Paris in Love (12 page)

When I wander out, the sky is blue and far away. By the time I emerge from the market, pearl gray clouds seem within my reach. The sidewalk is rain-splattered, and the puppy belonging to the homeless man at our Métro stop retreats under his blanket, nothing showing but a little black nose. I put a euro in the cup and hope it goes to dog food rather than cognac.

Today I made gingerbread, only to discover at a crucial point that I had no molasses. I poured in pomegranate molasses instead, since that’s the only molasses I’ve found in Paris. Anna loved it, but Luca wrinkled his nose and said, “Something’s missing.” Maybe he’ll win the palate contest on
Hell’s Kitchen
someday.

“You know Domitilla’s gerbil that got squished?” Anna asked by way of greeting, after school. “
Well
, Domitilla just threw it away.
Right in the trash can. And do you want to know about her other gerbil?” “Sure,” I said untruthfully. “She couldn’t throw it away because it got lost in the house and died somewhere. So now it’s going to smell. She is
really
not good with pets.”

My study looks directly onto the gray slanted roofs on the other side of rue du Conservatoire. I love watching rain pour over the slate, creating dark rivers that sheet down the gutters. The cat who lives opposite, whose owner puts her out on the little balcony when she cleans the apartment, is not so enthusiastic about rain.

I just took leftover cauliflower and potato soup, added frozen baby peas and a splash of Thai coriander sauce, threw it all in the blender, and came out with a fabulous soup. Bright green, not to mention healthy, and the children ate every drop.

Marina has put Milo on a diet. Chihuahuas are supposed to weigh about seven pounds, and Milo is more than twenty-seven. He looks like a 1950s refrigerator: low-slung, blocky, and rounded off at the corners. Apparently the vet has suggested vegetables, so for dinner Milo is having lightly steamed broccoli tossed in just a touch of butter, and some diet dog food steeped in homemade chicken broth.

Anna burst out with questions on the Métro today: Do you remember when your boobs started growing? How old were
you? Were you fifty? Do your boobs keep growing until you die? I didn’t dare glance around to see how many English speakers might be in the car with us.

Around seven o’clock, the autumn light turns clear and bluish, the color of skim milk. All the waiters lean on the doors of their restaurants, smoking, waiting for customers.

I
n a single week in November, I mixed up
immanent
with
imminent, paramount
with
tantamount
, and
soap
with
soup
. I addressed my friend Philip as “Paris,” and I put a roll of paper towels in the dishwasher, rescuing it in the nick of time.

In the middle of the night, I came to the stark conclusion that my brain must be dying. Words are my stock-in-trade; they are my daily bread. In the dark, it seemed obvious that turning Philip into Paris implied I had picked up a hitchhiking brain tumor. Or (thanks to an article I’d recently read in
The New York Times
), Huntington’s disease. In the morning, I succumbed to the siren song of Google and typed in “Huntington’s.”

The Mayo Clinic’s website specializes in reassuring language; I quickly gathered that unless and until I started dropping teacups, I was in no danger of that particular diagnosis. Then, just as I was relaxing, I happened on this cheery little passage: “Deciding whether to be tested for the gene is a personal decision. For some people, the uncertainty of whether they carry the faulty gene is stressful and distracting. For others, the knowledge that they will develop the condition is burdensome.”

Burdensome?
My first reaction was a snort. I’m finding the knowledge of my hopefully not imminent (or immanent) death burdensome, and I don’t even have a gene to warn me of that rendezvous. But a moment later I realized that I’m a fool to quibble with the Mayo Clinic’s definition of a “faulty gene.” Along with the rest of humankind, I inherited faulty genes,
all
of which are programmed to die. It’s the knowledge thereof that’s tricky.

When I was young I used to lie in bed at night memorizing poetry. Ours was a poetry-infused household, and I a dutiful oldest daughter. I memorized D. H. Lawrence’s ode to a snake, loving the sound as he “trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down.” I never shared my memorized verses with anyone, especially not my poet father. He seemed to have a thousand poems, even more, stockpiled in his brain. He would erupt at dinner with a bit from
King Lear
, and then follow up with two quatrains of Blake, and a verse in Swedish. My ambitions were secret and modest by comparison: I wanted a few poems, just a few. I wanted to have those particular words available, to know that Coleridge’s river Alph runs “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea” and that Frost’s snowy forest offered a challenge to those “with promises to keep.”

When I went to college I stopped memorizing poetry, thinking that I would pick it up again when I had more time. But as I lay in the dark thinking about how
soup
foamed into
soap
, it occurred to me that I may not have world enough and time to memorize the rest of even a very small canon. My grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, and was silent the last decade of her life; my father, my darling father of a thousand poems and more, has taken to watching leaves fall from their trees. Rather than knit those leaves into words, he simply allows them to fall.
It’s a cruel fate: to watch without recounting the fall of the leaf; to grieve without creating anew; to age without describing it.

In the last year, as I’ve watched him struggle with the way age is stealing his words, it occurred to me that I should memorize some more poetry, as ballast against my possible inheritance of that good, wordless night. Here, in its entirety, is the poem with which I resumed my memorization: W. H. Auden’s “Their Lonely Betters.”