Paris in Love (8 page)

It has taken most of October, loitering on avenue Montaigne during Anna’s weekly hour of spiritual education to gaze at mannequins in designer silks, but I’ve come up with a New Year’s resolution: I want to know what elegance looks like at age fifty, a milestone that looms just a few years away.

I refuse to find myself in my second half century still wearing my furry shoes and Alessandro’s sweaters. I intend to learn precisely what these French women buy and, perhaps just as important, how they manage to look so commandingly elegant after attaining
“un certain âge.”
It is truly a pity that my mother is no longer alive.

I’ve finally decided to dress like a lady.

Yesterday Anna announced that she and her babysitter saw an “angry mob storming the street.” I made a mental note that Alessandro should cut back on the nightly Dickens readings, but then I read about the strike: apparently, to protest grain prices, farmers threw hay bales into the Champs-Élysées—and set them on fire. This does suggest a certain level of malcontent.

I walk through the streets and enjoy listening to wild chatter in French with the same level of understanding that one has hearing a row of sparrows crowded on a telephone line. Are these people really talking, or are they just singing to each other? They look far too elegant and sophisticated to be uttering the half-assed things people say to each other in New York.

French chickens come with heads and feet still attached … my butcher cradles the bird like a baby, then waggles its head toward Anna, turning the bird into a clucking version of
Jaws
.

Paris is enlarging my waistline, and thus I’ve made the decision that I have to jog. Wanting to make sure I was properly kitted out before this event, I took a few weeks to acquire an iPod, a pair of running shoes, a hat, and a sweatshirt. This morning, out of excuses, I forced myself into the crisp autumn air as Leonard Cohen crooned through my earphones about goodbyes. Seven entire minutes of virtue! My ambitions are not huge.

By happenstance, Alessandro encountered Luca’s architectural drawing teacher today and inquired how the class was going. Not well. Apparently Luca hasn’t turned in a shred of homework since the semester began. “He’s such a nice boy,” she told Alessandro. “I know he sees the other children hand in their homework, but he never does so himself.” This evening Luca said, quite reasonably, that since he had no idea how to do an architectural drawing, he didn’t try. He was less successful at explaining why he hadn’t mentioned this salient fact to us.

Last night I asked Alessandro if he ever lies in bed and thinks about chocolate—say, about the way dark chocolate feels in your mouth, or how different it is when spiked with orange peel. He said no. Then he said that the only time he thinks about food in bed is when he wakes up in the middle of the night and wants steak. Somewhere in that clash lies a profound truth about the difference between the sexes.

Today I met Anna after school and she reported that it was a “great day.” “Wow,” I said, “what happened?” “I didn’t get yelled at,” she said proudly. And then, “Well, maybe in one class.” She is wire-thin, with flyaway blond hair and a single dimple. She doesn’t look like someone who has intimate knowledge of principals’ offices on two continents.

I walked through the twilight to Galeries Lafayette, surely one of the most glamorous department stores in the world. Far above the cosmetics counters on the grand main floor, a domed stained-glass ceiling shimmers like an enormous kaleidoscope. Instead of a counter, the skin-care company La Mer has a nine-foot-long sinuous aquarium. Dolce & Gabbana has its own little salon, with chandeliers made of black glass blown into elegant, slightly sinister, shapes.

Quelle horreur!
The
guardienne
came to clean and noticed that our glassware was smeared, which has been driving me crazy. The box of dishwashing powder that we’d been using? Salt! It looked like dishwashing powder, it was under the sink, and I never bothered to puzzle out the label. We have been running the dishwasher with salt alone for two months.

Last night we trotted out to our local Thai
“gastronomique”
restaurant, which means it’s a trifle more fancy than average and serves mango cocktails. A man and his son came in, trailed by a very old, lame golden retriever. The dog felt like lying down, legs straight out, in the middle of the aisle running down the restaurant—on a Friday night. The waiter and all customers patiently stepped over and around him, over and over and over … Bravo, France!