islands found gainful employ.
Are we Blue? Are we Green?
The Hot and Cold War? Which side are we on?
On
our
side, whose else, buster?
And we intend to keep it the side that’s winning.
In place of politics, New York had
attitude
.
Winners and losers?
Do what it takes.
Ocean rising gonna drown the Apple?
So hire the Dutch to dike it in.
It’s gonna cost a bundle.
So tough shit.
Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island gone to feed the fishes?
So eat as much as you can digest of lobster Newburg and bouillabaisse and linguine marinara and peddle what’s left to the rubes west of the Hudson at fancy prices.
Attitude.
Monique just didn’t get it when she arrived in New York as a college freshman straight off the plane from Paris and into a city that seemed to be on another planet.
Paris might not exactly be the bargain-basement capital of Europe, but not even Novosibirsk or Zekograd could have prepared her for the prices here. Building the seawall that had saved New York from an ocean of water had inundated the city in an ocean of bond debt, the result being that there were sky-high taxes on everything, including, it would seem, taxes on taxes. As a result, the prices in the shopwindows were unreal, and what would rent you a decent forty meters in Paris got you the equivalent of a maid’s room here. The metro had long since been inundated, the trams were expensive and unreliable, the motorized taxis were only for the rich.
How do people
live
here?
What am I
doing
here?
New York speedily enough taught Monique its answer to the first question. You did not waste time and energy bitching and moaning about taxes or the climate or the injustice of it all or your crappy broom closet of an apartment except when you had the leisure to indulge in New York’s favorite parlor game.
You survived.
Columbia University had dormitory studios students could afford at three per room. The street food was plentiful and varied and cheap. The gray-market pedicabs and rickshaws got you around at cut-rate untaxed prices to be negotiated. Tax-free secondhand machine-made or first-hand-crafted clothing was inexpensive once you developed thestreet smarts to find the black markets. You wore a mosquito repeller in the summer and sprung for sonic cockroach guard and air-conditioning no matter what it took.
You developed the
attitude
.
Or else.
It took a bit longer for New York to teach her to fully appreciate the irony of the answer to the second question, though she had known it even before she left Paris.
Monique had been dispatched to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience. It had been a negotiated compromise to bring about a truce in the familial Hot and Cold War.
Mother had grown up in balmy palmy Paris as the daughter of Cajun refugees who ran a restaurant in the Marais called Bayous et Magnolias.
Father was the son of a French architect who had made his pile building mansions for the movers and shapers of booming Siberia and the American public-relations consultant he had met there doing likewise with their rough-and-ready images. Having made their fortune in the Wild East, they had repaired to Paris to enjoy it.
In Paris, however, an American PR lady with limited French hardly commanded the salary to which she had become accustomed in Siberia the Golden. Nor was an architect who had specialized in neo-Las Vegas mansions for the Siberian nouveau plutocracy in hot demand in the City of Halogen Light.
So by the time Monique’s father married her mother, her paternal grandparents had been constrained to sell off their Paris apartment and retire to a farmstead in Var, where they could afford to live off their capital and from which reduced economic vantage they could not afford to look down their noses at the daughter of modest restaurateurs as economically below their son’s station.
The Blue and the Green of it, however, was a cat-and-dog matter.
Mother’s family wore their Blue on their sleeves, not to
Are we Blue? Are we Green?
The Hot and Cold War? Which side are we on?
On
our
side, whose else, buster?
And we intend to keep it the side that’s winning.
In place of politics, New York had
attitude
.
Winners and losers?
Do what it takes.
Ocean rising gonna drown the Apple?
So hire the Dutch to dike it in.
It’s gonna cost a bundle.
So tough shit.
Brooklyn and the Bronx and Long Island gone to feed the fishes?
So eat as much as you can digest of lobster Newburg and bouillabaisse and linguine marinara and peddle what’s left to the rubes west of the Hudson at fancy prices.
Attitude.
Monique just didn’t get it when she arrived in New York as a college freshman straight off the plane from Paris and into a city that seemed to be on another planet.
Paris might not exactly be the bargain-basement capital of Europe, but not even Novosibirsk or Zekograd could have prepared her for the prices here. Building the seawall that had saved New York from an ocean of water had inundated the city in an ocean of bond debt, the result being that there were sky-high taxes on everything, including, it would seem, taxes on taxes. As a result, the prices in the shopwindows were unreal, and what would rent you a decent forty meters in Paris got you the equivalent of a maid’s room here. The metro had long since been inundated, the trams were expensive and unreliable, the motorized taxis were only for the rich.
How do people
live
here?
What am I
doing
here?
New York speedily enough taught Monique its answer to the first question. You did not waste time and energy bitching and moaning about taxes or the climate or the injustice of it all or your crappy broom closet of an apartment except when you had the leisure to indulge in New York’s favorite parlor game.
You survived.
Columbia University had dormitory studios students could afford at three per room. The street food was plentiful and varied and cheap. The gray-market pedicabs and rickshaws got you around at cut-rate untaxed prices to be negotiated. Tax-free secondhand machine-made or first-hand-crafted clothing was inexpensive once you developed thestreet smarts to find the black markets. You wore a mosquito repeller in the summer and sprung for sonic cockroach guard and air-conditioning no matter what it took.
You developed the
attitude
.
Or else.
It took a bit longer for New York to teach her to fully appreciate the irony of the answer to the second question, though she had known it even before she left Paris.
Monique had been dispatched to New York to develop a True Blue social conscience. It had been a negotiated compromise to bring about a truce in the familial Hot and Cold War.
Mother had grown up in balmy palmy Paris as the daughter of Cajun refugees who ran a restaurant in the Marais called Bayous et Magnolias.
Father was the son of a French architect who had made his pile building mansions for the movers and shapers of booming Siberia and the American public-relations consultant he had met there doing likewise with their rough-and-ready images. Having made their fortune in the Wild East, they had repaired to Paris to enjoy it.
In Paris, however, an American PR lady with limited French hardly commanded the salary to which she had become accustomed in Siberia the Golden. Nor was an architect who had specialized in neo-Las Vegas mansions for the Siberian nouveau plutocracy in hot demand in the City of Halogen Light.
So by the time Monique’s father married her mother, her paternal grandparents had been constrained to sell off their Paris apartment and retire to a farmstead in Var, where they could afford to live off their capital and from which reduced economic vantage they could not afford to look down their noses at the daughter of modest restaurateurs as economically below their son’s station.
The Blue and the Green of it, however, was a cat-and-dog matter.
Mother’s family wore their Blue on their sleeves, not to
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