45

In September, fall came early to Avenue George V, with trees turning henpecked, their leaves shedding tips. Store windows changed to autumn displays: leather coats and baskets of apples. It was the best time of year to be in Paris. We took long walks in the Tuileries and visited the Orangerie, the museum where Monet’s Water Lilies were kept. They looked alive, especially with so many trees outside turning yellow. We visited the Picasso Museum and sat for an hour in its garden, which by itself was worth the price of admission on an iridescent weekend morning.

One Saturday, with an odometer, we covered seven miles and barely left the city center.

So I was feeling extremely good the Tuesday that I picked up my pasta at noon, strolled down Rue Lamennais, and discovered, to my horror, that my lunchtime park had closed.

A newspaper article posted on the gate said the park was shuttered until further notice. The foundation that managed the grounds needed to rework its finances before it could afford the upkeep again. One man interviewed in the article said he and his coworkers were in mourning. He said he worked at a nearby advertising agency—I jumped, reading that, though I didn’t recognize his name. He vowed to fight to reopen the park. It was a place, he said, that belonged to “old ladies and golden boys,” that made people happy.

Next to the article hung a petition under plastic, signed already with twenty names.

Nearby was an island of pea gravel, with four benches. I found Stephen King sitting there wearing headphones, reading a newspaper. I sat on the other side of his bench and ate my lunch.

That afternoon, I was reading Jean Echenoz’s I’m Gone, thinking about Paris being like an airport. Echenoz wrote,

An airport does not really exist in and of itself. It’s only a place of passage, an airlock, a fragile façade in the middle of an open field, a belvedere circled by runways where rabbits with kerosene breath leap and bound, a turntable infested by winds that carry a host of corpuscles of myriad origins: grains of sand from every desert, flecks of gold and mica from every river, volcanic or radioactive dust, pollens and viruses, rice powder and cigar ash.

Reading that, I was rather small.

Paris, I thought, was like a library book, something loaned.

At a party of Pierre and Chloe’s that weekend, an artist friend announced he’d be having his first solo gallery show. Big cheers. The guy, Simon, was known for turning pornography into sculpture; he took a sex movie, paused it at the climactic moment, printed out the image, and diced up the print into squares, like pixels. Then he glued each pixel square onto a wooden block and assembled the blocks into a solid wall, so that, stacked together, they showed the frozen orgasm in a wooden-block re-creation.

Only Simon would also print out three other orgasmic moments, and paste their cut-up squares onto the wooden blocks’ other sides, and make the blocks rotate in unison. So as the blocks turned, one of four orgasms was always coming into view, so to speak.

Around one in the morning, the liquor ran out. Pierre called a delivery service to send over more tequila, but everybody was short on cash, so Pierre and I, and some guy named Nicolas, whom I hadn’t met before, went out to find an ATM.

During the walk, Nicolas said he was curious about Americans’ ideas regarding anal sex. Was I actively pursuing it with my wife? Was I the type of American man who could discuss this?

“I used to be hung up about it,” Nicolas said. “You know, too nervous to ask. This is a big crisis for men today: being men. Even in France, men are scared to say, Here is what I want. I met a woman years ago. She really liked it in the ass. So, I’m a gentleman, I wasn’t going to ignore her desires. Once she introduced me to it, my life changed. What I’m saying is, if you like it and she likes it, what’s wrong?”

Pierre got some money from an ATM while Nicolas was putting on a sweater, speaking through the fabric when it passed over his head: “It’s just sex, it’s natural, sex is good. Like I said, if she likes it—now this is paramount, of course. But why not?

“A woman wants a man,” Nicolas said, squeezing my shoulder. “Believe me, if you want to be a man of the world, you need to try this,” he told me brightly.

The following Monday, I was sitting outside my lunchtime park, not with Stephen King but with the smoking man, one half of the Puzzlers, when I overheard two twentysomethings discover the newspaper article pinned to the gate.

“Shit. Well, now that our park’s closed—”

“What? It’s not true!”

“Oh, and look, someone has already put up a manifesto.”

“Oh good, the revolt of the bobos.”

That month, manifestos were all around us. One weekend, near Montparnasse, Rachel and I were having lunch outdoors on the Boulevard Raspail when several fashion models came marching down the street, dressed like guerrillas in camouflage, passing out leaflets on behalf of Yves Saint Laurent. They were newsprint bundles with erotic photos of Naomi Campbell accompanied by the following in English:

Fashion manifested. Fashion decontextualized, its net widened, the access great. Images for the world. Making connections, relations, associations. Giving beauty, prompting desire, inspiring change. Identities questioned, forged, explored, reforged … A contemporary spirit, a transnational dialogue, cultural hybrids. The new aesthetic of globalism.

After a year of advertising in Paris, I found it harder to tell the difference between bullshit and poetry. Sex fashioned as art, pornography, or manifesto. The next week, Rachel found the Naomi Campbell pamphlet on the bookshelf. “What’s this?” I was about to say I thought it was important somehow, then realized what I was thinking and tossed it in the garbage.