Paris in Love (2 page)

In August we moved to an apartment on rue du Conservatoire, a two-block-long street most notable for the music that floats, on warm afternoons, from the open windows of the conservatory. We found ourselves in the 9th arrondissement, in a quartier that is home to various immigrant populations, the Folies Bergère, and more Japanese restaurants than I have fingers.

I had made grand plans to write four books while in Paris: a scholarly book about Jacobean boys’ drama in 1607, a couple of romance novels, and a historical novel. But in spite of these inestimable
ambitions, I found myself walking for hours. I read books in bed while rain hit the window. Sometimes I spent two weeks doing one Sunday
New York Times
crossword, toiling every night to solve a clue that likely took Will Shortz two seconds to solve.

Soon enough, I discovered an interesting fact: if a writer doesn’t put in hours at the keyboard every day, no writing gets done. I had always suspected this was true, but having grown up in a family of writers (and a family without a television at that), I never had the chance to test it out. Even during an inglorious, nonacademic spell after college, I returned home after work to plug away at a novel. Remember, my mother sat in her hospice bed correcting copyedits. Leisure didn’t seem to be part of my DNA.

Yet virtually the only writing I did was on Facebook, where I created something of an online chronicle, mirroring it in even more concise form on Twitter. As each day passed, my thumbnail entries fell off the bottom of my Facebook page, relegated to Older Posts. My tweets evaporated, as ephemeral and trivial, as sweet and heedless, as our days in Paris.

A selection of these posts—organized, revised, a few expanded into short essays—has become this book. For the most part, I have retained the short form, the small explosion of experience, as it best gives the flavor of my days.

Those days were organized not around to-do lists and book deadlines but around walks in the park and visits to the fishmonger. Deadlines came and went without a catastrophic blow to my publishing career; I relaxed into a life free of both students and committee work;
laziness
ceased to be a frightening word.

I never did learn how to live in the moment, but I did learn that moments could be wasted and the world would continue to spin on its axis.

It was a glorious lesson.

W
e spent the summer in Italy, then rented a car and drove to Paris. I pictured this drive as the proverbial “quality time,” a charming entrée to a year of creative freedom. But in fact, the children took it as a chance to catch up on missed television, now endlessly available thanks to the Internet. “Look, kids,” I shouted from the front seat. “There’s a glorious château off to our right!” The only response was wild laughter inspired by
Family Guy
riffs on Ronald Reagan. They weren’t even alive for his presidency.

Last night we stayed with friends who own a kiwi orchard in Cigliano, in northern Italy, a misty, dim forest with rows of female trees, heavy with fruit, interspersed with fruitless males. The farmhouse had hooks over the beds to hang drying herbs and sausages. Showing no respect for tradition, Luca freaked out at the “meat hooks” and begged to be allowed to sleep in the car. We managed to keep from our friends his belief that their beloved house was really a charnel.

Back in the car for the final leg of our journey to Paris, Anna played fart noises on her iPod Touch off and on for hours. I tried to ignore the way my ten-year-old had regressed to half that age and kept my head turned to the window. The French highway was lined with short, vertical pipes from which ferns sprouted. The frilly parts made it look as though the troll dolls from my childhood were hiding in the pipes—perhaps waiting for a chance to hitchhike, if the right family were to happen along.

Our Paris apartment is elegant in the way of a Chanel coat found in an attic trunk: worn around the edges but beautifully designed. The building dates to the 1750s, and the wood floors are all original. The kitchen and bathroom are at the far end of a long corridor that bends around one corner of the building’s courtyard—so that the smells (and the servants) would be isolated.

Our
guardienne
, it emerged, is not French but Portuguese, with a round face and a bright smile. Alessandro went downstairs with her and was gone for an entire hour; it seems they discussed the price of vegetables the whole time. He reported that store owners on rue Cadet, the shopping street two blocks over, are all thieves. Armed with this knowledge, and dutifully following instructions, we set out for a covered market, Marché Saint-Quentin, where the vegetables are cheaper and the vendors are honorable. We found a dazzling variety of fruit, including four varieties of grapes: small, glistening purple ones, big violet
ones, green ones with wild sweetness, and tiny green ones with bitter seeds.

We just spent three hours opening a bank account. I thought our charmingly chatty banker would never stop talking. As he carried on, I felt more and more American. He even gave us a phone number to call for advice
diététique
. French women must not be universally thin if they need dietary advice from their bank.

There is a small hotel across the street from our building, and another to our right. Halfway down the street is an enormous Gothic church called Saint-Eugène–Sainte-Cécile. I gather that Cecilia is the patron saint of music; the conservatory is right next door. Being in the church is like being inside an enameled treasure box that a demented artisan slaved over for years. Every surface—pillars, walls, ceiling—is covered with ornament, most in different patterns. We gaped until we were shooed out, as Mass was going on. I was a bit humiliated about not understanding a word, thinking it was my defective French, but it turned out to be entirely in Latin. We’re going to try the American Catholic church instead.

In a wild burst of preparation for ninth grade, Luca has just had his lovely Italian curls straightened. Now he looks like a fifteen-year-old French teen, but with an Italian nose.