47

On the afternoon Vincent and I returned to Paris, Rachel learned her grandmother had died, her father’s mother. More than a year earlier, right after we’d moved to Paris, Rachel’s grandparents on her mother’s side had passed away within a day of each other, and she hadn’t been able to return for the funeral, to her regret. The evening I got back, Rachel talked to her family on the phone. After she hung up, she said the distance between them and Paris was acutely painful. She didn’t know where she was, only where she wasn’t.

Rachel flew back to the States for a week, and I worked later than normal and took long walks at night. I didn’t want to be in the apartment alone because I couldn’t focus with Rachel gone; I’d be going to brush my teeth and wind up taking out the garbage in my underwear.

We spoke at length on the telephone. I told her how much I wished I was there in North Carolina. This was true, though not complete; I wanted to be there, but I also didn’t want to be by myself. When a person felt marvelous in Paris, the city amplified his feelings and fed him full. But when a person was lousy, the city shut down. He belonged underground, at best.

Which perhaps explained all the women crying on the Métro—many more than I’d seen in New York. No one bothered them underground. If anything, crying in public in Paris seemed to be the best way to guarantee you’d be left alone.

One night, I ate dinner at a restaurant on the Champs-Elysées by myself, and finished a bottle of red wine. Afterward, stumbling a bit, I went next door to see a Pixar movie. I thought it would cheer me up: a film for kids that was billed as adult-friendly.

The “adult-friendly” part at least explained the ads that played first.

Advertisement number one was for Magnum ice-cream bars: women in bathing suits worshipping an ice-cream god while sunlight beamed out from their vaginas. The second ad was for Häagen-Dazs, in which a woman, who sounded like a phone-sex operator, told us about the passion we’d feel for their new dark-chocolate ice cream; we heard this while half-naked black people blew kisses at each other. The third ad was for M&Ms—it was one big setup for a crotch-fondling joke. Finally, in an ad for Orangina, animals dressed like strippers did pole dances.

I was temporarily much cheered up.

In a changing world, count on France.