New York about power tables—where you sit at Spago, what time you leave the Four Seasons—is diminishing in France. We are the worldly, corrupt ones at the table now, and the Europeans, in this regard at least, are the innocents. Even their philosophers eat for pleasure.
When the tomate confite, which David Angelot had been working on since nine o’clock, came out at last, Derenne tasted it. Then he said, “You see, he demonstrates for us what we knew from the first: that the tomato is a fruit. Would you call that arrogance or modesty?”
Not long after that I finally did what I had dreaded doing, though it would have been the practical thing to do all along, which was to go back to that first restaurant and see what it was like now. I walked back and found both the hotel and the restaurant, though both had changed their names—the hotel belonged now to the Best Western chain—and while in memory I had kept them on the same street, they were in fact a street apart. But the exterior of the restaurant was unmistakable; I found it by getting the Eiffel Tower in exactly the same area of my eye as it had occupied when I was fourteen. It was not far from—I am not making this up—the avenue Marcel-Proust. The restaurant is now called the Tournesol, and the less expensive prix fixe is 114 francs, or about twenty dollars. I ate a la carte. I had a little foie gras, sole meuniere, and a cassis sorbet.
The food was even better than I had remembered. This proves either that (a) Proust was wrong, and you can always recapture the pleasures of your youth if you just go back to the places where you had them, or (b) there is more good cooking left in Paris than I knew, or (c) I went to the wrong place. Anyway, there’s hope.
Barney in Paris
When people ask why Martha and I, not long after the birth of our first child, left New York for Paris, we can usually think of a lot of plausible-sounding reasons. They vary in tone from the high-mindedly agonized (we couldn’t endure the mailing of our SoHo neighborhood) to the cloyingly whimsical (we wanted to live within walking distance of the Gerard Mulct bakery, on the rue de Seine). The real reason was Barney. We had seen one after another of our friends’ children—charming children of parents who parse Greek texts or write long metafictions set in the eighteenth century—sunk dumbly in front of a television set watching a man in a cheap purple dinosaur suit sing doggerel in an adenoidal voice with a chorus of overregimented eight-year-old ham actors. Just a glimpse was enough to scare a prospective parent to death: the garish Jeff Koons colors, the frantic prancing, the cynically appropriated public domain melodies. And, finally, that anthem of coercive affection—“I love you/you love me/we’re a happy family”—sung, so incongruously, to the tune of “This Old Man.”
The experienced reader will know of course that Barney stands here for the whole of American kiddie video culture. The experienced reader, though, is wrong. We looked forward to introducing Luke to Bugs and Bullwinkle and Bert and Ernie, and even Steve and Norm on This Old House. We just couldn’t bear the idea of his watching Barney The only way, we thought, to be sure that he wouldn’t was to pack up everything we had and move to another country.
So, Paris. “We want him to grow up someplace where everything he sees is beautiful,” we said, and though we realized that the moment our backs were turned our friends’ eyes were rolling, we didn’t care. We knew that our attempt to insist on a particular set of pleasures for our kid—to impose a childhood on our child—might be silly or inappropriate or even doomed. We couldn’t help it, entirely. The romance of your child’s childhood may be the last romance you can give up.
In our first week in our new home on the Left Bank, we were awakened early one morning by loud, oddly fugitive organ music;
it sounded like a carousel yet seemed to be moving closer. We opened the long French windows, looked out—and there was an honest-to-God organ grinder coming along the street, “La Ronde” playing as he turned the crank on his hand-painted hurdy-gurdy. I found a ten-franc piece and threw it down to the street; Luke applauded; the organ grinder caught it with one hand and cheerily, nattily, tipped his cap. Things looked good.
That first year we went to a lot of circuses; in Paris there are usually six or seven in residence. We saw the Moreno-Bormann family circus, which is a true family circus: When any performer does anything slightly dangerous, the rest of the family stand around the ring calling out “Careful!” under their breaths and averting their eyes. We also saw the Mongolian National Circus, in a little tent pitched at the Arsenal. It consists of six broad-faced, smiling Mongolians, who do circus tricks appropriate to a nomadic scarcity economy—they eat a little bit of fire, walk on one broken bottle and save the shards—and finish off with an elaborate, pointless thirty-minute trick using a magician’s cabinet that must have been left in Mongolia by an American illusionist sometime around 1860. (A Mongolian girl gets in the cabinet; Mongolian circus members slowly slide the swords through the slots; spend twenty minutes removing the swords from the slots; and then the girl gets out.)
We went to a lot of parks and rode a lot of carousels. In the Luxembourg Gardens is a completely unsupervised playground that’s run on lines inspired by the last chapter of Lord of the Flies. There is a spinning red platter onto which little children are thrown by bigger ones, who whip it around, with the terrified little ones kept from flying off by sheer centripetal force. There is a weird ski lift-style conveyance that kids cling to with their fingers, dangling ten feet in the air over nothing but hard pavement. There are jungle gyms the kids climb on, to be knocked off the top bars by informal gangs of larger kids. There is not a safety belt, a padded surface, or a liability lawyer anywhere to be found. (Twenty years ago my wife and I, on our first date, saw Truffaut’s Small Change. We loved the sequence in which a child falls out of a sixth-story window and walks away unhurt. In our early Francophile moments we saw this as charming French fantasy In fact, it was pure cinema verite. Luke attends a weekly gym class for two-year-olds, along with heartbreakingly exquisite little girls named Amandine and Jolie and Neige. The children are routinely sent leaping from high, splintery boards onto low, uncushioned ones.)
At dusk, however, a uniformed surveillant emerges from a windowless shed at the center of the gardens and blows a whistle, and everyone goes home. The child who has his hands around your child’s throat lets go, helps him up, dusts off his tablier, takes his mother’s hand, and trudges toward the gates. The vicious big kids help the terrified small kids off the spinning red platter. The play routine at the gardens explains French history: The restrictive Old Regime, represented by the carousel, leads to the anarchy of the Revolution and the Reign of Terror, represented by the playground; then Napoleon emerges in uniform to blow his whistle and call everybody to order. (Or it could be the occupation, the Fourth Republic, and de Gaulle emerging in uniform.) Between the carousels and the circuses and a wealth of Charlie Chaplin movies, to which Luke developed a deep, sober attachment, we seemed, blessedly, to have skipped right past the B’s.
Then, last Christmas, we went back to New York for three days. A friend brought a pile of tapes for a jet-lagged Luke to watch in the bedroom while we had dinner. I should have guessed from the ominous, atypical silence coming from the bedroom that something was off. Scooping up my exhausted little boy at the end of the evening, I noticed that he was looking unusually withdrawn. Then, right there in the backseat of a New York City taxicab, he suddenly looked up and said quietly, “Daddy, I like Barney.”