Paris in July 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, expansive gardens, and bridge after bridge where people linger snapping 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 the Seine into a celebration during the oppressive summer months, with open-air bar after open-air bar, lounge chairs set up under palm trees in rolling planters, clusters of amateurs playing guitar and singing. (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 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’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.
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 and branded folders, 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 chase her down.
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 actually produce art.
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 actually 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 developed 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 down 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 famous on TikTok. We avoid the crowds at the Louvre but take on the Musée d’Orsay, even the 5th floor where the Manets and Van Goghs and all the people crowd like they’re at an indie-rock show. We spend a day at Versailles flowing 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 pausing between Coldplay covers to ask 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 cafe, and during every Metro trip. We witness 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 on the plane, 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 going 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 eating and riding the train and shopping we have in fact made Paris a little less for Parisians. We know this well as New Yorkers who negotiate the subway and the sidewalks around visitors walking too slowly while looking up at our looming city.
We agreed back in January to Q taking the Paris class when thinking about a summer six months away 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 summer camp and hadn’t spent that much time with. The pandemic surrounded (and still surrounds) us, fires and floods 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 trip had a Skipping Through the Apocalypse feel.
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 class 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 — sketches of pigeons and statues and latticework and street corners with distinctive French architecture and cafes on the ground floor. Q’s sketchbook is on display as well, and we turn page after page rich with drawings over 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 dorm elevator to take them home. In so doing we witness her re-presenting herself over and over, picturing herself to herself and to her viewers. Smiling.
Yes, 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 to our own lives as tourists, able to better see ourselves through the fresh eyes of visitors. 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 she knows that she can make her way to somewhere new. She knows that she can find them.