Paris Story: Places, Faces

PARIS—The view from my hotel window could be a very nice, very bright, very wide postcard: At right, in the distance, is the dome of the Sacre Coeur; at left, much closer, is the Eiffel Tower. You wouldn’t know it by looking, but the tower, iron icon of the modern, went up before the ancient-looking church. Each was built in reaction to the fast-moving 19th century and France’s multiple revolutions: The Eiffel Tower looked forward, the Sacre Coeur looked back. From my window, you can feel pulled in both directions at once. More so than in any American city, there are layers of history on view here, layers that have never been blown up in favor of new condo buildings or blotted out by office skyscrapers. Except for one skyscraper, that is, the building above the Montparnasse train station, a tall, dull brown slab that could have been airlifted out of a Jersey office park and that, when I look outside, sits right in between the Eiffel Tower and the Sacre Coeur—it ruins the postcard. I guess it was so ugly the city decided never to try it again. So I get my view, and visitors to Paris know exactly where they are every morning.

Unfortunately, when I wake up during the French Open, it’s almost time for work. With matches starting at 11 A.M. most days and my writing wrapping up about 12 hours later, there isn’t much time for anything but tennis. Sometimes, not even dinner. More than once this trip, I’ve walked into a restaurant in the neighborhood before its advertised closing hour and been hit with the dreaded hand wave from the waiter, followed by a brusque and dismissive, half-English, half-French, “Is finis.” One of them even crossed his wrists in front of me, as if I were a vampire. The one morning I’ve had free, I thought that I would make my way back to the Musee D’Orsay to re-see a few things that hadn’t gotten my full attention the first time around. No such luck. By the time I got there, at 11 or so, the line was out the door, across a courtyard, down a hill, around another corner and had begun to snake down a sidewalk. When I turned around and began walking back to the metro, there were dozens of people streaming in the other direction, about to make the line even longer.

Anyway, enough of what I haven’t done. Here’s a little of what I have.

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I guess I didn’t realize how lucky I was to make it into the Musee d’Orsay last Friday afternoon—the line had only crossed the courtyard that day. The place is being renovated at the moment—it seems like its being going on for years—which actually, if you just have time for one trip, makes it more convenient. The museum’s greatest hits have been moved to one jam-packed floor. You turn a corner and you’re hit with something so famous you can’t quite believe it’s right in front of you: Renoir’s giant Moulin de la Galette is currently on a side wall that doesn’t look like it was even meant for paintings. Of course, it still looks, for lack of a better word, incredible in that spot. You can’t appreciate the flecks of light in it when you see a reproduction. The same goes for all of the Gaugins on another wall; they were made to see live.

There are rooms of Van Goghs and Monets and Cezannes, too much to properly see in one spin. My favorite was the Degas room in the back corner. It’s a little like the corner room of dark Goyas at the Prado, except not as dark. Not dark at all, in fact—the primary Degas color is orange, an orange that shifts subtly from one painting to the next, from light and gauzy at one end to intensely rich at the other. The room, as you turn inside it, hums with the color.

In its back corner are three very simple watercolors. Look at them longer, though, and they begin to make sense and make an impact. For me, liking art is a matter of reducing expectations for what I’m going to get and finding something beautiful in it that may not have jumped out at me right away—a brush of orange across the top, nothing more. In this way, contemporary art, which has pointed out the art in every day life, has helped me understand what can be appreciated in older art.

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“Have you been to the top of the Eiffel Tower,” the round man with the mustache and the Chicago accent asks the two laughing teenage girls next to him.

“Non.” No, the girls are from Paris, why would they have been to the top of the Eiffel Tower?

This is one of those rare restaurants that appears to be patronized by locals and tourists alike. It’s small, with benches instead of individual tables, and you sit side by side with strangers.

“Well, we’re going to do that tomorrow," the American continues, "before we go to Notre Dame [pronounced like the college in Indiana] and see The Thinker. Have you seen The Thinker?”

“Non. Who is the Thinker?” They laugh.

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There are the venerable apartment buildings, the grand museums, the light-filtering trees, the Art Deco cafes—if San Francisco never left the 1960s, Paris is all about the 20s—the long windows and iron balconies, the water that flows down the sides of the streets in the morning and the motorbikes that buzz down the midde of them at night. But what's most definitive about Paris these days are its young, solo women. As in New York, they outnumber young men, at least in the city's center. What would you have seen on these streets 100, 200 years ago? Strolling flaneurs, or wealthy couples walking together past beggars and between horse-drawn carriages? I don't know, exactly, but now it’s women—college age, in their 20, in their 30s, smart-looking professionals or students or artists or whatever they may be—who are at the city’s heart.

You don’t notice them on the street, where they’re mixed in with tourists and workers, as much as you do on the metro, where the real, more sober and contemporary, city shows itself. You see them on the way to work or school, presumably. The younger ones in packs, the slightly older ones on their own, reading a paperback, brown-eyed, dark-haired, mostly serious but sometimes laughing hysterically. Their style is muted and casually sophisticated, more bohemian than New York’s—jackets and jeans and scarves and sometimes Chuck Taylors, not many heels, not many flip-flops. Perhaps because I can’t understand what they’re saying, can’t relate to what they’re reading or listening to, can’t really imagine what they’re thinking, these women seem more visually vivid to me. The images of a few have stayed in my mind.

The girl with wild curly black hair in red pants and white Nike high-tops listening to her IPod; she kept bouncing, just slightly, the back of her right heel up and down to the music. The girl with dark brown hair and strangely stained teeth, who, as she got off the train and left her friends behind, looked back and kept talking and laughing with them even as the doors closed on her. The rail thin girl with her black hair up on a hot day, leaning into the subway window, trying to catch some of the passing air. The woman usher at Roland Garros who kept kneading her forehead—it had been a long afternoon of tennis, and she had a headache.

Most memorable, though, was the preppy girl who wasn’t alone. I saw her on a busy corner. She had her dark brown hair in a ponytail, and was wearing white jeans with a blue sweater over her shoulders. As I passed her, she looked up and broke into a smile at something behind me. It was her boyfriend, a preppy match in a blue jacket. They made a dash for each other.

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