Paris in Love (50 page)

We discovered a wonderful crêperie, Breizh Café, which makes classic Breton crepes from dark buckwheat flour. The menu is marvelously varied, from savory to sweet. I had a crepe made with bitter orange marmalade and Cointreau. Set aflame, naturally. We sat next to a grandfather and his eight- or nine-year-old grandson. They each had a huge classic crepe—with just a dusting of sugar. They ate them up, and then Grandpa summoned the waiter: two more of the same! They talked about lions, about
how fast and fierce they are. I thought of a kindly grandpa lion, lying in the shade of a baobab tree, sharing bones and stories with a cub.

Math exams are still terrifying prospects for Luca. He has a tutor once a week, and many nights he and Alessandro work late, puzzling out his calculus homework. A few days ago he came home despondent; there had been a test, and while comparing answers with others after class, Luca discovered that no one had come up with the same numbers he did. But today the grades were handed out. Guess who got the second-best grade in the class?

My beloved father is losing his memory. Today I got a letter from him, with the correct street address but without my name, or indeed any name. Luckily, our mail carrier figured out that letters from the United States were probably for us. Inside, Dad enclosed a copy of his lovely poem, just published in
The New Yorker:
“I have daughters and I have sons.” I am so afraid of the day when there are no more poems, or letters.

Luca’s Italian literature class just finished reading Homer’s
Iliad
, the ancient story of warriors storming the city of Troy. His friends have nicknamed one of their classmates Achilles because he’s always angry and destructive; indeed, classroom chairs and tables have toppled before his wrath. Alessandro suddenly recalled a boy in his middle school class who’d been labeled Fast-Footed Achilles because of his speed. There’s something to be said about the downfall of culture in these two examples.…

Last week I wrote about kicking my way through drifts of flowers, and today I learned that Claude had the same experience. His flowers covered the ground like “white foam,” and his eyes filled suddenly with tears in response to “the unfettered soul of beauty.” I might have to stop reading his book. Claude’s overblown rhetoric makes me feel both surly and superior, a bad combination. I suspect that my irritation stems not from his sentimentality but from the fact that he is indisputably my predecessor, if not my prototype: we are describing the same flowers, albeit one hundred years apart. I don’t like to think of my great-niece chortling over my rhetoric, but I suspect it’s inevitable.

A
ll good Minnesotans head “up North” in July, landing alongside Canada geese at lakes crowded with speedboats and pasty-legged vacationers of Scandinavian descent. My clearest memory from my family’s northerly adventures was the summer when my parents were splitting up. I can’t bring to mind their actual fights (though I was dimly aware that finances and infidelity were pressing concerns); I wasn’t paying attention. Who had time? I was sixteen, and obsessed with earning the money to buy myself a pair of white painter’s pants with a little loop on the side, clearly designed for a teenage boy to hook his finger through. A deep tan would have been a cheaper route to “hot babe,” but since my gene pool ruled that out, I had fixated on those pants as the key to landing a boyfriend. The effort required to keep this magical thinking afloat meant that I had no mental energy left with which to dissect my parents’ surging, embarrassing emotions.

That summer my father was in charge of making lunch, which wasn’t unusual; my mother embraced shared housework the moment Betty Friedan put pen to paper. But Dad’s repertoire
was not large: scrambled eggs, spaghetti, applesauce—and tongue. He specialized in big, boiled tongues. Because grocery shopping had broken down in the face of escalating hostilities, a hunk of tongue always seemed to be on the kitchen counter, labeled “lunch.” I would stare at it, repulsed, until I became so hungry that I would douse a piece in salt and choke it down, my own tongue curling in an effort to avoid the pebbled texture. My sister, who was both more sensitive and more slender, skated near anorexia from pure tongue-loathing. My appetite was stronger than my revulsion; I did not lose a pound, but I did lose all respect for my parents.

Had anyone asked me at the time, I would have confidently asserted that I would never expose my future children to the revolting sights and sounds of marital strife. To our credit, Alessandro and I largely succeed in avoiding acrimony; steering clear of infidelity helps. Still, as they were for my parents, vacations are when we break into open warfare—and our flash point is money. To put it in a nutshell, I like a good splurge; my husband, on the other hand, can be frugal to a fault. Vacation puts such differences front and center.

Even before we decided to move to Paris, we had talked of a visit to the Loire Valley and its castles, and eventually we decided the trip should also celebrate Luca’s sixteenth birthday. I was in charge of finding a suitable restaurant for the birthday dinner itself; Alessandro’s mission was to find a hotel within driving distance of several castles. On a website boasting cheap deals, he found a hotel offering a suite, with a living room and kitchen, at an amazing rate. Because the hotel was brand-new, it hadn’t been reviewed. That was a bit worrisome, but the price was low enough to overcome such fiddling fears.

By this point in the book, you may have deduced that I have a
weakness for luxury. When it comes to hotels, sheets with thread counts higher than the national debt make me happy, as do little bottles of shampoo, particularly if labeled in the imperative: “Nourish,” for example. Or “Enhance.” From our first glimpse of the Cheapskate Hotel, I realized there would be no such civilizing treats. The rental car’s GPS disclaimed knowledge of the address, but somehow we chanced on an unpaved road running around an industrial complex, ending at a construction site on which a naked concrete building rose from the dust. Voilà. Our hotel.

Having checked in at a linoleum-covered counter, we were directed to a room on the fourth floor, where we emerged from the elevator to discover—the hard way—that the corridors were illuminated by motion-detector lights on a slight delay. Standing in the pitch dark, we froze until fluorescent tubes spasmed on, revealing dispiriting gray industrial carpeting—whose color continued straight into the rooms. Not that the color of our suite’s carpet was much in evidence: the previous occupants had thrown quite a party, judging by the dirty dishes, the pyramid of empty wine bottles, and the way cigarette ashes sprinkled the carpeting like dandruff on a church warden.

Downstairs, the manager threw up his hands and sent us to another suite, this one on the third floor. We opened the door to a room that had apparently been shared by about three dozen backpackers, if the sand dune–size debris pile left behind was any indication. By this point I had moved from dismay to open revolt, and headed back downstairs prepared to make a break for freedom and a hotel with three stars—or even
one
. And then came the moment of truth: Alessandro confessed that he had prepaid the entire week. “Third time lucky!” he said, trying for a jaunty air. But he came off sounding like a flight attendant offering
a second bag of pretzels during a five-hour tarmac delay. In response my face took on the snarl of a saber-toothed tiger. While this is a look those long-suffering flight attendants are probably used to, my children were not.

Will it surprise you to learn that the third time was
not
lucky? This time we schlepped our bags to the second floor, where the kitchen sink turned out to be free from dirty dishes. But we hardly noticed, too riveted by the smoke-blackened windows, intricately crazed in cobwebby patterns. It seemed that the hotel backed onto train tracks (which, as we learned later, handled an active timetable), and there had been a fire under the railroad bridge. One might surmise that the fire originated in the ramshackle shantytown under the bridge, but such speculation was irrelevant. We had identified the tenor of the neighborhood just by checking in.

“If I push this,” Anna observed, running a finger over the crazed glass, “the window kind of bulges out. See? Isn’t that cool?”

My heart was beating in a way that suggested an imminent stroke, so I retreated into the master bedroom. The bed bore a concave impression, perhaps of a person who had relaxed there to watch television while she should have been cleaning other rooms, and who was kind enough to have left the TV on so that guests could enjoy it. By that point, I wanted nothing more than to charge back into the living room and scream insults at my spouse while throwing my suitcase through that disintegrating window. But the ghost of my sixteen-year-old self stood at my shoulder, whispering, “Not in front of the children.” I gritted my teeth, lay down, and watched TV—which, of course, was in French, so I didn’t understand a thing. At that point, I couldn’t have imagined that things could get worse.