Paris in Love: A Memoir

  I told her as ferociously as I could that I expected her to wait for me on the other side of whatever bridge she was about to cross. “Do you hear me, Rose?” I demanded. There were tears sliding down her face. She loved Anna and Luca almost as much as Alessandro and I do, so I made her promise that she would meet my children, too, if by some awful twist they went before me. And then there was nothing else to say, so I cried my way down the corridor of the hospice, into my rental car, and back to the airport.

  Rose died a few days later, having said goodbye to everyone, tidied up her affairs, and found a home for her cat.

  A short time later, back in Paris, a book-size parcel arrived for me. It was from Rose, a last dash of the loving attention she gave so freely. It took me a while to force myself to open that package: I couldn’t bear that it was the last letter, the last present. I thought she had sent me one of those Latin American novels I always promised to read. But instead it was W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz, a novel about grief, memory, the longing to remember, and the longing to forget.

  I have spent this year in a kind of Paradise, though one without dolphins or beaches or mountaintops. I often thought of Rose—her Marilyn curls, her big laugh, her fearless before you die—while I walked the streets of Paris, and I missed her.

  The impetus to move to Paris, to sell the house and the cars and simply fly away, sprang from my mother’s death and my own brush with cancer. But I wonder if I would have acted on the idea without lessons learned from Rose.

  So this book is my phone call—not from the top of a mountain, or even the top of the Eiffel Tower: the “here” is negotiable.

  It’s so beautiful here. You must come before you die.

  This morning Anna said, casually, “I’ll make myself breakfast.” Afterward she reported washing her plate and glass. When I asked if she wanted me to run a bath, she said, “No, I’ll do it.” It was like seeing a movie version of Eloise, in which she suddenly leapt ahead ten years—delightful and frightening at the same time. Though, of course, Eloise would be terrifying at any age.

  Yesterday we went to the huge flea market, Clignancourt, looking for a special object to remind us of Paris. We were wandering around looking at antiques when we found a do-it-yourself chandelier store. You choose a base, and then add colored fruits in Bohemian crystal. Their examples seemed to suggest that restraint, color-wise, was a good idea: a chandelier in red and gold, say, or blue and violet. We started with a brass base, and then added violet and gold pears, glowing red bunches of grapes, amber apples, and strings of crystals. It’s crazily wonderful.

  Luca has a best friend at camp, a boy who sounds like a caricature of an emotional Frenchman. “He has a crush on this girl,” Luca reported. “And I kind of do, too. I think she may be looking at me. But I told him that I would back off.” Behind-the-scenes détente, teenage division.

  Anna is on Chapter Eight of the novel she’s been working on, a riveting tale of naughty children and a runaway pig. Recently she added a new character, a frilly French orphan named Lucille, and today she proposed a chapter that would flash back to Lucille’s mother reading to her. “Too sad,” I objected. “Mama,” Anna said impatiently, “this is a novel! There has to be some crying.”

  Our last night in Paris … Florent suggested dinner at one of his favorite restaurants as a way to celebrate our year. Apparently he and Pauline went there for a proper date, post–lemon tart. Le Bistrot du Peintre turned out to be an old-fashioned French bistro on avenue Ledru-Rollin—small and Art Nouveauish—that hasn’t succumbed to the tourist trade and was crowded with Parisians. I had a gazpacho, followed by delicate haddock and new potatoes in a mustard vinaigrette that I thought about all the way home. It was a splendid way to say goodbye to a fabulous year.

  Driving back to Florence, we stopped for a night in Beaune, a beautiful walled city in Burgundy. For supper Luca had escargots, which smelled so wonderful that Anna begged and pleaded for one. I was looking at the menu and said, “Anna, look, they have ice cream!” She wailed, “I don’t want ice cream; I want snails!” We ordered more escargots, and champagne (without orange juice) to celebrate: a year in Paris has done wonders for our children.

  Overnight, we have gone from the sublime (Beaune, France) to the ridiculous (Pavia, Italy). Rather than a splendid four-star hotel, we could find rooms only in a dingy hotel on a strip, with ripped holes in the towels (the first time I’ve seen that!). And rather than snails, we ate at Grillandia, where they were having Spanish night, with buxom, faux-Spanish dancers and a rice mix from a box. Even Anna allowed that she missed Paris.

  Before we leave Pavia, we are dragging our less-than-enthusiastic children to see the tomb of Saint Augustine, after which we will drive the three hours to Florence, back to Marina and Milo. Marina said defensively on the phone last night that we shouldn’t expect to see a thinner Milo, because it’s too hot in Florence to expect a dog to diet. Some things never change.

  THE END

  When I’m writing a novel, typing “The End” is the best moment of all, because by then I’m desperate to be finished—generally late for my deadline, exhausted, unkempt, and irritable. Yet I’m reluctant to type the final page of Paris in Love. Putting these last words on paper brings a close to an experience that I hate to see slip into the past, even though as I write this essay, we’ve been living in New York City for almost a year. But of course, even while we lived on rue du Conservatoire, time was slipping through our hands. Alessandro and I had jobs to which we had to return, but we had nowhere to live. We had sold our house and cars, planning to buy an apartment … sometime.

  After Christmas, we both realized with a jolt that the time had come. Two very nice realtors named Curtis and William lined up a series of apartment visits for us. Somewhat to their consternation, we decided to give the search exactly three days. We flew in on a Friday in February, and by five o’clock that afternoon we were inspecting apartments in the peculiar state of anxiety that goes along with buying something costing approximately the same as a small Polynesian island. Maybe even one that comes with a village or two. We were dazed by jet lag, but not enough to overlook the fact that the first apartment we saw was the only one in our size and price range located in our preferred neighborhood. And it had a long built-in bookshelf. Nevertheless, in the interests of due diligence, we spent the rest of the weekend struggling up and down Broadway in a snowstorm, tramping our way into strangers’ living rooms. But nothing appealed after that first one; I compared every bookshelf to the first, and found them lacking. On Monday morning, we went to see our realtors and put in a bid. The experience was surreal; our mortgage was going to be so huge it felt like Monopoly money. And the next morning we discovered that our offer was accepted.

  But we still faced the dreaded co-op approval process. In New York, most people don’t really buy their apartments; they merely buy shares in a co-op. And before the members of a co-op board deem you worthy to live within their hallowed walls, they have the right to see all your financial records (and when I say all, I mean going back to your first job at DeToy’s Supper Club), not to mention the fact you have to pass a personal interview with the board, as do your children and, if you’ve got one, your dog. We flew back in May for the co-op interview, knowing that the outcome was by no means a foregone conclusion: in fact, William and Curtis were a bit depressed when we arrived, since a co-op board had inexplicably turned down another of their clients that very morning. They left us on the doorstep with a few final, anxious bits of advice about not venturing any unasked-for personal details because almost anything might trigger someone’s dislike. It seemed obvious that prejudice and personal bias could hold sway—and with impunity. We hoped there was no one in the bunch who hated romance writers. Or literature professors. Yale alumni! Italians! The possibilities were endless.

  (I must add here that only one thing had scared me more than the co-op board, and that was the bedbug epidemic in New York. Even over in Paris, we’d heard that the entire
city was crawling with them. Happily, I no longer had worries about this particular apartment, because at the same time we’d allowed the co-op board to ransack our financial history, demand numerous personal recommendations, and even interview our children by Skype, we asked for one, and only one, thing in return: the right for our lawyer to scour the minutes of co-op board meetings, going back decades, in search of that panic-inducing word: bedbugs. It was nowhere to be found.)

  At the inquisition, once we’d cleared up a few questions (such as whether I had to return a publisher’s advance if one of my books failed—the answer is no), I began to feel cautiously optimistic. Everybody was smiling. They were talking about holiday parties. Then the chair of the co-op board leaned forward and said, “There is nothing personal about this question, but I’m afraid that I do have to ask whether you have been in contact with bedbugs.” Alessandro broke out laughing and explained my deep-rooted phobia, the only factor that would have made us turn down an apartment as lovely as this one. At which point an older gentleman piped up, “Oh, you shouldn’t be so scared; I had them last year.” As it happened, the interview was taking place in his very apartment. Every head at the table whipped around to stare at him. He nodded to a door at his shoulder. “They came in a suitcase that had been incorrectly routed through Bolivia,” he said cheerfully. “We figured it out when a guest staying in our guest room got bitten, so we had them taken care of.”

  Alessandro gave me a sharp kick—the marital equivalent of don’t scream—but I was too shocked to respond anyway. I was thinking that this apartment was directly below the one we’d just bought. “How long ago did you say this happened?” the board chair asked, in what I considered an admirably controlled manner. I emerged from a sickening panic attack only when I realized that the conversation had moved on, and now concerned a person living in the building who apparently did not always take his medication. The board was giving us a heads-up about his occasionally erratic behavior. “He can be rather abrupt with children,” one member said, “and they may think he’s attacking them, but he’s really not aggressive.” “He’s our lamb, our community project,” someone else offered. “He’s never attacked my children,” said a third. “Then you’re lucky,” the first board member shot back.

  We reeled out into the snow and walked precisely one block before I stopped to call our realtors and babble into the phone about bedbugs and unmedicated crazy people. Eventually, Alessandro managed to drag me away from the phone (by then I had Curtis listing pest control agencies that would guarantee total annihilation) and into a restaurant. Once I had a glass of wine in hand, my husband pointed out that a person doesn’t move to New York City if she really wants to be living in a placid, vermin-free suburb. We were moving to the city precisely so that we would never have to conduct another conversation about weed trimmers or oil changes. We would have other, more thrilling, subjects of discussion: to wit, bedbugs and schizophrenics.

  It took a while, but I came to see his point.

  New York would be an adventure, whereas New Jersey (for us) had been an existence. As it happened, our apartment proved to be, indeed, free from bedbugs, and we have come to know many, if not all, of the people in our building … without ever identifying the person who may or may not be taking his medication.

  In the past year, I have discovered the shop of a chocolate artisan half a block from the apartment. I have been asked (most politely) if there are any devils standing beside me on the subway platform. I have survived not bedbugs but three separate infestations of lice, mercifully limited to the younger members of the family. I have used my Parisian cocottes to make chocolate cakes, and worn my black boots to department meetings. Anna embraced the city happily, and Luca (who now says he is going to college in France) announces on a regular basis that he hates it. Though the children have reversed places, the opposition feels cozily familiar.

  Paris in Love is about a tremendously joyful year, one that I sometimes remember now through a rosy haze of chocolate and lingerie. But the joy didn’t come from chocolate alone. Surrounded by people speaking a different language, our family started talking to each other. We drew into a very small tribe (population: four), who ate together, and squabbled together, and mostly played together. We learned to waste our moments—together.

  And then we brought that lesson home with us.

  The End

  Paris in Love is dedicated to my family: to my beloved

  Alessandro and to my children, Luca and Anna,

  who unwittingly provided much of the humor in it.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people played a role in bringing Paris in Love to print. Carrie Feron was the first to tell me that our adventures in Paris should be turned into a book. The terrific food blog One for the Table published an early version of the Christmas essay. My fierce and fabulous agent, Kim Witherspoon, championed the project, and my brilliant editor, Susan Kamil, instantly understood it, gave it a home, and lent her perfect pitch to moments of both humor and sadness. Anne Connell painstakingly read every word and improved the text immeasurably. I was lucky that many wonderful people at Random House devoted so much time to designing and launching this memoir. I owe all of you a debt of deep gratitude. And finally, I would like to thank the friends and readers who begged me to tell them more stories of Paris: your enthusiasm taught me a new way to write.

  MY VERY IDIOSYNCRATIC GUIDE TO A FEW PLACES IN PARIS

  A SHORT LIST OF SMALL MUSEUMS WORTH SEEING

  Only you know whether you have the stamina for the Louvre and d’Orsay museums. I myself do not. I enjoy museums that take an hour or so to go through. Rather than try to rush past 300,000 paintings in the Louvre, or, worse, shoving aside your fellow tourists to see the Mona Lisa, you can wander through these museums in relative comfort.

  Musée Claude Monet à Giverny. Monet’s foundation at Giverny is easy to reach by train from Paris. Take the Paris-to-Vernon train, and then the shuttle bus from Vernon to Giverny (just follow the crowd). The train leaves every two hours or so, and the shuttle meets it. They have a gift store that displays an earnest belief that water lilies enhance everything from aprons to pencils. www.fondation-monet.fr/fr

  Les Arts Decoratifs. This is a small museum connected to the Louvre devoted to decorative arts—furniture, china, accessories. There are many reasons to go here: the collection of 1960s furniture, the collection of 1800s furniture, fascinating revolving exhibits … and the appealing fact that there is generally no line. www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr

  Musée Jacquemart-André. My favorite museum in all of Paris. I mention some of the collection in this book. Be sure to get the audiotape; I actually listened to all the “extra” sections, and they were worth it. Afterward, have lunch or tea in the Salon de Thé, which is located in the house’s original dining room (there’s an incredible Tiepolo ceiling). 158 boulevard Haussmann. www.musee-jacquemart-andre.com

  Musée de la Vie Romantique. To be honest, this museum doesn’t have anything utterly fabulous in it—no Renoirs or Fragonards. But it’s a preserved home from the 1800s and is fascinating in its own right; George Sand’s drawing room, for example, is beautiful. It’s small, and there’s a terrific tea shop in the garden where the kids can dash about. 16 rue Chaptal. www.vie-romantique.paris.fr

  Musée Nissim de Camondo. One of my favorite museums; don’t miss it. Not only are Count Moïse de Camondo’s possessions fascinating, but his story is heartbreaking. And the French have not shrunk from depicting the truth of what happened to his family during World War II. Be sure to get the audio guide. 63 rue de Monceau. www.lesartsdecoratifs.fr/francais/nissim-de-camondo

  Plus, when you walk though Parc Monceau from the Métro, keep an eye out for brides. The park in front of Musée Nissim de Camondo is one of the favorite places for bridal pictures.

  After the museum, recover your spirits by walking back through the park and then stopping at La Table Monceau. It’s not fancy, but the food is great, and the clientele are all Fre
nch, which is always interesting (1 rue de Phalsbourg). If you’d rather have a cup of tea and an excellent pastry, walk from Parc Monceau down boulevard de Courcelles to La Petite Rose, a charming little patisserie. I met a friend here for tea. We sat for hours discussing everything from babies to dementia (one leads naturally to the other). The pastries are wonderful. 11 boulevard de Courcelles.

  Musée Carnavalet. This is the museum of Paris. It can be summed up as a lot of separate rooms full of furniture that were bought outright and stuck into a jumbled-up museum. As that description implies, Carnavalet doesn’t really belong on a list of small museums; after a while, you might find yourself staggering with exhaustion. So don’t get encyclopedic; just take a look at the rooms devoted to the reigns of Kings Louis XV and XVI. 23 rue de Sévigné. www.carnavalet.paris.fr

  In the Marais. I am putting together a list of a few places in the Marais because so often people don’t have a week—let alone a year—to enjoy Paris. If you have only twenty-four hours, the Marais is a good place to go; a plus is that the stores are open on Sundays.

  IN THE MARAIS

  Brunch at Des Gars dans la Cuisine. You must have a reservation. Try to sit in the window and watch everyone prancing by. 72 rue Vieille-du-Temple. www.desgarsdanslacuisine.com

  Ironically enough, my favorite store in the Marais, Noriem, is Japanese. They make incredible crinkled-fabric coats that you can sling over anything and always look elegant—plus they’re machine-washable and never crease (because they’re already creased). Expensive, but worth every penny. 27 rue Vieille-du-Temple in the Marais; they have another address as well, 4 rue du Pas-de-la-Mule. www.noriem.fr