Trouble in Paradise

What’s a paradise without a little trouble?

Just as Paris seems to be our kind of heaven, so the trouble we've been experiencing over the last year seems to be our idea of hell, we who value silence so highly.

These nineteenth century buildings are gorgeous, but sometimes living in one feels like being inside a drum. Music next door? You hear it. Laughing? That too. All of which is fine, the sounds of life around you.

But what if you have a neighbor who likes to make noise early in the morning or past midnight, just to wake you, just for the hell of it? Sudden, sharp noise, like shoes being thrown against the wall. And who must listen to her radio at full volume, disturbing us and her neighbors upstairs.

You have to take measures.

And we did: wrote her courteous letters. Brought her flowers. Wrote the owners of the apartment. Spoke to the gardienne. Spoke with our neighbor in the street.

Why she was so noisy?, we asked.

Because she felt like it, she said. And then came a litany of resentment, against Americans, against artists, against the owner of her apartment, and other vague resentments.

Resentment. I thought of Friedrich Nietzsche’s words about Buddhism, that “there is nothing to which [the Buddha's] doctrine is more opposed than the feeling of revenge, antipathy, ressentiment (“it is not by enmity that enmity is ended”—that is the stirring refrain of all Buddhism).”

We wrestled with how to handle this.

We spoke with friends, French and American. We talked to a lawyer, a doctor, a property manager, and others.

The advice was varied:

Get very tough, don't let them walk on you; that posture is all the French understand.

Women said, She needs some flowers.

Men said, She needs a good ----.

French people of all genders said, She’s crazy (déséquilibré, as the French so delicately put it).

She’s miserable, lonely.

She’s both.

Quelle bêtise!, said a French woman about the anti-American, anti-artist bias.  What nonsense.

Monster-Baby-Tyrant is what we call this kind of behavior.

If you’re miserable, one way to handle it is to take it out on others. Scapegoating, it’s called.

If you want peace and compassion from others, you have to give it, we decided. Maybe over time this would have an effect. Maybe by setting an example of consideration towards her, she would follow suit. 

We vowed we wouldn’t descend to her level and play our music or TV loud. We bought earphones, and watch our French films and news programs (one of the ways we study the language) without making noise to bother our neighbors.

We bought a fan, to create white noise between our bed and the wall adjoining our two apartments.

That inspired the first communication initiated by her, after six months of none. She left a note outside our door. There was a sound, she said, that disturbed her sleep. Perhaps we had heard it too?

Yes, we replied. We needed a way to block out your noise in the morning (and sometimes during the day and night too).

She handled this as any mature human being would and hired a lawyer. A lawyer? No dialogue at all? Why not just offer to be quieter, and come to some agreement with us so that we all could sleep peacefully, without the need for a fan?

We replied with a letter (through our lawyer) that described our mutual history, including the soundproofing we’d put in on our side, at the request of the owners of the apartment. If that didn’t work, they had promised, they’d soundproof their side, too.

We had asked our excellent contractor about his experience soundproofing Paris apartments. He’d done it, he said, but hadn’t found a really good method yet. He’d heard that there were better methods in the U.S.

We spent months researching American soundproofing. It didn’t seem like such a big challenge to me, since my father was a contractor, and so is my brother. Easy enough.

The material was shipped to France while we were still in the U.S. Our contractor did a beautiful job of lifting it by crane through a fifth floor window, installing it, and finishing off the walls so that the beauty of the crown molding stayed intact. All for a reasonable price.

It didn’t work. It helped. It would have worked if our neighbor were making a reasonable amount of noise.

But she wasn't. From the day we moved here one year ago (and even before that, we’d heard from previous occupants), she had begun her campaign of banging on the wall to express some chronic misery in her soul.

And then the owners of the apartment decided they didn’t want to spend the money, or risk losing the beautiful ceiling line by soundproofing on their side, or—who knows, maybe they knew it would do no good with a tenant on a rampage.

They also decided they no longer wanted her as a tenant, and asked her to leave.

But she hired a lawyer, and has stayed. French law is heavily on the side of the tenant; it is almost impossible to evict one.

After a while, we protected our sleep with not just a fan, but sleeping pills as well.

Several months later, I read an article about the harm that these pharmaceuticals do. We decided to kick them together, to get “moraline-free,” a word that Nietzsche coined. “… not virtue but fitness (Renaissance virtue, virtú, virtue that is moraline-free).” His ideal, ours too, is to live a healthy life.

To make it easier, I rented a studio for a few weeks where I could catch three birds—fish with one net:

Go down into depth and find my fiction voice again.

Get off the sleeping pill.

And give Richard the solitude to do the same.

It worked! We are both “moraline-free.” We both were able to shift gears and go into deeper artistic focus.

Now that the studio rental is over, and I’m back home, how will this drama unfold? Stay tuned.

Paris Gardienne

Flashback:  April 2009

We board the Venice to Paris overnight train. Two narrow bunks, a closet and a sink. Legs entwined on the lower bunk, we eat our tuna wraps. Halfway through, there’s only lettuce and air.

We keep having this experience in Italy—lying sandwiches, crooked hotelkeepers. We turn in early, R. below, I above. (Bull below bird.)

At 6 a.m., the porter knocks with a tray of cappuccino and croissants. We throw on our clothes and pack. Line up for a cab.

Paris in the morning, hands clasped in the back seat, eyes eagerly scanning for the filagree of chestnut trees, the first glimpse of the Seine. Notre Dame. Quai de la Tournelle. Our street, our neighborhood café.

There is Hector at the counter, a year older, but young. When, two years ago, we admired an old photo on the wall, a turn of the century view of our street, he had it enlarged as a gift. It is framed now in our flat.

R. signs his book of poems to him. Hector treats us to cafés crèmes. We chat and wait for the tenants to leave.

Midmorning, we pass through the great green doors. There she is, Madame T, our Portuguese gardienne—Hestia, keeper of the household flame.

Dignified, in no rush, she tells us about the trouble with our neighbor. One of the tenants who rented our apartment had children who cried all night. (Half a year ago, as I remember.) And seven Israeli-American women came for the weekend.

“Seven?”

“Yes, seven.” She counts them on her fingers. “They yelled down to each other in the courtyard when they couldn’t figure out how to open the door. The one who spoke French complained that the elevator was too small.” Madame T. raises an eyebrow.

Up in the small elevator with our heavy bags. We wander the apartment in a joyful daze. Let’s go lay in supplies.

We roll our shopping cart up the street to the supermarket, Champion. Strawberries, carrots, zucchini—little photos of vegetables and fruit above the scales. Weigh each. Out comes a sticky receipt. You twist it around the bag. We look for Poilâne bread with raisins. It’s too good—they’re always out.

So many possible kinds of milk: we read the labels until we find lait entier¹. Beautiful jars of Bonne Maman jam. What kind? Fig! And Brie cheese. Long and wrinkled concombres² wrapped in cellophane. Pommes Granny³. Hefty lemons. Joker brand jus d’orange⁴. Tuna pasta, freshly made today.

First day in Paris, I feel it again: I want to live here, want to find a way. The double whammy of happiness and the quickened desire to write; the aesthetic sense heightened. I want to explore the streets! Learn the history of Paris! A cornucopia of inspiration.

Later I read in Sophie Barron’s “Le 5e Arrondissement”:

Liquid chocolate made its first appearance in 1668 at the Restaurant de la Tour d’Argent.

Right at the end of our street.

Here is where la fourchette—the fork—was first used. And in 1685, the first cup of café.

In spite of little sleep on the train, bumping over the Alps; in spite of being exhausted after the extraverted, action-oriented ten-day cruise (no inward time to read, write and muse—not my natural rhythm), I feel completely awake. This city’s rhythm suits me. It’s Aphrodite’s rhythm, the rhythm of beauty and love. Time to sit and talk with friends. Time to observe the world.

We head up Boulevard St. Germain to buy two bunches of tulips, one red, the other orange flames. The florist adds three pink and white roses, and asks how short we’d like them cut.

A florist has never offered to do this for me, I tell her.

"I love flowers," she says, "and I love my clients."

The spirit of place—its power and persistence! Aphrodite and Dionysus, the ruling gods here.

We knock on the gardienne’s door. She opens with that sly earthy look.

Which bouquet would you prefer?

"Mais non!" she smiles, and picks the flames.

--April 22, 2009 - Paris

[1] whole milk
² cucumbers
³ Granny Smith apples
⁴ orange juice