Me Talk Pretty One Day (17 page)

The long list of situational phobias includes the fears of being bound, beaten, locked into an enclosed area, and smeared with human waste. Their inclusion mystifies me, as it suggests that these fears might be considered in any way unreasonable. I asked myself, Who wants to be handcuffed and covered in human feces? And then, without even opening my address book, I thought of three people right off the bat. This frightened me, but apparently it’s my own private phobia. I found no listing for those who fear they know too many masochists. Neither did I find an entry for those who fear the terrible truth that their self-worth is based entirely on the completion of a daily crossword puzzle. Because I can’t seem to find it anywhere, I’m guaranteed that such a word actually exists. It will undoubtedly pop up in some future puzzle, the clue being “You, honestly.”

The City of Light

in the Dark

WHEN ASKED TO ACCOUNT FOR the time I’ve spent in Paris, I reach for my carton of ticket stubs and groan beneath its weight. I’ve been here for more than a year, and while I haven’t seen the Louvre or the Pantheon, I have seen The Alamo and The Bridge on the River Kwai.” I haven’t made it to Versailles but did manage to catch Oklahoma!, Brazil, and Nashville. Aside from an occasional trip to the flea market, my knowledge of Paris is limited to what I learned in Gigi.

When visitors come from the United States, I draw up little itineraries. “If we go to the three o’clock Operation Petticoat, that should give us enough time to make it across town for the six o’clock screening of It Is Necessary to Save the Soldier Ryan, unless, of course, you’d rather see the four o’clock Ruggles of Red Gap and the seven o’clock Roman Holiday. Me, I’m pretty flexible, so why don’t you decide.”

My guests’ decisions prove that I am a poor judge of my own character. Ayatollahs are flexible. I am not. Given the choice between four perfectly acceptable movies, they invariably opt for a walk through the Picasso museum or a tour of the cathedral, saying, “I didn’t come all the way to Paris so I can sit in the dark.”

They make it sound so bad. “Yes,” I say, “but this is the French dark. It’s … darker than the dark we have back home.” In the end I give them a map and spare set of keys. They see Notre Dame, I see The Hunchback of Notre Dame.

I’m often told that it’s wasteful to live in Paris and spend all my time watching American movies, that it’s like going to Cairo to eat cheeseburgers. “You could do that back home,” people say. But they’re wrong. I couldn’t live like this in the United States. With very few exceptions, video killed the American revival house. If you want to see a Boris Karloff movie, you have to rent it and watch it on a television set. In Paris it costs as much to rent a movie as it does to go to the theater. French people enjoy going out and watching their movies on a big screen. On any given week one has at least 250 pictures to choose from, at least a third of them in English. There are all the recent American releases, along with any old movie you’d ever want to see. On Easter, having learned that The Greatest Story Ever Told was sold out, I just crossed the street and saw Superfly, the second-greatest story ever told. Unless they’re for children, all movies are shown in their original English with French subtitles. Someone might say, “Get your fat ass out of here before I do something I regret,” and the screen will read, “Leave.”

I sometimes wonder why I even bothered with French class. “I am truly delighted to make your acquaintance.” “I heartily thank you for this succulent meal” - I have yet to use either of these pleasantries. Since moving to Paris my most often used phrase is “One place, please.” That’s what one says at the box office when ordering a ticket, and I say it quite well. In New York I’d go to the movies three or four times a week. Here I’ve upped it to six or seven, mainly because I’m too lazy to do anything else. Fortunately, going to the movies seems to suddenly qualify as an intellectual accomplishment, on a par with reading a book or devoting time to serious thought. It’s not that the movies have gotten any more strenuous, it’s just that a lot of people are as lazy as I am, and together we’ve agreed to lower the bar.

Circumstances foster my laziness. Within a five-block radius of my apartment there are four first-run multiplexes and a dozen thirty-to-fifty-seat revival houses with rotating programs devoted to obscure and well-known actors, directors, and genres. These are the mom-and-pop theaters, willing to proceed with the two o’clock showing of The Honeymoon Killers even if I’m the only one in the house. It’s as if someone had outfitted his den with a big screen and comfortable chairs. The woman at the box office sells you a ticket, rips it in half, and hands you the stub. Inside the theater you’re warmly greeted by a hostess who examines your stub and tears it just enough to make her presence felt. Somewhere along the line someone decided that this activity is worthy of a tip, so you give the woman some change, though I’ve never known why. It’s a mystery, like those big heads on Easter Island or the popularity of the teeny-weeny knapsack.

I’m so grateful such theaters still exist that I’d gladly tip the projectionist as well. Like the restaurants with only three tables, I wonder how some of these places manage to stay open. In America the theaters make most of their money at the concession stand, but here, at least in the smaller places, you’ll find nothing but an ice-cream machine tucked away between the bathroom and the fire exit. The larger theaters offer a bit more, but it’s still mainly candy and ice cream sold by a vendor with a tray around his neck. American theaters have begun issuing enormous cardboard trays, and it’s only a matter of time before the marquees read TRY OUR BARBECUED RIBS! or COMPLIMENTARY BAKED POTATO WITH EVERY THIRTY-TWO-OUNCE SIRLOIN. When they started selling nachos, I knew that chicken wings couldn’t be far behind. Today’s hot dogs are only clearing the way for tomorrow’s hamburgers, and from there it’s only a short leap to the distribution of cutlery.

I’ve never considered myself an across-the-board apologist for the French, but there’s a lot to be said for an entire population that never, under any circumstances, talks during the picture. I’ve sat through Saturday-night slasher movies with audiences of teenagers and even then nobody has said a word. I can’t remember the last time I’ve enjoyed silence in an American theater. It’s easy to believe that our audiences spend the day saying nothing, actually saving their voices for the moment the picture begins. At an average New York screening I once tapped the shoulder of the man in front of me, interrupting his spot review to ask if he planned on talking through the entire movie.

“Well … yeah. What about it?” He said this with no trace of shame or apology. It was as if I’d asked if he planned to circulate his blood or draw air into his lungs. “Gee, why wouldn’t I?” I moved away from the critic and found myself sitting beside a clairvoyant who loudly predicted the fates of the various characters seen moving their lips up on the screen. Next came an elderly couple constantly convinced they were missing something. A stranger would knock on the door, and they’d ask, “Who’s he?” I wanted to assure them that all their questions would be answered in due time, but I don’t believe in talking during movies, so I moved again, hoping I might be lucky enough to find a seat between two people who had either fallen asleep or died.

At a theater in Chicago I once sat beside a man who watched the movie while listening to a Cubs game on his transistor radio. When the usher was called, the sports fan announced that this was a free country and that he wanted to listen to the goddamn game. “Is there a law against doing both things at once?” he asked. “Is there a law? Show me the law, and I’ll turn off my radio.”

Sitting in Paris and watching my American movies, I think of the man with the transistor radio and feel the exact opposite of homesick. The camera glides over the cities of my past, capturing their energetic skylines just before they’re destroyed by the terrorist’s bomb or advancing alien warship. New York, Chicago, San Francisco: it’s like seeing pictures of people I know I could still sleep with if I wanted to. When the high-speed chases and mandatory shoot-outs become too repetitive, I head over to the revival houses and watch gentler movies in which the couples sleep in separate beds and everyone wears a hat. As my ticket is ripped I’ll briefly consider all the constructive things I could be doing. I think of the parks and the restaurants, of the pleasantries I’ll never use on the friends I am failing to make. I think of the great city teeming on the other side of that curtain, and then the lights go down, and I love Paris.

I Pledge Allegiance

to the Bag

ONE OF THE DRAWBACKS to living in Paris is that people often refer to you as an expatriate, occasionally shortening the word to an even more irritating “ex-pat.” It is implied that anything might take you to London or Saint Kitts, but if you live in Paris, it must be because you hate the United States. What can I say? There may be bands of turncoats secretly plotting to overthrow their former government, but I certainly haven’t run across them. I guess we don’t shop at the same boutiques. The Americans I’ve befriended don’t hate the United States, they simply prefer France for one reason or another. Some of them married French people or came here for work, but none of them viewed the move as a political act.

Like me, my American friends are sometimes called upon to defend their country, usually at dinner parties where everyone’s had a bit too much to drink. The United States will have done something the French don’t like, and people will behave as though it’s all my fault. I’m always taken off guard when a hostess accuses me of unfairly taxing her beef. Wait a minute, I think. Did I do that? Whenever my government refuses to sign a treaty or decides to throw its weight around in NATO, I become not an American citizen but, rather, America itself, all fifty states and Puerto Rico sitting at the table with gravy on my chin.

During Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearings, my French teacher would often single me out, saying, “You Americans, you’re all such puritans.” Citizens of Europe and Asia, my fellow class members would agree with her, while I’d wonder, Are we? I’m sure the reputation isn’t entirely undeserved, but how prudish can we be when almost everyone I know has engaged in a three-way?

I’d never thought much about how Americans were viewed overseas until I came to France and was expected to look and behave in a certain way. “You’re not supposed to be smoking,” my classmates would tell me. “You’re from the United States.” Europeans expected me to regularly wash my hands with prepackaged towelettes and to automatically reject all unpasteurized dairy products. If I was thin, it must be because I’d recently lost the extra fifty pounds traditionally cushioning the standard American ass. If I was pushy, it was typical; and if I wasn’t, it was probably due to Prozac.

Where did people get these ideas, and how valid are they? I asked myself these questions when, after spending nine months in France, I returned to the United States for a five-week trip to twenty cities. The plane hadn’t even left Paris when the New Yorker seated beside me turned to ask how much I’d paid for my round-trip ticket. Americans are famous for talking about money, and I do everything possible to keep our reputation alive. “Guess how much I spent on your birthday present?” I ask. “Tell me, how much rent do you pay?” “What did it cost you to have that lung removed?” I horrify the French every time I open my mouth. They seem to view such questions as prying or boastful, but to me they’re perfectly normal. You have to talk about something, and money seems to have filled the conversational niche made available when people stopped discussing the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

During my five weeks in the United States, I spent a lot of time on planes and waiting around in airports, where the image of Americans as hard workers was clearly up for grabs. Most passengers were in favor of the stereotype, while the majority of airport employees seemed dead set against it. Standing in long lines, I could easily see how we earned our reputation as a friendly and talkative people. Conversations tended to revolve around the incompetence of the person standing behind the cash register or computer terminal, but even when pressed for time, I found most travelers to be tolerant and good-natured, much more willing to laugh than to cause a stink. People expressed the hope that they might catch their plane, that they might leave on time, and that their luggage might eventually join them once they reached their destination. Once considered relentlessly positive, we seem to have substantially lowered our expectations.

I thought a lot about American optimism when, on a flight from Chicago to San Francisco, I watched one of those video magazines stitched together from a week’s worth of soft network news reports. There was the standard “just how safe are they?” report focusing on chopsticks or cardboard boxes, followed by the latest study proving that people who wear socks to bed are likely to live five hours longer than the rest of us. Then came a human-interest story about a New York City program designed to expose the homeless to great works of art. The segment opened with a genteel docent standing before a Rembrandt painting and addressing a group of unshaven men dressed in ragged clothing. The woman lectured on the play of light and shadow. She addressed the emotions provoked by the artist’s somber choice of colors, and her eyes glittered as she spoke. Interviewed later, one of the men conceded that the painting was nice, saying, “Sure, I liked it okay.” Then the camera cut back to the docent, who explained that art appreciation was a form of therapy that would hopefully help get these men back on their feet. Here was an example of insane optimism coupled with the naive popular belief that a few hours of therapy can cure everything from chronic obesity to a lifetime of poverty. It’s always nice to get out of the cold, but I think this woman was fooling herself in believing that these men would prefer a Rembrandt to a couple of reubens.

For all our earnest recycling, America is still seen as a terribly wasteful country. It’s a stigma we’ve earned and are trying to overcome with our own unique blend of guilt and hypocrisy. On the first night of my trip, while brushing my teeth in the bathroom of my $270-a-night hotel, I noticed a little sign reading SAVE THE PLANET!