Last Sunday, I took about the longest cab ride one can possibly take in Paris: from the Porte d’Auteuil (practically Brittany) to Roissy (practically Belgium). As soon as the cabbie picked up on my American accent (halfway through the word “Bonjour“), he decided to devote our 45 minutes together to Monica Lewinsky. This was less interesting than it might have been. My opinion of the matter tends to be congruent with the French one — the vive-la-difference, “your-so-called-free- country” opinion so widely lampooned in the American press. Still, I tried to explain that the Starr proceeding was neither illegal nor illogical.
“Look,” I said in halting French, “although the president shouldn’t be impeached, one can’t deny that he’s acted like a . . . like a . . . what’s the word in French?”
“Un homme?” my friend suggested helpfully.
So there we were at the unbridgeable divide. But once we hit it, I had a thought: Isn’t it Americans who are supposed to be the hedonists and Europeans the prudes? Under the mythology I grew up with in the 1970s, Europe was romantic, but the United States was sexual. Europe was Chanel No. 5 and necking on the Bridge of Sighs; America was Erica Jong and Plato’s Retreat. If what Europeans are now doing is tolerating anything-goes sexuality, then they’re not acting like Europeans — they’re acting like Americans in the Age of Disco.
We, on the other hand, are behaving like bloodless European socialists of yore. Here I’m thinking of the Swedish exchange program we had at my high school north of Boston. This was 1975. Just south of us, in the imploding shoe-factory town of Lynn, the two high schools were suddenly so full of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans that our baseball team didn’t win a game against either of them for a decade. In Boston, attempts to bus blacks into Italian and Irish neighborhoods led to riots and bombs. So our rich and progressive school board decided to share the burden of integrating society — by accepting 20 students from the richest suburbs of Stockholm.
Sweden at the time was associated with beer, pornography, and suicide. Two dozen Swedes could wreak moral havoc on a high-school class, or so we hoped. I remember sitting around with my tenth-grade chums in the waning days of summer, having a conversation that went something like this:
“Buncha kids comin’ from Sweden this year.”
“Yeah. Pot’s legal over there.”
“Yeah, prostitution, too.”
“Yeah, and ya can go to the beach naked, too.”
Maybe Swedes over there flocked to nude beaches and sex shops. Our Swedes must have gone through some stick-in-the-mud vetting. The boys were diligent, unironic, and dumb — this last failing disguised by their near-total failure to learn English. The women were all blocky farmer’s daughters, whose sensuality began at Yodels and ended at Devil Dogs.
One particular dance in the high-school gym illustrated the sexual backwardness of the Euros. Lars Petersen, a slow-witted and gangly soccer player, wanted to dance with Amy Schneider. He went up to Hector Bolkonsky, the school’s four-letter hero-athlete (and, perforce, its most wanton jerk) to ask if Hector thought Amy would dance.
“Oh, she’s got a big crush on you.”
“What is crush?”
“She wants to sleep with you.”
“Sleep with me?” (A reasonable question. How was Lars to know how cool it was to be Swedish?)
“Yeah. Now, listen, Lars. You ask her to dance. If she says yes, that means she wants you to make a pass at her.”
“What should I pass her?”
“Kiss her. Right on the gym floor. Don’t be shy.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t want to do that.”
“It’s bad manners if you don’t. And if she says ‘Thank you’ after the dance, then you must try to take her shirt off.”
“Must?”
“Must. It’s an insult if you don’t. Her father’d prob’bly kill ya.”
Lars and Amy stepped onto the floor for a slow-dance, and Hector called the tenth grade up into the bleachers to witness the scene. It was an ugly one, with two results: first, hilarity from all of us gathered in the bleachers, through which was vented — almost volcanically — all our resentment at our Swedish classmates’ failure to entertain us; and second, once Lars had explained himself to Amy, an enmity between Hector and Amy that lasted for the rest of high school.
This last was wholly unnecessary, as Amy had a reputation for being quick to forgive. But Hector was always kind of an angry fellow. Right now he’s probably throwing shoes at his television set, screaming about how Clinton has corrupted America’s youth.
CHRISTOPHER CALDWELL
