Paris in Love (30 page)

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 aspersions 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.”