Paris, Christmas 2006 (and before, and soon, and one day)

like this, and not really at all like this.

Grey and unreal as little roofs with deep-set, blue-shuttered windows blooming out of them, and the streets always perfect and water-stained in their narrow little smile-wrinkle curves.  Streets come and go, wind up in eachother’s angles, as though pushing hair into fingers, elbows into the backs of knees, legs around waists, discreet in their entanglements as small hats and neat hair.  There is forever the suggestion of hot lights in Paris, but never—blessedly—quite the realization of them.

I know that there are catacombs under the city.  I keep being told that that these old-world, book-turned, behind-hands-history sewers are actually a museum, and one could go there, imagine torches, imagine escapes, disease and romance, a nobleman lighting a large bill on fire to find a small lost coin.  But I’ve never actually gone.  I only contemplated the cold underground passages from the warmth of an impossible claw-foot tub in a blue-painted bathroom, in an apartment that fell through my having like a sieve because there was no way I could ever be grateful enough for it, no way even to begin.

What other city in the world would make its sewers into a museum?  I have been to Paris eleven times and still feel as though I have never actually been there.  I’ve stayed with residents and in hotels, I have touristed blatantly and I have sat in cafes and small bars for a day of hours, in the strange, gray months when airplanes are cheap.   I’ve gotten lost in the up and down turning streets and I’ve started relationships with bookstores and coffeehouses, I’ve stood in cathedrals until my neck ached, made preposterous mouth-love to cheese and chocolate and stayed in restaurants with skinny frites and smug bread, and yet for all this I still feel that I have only looked at a painting, stood respectful at a distance well beyond the embrace of the frame and made a student’s showily contemplative face at the image.

The closest I’ve felt to climbing inside was–in all obvious body metaphor–the metro.  The small, thoughtless grey trains, and the lazy, ominous gesture of the bricked and arched ceilings, are in my memory torchlit and filled with the skeletal staircases to nowhere that you see at the backs of old, dying theatres.  These rumbling utilities held me inside a secret-keeping mouth and rushed on into the buried, masked truths of the city.  But I was too frightened, too young, too inexperienced, too fat, too American, always too something for it, and whenever Paris was about to give me the show I and everyone else always imagine of her, I closed my eyes tightly and didn’t open them until it was over, when once again I stood just outside a charming painting.

Two winters ago, in a little finger-twisted heartbreak, I got very close to it.  I wrote on sallow-lined pages in a skinny notebook and drank espresso over and over again, triumphant daily about my visibly stained teeth, watching the cold go by through the grand windows of a café.  I walked around the backs of gray streets signposted where red bar lights bloomed like mouths into the ash-cold air, until the serpentine tangents of the city made me nauseous and dizzy.  My heart was then splitting like plywood about a sloppy and inelegant American boy, and I tried to Paris—as a verb—away my feelings for him.  I kissed Oscar Wilde’s grave with all the lipstick I could muster, and I stood on bridges and followed how Notre Dame drove the sky down the curve of the river, aching in the laid-out winter for a properly lost generation.

There was a single day’s long walk, and I ended up crossing the Louvre’s large courtyard.  It was the end of the afternoon, and all at once this huge, freezing cold sunset arrived.  Its color seemed to eat up the winter, as though color were a rush of blood all to one particular vein.  It hit all the glass in the pyramid and the million windows in the grand, multiplying structures, and I was just helpless, rooted to the beautiful ground, beautiful people on bicycles going by around me, their beauty equal to the scene, and mine utterly insufficient.  In the distance, a ferris wheel, a river, a great many eye-lidded windows and trees and a menacing park out of stories, and somewhere churches and dancing girls, somewhere fine homes and gates opening for carriages, somewhere everyone, every woman, every perfect woman, getting into bed slowly, with stockings and leggy cigarettes, and somewhere a revolution opening and closing like a day’s light, and I stood there in the thundering, silent, hard pastel beauty, and could not get to any of it.

So I went to get hot chocolate which kissed me at least as well as any person had up until then. My fingers finally warmed up and I wanted to curl them inside Paris as though into a man’s coat collar. I held the small cup, put my palm on the café table, and Paris waited for me to meet its eyes.  But as many times as I tried, I still couldn’t.