Paris in Love (31 page)

Today I sat at a café and read Claude comparing life in Florence to that in Paris. As he saw it, living in Florence makes a person become witty (“most people do, I believe”). I feel doubtful, given clear evidence to the contrary from my Florentine in-laws. In Paris, Claude writes, one “lives life too fast, like a mouse under oxygen,” and is likely to die at thirty. My sister, the font of all
genealogical knowledge, tells me that Claude was born in 1884, which means that he was twenty-four or twenty-five when he lived here, and that he lived only to forty-two. Perhaps it was all that Parisian oxygen.

Alessandro just came back from his conversation exchange: Florent is devastated. He logged on to Facebook and discovered that the object of his adoration, the waitress in Italy, had changed her status. She’s “in a relationship”! Florent says, dolefully, that she made a point of not telling him in person, and that he is very hurt by her indirect methods. I think that, given his scanty Italian and her nonexistent French, she may never have figured out his passion, let alone his honorable intentions. After all, he didn’t employ the romantic phrases that Alessandro taught him.

Paris (and our apartment) is so dark and quiet this morning that I feel as if I’m entirely alone. The sky is the color of gray flannel, the darkness broken only by the dormer window of another early riser. The woman who lives in that attic painted her walls yellow, and reflected light bounces out like a spring crocus. If light were sound, her window would be playing a concerto.

Today we walked by a store window revealing a room full of unclothed mannequins with (as Anna pointed out) nipples, not to mention very idealized figures. They stood around in groups chatting, and demonstrating how they could raise an arm, or twist to the side. Only one mannequin was dressed in a short black cocktail frock and a wig of tumbling curls. She was seated,
legs crossed at a rakish angle, and somehow her sartorial, bewigged splendor made the others look fifty times more naked—and erotic.

We started out this year the way any modern American family would: with multiple cellphones. But I inadvertently left mine on a table in London months ago, and I haven’t replaced it. Life without a phone is riskier, lonelier, more vivid. My family doesn’t understand. “What if I have to talk to you?” Anna wails. “We already paid for the contract,” Alessandro scolds. I remain obstinately disconnected.

I happened across a protest march organized by the unions that was unlike any I’d ever seen in the United States. The protesters ambled along in little groups, sipping their coffee. There was no equivalent to the “One, two, three” chanting Americans use to stay pumped up. Every fourth or fifth car played music, so in the time I walked along, going the other direction, I heard rock, rap, and finally (from a hospital’s association) Handel.

I am trying to teach Anna not to engage with the very pretty, and very pestilent, “Queen Bee” in her classroom. (The girl I have called Beatrice.) Anna tends to fight back, which makes things worse. This morning I asked her if Domitilla was one of the queen’s courtiers. It turns out that Domitilla is not a “cool girl,” and that those little wasps actually push her around, quite literally. To Anna’s horror, I announced that we are having Domitilla over for a playdate.

My favorite statue in Paris is an allegorical grouping, Boisseau’s
La Défense du Foyer
, in the Esplanade des Invalides. Alessandro tells me that a
foyer
is a hearth, which explains why Monsieur stands bold and tall, ready to slay dragons, while his wife and child huddle behind him. He has a very nice physique—and he’s naked save for an animal-skin loincloth furnished with a suggestively placed paw. To an American eye he looks like an early explorer, especially given his single moccasin, with the important distinction that he has maintained—and trimmed—his luxuriant French mustache.

Anna and I are both down with sore throats—something I blame on the fact that we shivered through two freezing days before the furnace was finally fixed yesterday. She is snuggled next to me, occasionally reading aloud from a Harry Potter book (Anna sees reading as a communal activity). “ ‘The afternoon sun hung low in the sky,’ ” she reads, and then tells me, “I like that, because the sun doesn’t really hang from anything, and so it’s cool.” Thank you, J. K. Rowling, for teaching at least one eleven-year-old the joys of figurative language!

We had a playdate yesterday afternoon with Anna’s archrival, Domitilla. Ever since Domitilla succumbed to passion and slapped Anna at the beginning of the year, Anna has considered her persona non grata. But lo and behold, the two played happily for hours. “She likes me,” Anna reported afterward. “I’m thinking about liking her back.”