I left my apartment early in the morning to get to the metro at Nation, a giant, bustling station that looks almost like an airport for underground trains. We, however, were scheduled to travel to Chantilly, a suburb of Paris that like all suburbs of Paris is painfully charming and features some kind of historical chateau in order to foster some kind of local economy from the tourism that stems from whoever actually wants to leave Paris (there are not a lot of people in Chantilly.) After waiting the mandatory 45 minutes past the scheduled departure time, we drove an hour into the suburb and the bus driver, who astounded me with his dexterity as do most bus drivers, began to navigate the narrow cobblestone streets of Chantilly toward the hotel.
Every suburb of Paris that I have seen looks like the same movie set for a film about Joan of Arc. My suspicion is that this colorful Medieval allure is actually the nature of most towns in France, but Paris takes their daily patterns and simple food while juxtaposing it with a metropolis through which run efficient systems of public transportation and cars carrying important people to important places. We drove past the town's chateau on the way to the hotel, and its sprawling, Arthurian perfection widened my eyes considerably. The hotel itself was, in a word, beautiful. It is an estate situated on a hilltop and has an outside appearance that is, to me, vaguely Florentine. The space behind the building is a rolling meadow with tree stumps for lawn chairs and lavender for weeds and paths through dense groves of trees for the more curious residents. There were tennis courts and, perhaps inappropriately, a ping pong table rested outside some of the ground floor rooms. Only this place could mix such motel-ish outside access with such well-manicured landscapes and stay flawless. A ground floor of high-ceilinged, velvet-curtained "conference rooms" led onto an outside terrace with trays of macarons (being constantly replaced with fresher macarons) and juice machines and up a luxurious staircase into an equestrian-themed bar and through the lobby onto another terrace that was a balcony that overlooked the green estate grounds out onto the straight border of conifers that signified the end of the scene. Apparently NYU decided to put us up in this place for further "orientation." It was here that I realized the full gravity of my dumb luck. It is at this present moment that I realize this blog should be called "The Gravity of my Dumb Luck." I was rooming with Cody, and after a round of meetings ranging from "here are your courses" to "try to lead a healthy lifestyle" to "let's talk about the summer's required reading" to "introduce yourselves..….again," we were served an incredible lunch and made to go to one more meeting before being set free before dinner.
Around 60 NYU students then descended onto the grounds of the estate, filling the pristine country air with the clouds of smoke that accompany us. Carcinogens are a sign of our university affiliation and I stand by them with pride while attempting to hide the fact that I am breathing quite sparingly and, if possible, between collective drags that punctuate group conversations. (I suppose I'll never get rid of the paranoia that comes from growing up around oncologists.) Some played tennis, some drank coffee, some sat and basked in the sun, sharing iPods and one-upping each other with varying amounts of unknown artists; the frolicking continued until dinner was prepared and, like a sheltered young prince, I stopped tying flowers into bracelets for mama and went to my room to put on a shirt and tie for dinner. This was an important juncture because I was introducing my new peers to my tie collection. Until now, I had refrained because I didn't want to be the kid who's ALWAYS in a tie. For anyone who doesn't know, four years of Catholicism and being able to wear nothing of my choice except neckties caused me to channel a lot of creative thought and a good deal of money into a sizable tie collection. I love ties; I appreciate their construction, their minor details, their versatility, their timelessness, and their ability to infuse outfits with appropriateness and irony at the same time. I chose one of my favorites, the narrow (but not obnoxiously so) one in a rich blood red and sporting a pattern of the RCA record logo (a jack russell terrier listening to a phonograph.) The repeating picture is barely visible and manages a sort of proud whimsicality like the Hermes ties with ducks and whatnot (I wish.) I feel as though this was a good choice.
Dinner, of course, was fantastic. A chilled Gazpacho (which is very well-loved here) and sliced baguette preceded a boned thigh of chicken salted heavily and wrapped in crisp phyllo dough like beef wellington. It was phenomenal (although it didn't surprise me; maybe that's what it is to be French. You eat like a king and don't visibly care.) I struggle to find an adjective for dessert and have discovered that there isn't a really a noble word for chocolate-based items. I'll take up that burden: dessert was cacaosomous, and the wine was on NYU. Espresso and the setting of the sun led naturally to a migration into the equestrian bar I mentioned earlier. Maya was talking about her favorite music and her difficulty with detoxing from her piano. It was immediately evident that she doesn't play music like other people play music. With other people, an instrument is a hobby or even an important component of their life or livelihood, but it isn't something that merits tears in the eyes of someone who hasn't touched piano keys in a week and a half. With some coercion, we managed to get her into the bar, which was lit moodily and held aloft the stale scent of dusty mahogany and old liqueur. Horses, horseback riders, photographs of old equestrian competitions, and posters featuring things related to horses (like Hermes) decorated the walls, and sitting directly on top of the piano (nestled against a wall in the back left corner) was a bronze sculpture of an old jockey and his steed. They were sculpted to look like they had experienced each other extensively; it was an intimate little piece, and they both looked down at the piano bench to watch the musician and ponder the floating chords being hammered onto strings as tight as the horse's sinews deep in the belly of the instrument. Maya sat down and fiddled with her hands, having promised something jazzy to a small group of us who were discussing jazz outside. She looked down and touched the ivory pieces, claiming immediately that she simply couldn't play anything. She seemed paralyzed by desire and embarrassed by the inability to resist it. Encouragement led her to evoke a few sweet notes, gifts to an unknown household, and she brought her hands to her face in exasperation. It had only been a little over a week and she was fighting her ecstasy like a heroin addict who tried to stop. Stillness fought its way into the atmosphere as her fingers became ten shepherds of unruly spiders running for their lives and Debussy's Clair de Lune, with all its confounding dissonance and heartbreaking changes in cadence, told its aggressive story through hysterical bouts of melody. The music, however, was not the main spectacle; Maya was. I have seen many a pianist become one with her piano and play something lovely, but the relationship between Maya and the piano is distant, an abusive relationship of constant fear. It is tense and engaging to watch every pass overpower her so completely that she is forced to jerk out of her poised classical training and shift the grin on the corner of her lips to a frightened, concentrated scowl while stifling a trembling ankle against the pressure to perform with something that throws such wild energy back over her body when she asks for nothing but functionality. The bronze jockey looks down in understanding. He knows what it's like to be on a horse whose wild desire to run can barely be controlled once he commands it to move. The ribbon affixed to her sock sways with the nervous energy like a dry leaf in the winter wind, and the black thicket which falls about her face seems a protective measure for her eyes. The music begets honesty. Around the bar with tables atop old gaslight poles and a linear pattern of recessed lighting in orbit around bulky paper fixtures, I hear confessions. We all realize that we're supposed to be here, and she keeps falling deeper into herself. She changes her lips again and begins to collect the scattered pieces of a descending trill as she furrows her dark eyebrows and glances away into a distant conversation like she thinks the spectators can help her. She's wrong. We can't. She punishes her addiction with perpendicular strikes of her fingernails, then apologizes to black keys with the pale pads of her fingers which seem to bleed in the maroon light about her. Maya doesn't control the piano; she resists it. Eventually the night became more jovial and everyone around the room offered their musical talents or their voices to the gathering of friends, but her electric performance stayed with me and flavored the trip to Chantilly with a small piece of what can happen when someone seems to love something so much that it inspires a real and present fear of descent into nonexistence.
The next morning, we toured the Chateau Chantilly and its surrounding grounds. While one group went inside, a few compatriots and I decided that, despite having only about an hour before our group met to go into the chateau (now an art museum called the Musee Condé), we would travel to the opposite side of the castle grounds to try to find a rumored kangaroo zoo. A professor by the name of Christina Van Koehler had told us about it, and even though we weren't sure whether she was being sarcastic, we felt the need to risk lateness and find those kangaroos.
On through the bending back roads and though the wooded areas we went, coming across mine fields of goose feces and lovely ponds of water clear as crystal. We had a map, but it didn't help very much, and we ended up a long way away from the main chateau taking a sharp right through trees because we thought…well we didn't think. Maybe the kangaroos were back there?
And they were. Across a clearing peppered with dandelion on the other side of the trees was an enclosure through which ran about a half dozen chilly, bored wallabies. It was incredibly strange to see a collection of such foreign animals in the middle of a Parisian suburb in such a cold climate, and so far from where anyone would ever want to maintain them. Anyway our victory was documented for Facebook and we were back on our way toward the chateau, power walking down a straight road that ended up taking us back to where we had been in much less time than it took us to get there.
The chateau itself is a vision. I myself think it beats Versailles in beauty, plus it has a moat. Where's Versailles' moat? Across the bridges to access the entrance, stone sentinels sit atop their posts and represent different royal characteristics. There are lions for bravery, dogs for loyalty, stags for grace and strength, and some animals that don't exist just to give visitors a sense that Anne de Montmorency had an imagination. Intricacies are carved in stone over every window; shields bearing the crests of old families rest atop the doors, and griffins guard each corner of the exterior. The masonry that went into building this place is mind-bending; it's possible that I simply prefer its Renaissance style to the golden gaudiness of Versailles, but I really think that its construction required more thought. On the inside are rooms upon rooms of masterpieces about which I know little but feel a great deal. The famous Three Graces is hidden away in a little corner with a velvet rope around it beckoning visitors to look away from the mythological storyboards on the ceilings, and there is a room of stuffy portraiture that features a painting of Mary Queen of Scots.
We followed the trip to the Chateau with the compulsory tourist lunch in the surrounding town (which of course has menus in international languages for the hordes of tourists.) We passed the time in a little pizzeria where I had a Florentine pizza with a fried egg in the middle. I am beginning to want fried eggs in the middle of everything. Life with a fried egg in the middle. This is a good way to live.
The group then climbed back onto our buses and returned to Paris satisfied and ready to begin our real lives as students. Thus begins the days of preliminaries...
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