Then

He spent that summer studying in Paris at an American University. That particular night he was sitting near the Eiffel tower drinking a bottle of wine, studying the glittering tower above him, the women walking by, the clip of their heels on pavement, and the image of them burned on his retina like smoke drifting slowly at out of a room. It’s bad business to fall in love in Paris as most people know. Truth be told, it’s bad business to fall in love anywhere, but it’s particularly bad to do so in Paris. This is because the Parisians are notoriously rude to outsiders, and there is no one who is more of an outsider than a person in love. They take very little interest in anyone besides themselves, which, of course, makes lovers the worst sort of Parisians to be around. In short, it’s bad news to be around lovers for they tend to focus inwardly.

Paris had existed in his mind long before the plane had touched down at De Gaulle, and he’d spent an hour waiting for the train in the small grey depot below. Before he landed Paris had been an idea of faded grandeur, an expression of what it would be like to be in New York when Tokyo had reached its final ascension. Only better, because the Parisians were so damn proud where New Yorkers were just pushy and mean, and so as he walked the grand Boulevards of Van Haussman, that old rascal clearing out the mud and filth and charm of a Paris even older than the one in his mind, a Paris of winding streets and whores with consumption, he thought how the boulevards could just as easily have been used for ships, how he, as a child, had flooded the lawn by turning on the hose all afternoon to float his army men across the heavy clumps of grass, and how if one were to turn on a spigot in Paris, the liners would have no problem sailing down the streets with passengers plucking flowers from window boxes.