I still care about the words, though. One day, shopping for dinner along the rue du Bac and waiting in one of the interminable lines that are created by the individual care of French service—a line that is briskly, infuriatingly violated by the same arrogant dyed-blond woman in a fur coat and with a great jaw—I thought. Nobody in this line but me knows what an RBI is, or who Gene Mauch was, or what Jarry Park used to look like, or what a twinight doubleheader is. And I felt yearningly, unappeasably homesick. (This was not a rational emotion, since I have lived for years with a woman who doesn’t know what an RBI is either.)
The things an American who is abroad for a very long time misses—or at least the things I missed—I was discovering, weren’t the things you were supposed to miss. We are supposed to come to Europe for leisure, sunshine, a more civilized pace, for slowness of various kinds. America we are supposed to miss for its speed, its friendliness, for the independence of its people and the individualism of their lives. Yet these were not the things I missed, and when I speak to Americans who have lived abroad for a long time, those are not the things they seem to miss either. I didn’t miss crosstown traffic, New York taxicabs, talk radio or talk television, or the constant, appalling flow of opinion that spills out like dirty floodwater. (Paris is an argumentative but not an opinionated city; it is the ideal of every French newspaper columnist to have premises so inarguable that the opinions can more or less look after themselves while he goes to lunch.)
I didn’t miss American “independence” either. If anything, I missed its opposite, American obsequiousness, that yearning, beseeching tone of a salesman trying to sell something that you never hear in statist Europe. (The French, I think somebody said, have every vice except obsequiousness.) Buying shoes for my son, I missed the shoe salesmen of my childhood, my own uncles among them, their glasses held together with tape, their voices keening as they got down on their knees to tie the laces and make the sale. “Now the youngster can wear this shoe as a sports shoe or a dress shoe. Yeah, you got plenty of room there at the toe, young fellow—stand up. Now show your mom these shoes. Walk around.” Quieter: “I have it in burgundy, in brown, in blue…” A French shoe salesman, indignant at his position, laces the child’s shoes in silent anger and rises to his feet pretty much shaking his fist in your face.
I found, to my surprise, that what I missed and longed for was the comforting loneliness of life in New York, a certain kind of scuffed-up soulfulness. In Paris no relationship, even one with a postman or a dry cleaner, is abstract or anonymous; human relations are carved out in a perpetual present tense. There’s an intricacy of debits and credits. Things have histories. The little, quickly forgiven bumps of New York social life—the missed phone calls, the suddenly canceled lunches, the early exit from the dinner party, which are, if anything, signs of status, of “busy-ness”—are sources of long grievances, permanent estrangements, endless reexplanations. It isn’t possible just to remove yourself from a friendship in Paris for a month or two, as you can in New York. (“What have you been doing?” “Working.” “Oh.”) Even the most apparently professional relationships get overloaded. The dry cleaner is recovering from cancer, and her visits to pick up the clothes are scheduled around her treatments, with enough time to talk about them; the man who puts up shelves is a jazz guitarist, and an extra hour must be budgeted in to trade licks and discuss Jim Hall. On your way down the street in the early morning to run with all the other Americans in the Luxembourg Gardens—only Americans and French riot police go running; the Americans you know by their music festival sweatshirts, the French police by their flattop cuts and thoughtful, coiled power—you hear footsteps coming after you, and you worry that you have violated some ordinance, stepped on some forbidden grass. It is the fishmonger. “The wild salmon went well?” he demands anxiously. You find a café where you feel at home—and then become reluctant to go there, since it will involve such a wearing round of handshakes and “How is Madame?”
New York is devoted to the cult of busyness, but like all cults, it has at its heart the worship of a single, unforgiving idol, the office. After the idol has been served, life can be pretty formless. The things Americans miss tend to involve that kind of formlessness, small, casual, and solitary pleasures. A psychoanalyst misses walking up Lafayette Street in her tracksuit, sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup with the little plastic piece that pops up. My wife, having been sent the carrot cake that she missed from New York, discovered that what she really missed was standing up at the counter and eating carrot cake in the company of strangers at the Bon Vivant coffee shop. I thought I missed reading Phil Mushnick in the sports pages of the Post; when I read him on-line, I discovered that what I really missed was reading Phil Mushnick on the number 6 uptown train on a Monday morning around ten.
It was, in a way, the invisibility of the men up on Coogan’s Bluff in 1908 that drew me to them. The consensual anonymity of men in crowds is what we are escaping when we leave, and then it is what we miss. You can be alone in Paris a lot, but it is hard to be lonely; there is always another pair of eyes, not unfriendly, appraising you. (The French husband of an American friend will not meet her in the park in his tennis shorts. He does not know who will see him, but he is sure that he will, in some way, be seen.) You are a subject, not an object, and if this is part of the narrow, centuries-old happiness of life in Paris, it is also one of the things that narrow that happiness. Walk into Central Park to watch the sea lions, and you disappear from the world for a little while. In the Luxembourg Gardens, or at the menagerie in the Jardin des Plantes, you are always conscious of the long allees leading you back the way you came; of the surveillants’ shed at the center of the park, where the two uniformed men sit with their hot plate, warming up coffee and watching the world; of the lion looking back at you. We go to cities to be invisible, or to be invisible and visible by turns, and it is hard to be invisible in Paris. The light at night is too strong. Gershwin got this right at least: The car horns and the syncopations in An American in Paris are all French. What that American misses is the blues.
After about a year of telling the Rookie story, I went to New York to give a talk, and I turned the trip into a literary mission, a sort of Rookie collecting expedition. I wanted to bring home tangible evidence of something that, as a matter of fact, had never taken place there. I bought a baseball encyclopedia and a box of books on the Cobb era and borrowed a Ken Burns video. A vintage Giants cap, child size, which I thought would be the hardest thing to find, turned out to be absurdly easy; the past is so neatly packaged now that I just walked into a memorabilia store on Lexington Avenue and found a replica cap, no problem.
When I got home, I put on the video, from the PBS Baseball series, which I had never seen, and we watched all those flickering, overfrantic little ghost figures racing around. One by one the faces and bodies and actions that you couldn’t see in the photo above Luke’s bed were being filled in. There was Ty Cobb, looking appropriately evil; there was John J. McGraw. There was pitching and batting (I realized, from Luke’s comments, that he had them the wrong way around). There was baserunning.
There was Christy Mathewson, and then a picture of Matty, handsome and assured as ever, slowly dissolving into a picture of a small, serious boy with blond bangs, wearing a baseball cap and a perfectly sober expression, going into a pitching windup. I still have no idea who he actually was (it’s not Christy Mathewson’s kid; I’ve found a picture of him, and he had darker hair), but of course Luke knew, perfectly well.