Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  I lived in Paris once before, during a junior year abroad. Back then, I was working as a model, which meant that I reflexively averted my eyes from all sorts of culinary temptations. Instead, I salivated over lingerie stores displaying delicate pleated bras and extravagant silk panties. Now I zip past those stores, only to linger at chocolate shops displaying edible chess sets, or a model of Hogwarts in dark chocolate. It’s nice that life is long enough to give you desires of many kinds.

  This afternoon the doorbell rang, and Alessandro spied our local pharmacist standing down below, in the street. Anna has chronic kidney disease and must take four medications a day, so my instant panic was that there’d been some sort of mix-up. But no. He cheerily said hello, then noted that there was a tiny change in one of her prescriptions, and he wanted to check that we knew (we did). He had hopped across the street just to make sure.

  Alessandro feels that he’s not speaking enough French, because his conversation partner, Florent, spends most of his free time in Italy wooing the elusive waitress. So today he started another such exchange, this one with a woman named Viviane. She is a professor of American culture, which means that I would essentially be a walking research project for her—particularly as she is writing an article on Americans’ use of social networks such as Facebook, and I spend an inordinate amount of time fashioning my updates.

  We took a boat down the Seine today and saw a houseboat with a charming upper deck, which included a grape arbor and lovely potted plants. A gorgeous little dark blue Porsche was parked at the quay.

  The front steps of the bank at the top of rue du Conservatoire are often thronged with beautiful young men in pale pink shirts; French bankers are a miracle to behold. But the building deserves the description as well. Its stone is vermiculated, which means carved in shallow designs that look like the kinds of wiggling trails one sees in a child’s ant farm. The effect is not beautiful close up, but from a distance, vermiculation gives the stone a kind of foggy beauty that eases its grandeur.

  My great-uncle Claude writes that two “classes” of people come to Paris: those to whom the city will never be more than the sum of its parts, and those who grasp “the overpowering, constantly increasing sense of the great city’s personality.” To me, Paris feels like a jumbled-up buffet of earthly delights (lingerie and museums and cheese)—the “parts,” that is—so I gather he would relegate me to that class. My betters (including Claude) discover Paris to be “delicately fanciful and gay,” a persona grasped by those more discriminating sensibilities. Frankly, what I’ve read so far leads me to think that Claude, not Paris, was gay, notwithstanding the historical fact of his marriage, right there in black and white.

  We found ourselves in a stretch of rue Saint-Denis that is the province of middle-aged sex workers, whores whom age has visited but not defeated. They were all accoutred appropriately, with high leather boots, bustiers, and tired eyes. They leaned against doorways on both sides of the street, at polite distances, and chatted desultorily while waiting for clientele who had not succumbed to a lust for youth.

  Yesterday I bought warm gloves in aubergine. Last week I bought sleek shoes in the same color: lace-ups, with Italian toes. I feel like an answer to one of those fashion magazine questions: “Are you spring, summer, fall, or winter?” I guess I’m fall.

  There is a bakery down the street from Anna’s school, on avenue de Villars, where there is always a line. They specialize in little fruit tarts. The most beautiful one has figs sliced so thin as to be translucent, then dusted in sugar. Luca’s favorite looks like a tiny version of the Alps: small strawberries, each one sitting upright and capped in a drop of white chocolate. My personal favorite has sliced apricots arranged in overlapping patterns, like crop circles in an English field.

  Hôtel Drouot is the auction house where many Paris estates end up. You can stroll in and wander rooms filled with everything from fourteenth-century Flemish paintings and tarnished silver plate to groovy 1960s furniture. Today we rifled through boxes of old linens and army medals. I was particularly struck by a portrait of a boy and girl sitting in what seemed to be a 1970s living room. Where are those children now? Do they care that their rather sullen faces are being knocked down in an auction house—and finally sold only after an engraving of Japanese birds is added to the lot?

  Anna and I were waiting on the Métro platform as a train arrived when I caught sight of a skinny, shaggy teen in a Keith Haring sweatshirt through the window. Luca! We managed to dash through the open doors just before they closed. There was my fifteen-year-old, chatting in Italian and looking too cool for words. “Honey!” I caroled out. I had forgotten one of life’s cardinal rules. Teenage males do not care to be greeted by their mothers in front of peers. He turned his head and kept talking. Anna and I sat down.

  I just discovered De Bouche à Oreille (By Word of Mouth), a store in the Marais with a trunk full of miniature globes about the size of your hand. There are ivory-colored, black (marked in white), or creamy blue-green. My impression is that you buy three or four and put them in a bowl, like fruit. They had a glass dome holding nothing but antique porcelain doll heads, antique compasses, and cool clocks embedded in glass balls, hanging from chains.

  Alessandro thinks “our” homeless man is no drunk but a deaf-mute, since he hasn’t said a word in the three months we’ve known him, if one can so label our relationship. We drop change in his hat, hand over cans of dog food, and pet the puppy, and he just smiles a truly sweet smile. To me he has an Eastern European face, rather round and stoic, as if his ancestors spent a lot of time picking potatoes in a chilly wind.

  We have played good, supportive parents as Anna’s teachers have yelled, stood her against the wall, and kicked her into the hallway. We have kept silent when the math teacher slapped a student with a book and made Domitilla shake in her boots. But today Anna came home in tears after the math teacher mocked her division (or her attempts at it). Alessandro is going in tomorrow, armed for bear. He’s generally very calm, but when pressed, he pulls rank—as a professor and a member of the school board, not to mention a knight. That teacher had better Watch Out.

  Anna and I had just entered the men’s department of Galeries Lafayette to meet the male half of our family when Anna said, “Mama! Mama, look at them!” Automatically I began to reply, “Don’t ever point …” when I saw where she was looking and my mouth fell open. Five men were strolling toward us wearing the smallest of tighty-nonwhities. Let me clarify that: five built, gorgeous, model-icious men, wearing only the briefest of briefs. They strolled along, chatting among themselves, advertising (I gather) their itsy-bitsy garments. The male shoppers didn’t seem nearly as entertained as I was. In fact, although the men must have walked next to Alessandro, he claimed not to have noticed.

  Papa Bear (i.e., Alessandro) has returned triumphant from the Leonardo da Vinci School! Promises have been made about guarding Baby Bear’s (i.e., Anna’s) feelings. In return, Papa Bear has promised that said Baby Bear will stop chattering in class, will stop forgetting to bring her homework, and will forbear from announcing (this is a direct quote) “I didn’t learn how to divide in my old school; they don’t teach that in the States.” ’Twas this last that invoked the math teacher’s laughter (described by Anna as mockery), but really, one can hardly blame him.

  GRIEF

  In the grip of a vicious cold, I slunk back to bed after the kids went to school and buried myself in Kate Braestrup’s memoir, Here If You Need Me. She is a chaplain attached to the search-and-rescue department of the Maine Forest Service, and her book starts when she suddenly finds herself a widow with four small children.

  I started crying on cue, until a little further on in that chapter, when her seven-year-old son suggested that his father had already been reincarnated. As a tiger. At that, I laughed aloud, which turned into a pattern: moved to tears, soothed with laughter. Every once in a while I would glance out at the chilly, blue-gray Parisian sky, cuddle deeper into my down quilt, and pl
uck another tissue.

  Alessandro came in to check on me at one point, sympathetic about my cold but very disapproving when he realized my pile of soggy tissues was the result of tears rather than a virus. “I never cry when I read,” he pointed out, with perfect truth. His nighttime reading, a biography of Catherine the Great, seemed unlikely to generate tears, even from one as susceptible to sentimentality as I. His book also didn’t seem like much fun, especially after I inquired about the one thing I knew about Catherine—to wit, her purported erotic encounters with equines—and he informed me that the empress was a misunderstood feminist whose sexual inventory, while copious, was nevertheless conservative. Nothing to cry about there.

  I shooed my husband out of the room and returned to my book and my Kleenex. Braestrup writes of a “hinge moment”—the second when you hear news that changes your life forever. I wept not just for her brave, funny state trooper of a husband, or for the child who drowned in an icy pool, or for the park ranger who curled his arms to demonstrate to Kate how he carried that child from the lake—but for the fear of that hinge moment in my own life, and the pure gratitude and relief of not having experienced it so far.

  While reading, I silently reminded myself that Anna was too old to get lost in the woods, that I was never an outdoors type, that Alessandro hated picnics, that we never let our children out of our sight, and that I was too afraid of Lyme disease to go near a forest. About halfway through I made a mental note to stay away from the state of Maine altogether. Yet from the moment Braestrup describes her husband’s fatal accident, she insists that no matter how well or how carefully or how prudently we love our children or our husbands or our dogs, there are no guarantees, and lives can be wrenched apart by death at any moment. When she writes of grief as a “splintery thing the size of a telephone pole” in your chest, her splinter endangers all the places of your heart.

  Later, Alessandro brought me lunch: salad, a little steak, a chunk of Camembert, a clementine, a slice of almond cake for dessert. We ate in companionable silence, until he tried to wrest the book away. “What’s the good of a book like that?” he wanted to know. “Now you’ll dream about dead people.” I do that anyway. Just a few nights before I had woken in the middle of a sentence that used Mom as punctuation. I stared into the dark for a while, trying to remember what she and I were talking about. Were we chatting about books? Was she sitting beside me, telling me something? Or was I only trying to get her attention, calling her name?

  That’s what Alessandro doesn’t understand. A day spent crying in bed over stories of lost strangers gives you permission to cry for things over which you have no right to grieve: my children are alive and my mother died almost two years ago. Yet I wake thinking of her. I wish I could call her. I will always want her arms around me. I still want to cry for her.

  My sister, Bridget, and her daughters are visiting. Jet lag triumphed and we didn’t make it out of the apartment until six o’clock, when it was already dark and raining. We splashed along to the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum. Anna and her cousins talked so intently about summer camp that they noticed they were in Paris only when a crepe stand came into view.

  Milo has been back to the vet for a follow-up visit. To Marina’s dismay, her Florentine vet labeled Milo obese, even after she protested that “he never eats.” Apparently the vet’s gaze rested thoughtfully on Milo’s seal-like physique, and then he said, “He may be telling you that, but we can all see he’s fibbing.”

  We went to a pharmacy to pick up some vitamin C, and Bridget, paying, confused fifty cents with fifty euros (and, it seems, vitamin C with gold dust); she offered the pharmacist three twenty-euro banknotes. The pharmacist’s eyes widened: “Ooooh, là là!” he cried. I love moments when I feel as if I’m living in a French movie.

  “Our” homeless man is not a deaf-mute, as Alessandro had conjectured. He spoke today, saying “merci” when Anna delivered a hopelessly ugly red squeaky toy for his puppy. Every day he sits to the side of the railing guarding the steps to the Métro, very bundled up and miserable-looking, with his dog in a cardboard box covered by a blanket, and a hat for money in front of the box.

  I consider myself an academic before a romance writer, so I tend to particularly enjoy readers’ letters pointing out errors—especially if the reader is wrong. Often I am castigated for using slang that readers are sure is modern but that is actually historically accurate. A favorite new example of this sort of word comes from Caleb Crain in The New York Times Magazine; he unearthed a letter from Keats, gleefully informing his brothers of the latest slang term for stopping at a tavern: “they call [it] ‘hanging out.’ ”

  Let me be the first to admit it: my Thanksgiving turkey was not all it could be. In fact, in flavor it brought to mind the Sahara desert. It was a strange turkey in the first place, as it came charred from having its feathers burned off, and wrapped in strips of lard. On the bright side, Bridget made fabulous gravy, and Alessandro’s friend Donatella brought a mock pumpkin pie with a shiny orange top. It was in reality a custard tart with a glossy sheen: as if a pumpkin pie had been to Chanel and dressed for the occasion.

  The homeless man is from Bucharest! Alessandro and Anna made conversation with him on the way to school today. He speaks very little French, so Alessandro is going to look up some phrases in Romanian. Apparently, the man said he wants to go home. I would, too. Paris is a chilly, hopeless place if you have nothing to do but sit and wait to be rained on.

  In Notre-Dame: “How many people died making this church?” Anna asked. And then, exasperated by my evasive answers (“lots … no, more than ten”), she stopped below the rose window. “Well, how many died making that? Don’t you even know how many died putting it up there?” I discover, once again, that growing up is synonymous with disillusionment with one’s parents.

  I was fascinated in Notre-Dame by a priest, sitting at a businesslike desk behind a pane of bulletproof glass, offering confessions in either French or Arabic. He resembled nothing so much as a lower-level banker, the kind who should not be trusted to send an international wire.

  It has apparently been cold and rainy in Florence for over a week, which is distressing to Marina. Milo is supposed to take a long walk every day to help him lose weight. But she never takes him outdoors when it rains, as she says he has a delicate constitution and doesn’t digest well if he gets chilled. No one wants to know exactly how she has diagnosed this frailty.

  Florent is back from Italy, and he and Alessandro met again. He is still in love with his beautiful Italian waitress, but he didn’t manage to use any of the romantic phrases Alessandro taught him. He says he thinks she is interested, but he isn’t quite sure, because of the language barrier. So he and Alessandro talked about the fact that Florent is buying land from a swindler who considers him easy prey because he is a foreigner. There is only one standing wall on Florent’s land, but the Italian wants to sell the land as “with house.”

  Varenne Métro station is home to a huge replica of Rodin’s Thinker; at some point a discourteous person knocked a roundish hole in his thigh, revealing that he is entirely hollow. This morning on the way to school Anna and I started discussing the family of mice who undoubtedly live inside. Anna suggested that Mama and Babbo would each sleep in one of the Thinker’s big toes. I pointed out that Mama and Babbo like to sleep together, and she allowed that they could share one big one, while the babies had a small toe each.

  The newest family game: pick on Mom by way of the pack of French language cards that everyone in the family knows except moi. Go on … ask me how to say frog in French. I just learned it. My favorite card is la girafe.

  Bridget and I took the girls off to Versailles, detouring at a photo booth in the Métro. Later Anna discovered to her horror that her beloved blue knit hat was gone, leading to tears and gnashing of teeth. On the way back, the children flew to the booth, but it was empty. Then my niece Nora shrieked. To the side sat a homeless person’s blanket roll, the hat perched
on top. But no homeless person. So … she stole it back!

  The Hall of Mirrors at Versailles is gracious, elegant, and jaw-droppingly beautiful. I drifted down the center dreaming that I was a member of the noblesse ancienne, my imaginary skirts extending three feet to each side. We all had audio tours; over the elegant sound of a British man informing me about architectural details, I heard Anna talking to her cousin Zoe: “I dare you to pick your nose in front of that mirror.… Go on, I dare you!”

  In Versailles, I bought a wonderful cookbook: 100 Recipes from the Time of Louis XIV. Apparently, the court adored oysters and ate them along with both duck and leg of lamb. I am going to try chicken with champagne and the truly unusual cucumber fricassee. Almost every recipe calls for lard—and I can’t imagine where one buys that in the United States.

  This weekend we happened on a brocante, a string of small booths selling odds and ends, everything from chipped lamps to Elvis LPs. Our favorite table was selling twenty-two different kinds of homemade sausages. We bought five kinds, among which were wild boar and pepper-cured duck. Unfortunately I have no idea which is which, but last night I made a fabulous pasta sauce using wild boar or perhaps duck or, as Alessandro suggested, indigenous Parisian rat.

  The homeless man has asked us to adopt his puppy as he wants to return to Bucharest and cannot take him. It’s impossible, alas. We travel too much to own a dog that will soon be the size of an ottoman. Anna is devastated, and won’t speak to either of us. Alessandro just found a friend who knows Romanian and got him to translate “Would you like us to make sure your dog is safe in a pet shelter?” This is not a popular option at home.