A Night Out in Paris

The Hinternet Gets Invited to a Party

I’m heading down to Wally’s for his annual summer solstice bash. This time of year there are about 23½ hours separating sunrise from sunset in Northern Europe, and I always feel as if I am under the relentless interrogation of sinister men who know how to weaken a detainee by messing with his circadian rhythm. It’s 22h when Wally buzzes me in to his building in the rue de la Raquette, but it could just as well be the middle of the afternoon. Yet I suppose even the sun’s refusal to set at a reasonable hour cannot entirely suppress the spirits that are believed to come out only at night. For I admit I am feeling unusually Dionysian, or at least more free-spirited than I have generally been in years, and ready to make a bit of trouble.

In the spiral staircase two Australians are following behind me, already primed, it seems, by apéros somewhere else. “Give me a pastille,” the one says to the other.
“A what?”
“I said a pastille. It’s not Bastille Day yet, it’s Pastille Day. Like, hello? Unvoiced bilabial plosive? Conard.”
“What?”
“Donne-moi une pastille putain!”

Wally opens the door all sweaty and rose-colored. The drunk Australians hug him, one on each shoulder, tell him he smells like sausage, and quickly disappear into the depths of the apartment. Wally’s wearing his “Baise le chef” cooking apron, and looks ready to explain yet again the two different uses of that word. In 14 years in France he seems to have learned little else, other than what they taught him at that cooking school in Lyon. He’s probably about to tell me the wine is breathing right now. He’s probably about to tell me of all the unlikely things he’s caramelized.

“I’ve got the sous-vide firing up right now,” Wally says to me after a few seconds of silence. “You’re gonna flip when you taste what comes out of it.” Wally knows I don’t care about gastronomy. He knows it is extremely unlikely that I will “flip”, or anything of the sort, and if he had not been so perfectly pink already I might have thought he was now blushing at this misplaced promise.

I wander inside and there’s an older Englishman with an Oxbridge accent and a purple kerchief in his breast pocket matching the ascot around his neck. He’s excitedly recalling an incident about 15 or 20 years ago, when someone wrote in the LRB about someone else whose nemesis was named Baker. “When this Baker finally dealt him a professional death-blow,” the Englishman recounts, “he replied with what many held to be the wittiest line in the long and storied history of Oxford wit: ‘I’ve met my Bakerloo’, he said. ‘I’ve met my Bakerloo!’ Can you believe that! Does anyone remember who it was? I suppose I could go through the digital archives, but part of me prefers not being able to recall it with any precision. Do you know that feeling? Why resort to tech-aided total recall, when we can just go about our lives with ‘I’ve met my Bakerloo’ clunking around in our heads? I for one enjoy feeling it clunking in there.”

“I do not understand what is funny”, a French person says. “For me it is not funny.”
I introduce myself to him and ask him how he ended up at this party. He says his name is Corentin. “I am marry to…” he pauses, and points, to all appearances, at a covey of Bryn Mawr women. “My wife is work on Proust, is work on a novel retelling Proust from ze perspective of Albertine. She still does not ‘ave a publisher. Me, I am sooner software.” He moves his fingers as if on a keyboard, to illustrate the signature gesture of his métier, which to be honest looks more or less the same, at this level of abstraction, as the signature gesture of his wife’s line of work as well.

Rebecca butts in with an enormous tray. “If anyone wants to amuse their gueule, these are bacon stracciatella thingies, most definitely not kosher don’t tell my bubbee, and these are like mini-dessert quiches or canapés with rhubarb or rutabaga or one of those. Wally would know.”
“Hiç bir şey, teşekkür,” one of our company says.
“Yok?”
“Yok.”
When Rebecca is out of earshot, the Turk leans in and says to all of us: “Guess whose personal cell Rebecca’s got? Olena. Fucking. Zelenska.”
“Get out of here.”
“Serious. She showed me before you got here. She’s gonna go to Kyiv to profile her beauty routines for Marie Claire or something.”
“Get out of here.”
“Serious. I wish I had been quick enough to memorize it. We could text her right now.”
“What would we say?”
“I don’t know, like ‘Слава Украïнi’? Or like, ‘Keep being a beacon of freedom’?”
“Or an icon of fashion?” someone says.
“Porque no los dos?” someone else says.
“Totally.” 

I catch a glimpse of a young woman with a fresh jonquil stuck in her long brown hair, just over her left ear. She is retreating into the side bedroom, and she quickly shuts the door behind her. After another minute or so I hear the distinct sound of a needle making contact with a record, some cyclical cracking, and then, the opening notes of Juice Newton’s “Queen of Hearts”. “A peculiar choice,” I mutter to myself.

I move over to where Fabrice is holding court and I catch him mid-sentence. “… yeah so that’s why my firm is suing Hungary,” he says. “I’ve been involved in some high-level cases before, but I mean this time we’re just outright suing Hungary.”
“Can you even do that?” someone asks, “I mean like sue a country?”
“Watch me,” Fabrice says, and he slides his Ray-Bans out of his breast pocket and onto his face, and everyone laughs.

Someone new comes in, a beautiful middle-aged woman with a distinguished older man. “That’s Celia R***”, Fabrice whispers, still sporting his shades.
“You mean the autofiction one?” says Colleen.
“The autofiction one.” Fabrice answers.
“The British one?” says Chiara.
“The British one.”
“The one with the prolapsed…”
“The one with the prolapsed. Now shht,” Fabrice commands testily.

Then I see Caleb Hornblith, a fellow Californian who, like me, ended up a professor in the French university system. He’s a Byzantinist in the classics department at Université Paris XV — Éliphas Lévi. I make my way over to ask him how he’s faring, and he wastes no time: “I’m fucked. I think the last time I talked to you I was working on the Hesychast controversy, which was cool, but then I took a little detour and did an edition of some materials on Byzantine horse medicine, basically just the text of the Hippiatrica along with some shorter anonymous sources. Someone told me I should apply for European Research Commission funding for this work, so I did, but the ERC kept insisting the project be bigger and more interdisciplinary. Now I’ve got a €16,000,000 ERC grant with six different PI’s in five different countries, and all but me are like actual veterinarians. I just wandered into this, like fucking Forrest Gump, like Chauncey the Gardener. Five million euros are supposed to go directly to some institute in Aalborg working on vector-borne equine encephalitis. There’s a whole component of the project that involves pairing autistic children in Turku with horses that can understand what the hell they want and translate it by stomping their hooves or something. We’re funding some other initiative in Sicily where the peasants there extract some kind of pus from their horses’ chestnuts for some traditional balm, and we’re trying to get patents for them. They sell it everywhere in China. There’s even a part where we have to redo Eadward Muybridge’s photographs from 1878, you know, the ones where he proves all four of the horse’s legs leave the ground simultaneously at a gallop, and inadvertently inaugurates the motion-picture era? Yeah, we’re doing that. I mean, I’m managing the budget that causes other people to do all these things. It’s all I do now. I manage the European horse budget. What the fuck? I’m an antiquisant, not an équinisant or whatever the fuck they call it. You know that line in Brecht where the guy is like, ‘One life to live, and of all things a plumber in Detmold’? That’s me, except I’m the European horse-research budget manager. It doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how I landed in this.”

“Look Caleb,” I say when he takes a second to sigh, “I’ve worked very hard to cultivate a double life for myself, and it usually works just fine until a nerd like you comes along and blows my cover. I have a strict policy when I’m out of an evening in Paris, of not talking about ERC grants and “projets transversaux” and “comment percevoir des sous” and anticipating application deadlines “en amont” and how to pass the Brussels interview phase and to make a good impression on these absolutely sadistic European funding agencies. Please don’t talk to me about this stuff. I don’t care. If we want a different life than the one we’re thrown into, we just have to make it for ourselves. Now tell me something interesting about horses.” He’s silent so I keep talking. “Did you know the first equids were only about the size of capybaras?” He’s still silent so I ask him what “chestnuts” are, and he pulls out his iPhone and shows me a graphic image of a leathery knob on the inside of a horse’s knee. “Oh yeah,” I say, “I used to see those things when I rode ponies as a kid. Ponies have them too, right? I figured they were some kind of infection. I never knew they were an actual organ.”

Just then Charlotte comes up with an extra glass of champagne. “Tu ne bois toujours pas, Justin?” she asks.
“Non, toujours pas. Ça fait archi-américain, je sais, mais je suis comme ça.”
“Y a quand même un juste milieu, n’est-ce pas ? Tout est bon avec modération.”
“Je ne fais rien avec modération. Ce n’est pas dans ma nature, qu’est-ce que tu veux.“

Charlotte wanders off and I text my wife, who’s on a research trip in Rome. “Can I go home yet?” I ask.
“Just stay a while longer,” she texts back immediately. “It’s good for you to see some real human faces!” I love my wife so much. I’d be so lost without her.

Whoever is DJing has decided to put on Bruce Hornsby and the Range’s “The Way It Is”. What is happening here? Please don’t tell me this has come back around, whether under the banner of sincerity or of irony? Please, not this.

The Australians reappear with a tote bag full of what they are calling “party favors”. I look in and I see several installments in the venerable old “Que sais-je ?” series of books published by Presses Universitaires de France in the middle of the previous century. The first one I pull out is La Télévision en couleur, and the Australians can see I am not so thrilled, so they tell me I can keep that one if I want, but that I can pick out another as well. This time it’s La Country-Music, and they can see I’m very pleased. I open at random and I read: “Plus encore que Buck Owens, c’est Merle Haggard qui a donné ses lettres de noblesse à l’école de Bakersfield.” Wonderful, I say to the Australians. Thanks, guys.

I notice the Oxbridge fellow again and see he has quite a circle around him, so I go over to find out what he’s doing to keep them in his thrall. He seems to be reciting some medieval fabliaux érotiques. “No but the greatest contribution to this rich genre,” he says, “is ‘La Dame qui sonjait des vez’, that is, ‘The Lady Who Dreamed of Dicks’. She goes to an outdoor market where all of the merchants are selling nothing but barrows full of male members, and

La dame a par tot resgardé
qu’ele en vit un gros, un lonc,
si s’est apoiee selonc.
Gros fu garriere et gros par tot,
lo musel ot gros et estot ;
se lo voir dire vos en voil.”

“I didn’t catch much of that, to be honest,” someone says. “But I did once stand next to Catherine Deneuve at an open-air market. She was buying a giant cucumber.”
“I stood next to Kristin Scott Thomas when she was buying an aubergine,” someone else pipes in.
“I once peed next to Jacques Derrida,“ says another. “But that was in Memphis so it probably doesn’t count.”
“I once stood behind Olivia de Havilland at the pharmacy,“ I add. “She was getting her statin prescription refilled. I suppose when you’re 102 you’re bound to have some issues with cholesterol.”

I wander away in search of another cluster. “My name’s Dennis,” I hear someone saying, “I’m with the Times bureau at K***. No yeah sure it’s a challenging place to live, but it’s great for finding real human stories to share.”

I swerve away from that groupuscule just in time to avoid getting pulled in, and land on another in which I know only Jessica. She’s saying that she and the others are “working on a musical. Not so much even a musical really. More of a hip-hopera. It’s inspired by In the Heights, but it’s gonna be set at Barbès, you know with like a whole African feel. There’ll be a whole number with women leaning way over into the close-out bins on the sidewalk at Tati and doing this whole little dance with just their butts. I know Tati went out of business but still.”

“That sounds amazing,” a young man says. He has round glasses and thick eyebrows, and he looks like an old photo of a member of, say, the Armenian chapter of the Union of Soviet Writers. Jessica asks him what he’s been working on. He tells us he has an idea for a screenplay. “Do you know who King Robert is?” he asks, and all of us shake our heads no. “Well hundreds of millions of others do, and I want to make a movie about his origin story. Do you know how when you’re standing in the metro, you see all these people staring at their phones, and like half of them are playing this game where they have to match three spades or hearts or whatever, and if they don’t do it in time a giant serpent devours this old medieval-looking king? Or he is made to stand in radioactive green sludge rising slowly past his waist, and you have to save him by matching shapes? That’s King Robert, and the game is called Royal Match and it was made in Turkey and is breaking all kinds of records, even though it still has zero uptake. No product tie-ins, no t-shirts, nothing. This is what I call the ‘dark energy’ of culture, all that stuff that the world’s inhabitants are actually feeding off of, but that doesn’t even show up on the sensors of shall we say the shapers of discourse? I want to take it from zero to a hundred, just like that.”
“Awesome!” Jessica says.
“But get this,” he continues, “I want King Robert’s back-story to recapitulate several of the key moments in Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, you know, with King Charles of Zembla?”

“Oh my God look,“ Jessica interrupts, “that’s Élise de C***. You know, the granddaughter of Egbert von W***?”
“The one who had an affair with Jean Cocteau?” the Soviet-looking writer asks.
“The one who may have had an affair with Jean Cocteau,” Jessica clarifies.
“During the…?”
“Yes, during the.”
There’s a brief silence, and then she says to all of us in hushed tones: “Honey, around here that’s royalty.”

I notice a cluster of five or six young people, evidently the children of some of my coevals. I figure their conversation couldn’t be any worse than what I’ve experienced so far, so I make my way over to them, greet them warmly, and tell them to go on with their conversation as if I weren’t there.
“When I was a kid I seriously thought there was an animal called a ‘hog-a-pig’,” a young woman says.
“Oh my God that reminds of that one girl who used to be on Twitter? Her handle was like Empress Molly Ekateringwald?” says a young man. “She’s gone now. Without a trace.”
“Pour one out for a real one,” says the hog-a-pig girl.
“No but look I’m telling you the truth,” a young man pipes in, evidently resuming a lapsed line of argument. “Beenslackin is back with Young Chemist. Serious.”
“Young Chemist?” I ask.
“Yeah that’s his girlfiend. She’s called that because she’s like an actual chemist. My friend saw them walking his dog Keiko across Dimes Square. Head-to-toe Balenciaga.” One of the young women is scrolling frantically on her phone, and then she seems to find what she was looking for, a meme of some sort, and she holds it up and reads it. “See this is what I was talking about: ‘All you male cervids out there with the huge-ass antlers? Y’all sigma as hell!’.” All the young people laugh, and I try to smile genially as I slowly walk backwards away from them.

I abscond into the side room, expecting to find there the young woman with the jonquil. Instead I find an old woman. She is wearing a respirator, and sitting upright on a couch pulled up close to the record player. She’s holding a 12’’ single of Yellowman’s “Yellow Like Cheese”. “Do you know this one?” she asks me without introduction. “‘I’m yellow like cheese / You can love me any way that you please’?”
“Yes, of course,” I say, “a true classic. Are you the one who has been choosing all the music?”
“Yes,” she says, “I’ve been hoping to drive everyone away. But I guess it’s not working.”
“Why would you want to do that?”
“To be alone with Wally again. He’s my sigisbée.“
“That’s a word I don’t know, regrettably.”
“It means ‘chaperone’, ‘orderly’, ‘lover’. It can mean a lot of things.”
“Did you see a young woman come through this room a while ago? I caught her out of the corner of my eye, and it seemed to me I knew her from somewhere.”
“I didn’t see anyone come through here.”
“But I know I saw her come in here.”
“Perhaps she did,” the woman says, and just then I notice a wilted jonquil almost entirely concealed by her white hair.

“My lungs are going to give out any day now,” she says.
“I’m sorry to hear that. You’re from here? From Paris?”
“I’m from Ann Arbor. I came in 1971. I signed up for the whole ‘Histoire et Civilisation Françaises’ program at the Sorbonne like all the other American girls. At least all the ones who weren’t hippies. The ones who were still operating on the Audrey Hepburn model, of France as a place to go to absorb some Old World refinement. Then I started a Ph.D. at Paris XVI, which at the time was still called ‘Catherine Monvoisin’. I was working on the semiotics of turtlenecks. Don’t ask. Then I got a job at the Musée de la Mode, and soon enough I was running the whole mid-century American department. I discovered my Sapphic side adjusting the waistline of a skirt once worn by Eleanor Roosevelt. We had to tighten it up just so it would fit on the museum’s thickest mannequin. My name’s Kate, by the way. I was there until 1986, I think, then I registered as an auto-entrepreneuse at the Pôle Emploi and started doing translation for museums. You know how when you go to the Louvre and you read the labels they’re always a bit different in English than in French? Say, if you’re looking at a Safavid ewer, the French will tell you that it’s an ‘aiguière de bronze coulé’ while the English will tell you it’s a ‘bronze pouring vessel’? That’s me. I’m the one who got to decide how different they should be. I mean I was working under orders from higher up, but the final choices were always mine.”
“You mean it’s official Louvre policy to make them different?”
“Yes of course. So I never finished the turtlenecks thing, I never finished the ‘imagined erotic biography’ of Eleanor that I was working on for a while, I just kept doing this and that. I was living in a city I somehow believed was going to keep me safe from all the dreary necessities of life and all the cruel ravages of time. But as you can see at some point I grew very old.”
“I wouldn’t say ‘very’.”
“It’s a lie we tell ourselves here,“ she continues, “that we’re removed from all the misery of the world. Cigarette?” At first I imagine she is asking me for a cigarette, and I tell her I do not think that is such a good idea in her condition, and in any case I no longer smoke. Then I see she is offering me one, and has already placed another in her own mouth. “What’s one day, more or less?” she asks, and then she lights them both.
“Every time something bad happens here,” she goes on, “which has been pretty regular ever since the Vikings came up the Seine, we all react as if it’s an anomaly, as if there has been some sort of mistake. Even in 2015 the overwhelming response to Bataclan was to make a big scene of going back out and sitting on the terrasses for an apéro, as if we were a world apart, sustained from day to day, from century to century, only by the power of our collective insouciance. No one could ever really face up to the fact that Paris exists within the same spatiotemporal dimension as Damascus or Donetsk. Oh we talk plenty about those places here, we even sometimes travel back and forth between them. But you would think it’s a wormhole and not an airplane that makes this travel possible, for all the reality we grant to those other places once we’re back in our little paradise. Go over to the window. You’ll see a whole family sitting on a queen-size mattress on the sidewalk. The mother is holding a cardboard sign in Arabic and French. It says they’re Syrian refugees. That’s Paris: mattresses on the sidewalks, spillover from neighboring wars. Those people are as quintessentially Parisian as the hype crews swinging on the bars in the subway are New York. But those guys go viral. They go iconic. They land on t-shirts. They blow up on Instagram. What happens in Paris? Nothing. If we were to acknowledge them we would be acknowledging our own inevitable insertion in history, which would include among other things our own mortality. But that’s what we came here believing we were escaping… This Yellowman sounds pretty horny doesn’t he?”

I stand looking out the window, and some moments go by in silence. The youngest of the Syrian children, a little girl, has wandered up to a man getting onto his scooter in front of La Pause Café. She looks about four years old, and is wearing a shirt that says “Mbappé”. The man sits down on the scooter and pats her head. She tries to climb on to sit in his lap, and he picks her up and places her back on the sidewalk. She tries again, and the man laughs, and so does the mother sitting on the mattress.
“You’ve got to see this, Kate,” I say. I hear nothing in response but the crackling at the end of the Yellowman 12’’.
“Kate?” I say again, and am met with silence. I’m overcome with dread, and it seems to me now that the only way to keep time at bay is simply to go on staring out the window, to keep my eyes fixed before me, nor to give into the same temptation as befell the wife of Lot.

Little Mbappé has taken to jumping in front of random passersby, roaring at them like a ferocious lion.

(For Katharine Nancy Crenshaw, 1948-2024)

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