Paris in Love (16 page)

We have played good, supportive parents as Anna’s teachers have yelled, stood her against the wall, and kicked her into the hallway. We have kept silent when the math teacher slapped a student with a book and made Domitilla shake in her boots. But today Anna came home in tears after the math teacher mocked her division (or her attempts at it). Alessandro is going in tomorrow, armed for bear. He’s generally very calm, but when pressed, he pulls rank—as a professor and a member of the school board, not to mention a knight. That teacher had better Watch Out.

Anna and I had just entered the men’s department of Galeries Lafayette to meet the male half of our family when Anna said, “Mama! Mama, look at them!” Automatically I began to reply, “Don’t ever point …” when I saw where she was looking and my mouth fell open. Five men were strolling toward us wearing the smallest of tighty-nonwhities. Let me clarify that: five built, gorgeous, model-icious men, wearing only the briefest of briefs. They strolled along, chatting among themselves, advertising (I gather) their itsy-bitsy garments. The male shoppers didn’t seem nearly as entertained as I was. In fact, although the men must have walked next to Alessandro, he claimed not to have noticed.

Papa Bear (i.e., Alessandro) has returned triumphant from the Leonardo da Vinci School! Promises have been made about guarding Baby Bear’s (i.e., Anna’s) feelings. In return, Papa Bear has promised that said Baby Bear will stop chattering in class, will stop forgetting to bring her homework, and will forbear
from announcing (this is a direct quote) “I didn’t learn how to divide in my old school; they don’t teach that in the States.” ’Twas this last that invoked the math teacher’s laughter (described by Anna as mockery), but really, one can hardly blame him.

I
n the grip of a vicious cold, I slunk back to bed after the kids went to school and buried myself in Kate Braestrup’s memoir,
Here If You Need Me
. She is a chaplain attached to the search-and-rescue department of the Maine Forest Service, and her book starts when she suddenly finds herself a widow with four small children.

I started crying on cue, until a little further on in that chapter, when her seven-year-old son suggested that his father had already been reincarnated. As a tiger. At that, I laughed aloud, which turned into a pattern: moved to tears, soothed with laughter. Every once in a while I would glance out at the chilly, blue-gray Parisian sky, cuddle deeper into my down quilt, and pluck another tissue.

Alessandro came in to check on me at one point, sympathetic about my cold but very disapproving when he realized my pile of soggy tissues was the result of tears rather than a virus. “I never cry when I read,” he pointed out, with perfect truth. His nighttime reading, a biography of Catherine the Great, seemed unlikely to generate tears, even from one as susceptible to sentimentality
as I. His book also didn’t seem like much fun, especially after I inquired about the one thing I knew about Catherine—to wit, her purported erotic encounters with equines—and he informed me that the empress was a misunderstood feminist whose sexual inventory, while copious, was nevertheless conservative. Nothing to cry about there.

I shooed my husband out of the room and returned to my book and my Kleenex. Braestrup writes of a “hinge moment”—the second when you hear news that changes your life forever. I wept not just for her brave, funny state trooper of a husband, or for the child who drowned in an icy pool, or for the park ranger who curled his arms to demonstrate to Kate how he carried that child from the lake—but for the fear of that hinge moment in my own life, and the pure gratitude and relief of not having experienced it so far.

While reading, I silently reminded myself that Anna was too old to get lost in the woods, that I was never an outdoors type, that Alessandro hated picnics, that we never let our children out of our sight, and that I was too afraid of Lyme disease to go near a forest. About halfway through I made a mental note to stay away from the state of Maine altogether. Yet from the moment Braestrup describes her husband’s fatal accident, she insists that no matter how
well
or how
carefully
or how
prudently
we love our children or our husbands or our dogs, there are no guarantees, and lives can be wrenched apart by death at any moment. When she writes of grief as a “splintery thing the size of a telephone pole” in your chest, her splinter endangers all the places of your heart.

Later, Alessandro brought me lunch: salad, a little steak, a chunk of Camembert, a clementine, a slice of almond cake for dessert. We ate in companionable silence, until he tried to wrest
the book away. “What’s the good of a book like that?” he wanted to know. “Now you’ll dream about dead people.” I do that anyway. Just a few nights before I had woken in the middle of a sentence that used
Mom
as punctuation. I stared into the dark for a while, trying to remember what she and I were talking about. Were we chatting about books? Was she sitting beside me, telling me something? Or was I only trying to get her attention, calling her name?

That’s what Alessandro doesn’t understand. A day spent crying in bed over stories of lost strangers gives you permission to cry for things over which you have no right to grieve: my children are alive and my mother died almost two years ago. Yet I wake thinking of her. I wish I could call her. I will always want her arms around me. I still want to cry for her.

My sister, Bridget, and her daughters are visiting. Jet lag triumphed and we didn’t make it out of the apartment until six o’clock, when it was already dark and raining. We splashed along to the Centre Pompidou, the modern art museum. Anna and her cousins talked so intently about summer camp that they noticed they were in Paris only when a crepe stand came into view.

Milo has been back to the vet for a follow-up visit. To Marina’s dismay, her Florentine vet labeled Milo obese, even after she protested that “he never eats.” Apparently the vet’s gaze rested thoughtfully on Milo’s seal-like physique, and then he said, “He may be telling you that, but we can all see he’s fibbing.”

We went to a pharmacy to pick up some vitamin C, and Bridget, paying, confused fifty cents with fifty euros (and, it seems, vitamin C with gold dust); she offered the pharmacist three twenty-euro banknotes. The pharmacist’s eyes widened:
“Ooooh, là là!”
he cried. I love moments when I feel as if I’m living in a French movie.

“Our” homeless man is not a deaf-mute, as Alessandro had conjectured. He spoke today, saying
“merci”
when Anna delivered a hopelessly ugly red squeaky toy for his puppy. Every day he sits to the side of the railing guarding the steps to the Métro, very
bundled up and miserable-looking, with his dog in a cardboard box covered by a blanket, and a hat for money in front of the box.

I consider myself an academic before a romance writer, so I tend to particularly enjoy readers’ letters pointing out errors—especially if the reader is wrong. Often I am castigated for using slang that readers are sure is modern but that is actually historically accurate. A favorite new example of this sort of word comes from Caleb Crain in
The New York Times Magazine;
he unearthed a letter from Keats, gleefully informing his brothers of the latest slang term for stopping at a tavern: “they call [it] ‘hanging out.’ ”