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francofile chronicles

Oct, 30th 1999 "Paris-Newark: November for Nathalie"

by David Applefield

It´s practically November and I´m on my annual pilgrimage to the homeland. Continental Airlines stewardesses (they have to be called flight attendants since the early 80s) are handing out our afternoon goÅ"ter, double-fudge cookies, and some undrinkable coffee that an American guy next me is gulping with ravenous delight. "It´s been ten days since I´ve had real coffee," he informed me. "The stuff in Paris is way too strong. I couldn´t sleep." He looked really happy to be going home.

"Did you enjoy Paris?" I nosily asked.

"Not really, the heat in the hotel wasn´t turned on yet."

"Oh, I´m sorry to hear that."

He went on to tell me a terrible story about how it started to rain and a Parisian waiter kicked him out of a café because he was carrying a can of Fanta. I felt sorry for everyone, the waiter who had to deal with tourists bringing drinks into his café, the innocence of this guy just trying to dodge the rain and getting barked at on his first time to Paris, myself feeling stuck between both worlds of logic. There really are two worlds of logic, and they don´t really get along. What works is the momentary patches of pleasure you experience in both directions from venturing out into the other world. Otherwise, the systems of governing, of working, or organizing always clash, whether it´s doing business, importing meat, buying an apartment, or putting on an art show. The conflict is always in the logic.

I watch the flutter of video screens that are now built into the back of the seats of 777s with the latest movies blipping along in English, French, Spanish, and Japanese. We´ve come along way since that first TWA flight to Paris in the late 70s. For me, that was thirty flights ago.

It goes without saying that the complexity of feelings that accompany these returns flutter like the wings of frightened pigeons each time to the foreground of consciousness. That unsettling grumble of being both home and far-from home at once was rolling in and I watched it like the way you track a nasty hurricane before it hits land in a kind of CNNization of the visual mind.

"It´s 70 degrees in Newark,´ the pilot announces, and again the contradiction between the good news and Newark itself irks this confused expat writer. Many of us remember when Newark Airport was as international as Lille. You had to trek out to JFK, then Idewile, even to fly to Bermuda. Ah, sacre Newark. A lot has started in Newark. Newark is where the dechet from Mayor Guilliani´s cleaned up Manhattan has landed. Newark has more boarded up houses and bogus Haitian churches per square foot than any other city in the country. Bonjour progress. Number 2 in car vandalism. Plenty of money to pulverize foreign despots and pump up a digital infrastructure, but nickels and dimes for the citizens who´d like to hang onto their cars and raise kids that can read a book.

Flying home forces you to contemplate time in a way that escapes us in Paris. Your points of reference fall into a B.C. versus A.D. kind of divide-before I got to Paris (B.P.) and after I got to Paris (A.D.). On the way to the other side I feel myself falling into the B.P. mode, trying to resist the artless state of sentimentality I remember that I have to pick up my tickets to the Barry White/Earth Wind ? Fire gig at Bercy in December. My most guarded secret is that in Paris I listen to Radio Nostalgie.