Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  Paris in Love is a work of nonfiction. Nonetheless, some of the names and personal characteristics of the individuals involved have been changed in order to disguise their identities. Any resulting resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.

  Copyright © 2012 by Eloisa James

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., and Curtis Brown, Ltd., for permission to reprint “Their Lonely Betters” from Collected Poems by W. H. Auden, copyright © 1951 by W. H. Auden. Electronic book rights are administered by Curtis Brown, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., and Curtis Brown, Ltd.

  An early draft of “A Parisian Winter” appeared on the blog One for the Table (www.oneforthetable.com).

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  James, Eloisa.

  Paris in love : a memoir / Eloisa James.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-60444-0

  1. James, Eloisa. 2. Authors, American—Biography. 3. Women authors,

  American—Biography. 4. Americans—France—Paris—Biography. 5. Cancer—

  Patients—Biography. 6. Life change events. 7. Quality of life—France—

  Paris. 8. Self-actualization (Psychology) I. Title.

  PS3560.A3796Z46 2012

  813′54—dc23

  [B]

  2011040662

  www.atrandom.com

  Jacket design: Claudine Mansour

  Jacket illustration: Sophie Griotto

  v3.1

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  AN INTRODUCTION TO LA VIE PARISIENNE

  A PARISIAN FALL

  THE EIFFEL TOWER

  CHASTISED BY DIOR

  THE ROBIN-ANTHEM

  GRIEF

  A PARISIAN WINTER

  IN CHURCH WITH SCROOGE

  VERTIGO

  CHICKEN SOUP

  A PARISIAN SPRING

  OF BREASTS AND BRAS

  OF RICE AND MEN

  FIGHTING THROUGH THE HOLIDAYS

  THE HORROR THAT IS THE SCHOOL PLAY

  A SLICE OF PARISIAN SUMMER

  ON FRENCH WOMEN, AND WHETHER THEY GET FAT

  ROSE

  THE END

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  MY VERY IDIOSYNCRATIC GUIDE TO A FEW PLACES IN PARIS

  Other Books by This Author

  About the Author

  AN INTRODUCTION TO

  LA VIE PARISIENNE

  In December 2007, my mother died of cancer; two weeks later I was diagnosed with the same disease.

  I’ve always been an obsessive reader of memoirs, particularly those that revolve around terrible diseases. While gawking at car accidents gives you a toe-curling sense of shame, perusing a memoir about multiple sclerosis, for example, has an air of virtue—as if by reading about other people’s tragedies, you are gathering intelligence about your own possible future. Having read at least ten cancer memoirs before my diagnosis, I was quite sure about what would happen next.

  I immediately started anticipating the epiphany when I would be struck by the acute beauty of life. I would see joy in my children’s eyes (rather than stark rebellion), eschew caffeine, and simply be, preferably while doing yoga in front of a sunset. My better, less irritable self would come out of hiding, and I would stop wasting time at the computer and sniping at my husband.

  I have cancer … but the good news is that I will learn to live in the moment.

  Or perhaps not.

  When the Life-Is-Precious response didn’t immediately appear, I delayed making joy my modus vivendi while I looked for a doctor. My mother had demanded that her surgeon give her at least enough time to finish her novel-in-progress, and her surgeon had delivered. Mom had the copyedits right there in the hospice with her. I couldn’t concentrate on joy when I was obsessively trying to figure out which breast specialist would give me the time I wanted—about forty more years. Maybe fifty.

  My sister, Bridget, who is science-minded and capable of retaining unpleasant medical facts, accompanied me on the quest for the right oncologist. We first saw a fierce woman on Madison Avenue who had decorated her office with Wonder Woman dolls. I took this as a sign of somewhat juvenile (but welcome) joie de vivre, but Bridget deemed it too self-congratulatory. Dr. Wonder Woman was ready to battle tremendous odds; her eyes shone with a true-believer fervor as she prescribed removing various parts of my body and radiating much of what was left. She wrestled me onto a cot and drew blood for a gene test right there in her office. “Don’t worry about your insurance,” she said blithely. “After they hear your family history, they’ll pay up.”

  Once I learned that I didn’t have the BRAC gene, the one that brands you with a big red C for cancer, I couldn’t get myself to go back to her office. For BRAC carriers, Dr. Wonder Woman offered a scorched-earth policy and the zeal to Fight the Good Fight. I had started sleeping better once I decided that my early-stage case was like herpes, another disease I’d read about and hoped to avoid: disagreeable, but hardly terminal.

  Eventually Bridget and I found a calm, quiet oncologist who recommended radiation and hormone treatment, but also noted the salient fact that my breast was the culprit. I stopped thinking about herpes. This was a part of my body that I could live without. In rapid order, I lost that breast.

  But having escaped chemotherapy and radiation, did I have the right to call myself a survivor, especially when my newly reconstructed breast turned out to be so pneumatic and round? I decided the answer was no, explaining my lack of epiphany and my disinclination to watch the sun rise from a downward dog position. No pink ribbon for me. Obviously, my diagnosis just wasn’t serious enough to change my personality.

  Lucky me. I had a better profile but the same old psyche.

  And then, without consciously deciding to, I began to shed my possessions. I started with my books. Since I was seven, I had compulsively collected novels, cataloging them and keeping my favorites close to the door in case of fire. My boxed set of The Chronicles of Narnia bore a large sign instructing my parents not to forget it as they carried my (presumably unconscious) body through the door, just before the ceiling fell in.

  Now, though, I started giving away books with abandon. My husband, Alessandro, had weathered my bout with cancer with considerably more aplomb than he did its aftermath. As I purged my own belongings, I proselytized the same, but to no effect. Alessandro was flatly uninterested, as anyone might have guessed from the neatly labeled boxes in our attic containing every exam he’d given since 1988. I sometimes worried that the floor might buckle from the tons of Italian literature stored under the eaves. The day he discovered three of his books that I had mistakenly placed in a box labeled Goodwill shall not soon be forgotten in our marriage. It was like our honeymoon night, when he set alight an ornamental fire in our room at the bed-and-breakfast and smoked out all the sleepy guests. That blaze is stuck in my memory, and those three books are stuck in his.

  But I didn’t stop with books. I did the same with my clothes, jettisoning unopened packages of black stockings from the eighties, the silk nightgown I’d worn on my smoky wedding night, miniskirts in size six. I gave away our wedding presents. My high school term papers hit the recycling bin, followed by college essays and eve
n the children’s artwork, which I had once found endlessly endearing.

  For years we had talked of living in Manhattan, in the nostalgic fashion with which my mother used to inform me that she might have been a ballerina, if only I had not come along. Alessandro had grown up in an apartment in the center of Florence; he hankered after narrow alleys and the noise of recycling trucks smashing wine bottles at 4:00 A.M. But I grew up on a farm, and when we moved to the East Coast, I had insisted that we live in the suburbs, even though I would be teaching in the city. I thought that parenthood entailed a backyard, a tree, and the sacrifice of urban delights.

  So we had settled into a charming house in New Jersey, with a backyard, a mock pear tree, two studies, and forty bookcases. But now, all these years later, lying on the couch recuperating from my surgery, I realized that I had no close friends nearby who might stop in and bring me tea. The people I loved were New Yorkers who braved the bridge and tunnel to bring me certificates for day spas—in the city.

  We found a realtor.

  Staring out the living room window at that mock pear tree, I also discovered a keen desire to surprise myself. Rather than living my life in the moment, I wanted to live someone else’s life—specifically, that of a person who lived in Paris. Being a professor has many drawbacks (such as a minuscule salary), but having no time off is not one of them. We could each take a sabbatical year; we simply needed to renew our passports. Once Alessandro found that there was an Italian school in Paris that our bilingual children could attend, I turned my back on the pear tree and bought new drapes for the windows. I filled the empty spots in the denuded bookshelves with pink vases. The house sold in five days, during the worst real estate market in decades. Our cars were last to go.

  Luca and Anna, the younger members of our family, were less than enthralled, to say the least, at the prospect of decamping to France. They were particularly struck by the fact that, of all of us, only Alessandro spoke French. (Although they had received good grades for three years in French class, they were right: they couldn’t speak the language.) I informed my disbelieving children that inability to understand our neighbors would make their experience more gripping. Threatened with insubordination, I pointed out that I, too, had loathed my parents at their age; instigating fear and mutiny in one’s offspring is a parental duty.

  Friends were kissed goodbye, Facebooking promises were made, toys were packed. Large amounts of logo-emblazoned clothing were purchased, since a savvy friend promised us that a prominent display of American brands would ensure popularity in the Leonardo da Vinci School.

  Paris awaited: a whole year with no teaching and no departmental responsibilities, just la vie Parisienne.

  In August we moved to an apartment on rue du Conservatoire, a two-block-long street most notable for the music that floats, on warm afternoons, from the open windows of the conservatory. We found ourselves in the 9th arrondissement, in a quartier that is home to various immigrant populations, the Folies Bergère, and more Japanese restaurants than I have fingers.

  I had made grand plans to write four books while in Paris: a scholarly book about Jacobean boys’ drama in 1607, a couple of romance novels, and a historical novel. But in spite of these inestimable ambitions, I found myself walking for hours. I read books in bed while rain hit the window. Sometimes I spent two weeks doing one Sunday New York Times crossword, toiling every night to solve a clue that likely took Will Shortz two seconds to solve.

  Soon enough, I discovered an interesting fact: if a writer doesn’t put in hours at the keyboard every day, no writing gets done. I had always suspected this was true, but having grown up in a family of writers (and a family without a television at that), I never had the chance to test it out. Even during an inglorious, nonacademic spell after college, I returned home after work to plug away at a novel. Remember, my mother sat in her hospice bed correcting copyedits. Leisure didn’t seem to be part of my DNA.

  Yet virtually the only writing I did was on Facebook, where I created something of an online chronicle, mirroring it in even more concise form on Twitter. As each day passed, my thumbnail entries fell off the bottom of my Facebook page, relegated to Older Posts. My tweets evaporated, as ephemeral and trivial, as sweet and heedless, as our days in Paris.

  A selection of these posts—organized, revised, a few expanded into short essays—has become this book. For the most part, I have retained the short form, the small explosion of experience, as it best gives the flavor of my days.

  Those days were organized not around to-do lists and book deadlines but around walks in the park and visits to the fishmonger. Deadlines came and went without a catastrophic blow to my publishing career; I relaxed into a life free of both students and committee work; laziness ceased to be a frightening word.

  I never did learn how to live in the moment, but I did learn that moments could be wasted and the world would continue to spin on its axis.

  It was a glorious lesson.

  A PARISIAN FALL

  We spent the summer in Italy, then rented a car and drove to Paris. I pictured this drive as the proverbial “quality time,” a charming entrée to a year of creative freedom. But in fact, the children took it as a chance to catch up on missed television, now endlessly available thanks to the Internet. “Look, kids,” I shouted from the front seat. “There’s a glorious château off to our right!” The only response was wild laughter inspired by Family Guy riffs on Ronald Reagan. They weren’t even alive for his presidency.

  Last night we stayed with friends who own a kiwi orchard in Cigliano, in northern Italy, a misty, dim forest with rows of female trees, heavy with fruit, interspersed with fruitless males. The farmhouse had hooks over the beds to hang drying herbs and sausages. Showing no respect for tradition, Luca freaked out at the “meat hooks” and begged to be allowed to sleep in the car. We managed to keep from our friends his belief that their beloved house was really a charnel.

  Back in the car for the final leg of our journey to Paris, Anna played fart noises on her iPod Touch off and on for hours. I tried to ignore the way my ten-year-old had regressed to half that age and kept my head turned to the window. The French highway was lined with short, vertical pipes from which ferns sprouted. The frilly parts made it look as though the troll dolls from my childhood were hiding in the pipes—perhaps waiting for a chance to hitchhike, if the right family were to happen along.

  Our Paris apartment is elegant in the way of a Chanel coat found in an attic trunk: worn around the edges but beautifully designed. The building dates to the 1750s, and the wood floors are all original. The kitchen and bathroom are at the far end of a long corridor that bends around one corner of the building’s courtyard—so that the smells (and the servants) would be isolated.

  Our guardienne, it emerged, is not French but Portuguese, with a round face and a bright smile. Alessandro went downstairs with her and was gone for an entire hour; it seems they discussed the price of vegetables the whole time. He reported that store owners on rue Cadet, the shopping street two blocks over, are all thieves. Armed with this knowledge, and dutifully following instructions, we set out for a covered market, Marché Saint-Quentin, where the vegetables are cheaper and the vendors are honorable. We found a dazzling variety of fruit, including four varieties of grapes: small, glistening purple ones, big violet ones, green ones with wild sweetness, and tiny green ones with bitter seeds.

  We just spent three hours opening a bank account. I thought our charmingly chatty banker would never stop talking. As he carried on, I felt more and more American. He even gave us a phone number to call for advice diététique. French women must not be universally thin if they need dietary advice from their bank.

  There is a small hotel across the street from our building, and another to our right. Halfway down the street is an enormous Gothic church called Saint-Eugène–Sainte-Cécile. I gather that Cecilia is the patron saint of music; the conservatory is right next door. Being in the church is like being inside an enameled treasure b
ox that a demented artisan slaved over for years. Every surface—pillars, walls, ceiling—is covered with ornament, most in different patterns. We gaped until we were shooed out, as Mass was going on. I was a bit humiliated about not understanding a word, thinking it was my defective French, but it turned out to be entirely in Latin. We’re going to try the American Catholic church instead.

  In a wild burst of preparation for ninth grade, Luca has just had his lovely Italian curls straightened. Now he looks like a fifteen-year-old French teen, but with an Italian nose.

  Today we joined a Rollerblading event: thousands of hip Parisians zipping over a medieval bridge as the sun shone on the Seine. Until I ricocheted off a stranger and flopped on my bottom. A race organizer told me sweetly that “eet eez too difficile.” That, as they say, was that. We fell into café chairs and watched Paris stream by as we drank Oranginas. Then we rode back, slowly, practicing our braking.

  This morning I saw a chic French woman in the Métro … wearing a beret. How is that possible? I would look unbearably twee, like one of the chipmunks, from Alvin and the Chipmunks doing “Singin’ in the Rain.”

  Anna hates Paris. She hates the move, she hates leaving her friends, she hates her new school, she hates everything. I am the only mother in France dragging a child with her nose in a book down the street, the better not to see anything Parisian.

  Our apartment has a sweeping staircase, and stained-glass windows looking into the courtyard—and a tiny, slow elevator added in the 1960s. My husband and I both fit in only by standing side by side and sucking in our tummies. Sometimes the groceries fit, too. The children have to take the stairs. I generally emerge to find Anna lying on the last few steps, gasping, one hand outflung toward the (locked) door, doing a great imitation of dying-man-in-desert-sees-mirage.