Paris in Love (4 page)

Archetypal French scene: two boys playing in the street with baguettes were pretending not that they were swords, as I first assumed, but giant penises.

Big excitement! We have just entertained a fraudulent chimney sweep, ostensibly sent by the landlord’s insurance company. He set to work, but Alessandro decided to check up on him. It was all a scam to get us to pay for unneeded cleaning. The sweep had to be thrown out, brushes, rods, and all, with much French protesting and yelping, after cleaning two chimneys. It felt very Dickensian.

Anna has just told me of my demise. She re-created our family in the Sims computer game, and I died after refusing to stop reading in order to eat. “Next time,” she said, “I’ll make you a rock star, and then you won’t mind leaving the house.”

At home, meat comes encased in plastic, shiny and shrink-wrapped; the very sight of it reminds me that red meat has been tied to cancer. Here every kind of meat looks fresher than the last. The butcher chars the last feathers from a beautifully plump goose as he lays it before you. At first pigeons reminded me of my office window back in New York; now I see tiny, delicious chickens. The
“bio”
—that is, all-natural—pigeon is particularly enticing.

A wooden pallet is descending silently past my study window from the floor above, carrying down exquisite furniture: fabulous chairs, a library table, an antique writing desk. This spectacle is terrible for my writing schedule, as I hurtle from my chair every fifteen minutes to ogle.

The Italian school, Leonardo da Vinci, is graced by a nondescript door, but you can easily tell where you are by the flock of Italian
mamma
s standing on the sidewalk, chattering madly about the difficulties of finding good pasta in Paris. Luca came home from his first day of school with a shell-shocked expression. He’s expected to do “architectural drawing” (whatever that is), Latin-to-Italian translation, and a kind of math he can’t identify. We think it must be advanced geometry.

The American Catholic Church of Paris turns out to be on avenue Hoche, quite a distance from our apartment. Mass is like a sweet time capsule to my 1970s Lutheran Bible camp: lots of guitars, hand-holding, and singing “It only takes a spark to get a fire going …”

Between six thirty and seven o’clock in the evening, every other person on the street swings a long baguette partially wrapped in white paper. Suddenly, the world is full of crusty bread.

We are the sometime owners of an obese Chihuahua named Milo, who traveled regularly between the United States and Italy
until one fateful August when Air France declared he was too fat to board their plane. Since then he has lived in Florence with Alessandro’s mother, Marina, whose cooking has had a further ruinous effect on his waistline. Today Marina called to say that stress has given Milo a few more pounds (although the vet unsympathetically suggested the weight gain was the result of an overindulgence in prosciutto). The source of Milo’s stress is hard to pinpoint; among other indulgences, he literally sleeps on a velvet cushion, like an emperor’s cat in a fairy tale. But Marina claims that the mere presence of other dogs on the street (and, by extension, in the world) is very upsetting for him.

In a mad rush this morning, I didn’t eat, trying to get Anna to school on time. Returning home on the Métro, I struggled out of my coat—only to realize that I was still wearing my pajama top. I stood with blushing ears among elegant commuters for eight stops, too hemmed in to put my coat back on, pretending I wasn’t wearing fuzzy green-and-yellow-stripy flannel.

At home, both children attended a Quakeresque school that specialized in cozy chats as a form of discipline, but here the instructors shriek at kids and make them stand against the wall. Even worse, after only a few days of class, Luca and Anna have realized that they are at the bottoms of their respective grades. The family is in the grip of a dispiriting feeling that their former, much-beloved school taught them to be very nice, but perhaps wasn’t quite so successful on the academic front.