THIS IS US

Tourists filling Sacré Coeur (photo by me)

Paris in the summer is hot and not really built for heat. Air-conditioning is rare, as is ice, and the only cold things we regularly experience are the looks from Parisians after confirming their suspicions that we are Americans. Still, even sweaty this city earns its reputation as beautiful and ancient yet alive, its long-legged concourses lined with bistros full of smokers spectating from tiny round tables, its expansive gardens, and its ancient bridges where people snap moments with their phones. The Seine passing under those bridges pulses with people. An initiative called “Paris Plages” (or “Paris Beaches”) converts both sides of this iconic river into a celebration during the oppressive summer months. (Parisians tend to leave their city during the summer as the temperature, humidity, and number of tourists rise, and Paris Plages, launched in 2002 by then mayor Bertrand Delanoë, strives to assuage the misery of those trapped in the city by work or lack of money.) The warm evenings seem to pull the whole city to river’s edge to drink European amounts of wine, the women effortlessly elegant in wide-legged dress pants and short tops, the men generally wrinkled and unremarkable. We pass by open-air bar after open-air bar, lounge chairs opened under palm trees, clusters of people playing guitar and singing at various levels of professionalism.

We’re in Paris contributing to this summer tourist misery to pick up our daughter Q after a two-week drawing class at the Paris College of Art (PCA). She’s 17, heading into her senior year of high school in the fall and then into The Future. She and a friend from Boston found the class online and organized the trip themselves.

We agreed back in January to Q taking the Paris class when thinking about summer seemed like an audacious act of optimism. She would be traveling to a foreign country where she didn’t speak the language with a friend that she knew from three weeks of summer camp and hadn’t spent that much time with. The pandemic surrounded (and still surrounds) us, fires and floods and storms spread and grow more Biblical each time, and powerful minorities in the U.S. work constantly, with alarming success, to take back rights and the futures they enable, particularly from women and the vulnerable. The whole idea had a Skipping Through the Apocalypse feel. Still, we thought it better than Lying Down Through the Apocalypse.

Lots of high school kids do summer pre-college programs, but Q quickly discovered that PCA’s class was less “pre-” and more just college. Instead of traveling between highly scheduled events in a knot of kids with matching lanyards, PCA provided no lanyards, held no hands. Housing associated with the program turned out to be a small studio apartment in a building for students of all sorts located a good 30 minutes by Metro from her classroom. Her resident assistant made the trip from building lobby to PCA the first morning of classes, and anyone who wanted to learn the route was welcome. After that, students, many of whom were already college graduates, were on their own. The class itself operated on college rules — viz., if Q didn’t show up, the absence affected her overall grade, but no one would go looking for her.

Which is to say that Q had to navigate a foreign city in a foreign language, feed herself, drink enough water, get enough sleep, and produce art, all on her own.

Q did remarkably well. Growing up in NYC has given her the confidence to navigate cities and their public transportation, and she became the de facto guide for her group of friends. She found local bistros with decent pastries and the one or two places that put a couple of ice cubes in drinks. By the time we arrived, she had Paris roughly mapped in her head and knew many of the neighborhoods (“arrondissements”) and routes between them. She had cultivated nuanced opinions about varieties of coffee drinks, particularly double espressos, which she came to see as an essential morning height from which she could roll downhill through her long days.

We move Q out of her studio and into our Airbnb and the full-on tourist part of the trip. We eat onion soup from a place gone viral on TikTok. We avoid the crowds at the Louvre but take on the Musée d’Orsay, even the 5th floor where people crowd the Manets and Van Goghs like fresh indie-rock bands. We spend a day at Versailles carried through the absurd and guillotine-triggering chateau in a flood of non-French visitors. We visit the Basilica of Sacré Coeur at Montmartre and walk past a busker doing crowd work between Coldplay covers, asking the tourists that cover nearly every inch of the place where they’re from. (The view of Paris nevertheless astonishes.)

America is everywhere in Paris. We hear our country’s English at nearly every store and café and during every Metro trip. We spot a confounding number of NY Yankees hats. My son M gets stopped by some people asking where he bought the scarf he’s wearing, and they turn out to be from New York. We try to disguise ourselves somewhat but usually fail. My French is rickety from years of disuse, or rather from years of being American. At one point I buy a cardboard tube from a local Office Max so we can transport Q’s drawings home safely, and I’m in line practicing a passable “Merci, au revoir” for the cashier. When it’s my turn, he says something fast but obviously rehearsed. I manage “sorry” in English before I realize that he is (probably) asking if I found everything I was looking for. He sighs and switches to English, and I slink out clutching the empty tube feeling large and lumbering, like the United States itself.

Whenever we travel, I can’t help but think of David Foster Wallace’s footnote about tourists from his essay “Consider the Lobster”:

To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing.

Wallace here is writing about Americans attending a Maine lobster festival, and surely his point gains force when Americans go abroad. We may stay in an apartment on a small side street, but Paris meets us everywhere with its face for tourists. We do not experience Paris as it is for Parisians, and in dining and riding the train and shopping, we have made Paris a little less for Parisians. We know this well as New Yorkers who stand in line behind and who negotiate the subway and the sidewalks around visitors walking too slowly while looking up at our looming city.

To receive credit for the class, each student had to submit 50 drawings over the two weeks and one large project. We schedule our trip to overlap with the end of Q’s term so that we could attend the final showcase. We arrive at the Paris College of Art to a whole wall dedicated to the work of Q and her friend: lively sketches of pigeons and statues and latticework and street corners with distinctive French architecture and cafés unfurling on their ground floors. Q’s sketchbook is on display as well, and we turn page after page rich with drawings on collages of Metro-map clips, receipts for coffees and croissants, museum brochures, tickets to the Minions movie in French. And, like the showcase wall, it contains many drawings of Q with her friends — at dinner, on the street, in class, waiting for the elevator to take them home. We see her re-presenting herself over and over, picturing herself to herself as well as to her audience.

Image from Q’s sketchbook (that’s her pictured on the left)

Walking our New York neighborhood shortly after we return, I notice, for the first time this summer, the ambient hum of air conditioners. We were tourists in Paris, but Wallace is wrong about tourism in a deep respect. We may not have been able to see the real Paris, but we returned home as tourists to our own lives, better able to see ourselves through fresh eyes. After just two weeks away on her own, Q unrolled the map of herself a little further, found new monuments and destinations, recalculated a few of the routes between her familiar points.

Back at our apartment’s table, Q says, “My people are out there,” and she believes it. She isn’t exactly sure where they are, but now she knows that she can make her way to somewhere new. She knows that she can find them, that she herself can be found.