Thursday, December 08, 2005First night in Paris4:16 a.m.The city outside is foreign, and it's Paris. It is filled with wonders I have only a limited number of days and hours to breathe in and assimilate. It's like a huge bookstore with countless volumes waiting to be read, promising juicy stories, rich descriptions, evocations that pierce the soul. How am I supposed to sleep amidst all of it? Long ago I came to this city and spent heady days and nights roaming the streets with a polyglot group of other young people. We spoke multiple languages, primarily the universal one of youth. We met at Shakespeare & Company, the renowned bookstore, so we shared a second language of love of writing and books. Our third and fourth languages included alcohol and the high spirits of the late 1970's, so we communicated successfully and well. We moved in a group. I found my notes from those days and since they were the days before the Internet and email, of course I never heard from any of them ever again. They were ephemeral and potent. They were the embodiment of all foreign pleasures, all conversations possible. Upon arriving in Paris today, we realized that we could not find my friend Dee. Dee is here to celebrate his 50th birthday and we have been invited to be his guests for the occasion. As Spencer says, it's the ultimate party favor. It was Dee with whom I was traveling when we came here in 1979. It was Dee who left me here for a few days while I stayed on, living at Shakespeare & Company, unable to stop the flow of conversation with the books and the city and the people and wondering if I should stay on the entire summer to get my fill. It was Dee with whom I met up again in Bombay a few days later, realizing (rightly) that I would always be able to come back to Paris but that a trip around the world was not going to fall into my lap every day. It was Dee who taught me how to travel, and to navigate through new streets, and how to be resourceful and calm and polite and smart. I had no real concern about how to meet up with him. No matter that the web site for the apartments he's rented for us and his other family and friends had no street address. No matter that I was traveling heavy (as usual) and with two kids. We had a bit of a problem with the taxi driver who insisted angrily that we needed an address number for him to drop us off at. There was kind of a foreshadowing of future problems when I pulled out my cell phone and called the phone number on the web site only to get an outgoing message in France that sounded a lot like I wasn't going to figure out how to dial the number successfully, ever, in this or any future lifetime. But I tipped the driver generously and assured him that it was not his fault, nor his problem, and persuaded him to drop us on a corner on Rue St. Honore, just north of the Louvre. This is Paris, you realize. Every square inch is intoxicating, filled with little cafes, creperies, tabacs, bars. Behind every glass pane are people deep in conversation, shrouded in cigarette smoke, discussing les travailles de la monde, the passions de la couer, or just doing that particularly un-American thing that looks a lot like relaxing. We're kind of lost, but MAN we're lost in a great place. We're lost in a place like people get lost in opium. Like we're lost but, with all due respect to the gods of chance, who CARES? Still, there's the fact that it's about two degrees the wet side of freezing, dark and starting to rain. And I am in charge of two children and three large bags, and three backpacks and we do need to get this sorted out. So we go into the first creperie. I am glad I have been whitening my teeth for the past few weeks as my smile is going to have to do a lot of work here. My hair is flat and pulled back into some kind of mess, my makeup has been non-existent since we left Waterloo station, and I'm encased in a ski jacket, gloves, scarf, jeans and tennies. There isn't much to work with in the realm of feminine allure, so it's down to the smile, the eyes and a wretched recall of French that I hope will be charming rather than completely annoying. Plus I have the kids, who are doing the wide-eyed "please sir can you help us" thing very convincingly. I order some Nutella chocolate crepes for me and the kids, and an extra croissant for Taylor. The store is about four feet wide and 12 feet deep. One customer is hanging out in back, obviously a friend of the guy in charge. There are pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Babe Ruth on the walls. Louis Armstrong is singing "What a Wonderful World." We indulge in the crepes when they are handed to us, hot and insanely delectable. See, I say to the kids, see how quickly life gets really super good? I want to appear a bit bigger than life here, as I'm about to ask these guys for help. I also want to appear moneyed and sane. The big-billed Euros help the former, the kids help with the latter. I pull out my printouts from the web and ask in pathetically broken French and a large apologetic smile if either of these guys knows where these apartments are. They look for the street address, which still isn't there. Together we decide from the clues and the map that it has to be on the next block over. Not wanting to lose our sugar rush, I bundle up the kids and we go back out optimistically into the cold cold night. We walk up and down the block of St. Honore, between Rue du Louvre and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The sidewalk is about 18 inches wide and well traveled. Our suitcases are about 19 inches wide and we are bulky and slow and cold as we stop and peer at every storefront and window. I know there are five units to these apartments, over a storefront. The description on the web says there's a view of the Louvre. It says it's on the corner of Rue due Louvre and St. Honore. The map gives us a big X right where we are standing. In reality, this X spans maybe 20 different addresses, maybe 100 separate apartments. I know we're in the right place, but I haven't a clue how to figure out where we're supposed to go. We cruise back and forth, looking up at windows and storefronts and I realize that there is nothing left to do but to keep asking people. I go to an ice cream store called Scoop. Same deal: clouds of smoke, interrupted conversation - but women and ice cream, rather than men and crepes. The proprietor is an American and tres sympathetique. We go through the printouts, cluck over the map and the lack of numbers, and draw the same conclusion. We are too big for this store totally: the suitcases block the door and the kids don't know where to stand. We leave, having this time decided that the huge X on the map is really on Rue Jean-Jacques Rousseau. So we go up that street. Nothing. Rien. We come to a cafe/bar. This time I leave the kids outside. Again we are way too big for this place. The woman behind the counter doesn't speak much English. But there are two customers - again we've interrupted a conversation in progress (or is it our cumbersome arrival and instant disruption that immediately bonds us all together and makes it feel like we've all been part of this adventure from the very beginning?) – and they speak English pretty well. The woman behind the counter, the woman at the counter and the couple all take interest in our plight. I pull out the ragged pages. I work on establishing the "solvent and sane" criteria. Eventually I ask if I can bring my kids inside, as they are standing outside in the freezing air. We lug our stuff in, instantly taking up way too much space, and the kids slump down in the chairs. I try to make us as small as possible but it feels as though we are taking up the entire place with our baggage, both internal and external. The Nutella has worn off; Taylor is floppy and Spencer is in a sullen head-phone-wearing funk. Nerves are wearing thin between us; Spencer had pissed me off by agreeing way too enthusiastically awhile back when I commented how badly my French sucked, and Taylor's floppiness is not helping my campaign to keep convincing these people that we are alert, safe, well-meaning and worthy of their much-needed help. We seem too much like the gypsies who approached us in the Gare du Nord, asking if we spoke English and then asking for money. (I started off by saying Yes, and then no to the begging part. Then, once I figured out the drill, I cut them off with a very European "Non" when asked. But my favorite was after about six such invasions, while distracted with grabbing a taxi. The woman asked if I spoke English and I said clearly and completely "No, I don't," with (a) perfect articulation and (b) such a vehement refusal to play the game that she bought the subtext even while the text was so obviously in contradiction.) I digress. The point is that I suddenly felt very much like a gypsy and needed badly to change the image as thoroughly as possible. For all concerned. The customers, a couple about my age, take interest in our plight. The man offers to go out, with the printouts, and do the sleuth work of looking at the doors, windows, addresses, signs to try to find the apartments. I order some tea. We try to figure out if the kids want anything to eat, but they are picky about the offerings and the kitchen is closed anyway. No luck on that front. I really want to spend some money (see "solvent and sane," above.) But all I can do is sip some lovely Earl Gray. I have a bright idea. I can call up the Internet on my cell phone and check out the web site of these apartments, trying to see if there is any clue possible that I had overlooked. I am totally happy that I have a phone with Internet access. Who cares if it's going to cost, like, five bucks a minute? Who cares if I am really pretty convinced that there isn't any more info there than I had already printed out? I am connected! I have technology! The web page won't load. I'm momentarily defeated, but wait! I am connected! I have technology! And by this time it's nine a.m. on a Sunday morning in L.A. If I can't connect, I can CALL someone who can connect! I will call Bridget! I will call Cindy! I will call my legions of friends who all love me and all have computers and THEY can log onto the web site and find out that there is no address number nor any more information than I already have. It's OKAY. Because I'll be proving that I'm not only sane AND solvent, I have TECHNOLOGY! I am CONNECTED! I remember to dial the international code for Bridget when I see a new message on my cell phone. The cell phone that is going to connect me with something I can control. The cell phone that usually is stuck to my body 24/7 but that I've been able to live without for a few days. The cell phone that . . . well . . . hasn’t been plugged in for a few days . . . because I haven’t used . . . it . . . that . . . much. Low Battery. Oh. But WAIT! We can get around this! If I really have to, I have a converter and an adapter. In the huge 32 kilo suitcase, true. The one that would completely take over all remaining free floor space in the bar/cafe (after we moved a few bar stools and maybe one table). The one filled with laundry and clothes I'll never wear. But that's not the impediment. The impediment is that even once I dig out the converter and even once I unearth the adapter from the baggies of extension cords, camera adapters, iPod adapters computer adapters . . . at that point I'd have to ask for an outlet to plug in my cell phone, seriously reducing the image I'm trying SO hard to maintain of being (what? Right! Sane and Solvent) low maintenance. And THEN I'd have to WAIT while the phone recharges. At WHICH time I'd call my good friends Bridget or Cindy and have them log on to the web site only to what? Right! Find out there's no address number or any more information than I'd already have. Nevertheless, I scout around for an outlet anyway. But WAIT! We have another option! SPENCER has a cell phone! YES!!! That's it. That's the brilliant idea I'd been waiting for. I'm smart enough to copy down Bridget's phone number before my own phone dies (thinking things through like the master logistician I am). Then I get through Spencer's cloud of funky pissed-offness and he digs out his cell phone and throws it at me. I start it up. It's small and alien in my hand. I wait for it to boot. And then see another bad message: Network Not Found. What kind of bullshit is THIS, man? Network not found? Why is the network found on MY phone and not HIS phone? We're the same carrier! We're the same LINE! We're fungible, my child and I. My DNA is HIS DNA. My cell phone account is HIS cell phone account. We are the same being, with one vital exception: he is charged and I'm not. I should be able to feed off his youth, his battery power, his advanced technology, his RESERVES. I have been extending myself to the max here. It only seems fair that his battery power should kick in right now, while mine is flagging. It's the way the world works. It's the way humanity has survived chaos and uncertainty through the centuries. It's necessary, it's Darwinian, it's The Way It Must Be. And yet. It's not. Network not found. At this point, it's true, I do start to question and doubt. With my oldest son sitting there in a funk because his beloved mother is failing him on many levels, with my youngest son's head on the cafe table resigned into despair, and now without the Darwinin Imperative to rely upon . . . I start to entertain doubts. Perhaps this won't work. The man comes back: no luck. He has traversed the streets. Nothing. And then, quietly, like it has so many times already in the past few days, I remember the thing that will save us. The one power I still have that will get us out of this situation. The credit card. Yes. We still have that. Lost, alone, and in the cold. Without Internet, with a dead cell phone battery, without even a network connection. Having lost both credibility and faith, I still have that one thing that will enable me to prevail: False money. Money borrowed from the future. A future that seems distant and inconsequential in light of the next few hours' needs. I'm in Paris with a credit card. The very worst that can happen is what? We stay at the George V and order room service. So. I ask my new and only accessible friends on the planet where to find a hotel. They point around the block up two then turn gauche and then droit, and I say yeah OK and leave my children and all my belongings in the cafe while I go out to find a hotel room. It's cold. It's somewhat biblical in proportion . . . Mary out looking for lodging in the cold of winter. Odysseus trying to find Ithaca. Leopold Bloom . . . I'm failing here in keeping it literarily distant. . . it's, ah, like, way too fucking cold. We need a place to stay and it's getting less romantic by the second. I find the nearest hotel. Perfect. Clean. Close. I can find Dee in the morning. No rooms available. What?? What the fuck??? BUT WAIT! My lightning sharp brain does not miss a beat. It does not find multiple setbacks intimidating. Whenever the doors all seem closed, there are always new ones that open. This filled-up hotel is a professional establishment, not un cafe or un creperie. This place has a computer. Which means they have . . . what? They have the Internet!!! I smile the white teeth and ask the guy if we can look up a web site. Bien sur. But of course. I type in the URL and guess what? Finally, after all that time trying to see if there's any more information to be had . . . guess what? NO! There isn't any! The same "30 metres from the Louvre." The same "on the corner of Rue Du Louvre and St. Honore." The same HUGE fucking dot on the map that narrows the place down to only half a city block of potential windows. So I go back out into the cold, down to the cafe, musing as I go about how incredibly stupid this whole idea was in the first place. Not just the hotel thing. Everything. Paris. London. The whole stupid expensive time-consuming non-relaxing physically brutal potentially dangerous trip. This is only about the twentieth time over the past four days that I've really thought this thought. I actually count the occasions when I'm NOT thinking this thought as noteworthy. Sometimes I am un-jetlagged and I don't think this thought. Sometimes my body doesn't hurt and sometimes the kids aren't driving me crazy and sometimes, when both those things are happening simultaneously, I don't think this thought. But usually, frankly, I walk around thinking this thought. What a stupid fucking idea. Glorious, yes. The kids are ravenously enjoying this, yes. We're all alive and living and noticing and awake, yes. But a stupid idea, oh yes. Always. These big ideas, these big adventures are ALWAYS stupid ideas. So I'm thinking that thought. Again. And I go back into the cafe. The couple offers to find us a place. She makes a call. The hotel is nice, and not too expensive. They will walk us there. We leave the cafe. I'm grateful beyond words, to all of them. I realize I have one of my books accessible and am glad I have something of myself to give them in thanks. He takes one of the bags. We walk down the street. They point out a restaurant that has good food, pizza for the picky boys, good greek food for me. We talk a bit. She's a Parisienne going back many generations. He's from Quebec. Good people. Marvelous ambassadors. My kids will always remember the kindness of French strangers. And especially since we are les Americains, and unwelcome in many parts of the world, I am even more grateful. The hotel is fine, great. Clean, charming, and a huge step up from our cramped little digs in London. I give Francois and Marine the book. He is a writer. And because of the Internet, and email, I'll be able to find them again and tell them how it all worked out. Once again, I find myself roaming the streets with people with whom I share a common language. Maybe not so much the language of youth any more, but certainly the language of adventure and the language of community. My children are seeing some of this and I am glad they're learning some of the vocabulary. These vocabulary words are ones of politeness, of appreciation, of making sure that the footprint we inflict on other territories is as honorable and respectful as possible. The act of using French, however inept, to speak to the French. Not having a quota on how many merci's and s'il vous plaits one can use in a sentence. We made it through the dark night to the hotel. I imagine I will not get sent to jail for spending false money any more this time than I have in the past. The money will appear. The adventure will continue. The leaf floats down the river to its appointed destination, whether it wants to or not. Later. . . We're eating at the Greek restaurant that Marine and Francois recommend. I look up. Outside I see Dee and and his friends walking down the street. I jump out of my seat and nearly fall over Taylor as I yell "It's Dee! There's Dee!" Too loud, too boisterous, the crazy American lady runs out of the restaurant and down the street, chasing the three guys. Sure enough, it's him. With his friends Sandy and James. We fall all over each other laughing and talking. Oh my GOD, I tell them, I can't believe we found each other. I had told Taylor and Spencer that we’d probably run into them, because that’s how the world tends to work, and now I'm intensely grateful that my spidey sense was right on this one. We have found each other. This doesn't negate the hotel room we'd just booked and moved into. But it does save us a ton of hassle in the morning as we resume our search for the missing St. Honore apartments. They are walking around, going to do the boat ride on the Seine. Please, can we join you, I beg? They agree to wait while we finish. Dee gets the key to the mystery apartment while we finish eating. The kids are elated and finally perking up again. They can't believe we found Dee. I explain the situation to our waiter, who has been happily indulging our hideous but well-meaning French and laughing at our new phrases ("Il pleut comme il vache pisse" "It’s raining like cow piss") that we’re getting out of the book. I feel like the whole restaurant is once again actively engaged in our plight. Monomaniacal Americans. Coming into a civilization and taking over. But the feeling I get is, at worst, bemused exasperation. At best, compassion and indulgence. It helps that I'm a woman traveling alone with two kids. We finish up, overtip, and leave. The waiter has paid attention to me in a kind way and I'm kind of pathetically grateful that he, a man, has been nice to me, a woman. Nothing untoward at all, but it made me feel noticed for the first time in ages. Thank you kind sir. We go out and everyone talks a mile a minute. James is from SF; arrived yesterday. Sandy is from LA and just got off the plane. Dee's been here for a week already. I am insanely happy to be with these people. I've known Dee forever, something like 35 years, but the other two go back at least 20 years so everyone's easy with each other. I fall into a groove immediately with both Sandy and James, the kids immediately bond with everyone; it's great. They are walking towards a boat that does the nighttime illuminated cruise of the Seine. It's docked on the north side of the Ile de la Cite and we're early, so we take the stairs down to the quai and start walking along the side of the island towards Notre Dame. We hike back up to the top of the island and find ourselves in the center of Paris, the towers rising above us. We have about 30 seconds to take it in if we're going to walk back to the boat for the last cruise, so we all run across the plaza and touch a piller. The kids pull one arm in from their jackets and put it behind them, creating a wild crazy faux hunchback, and run all the way back to the boat that way, calling each other igor and mixing metaphors and storylines like crazy. We get on the boat and it's freezing. Spencer, Dee, James and I go up on top. Incredible. The wind whips the French flag that's hanging off the stern railing, the Seine is black and churning against the limestone quais. To our west, the Eiffel Tower is lit up, glittering. We take off and Spencer and I stay up on top the entire time. It becomes a competition about who is tougher, so neither of us can go downstairs despite the fact that we soon start freezing down to the very core of our bones. The cold is the main part of the ride, but we are awed by the beauty of the bridges, the sheer splendor of the architecture. James talks about how the French used the limestone that was nearby to create the city but for some reason never seemed to try to paint it. This is something I'd never thought about. The rock of the buildings, of the walls, of the bridges is beautiful in its natural variations. It's the subtlety that gives off the sublime elegance, the stately majesty. As we get closer to the Eiffel Tower, we start really appreciating what it IS. We talk about how no one, at least not in the states, builds things that magnificent just BECAUSE. Except for in Las Vegas. We somehow don't have the budget for things that are outrageously stupid and beautiful and expressions of the human spirit anymore. We just kind of don't. We talk about how graceful the structure is, how it's so feminine in its grace, and yet constructed out of steel. How it rises up, phallically, but has this exquisitely female curve that really can't be appreciated except by seeing it full-size, in three dimensions. I think of Cindy who is the ultimate connoisseur of form and shape; she deplores the outside of the Disney Hall as being sloppy in form, inexact in its structure. This tower is as far from that as you can get. It is perfection. We get closer and closer to it, watching the light show that has been newly designed for it (well, newly for the millennium . . . new for us who haven't been here in 15 years). We gaze up at it, speechlessly. Spencer and I tough it out on top of the boat, freezing and chattering and teasing each other, trying to get the other to give up and go downstairs. Taylor has been below with the rest of them the whole time, wisely sitting by the heater. But Spencer and I have a fight to mend and we need to bond, so we stay up top, getting ever crazier and loopier with it all. We go by Notre Dame, looking up at the flying buttresses. Spencer looks up and says "OH yeah. Now I believe in God." And he’s half kidding - knowing that the architecture was supposed to inspire that kind of sentiment - and he's half not. As Napoleon once said, there are no atheists in Chartres cathedral. On the way back, Spencer - amped on cold and our wild ride and exuberance and the events of the past six hours - runs headlong into a busy street as the light changes. He is following James and Sandy but is too far back to make the light. I yell GO so he'll make it across, he pauses to look back, and then charges forward right as the cars start moving. A truck passes in front of our line of vision right when the impact would be. It all happens too quickly, and too slowly. When the truck passes, we see Spencer on the other side of the street, unharmed. We are all ashen-faced. He is shocked, sure of my wrath. I am so angry I want to slap him to the ground and then realize there is nothing I can say that can make it any worse. Dee is not smiling. No one is smiling. He starts crying and the three of us clutch each other as we walk back to the hotel. Dee and his friends walk ahead of us. We don't talk too much about the incident but we cling to each other in the cold. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:20 AM  
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