It’s practically November and I’m on my annual pilgrimage to the homeland. Continental Airlines stewardesses (they have to be called flight attendants since the early ’80s) are handing out our afternoon goûter — double-fudge cookies and some undrinkable coffee that an American guy next me is gulping with ravenous delight.
“It’s been 10 days since I’ve had real coffee,” he informed me. “The stuff in Paris is way too strong. I couldn’t sleep.” He looked really happy to be going home. “Did you enjoy Paris?” I nosily asked. “Not really, the heat in the hotel wasn’t turned on yet.” “Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”
He went on to tell me a terrible story about how it started to rain and a Parisian waiter kicked him out of a café because he was carrying a can of Fanta. I felt sorry for everyone, the waiter who had to deal with tourists bringing drinks into his café, the innocence of this guy just trying to dodge the rain and getting barked at on his first time to Paris, myself feeling stuck between both worlds of logic. There really are two worlds of logic, and they don’t really get along. What works is the momentary patches of pleasure you experience in both directions from venturing out into the other world. Otherwise, the systems of governing, of working or organizing always clash, whether it’s doing business, importing meat, buying an apartment or putting on an art show. The conflict is always in the logic.
I watch the flutter of video screens that are now built into the back of the seats of 777s with the latest movies blipping a long in English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We’ve come a long way since that first TWA flight to Paris in the late ’70s. For me, that was 30 flights ago.
It goes without saying that the complexity of feelings that accompany these returns each time flutter like the wings of frightened pigeons to the foreground of consciousness. That unsettling grumble of being both home and far from home at once was rolling in and I watched it like the way you track a nasty hurricane before it hits land in a kind of CNNization of the visual mind.
“It’s 70 degrees in Newark,” the pilot announces, and again the contradiction between the good news and Newark itself irks this confused expat writer. Many of us remember when Newark Airport was as international as Lille. You had to trek out to JFK, then Idlewild, even to fly to Bermuda. Ah, sacré Newark! A lot has started in Newark. Newark is where the déchet from Mayor Guiliani’s cleaned up Manhattan has landed. Newark has more boarded up houses and bogus Haitian churches per square foot than any other city in the country. Bonjour progress. Number two in car vandalism. Plenty of money to pulverize foreign despots and pump up a digital infrastructure, but nickels and dimes for the citizens who’d like to hang onto their cars and raise kids that can read a book.
Flying home forces you to contemplate time in a way that escapes us in Paris. Your points of reference fall into a B.C. versus A.D. kind of divide — before I got to Paris (B.P.) and after I got to Paris (A.P.). On the way to the other side I feel myself falling into the B.P. mode. Trying to resist the artless state of sentimentality, I remember that I have to pick up my tickets to the Barry White/Earth Wind & Fire gig at Bercy in December. My most guarded secret is that in Paris I listen to Radio Nostalgie.
The man next to me is traveling with his guitar. He’s been in France to attend the funeral of his college roommate who was engaged to be married to a woman from Saint Malo, but fate cut him down and he died in a plane crash between Chattanooga and Newark on the way to his wedding. I felt so badly. The café story and then his roommate. I felt embarrassed for judging him on his terrible taste in coffee.
And then it got worse. He plays in a band, he tells me, but his bass guitarist has kind of taken a leave of absence. He was engaged to a girl called Nathalie, and Nathalie went into the hospital to have a cyst removed, but something went wrong during the operation and poor Nathalie sunk into a coma. Her fiancé, the bass player, was called to the hospital. It looked real bad. How could this happen. He called a priest, and four hours before poor Nathalie died, she and the bass player were married. “He married her in the intensive care unit,” my neighbor told me. Nathalie died at age 24, married for four hours. Her husband wrote a song for her called “Nathalie.” It was recorded on the group’s only CD and now he’s taken some time off to get his head together.
I sat there on Continental flight 56 a bit numb. And then it struck me why so many European filmmakers and writers are so fascinated by America. In America, the stories come to you. People sit down next to strangers and talk about coffee, their roommates and how Nathalie died. I looked up on the screen; we were just over Gander, one of those famous coordinates that airlines always point out and no one goes to. The trip was going too fast; I felt like stopping in Gander for a while before completing the Paris-Newark time warp. So I pushed my mind back to the City of Lights, the city that experiences so little natural light in November. November.
I love Paris in November. Precisely for the reasons most people hate it. It’s gray and wet and everyone is either crabby or depressed. For reasons that I’ve never been able to figure out, 38 degrees Farenheit temperature in Paris, six degrees above freezing, manages to chill humans to distraction. In November you learn the art of wearing wool. You come to understand from a historical point of view why soup is so important. You come in direct conflict with the inadequacies of Italian shoes. Red wine never tasted so good. Everyone is so bummed out that you learn that there’s no point in talking to strangers, let alone complaining to a fonctionnaire or to the lady in the metro whose pincher is stepping on your Hush Puppies, and thus you are afforded a unique form of anonymity and alienation particularly useful for creative people who thrive on and thirst for existential angst and general psychic pain. November in Paris is great stuff for all that. So put on a silk undershirt, order a soupe à l’ oignon, and sit tight — I'll be back from Newark in a week and the strikes will be coming.
