New Paris York: A Novel

By Al Stotts

New Paris York is a love story that explores the histories, cultures, politics, art and architecture of its three geographic locations: Paris, New York and New Mexico. The story begins before the Covid pandemic and continues into the spread of the virus around the world. There’s sexual and romantic intrigue as well. Before meeting Taos Pueblo artist Betty Lujan in New York, history professor Kiloran Hamill has a complicated relationship with a fashion journalist who lives in his East Village building. And Betty is pursued in Paris by a wealthy French high-tech executive who is obsessed with art and with her. As French author Anatole France observed, a tale without romance is like beef without mustard -- an insipid dish.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jul 5, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663241009

Al Stotts

Al Stotts lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He is the author of four previous novels: Pont Marie (2011), No Angels in Montmartre (2013), Oligarch Games (2016), and Mountain Road (2019).

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Copyright © 2022 Al Stotts.

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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, names, incidents,

organizations, and dialogue in this novel are either the products

of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-4101-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-4100-9 (e)

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iUniverse rev. date: 06/06/2022

Contents

Prologue

Names Given and Taken

Fleeting Passion

Progressive Roots

Portrait by the Artist

New Mexico Paris York

Nude York

New York to New Mexico

Manhattan Through Taos Eyes

The Beauty of Manhattan

Parlez Vous Tiwa?

The Roof of Paris

Champ de Repos

Champ de Mars

Flâneurs

La Galerie Moderne

Commune de New York

Le Bistrot

The Judgment of Paris

La Peste

Séduction

Les Microbes

Saint-Pol-de-Leon

Pilgrims

Far From the Madding Crowd

Ideological Virus

Underlying Conditions

The Best of Times in the Worst of Times

J’ai Trois Amours

Art in the Time of Covid

Plein Air

Portrait of the Art Collector

Seeing the Face, Seeing the Soul

Covid Dreams

Lost Illusions

The Place

City of Romance

Paris Mon Amour

Le Jour du Mariage

God Bless Amérique

Ville Lumière

Au Revoir, Paris

Manhattan est Belle

News of Paris

Like a Siren

I am learning that there are cities, like certain women, who annoy you, overwhelm you, and lay bare your soul, and whose scorching contact, scandalous and delightful at the same time, clings to every pore of your body.

~ Albert Camus, The Rains of New York (1947)

For Paris and New York

With special thanks to my friend Eric Hajas of Saint-Pol-de-Leon, France, for making valuable edits and comments on numerous drafts. I also want to thank Jim Danneskiold, Michael Bustamante, Zandra Trujillo, Steve Baca, Maureen Baca, Melissa Stotts, and Liz Dineen for taking time to review initial drafts.

Well, I said, "Paris is old, is many centuries. You feel, in Paris, all the time gone by. That isn’t what you feel in New York —" He was smiling. I stopped.

What do you feel in New York? he asked.

Perhaps you feel, I told him, all the time to come. There’s such power there, everything is in such movement. You can’t help wondering—I can’t help wondering—what it will all be like—many years from now.

~ James Baldwin, Giovanni’s Room (1956)

Prologue

New York City and Paris captured Kiloran Hamill’s heart when he was young, long before he had an opportunity to visit either city. Both had great literary traditions, and it was their novelists who taught him most of what he knew and appreciated about them as he grew up.

Kiloran’s literary education about the two cities was facilitated by the Albuquerque Public Library in New Mexico. Albuquerque was as unlike Paris or New York as it could be. Yet he loved his hometown and New Mexico with the same passion he had for what he considered to be the two greatest cities of the world. It was an urban love triangle that would help shape his life.

His love of New York started with baseball because the Yankees were his favorite team. A city with such a legendary team must be great in other ways, he reasoned. His preoccupation was nurtured by all the images of the city he saw in movies and in the works of John Dos Passos, Bernard Malamud, Pete Hamill, Piri Thomas, Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, Edith Wharton, James Baldwin, and Henry Roth, who died in Albuquerque in 1995.

His affection for Paris began with his French grandmother who grew up in Suresnes, a commune in the western suburbs of Paris. He was fascinated by her stories about Paris and by her French accent. As a boy, he wondered what life would be like in a country without baseball. His grandmother introduced him to the writings of Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, Émile Zola, George Sand, Anatole France, Marcel Proust, and Guy de Maupassant; so he developed an affinity for 19th century French authors. Their stories transported him to the streets of Paris in centuries past. The books he befriended when he was young had become friends for life.

Kiloran thought about how Victor Hugo described Notre Dame as a chimera among the other old churches of Paris: it had the head of one, the limbs of another, the back of a third. The same was true for New York and Paris – sometimes they borrowed from each other culturally, artistically, and politically.

It was more broadly true of France and America. After all, France had been an ally of America in the War for Independence from England and the U.S. had helped liberate France from Hitler’s occupation in World War II. And the flags of both nations shared the colors red, white, and blue.

In 1776 the Marquis de La Fayette expressed his hope for the new American experiment: The happiness of America is intimately connected with the happiness of mankind; She is destined to become the safe and venerable asylum of virtue, of honesty, of tolerance, and of peaceful liberty.

More recently, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen wrote about the shared Franco-American ideal: Perhaps the root of the mutual fascination that binds France and the United States is that each sees itself as an idea, a model of some kind for the rest of the world. This is an immodest but tenacious notion, bound up with the founding articles and myths of both republics. No other countries make such claims for the universality of their virtue.

As a historian, Kiloran understood that the two nations also shared darker realities in their pasts, including slave-trading and colonialism. Early in the 20th century, fascist ideology took seed in the U.S. and France. It grew during World War II but went mostly dormant after the defeat of Hitler. Then it emerged from the fringes of both societies in the 21st century to seek and achieve political power.

In the U.S., the Republican Party’s capitulation to Donald Trump made the GOP a political safe haven for white nationalism. Gold Star father Khizar Khan called Republican leaders the mute enablers of Trump’s fascism.

In France, right-wing figures such as Marine Le Pen and fiery orator Éric Zemmour, a nationalist with an ominous view of the future, experienced rising popularity. Trump was also a cult figure for all of Europe’s far-right organizations.

The Trump administration’s antipathy toward immigrants caused Kiloran to worry that the separation of families and caging of immigrant children at America’s southern border could be the first step along a path to the industrialized barbarism that Nazi Germany unleashed in World War II.

The former television personality had demonstrated autocratic aspirations from the beginning of his presidency. Kiloran was particularly alarmed by how much influence Russia’s Communist-dictator-turned-Fascist-despot, Vladimir Putin, had over him. At an infamous Helsinki news conference with Putin in 2018, Trump refused to blame the Russian president for meddling in the 2016 election or to acknowledge Russia’s ongoing cyber war against the United States.

The puppet did the bidding of the puppet master. In an astonishing statement from a U.S. President, Trump accepted Putin’s word over the assessment of the American intelligence community: My people came to me, Dan Coats came to me and some others, they said they think it’s Russia. I have President Putin; he just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.

Then in 2019 the U.S. House of Representatives impeached Trump for soliciting Russia’s election interference in the 2016 presidential election and for promotion of a debunked conspiracy theory that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered. He was also accused of withholding military aid to Ukraine unless President Volodymyr Zelensky initiated an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden. Senate Republicans foolishly refused to convict Trump.

America was at risk because Republicans no longer believed in the common good. They put power and party above country. For decades a faction of their leadership had preached a selfish philosophy of personal freedom and that had become the dominant creed of the party. They no longer believed in the rule of law, and they felt free to reject truth in favor of personal opinion and ideological purity.

How could anyone not understand the logical outcome of a political movement that thrived on hatred, greed, and corruption? In the middle of the previous century, the United States had helped France and the world defeat fascism. A mere eight decades later, the U.S. and France needed to defeat their own swastika-tattooed fascists. As former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright explained, under fascism the mission of citizens was to serve; the government’s job was to rule.

American democracy and its two-party system had been a light to the world as long as both political parties valued constitutional self-government. But when the Republican Party surrendered itself to the autocratic aspirations of Trump and the far right, the fragility of democracy was exposed.

Still, Kiloran believed that democratic ideals would prevail, even though neo-Nazi politics had returned with various levels of strength around the world. He clung to the republican traditions of France and the United States that were initiated with revolutions in 1776 and 1789. The basic principles of each had become fundamental aspects of Western liberal democracy.

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In 1889, a quarter-scale replica of Liberty Enlightening the World, one of French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s models for the Statue of Liberty in New York, was donated to Paris by the American community in the city to help commemorate the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. Installed in the Seine on the Île aux Cygnes to the west of Gustave Eiffel’s tower, the gift reaffirmed the dedication of the two nations to the republican ideal.

Every time he was in Paris, Kiloran liked to go to the Pont Mirabeau and look east at the statue with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Seeing those two great symbols together reaffirmed his personal dedication to the shared democratic aspirations of his two favorite nations. And it nourished a newer concept he had encountered when he read about another American’s obsession with Paris and New York.

Raymond Duncan, the older brother of American dancer Isadora Duncan, promoted an idea in the 1940s that was based on his Franco-American enthusiasm. He articulated it in a newsletter published on his personal press at 31 Rue de Seine in Paris. The publication was titled New Paris York.

Duncan, whose clothing and lifestyle eccentricities foreshadowed the American hippie culture by several decades, was captivated by the intellectual, cultural, and political appeal of the two cities, so he conducted a symbolic wedding for them. He poured water from the Seine into New York’s East River, then took East River water to Paris where he joined it with the Seine.

Kiloran was delighted by Duncan’s consummation of the two cities through the comingling of their vital river fluids. Like the Romans, Kiloran thought of the Seine as a curvaceous water nymph. There was no greater beauty in Paris. The East River, with its swift, turbulent current, its whirlpools and eddies, seemed like an impatient, passionate American. He imagined that Johann Pachelbel’s 17th century Canon in D Major, a popular wedding song, filled the air during Duncan’s ceremony that merged Paris and New York.

It inspired Kiloran to create his own symbolic union of the cities. In Paris he had a fleur-de-lis tattooed on the inside of his left wrist, and in New York he had a Yankees NY logo engraved on the inside of his right wrist. Thereafter, the two cities were always on his body as well as on his mind.

Raymond Duncan’s newsletter imagined that New Paris York could be built in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean at latitude 45N, longitude 36W. It would be a new Atlantis, he said. And he suggested that Americans and Parisians who traveled to the cities on ocean liners could create the foundation for the mythical city by dropping New York and Paris stones from the decks of their ships at that nautical halfway point.

That was the part of Duncan’s fantasy that didn’t appeal to Kiloran. New Paris York was a compelling concept, but it didn’t require a mythical city in the middle of the Atlantic. It could exist in the minds of everyone who loved Paris and New York. In Kiloran’s case, he came to understand that New Paris York was his natural habitat. French theologian Jacques Ellul had written that cities could direct and change one’s spiritual life. New Paris York was Kiloran’s spiritual home.

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He loved that the two cities inspired creative people to make art in all its forms. Paris and New York were particularly melodic, he believed; literally music to his ears. There were three great compositions from the early 20th century that expressed his love of the cities. He thought George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue (1924) described Manhattan as well as any novel he had read. Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern’s The Last Time I Saw Paris (1940) evoked the City of Light during the Nazi Occupation. And Josephine Baker’s J’ai Deux Amours (1930) was the perfect anthem for New Paris York.

Although New Paris York was a romantic notion for Kiloran, he also understood that neither city was a utopia. After all, in real life he had been mugged in Manhattan and pickpocketed in Paris. But nothing could diminish his affection and esteem for the two great centers of urban culture.

He thought Oscar Wilde was correct when he wrote, When good Americans die, they go to Paris. Actor William Powell expanded on that thought in the movie Fashions of 1934: I’ve always been told that when good Americans die, they don’t go to Heaven, they go to Paris. Smart Americans don’t wait until they die. They don’t want to take any chances. On the other hand, American song writer Cole Porter declared in a 1930 composition that when he died, he didn’t want to go to Heaven or Hell because he happened to like New York.

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Paris and New York were born on islands. The Parisii inhabited the Île de la Cité during Caesar’s Gallic Wars in 52 BC. In the early 1600s, just when Manhattan Island received its first European settlers, another island on the Seine, the Île Saint-Louis, was developed just east of Notre Dame.

Manhattan was the smallest but most densely populated of New York’s five boroughs, and it was easy to forget that it was an island. Most of the population could live each day without seeing the East River or the Hudson. The Seine, however, was easily visible to residents of the smaller Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis. Kiloran admired the iconic bridges that connected the New York and Paris islands to other political subdivisions – the Brooklyn Bridge, Manhattan Bridge, Queensboro Bridge, Pont Neuf, Pont Marie, Pont de la Tournelle, Pont Notre Dame.

The geology of the islands also fascinated Kiloran. The entire Paris region consisted of plastic clay and sands at the base, followed by coarse limestone, sands, marls, Brie gypsum, Beauce limestone, and green clays. The coarse limestone of Paris provided stones to build its cathedrals and public monuments. The Beauce limestone, which evolved into millstone, was used in the construction of many of the grand buildings of Île Saint-Louis.

The Island of Manhattan was composed of volcanic rock — Fordham gneiss, Inwood marble, and Manhattan schist. The Inwood marble had metamorphosed from limestone through heat and pressure. Together, the ancient rocks provided firm land upon which to build the skyscrapers of Downtown and Midtown. Architectural historian Norval White pointed out that Manhattan schist jutted above ground to publicly reveal itself in the boulders of Central Park.

This cooperative venture of nature and man in France and the United States was breathtaking, at least in Kiloran’s eyes. Simply looking at Manhattan and Paris filled him with joy over the resulting architectural and natural beauty of the two island cities.

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The cathedral that dominated the Île de la Cité had also captured Kiloran’s heart and soul. He grieved over the tragic fire that gutted much of its interior and consumed the roof and the 19th century spire of the medieval church.

Whenever he was in Paris, he made it a point to walk or run by Notre Dame at least twice a day. He particularly loved looking at Our Lady from the southeast, which provided a comprehensive view that included the Seine, the cathedral’s flying buttresses, the vault, the 19th century spire, and the lead roof. But that view no longer existed, and it broke his heart.

President Emmanuel Macron had promised to restore Notre Dame just as it was and within five years, but no one knew if the pledge could be kept. One of Kiloran’s fondest memories of Notre Dame was an evening he spent listening to a medieval chant concert in the ancient building. He gazed lovingly at the interior architecture as the beautiful a cappella music wafted around the columns and bounced off the walls. The cathedral was a dear friend. He had gone to Paris soon after the fire to be with her and to mourn with the citizens of Paris over the inferno’s defacement of her beauty and history.

It reminded him of the need he felt to regularly visit lower Manhattan to see the memorial for the 2,606 people killed in and within the vicinity of the twin towers of the World Trade Centers, and the 157 passengers on board the two hijacked aircraft that terrorists slammed into the buildings on Sept. 11, 2001. It wasn’t architecture or history that prompted his visits. As author Phillip Lopate had written, the towers were not offensive or overbearing, but neither were they well loved. It was Kiloran’s anguish over the loss of life and the injury to his favorite American island that brought him back to the heinous crime scene each year.

In January of 2015 he likewise made a pilgrimage to 10 Rue Nicolas-Appert on the Right Bank of Paris to the offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo. On January 7 that year, two Muslim brothers aligned with al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula killed 12 people and injured 11 others. The monstrous attack was in revenge for the newspaper’s 2012 publication of cartoons about the prophet Muhammad. It was an attack on individual lives and, more broadly, on freedom of speech and the press.

During that visit Kiloran walked around the building and looked mournfully at the memorials to the slain Charlie Hebdo staff members. As he thought about the fundamentalist rage that had prompted the cowardly attack, he was aware that Paris police officers still patrolled the blocks around the crime scene.

Unfortunately, there were additional attacks that year. In November, also in the 11th Arrondissement, ninety people were killed and hundreds wounded when Islamic terrorists attacked a rock concert attended by 1,500 people in the Bataclan theatre. They murdered innocent people because they considered them to be decadent secularists and a threat to their bigoted fundamentalist view of the world.

Kiloran thought fundamentalists of all religions had the potential for violent acts against anyone who did not share their worldviews. They all justified their bigotry and misogyny in the name of God. Christian nationalists in the U.S., for example, believed that the American government derived legitimacy from the Bible, not from its democratic institutions. And they supported political violence against the tyranny of those who rejected their theocratic beliefs.

New York and Paris had been the victims of vicious ideological violence, but the citizens of both cities refused to be cowed by the terrorism. They immediately gathered by the thousands in public memorials to the dead in defiance of the attackers. It was one more reason why Kiloran wanted to record his love for Paris and New York in a book. He had a strategy to spend a year in each city working on research projects for other books but prepping himself to ultimately write about his love for the two urban icons.

He applied for and received a fellowship that would allow him to spend a year in Manhattan to research the life of a New Yorker who moved to New Mexico in the early 20th century and became an influential politician. He was already working on an application for another fellowship to support a year of research on an ill-fated attempt to establish a democratic government in Paris in 1871. But ultimately, it was a book to be titled New Paris York that was the focus of all his efforts.

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Maybe it wasn’t love. Maybe it was only chemistry, or the right combination, or a miracle. Most people drag through their whole lives without finding it.

~ Eva Gardner to James Mason in

East Side, West Side (1949)

Names Given and Taken

Kiloran had a twelve-month lease on a small one-bedroom Manhattan apartment. It was on the top floor of a white brick walk-up building at 438 East 9th Street. Constructed in 1900, the building had decorative moldings around its windows and a black metal fire escape on its front façade that was typical of the era.

The total rent for the year amounted to a significant percentage of his fellowship money, but the location was close to bus stops and just a 10-minute walk to the 4 and 6 subway trains at Astor Place Station.

The 350 square foot apartment had a view of historic Tompkins Square Park from the bedroom. He imagined what it must have been like in the 1960s to hear Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead play free concerts in the park’s former band shell. But he was glad that he missed the drugs and violence that plagued Tompkins in the 1970s and 1980s.

Kiloran liked the oak floors and the small open kitchen of his apartment. White walls and recessed lighting gave the apartment a clean look. The living room was defined by an exposed brick wall that had a non-functioning fireplace at its center. The mantle for the faux fireplace was the perfect spot to display a prized possession he found at a Lower East Side flea market – an original navy-blue early 20th century humpback New York street sign. The oval at the top said Ave. A. and the larger rectangular space beneath said 6th St. For many decades, the sign had announced the intersection of those two streets only a few blocks from his building.

To make the apartment feel more spacious, he was careful not to clutter it with bulky furniture or extraneous possessions. What he missed most, however, was space for a library. In Albuquerque, he owned a 19th century Downtown adobe house. It had a big upstairs library that barely accommodated his beloved collection of literature and history. At home he thought of himself as book-wrapt, which meant he loved to be surrounded by books that transported him to other places, experiences, and times. A visiting UNM professor rented the Albuquerque house and its library with an option for an additional year in case Kiloran got a fellowship for research in Paris.

Overall, Kiloran was pleased with his temporary New York residence. The retail space on the first floor was occupied by a wine shop and Tacos Cuautla Morelos, a Mexican restaurant. There were only eight apartments in the building, and he hoped to meet all their occupants, especially a pretty brunette who lived on the first floor. For weeks he exchanged greetings with her, but that was it. A neighbor on his floor told him she was a native New Yorker named Honey who was a fashion writer for Vogue Magazine.

Some mornings he saw Honey running in and around Tompkins Square Park, but she was always going the other direction and listening to music on her cell phone, so he would wave or nod a greeting as they passed.

She had a wavy bob hairstyle and a dewy complexion. Her eyes, which were almond-shaped, had minimal makeup. Her nose was small and thin, and her lips were full. Honey’s figure was well proportioned and well suited to the spandex running clothes she wore. He always turned and looked at her as she passed by. One morning, to Kiloran’s surprise, she ran up to him, removed her earbuds, and extended her hand in greeting.

I’ve been meaning to introduce myself, she said. I kept waiting for you to say something, but you never did, so, hi, I’m Honey Johnson.

I’ve hesitated to introduce myself, he said, because I didn’t want to interrupt your morning runs. My name is Kiloran Hamill, and I’m happy to meet you.

Would you like to have dinner with me at my apartment sometime this week? she asked.

Kiloran froze for a moment as he processed the unexpected dinner invitation.

I’d…I would love to have dinner with you. But you don’t have to make dinner. I’d be happy to take you to a restaurant.

No, I get tired of eating out all the time. I’m a decent cook. Come over Friday evening at seven o’clock, and we can introduce ourselves more properly.

Thank you, he said, as she replaced her earbuds and ran off. He was tempted to feel flattered, but he assumed a beautiful New Yorker undoubtedly had more options than dining with an Albuquerque academic. He decided he should just be grateful that she wanted to get to know him.

As he waited for Friday evening, Kiloran