This apartment came with two small refrigerators, one for food, and one for beverages. The one for food just died. I can push a cauliflower onto the second shelf of the beverage fridge, but it makes the top shelf topple.
Alessandro’s conversation-exchange partner, Florent, said today that he doesn’t understand Italian women, as the object of his affection is so reserved that he has no idea whether he is moving too fast. If she were a French woman, he says, they would already have had a whole relationship, from first kiss to divorce. Apparently French women kiss first and talk later; Alessandro told Florent that’s the pattern of an Italian male. He doesn’t think Florent took the hint, though.
I feel taller every day. This morning I crammed onto a rush-hour train only to discover a very petite Frenchman with his head in my armpit. I had to reach over him to hold on to the bar, and we both stood stiff and embarrassed.
I need to work on developing a new, less irritable personality. Though I suspect that an empty nest would be at least a partial cure, today I resorted to substance abuse. I sallied forth to La Grande Epicerie on rue de Sèvres and bought three different kinds of chocolate: Zanzibar’s oranges en robe (twists of rind with delicious coating), Côte d’Or’s citron gingembre (a bar with ginger and lemon peel), and Michel Cluizel’s noir aux écorces d’orange (a dark bar with tiny chunks of orange).
Anna and I had a tasting test. The winner was Cluizel’s chocolat noir. It’s astounding: deep and rich, with a silky melt.
We have reached a new academic low: Anna brought home a warning note from her Italian teacher about her misbehavior. Rather than being repentant, she was excited by the fact that one of her other teachers had whacked an even naughtier child with a book. We are a nonspanking household, somewhat to Alessandro’s disgust (he thinks he turned out the better for his mother’s corporal discipline). The sheer novelty of seeing an adult lose her temper and respond in a physical manner fascinated Anna. After signing the note, as requested, I have to admit to a surge of acute sympathy for the teachers managing Anna, Domitilla, and what sounds like a berserking horde of ten-year-old boys.
I ran for all of ten minutes today, a new record. My flirtatious butcher was unloading boxes as I jogged past, and blinked at me, probably startled to see me in Lycra. He has long sideburns, the kind you never see in the United States. I wiggled my fingers at him as I trotted by, and then felt painfully self-conscious about my bottom.
In an art gallery: tiny, ornate reliquary boxes, the kind that house a saint’s finger bone. But these contain objets trouvés, the relics of saints we haven’t heard about—my favorite is “Saint Protecteur” (a condom in its jaunty wrapper).
Anna reported today that Domitilla’s gerbil died, an event that should instinctively raise a spark of sympathy rather than raucous laughter … but no. The gerbil fell off the balcony, and then a flowerpot fell on it, after which its eye bulged out (a gory detail of particular interest). Maybe Anna will be a biologist one day. Or a mortician.
My kitchen window looks down into the courtyard, giving me a view of the couple two stories below. The wife seems to spend her evenings canoodling with a small dog, though she and her husband may have a passionate life hidden from those who peer down into the courtyard, spying into their windows. One could not call her chic, exactly, but she is a French sixty, which means that her hair is always perfect and her eyebrows are plucked to perfection.
We had a very painful family dinner last night. Luca is pretty sure that he is doing well in his English language and literature class (not much to applaud about there), but is also quite certain that he’s failing all his other courses. He doesn’t understand math in Italian and believes that the math they’re doing doesn’t exist in the States (we contested this). He was pretty good at English-to-Latin translation at home, but Latin into a complicated Italian past tense is another story. The kids in his French class have French mothers, which explains why they are reading Voltaire although he is at the Captain Underpants stage. We decided to find tutors. In everything. Maybe even in parenting.
When I wander out, the sky is blue and far away. By the time I emerge from the market, pearl gray clouds seem within my reach. The sidewalk is rain-splattered, and the puppy belonging to the homeless man at our Métro stop retreats under his blanket, nothing showing but a little black nose. I put a euro in the cup and hope it goes to dog food rather than cognac.
Today I made gingerbread, only to discover at a crucial point that I had no molasses. I poured in pomegranate molasses instead, since that’s the only molasses I’ve found in Paris. Anna loved it, but Luca wrinkled his nose and said, “Something’s missing.” Maybe he’ll win the palate contest on Hell’s Kitchen someday.
“You know Domitilla’s gerbil that got squished?” Anna asked by way of greeting, after school. “Well, Domitilla just threw it away. Right in the trash can. And do you want to know about her other gerbil?” “Sure,” I said untruthfully. “She couldn’t throw it away because it got lost in the house and died somewhere. So now it’s going to smell. She is really not good with pets.”
My study looks directly onto the gray slanted roofs on the other side of rue du Conservatoire. I love watching rain pour over the slate, creating dark rivers that sheet down the gutters. The cat who lives opposite, whose owner puts her out on the little balcony when she cleans the apartment, is not so enthusiastic about rain.
I just took leftover cauliflower and potato soup, added frozen baby peas and a splash of Thai coriander sauce, threw it all in the blender, and came out with a fabulous soup. Bright green, not to mention healthy, and the children ate every drop.
Marina has put Milo on a diet. Chihuahuas are supposed to weigh about seven pounds, and Milo is more than twenty-seven. He looks like a 1950s refrigerator: low-slung, blocky, and rounded off at the corners. Apparently the vet has suggested vegetables, so for dinner Milo is having lightly steamed broccoli tossed in just a touch of butter, and some diet dog food steeped in homemade chicken broth.
Anna burst out with questions on the Métro today: Do you remember when your boobs started growing? How old were you? Were you fifty? Do your boobs keep growing until you die? I didn’t dare glance around to see how many English speakers might be in the car with us.
Around seven o’clock, the autumn light turns clear and bluish, the color of skim milk. All the waiters lean on the doors of their restaurants, smoking, waiting for customers.
THE ROBIN-ANTHEM
In a single week in November, I mixed up immanent with imminent, paramount with tantamount, and soap with soup. I addressed my friend Philip as “Paris,” and I put a roll of paper towels in the dishwasher, rescuing it in the nick of time.
In the middle of the night, I came to the stark conclusion that my brain must be dying. Words are my stock-in-trade; they are my daily bread. In the dark, it seemed obvious that turning Philip into Paris implied I had picked up a hitchhiking brain tumor. Or (thanks to an article I’d recently read in The New York Times), Huntington’s disease. In the morning, I succumbed to the siren song of Google and typed in “Huntington’s.”
The Mayo Clinic’s website specializes in reassuring language; I quickly gathered that unless and until I started dropping teacups, I was in no danger of that particular diagnosis. Then, just as I was relaxing, I happened on this cheery little passage: “Deciding whether to be tested for the gene is a personal decision. For some people, the uncertainty of whether they carry the faulty gene is stressful and distracting. For others, the knowledge that they will develop the condition is burdensome.”
Burdensome? My first reaction was a snort. I’m finding the knowledge of my hopefully not imminent (or immanent) death burdensome, and I don’t even have a gene to warn me of that rendezvous. But a moment later I realized that I’m a fool to quibble with the Mayo Clinic’s definition of a “faulty gene.” Along with the rest of humankind, I inherited faulty genes, all of which are programmed to die. It’s the knowledge thereof that’s tricky.
W
hen I was young I used to lie in bed at night memorizing poetry. Ours was a poetry-infused household, and I a dutiful oldest daughter. I memorized D. H. Lawrence’s ode to a snake, loving the sound as he “trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down.” I never shared my memorized verses with anyone, especially not my poet father. He seemed to have a thousand poems, even more, stockpiled in his brain. He would erupt at dinner with a bit from King Lear, and then follow up with two quatrains of Blake, and a verse in Swedish. My ambitions were secret and modest by comparison: I wanted a few poems, just a few. I wanted to have those particular words available, to know that Coleridge’s river Alph runs “through caverns measureless to man / Down to a sunless sea” and that Frost’s snowy forest offered a challenge to those “with promises to keep.”
When I went to college I stopped memorizing poetry, thinking that I would pick it up again when I had more time. But as I lay in the dark thinking about how soup foamed into soap, it occurred to me that I may not have world enough and time to memorize the rest of even a very small canon. My grandmother was diagnosed with dementia, and was silent the last decade of her life; my father, my darling father of a thousand poems and more, has taken to watching leaves fall from their trees. Rather than knit those leaves into words, he simply allows them to fall. It’s a cruel fate: to watch without recounting the fall of the leaf; to grieve without creating anew; to age without describing it.
In the last year, as I’ve watched him struggle with the way age is stealing his words, it occurred to me that I should memorize some more poetry, as ballast against my possible inheritance of that good, wordless night. Here, in its entirety, is the poem with which I resumed my memorization: W. H. Auden’s “Their Lonely Betters.”
As I listened from a beach-chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin-Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any, should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying,
There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
On the Métro, Anna pointed out a tiny orange ladybug in the car with us. We watched as she gamely walked upside down across the ceiling and then flew to the ledge above the door. As the subway stopped, I toppled her into my hands and we brought the ladybug up a flight of stairs, down a hallway, up two more smaller sets of stairs … finally into the chilly morning, where she flew into a cluster of glossy bushes.
Anna and I are slowly exploring the grocery stores in the Japanese quarter of Paris. My favorite has a wall of different soy sauces and an upstairs room filled with mysterious foods in exotic packaging. Nothing is labeled in French or English, and we bring things home and puzzle over them.
Alessandro and I followed an exquisite pair of legs out of the Métro today. They were clad in flowery black lace stockings and dark red pumps. Their owner wore a coat with five buttons closing the back flap, and gloves that matched her pumps precisely. We walked briskly up the steps, and I turned around to see the front of the coat, only to find that the lady in question was at least seventy. She was both dignified and très chic. Old age, à la parisienne!
Twelve teens from Luca’s ninth-grade class were out sick today; the H1N1 virus has hit the Leonardo da Vinci High School hard. Luckily, both my kids had got it back in the States, in June. Luca has the same happy glow in his eyes that I used to get while standing at the window watching snowflakes fall in rural Minnesota: will it, will it, will it snow enough to close school? The contemporary equivalent involves refreshing Facebook every five minutes, asking friends if they feel feverish, and hoping desperately (disgracefully) that they do, so that the whole school closes down.
All the buildings lining rue du Conservatoire are constructed of cream marble or limestone. When I went outside today, the sky was pale and fierce, on the very cusp of rain. From the top of the church and the conservatory, the contrast was almost imperceptible, as if marble and air danced cheek to cheek.
I just sent Anna to school with a blotted, misspelled, blood-sweat-and-tears note of apology to her teacher for cheating “a little bit” during an exam. She vehemently protested, telling me that her teacher wouldn’t care, and that it was like writing a letter to Santa Claus apologizing for burning his beard. The logic of the burning beard escaped me, so I just kept saying, “Your teacher has to sign this letter, Anna.”
Last night we went to a bistro gifted with an irritable waiter who brought us tepid skate swathed in salty capers. The menu included a section à l’ancienne, so I chose a unique appetizer: beef snout. It came in little strips, drowned in vinaigrette. The taste? Spam! I know Spam because my father was in World War II and would occasionally have a fit of nostalgia and buy some. And now I know what’s inside Spam, too.
Halfway through an enormous antiques fair, we collapsed into a tiny café overlooking gardens near the Bastille and drank glasses of chocolat à l’ancienne—old-fashioned hot chocolate with whipped cream, topped with a drunk cherry. There was almond laced in there somewhere … it was incantatory. As we sat, savoring our chocolate, the atmosphere turned to l’heure bleue, the sliver of time between afternoon and evening, when the sky is periwinkle.
Two objects at the antiques fair kept me awake last night, and I had to remind myself several times that possessions don’t lead to happiness. The first was a madly improbable Venetian blown-glass chandelier. It was festooned with tiny glass fruit and flowers, and probably dated from the 1950s, taking a crazed glassblower two years of his life. The second was an 1850s mirror, also from Italy. It was framed in black walnut, inlaid with elaborate curlicues and etchings of joyful, inebriated cupids.
The French walk slowly. They amble down the street, meet friends and spend two minutes kissing, then plant themselves, chatting as if the day were created for this moment. My husband and I walk like New Yorkers: fast, dodging obstacles, glancing at windows, going places. It’s taken a few months … but I now keep thinking: Where am I going that’s so urgent, when all these French people don’t agree?
We have migrated from the charming but crowded American church to Saint-Eugène–Sainte-Cécile right on rue du Conservatoire. It turns out that they have a Mass in French as well as the one in Latin (not that it matters to me in terms of comprehension). The priest has nine male acolytes of different ages; incense and little chiming bells are waved around as if they were magic potions guaranteed to increase piety.
We discovered yesterday that our beloved covered market, not to mention the local fishmonger and butcher, is closed on Monday, which left our cupboard bare. For lunch I had a hunk of an excellent Camembert, with a boiled potato sprinkled with coarse sea salt, followed by a leftover apricot tart. Life is good.
Florent, Alessandro’s conversation partner, is going to Italy for a visit, so today they practiced romantic phrases. Florent is going to try to move past cheerful commentary. In Italian, you say “Ti amo” (“I love you”) only to a lover. To everyone else—children, parents, friends—you say “Ti voglio bene,” which roughly means “I wish you well.” It’s very romantic to save I love you only for affairs of the heart.
When it rains on rue du Conservatoire, rainwater pours into subterranean conduits that run underneath the sidewalk. The water rushing through those pipes turns drain holes to tiny fountains, squirting rain a few inches into the air. It’s as if huge clams were signaling that they were digging deeper, under the streets of the 9th arrondisse
ment.
Yesterday we bought little cans of dog food for “our” homeless man, or rather for his puppy, which is growing very fast and developing the awkward paws that promise he will be a large dog. Anna delivered the first can on her way to school. The puppy knows us now, and leaps from his box with a squeaky bark as soon as we get close. He’s a licker, a face licker (of course Anna gets down on his level), but very sweet all the same.
BHV is a huge Paris department store, five floors of everything from lamps to kids’ undies and bright pink whisks. I just spent hours there, ending up in the art materials department, where I bought a book of delicate papers from around the world: paper that has designs sewn on it in gold thread, Japanese tissue paper, papers with wild swirls and elegant fleurs-de-lis. Rather than sending a Christmas card depicting the children smiling under duress, I am determined that we will make our own cards this year.
Anna came home with a big grin and told me that Domitilla had a “time of stress” at the blackboard in math class, as the teacher not only shouted, but pounded his fist on the desk. The truth is that I am failing to instill compassion in this child. I talked to her for five minutes about patience, kindness, and generosity, and then she laughed like a hyena and ran away.