Paris in Love (33 page)

As I was walking along the street today, my eye was caught by the gleam of orange berries hanging from two small bushes in pots on either side of the “door” of a pup tent set up on the sidewalk. Inside was a man, his tent flap half unzipped, feeding sparrows at his threshold.
“Bonjour, madame!”
he cried, with such an infectious smile that I waved, realizing only halfway down the block that he might be hungry.

Florent is still disconsolate. Alessandro reports that he had been thinking of taking a leave from his job as a middle school teacher and moving to the town in Italy where the heartless waitress lives. I feel some sympathy as regards her decision. It is extraordinarily difficult to navigate interlingual relationships, especially in the beginning. I couldn’t figure out how to pronounce Alessandro’s name correctly for at least two weeks after we started dating—far too long to ask him again exactly how it sounded. Luckily a friend visited from England and coached me in rolling
R
s. Somehow we survived.

By this point in our sojourn in Paris, we’ve encountered a number of amiable protest marches. My favorite part is the coda: on the heels of the last ambling protester comes a miniature fleet of four or five green city trucks, the same public-works fellows whose comrades are often found marching at the front. The drivers have a great time doing spins on the car-free avenues while sweeping and washing.

This afternoon Anna walked through the door, her face closed and tight. It turned out that Beatrice is having what promises to
be a particularly splendid birthday party, to be held at an indoor water park—but not everyone in the class is invited, and Anna was not one of those anointed ones to be handed a precious invitation. “Right after that, my tummy started hurting,” Anna said. Mine, too.

Boulevard des Invalides is lined with chestnut trees that lost their leaves months ago, but not all their burrs. The chestnuts hang from curling, fragile stems high in the air, creating knots of black lace against the morning sky.

I have now turned from having rather unwelcome gold highlights to being a blonde. It wasn’t a change I wished for or welcomed (though one could say that it’s France’s revenge for my terrible language skills). Although I like to tell myself that I am not shallow, it turns out I was lying. Hair apparently ranks just below the happiness of my children and possibly above my husband’s happiness.

When we moved into this apartment, I first noticed the windows because they are draped in shimmery peacock blue taffeta from the ceiling to the floor—very Parisian, I thought. But over the months I’ve realized that having five-foot-tall windows through which to view the world changes everything. Watching snow fall on the other side of large panes of glass makes it feel as if the snow falls in the room itself; a normal window brackets off the snow, as if it fell on a Hollywood set, far away.

Alessandro came home with a mischievous expression on his face and an unfamiliar shopping bag in his hand. Inside, the most gorgeous hat I’ve ever seen, of mossy velvet, with a floppy flower on one side. The brim can curl up like that of a Jazz Age flapper, or rakishly down over one ear. My newly blond (and heretofore despised) hair now looks like a brilliant decision!

I walked past the man in the pup tent again. He has built a little wooden threshold in front of his tent to support his two berry bushes; they are firethorn, perhaps. A small dish discreetly invited assistance; as I bent over to put in a coin, I saw that his tent flap was open. He was inside, sitting in the lotus position, meditating. I walked home thinking how happy he looked, with his orange berries flaring against the gray sidewalk, and his simple house.

Last night Anna and I cooked dinner while Alessandro and Luca wrestled with algebra; there’s to be a two-hour test tomorrow. When the pasta was ready, the guys were not, thanks to mathematical complications. So Anna and I sat down to read aloud some Enid Blyton with an appetizer of a crusty baguette, delicious sweet butter, and a twist of salt from the grinder. We ate, and read. And ate. And read. By the time the boys had put the final algebra problems to rest, there was no bread left, and no room in our stomachs for dinner.