Paris in Love: A Memoir Read online

  On the shabbier end of rue de Cléry: a lace shop with thousands of samples spilling from cabinets lining its narrow walls. Close to the door are laces in persimmon and saffron, embedded with tiny mirrors. Stuffed alongside are spools of black lace sewn with teardrop pearls, copper ruffles, and (presumably) fake ermine trim, garish but gay.

  A full renovation has begun in the apartment above us. In the kitchen we have what’s called in the trade a “coolie lampshade,” shaped like a very broad cone. We’ve just discovered water flowing steadily down the cord and the shade, organizing itself into drops around the edge of the shade, then falling in straight lines like tinsel. Alessandro ran upstairs and returned with the head workman. He walked into the kitchen, took stock of the situation, and said, “Don’t use that light—it might not work.”

  Can there be a crueler fate than the need to diet in Paris? I’m not saying that I regret all that crème fraîche, because I don’t. But unless I buy a whole new wardrobe, I must exercise restraint. I gather French women drink a lot of leek soup (not the creamy kind) when they have to reduce. I simply write down everything I eat. In short: I thin by shame, rather than by leek broth.

  The sky is a cloudless bright blue, and yet somehow little snowflakes are drifting down outside my window. They float sideways, looking fluffy and indecisive, as if they belong in another part of the world and are falling here by accident.

  Anna revealed, five minutes before bedtime, that last week her music teacher had yelled at her until she promised to practice her recorder. “But I forgot,” she said, shrugging. “Now he’s going to yell at me again.” “Where’s the recorder?” I demanded. “You can practice right now!” “Mammma,” she said with a roll of her eyes, “it’s in my boot, at school, where it always is. If I brought it home, I might lose it.” Such impeccable logic.

  My excuse for why my French is terrible is that my head is filled with English words. I like to think about their nuances. Take gay, for example. It’s a shame it’s all but lost its original meaning; to me, it has a kind of tinsel joy, like waltzing on the deck of the QE2, or the feeling of swing music, played at a frantic beat and danced to by soldiers returning to the front.

  Milo still loves Luca—his original owner—dearly, though it has become manifestly clear that Milo is not a boy’s dog, insofar as his favorite activities are eating and sleeping (in that order). Luca made up a song when Milo was a chubby puppy that goes, “Milo, precious Milo, sweet and juicy, tender Milo …” He still croons it, even though Milo is now the size of an adolescent seal. You can’t really hold him in your lap, so Luca lies on the floor, his head on Milo’s stomach, and sings to him during television commercials.

  On the way home from shopping I tried to counter the misery of trudging along with bags of groceries and freezing toes by conjuring up the memory of lying in the moss of a Minnesota forest, with curly-headed ferns bobbing over my head and a sweet, warm smell of growth and black earth around me.

  How I Know I Married the Right Man: Last night we went to the cinema, where we watched the Meryl Streep movie It’s Complicated. We had to sit separated by two people because of an extraordinarily rude woman, who refused to move over a seat. At first I was cross, but as the movie went on I realized that I was listening to Alessandro laugh, quite as if he were a stranger to me. We laughed—hysterically—at all the same moments. Ordinarily I don’t notice, because he’s right at my shoulder, but last night I became aware of how great it is to be married to someone whose sense of humor dovetails so precisely with my own.

  Back in New Jersey, Father Mahoney wore a black cassock over his majestic stomach, occasionally adding a purple chasuble. In contrast, our priest here is Dior on steroids. Today he wore a white surplice with a foot-long border of handmade lace and a deeply scalloped hem. Over it he wore a crimson brocade chasuble, to which had been appliquéd a dark green velvet cross, adorned with twisting patterns of gold embroidery.

  We just came close to a family spat over the question of whether Milo should stay with us in Paris through the spring and be put on yet another diet (which clearly is not going to happen in Italy). Marina said that when we left him in Florence all those years ago, he felt abandoned by us, and that’s why he overeats. She’s the Oprah of dog owners; I’m sure it will surprise no one that Milo is going home with her for further coddling.

  Yesterday I went with a friend to the Musée Jacquemart-André, the home of a nineteenth-century couple who were passionate art collectors. The collection is spectacular; the bath alone was worth the price of entry. My favorite picture was of a dreamy, sensuous young woman by Jean-Honoré Fragonard. A painter stands before her, naughtily drawing her skirt a bit higher with his cane. If you’re planning a trip to Paris, this museum is a must-see—the café is catered by a fabulous patisserie, Stohrer. Nicolas Stohrer worked in Versailles as pastry chef to King Louis XV; he’s famous for creating the beloved baba au rhum (rum cake). Diet suspended for the occasion, I had it, and I think he’d be proud.

  I was riveted in the Métro by an utterly superb trench coat worn by a long-nosed Parisian woman in her forties. It was shiny black, stamped with a snakeskin pattern, and belted at the wrists and the waist, with epaulets and large pockets. She wore it with a lacy white scarf and a busman’s hat, jauntily situated on the side of her head: Emma Peel from The Avengers, with a Gallic flair.

  How to Know You’ve Overdone a Politically Correct Agenda: Anna told me last night, very seriously, that her Italian teacher was racist. Apparently they watched and then discussed Star Wars (the educational value of which was lost on me). “You told me that you should never describe people by their race and then say bad things,” Anna insisted. So what was the teacher discussing? The alien races in the bar scene.

  Le Bon Marché is a department store with a fabulous gourmet grocery section. Imagine a table laden with shallow boxes with fresh, pale brown eggs tumbling out. Surrounding them are egg cartons in Easter egg shades … choose your eggs, choose a pastel-colored carton, make a wonderful omelet!

  I have decided to adopt a French style of dieting, not including the leek soup. It has become clear that French dinner plates are smaller than American ones, and French people eat very small portions, forgoing seconds. Alessandro is complaining, as I order a full meal and leave him to finish a good part of it. I find that eating two spoonfuls of crème brûlée is infinitely preferable to eating none whatsoever.

  Yesterday Anna’s class laughed at her when she made a mistake in two-digit multiplication. And Luca slunk through the door with shadows under his eyes, his math test covered in red. The Italian school is far more difficult—and thereby more traumatic—than their former school in New Jersey. Sometimes I can’t sleep, wondering if we’ve done the right thing coming here. My children inherited my (lack of) math ability, and figures are doubly difficult to calculate while speaking Italian.

  I tend to think of umbrellas as transitory, expendable objects that pass through my hands, to be left broken in trash cans, left behind in restaurants, left in taxis, cars, airplanes. But of course they weren’t always disposable: in the nineteenth century, they were made of silk, ruffled and flirty and intended to shade a lady’s delicate skin—and show off her exquisite taste. At an exhibition of historic early umbrellas, it was clear that lace, perhaps two flouncing levels, was au courant.

  In the window of Le Bon Marché hang enormous gold birdcages. Fake canaries are poised on perches outside the bars. And the cages hold Louis Vuitton handbags. The biggest cage holds a gorgeous dark marine bag, its surface embossed and shiny. A yellow canary sits outside, head cocked to stare at the bag, which is (presumably) too beautiful to fly free and must live in a gilded cage instead.

  Marina said today the first thing she plans to do back in Florence is find a new vet. That nasty vet who told her Milo is obese, she said, is too young and doesn’t understand Milo’s emotional problems. Taking his life in his hands, Alessandro pointed out that the vet was the third and most recent to cast aspersi
ons on Milo’s weight, and that the most important number to keep in mind was not the vets’ years, but the figures displayed on their scales.

  Going out to dinner, Alessandro and I passed four teenage girls sitting together on a heating grate, carefully tapping the ashes from their cigarettes into the grate, managing to look almost grown-up. But their voices betrayed them, spiraling high into the air with their cigarette smoke, as if those Bon Marché canaries were singing in the cold.

  Last night Alessandro and I walked to the cinema. On the way home we passed a man tap-dancing, Duke Ellington pouring from his CD player. He had a hat and long, skinny legs; his feet clicked the pavement of boulevard Poissonnière so quickly that it was as if a spider were dancing in little tap shoes.

  I have fallen in love with the shiny tiled walls of the Métro. Most stations have their own distinctive styles, dating back to the original construction, from the look of it. In Madeleine, a line of pearly aqua tiles are sculpted in bas-relief, creating a stylized wave that runs along the passageway. The wave morphs into a complicated “NS” pattern, those initials standing for the Nord-Sud line, as it was labeled in 1900. The Cité station has four-petaled flowers in glossy bottle green. The Concorde station was renovated about twenty years ago, and the huge vault over the tunnel for Line 12 is completely covered with white tiles, each bearing one black letter. It reminds me of when my children, as toddlers, used to jumble up refrigerator magnets in the form of letters. I would crow with exaggerated delight if cat was achieved; these tiles, however, are entirely more august: they spell out excerpts from the Declaration of the Rights of Man, from the French Revolution.

  I asked if Alessandro would pick up some of the spectacular chocolate mousse made by a patisserie on nearby rue Richer. His response: “I thought you were on a diet.” These seven words rank among the more imprudent things he has said to me in the long years of our marriage.

  Yesterday, to Anna’s delight, Domitilla was unceremoniously tossed out of class and told to wait on a bench until school was over (a few minutes). Alas, today Anna was bounced out of math class to the same bench. I pointed out that perhaps she and Domitilla were more alike than Anna might want to believe. “So, why were you kicked out of class?” I asked. “Rambunctiousness,” Anna answered morosely. “That teacher doesn’t understand my sense of humor.”

  Today I sat at a café and read Claude comparing life in Florence to that in Paris. As he saw it, living in Florence makes a person become witty (“most people do, I believe”). I feel doubtful, given clear evidence to the contrary from my Florentine in-laws. In Paris, Claude writes, one “lives life too fast, like a mouse under oxygen,” and is likely to die at thirty. My sister, the font of all genealogical knowledge, tells me that Claude was born in 1884, which means that he was twenty-four or twenty-five when he lived here, and that he lived only to forty-two. Perhaps it was all that Parisian oxygen.

  Alessandro just came back from his conversation exchange: Florent is devastated. He logged on to Facebook and discovered that the object of his adoration, the waitress in Italy, had changed her status. She’s “in a relationship”! Florent says, dolefully, that she made a point of not telling him in person, and that he is very hurt by her indirect methods. I think that, given his scanty Italian and her nonexistent French, she may never have figured out his passion, let alone his honorable intentions. After all, he didn’t employ the romantic phrases that Alessandro taught him.

  Paris (and our apartment) is so dark and quiet this morning that I feel as if I’m entirely alone. The sky is the color of gray flannel, the darkness broken only by the dormer window of another early riser. The woman who lives in that attic painted her walls yellow, and reflected light bounces out like a spring crocus. If light were sound, her window would be playing a concerto.

  Today we walked by a store window revealing a room full of unclothed mannequins with (as Anna pointed out) nipples, not to mention very idealized figures. They stood around in groups chatting, and demonstrating how they could raise an arm, or twist to the side. Only one mannequin was dressed in a short black cocktail frock and a wig of tumbling curls. She was seated, legs crossed at a rakish angle, and somehow her sartorial, bewigged splendor made the others look fifty times more naked—and erotic.

  We started out this year the way any modern American family would: with multiple cellphones. But I inadvertently left mine on a table in London months ago, and I haven’t replaced it. Life without a phone is riskier, lonelier, more vivid. My family doesn’t understand. “What if I have to talk to you?” Anna wails. “We already paid for the contract,” Alessandro scolds. I remain obstinately disconnected.

  I happened across a protest march organized by the unions that was unlike any I’d ever seen in the United States. The protesters ambled along in little groups, sipping their coffee. There was no equivalent to the “One, two, three” chanting Americans use to stay pumped up. Every fourth or fifth car played music, so in the time I walked along, going the other direction, I heard rock, rap, and finally (from a hospital’s association) Handel.

  I am trying to teach Anna not to engage with the very pretty, and very pestilent, “Queen Bee” in her classroom. (The girl I have called Beatrice.) Anna tends to fight back, which makes things worse. This morning I asked her if Domitilla was one of the queen’s courtiers. It turns out that Domitilla is not a “cool girl,” and that those little wasps actually push her around, quite literally. To Anna’s horror, I announced that we are having Domitilla over for a playdate.

  My favorite statue in Paris is an allegorical grouping, Boisseau’s La Défense du Foyer, in the Esplanade des Invalides. Alessandro tells me that a foyer is a hearth, which explains why Monsieur stands bold and tall, ready to slay dragons, while his wife and child huddle behind him. He has a very nice physique—and he’s naked save for an animal-skin loincloth furnished with a suggestively placed paw. To an American eye he looks like an early explorer, especially given his single moccasin, with the important distinction that he has maintained—and trimmed—his luxuriant French mustache.

  Anna and I are both down with sore throats—something I blame on the fact that we shivered through two freezing days before the furnace was finally fixed yesterday. She is snuggled next to me, occasionally reading aloud from a Harry Potter book (Anna sees reading as a communal activity). “ ‘The afternoon sun hung low in the sky,’ ” she reads, and then tells me, “I like that, because the sun doesn’t really hang from anything, and so it’s cool.” Thank you, J. K. Rowling, for teaching at least one eleven-year-old the joys of figurative language!

  We had a playdate yesterday afternoon with Anna’s archrival, Domitilla. Ever since Domitilla succumbed to passion and slapped Anna at the beginning of the year, Anna has considered her persona non grata. But lo and behold, the two played happily for hours. “She likes me,” Anna reported afterward. “I’m thinking about liking her back.”

  Luca’s New Year’s resolution was to pass ninth grade. Translating arcane verb forms from Latin into Italian (which he speaks fluently but conjugates with difficulty); creating detailed architectural drawings; going to one-man plays in French … this year is stretching him in ways that he never imagined. He would be the first to tell you that he didn’t need any such stretching. But today he aced exams on classical theater and math!

  Over the years of raising children I was forced to give up baths for rushed showers, unable even to pee without someone outside the door, wailing. These days, as soon as Anna is in bed, I seek refuge in steaming water. The pages of paperback romances, along with my fingers and toes, wrinkle the way they used to when I was fifteen; my body feels strong, buoyant, unscarred.

  This morning Anna and I walked down our narrow little street in the near dark on our way to school. Suddenly a huge flock of starlings swooped down low, flying over our heads between the building to our right and the conservatory to our left, their wings black against the pearly sky. Just before rue du Conservatoire dead-ends in a row of tall buildings o
n rue Richer, they all turned around and flew back, close enough that we heard the whir of their wings, as if angels swooped down to visit two blocks of a Paris street.

  Anna came home from school teary. She was yelled at in French class for misplacing her homework, in Italian class for secretly reading Harry Potter, in math class for flubbing her exercises, and was kept in at recess for berating a boy who wrote her name on the board (it’s unclear why he felt moved to do so). “There was one good class,” she said, sniffling. “In English, I was the only one who spelled ‘The orange bag is in the bedroom’ correctly.” Forgive me if I don’t get too excited.

  Anna had a sleepover guest last night, her friend Nicole. They played Monopoly until Nicole said (in French), “Told you I was great!” and Anna answered (in English), “Let’s jump on my bed!” This morning I made pancakes, which Nicole promptly rolled up like crepes; Anna followed suit. I am dazzled by the novelty of my daughter’s life, but she is not. “When are we going home?” she just asked. “You said a year, and we’ve been here two years already, easy.”

  Alessandro and I walked to our covered market today and discovered that the very first narcissus of the year are for sale. They’re sweet-scented, pale yellow with bright orange centers, and smell indisputably of spring. We bought some, and when we walked outside, snow was falling. My spring flowers arrived home dusted with a bit of winter.