Another Paris…
It was 1980 and I was in my twenties, in search of what everyone else probably goes to Paris for: Adventure, Good Sex and French cigarettes. That and the chance to impersonate a French Film Goddess. Of course, I smoked Gauloises like crazy — like they were going out of style — which when I was there — they most certainly were not. In those days, everyone was puffing away like mad — in between bites of pain de chocolate and kisses. Everyone was always kissing everyone else then too.
Paris was charming then in a way New York had long since lost. I remember walking the windy, cobblestoned streets and being in premature mourning even then — even before I left — for its charm, its light, the way it allowed for fantasy — for joy.
I would hang out in bookstores, pouring over titles I could barely understand, my eyes popping out of my head as I tried to comprehend what the hell Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were saying, especially in French. At least Tin Tin and Babar had beautiful pictures. I would sit hunched over one of the millions of cheap cafes that lined the street in those days — an unfiltered cigarette blowing lazily, earnestly trying to read ‘Being and Nothingness’ wearing, of course, the requisite blue beret and black leather patent shoes.
For you see, I wanted desperately to look like Anna Karina, Godard’s muse in his earlier days. I was especially obsessed with the film: “Vivre, Sa Vie”. I would walk the streets like Karina’s poetic prostitute, pretending to be her. I would shout: “Questceque on put fair? What should I do? What should I do?” just like she did when she starred in “Vivre, Sa Vie”. I wore high-heeled pumps, just like hers and nylons with a seam up the back, black eye liner and a pouty, yet serious expression, I hoped.
I was in love with Abder — a Tunisian guy I had fallen for. We met on the street — very Anna Karina style. Next thing you know, we were having les midnight rendezvous and I was pining for him. That was after I had sternly told him I was not looking for that ‘sort of thing’ but really — that was exactly what I had come to Paris for. In the morning, we would sit smoking unfiltered Gitanes or Gauloises and he would make me strong, steaming coffee, Arabic style. “Tout va Bien, Cherie?” he would ask me. “Oui, I would say. “Oh, Oui.”
Paris was also melancholy that year. In December, John Lennon was shot. “Liberation” screamed out the headline: “Lennon ext mort!” We listened to “Imagine” over and over again. At my job as an au pair for a diplomat living in Neuilly, while vacuuming his rug, I would listen to “Love, Love Me Do” over and over again.
After my assignations with Abder, I would go off to my classes in film theory at the Odeon. “Les Plaisirs de la Cinema!” That’s what the course was called. My gap-toothed, chain-smoking professor talked and talked — about Godard this and Truffaut that and how the American musical “Top Hat” was all about the castration fears of the audience — but oh, how they love it! That’s why they keep coming back to Le Cinema. It was Lacan this and Virginia Woolf (somehow she was also involved.) I couldn’t understand most of it because my French was pretty terrible. But still, I was able to ask every sexy garcon I met: “Est-ce que tu aime, Godard?”
I would sign all my letters and cards: Divine Decadence, darling! Somedays I would pretend to be Christopher Isherwood’s famed character: Sally Bowles. Othertimes, it was Audrey Hepburn. I would pull my hair up and pretend my neck was long and slender. (Full disclosure — it wasn’t) and my cheekbones high. (Full disclosure — they weren’t). I would wear little flats and black tights. Other times, I was that Famed French Fatale, Jeanne Moreau — always laughing — running down the street with two beautiful men to either side of me — all three of us in berets. It didn’t matter that I was 20 pounds overweight and no men were running beside me — or pining for me — as they did for Audrey or Jeanne or Anna Karina. Paris allowed me that dream.
After my classes, I would wander the streets — or go see French or American or Italian films at the little cinema near Place St. Michel. I remember the bookstores sold special kinds of notebooks with squares to write in. I would wander and see: the rushing Seine, the Cobblestoned streets, The Bridge of Sighs — of Lovers, Le Louvre and the Ile St Louis, le Pain de Chocolates and unfiltered gauloises and the Impressionists and Le Marche de la Clignacourt and the Light. Always the Light. Paris, je t’aime.
“It is easy to live. Simply move — move towards all that you love.” Paul Eluard
