New York
I called Amy at four a.m. Paris time and finally got through to her. She told me that, a few days after the World Trade Center collapsed, she went to a play rehearsal on the Upper East Side. The trains were moving faster than she’d anticipated, and she wound up arriving early, with half an hour to kill. There’s a Gucci boutique up on Madison Avenue, and, although the brand has never appealed to her, she went inside and looked around. The saleswoman was pushy, and within ten minutes, Amy was strapped into a pair of shoes with very high heels. They were uncomfortable, and when she removed them, she noticed that the insides were stained with blood. Wet blood. Her blood.
The shoes had caused her to pop a blister, but rather than writing it off as an accident, the saleswoman told Amy that now she pretty much had to pay for them, to the tune of $500.
I can’t fault Amy for giving in, as I would have done the same thing. She bought the shoes she’d never liked in the first place and was leaving the store when she was approached by what she described as two hippies. She meant the new, anti-globalization hippies, who are even more self-righteous than the old ones. The pair moved up the street, and as they passed her one of them spat, “The world is falling apart, so let’s all go shopping, right.”
Feeling now both shallow and taken advantage of, Amy went to a deli and asked for a brown paper sack. She transferred the shoes into it, threw the box and the Gucci bag into the trash, and continued on to her rehearsal. Eventually she got the bloodstains out with an ice cube, but she couldn’t return the high heels, as she’d thrown the receipt into the trash can. The world is falling apart and now she’s stuck with this pair of shoes.
October 6, 2001
Paris
A stranger called and left a message saying that he too knew someone who’d attempted to “talk pretty.” “My friend tried to say he was hungry, but instead he said, ‘I am a woman’! Ha! Anyway, keep writing!”
I’d never anticipated that people would want to work the book title into a sentence, though I guess I should have expected as much. They did the same with Naked: “I told a friend to get Naked. Ha!” or “I was reading Naked—but, hey, not literally!” Yesterday’s stranger phoned from the airport and apologized for not having called me sooner.
October 7, 2001
Paris
The French meteorologists have gone on strike, meaning that no one knows what the forecast will be from one day to the next. The TV weathermen are still there, but they have no reports to deliver. Instead of predicting what might happen tomorrow, they discuss what already happened today, saying things like “Well, as you can see, we had some rain.” It’s a news report designed for shut-ins.
October 8, 2001
Paris
When hauled before the new world court of folly and decadence, I will have to admit that when the war broke out, I was standing in the Paris branch of the Jil Sander boutique talking to a woman in a calf-length Prada vest trimmed with the fur of aborted fetal lamb. An American press had just published the collected snapshots of Dennis Hopper and we’d been invited by Leslie to the launch party. The first bombs fell on Iraq as the guest of honor made his way to the second floor, and the news was delivered by Lauren Bacall, who wore a fist-size jeweled hair clip, the tiny stones arranged into the message I love Paris.
October 10, 2001
Paris
The news gets more distressing every day. I’m lucky, then, to have Hugh, who’s taken the calm and logical approach. Last night before going to bed he said, “What are you so worried about? The guy’s finished. He can’t even come out of his cave.” I thought of how strange that might have sounded a year ago. “He can’t even come out of his cave.” Who would I have thought he was talking about? What kind of a person lives in a cave?
What initially set me off was bin Laden’s television appearance. It wasn’t live, of course. It was just a speech recorded in, well, his cave. The language was very baroque and I would have laughed were he not calling for the complete annihilation of my country. It was both horrible and horribly overwritten. “America is scared,” he said. “From the north to the south. From the east to the west.”
Why not just say that America is scared all over?
His call for a holy war was backed up last night by a taped message from his al Qaeda network; a spokesman said that more planes would be hijacked. I don’t necessarily believe they’ll be able to do it again, but with every broadcast, they inflame more of their followers.
It’s really disheartening to see those narrow streets choked with people, raising their fists and calling for our death. I was uncomfortable but felt better after talking to Paul. “Listen,” he said, “those folks running from the World Trade Center, they eat with knives and forks. They wear shoes, understand? See, we’ve moved on. We’ve progressed while they’re sitting around in the dirt just toiling with that shit. OK, they fucked us up a little. We let our guard down and they got us. This shit happens, but it won’t happen again.” That Paul. They should put him on TV.
This afternoon we went to look at sofa beds at a store on the boulevard Raspail. I was just wondering if a certain model came in a smaller size when the saleswoman interrupted me and asked if I was English. I said that I was American and for the next twenty minutes she talked nonstop, the words gushing from her mouth like water from a fire hose. “You have to stop this bombing,” she said, “because the people, they’ll get mad and we don’t know what they’re going to do next. They could corrupt our drinking water and then what? You open the tap and you die, or maybe they’ll blow up our nuclear power plants, and then what? It’s over, all of this, the whole world is over and, yes, what they did was terrible, but you’re only going to get them stirred up. They’re crazy, the Israelis are crazy, and when they’re done fighting, whoever wins is going to come after us. They’ll poison the earth and the water and there’ll be chaos and rioting and we’ll all die!”
I understood her fear, but is that really the way to sell a sofa bed?
October 17, 2001
New York