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He’d thought he would spend Saturday night with Emily. With that plan crushed, John had nothing to fill a Saturday night for the first time in many years. He used to take potential clients out to dinner at the city’s best restaurants, with Cassandra dressed to dazzle and flashing her engagement rock, even tapping it on the stemware if people hadn’t seemed to notice. Or he might take Cassandra and Emily out to dinner, or just Cassandra when Emily was at a friend’s. What could he do with so much time this evening? If he went out to eat tonight, couples would be lurking in corners, gazing into each other’s eyes. He just didn’t want to see it. What was he going to do?
When he got back to his apartment, he saw that it had been stripped. He couldn’t make so much as a cup of coffee. He had told the estate sale crew to keep certain kitchen things for his everyday life, like the microwave. But every item had been sold except his bed, a dresser, and one lamp—not Baccarat.
It was all too much. He went for a walk and saw a sign for the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the liberation of Paris on a wall. He headed over to l’Hotel de Ville.
The son et lumière show, projected onto the façade of City Hall or onto screens erected in the place that surrounded the building, started just as he arrived. It wasn’t very crowded. The French were blasé about the liberation of Paris, evidently. John found a place near the front, along the crowd barriers that had been erected.
Images of tanks were projected onto the screens, and the sound of their tracks rumbling boomed through loudspeakers throughout the place. A narrator spoke in urgent French, too fast for John to understand. A filmed re-enactment of men and women ripping cobblestones up off streets paved elegantly in scallop-shell patterns ensued. A black and white picture from the 1940s of people huddling behind a barricade of cobbles followed.
The show was long on special effects, faky drama, and glancing references to tanks and marching men. It was short on facts about the Resistance, the danger, the price people paid. It’s a cheesy bit of entertainment, John thought. Cassandra would have loved skewering it with her viper tongue. He missed her brittle intelligence.
Halfway through, somebody must have disconnected a cable, because the whole show suddenly stopped. John had nothing better to do—he stayed, mostly to see how long it took the French to find the broken connection. Fifteen minutes later he thought, this would not happen in New York City. A disruption like this, so prolonged, simply wouldn’t be tolerated. Six back-ups would have been put in place and tested before the show began.
Finally, at the twenty-minute mark, the show resumed. A tape of Charles de Gaulle giving his victory speech was played, with the text projected in French and English. “Paris has been liberated by the French, for the French,” DeGaulle said.
What?
What about the Allied forces landing in Normandy and fighting all the way here? What about their sacrifices on the beaches, in the fields and villages? Leave it to de Gaulle to ignore that, he thought. De Gaulle had a gall, didn’t he?
Just then the soundtrack changed to churchbells ringing, and young people dressed in 1940s clothing streamed onto a stage. They ran from one to the other, hugging and kissing each other in celebration. No reference to the Nazi occupation, nor to the end of the oppression, which was the reason for the joy.
This show was so empty, John thought. The producers took the story of the liberation of one of the world’s great cities from one of the world’s great evils during the biggest armed conflict ever known and dumbed it down into a vapid bit of entertainment. Would the U.S. do any better? Maybe Ken Burns would make a factual, heart-wrenching documentary out of it.
He left and walked down Rue de Rivoli. The streets, though teeming with people, felt empty. Everybody he passed was a stranger and therefore remote.
He was loony to think he’d find some sort of companionship on these streets. Yes, he was loony—note his investment strategy, he thought. Nobody knew how hard he worked at acting normal.
How many hours could he fill walking among these vaguely evil, or at least disinterested, people? How long could he just walk amongst these thousands of six-story white buildings looming above him with their black wrought-iron balconies? Even if the wrought-iron pattern was different on each one, somehow they all looked the same on every rue and boulevard.
As he looked up and thought of Cassandra and their dead relationship, the white buildings seemed to be collapsing, right onto his hungry heart.
