Spontaneous Combustion

Honoré de Balzac in La Cousine Bette and Charles Dickens in Bleak House describe characters who suddenly go up in smoke. I know spontaneous human combustion is nineteenth-century pseudo-science and even then only happens to lowlifes and drunks. I am not that pickled yet, but I think Dickens and Balzac—and Herman Melville, Washington Irving, and Captain Marryatt—were on to something. I feel I could ignite any minute. It was not the brightest of ideas to go to lunch, after getting off the plane at Charles de Gaulle at one o’clock in the morning, at treize heures that afternoon: Washington time and Paris time were still at odds, and my body was trying to be on both clocks. It was even less bright to have a slice of terrine as a starter, but it was a black hole of unbrightness to order a petit salé as my main course. It wasn’t New Year’s Eve, but it seemed like a good idea at the time. If Paris has a drawback for me, it’s the food. I like it and eat more of it than in Washington. The food itself is a temptation, naturally. But for some reason the rhythms of my day change between the cities. In Washington, I get up very early, eat some breakfast, and get to work. I rarely eat lunch: when I do, it is almost ceremonial and usually involves making a living. In Paris, I get up later, have little for breakfast, and head out the door. Come midday, I am hungry and do something good about it. Dinner should be light, but I have become much more social in Paris in recent times than I have ever been, so dinner more often than not means dinner out, and dinner out is always more food than dinner in. Why this should be in Paris, where the portions are not outsized as they are in the States, I can’t tell: perhaps it’s because the courses keep coming, and I don’t say suffit, terminé, uncle. Weeks after the initial shock of the salted, braised pork for lunch, I feel stuffed and as if the food I have consumed is all still parked inside me somewhere and fermenting, the heat of fermentation being the scientifically proven cause of spontaneous combustion in cotton, fresh hay, pistachio nuts, and the famous oily rags. Why not in me, I wonder. I haven’t yet gone up in flames and I probably won’t this time, though I say that with as much confidence as a man who’s jumped off a bridge has in landing on a trampoline. The state of my innards makes me wonder even more about my state of mind. What is it that happens when I get off the plane here in Paris that changes my rhythms and patterns, then changes them again when I get off the plane there in Washington? Nothing conscious, nothing I have calculated, but it happens every time. The best I can figure is that I prefer to work in the afternoon in Paris, so I often spend the morning on foot looking for pleasures or trouble, running errands, and snapping up unconsidered trifles as I can. There is no reason that any of these things should be more rewarding or more pressing to do starting early, but that has always been my habit. What I mean is Paris in the afternoon is not dull. If anything, it should be livelier, and it is generally when I do go out in the afternoon, Paris not being an early-to-rise city, unlike Washington where I can tell it’s six in the morning because of the steady noise of solid commuter traffic I can hear through the window. If nobody else ever experienced this same gear shift, I’d say it’s my own peculiar reaction to travel or different time zones or the food. But I am not alone. Several people I have talked to and who go back and forth between Paris and the States have told me they have similar swaps of habits, like working at different times of the day, eating later or earlier, sleeping more or fewer hours, and so on. Even so, not one of them thought he was going to catch fire any minute. I have a guess, maybe only a tarted-up hunch, and it’s threadbare nonetheless, but it’s the best I can do. The two cities are so different in so many ways that adapting to them requires more than using euros instead of dollars or eating later or living without a car or thinking in grams instead of ounces, or vice versa. To adapt requires a visceral change (in my case, literally), a top-to-bottom housecleaning, a molting of the cultural skin. Or, Paris fat, Washington lean. Something. It’s worth the price, letting me feel at home here or there. And I suppose it’s true that feeling that I’m about to go up in smoke provides both a certain piquant to being in Paris and a lesser unwillingness to leave when it’s time. © Joseph Lestrange