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non!” André exclaimed gaily. “For you, it is still late at night in Los Angeles!”
    But he waited until the car had turned off the highway and was careening across a huge traffic circle jammed with cars zigging and zagging every which way before he popped the cork. The champagne bubbled up out of the bottle and frothed down it and onto the carpeting. André shrugged and paid the mess no mind. “Good for the carpet as you say in America, oui?” he declared.
    And Jerry found himself sitting there in the back of a limousine—careening along through streets packed with traffic, past sidewalk cafés and massively ornate nineteenth-century architecture, sidewalks thronged with people, a city alive with a life and energy he had never experienced before—exhausted, zoned, half asleep, but nevertheless having a high old time getting royally drunk on champagne at eleven o’clock in the morning.
    By the time the limousine finally pulled up at the hotel, he was barely able to stand.
    “The Ritz,” André told him, as they exited the car amid an absolute swarm of doormen and bellmen. “Hemingway and all that, a bit theatrical, peut-être, but we thought you might find it amusing.”
    It was the understatement of Jerry Reed’s life. He was ushered into a reception area that seemed like a palace set for an old Cecil B. DeMille movie, into an elevator out of the same film, and into a room . . . into a room . . .
    “Holy shit. . . .” Jerry sighed as André tipped the bellman and closed the door behind them.
    The room was enormous. There was a brass bed, and a lavishly furnished sitting area separated from it by brocaded curtains. There was a table heaped with baskets of flowers and fruit and trays of petits fours and a silver tray holding a crystal bowl of caviar with all the fixings. There was a fully stocked bar with a refrigerator and a sink. The ceilings were covered with plaster floral-work painted ingarish full color, and the moldings were all gilt braid, and the walls were papered in red and gold and blue velvet flocking, and hung all over with original oil paintings in heavy complicated frames. “My God, I feel like I’m sneaking into some royal bedroom. . . .” Jerry muttered.
    André Deutcher laughed. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Nothing exceeds like excess. See a movie, be a movie, as someone once said.”
    He went over to the floor-to-ceiling windows, drew the drapes, and opened them vertically like a pair of doors, and with a little bow, ushered Jerry out through them onto a little balcony. “However,” he said, “
this
is the real Paris.”
    Jerry stepped shakily out onto the balcony into the warming morning sunlight. From this vantage he could see far out across the low rooftops of the city to the shining waters of the Seine beyond the treetops of some intervening garden. Traffic buzzed across ornate stone bridges. Bright sunlight through an occasional dappling of shadows from fleecy white clouds illumined the famous Left Bank like a picture postcard of itself, and way off to the right the Eiffel Tower proclaimed the fabled cityscape’s identity.
    It was a view that everyone in the world had probably seen a thousand times, a cliché landscape of a cinematic city. But there was a subliminal music in the air and a subtly alien heady perfume wafting to his nostrils that told his backbrain that, no, this was no painting on black velvet, this was no picture postcard, this was no movie.
    This was utterly unexpected. This was overwhelmingly beautiful and overwhelmingly real. He could smell it, and taste it, and hear its song calling to him.
    “It is said,” said André Deutcher, “that every man has two hometowns. The place he was born and Paris.”
    In a way that he doubted André could fully understand, Jerry Reed, American, space cadet, stood there drinking in the marvelous unexpected alien wonder of it all, and knew, somehow, that it was true, dangerously and wonderfully true.
    And