IN MY FIRST years in Paris I felt a shyness about going into cafés where I wasn’t known—a timidity peculiar, admittedly, in a man already in his forties. I preferred to wander the streets in the constant drizzle (London has the bad reputation, but Paris weather is not much better). The whole city, at least intra muros, can be walked from one end to the other in a single evening. Perhaps its superficial uniformity—the broad avenues, the endlessly repeating benches and lamps stamped from the identical mold, the unvarying metal grates ringing the bases of the trees—promotes the dreamlike insubstantiality of Paris and contributes to the impression of a landscape “stripped of thresholds.” Without barriers, I found myself gliding along from one area to another. (This inside/outside dichotomy of Paris as experienced by the flâneur keeps showing up in [the German essayist Walter] Benjamin’s notes: “Just as ‘flânerie’ can make an interior of Paris, an apartment in which the neighborhoods are the rooms, so neatly marked off as if with thresholds, in an opposite way the city can present itself to the stroller from all sides as a landscape stripped of all thresholds.”)
Eventually I was able to distinguish what Parisians had labeled a “stuffy” quartier from a “happening” one, a workers’ neighborhood from the home of the young and up-and-coming, but these distinctions were all acquired later and in conversation. At first, when I had to depend on my own observations, Paris impressed me as a seamless unity in which, by American standards, everything was well tended, built to last, and at once cold (the pale stone walls, the absence of neon, the unbroken facades never permitted by city ordinance to pass a certain height or to crack or crumble without undergoing a periodic facelift) and discreetly charming (lace curtains in the concierge’s window, the flow of cleansing water in the gutters sandbagged to go in one direction or the other, the street fairs with rides for kids, the open-air food markets two days out of every week, segregated into different stalls under low awnings: this one loaded down with spices, that one with jellies and preserved fruits, not to mention the stand of the pâtissier and the baker, florist, butcher, fishmonger, the counter selling hot sausages and choucroute—or two hundred kinds of cheese). That water in the sandbagged gutter reminds me of something the great American poet John Ashbery once said in discussing the peculiar unaccountability of artistic influence: “I found my poetry being more ‘influenced’ by the sight of clear water flowing in the street gutters, where it is (or was) diverted or dammed by burlap sandbags moved about by workmen, than it was by the French poetry I was yearning to read at the time.”
Imagine dying and being grateful you’d gone to heaven, until one day (or one century) it dawned on you that your main mood was melancholy, although you were constantly convinced that happiness lay just around the next corner. That’s something like living in Paris for years, even decades. It’s a mild hell so comfortable that it resembles heaven. The French have such an attractive civilization, dedicated to calm pleasures and general tolerance, and their taste in every domain is so sharp, so sure, that the foreigner (especially someone from chaotic, confused America) is quickly seduced into believing that if he can only become a Parisian he will at last master the art of living. Paris intimidates its visitors when it doesn’t infuriate them, but behind both sentiments dwells a sneaking suspicion that maybe the French have got it right, that they have located the juste milieu, and that their particular blend of artistic modishness and cultural conservatism, of welfare-statism and intense individualism, of clear-eyed realism and sappy romanticism—that these proportions are wise, time-tested, and as indisputable as they are subtle.
If so, then why is the flâneur so lonely? So sad? Why is there such an elegiac feeling hanging over this city with the gilded cupola gleaming above the Emperor’s Tomb and the foaming, wild horses prancing out of a sea of verdigris on the roof of the Grand Palais? This city with the geometric tidiness of its glass pyramid, Arch of Triumph, and the chilly portal imprinted by the Grande Arche on a cloudy sky? Why is he unhappy, this foreign flâneur, even when he strolls past the barnacled towers of Notre-Dame soaring above the Seine and a steep wall so dense with ivy it looks like the side of a galleon sinking under moss-laden chains?
WHEN I ARRIVED in Paris I was a fairly young-looking forty-three and when I left I was nearly sixty, snowy-haired and jowly. In the beginning I’d cruise along the Seine near the Austerlitz train station under a building that was cantilevered out over the shore on pylons. Or I’d hop over the fence and cruise the pocket park at the end of the Île Saint-Louis, where I lived. There I’d either clatter through the bushes or descend the steps to the quay that wrapped around the prow of the island like the lower deck of a sinking ship. Garlands of ivy dangled down the white walls from the deck above. I kept thinking of those lines in Ezra Pound’s Second Canto where a Greek ship is immobilized at sea and transformed by the gods:
And where was gunwale, there now was vine-trunk,
And tenthril where cordage had been,
grape-leaves on the rowlocks,
Heavy vine on the oarshafts,
And, out of nothing, a breathing,
hot breath on my ankles,
Beasts like shadows in glass,
a furred tail upon nothingness.
I had to step over the giant rusting rings on the quayside to which boats could be roped—though I never saw a boat moored there. When the bateaux-mouches would swing round the island, their klieg lights were so stage-set bright that we’d all break apart and try to rearrange our clothing. I kept hoping I’d run once more into an ardent, muscular lad who came home with me several times but never told me his name or gave me his number; all this boy would admit to was that he was kept in great style, in a town house in the Marais, by a German businessman who greatly resembled … me. (Busman’s holiday, apparently.)
Of course most people, straight and gay, think that cruising is pathetic or sordid — but for me, at least, some of my happiest moments have been spent making love to a stranger beside dark, swiftly moving water below a glowing city. If you’re a history buff, you can look at men (but don’t touch them) in the late afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens up and down the gravel walkway behind the Orangerie. At night the whole place rocks—or did, at least, when I was still motivated to jump over fences and prowl (illegally) the moonlit pathways between ancient and modern statues or circle the mammoth round pond in which prehistoric carp doze in the ooze and surface in a feeding frenzy only when someone scatters breadcrumbs.
I CAN REMEMBER the heady days of 1981, when I paid a long visit to friends in Paris. When I moved to France in 1983, the euphoria was still in the air. I’d been conditioned by three decades of gay life in America to be in a permanent state of alert about possible police raids of bars, baths, and cruising places; equally feared were roving gangs of queer-bashers. But in Paris the streets and parks and saunas and back rooms seemed positively tranquil by contrast.
Socially, gays were treated differently as well. In New York, at least in the 1960s and 1970s, gays seldom ventured to gatherings out of the ghetto, whereas in Paris my American lover and I were invited everywhere and received as a couple, even if sometimes we were the only gay males present. In New York, liberal straights would have found a way to reassure us that we were really, truly welcome, whereas in Paris (at least among the well-heeled, sophisticated, arty people we were meeting) no one ever mentioned our sexuality. Or if someone did, it was in a general spirit of ribaldry, which so often presided over those worldly, lighthearted conversations.
FOR ME PARIS lives in its details—the blue windows set in the doors of the boxes at the Opéra-Comique, the only (and magical) source of illumination during that moment just after the house lights are lowered and before the stage curtain is raised. The drama with which the waiters cluster around a table in a first-class restaurant and all lift the silver bell-shaped covers at the same moment to reveal the contents of the plates—and the pedantry with which one of the waiters explains in singsong detail exactly what each dish contains. The pleasant shock of the klieg lights that suddenly turn night into day when a bateau-mouche glides by. The melancholy mood (worthy of an old-fashioned production of Pelléas et Mélisande) of an autumn day when one rows over to one of the islands in the Grand Lac of the Bois de Boulogne in order to have lunch in a deserted restaurant — or the squalid excitement when one staggers through the bushes nearby at night to see the theatrical costumes and maneuvers of glamorous transvestite prostitutes from Brazil striking poses in the glare of passing headlights.