Mistaken Identity (Five Things 18/12/20)
1. Walking by the park behind the Picasso Museum, I saw a child’s balloon drifting up over the rooftops. It was metallic, and in the shape of something I couldn’t decipher. Maybe a cartoon character, I don’t know, but it made me think of Le Ballon Rouge. Somewhere nearby was a child who had just lost a balloon. I turned a corner and continued along a narrow street. It was nearing dusk. People were walking along the sidewalk, coming home from work, bundled up in scarves and coats. The sky was clear of clouds and going hazy pink-gold-purple near the horizon. I turned another corner and there the balloon was again, drifting high, high up. Three seagulls were diving around it, swooping and squawking in the way that birds sometimes do when they’re ready to do battle with one another. I’ve always liked that there are seagulls in this city. Having grown up near the coast, I never feel quite right living somewhere where I never hear the cries of seabirds. These three evidently saw the balloon as a threat. They floated above, and then shot down past it. I never saw them touch it, but they must have, for it had started to drift down again, as if in deference, wounded
2. I went to a lab to get a Covid test yesterday afternoon. On my way there, I noticed an attractive older woman with white hair standing on the sidewalk. She was wearing a fur coat, sheer black stockings, and stiletto high heels. She looked very dressed up for 2pm, and standing so resolutely there on the sidewalk, like she was representing an art gallery and was hoping to get people inside for an opening. I noted that her black shoes had a pattern of red laces with bows running up the back. Racy, I thought, but not too crazy. With the shoes and the coat and the general bearing, I thought in passing that she might be Russian. I turned onto the street with the lab, and I saw at least four other women who looked practically identical. They were all older, with white or silver hair put up in neat chignons, with bangs, or artful tendrils spiraling down on the sides. They all wore fur coats, stockings, and stiletto high heels.
Is it some kind of art project, I wondered? I went into the lab, but it turned out I had to go to another lab for the swab test, blah blah blah. I went back outside and the women were still there, standing in intervals, unmoved as palace guards. I felt I had to know what the deal was. What could they be doing, standing there like that on a Thursday afternoon? If they were participating in some sort of art installation, about high heels or femininity or some such, I wanted to know about it. After all, I had written an arty book about high heels. I approached the nearest woman and began to ask her. Was this part of some sort of project? Why were they all standing together like that, spaced out on the sidewalks, in matching coats and shoes? She looked at me with her carefully made-up eyes over the top of her mask, perplexed but friendly. A project? Yes, I went on, or an installation of some kind? An exhibition? I noticed that another woman had come to stand in an open doorway across the street. She was dressed similarly to the other women, but without a coat on. She had on a very tight, very short black skirt, and a sheer black top displaying a remarkable quantity of cleavage.
Oh. Of course. I was an idiot. I asked the woman to excuse me. We were only a block from the rue Saint-Denis. These were sex workers. M, who was with me when this happened, teased me about it for the rest of the day. He had realized what was up a few moments before I had. But why had I never seen them there before? And why were there suddenly so many of them, and all of the same type? I had seen prostitutes on the Paris streets before, but they were more like foot soldiers, weary Communards lined up against a wall at night. These women looked like four-star generals.
“I can’t believe I asked if she was part of an art show,” I said.
“Well, in a way, she is,” M replied.
3. The other day, outside of Monoprix, a young white man in dirty clothes was sitting on the sidewalk next to a small dog and a plastic cup. He looked the way the romantic lead in a Judd Apatow comedy might look if he’d been sleeping in a park for the past three weeks. His demeanor was cheerful. His carefully printed sign read too ugly for prostitution. I didn’t have any change.
4. Years ago, I got an email sent to me by someone who had me confused for someone else. The message read “I found this picture of your father’s grave.” Naturally I opened it. It felt vaguely threatening, since my father was and remains very much alive. Attached was a photograph of an Australian cemetery thronged with kangaroos. There must have been close to thirty of them, and most were looking towards the camera. I still don’t know whose grave that really was.
5. The planets Saturn and Jupiter will be aligning in the night sky very soon in what astronomers are calling “a great conjunction.” A mega-star that isn’t really a star. In illustrations of their colliding pathways, the two gas giants are falling towards one another in a V formation, like the flight of a migrating bird. I want to see it, and I want to find some meaning in it, but I’m not sure what. Maybe I want the mysteries to smile down on me a little. I’m trying to pull together these strands of ideas, but the balloon string slips through my fingers. Gulls dive in the particulate air. A child’s hand lets go.