Paris in Love (51 page)

But the day was not over.

I had made reservations for Luca’s birthday dinner at a charming country restaurant, acclaimed for its traditional cuisine. Accordingly, we bundled the children into their best clothes—even though getting a teenage boy into a button-down shirt practically takes an act of Parliament—and took off. Yes, there was some tension in the car during the drive there. Luca was brooding over the indignity of my sartorial choices, and Alessandro had taken umbrage at my dislike of the hotel. But I practiced taking deep breaths and calling on the Zen side of myself that I’d always meant to cultivate. No time like the present!

The restaurant’s exterior was hung with ivy and flowers; inside it was all hushed white tablecloths and bowing waiters, and a big sign specifying
NO CELL PHONES
in several languages. We were ushered to our table by a very, very
French
waiter.

I suspect most people grapple with a prejudice of one kind or another. Given how they beam while announcing that they would
never
have guessed I was American, I rather think a lot of French people have zeroed in on my countrymen as the objects of their contempt. As for me? I have, over the course of my life, developed a deep intolerance for the archetypal French waiter: a supercilious, sanctimonious, self-important man in black. I particularly loathe the way such men intimidate their customers into a state of cowed gratitude, from which submissive posture the customers beg for advice—which is invariably delivered with a barely concealed Gallic sneer.

Alessandro now embarked on just such a conversation with our waiter, about champagne. We had decided that a sixteenth birthday should be celebrated with a toast, but because I am wary about children drinking alcohol (a notion both Italians
and French ridicule), I had stipulated mimosas. As our fluent family representative, Alessandro was thus forced to explain the concept of a mimosa to our ever-more-haughty waiter.

It hardly need be said that Monsieur did little to contain his distaste at the idea of pouring
juice
into
wine
. I felt defensive, judged, and outclassed; even Alessandro grew flustered. At that point his cellphone rang. Monsieur’s brow darkened, but Alessandro flipped the phone open and then proceeded to punch the wrong button, putting it in speaker mode at precisely the moment a group of Italian relatives gathered together to scream
“Buon compleanno”
to Luca. A second later they began singing their birthday greetings.

“Close the phone!” I snapped at Alessandro.

“I can’t!” he hissed back. “It’s my
mother
.”

I was now in the throes of deep humiliation. Sedate, decorous couples all around us turned their heads in our direction. To judge by the clamor emitting from the phone, Marina was handing the cellphone around on her end, and a whole tableful of Italians were taking turns shrieking their best wishes to Luca. At this point, Alessandro looked up at the waiter’s glittering black eyes and asked—humbly—“Would it be all right with you if we ordered glasses of champagne for the children?”

Confirmed in his conviction that he was master of the universe, Monsieur stalked away, shoulders tight with scorn, and returned with four large bell-shaped glasses of champagne. Then, with a withering flourish, he put down two unopened bottles of orange juice.

We managed to place our orders, but by then my sixteen-year-old ghost was long forgotten, and I had lost both my control and my self-respect. It wasn’t until Alessandro ventured the opinion that I had better look out or I would turn into my
mother that I decided it was time to remove ourselves from our children’s presence.

“But where are you going?” Anna demanded.

“Tell the waiter we’ve gone to smoke a cigarette,” Alessandro replied.

“You don’t smoke,” she wailed.

Some moments should be relived only between spouses, so I will draw a discreet curtain over the wretched way we screamed at each other in the quiet cobblestone street. By the time we returned to the table—pretty much reconciled to marital existence—our entrées had arrived, and the champagne was gone. Luca, the guest of honor, sat stone-faced, in the grip of an adolescent disgust that I instantly recognized. His face threw me straight back to the summer of the painter’s pants, the boiled tongue, the impending divorce. Meanwhile, Anna had taken advantage of our absence to gulp not only her own champagne but ours as well. She was giggling madly, an empty walnut shell balanced on top of her head. The walnut was serving as a witch’s hat, and she had been amusing herself by acting out the Harry Potter characters one after another for the benefit of her mortified brother. (Have I mentioned this was an elegant, and very dignified, restaurant?)

Early on in our year in France, I had resolved to eat adventurously while here, and in that spirit I had ordered a local delicacy:
tête de veau
. Calf’s head. Now I saw that the
tête
had been transformed into a little pie—over which was draped a limp, ruddy-colored rooster’s comb. Monsieur le Waiter reappeared and explained that a boiled cockscomb was the perfect accompaniment to a pie made of brains, and that they should be eaten together. At this point Luca abandoned his silent protest and made his first contribution to his sixteenth-birthday party: an exaggerated retching noise.

I didn’t even look up to see what the other guests or the waiter made of my children’s behavior. I was too transfixed by the boiled rooster comb.

My father’s penchant for boiled tongue—as well as my mother’s wrath over lavish purchases that the family could not afford—came back to me in a rush.

In one day, I had reproduced an entire summer from my childhood.

The rooster comb brought back the deep despair that reverberated through our family that July—the way no grown-ups noticed that my sister had virtually stopped eating, and the way no grown-ups ever spoke to each other quietly, let alone civilly. Alessandro and I, on the other hand? We could sleep on thousand-thread-count sheets or sheets that felt like grain-sack burlap, and we would still be talking to each other the next morning. We will always notice if one of our children stops eating. We have learned not to hold grudges over Cheapskate Hotels and snide French waiters.

The rooster comb was quite good, in its own way.

The brain pie? Inedible.

Château de Blois was the scene of the Duke of Guise’s murder in 1588 by King Henri III, and there’s a truly creepy feeling knowing that the bedchamber was, as Henry James put it, “the scene of the principal events of [Henri III’s] depraved and dramatic reign.” Children being the depraved and dramatic creatures they are, Anna and Luca fought to stand on the exact spot where Guise was stabbed by eight assailants.

After our visit to the Blois castle, Anna and I decided that the scariest gargoyles aren’t lizardlike or dragonlike, with scales and tails and pointed ears. No, the human gargoyles are far more terrifying, with their blank eyes and toothless, open mouths. They look like the souls Dante describes in the
Inferno
, mouths stretched open in an eternal howl.

In the main square of the town of Blois is a Maison de la Magie—i.e., a magic museum. Six golden dragon heads emerge from windows on the upper story of the museum and roar into the plaza. They have long, wicked snouts and pale blue eyes that seem all the more ferocious for being such a limpid color.

My favorite place in Orléans is the Chocolaterie Royale, where we bought chocolate oranges, almond bark, white chocolate cranberry bark, and—the best—chocolate medallions featuring
the Joan of Arc statue in the main square. Feeling guilty over the hotel debacle, Alessandro kept bringing more to the counter until we had spent approximately half the price of our hotel room on an artisanal-chocolate bender.

For someone like Anna—who spends her days (a) reading Harry Potter books, and (b) examining her hair to see if it curls like Hermione’s yet, and (c) trying to find a stick that might be a magic wand—a jaunt around French castles is like a repeat visit to Disneyland. She squealed at Chambord’s great hall (just like Hogwarts!), greeted the Blois suit of armor (in Hogwarts, suits of armor are quite chatty), and became joyously lost in the maze at Château de Chenonceaux (alas, no magic cup to be found).