Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  The butcher down the street has started flirting with me! It makes me feel as though I’m in a movie. He also gave me a one-euro discount on my sausages. Alessandro’s unromantic assessment is that the butcher is an excellent marketer. Which is true. I am now a customer for life.

  Alessandro was born and grew up in Florence, Italy, with a passion for learning languages (English and Latin in high school, French, German, Russian, and ancient Greek thereafter). When I first met him, he had a charming accent that he shed after having been, as he puts it, seduced into domesticity. He’s now a professor of Italian literature at Rutgers University, and was even knighted by the Italian government for obscure intellectual contributions to the republic. At any rate, Alessandro made up his mind not to squander the opportunity to make his French as good as his English, and to that end he’s put a notice on an Internet bulletin board offering to exchange an hour of French conversation for an hour of Italian. He’s being deluged with responses—most of which seem to be treating his offer as an opportunity for a blind date. My personal favorite is from Danielle (“but some call me Dasha, your choice”), who wrote saying that she had an extra ticket to The Nutcracker, and that they would have a great time speaking French, especially after drinking much champagne.

  This morning the Thai restaurant at the bottom of our street exploded, resulting in clouds of white smoke and a terrible smell of burning rubber. The guardienne came up to the fourth floor to tell us that she thought the owners were doing something nefarious in their basement.

  The woman who works in the Italian grocery down the street turns out to be from Alessandro’s hometown. Once this interesting fact was established, she took charge of his groceries, removing the olive oil (inferior), switching to buffalo mozzarella (fresher than the kind he’d chosen), and slicing Parma prosciutto rather than San Daniele. It occurs to me that the wily Florentine extracted quite a few more euros from Alessandro’s wallet by claiming kinship, but her creamy, delicate mozzarella is worth every penny.

  It’s night, after a day of rain … the windows are open and the strains of a glorious opera pour from the conservatory down the street.

  Like any big city, Paris has homeless citizens. But I’ve never before seen a woman carefully sweeping the doorstep where she, her baby, and her husband sleep. Some homeless Parisians have little pup tents and simply flip them open on the street; many have carefully tended cats and dogs on leashes.

  Mirabile dictu! Anna has found two things she likes in Paris. The first is chocolate, and the second is the rat catcher’s shop, which has four big rats hanging upside down from traps. We detour to gawk at them before grocery shopping.

  Archetypal French scene: two boys playing in the street with baguettes were pretending not that they were swords, as I first assumed, but giant penises.

  Big excitement! We have just entertained a fraudulent chimney sweep, ostensibly sent by the landlord’s insurance company. He set to work, but Alessandro decided to check up on him. It was all a scam to get us to pay for unneeded cleaning. The sweep had to be thrown out, brushes, rods, and all, with much French protesting and yelping, after cleaning two chimneys. It felt very Dickensian.

  Anna has just told me of my demise. She re-created our family in the Sims computer game, and I died after refusing to stop reading in order to eat. “Next time,” she said, “I’ll make you a rock star, and then you won’t mind leaving the house.”

  At home, meat comes encased in plastic, shiny and shrink-wrapped; the very sight of it reminds me that red meat has been tied to cancer. Here every kind of meat looks fresher than the last. The butcher chars the last feathers from a beautifully plump goose as he lays it before you. At first pigeons reminded me of my office window back in New York; now I see tiny, delicious chickens. The “bio”—that is, all-natural—pigeon is particularly enticing.

  A wooden pallet is descending silently past my study window from the floor above, carrying down exquisite furniture: fabulous chairs, a library table, an antique writing desk. This spectacle is terrible for my writing schedule, as I hurtle from my chair every fifteen minutes to ogle.

  The Italian school, Leonardo da Vinci, is graced by a nondescript door, but you can easily tell where you are by the flock of Italian mammas standing on the sidewalk, chattering madly about the difficulties of finding good pasta in Paris. Luca came home from his first day of school with a shell-shocked expression. He’s expected to do “architectural drawing” (whatever that is), Latin-to-Italian translation, and a kind of math he can’t identify. We think it must be advanced geometry.

  The American Catholic Church of Paris turns out to be on avenue Hoche, quite a distance from our apartment. Mass is like a sweet time capsule to my 1970s Lutheran Bible camp: lots of guitars, hand-holding, and singing “It only takes a spark to get a fire going …”

  Between six thirty and seven o’clock in the evening, every other person on the street swings a long baguette partially wrapped in white paper. Suddenly, the world is full of crusty bread.

  We are the sometime owners of an obese Chihuahua named Milo, who traveled regularly between the United States and Italy until one fateful August when Air France declared he was too fat to board their plane. Since then he has lived in Florence with Alessandro’s mother, Marina, whose cooking has had a further ruinous effect on his waistline. Today Marina called to say that stress has given Milo a few more pounds (although the vet unsympathetically suggested the weight gain was the result of an overindulgence in prosciutto). The source of Milo’s stress is hard to pinpoint; among other indulgences, he literally sleeps on a velvet cushion, like an emperor’s cat in a fairy tale. But Marina claims that the mere presence of other dogs on the street (and, by extension, in the world) is very upsetting for him.

  In a mad rush this morning, I didn’t eat, trying to get Anna to school on time. Returning home on the Métro, I struggled out of my coat—only to realize that I was still wearing my pajama top. I stood with blushing ears among elegant commuters for eight stops, too hemmed in to put my coat back on, pretending I wasn’t wearing fuzzy green-and-yellow-stripy flannel.

  At home, both children attended a Quakeresque school that specialized in cozy chats as a form of discipline, but here the instructors shriek at kids and make them stand against the wall. Even worse, after only a few days of class, Luca and Anna have realized that they are at the bottoms of their respective grades. The family is in the grip of a dispiriting feeling that their former, much-beloved school taught them to be very nice, but perhaps wasn’t quite so successful on the academic front.

  Eleven o’clock Sunday morning: a four-piece brass band took over our street corner and played tunes from My Fair Lady. We all crowded to the window, and they blew us kisses and requested money to be thrown. The children took great pleasure in doing precisely that.

  Anna flung the door of the apartment open after school: “Mom! I was attacked today!” “What happened?” I asked. “A girl named Domitilla slapped me!” Anna said, eyes open very wide. “She said I was screaming in her ear.” We chose Anna’s former school in New Jersey with an eye toward just this sort of encounter: they devoted a great deal of time to teaching the students to reject violence, studying Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and practicing conflict resolution. I inquired hopefully how Anna responded to her first real taste of playground aggression. “I slapped her right back,” my daughter explained. “My hand just rose in the air all by itself.”

  I walked into a hair salon yesterday and asked for my customary red highlights; the coiffeur snapped: “Non! For you, gold. Red is not chic.” It’s a good thing that our apartment is fitted with low-wattage, environmentally friendly lightbulbs, because strong light turns me into a marigold.

  Alessandro has been asked to join the board of the Leonardo da Vinci School. He complained pathetically that he was on sabbatical and shouldn’t have to do committee work, but ended up agreeing to do it. Today there was a welcome-to-school meeting, during which the Italian teacher for A
nna’s grade suggested that the class was rather undisciplined, which might make them a challenge to teach. The mother of a classmate stood up and said that her daughter—let’s call her Beatrice—had complained that she was told to stop talking. “You cannot tell my daughter to be still,” Beatrice’s mother scolded. “She will be traumatized by being silenced. I have raised her to freely speak her mind.” I thought this sort of pathological insistence on childhood freedom of speech was an American trait. It’s rather gratifying to realize that I was wrongly maligning my country.

  I have discovered at least one secret of thin French women. We were in a restaurant last night, with a chic family seated at the next table. The bread arrived, and a skinny adolescent girl reached for it. Without missing a beat, maman picked up the basket and stowed it on the bookshelf next to the table. I ate more of my bread in sympathy.

  Alessandro came home from doing the shopping and said, “I was going to buy you flowers because of the argument we had yesterday.” I looked at his empty hands. He shrugged. “There were too many to choose from.”

  THE EIFFEL TOWER

  One October day we picked up Anna and her new friend Erica after school and walked to the Eiffel Tower. The girls ran ahead, zooming here and there like drunk fighter pilots showing off. Alessandro and I tried to imagine why the French ever planned to demolish the tower after the 1889 World Fair. It’s such a beautiful, sturdy accomplishment; destroying it would be like painting over the Mona Lisa because of her long nose.

  Smallish bateaux mouches, or tourist boats, moor in the Seine near the foot of the tower, or so my guidebook said. We wandered beneath the lacework iron, the girls skittering and shrieking like seagulls. Down by the water we paid for the cheaper tickets, the kind that come without crepes and champagne. With twenty minutes to wait, we retreated to an ancient carousel next to the river. A plump woman sat huddled in her little ticket box, shielded from tourists and the rain, although as yet neither had appeared.

  Anna and Erica clambered aboard, but still the operator waited, apparently hoping that two children astride would somehow attract more. The girls sat tensely on their garish horses, their skinny legs a little too long. At ten years old, they’ll soon find themselves too dignified for such childish amusements. But not yet.

  Finally the music started and the horses jerked forward. A crowded merry-go-round on a sunny day is a blur of children’s grins and bouncing bottoms. But as the girls disappeared from view, leaving us to watch riderless horses jolt up and down, I realized that an empty merry-go-round on a cloudy day loses that frantic gaiety, the sense that the horses dash toward some joyful finish line.

  These horses could have been objets trouvés, discovered on a dustheap and pressed into service. The steed behind Anna’s was missing the lower half of his front leg.

  They arched their necks like chargers crossing the Alps on some military crusade, battle-scarred and mournful. Every chip of gold paint dented by a child’s heels stood out, stark and clear.

  With nowhere to go, and nothing better to do, the operator let the girls go around and around. Finally, though, the music slowed, the last few notes falling disjointedly into the air.

  I decided there is nothing more melancholy than a French carousel on a rainy day, and wished we had paid for champagne and crepes.

  On the Métro heading to school, Anna launched into a wicked impersonation of her enraged English teacher stamping her foot: “Shut zee mouths! Zit down! Little cretins!” The entire subway car was laughing, though Anna remained totally unaware of her captive and captivated audience.

  Alessandro brought home a very successful makeup present after the non-flowers: a heart-shaped cheese, sort of a Camembert/Brie, as creamy as butter and twice as delicious. We ate it on crusty bread, with a simple salad of orange peppers, and kiwis for dessert.

  I just came across a list Luca created on a scrap of paper. At the top of the sheet he wrote (in cursive) “The End.” The list is entitled “Several Problems”:

  – Can’t write in cursive script

  – Can’t write in Italian

  – Don’t think I copied the math homework down correctly

  – Screwed up on the Italian writing evaluation

  – Have French essay for Monday

  – Need my books by tomorrow

  I feel terrible. What have we done, bringing him here? I have ulcers just reading the list.

  My sister mentioned before we left for France that a relative on our mother’s side had published a memoir about living in Paris. I’d never heard of Claude C. Washburn, who was one of my grandmother’s brothers and died before I was born. But today the post brought Pages from the Book of Paris, published in 1910. From what I can gather, Claude was born in Duluth, Minnesota, and moved to Europe after getting his undergraduate degree, living in France and Italy. At some point after his year or so in Paris, he married a woman with the unusual name of Ivé. I’m not very far into the book, but so far he has characterized marriage as “an ignominious institution” and boasted of his “increasing exultation” at remaining a bachelor, steering clear of “the matrimonial rocks, that beset one’s early progress, toward the open sea of recognized bachelordom.” Ivé must have scuppered his vessel before he could steer clear of her rocks.

  It started to pour while we were out for dinner, so hard that a white fog hovered above the pavement where the rain was bouncing. We ran all the way home, skittering past Parisians with umbrellas and unprepared tourists using newspapers as cocked hats, the water running down our necks, accompanied by an eight-block-long scream from Anna.

  Today I went to my favorite flirtatious butcher and pointed to some sausages. He coiled up seven feet of them and put them on the scale, saying, “The man who is married to you needs to eat lots of sausages.” One problem with my French is that I require time to think before replying, so I ended up back out on the street with far too many sausages and spent the next hour unsuccessfully trying to come up with French ripostes that I will be able to use in my next life. The one in which I am fluently multilingual, and never at a loss for words.

  Anna had to stand against the wall twice during one class period yesterday. I asked her why, and she told me that she couldn’t remember, and anyway, she wasn’t as bad as the boys. I can’t wait for parent-teacher conferences. “She’s a bad American” keeps running through my head to the tune of “She’s a very pretty girrrrlll …”

  My favorite of Paris’s many bridges is Pont Alexandre III, and my favorite of its many statues is not one of those covered with gold, but rather a laughing boy holding a trident and riding a fish. Although just a child, he’s bigger than I am, his huge toes flying off the fish as he twists in midair. But he’s a boy still, with a guileless smile—caught in a moment when he is big enough to ride the back of a fish but not yet acquainted with the world’s sorrows and deceits. On the far end of Pont Alexandre III, opposite the mer-boy, sits his twin sister. She seems to have just left the water; she holds fronds of seaweed in one hand, and in the other a large seashell to her ear. Her face is intent as she looks into the distance, listening carefully. I imagine that she is listening for the rushing sound of waves, the sound of home.

  Every Peter Pan has his Hook, Harry Potter his Malfoy … Anna’s nemesis is Domitilla, the young lady who slapped her on the playground. Domitilla is a talkative Italian with a propensity for hogging the spotlight (which Anna prefers to reserve for herself). “She is devilish,” Anna told me, very seriously, this morning on the way to school.

  “We’d like white wine,” Alessandro tells our wine seller, Monsieur Juneau. “What are you eating?” M. Juneau inquires. “Fish.” “What kind of fish?” “Halibut with mint and lemon,” I report. “And on the side?” “Potatoes.” “Small or large?” asks Monsieur. (Who knew that mattered?) “Small.” Our menu rolls off his tongue, sounding like the carte du jour at a three-star Michelin restaurant. “The wine for you,” he says, lovingly plucking down a bottle. At home, the fish is disastrous, bu
t the wine, a revelation.

  Luca has caught a virus, and declared pathetically this morning that there was only one thing in the world he could bring himself to eat: Froot Loops. I picked up Anna at school, and we detoured to a small store called the Real McCoy, which caters to homesick American expats. Jackpot! We bought brown sugar, marshmallows, and Froot Loops. Luca ate three bowls.

  Ballerinas fall out of the conservatory on our street, eager for a smoke. They cluster around the steps, hip bones jutting. Today, two of them are resplendent in pink tutus, absentmindedly stretching their hamstrings.

  I worked hard this afternoon on A Kiss at Midnight, my reimagining of Cinderella. My heroine is flat-chested, poor thing, and part of her transformation involves a pair of “bosom friends” made of wax. These accoutrements are thoroughly historical, and great fun to write about. I gave her so many misadventures that I felt very glad to have gone through with reconstruction surgery, so I don’t have to walk around wearing a wax tata.

  Today Alessandro had his first meeting with a Frenchman from the “conversation exchange” website. His name is Florent, and he wants to learn Italian because he bought a plot of land in a tiny village near Lucca, in Tuscany, and he plans to build a house there. But mostly because he is in love with a waitress he met in the village. Apparently she is very, very shy and reserved.