and smearing black paint on their foreheads when they’re not looking. The sidewalk is packed with people with crosses on their faces. I swim against the tide of urban crossbreeds and finally I realize: they’re coming from Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. Today is Ash Wednesday. There’s a line several blocks long hanging around waiting to have holy ashes applied to their foreheads. It gives you an idea of the atmosphere in the capital of the world. Workers from every walk of life are willing to give up their lunch hour so that a priest can draw a cross on their foreheads in dust. I’ve never seen the like of it in France.

  Something else is new: New Yorkers have become unbelievably considerate, helpful, thoughtful, polite. I remember the fanatical individualism of the eighties, when you’d see a New Yorker stepping over the corpse of a homeless person on the sidewalk without breaking stride. There’s nothing like that now. Firstly, because Giuliani’s relocated all the homeless (or they’re dead); but something else has happened: apocalyptic politeness. The end of the wor
ld makes people kind. I saw someone help a blind man across the road in the snow, a woman pick up a man’s umbrella, two people hail the same taxi and each suggest the other take this one. It’s like a Frank Capra movie! Ten, twenty times a day I’ve spotted this strange hybrid, this mutant creature, this incredible thing: a philanthropic New Yorker.

  September 11 has had two diametrically opposed consequences: kindness at home, cruelty abroad.

  9:31

  My name’s David Yorston and my dad’s about to mutate. He keeps saying he’s not a superhero but the transformation is imminent. Two minutes ago, he was imitating a fly: the signs are unmistakable.

  “David, I’m not Superman! I wish I was! You think I’m proud of just being me?”

  A typical denial. Mortals with superhuman powers always pretend to be puny humans so they can preserve their freedom of movement and autonomy of action. There’s a really strong smell of chocolate. Yummy.

  “It’s the candy machine on 108,” says Lourdes, “starting to cook.”

  Okay, now it’s starting to stink. Dad’s walking round in circles like a mutant in a cage. That’s when he spots the camera: a little grey box dangling from the ceiling. He rushes at it waving his arms.

  “Hey! Yoo-hoo! We’re up here!”

  He holds Jerry up to the camera, then lifts me up too. He’s squeezing me so hard he’s bruising my arms. It’s probably his superpowers getting activated.

  “They can see us! Hello! Come and get us!”

  He jumps up and turns the camera toward the door and points at it.

  “Look at the door! OPEN THE DOOR!”

  Dad’s doing the pogo, he looks like the Chili Peppers all rolled into one.