Yesterday I had my picture taken by an American named Anthony. He’s been in Paris for seventeen years and his girlfriend just had a baby, which has changed his life. “It’s different now,” he said. “When you’re single you maybe have an affair and your girlfriend decides to break up with you. So it’s painful, but you just go out and find someone else.”
It seems to me that if you’re having an affair, the person being cheated on has dibs on the word painful, but I didn’t say anything. Anthony has done a lot of work in Russia and used to keep an apartment in Moscow. “Those Russian women will destroy you,” he said. He’s trying to be a family man, but I don’t have much faith that it will work out.
September 12, 2001
Paris
Last night on TV I watched people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center. I watched the towers fall in on themselves, I watched the burning Pentagon, and then I watched people jump from the windows of the World Trade Center. From my kitchen, office, and living-room windows, I saw my neighbors watching the same thing, each with a remote in one hand and a telephone in the other. It felt like everyone in the world was in front of the TV. Now it’s the next day and I still haven’t gotten it through my head. The thing that gets me the most are the hijacked planes. I can’t imagine what it must have been like to realize you’re actually aiming for something. You’re not going to land in Afghanistan or be held hostage on some tarmac; you’re going to die in three seconds. What’s frightening is that it was so ingenious and perfectly orchestrated. Who did this?
Patsy and I met at six o’clock at the café on Saint-Sulpice. She’d been watching CNN and told me that, as Americans abroad, we’re supposed to keep a low profile and avoid speaking English on the street. It’s a standard warning the State Department issues whenever there’s trouble. French police have blocked off areas of the Marais and are stopping pedestrians to ask for their papers. Flights en route to New York returned to de Gaulle and I’m not sure when they’ll resume. All American airports are closed, as are the bridges and tunnels leading into Manhattan. I tried calling Amy, but all the lines were clogged. She doesn’t get out of bed before noon, so I’m assuming she’s OK. Steven called me at midnight to tell me that Rakoff and Sarah are fine, as is Art Spiegelman. On the television Giuliani is saying that as many as ten thousand people might have died. On the radio the event’s being compared to D-day. Bush called it “an attack on freedom itself,” while Jacques Chirac, much more eloquently, called it an attack on civilization.
September 14, 2001
Paris
Last night, we attended the memorial service held at the American Church over by the Musée d’Orsay. Unlike Wednesday’s service at the American Cathedral, this was a full-fledged media event, with appearances by President Chirac, Prime Minister Jospin, and the mayor of Paris. I’d never been in a room with a president and thought it was nice the way he paused every so often and made eye contact with the audience. The church isn’t very big, and half the pews were reserved with signs reading PARLIAMENT, HIGH DIGNITARIES, and DIPLOMATIC CORPS. This being the American Church, I’d assumed the service would be in English, but, aside from a few opening remarks, everything was said in French.
Brief, five-minute sermons were delivered by a Protestant minister, the grand rabbi of Paris, and a Muslim cleric with a strange gray comb-over. The choir sang, the service ended, and just as the dignitaries were filing out the door, someone in the back of the room started singing “God Bless America.” The man started and his countrymen joined in, including Jessye Norman, who placed her hand over her heart and sang as if she were an average devastated woman rather than an opera star. The thing about “God Bless America” is that, after a certain point, nobody really knows the words.
There’s always a weird mumbling that follows “Stand beside her and guide her,” and lasts until “From the mountains to the prairies.” Then there’s that bit about the oceans white with foam, which is just a strange thing to mention in a patriotic song. What killed me, what killed many of us, was the very end: “My home sweet home.” Because, whatever else Paris might be, this is not our home, it’s just the place where we have our jobs or apartments. How could we have forgotten that?
September 24, 2001
Amsterdam
The day before yesterday a chemical plant exploded in Toulouse. Patsy called to tell me about it, and, as we’d done a week earlier, we both turned on our TVs and continued to talk while flipping between channels. Twenty-nine people were reported dead and hundreds were injured. Windows were smashed for miles around. A woman lay on the sidewalk crying. Men mopped their bloody faces with the sleeves of their sport coats. The first assumption was that it had been a bomb, but after an hour or so, they attributed it to human error, which was a huge relief. The thing is that we’d been expecting something. Everyone’s just sort of waiting for the next big event. Yesterday morning the phone rang and I heard Hugh say, “Oh, my God. You’re kidding. When?”
I was sitting at my desk, imagining the worst, when he covered the receiver and said that Leslie had chipped a tooth.
September 28, 2001
Paris
Don called last night to talk. I’m thinking that before he dials he makes a list of topics, adding little notes pertaining to this or that subject. Haffmans. Sent faxes. No response. Anything unexpected seems to throw him off balance and it’s painful to listen as he tries to right himself.
“Amsterdam, right. That reminds me of, oh, it was that movie with what’s her name, when she and the guy get thrown into the water and so forth. It was…no, maybe that was Venice, or rather they made it in Amsterdam because of course everything’s so hard when it comes to the Italians. But Amsterdam, that reminds me of, oh, he was this great old guy who was up near…I think it was Greenland and he got lost somehow and, well, what with the weather and so forth he got…the thing with, the disease and he had to cut off his own feet, which is what’s happening right now to Bradbury with the diabetes. They didn’t remove the entire foot, but they took a part of it and, oh, it’s just been a rough couple of weeks here.”
October 2, 2001