Paris Is Always a Good Idea (2 page)

Rosalie had fallen in love with the little store straight away. There was a sky-blue frame surrounding the single display window and the entrance to its right, with the old-fashioned silver bell the previous owner had left behind hanging over the door. The light fell on the old black-and-white tiles of the floor in little circles. There was a cloudless sky over Paris that day in May, and it seemed to Rosalie as if the little shop had just been waiting for her.

Admittedly, the rent was anything but cheap, but it was probably still reasonable for the good location, as Monsieur Picard, a tubby, elderly man with receding hair and crafty brown button eyes, assured her. There was also another room above the store, reached by a narrow wooden spiral staircase, with a little bathroom and a tiny kitchen beside it.

“So you have an apartment as well, right on the spot, ha ha ha,” joked Monsieur Picard, and his little belly quivered with satisfaction. “What sort of business are you thinking of, mademoiselle? I hope it's nothing that makes a noise or smells—after all, I live in this building, too.”

“A stationery store,” said Rosalie. “Gift wrap, writing paper, pens and pencils and beautiful cards for very special occasions.”

“Aha. Well, well. Good luck, then!” Monsieur Picard seemed a bit nonplussed. “Tourists always like buying cards with the Eiffel Tower on them, don't they?”

“A
postcard store
?” her mother shouted down the phone in disbelief. “
Mon Dieu!
My poor child, who still writes cards these days?”

“I do, to name but a few,” Rosalie answered and then just hung up.

Four weeks later she was up on a ladder outside her store, fixing a painted wooden sign over the entrance.

It said LUNA LUNA in large, curving letters and beneath, slightly smaller:
ROSALIE'S WISHING CARDS
.

 

Two

As far as Rosalie was concerned, it would have been fine if a lot more people wrote letters and cards. The minor—and sometimes major—pleasure still provided even nowadays to the receiver and also the writer of a handwritten letter could simply not be compared with an e-mail or a text, which would be quickly forgotten and lost in the abyss of meaninglessness. That brief moment of wonderment when you suddenly found a personal letter in the mail, the joyful anticipation as you turned over a postcard, carefully unstuck an envelope or ripped it open impatiently. The possibility of holding in your hands a piece of the person who had thought of you, studying their handwriting, sensing their mood, maybe even catching a trace of tobacco or perfume. That was so very vivid. And even if people nowadays wrote letters ever more infrequently, because apparently they had no time for them, Rosalie didn't know anyone who wouldn't like to receive a personal letter or a handwritten card. The present with all its social networks and digital gadgets had very little charm, she thought. It might all be effective or practical or fast—but it definitely lacked charm.

In the past, opening the mailbox must have been a bit more exciting,
she thought as she stood in the lobby of the building before the row of mailboxes. The only thing you regularly found there these days was bills, tax demands, and junk mail.

Or notices of a rent increase.

Rosalie looked at her landlord's letter with annoyance. This was now the third increase in five years. She had seen it coming. In recent weeks Monsieur Picard had been so exceptionally friendly every time she met him in the hall. And every time as they parted he had sighed deeply and said that life in Paris was getting dearer all the time.

“Do you know what a baguette costs these days, Mademoiselle Laurent? Or a croissant? Do you know what they charge for a croissant in the boulangerie? It's unbelievable! I ask you, what is there in a croissant—water and flour, and nothing more, is there?” He had shrugged his shoulders and made an accusatory gesture, looking at Rosalie with a mixture of indignation and despair, before shuffling off without waiting for an answer.

Rolling her eyes, Rosalie went into her shop. Of course she knew what a croissant cost. After all, she ate one every morning—much to René's annoyance.

René Joubert was tall, dark haired, and extremely sporty. He'd been her boyfriend for three years and was a personal trainer. Perhaps, Rosalie sometimes thought with a sigh, in the reverse order. René Joubert took his profession very seriously. He preferred working with well-heeled women from the upper ranks of Parisian society who were very happy to have their figure, their fitness, and their health looked after by this good-looking young man with his sports diploma, his gentle brown eyes, and his well-honed body. René's appointment book was always full, but, as it seemed, the top layer of Parisian society was not enough of a challenge to his abilities. At least, he never failed to take every opportunity to try to convert Rosalie to a healthy, exercise-filled life (
mens sana in corpore sano!
) and to point out the dangers that lurked everywhere in food. On his death list—at the very top!—were the croissants Rosalie loved so much. (“White flour is poison for the bowels!” “Have you never heard of wheat belly?” “Do you actually know how much fat there is in those things?”)

Rosalie, who had her own idea of what makes for a happy life (which did not necessarily include power training, muesli, or soy milkshakes), was not at all impressed, and all her boyfriend's missionary efforts had so far failed miserably. Rosalie just couldn't see why she should eat “grain.” “Grain is cow fodder and I'm not a cow,” she used to say and then spread thick layers of butter and jelly on a piece of croissant and stick it in her mouth.

René watched her with a pained expression.

“And anyway, nothing tastes better with a
café
crème
than a croissant or a baguette,” she went on, brushing a few crumbs off the bedclothes. “You have to admit that.”

“Then just leave out the café crème, a kiwi and spinach smoothie is healthier in the morning anyway,” retorted René, and Rosalie nearly choked on her croissant with laughter. That was really the most absurd thing she'd ever heard. A morning without coffee was like—Rosalie tried to find a suitable comparison—was … just unimaginable, she concluded to herself.

At the very beginning, when she'd only just met René, she had allowed herself to be persuaded to join him on his early-morning run through the Jardin du Luxembourg. “It'll be great—you'll see,” he had said. “At six in the morning Paris is a totally different city!”

He might well have been right, but the old, pleasantly familiar Paris, where you stayed up late at night and drew, wrote, read, debated, and drank red wine, then began the next day comfortably in bed—best of all with a large cup of milky coffee—was much more to Rosalie's taste. And while René ran beside her under the old chestnut trees with great gazellelike strides, trying to involve her in relaxed conversation (“you should only run at a pace that allows you to chat properly”), she started to puff after the first hundred meters and finally stopped with a stitch.

“The beginning is always the hardest,” said her coach. “Don't give up now!”

Like everyone who's in love and tries very hard at the outset to merge symbiotically with their partner and adopt their preferences, Rosalie had even given in to René's entreaties and tried it one more time—but alone, and not at six o'clock in the morning—but after a centenarian with a tottering gait, his body bent terrifyingly forward, his arms swinging wildly, had overtaken her, she finally said goodbye to the idea of becoming sporty.

“I think my walks with William Morris are enough for me,” she explained with a laugh.

“Who's William Morris? Should I be jealous?” René was concerned. (At that point he had not yet been in her shop, and he had no clue about William Morris the artist. But that was forgivable—after all, she didn't know the name of all the bones and ligaments in her body, either.)

She'd given René a kiss and explained that William Morris was her little dog, whom she—as the owner of a stationery store—had named after the legendary Victorian painter and architect, among other reasons because he had produced the most wonderful designs for fabrics and wallpaper.

William Morris—the dog—was an extremely agreeable Lhasa Apso, and he was now almost as old as the postcard store. During the day he lay peacefully in his basket near the entrance; at night he slept behind the kitchen door on a blanket, and sometimes, when he was dreaming, his paws would jerk in his sleep and bang against the door frame. As the man from the animal shelter had explained to her when she got him, this small breed of dog was so particularly peaceful because they had in the past accompanied wandering Tibetan monks who had taken a vow of silence.

René liked the Tibetan connection, and William Morris himself greeted the young man with the broad shoulders and big feet with a friendly wag of the tail when, after four weeks, Rosalie invited him into her apartment for the first time. Well … perhaps
apartment
wasn't exactly the right word for that one poky little room over the store with only enough space for a bed, an armchair and wardrobe, and a big drawing table under the window. However, the room was extremely cozy, and Rosalie had only discovered its best feature after she moved in: through a second little window at the back of the building you could get out onto an area of flat roof that Rosalie used as a terrace in the summer. It was sheltered and secluded by old stone tubs with plants and a couple of weather-worn trellises, which were covered with glowing blue clematis in the summer, so that it was almost completely hidden from view.

This was where Rosalie had set the table in the open air when René visited her for the first time. She was no great shakes as a cook—she was much more skilled with her pencil and brush than she was with a ladle—but on the rickety wooden table with its white cloth there were flickering tea lights in a variety of sizes, and there was red wine, pâté de foie gras, ham, grapes, a little chocolate cake, artichoke hearts drenched in lots of oil, salted butter, Camembert, goat cheese, and—a baguette.

“Oh, my God!” René had sighed in comic despair. “Nothing but unhealthy stuff! Total overkill! You'll come to a bad end. Someday your metabolism will collapse and then you'll become as fat as my aunt Hortense.”

Rosalie took a great gulp of red wine from her glass, wiped her mouth, and pointed her finger at him. “Wrong, my dear,” she said. “Nothing but
delicious
stuff.” Then she stood up and with a quick movement stepped out of her dress. “Am I fat, then?” she asked, dancing half-naked over the roof with graceful steps and flowing hair.

René couldn't put his glass down quickly enough.

“Hey, wait!” He'd run after her, laughing, and eventually caught her. “No, you're just right,” he'd murmured, his hands running sensuously over her back, and then they'd stayed on the roof, lying on a woolen blanket until the damp of the morning crept up on them.

Now, as she stood in the gloomy hall, which always smelt of orange-scented cleaning fluid, and closed the mailbox, Rosalie thought back to that night on the roof with a degree of melancholy.

In the past three years the differences between her and René had become more and more obvious. And where she had earlier sought and found common factors to unite them, she now saw everything that divided her from her boyfriend with all too much clarity.

Rosalie loved breakfasting in bed; René had no time at all for “crumbs all over the bed.” She was a night owl; he was an early riser. She enjoyed her moderate walks with her little dog; he had bought himself a racing bike on which he sped like the wind through the streets and parks of Paris. When traveling was in question, nowhere was too far away for him, while Rosalie could not imagine anything more pleasant than to sit in one of the little old squares in the cities and towns of southern Europe and just watch the time go by.

But what she most regretted was that René never wrote her letters or cards, not even on her birthday. “But I'm here,” he would say when she looked in vain for a card on the breakfast table on her birthday. Or, “But we can always phone,” when he was at one of his seminars.

At the beginning Rosalie had still written him notes and cards she drew herself—for his birthday, or when he broke his foot and had to spend a week in hospital, or just when she was leaving the house on some errand or other, or when she'd gone to bed late at night and he was already asleep. “Hi, Early Riser: please be quiet and let your little night owl sleep in—I worked very late tonight,” she would write, and put a note with a little owl perching on a paintbrush beside his bed.

She'd left her little messages all over the place: tucked in behind the mirror, on his pillow, on the table, in his sneakers, or in a side pocket of his carryall—but one day, she couldn't really remember exactly when, she'd given up.

Fortunately they each had their own apartment and a certain degree of tolerance, and René was a positive, life-affirming guy without any hidden depths to speak of. He seemed to her as calm as her little Lhasa Apso. And when they did occasionally quarrel (about little things), they always ended up in bed where their conflicts and frictions faded away in the soothing darkness of the night.

When Rosalie spent the night at René's place, which happened relatively seldom, because she liked to be close to her store and he lived in the Bastille Quarter, she would, just to please him, eat a couple of spoonfuls of the mush with the dried fruits and nuts that he kept on preparing for her with such enthusiasm—he never ceased to assure her that she would one day develop a taste for it.

She would then smile half-heartedly and say “I'm sure I will, someday,” and as soon as he'd gone she'd scrape what was left in the muesli bowl down the toilet; then on her way to the store she'd buy a croissant, still warm from the oven, from a boulangerie.