Paris in Love (5 page)

Eleven o’clock Sunday morning: a four-piece brass band took over our street corner and played tunes from
My Fair Lady
. We all crowded to the window, and they blew us kisses and requested money to be thrown. The children took great pleasure in doing precisely that.

Anna flung the door of the apartment open after school: “Mom! I was attacked today!” “What happened?” I asked. “A girl named Domitilla slapped me!” Anna said, eyes open very wide. “She said I was screaming in her ear.” We chose Anna’s former school in New Jersey with an eye toward just this sort of encounter: they devoted a great deal of time to teaching the students to reject violence, studying Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and practicing conflict resolution. I inquired hopefully how Anna responded to her first real taste of playground aggression. “I slapped her right back,” my daughter explained. “My hand just rose in the air all by itself.”

I walked into a hair salon yesterday and asked for my customary red highlights; the
coiffeur
snapped: “
Non!
For you, gold. Red is not chic.” It’s a good thing that our apartment is fitted with low-wattage, environmentally friendly lightbulbs, because strong light turns me into a marigold.

Alessandro has been asked to join the board of the Leonardo da Vinci School. He complained pathetically that he was on sabbatical and shouldn’t have to do committee work, but ended up agreeing to do it. Today there was a welcome-to-school meeting,
during which the Italian teacher for Anna’s grade suggested that the class was rather undisciplined, which might make them a challenge to teach. The mother of a classmate stood up and said that her daughter—let’s call her Beatrice—had complained that she was told to stop talking. “You cannot tell my daughter to be still,” Beatrice’s mother scolded. “She will be traumatized by being silenced. I have raised her to freely speak her mind.” I thought this sort of pathological insistence on childhood freedom of speech was an American trait. It’s rather gratifying to realize that I was wrongly maligning my country.

I have discovered at least one secret of thin French women. We were in a restaurant last night, with a chic family seated at the next table. The bread arrived, and a skinny adolescent girl reached for it. Without missing a beat,
maman
picked up the basket and stowed it on the bookshelf next to the table. I ate more of my bread in sympathy.

Alessandro came home from doing the shopping and said, “I was going to buy you flowers because of the argument we had yesterday.” I looked at his empty hands. He shrugged. “There were too many to choose from.”

O
ne October day we picked up Anna and her new friend Erica after school and walked to the Eiffel Tower. The girls ran ahead, zooming here and there like drunk fighter pilots showing off. Alessandro and I tried to imagine why the French ever planned to demolish the tower after the 1889 World Fair. It’s such a beautiful, sturdy accomplishment; destroying it would be like painting over the Mona Lisa because of her long nose.

Smallish
bateaux mouches
, or tourist boats, moor in the Seine near the foot of the tower, or so my guidebook said. We wandered beneath the lacework iron, the girls skittering and shrieking like seagulls. Down by the water we paid for the cheaper tickets, the kind that come without crepes and champagne. With twenty minutes to wait, we retreated to an ancient carousel next to the river. A plump woman sat huddled in her little ticket box, shielded from tourists and the rain, although as yet neither had appeared.

Anna and Erica clambered aboard, but still the operator waited, apparently hoping that two children astride would somehow
attract more. The girls sat tensely on their garish horses, their skinny legs a little too long. At ten years old, they’ll soon find themselves too dignified for such childish amusements. But not yet.

Finally the music started and the horses jerked forward. A crowded merry-go-round on a sunny day is a blur of children’s grins and bouncing bottoms. But as the girls disappeared from view, leaving us to watch riderless horses jolt up and down, I realized that an empty merry-go-round on a cloudy day loses that frantic gaiety, the sense that the horses dash toward some joyful finish line.

These horses could have been
objets trouvés
, discovered on a dustheap and pressed into service. The steed behind Anna’s was missing the lower half of his front leg.

They arched their necks like chargers crossing the Alps on some military crusade, battle-scarred and mournful. Every chip of gold paint dented by a child’s heels stood out, stark and clear.

With nowhere to go, and nothing better to do, the operator let the girls go around and around. Finally, though, the music slowed, the last few notes falling disjointedly into the air.

I decided there is nothing more melancholy than a French carousel on a rainy day, and wished we had paid for champagne and crepes.

On the Métro heading to school, Anna launched into a wicked impersonation of her enraged English teacher stamping her foot: “Shut zee mouths! Zit down! Little cretins!” The entire subway car was laughing, though Anna remained totally unaware of her captive and captivated audience.

Alessandro brought home a very successful makeup present after the non-flowers: a heart-shaped cheese, sort of a Camembert/Brie, as creamy as butter and twice as delicious. We ate it on crusty bread, with a simple salad of orange peppers, and kiwis for dessert.

I just came across a list Luca created on a scrap of paper. At the top of the sheet he wrote (in cursive) “The End.” The list is entitled “Several Problems”:

I feel terrible. What have we done, bringing him here? I have ulcers just reading the list.