Caroline
said that if I wrote this no one would believe it, but it’s true, so . . . .
On our first trip to Paris together around 1983 we checked into a
hotel that had been recommended to us by a friend who had stayed there before
and liked it a lot. We arrived on a
gray rainy day following a 10-day stay in London where friends had lent us
their house in Putney, although it really seemed as if they had lent
us their entire London lives and outlook, and we experienced that city joyfully and
gratefully.
Caroline, looking very lovely with her London smile and Brown's of South Molton Street haircut, had a dreadful cold and Paris imposed a dissonant tone
beginning with the very first taxi ride from the airport. When we arrived at our hotel reception, it
gave off an ominous bad vibe, which translated into open hostility when an angry-looking
male clerk eventually descended from a
sort of raised alcove office to check us in.
We were all American smiles and cooperative fluent-enough French, even
when we were shown to an ugly room in a back corridor on a low floor. When the door closed, we looked at each other
and agreed that it was like being locked in a trunk.
Despite Caroline’s malady,
we decided to press on with the day and had a great afternoon, lunching at
Willi’s Wine Bar (still extremely new, we learned of Mark Williamson and Steven
Spurrier’s restaurant through our heavily-marked Gault-Millau Paris guide) and
dropping in at the headquarters of J. Danflou, the famed producer of cognacs,
armagnacs and eaux-de-vies. (From our
guidebook we thought we’d be visiting a retail establishment, but these were
actually the Danflou corporate offices. They
treated us royally, insisting we sample a wide range of their amazing liquors
sold in the famous medieval-shaped bottles, and M. Danflou himself stopped by
to shake our hands and say rather portentously: “I love Americans, but I hate
Germans.”)
Later that evening after
turning in, Caroline woke up crying and practically on fire. She asked me please to get her aspirin. I dressed and visited the front desk, where
the same devil from earlier in the day was on duty. I asked him for several aspirin in perfectly
serviceable French and he told me that if I did not vanish from his sight
immediately he would call the police to arrest me. I told him that would be fine; perhaps one of
the gendarmes would have an aspirin on him.
Getting nowhere fast, I
told Caroline what happened and seeing the look of desperation on her face I
said that I knew that Paris had all-night pharmacies marked by green or
blue-green crosses and I would visit one of those. She looked really alarmed then, but I knew I
needed to take care this.
We were in a perfectly
lovely Parisian neighborhood and my nocturnal stroll felt very “I am a
Surrealist in Paris out past midnight.”
Louis Aragon and Andre Breton were definitely guiding my steps to the
first druggist, who couldn’t have been more cooperative and furnished me with tablets, sore throat patent
medicine, soothing lozenges, etc.
Returning
to our weird hotel, the sight of Caroline’s relieved face was
uplifting and revivifying. (Those were the days
when simple pleasures visited more often.)
She took the pills and liquid and felt much better in the morning. We phoned our friends, asked if we might
return to London to finish out our vacation with them (we were not tired of
London yet; we were not tired of life), spent one more terrific Run For Your
Life Day in Paris (Eiffel Tower, Yves Saint Laurent, Saint-Chapelle,
Montparnasse and the Latin Quarter), and
departed Dodge for Londinium where we showed our friends things about Putney
and environs that even they didn’t know.
