My friend Susu just sent me a pic she took 24 years ago, when we were students in Paris together. I remember the dominant colors that fall — colors you would see in everything from women’s scarves to men’s plaid coats to teenagers’ shoes — were dark green and royal purple, and because the latter didn’t really suit me, I went in 100-percent for the green. I even went so far as to buy a mock turtleneck, even though I never liked turtlenecks, because many of the French men were wearing them and I didn’t want to look like an American. I also got a French haircut. (I had yet to buy French glasses, however.) I was fairly fluent in French by the time I left, and in this picture you can see me wearing an expression along the lines of “quoi?” or “what?” of a sort that one must also learn in mastering another language, assuming you want to fit in. In the manner of my generation, I wore the expression half-seriously, both (gently) mocking and honoring the French culture in which I was immersed.
It was a good time to be out of the United States (is there ever not a good time?): George Bush was about to take the reins from Ronald Reagan in leading the country into the political and cultural quagmire from which we have yet to emerge. There was no internet! Politics all felt very far way as I walked back and forth through the rain from my French family’s apartment, located in the 20th arrondissement, in the northeast (not far from the Pere Lachaise cemetery), to the center of the city, where we took classes, or at least I would walk when the metro workers went on strike, which happened fairly often. Once, though, I remember walking back in the rain, not because of the subway, but because I was berating myself for lacking the courage to approach a guest lecturer in my art history class, a man who had struck me as not only highly intelligent, but also attractive in a slouching, Gallic manner, and pretty clearly non-heterosexual. When I left the school, I spotted him in a nearby bookstore — fate seemed to be guiding me! — but rather than introduce myself, I stood paralyzed and transfixed in the shadows outside until he slipped out the door into the night. It wasn’t like I had formulated any plans beyond just talking to someone from another world (a gay world, a Parisian world, a world in which art mattered more than anything else) who seemed reasonably comfortable in his shoes; at the time, I told myself that perhaps he would have invited me for a coffee or drink, and I could have asked for his opinions on Paul Klee or Jean Dubuffet. I couldn’t bring myself to walk through the door, however, because I knew that my interest in talking to him also contained an element of desire that I didn’t want to acknowledge, and I felt sure (or perhaps hoped) that he would have been able to see right through me. Being twenty, and with a melodramatic interior that had little resemblance to the carefully constructed facade I had learned to wear, I walked home despondent, certain that I had failed a big test I would never be able to pass. Thankfully, twenty-four years later, I can take comfort in knowing better.
Related:
The Paris Project (September 9, 1988)
The Paris Project (October 15, 1988)
The Paris Project (November 8, 1988)
The Paris Project (November 22, 1988)
The Paris Project (November 24, 1988)
The Paris Project (November 26, 1988)
The Paris Project (December 8, 1988)
The Paris Project (December 13, 1988)
