Paris in Love: A Memoir, Page 3

We woke this morning to a sheet of rain pouring into the street, with the kind of concentrated intensity that made me think, drowsily, that our bedroom could be behind a waterfall: a dim and cool cave, our big windows a pane of moving water.

  Today Anna was kicked out of her math class and sent to the hallway to “think about herself.” I asked her what she thought about. In lieu of self-examination, she planned a new Sims family, but admitted that she was afraid I would kill her before she got to make it.

  A concerned friend has just written from England to inform me that her son’s economics reading included the fact that 650 Parisians are hospitalized every year due to dog-poo-related accidents. After living here for almost two months, I am not surprised by this datum. The good news is that we are not (yet) among the fallen.

  I walked home at dusk, and everyone I passed was munching a baguette. The pavement looked as if hundreds of lost children had scattered crumbs so they could find their way home again.

  Anna’s archrival, Domitilla, just returned from her grandmother’s funeral in Italy. Apparently Domitilla glanced above the coffin and saw Jesus suspended in the air. Anna’s comment: “I was pretty surprised to hear that.” But another classmate, Vincenzo, chimed in and said that he knew about a boy with no legs at all who went to church and prayed, and after seeing a white-bearded man in the air, got up and walked. “So that was better than just seeing Jesus,” Anna pointed out.

  My publisher is in town on her way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and she took me to lunch at Brasserie Lipp, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre used to lunch every day. I had a dark, delicious fish soup and too much wine; we talked about food writing and life before children.

  People kiss all the time here: romantically, sadly, sweetly, passionately; in greeting and farewell. They kiss on the banks of the Seine, under bridges, on street corners, in the Métro. I hadn’t realized that Anna had noticed until yesterday, when I suggested perhaps a single-mother situation in her classroom could be explained by divorce. Anna didn’t agree. “They don’t get divorced over here,” she reported. “It’s ’cause they kiss so much.”

  Very early in the morning, the only light comes from tightly closed bakeries. Chairs are upside down on top of the tables, but the smell of baking bread feels like a welcome.

  CHASTISED BY DIOR

  I attended Madison Public Elementary School wearing only dresses. No matter how deep the snow, my sister and I stripped off our snow pants in the school hallway to reveal wool tights. In our mother’s eyes, we were young ladies, and ladies wore dresses, along with white gloves to church, hats on Easter, and long flannel nightgowns to bed.

  She generally sewed those dresses from Simplicity patterns, whose packets featured illustrations of hyperattenuated girls with freakishly long legs. Those pattern packets would float around the house, the jaunty hip-hugging belt in matching plaid never looking quite as good in my mother’s rendition. By the time I was ten years old, I was prone to fits of deep sartorial lust. Even all these years later, I can still remember certain articles of clothing that I longed for in 1974. My classmate Rachel Larson has undoubtedly forgotten the matching jacket and jeans she wore to the first day of school in fourth grade.

  I have not.

  It wasn’t until my entrance into middle school that I was allowed to buy exotic contraband—trousers, in the form of a pair of burnt orange bell-bottom corduroys. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s occurred to me recently that I’m close to fifty and I’m still wearing a version of those bell-bottoms.

  When I’m teaching, I wear a female approximation of men’s business clothing, down to the lace-up shoes. Without an audience to consider, though, I sacrifice fashion for warmth, pulling on fur-lined clogs, my cords, silk camisoles edged with lace that peeks from the neck of whatever large sweater I’m wearing. I formed this pattern in my twenties, when a provocative flash of lace was, well, provocative. It doesn’t feel sensual or remotely fashionable these days, but I live with it.

  Most of the fourth grade of the Leonardo da Vinci School takes communion class together, at a church in the most chic shopping area of Paris. One day in September I left Anna to her spiritual pursuits and began my own, wandering down avenue Montaigne, past the windows of Dior, Fendi, Lacroix, and Gaultier.

  The windows of Dior were particularly entrancing. I actually turned back, retracing my steps to look once more at a dress of grave violet silk with a knife-edge pleated skirt and wide looped trim of the same color around the neck. The mannequin came alive in my imagination. I could picture a sleek and gorgeous woman drifting into a drawing room—although she then regarded reproachfully my scuffed shoes and the smudged cuff of my white shirt.

  Glancing down, I discovered I was wearing one of Alessandro’s countless black sweaters, so bulky that I had a pregnancy-like bulge in the front. I hastily buttoned up my coat. My shoes were the menswear type, comfortable for long walks. I was wearing bell-bottom cords, and I wasn’t entirely sure I had put on any makeup.

  On the way back to the church, I realized that the streets were crowded with Parisian women in their forties and fifties who would no more think of allowing lacy trim to show under a man’s sweater than they would contemplate renting Flashdance. They tapped briskly past me in their high-heeled black boots, scarves tied with exquisite finesse, coats snugly hugging their bodies.

  Just like that, all the frustrated lust I felt for Rachel Larson’s jaunty pantsuit flooded back. The elegance of that Dior mannequin, her effortless insouciance, the turn of her plastic chin and the twist of her plastic wrist, made her haute couture seem just as tantalizingly unavailable.

  It has taken most of October, loitering on avenue Montaigne during Anna’s weekly hour of spiritual education to gaze at mannequins in designer silks, but I’ve come up with a New Year’s resolution: I want to know what elegance looks like at age fifty, a milestone that looms just a few years away.

  I refuse to find myself in my second half century still wearing my furry shoes and Alessandro’s sweaters. I intend to learn precisely what these French women buy and, perhaps just as important, how they manage to look so commandingly elegant after attaining “un certain âge.” It is truly a pity that my mother is no longer alive.

  I’ve finally decided to dress like a lady.

  Yesterday Anna announced that she and her babysitter saw an “angry mob storming the street.” I made a mental note that Alessandro should cut back on the nightly Dickens readings, but then I read about the strike: apparently, to protest grain prices, farmers threw hay bales into the Champs-Élysées—and set them on fire. This does suggest a certain level of malcontent.

  I walk through the streets and enjoy listening to wild chatter in French with the same level of understanding that one has hearing a row of sparrows crowded on a telephone line. Are these people really talking, or are they just singing to each other? They look far too elegant and sophisticated to be uttering the half-assed things people say to each other in New York.

  French chickens come with heads and feet still attached … my butcher cradles the bird like a baby, then waggles its head toward Anna, turning the bird into a clucking version of Jaws.

  Paris is enlarging my waistline, and thus I’ve made the decision that I have to jog. Wanting to make sure I was properly kitted out before this event, I took a few weeks to acquire an iPod, a pair of running shoes, a hat, and a sweatshirt. This morning, out of excuses, I forced myself into the crisp autumn air as Leonard Cohen crooned through my earphones about goodbyes. Seven entire minutes of virtue! My ambitions are not huge.

  By happenstance, Alessandro encountered Luca’s architectural drawing teacher today and inquired how the class was going. Not well. Apparently Luca hasn’t turned in a shred of homework since the semester began. “He’s such a nice boy,” she told Alessandro. “I know he sees the other children hand in their homework, but he never does so himself.” This evening Luca said, quite reasonably, that since he had no idea how to do an architectural drawing, he
didn’t try. He was less successful at explaining why he hadn’t mentioned this salient fact to us.

  Last night I asked Alessandro if he ever lies in bed and thinks about chocolate—say, about the way dark chocolate feels in your mouth, or how different it is when spiked with orange peel. He said no. Then he said that the only time he thinks about food in bed is when he wakes up in the middle of the night and wants steak. Somewhere in that clash lies a profound truth about the difference between the sexes.

  Today I met Anna after school and she reported that it was a “great day.” “Wow,” I said, “what happened?” “I didn’t get yelled at,” she said proudly. And then, “Well, maybe in one class.” She is wire-thin, with flyaway blond hair and a single dimple. She doesn’t look like someone who has intimate knowledge of principals’ offices on two continents.

  I walked through the twilight to Galeries Lafayette, surely one of the most glamorous department stores in the world. Far above the cosmetics counters on the grand main floor, a domed stained-glass ceiling shimmers like an enormous kaleidoscope. Instead of a counter, the skin-care company La Mer has a nine-foot-long sinuous aquarium. Dolce & Gabbana has its own little salon, with chandeliers made of black glass blown into elegant, slightly sinister, shapes.

  Quelle horreur! The guardienne came to clean and noticed that our glassware was smeared, which has been driving me crazy. The box of dishwashing powder that we’d been using? Salt! It looked like dishwashing powder, it was under the sink, and I never bothered to puzzle out the label. We have been running the dishwasher with salt alone for two months.

  Last night we trotted out to our local Thai “gastronomique” restaurant, which means it’s a trifle more fancy than average and serves mango cocktails. A man and his son came in, trailed by a very old, lame golden retriever. The dog felt like lying down, legs straight out, in the middle of the aisle running down the restaurant—on a Friday night. The waiter and all customers patiently stepped over and around him, over and over and over … Bravo, France!

  It’s raining. Our neighborhood homeless man hasn’t moved from where he sits on the sidewalk, next to the Métro stop, but he cocked one big umbrella over himself, a smaller one over his dog, and a third over his belongings. The umbrellas look like wildly colorful mushrooms sprouting from the pavement. From down the street, they seem to bloom, low and colorful against the gray buildings.

  Alessandro and Luca sat down at the dining room table after school and wrestled with Luca’s architectural drawing homework. After what seemed to be a great deal of exertion, they brandished a complicated looking plan, replete with circles and arrows and lines in all directions. “How on earth did you do it?” I asked. “We mostly copied it from the book,” Alessandro admitted. I practiced wifely virtue and didn’t say anything about professorial views of plagiarism.

  One of Alessandro’s friends from college, Donatella, is attached to the Italian Cultural Institute here. It’s her birthday, so we’re going to dinner at Ladurée, a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées that was founded in the 1800s. They are famous for their patisserie, which made the pastel-colored macarons for Sofia Coppola’s film Marie Antoinette. We’re planning to dress to the nines and drink a lot of champagne.

  Anna, looking at my Facebook fan page: “Can you switch that picture?” “Yes,” I say. “Then why don’t you put me there?” “You? Why would I put you there?” “Because I’m your Mini-Me. I just need some glasses and no one would know.” A point of fact: she just turned eleven, she’s blond, and she weighs about four pounds. I’m forty-seven, a redhead, and weigh considerably more.

  At Ladurée, I had fabulous fish with ginger fennel. The only disappointment, oddly enough, was the dessert, chosen from a ten-page menu. We read every single offering, and I finally chose a rum cake. It was soggy and arrived in a plastic cup, so it had the general aura of coming from an inebriated vending machine. Ladurée’s own brand of rosé champagne went some way toward amelioration.

  We walked past a group of Parisian teenagers laughing boisterously in the street, and Alessandro pointed out that we never laugh like that anymore. These days happiness is quieter, captured perhaps in one of the kids laughing, or the bliss of hearing a favorite song when I actually have time to listen to it.

  It’s school break, so I took Anna and her friend Nicole to the Marais. We had brunch at Des Gars dans la Cuisine, a chic little restaurant on rue Vieille-du-Temple with large, low windows lined with red-cushioned window seats. The girls had hamburgers, gussied up with a touch of nouvelle cuisine. With great kindness, the waitress brought out little pots of applesauce for them. Unfortunately, the moment she turned her back they declared scornfully that applesauce was for babies, so I had to eat both pots so that the waitress would not feel snubbed.

  Our children are driving us mad. As a surprise, Alessandro came home today with train tickets for London, dated tomorrow. Apparently it’s only about two hours by Eurostar, through the Channel Tunnel.

  The Eurostar that runs between London and Paris has full security; consequently, we almost missed the train. We collapsed into our seats and then spent a lively two hours as the children battled over one copy of Diary of a Wimpy Kid, regardless of the fact they’d both read it several times. In a low moment, a jostled arm led to an airborne flood of hot tea landing on Alessandro’s pants in just such a spot as to suggest that he needs Depends. This led to the revelation that he brought only that pair for the next three days.

  In the late afternoon we set out for Big Ben. But it was rush hour in the Underground, and we finally fled the crowd. We got lost in a big park, a helicopter hovering overhead. Alessandro thought he recognized Buckingham Palace, but it turned out to be the back of an apartment building. We were all making fun of him when we saw a motorcycle cop zoom by ahead, and then another one. Alessandro started running toward the street, shouting, “The Queen!” We all ran after him, laughing hopelessly and shouting insults. But he was right! Her Majesty Elizabeth II was riding along in a Rolls-Royce, bolt upright, a dorky scarf tied securely under her chin. This was a highlight of our trip, though the children were truly impressed only after a taxi driver confided that he hadn’t seen her in eleven years of driving.

  We had a long, fractious lunch punctuated by battles over the one functioning iPod Touch, and then went to Harrods, where we bought a Christmas pudding and wandered through women’s designer clothing. Anna fell in love with fur. I pulled her away from rubbing her cheek against the minks. “It’s so soft,” she said dreamily. “Just like my hair in the morning after I wash it.”

  Everyone’s favorite exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum was the Great Bed of Ware, which apparently sleeps eighteen—though not if they’re American, we decided after much discussion. In the gift shop, Luca bought a shaggy hat with little sheep horns. He’s all hair these days. The saleslady said, “I was watching you decide.… He had to have this. It’s an extension of himself.”

  Best bit of history from yesterday: noticing that the big red Royal Mail postboxes have slots for both stamped mail and franked mail. Back in the day, lords could simply sign letters in the area where a stamp might be, and the letters went out for free.… I can’t believe that’s still the case, but it was very exciting to see the slot.

  Lunch at Gordon Ramsay’s Boxwood Café was wonderful. I had a delicate leek and pea tart, and then sublime crusty black bream, a kind of fish I’d never heard of before. I was torn between “spotted dick” and “fool” for dessert, both less for their intrinsic appeal than for that of their names. Alessandro lowered himself to note that I had enough of the first at home, so I went for the fool. (And virtuously refrained from the obvious retort.)

  Life after Gordon is dismal. We went to a celebrated restaurant in the West End … but nothing measured up. We all ate mournfully, and Anna made up her own song, the chorus of which was “Pinkberry, blueberry, vomit.”

  In honor of my characters (who have done the same), we had tea and scones in Fortnum & Mason. My favorite mom
ent was in the bathroom, where Anna was happily trying out the lotion. A very nice lady explained to us that “this is the way the posh live every day … all the time.”

  The British are vehicle-mad. We arrived at this conclusion based on seeing two demonstrations: first, a parade of growling, honking Hells Angels–type motorcycle riders protesting a tax on parking. And then, about an hour later, a parade of tiny minicars, not protesting anything, just enjoying being small.

  Completely exhausted by cultural and touristic activities, we retreated to Waterstone’s bookstore. The hour or two spent there was lovely. No squabbling, no screaming, no whining, just happy heads bent over books. We staggered out with three bags of books—and only one sticky moment, when we were at the counter and Anna’s pile turned out to include My Dad’s in Prison. Alessandro objected.

  On the Eurostar back to Paris, we assembled a list of fabulous food: Gordon Ramsay’s sweet and silky leek tart for me, and his butternut squash and sage risotto for Anna. From a restaurant whose name I can’t remember, a pear poached in Armagnac and then baked into a delicate little custard. Plus a Cornish pasty, the one item on this list that I think I can’t reproduce.

  Anna is dutifully doing homework in the next room—watching Les Aristochats. It’s so funny to hear the kittens even more Frenchified, not to mention my favorite goose, Abigail, who has been transformed into Amélie.