a new kind of electric scooter had invaded the city, like the child’s version but twice the size and made of metal. People left them abandoned wherever and whenever they felt like, then took them up again, using an app on their phones, translating this new technology into ancient Parisian habits, so that as we sat in Café de Flore we could watch several pairs of picturesque lovers go by, two bodies on a single scooter, helmetless, holding each other, as they had previously done on Vespas and on bikes, in 2CVs and horse-drawn carriages, or on the back of a farmer’s trailer, snug upon bales of hay.
It was very late. We launched into a cruel assessment of previously pretty young men we’d once known, and then back again to age in general, to May and December romances, and whether either of us still found people in their early twenties attractive. V felt that absolutely yes, he did, although it was sometimes very hard to listen to their conversations, while I had to admit that my apparently typically feminine preoccupation with time made the young more or less invisible to me now, they were young enough to be my children and I could see them in no other light. Something about this fact depressed me: with age, and despite myself, even my desires had become civilized and appropriate. To cheer me, V described an older French artist of his acquaintance. She was eighty years old, traveled all over the world to museums showing her work, and always took with her a little case on wheels, filled with lingerie. She prided herself on regular one-night stands with men in the art world, many of whom were in their twenties. I told V that was the Frenchest thing I ever heard. He agreed and we raised a glass to this octogenarian adventuress. As we counted out our euros, we discussed another old artist, a man this time, who had recently lost his gallery because of a series of exploitative sexual relationships with younger men. What interested me in V’s account of the matter was that “everyone” had known that the man in question was a sentimental and submissive bottom, who had a habit of becoming sloppily emotionally attached to his young lovers, or victims—depending on your point of view—sending them flowers, crying down the phone, et cetera. That the “perpetrator” happened in this case always to be the penetrated, never the penetrator, was an aspect of the case that played no part whatsoever in the newspaper accounts, for whom this detail was of no interest, either because it made no difference whatsoever to his guilt or innocence, or perhaps because it was structurally invisible. But so much of life is structurally invisible, I noted, and has no way of fitting into the external accounts of our lives. Our lives are so different on the inside. We can never express their full particularity and strangeness in public, their inner chaos and complexity. There are always so many things it proves impossible to say! Yes, said V, but at the same time you can’t concede everything to the public account, to what people see or think they understand. In a completely different arena, for example, here in Paris I am Chinese. The public part of me, that is my face, speaks for me before I can, and so in the public accounting, Chinese is what I am. I cannot walk the streets with a sandwich board explaining my birth, my nationhood, my culture, my history, the history of my country and so on. That would be exhausting, impractical. But neither do I concede to their external definition. You have to be careful how much of yourself you render to Caesar. Of course, I know what I am and given the time and space I can and will express the facts fully. Although in truth I don’t bother very often. It may be a question of sensibility. I am always very amused, for example, by the sort of person who gets infuriated if you mispronounce their name! Everywhere I go in France people ask me if it’s a long A in my name or a short one. They ask very anxiously, as if they know many people for whom this kind of thing matters enormously and they don’t want to make the same mistake with me. I suppose, continued V, living peacefully in a society means understanding that the things others care about might mean