Paris in Love (3 page)

Today we joined a Rollerblading event: thousands of hip Parisians zipping over a medieval bridge as the sun shone on the Seine. Until I ricocheted off a stranger and flopped on my bottom. A race organizer told me sweetly that “eet eez too
difficile
.” That, as they say, was that. We fell into café chairs and watched Paris stream by as we drank Oranginas. Then we rode back, slowly, practicing our braking.

This morning I saw a chic French woman in the Métro … wearing a beret. How is that possible? I would look unbearably twee, like one of the chipmunks, from
Alvin and the Chipmunks
doing “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Anna hates Paris. She hates the move, she hates leaving her friends, she hates her new school, she hates everything. I am the only mother in France dragging a child with her nose in a book down the street, the better not to see anything Parisian.

Our apartment has a sweeping staircase, and stained-glass windows looking into the courtyard—and a tiny, slow elevator added in the 1960s. My husband and I both fit in only by standing side by side and sucking in our tummies. Sometimes the groceries fit, too. The children have to take the stairs. I generally emerge to find Anna lying on the last few steps, gasping, one hand outflung toward the (locked) door, doing a great imitation of dying-man-in-desert-sees-mirage.

The butcher down the street has started flirting with me! It makes me feel as though I’m in a movie. He also gave me a one-euro discount on my sausages. Alessandro’s unromantic assessment is that the butcher is an excellent marketer. Which is true. I am now a customer for life.

Alessandro was born and grew up in Florence, Italy, with a passion for learning languages (English and Latin in high school, French, German, Russian, and ancient Greek thereafter). When I first met him, he had a charming accent that he shed after having been, as he puts it, seduced into domesticity. He’s now a professor of Italian literature at Rutgers University, and was even knighted by the Italian government for obscure intellectual contributions to the republic. At any rate, Alessandro made up his mind not to squander the opportunity to make his French as good as his English, and to that end he’s put a notice on an Internet bulletin board offering to exchange an hour of French conversation for an hour of Italian. He’s being deluged with responses—most of which seem to be treating his offer as an opportunity for a blind date. My personal favorite is from Danielle (“but some call me Dasha, your choice”), who wrote saying that she had an extra ticket to
The Nutcracker
, and that they would have a great time speaking French, especially after drinking much champagne.

This morning the Thai restaurant at the bottom of our street exploded, resulting in clouds of white smoke and a terrible smell of burning rubber. The
guardienne
came up to the fourth floor to tell us that she thought the owners were doing something nefarious in their basement.

The woman who works in the Italian grocery down the street turns out to be from Alessandro’s hometown. Once this interesting fact was established, she took charge of his groceries, removing the olive oil (inferior), switching to buffalo mozzarella (fresher than the kind he’d chosen), and slicing Parma prosciutto rather than San Daniele. It occurs to me that the wily Florentine extracted quite a few more euros from Alessandro’s wallet by claiming kinship, but her creamy, delicate mozzarella is worth every penny.

It’s night, after a day of rain … the windows are open and the strains of a glorious opera pour from the conservatory down the street.

Like any big city, Paris has homeless citizens. But I’ve never before seen a woman carefully sweeping the doorstep where she, her baby, and her husband sleep. Some homeless Parisians have little pup tents and simply flip them open on the street; many have carefully tended cats and dogs on leashes.

Mirabile dictu! Anna has found two things she likes in Paris. The first is chocolate, and the second is the rat catcher’s shop, which has four big rats hanging upside down from traps. We detour to gawk at them before grocery shopping.