Paris in Love (56 page)

Huzzah! Florent’s end-of-school dinner wore on into the night … eating, drinking, smoking, celebrating. In the end, he and Pauline left the restaurant together and walked around the city. They wandered from the Bastille down rue du Faubourg-Saint-Antoine,
then turned up boulevard Voltaire to République, talking madly, walking until dawn. Finally, when the sun was just pink over the Seine, Pauline looked at him and said, “You compared me to a lemon tart that you could not eat.” He nodded. She opened her bag, and nestled in the bottom was a perfect little lemon tart.

T
his morning I saw the family off to Italy; for the next two weeks, Alessandro will stay in Italy while the children are in tennis camp. I am remaining in Paris to write, write, write. As I reentered the apartment, it came to me that I’ve never been the one left behind; generally I’m the one who travels. Silence swelled in the apartment until it drummed in my ears. But now rain is pouring down the windows, and soon I will take my polka-dot umbrella out for a walk through city streets. Silence, with rain, is a friendly sound.

StylePixie Salon turned out to be the answer to my prayers. From the moment I entered and spotted a heap of U.K. women’s magazines, I was happy. And after Victoria, the owner, assessed the ghastly situation on my head and delicately put in two or three different shades so as to tone down the orange and mask the platinum, I was in heaven.

The homeless man is gone. He packed up his tent and whisked himself away in the night. I hope he has found his way to somewhere green; I would like to think of him meditating on grass rather than concrete. I paused where his tent used to be and realized that it had been positioned on top of a powerful heating vent. No wonder he looked so comfortable, even in the depth of winter.

I’m writing a book about small theaters in London during Shakespeare’s time, and I came across this lovely reference: in 1555, a quite powerful man named Sir Thomas Cawarden, who owned much of the fashionable area of London called the Black-friars, wrote a lease agreement for one Elizabeth Foster. The lease gave her lodging “for the terms of her lyffe by the yearly rente of 3 odoriferus Flowers.” By comparison, other people were paying upwards of thirty pounds a year, a huge amount at the time. The romance-writer part of me finds this contract both intriguing and agreeable.

I went to visit a friend in the 16th arrondissement today. She walked me back to the Métro stop, Porte Dauphine, and pointed out a glass canopy over the entrance that looks like a large, colorless peacock tail. Apparently, it is one of the few original Art Nouveau entrances left in the city. All that transparent glass arcing above the door seemed almost confrontational, as if to assert that this is
not
the door to the Underworld; Cerberus does not wait beneath.

Grades posted! We were afraid Luca might be remanded into the two-week remedial courses doled out to those with low grades. But no! He has worked incredibly hard this year to master Latin-into-Italian translations, geometry explained in Italian, and
interrogazioni
in history (routine complaint from teacher: “your facts are right, but your sentences aren’t complicated enough”). Not only did he pass but he did very well indeed in some subjects! He appears to have a real gift for literary analysis (ahem).

I woke to silence and took myself out for a jog. Paris is moody, cool, and empty early in the morning. On my way home I found fruit sellers arranging artful mountains of apples, kiwis, and pineapples, like anxious (but artistic) squirrels stacking nuts for a long winter.

I finished Claude’s memoir, which concludes with a rather awkward imaginary interview with the writer Anatole France. The parallels between my great-uncle and me are remarkable. We both went to Harvard (I must give a nod to the tradition of legacy admissions here), moved to Paris, wrote memoirs, got emotional about French light, and wrote novels that were not admired by the literary establishment. Not only that, but we both wrote opinion pieces for
The New York Times
, though his was on Italian politics and mine was on the term
bodice-ripper
. And we did all of this almost precisely one hundred years apart. I called up Alessandro in Italy to inform him that I might be possessed by the ghost of Claude C. Washburn, but he merely snorted.

Milo is going on a thinning cure! Alessandro will be in the mountains while the children are in camp, and he’s talked Marina into letting him take Milo with him. Marina packed Milo’s red velvet pillow, his special dishes, his special coat, his special towel, and his special blow-dryer, and sent them off, admonishing Alessandro to keep him dry because the veterinarian says he is very, very sensitive and may get rheumatism if he’s not coddled.

I spent yesterday at my computer, occasionally reaching over and savoring pieces of the chocolate shoe that Alessandro and Luca gave me: a touch of vanilla, an undertone of cocoa, a moody aftertaste. Silence, no cross teenager or needy eleven-year-old—and a whole shoe to eat!