Paris in the Present Tense: A Novel
Mark Helprin
Jules Lacour was born in 1940, while his parents were hiding in an attic in Reims. His mother prayed that he would not cry, he seldom did, and in the four years that followed neither he nor they spoke above a whisper. That was the beginning of a long story.
I.
Rising and Aloft
Air France 017
A DISINTEGRATING AIRFRAME offers little in the way of second chances, and because this sometimes happens, taking to the air tends to heighten one’s awareness of that which has come before and that which may come yet. Though travelers convince themselves that statistics watch over them, tension flows through airports like windblown clouds, and as an aircraft rises to 13,000 meters those within it may be drawn to assess what they love and what they hope for in the time left.
And when autumn weather on land may be pleasantly crisp and permissive of wearing a suit in perfect comfort, the North Atlantic is deadly cold and unforgiving. Swells that normally run at three or four feet can easily rise to ten or more, and even as freezing wind draws long lines of foam across the wave crests at thirty knots it isn’t called a storm. Delicate airplanes constructed of a million discrete parts fly far above such cold and dark seas for hours as meals are served, movies screened, telephone calls made, and lights turned down while passengers sleep under soft wool blankets. But should the plane break up in the air or crash into the waves, death will have its way most horribly. Surprising for most, but not for all.
A huge, dark-gold, reddened sun had almost set. Manhattan’s skyscrapers and tenements, painted in flame on their south and west sides, stood in impenetrable shadow on their north and east faces. And in business class on Air France 017, Kennedy to Charles de Gaulle – who, before they became airports, knew one another and were in power at the same time – a window seat awaited Jules Lacour, who found it, settled in, and assessed his quarters with less enthusiasm than they were supposed to elicit. Low walls that curved to provide privacy and call attention to their design allowed him to see the procession of boarders passing through: tourists and Egyptians, Philadelphia housewives and graduate students, a baby or two, but mainly, in the business and first class cabins, jaded men of affairs who an instant after taking their seats opened newspapers, laptops, or spiral-bound books full of tables and charts. That is, if they were not engaged in cell-phone conversations projected with the stiff self-importance that was their oxygen.
The flight wasn’t full, it had boarded quickly, and traffic on the runways was such that the crew wanted to pull from the gate as fast as possible to be slotted-in for takeoff. As the plane was pushed back from the terminal, Manhattan came into view from the Battery almost to Hell Gate. The palisade of buildings was pitch black on its eastern face, but light from the sun side broke so hard upon steel and glass that its coronas roiled over the rooftops like waves breaking over a sea wall.
Although it was for him the scene of bitter defeat, Jules Lacour could not hold his own failure against a city that – unlike Paris, but like life – was beautiful both in spite of itself and as the sum of its ungainly parts. Manhattan was a gift not of form but of light and motion. From a distance or on high the persistent sound that rose from it, a barely audible hum that never ceased, might have been the whispered stories of all its inhabitants, even the dead. He couldn’t dislike New York, no matter the petty injuries and humiliations he had suffered there because as a foreigner he could neither fully understand it, nor fight the way it fought, nor speak the way it spoke. Nor could they speak the way he spoke. They didn’t even say his name correctly, pronouncing Jules indistinguishably from the English word jewels.
He never quite got used to this, as in French the S was silent and the J pronounced “zh.” They did almost alright with Lacour, coming close to the second syllable’s cooor, and not quite making it, but Jewels drove him crazy, as if every time someone addressed him they called him Bijoux. Not that Jules’ English was that precise – he had a strong French accent – but no one in America seemed to know how to pronounce any foreign word.
And apparently no one had ever heard of anything either, and Jules Lacour was so constantly explaining references and allusions that eventually he gave up. De Gaulle? Churchill? Renoir? Winslow Homer? Cavafy? Not a chance. Set (invisibly when it was off) in the bathroom mirror, a hotel television nearly scared him to death when he accidentally turned it on and saw Mick Jagger staring back at him. On the same machine he witnessed interviews with American beach-goers who thought that in 1776 America had won its independence from California, that the moon was bigger than the sun, that you could take a Greyhound Bus to North Korea, that Alaska was an island south of Hawaii, and that the Supreme Court was a motel in Santa Monica. How could the United States have become so rich, powerful, and inventive? Or, rather, how long could it remain so?
RAISING THE RPM of its enormous engines, the pilots smoothly and slowly moved the Airbus forward. Ailerons and flaps were exercised at a stately pace as spoilers popped up like prairie dogs and then retreated. The deep harmonies and a slight treble weaving amid and yet overwhelmed by the bass said that despite the immense power already evident, the turbines were still at rest, with the counterpoint of bass suggesting that they were yearning to come up full. Music even of this kind was everywhere the bearer of messages from an unreachable but always beckoning place out of which perfection spilled easily and without limit.