Paris in Love (7 page)

Today Alessandro had his first meeting with a Frenchman from the “conversation exchange” website. His name is Florent, and he wants to learn Italian because he bought a plot of land in a tiny village near Lucca, in Tuscany, and he plans to build a house there. But mostly because he is in love with a waitress he met in the village. Apparently she is very, very shy and reserved.

We woke this morning to a sheet of rain pouring into the street, with the kind of concentrated intensity that made me think, drowsily, that our bedroom could be behind a waterfall: a dim and cool cave, our big windows a pane of moving water.

Today Anna was kicked out of her math class and sent to the hallway to “think about herself.” I asked her what she thought about. In lieu of self-examination, she planned a new Sims family, but admitted that she was afraid I would kill her before she got to make it.

A concerned friend has just written from England to inform me that her son’s economics reading included the fact that 650
Parisians are hospitalized every year due to dog-poo-related accidents. After living here for almost two months, I am not surprised by this datum. The good news is that we are not (yet) among the fallen.

I walked home at dusk, and everyone I passed was munching a baguette. The pavement looked as if hundreds of lost children had scattered crumbs so they could find their way home again.

Anna’s archrival, Domitilla, just returned from her grandmother’s funeral in Italy. Apparently Domitilla glanced above the coffin and saw Jesus suspended in the air. Anna’s comment: “I was pretty surprised to hear that.” But another classmate, Vincenzo, chimed in and said that he knew about a boy with no legs at all who went to church and prayed, and after seeing a white-bearded man in the air, got up and walked. “So that was better than just seeing Jesus,” Anna pointed out.

My publisher is in town on her way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and she took me to lunch at Brasserie Lipp, where Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre used to lunch every day. I had a dark, delicious fish soup and too much wine; we talked about food writing and life before children.

People kiss all the time here: romantically, sadly, sweetly, passionately; in greeting and farewell. They kiss on the banks of the Seine, under bridges, on street corners, in the Métro. I hadn’t
realized that Anna had noticed until yesterday, when I suggested perhaps a single-mother situation in her classroom could be explained by divorce. Anna didn’t agree. “They don’t get divorced over here,” she reported. “It’s ’cause they kiss so much.”

Very early in the morning, the only light comes from tightly closed bakeries. Chairs are upside down on top of the tables, but the smell of baking bread feels like a welcome.

I
attended Madison Public Elementary School wearing only dresses. No matter how deep the snow, my sister and I stripped off our snow pants in the school hallway to reveal wool tights. In our mother’s eyes, we were young ladies, and ladies wore dresses, along with white gloves to church, hats on Easter, and long flannel nightgowns to bed.

She generally sewed those dresses from Simplicity patterns, whose packets featured illustrations of hyperattenuated girls with freakishly long legs. Those pattern packets would float around the house, the jaunty hip-hugging belt in matching plaid never looking quite as good in my mother’s rendition. By the time I was ten years old, I was prone to fits of deep sartorial lust. Even all these years later, I can still remember certain articles of clothing that I longed for in 1974. My classmate Rachel Larson has undoubtedly forgotten the matching jacket and jeans she wore to the first day of school in fourth grade.

I have not.

It wasn’t until my entrance into middle school that I was allowed to buy exotic contraband—trousers, in the form of a
pair of burnt orange bell-bottom corduroys. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s occurred to me recently that I’m close to fifty and I’m still wearing a version of those bell-bottoms.

When I’m teaching, I wear a female approximation of men’s business clothing, down to the lace-up shoes. Without an audience to consider, though, I sacrifice fashion for warmth, pulling on fur-lined clogs, my cords, silk camisoles edged with lace that peeks from the neck of whatever large sweater I’m wearing. I formed this pattern in my twenties, when a provocative flash of lace was, well, provocative. It doesn’t feel sensual or remotely fashionable these days, but I live with it.

Most of the fourth grade of the Leonardo da Vinci School takes communion class together, at a church in the most chic shopping area of Paris. One day in September I left Anna to her spiritual pursuits and began my own, wandering down avenue Montaigne, past the windows of Dior, Fendi, Lacroix, and Gaultier.

The windows of Dior were particularly entrancing. I actually turned back, retracing my steps to look once more at a dress of grave violet silk with a knife-edge pleated skirt and wide looped trim of the same color around the neck. The mannequin came alive in my imagination. I could picture a sleek and gorgeous woman drifting into a drawing room—although she then regarded reproachfully my scuffed shoes and the smudged cuff of my white shirt.

Glancing down, I discovered I was wearing one of Alessandro’s countless black sweaters, so bulky that I had a pregnancy-like bulge in the front. I hastily buttoned up my coat. My shoes were the menswear type, comfortable for long walks. I was wearing bell-bottom cords, and I wasn’t entirely sure I had put on any makeup.

On the way back to the church, I realized that the streets were crowded with Parisian women in their forties and fifties who would no more think of allowing lacy trim to show under a man’s sweater than they would contemplate renting
Flashdance
. They tapped briskly past me in their high-heeled black boots, scarves tied with exquisite finesse, coats snugly hugging their bodies.

Just like that, all the frustrated lust I felt for Rachel Larson’s jaunty pantsuit flooded back. The elegance of that Dior mannequin, her effortless insouciance, the turn of her plastic chin and the twist of her plastic wrist, made her haute couture seem just as tantalizingly unavailable.