Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  I cooked duck breasts for dinner, first marinating them in red wine and garlic, and then pan-searing them with a pear and Grand Marnier sauce. Afterward Luca, who pours ketchup on everything from French fries to escargots, waved his unopened ketchup bottle in the air and announced: “Do you know what this means, Mom?” Yes, I do. It means that somewhere, in some remote part of the world, a pig just levitated gracefully and flew around his pen, that’s what.

  A row of elegantly narrow dormer windows sprouts from the building opposite my study. Sometimes a gaunt woman with beautiful cheekbones and sleek black hair pushes open her window and leans out, smoking and flicking the ashes onto the slate. Today she wears a red dress and looks as if she belongs in an eighteenth-century novel, the kind in which heroines come to a bad end.

  It was New Year’s Eve last night, so the family drank champagne and ate oysters on the half shell. Alessandro’s mother tolerated the champagne, although she said the Italian version, prosecco, is better for one’s digestion. The oysters had been harvested that morning, and still had the faintest tang of the sea, like the memory of a briny swim in childhood. At midnight the Eiffel Tower burst into a shower of sparks, and 2010 slipped in the door.

  At one end of our street is an excellent kosher restaurant, Les Ailes. The first time we ate lunch there, in the fall, we were fascinated by a middle-aged couple, who we quickly decided were lovers married to other people. They leaned close, eating with an air of heat and excitement. Over time, and subsequent lunches, we have concluded that Les Ailes is a playground for adulterous frolics; we can always find a couple in the room who qualify. But yesterday, escaping from our houseful of relatives, I realized that Alessandro and I probably looked like adulterous lovers, giddy with freedom and delighted by food we hadn’t cooked.

  In France the Boy and Girl Scouts are organized by parish. This morning both troops sat just in front of us in church, wearing little berets with blue crosses and long shorts, although the winter air has a snap to it. Our neighborhood is very multicultural, but these scouts looked like a French advertisement from the 1940s: Caucasian, neatly kempt and behaved, wearing their red scarves and berets with unconscious but distinct flair. The retro vibe of these homogeneous scouts is not entirely attractive.

  After careful inspection, Marina decided this morning that Milo has gained weight since arriving in Paris. This caused a crisis, exacerbated when Anna confessed that Milo had just snatched and eaten a chocolate cellphone. Contrary to everything we had heard about chocolate’s toxicity to dogs, Milo remains hale and hearty, not to mention hungry. He has indeed gained a Parisian pound and will be allowed no more holiday prosciutto.

  In the window of Emanuel Ungaro, a mannequin stands with her back to us, gesturing toward an invisible companion. She wears reckless hot pink, a long swath of silk that leaves most of her back bare. Rather than overtly selling the gown, the display subtly reminds us that we stand in the dark with chilly noses and snowy feet, and somewhere … where she lives … the very air breathes luxury.

  Anna in the bath, arguing over her bedtime. “Why,” she wants to know, “can Luca stay up until ten o’clock and I can’t?” “Because he’s fifteen,” say I, “and when he was eleven, he had to go to bed at eight o’clock, too.” “How do you know?” she demands. “Because I’m the mother of both of you!” “You might not be,” she points out. “You might be only a mother in disguise.”

  Paris is so cold that I keep going into the kitchen and opening up the little furnace, as much to encourage the poor creature as to warm my hands. On the Métro this morning, I noticed that women are adapting by adding an extra scarf. One woman wore silk embroidered in small flowers next to her face, and a ruby cable-knit scarf, almost a shawl, wrapped around her shoulders.

  Anna owns a hotly prized possession: a tiny pink eraser in the shape of a hamster, given to her by cousins in Michigan. “So you see,” Anna explained, “everyone loves it because Paris doesn’t have anything like this.” Oh, those deprived Parisians. Apparently of all the kids, Domitilla loves it most. “She said, ‘I love it, I love it, I adore it, please can I play with it?’ ” Anna reported. “And?” I prompted, hopefully. Anna gave me a scornful look.

  Last night we had a dinner party and invited Alessandro’s conversation partner Florent, so I finally got to meet him. He is absolutely lovely—tall, lean, very handsome, and very, very French. He has brown hair and beautiful green eyes. What’s more, he teaches language and literature to middle school students and actually likes adolescents. I think he is perfect and could match him with any number of single friends at home. But Alessandro says that his heart belongs to the Italian waitress.

  Given my New Year’s resolution, which was to acquire a Parisian level of elegance pretty darn quick, I thought it behooved me to go shopping. Today is the start of biannual sales in shops throughout Paris. The French government allows only two sale events a year, regulating markdowns in department stores as well as in, for example, the fashionable (and expensive) shops on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré. Have you seen the Filene’s Basement wedding-dress event on television? Add the security guards from Walmart’s “Black Friday” sales, keeping back the hordes so that innocent salespeople aren’t literally trampled to death. I aged five years in Galeries Lafayette, so I’m not sure my new black boots will get much use.

  On the way to the Marché Saint-Quentin, we pass a small shop with crates of different oyster varieties arranged in the window. Three gnarled gentlemen stand behind a counter; they wear heavy gloves and crack open oysters. It takes surprising physical strength: they wrench the wrinkled, defensive shells open and flip them onto platters, joking among themselves the whole time.

  We must return the chic little raincoat that cannot be fastened around Milo’s rotund middle, but meanwhile Anna has been playing with it. She has it bunched over her head and belted under her chin. She says it’s a welding helmet and that she’s “Anna, Secret Agent Man.” I asked her what the Secret Agent Man was doing, and she said she was “seeking out the awesomeness”: that is to say, trying to break into Luca’s bedroom, strictly off-limits to younger sisters.

  For Christmas, my stepmother sent Anna a gorgeous hat: hand-knitted in Minnesota, of nubbly purple wool trimmed with wooden beads. On top is a small tassel with a bead at the end. It’s an adorable creation that reminds me of hats worn by Norwegian elves in children’s picture books. I find it very moving, and a bit homesick-making, to look down in a crowded Métro station and see this scrap of Minnesota handiwork bobbing its way through Paris.

  We took Milo with us to the fancy dog apparel store in order to guarantee a coat that fit. Alas, we had to take an aesthetic step down from purple trim: the sole coat that fits our obese dog is camouflage green, seemingly designed for a dog being kitted out for a paramilitary operation. Marina was greatly taken by bright pink dog booties. Milo doesn’t care for his new jacket, and I hate to think about his reaction to those boots.

  Luca has started twice-a-week night classes in French. Because he is bilingual, he has a beautiful accent, but he is still far behind the rest of the ninth-grade class, most of whom have at least one French parent. “What are the other students like?” we asked at dinner. “Older,” he said, with a mischievous grin, and then refused to say anything other than to observe that their lives were more interesting than his.

  Yesterday I ventured back into the Great Sales. I found myself in a dressing room next to a teenager cheerfully driving her mother crazy by trying on sexy clothing. “Oh, là là!” Maman cried; from her description the skirt was as high as her daughter’s armpit. The next outfit wasn’t much better. “Oh, là là!” Maman exclaimed. “Oooh, là là!” For my teenager’s part, Luca slouched off to school today with hair like a toilet brush; it’s so nice to know that teenagers are the same the world over. OOOH, LÀ LÀ, indeed.

  The huge lingerie department at Le Bon Marché was crowded with tables of markdowns, women ruffling through them as intently as if they were looking in
a box of old photographs for their first love. I discovered that French women wear undies of pink pleated satin, fanciful white lace, and translucent pearly silk, but they don’t wear cotton. I left empty-handed, unable to give up my Jockeys for Her for these delectable hand-wash-only confections. Still, I find myself thinking about the bras … perhaps it is time to turn my back on cotton.

  Paris is triggering one of the friction points in my marriage. Our apartment was built in the 1700s, and the windows are original. Brrr. Alessandro turns the heat down; I hike it back up. He says the heating bill will impoverish us, but I insist on being warm. We have been having this battle for sixteen years. Hopefully, we will have it for many years to come.

  Milo is a dog with an undiscriminating palate; today he shredded—and then ingested—a plastic baby bottle belonging to a purring stuffed bear. Anna has been flinging herself around the apartment, melodramatically announcing that now her baby will staaarve.

  Luca told me he didn’t want to do his homework “because there is no point because in 2012 we will all be blown into dust,” and he will have wasted his time in school. I asked where he learned this crucial and terrifying information, and he admitted “crazy people on the Web. But,” he added, “crazy people are often right.” Cruelly, I continue to ruin his brief time on earth by insisting he study the Romans.

  Yesterday our priest’s solo singing during the Mass wavered up and down; a bit later he suddenly dropped a sentence about the importance of baptism, said he felt ill, and walked out. In the United States, the congregation would have instantly started chattering to each other. But the French are utterly composed; the whole church waited silently, and five minutes later another priest dashed in, announced that all was well, and smoothly took up the sermon on baptism.

  VERTIGO

  This morning the snow was coming down fast in rue du Conservatoire, slanting sideways and turning the gray slate roofs the color of milk. I leaned against my study window, idly thinking about how passionately children love snow, when I realized that I was peering down at a group of Parisian women in the street below, engaged in the rapid-fire kissing of a wintry hello. Growing up on the farm, we’d braved snowstorms in puffy coats (preferably lurid orange, the better to avoid being targeted by a hunter who’d killed a six-pack rather than an animal); these women wore dark coats belted tightly around their slim waists. As they bent toward each other, pecking like manic sparrows, their scarves flashed magenta, lavender, dull gold. From my vantage point, far above them, they looked like inhabitants of a different world, as dissimilar to me as a gaggle of peacocks to a turkey.

  One year, when we had even less money than usual, my mother took down the dining room curtains, which were printed with fifteenth-century sailing ships, and made back-to-school dresses for my sister and me. Even though the politically correct contingent wouldn’t turn Christopher Columbus from saint to devil for another twenty years, I was an early adherent of the Loathe-the-Conquistador club, thanks to being forced to wear the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa María all that year, snow or shine.

  The Parisiennes in my street had never worn dining room curtains. You could just tell. The moment I allowed that certainty to sink into my mind, unfortunate scenes from my high school years lit up in my memory like a horrible TV show from the seventies. My prom party was held in a gravel pit, though I don’t remember the party nearly as vividly as I do the dress I wore—sadly, I find this to be true of many occasions. I had earned the money for it waitressing at DeToy’s Supper Club. The manager made us wear polyester dirndl skirts and white blouses that pulled down over our shoulders; we looked like von Trapp wannabes. I took my waitressing money and bought a prom dress in the precise shade of pink that would most clash with my hair. My date brought me a bouquet of nearly dead roses. I had to cradle them in the crook of my elbow, but their heads kept slipping off my arm like a drunken woman being carried to bed.

  Over the years I’ve tried to explain to Alessandro what growing up on a farm in the upper Midwest, outside a town of 2,242 people, was like. He’s never quite been able to grasp it. He grew up in Florence, Italy, and his experience in, and with, America is largely limited to the East Coast. Furthermore, he has an annoying way of trying to top my stories. If I describe the trauma of circling the gym in a salmon-colored dress to the dulcet strains of “Stairway to Heaven,” he’ll counter with a tale about a family trip to Switzerland.

  Thus, when I received an invitation to my twenty-five-year high school reunion a few years ago, it seemed the perfect moment to introduce him to my past. We arrived in Madison to find that its population had shrunk by more than half. There was one pickup truck halfway up Main Street and—I kid you not—a tumbleweed rolling toward us. I peered at Alessandro to make sure he registered the symbolism, but his face was lit up, reveling in the possibility that gunslingers might leap out from behind the Shear Salon, à la spaghetti westerns that he’d grown up with.

  The reunion itself was held in the VFW lounge, which was in a basement. I told myself that it was all going to be different. I was a professor now, not to mention a New York Times bestselling writer. I could hold my head high; my failure to make the cheer-leading team was far behind me. But alas: the painful glaze of humiliation that plagued me in high school rushed back the moment I saw the same clusters of people, still talking together, two and a half decades later. Though, of course, the subjects of those conversations had changed. “She fired that shotgun right through the ceiling,” one of my classmates whispered. “She was hoping to hit that worthless husband of hers—he was carrying on an affair right in her bed—but instead she shot the sheriff. Got him right in the foot.” I was opening my mouth to ask what the sheriff was doing in the assailant’s bedroom, but she had already moved on. “You did hear about Lindsey-Ray, didn’t you?” I shook my head. “She moved in with seven or eight gay men down in Minneapolis,” she said, “and then got pregnant. Kind of a miracle birth, doncha think?” The drinks had turned out to be vodka with a splash of juice, and Alessandro grew very cheerful, periodically circling back to me to report on his conversations like a slightly drunk Garrison Keillor. “Did you talk to that woman who already has six grandchildren? Amazing!” He shook his head in disbelief. We had barely recovered from toilet training, so he hadn’t noticed that procreation can start early.

  After what felt like yet another four-year ordeal, the evening’s program got under way. A class member who now happened to be the mayor of Madison started awarding prizes. I honestly can’t remember why I won a prize; as with the prom, a sartorial detail eclipsed the main event. When I walked to the front of the room, I was presented with a huge, dingy pair of men’s boxer shorts, stapled to two slats of wood, with a rope slung on the top. A “Norwegian handbag,” the mayor called it. I carried this object back to our table, trying to smile like a good sport.

  Finally, finally, finally, I saw on Alessandro’s face the expression that should have been there all along: pure horror. “Did they give that to you because you write romance?” he whispered. I had no idea. In fact, I can’t even remember what came next. Maybe the whole room went home with Norwegian handbags; maybe the reunion committee had stayed up all night staple-gunning their grandfathers’ undershorts to bits of wood. Back in the day, I had known instinctively that I was never going to fit in—and I’d blamed my mother and those dining-room-curtain frocks. But in light of my Norwegian handbag, I am inclined to forgive her.

  She wanted us to be ladies, to leave Madison, and to raise our children in a place where no one had heard of a Norwegian handbag. These days, I own a magenta scarf and high-heeled black boots. I live on the other side of the ocean from Minnesota. I survived the year of wearing the dining room curtain, and lived to tell the tale.

  The women below my study window had stopped pecking at each other and had gone their separate ways. And the snow was still falling, in that directed, intense way that snow falls in Minnesota and, apparently, in Paris as well.

  Too much chocolate an
d crusty bread.… I have determined that I should walk up the stairs to our apartment on the fourth floor once a day. With only one apartment per floor, this sort of invasion is new to the little dog who lives below us. He starts growling when my foot touches the first stair; he’s barking by the second level; he’s a lunatic by the third. As I open my door, I’m panting heavily, and I imagine that he is too, exhausted by the demented Paul Revere act that no one hears but the two of us.

  Snow on the dark gray tiles opposite my study window looks like white fur clinging to the roof, as if the house were growing a protective coat against the freezing air. But I am learning Paris now: by afternoon a chilly sun will emerge. The snow-fur will molt, and water will rush into drains under the street.

  Putting away groceries as I snapped out domestic commands, I dislodged the ice tray, and ice cubes skittered all over the floor. Alessandro bent to pick them up, but a glitch in the space-time continuum intervened and he was thrown back to age nine. I found myself trying to fight off an impudent boy sticking ice down my neck.

  This morning I walked down rue de Cléry, where little storefronts hold nothing but rolls of fabric, built into log-cabin-type castles. As I walked on, the stores grew more stylish, and the fabric changed from bright polyesters to creamy linens and exquisite silks. No longer piled up like logs, these rolls stand on their ends, a drape of upholstery fabric pulled to the side to display fiery red flowers, next to a roll of dusky heather tweed fit for a Scottish lord striding the moors.