Paris in Love (15 page)

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.