Paris in Love (62 page)

Rose wasn’t afraid to say that. She had the gift of knowing, very concretely, that her time was limited, though she certainly didn’t welcome the end. She loved the Dominican Republic, and one year we flew to a resort, just the two of us. The next year we went to the island again, but to a different resort, one she had found online that titled itself Paradise.

Paradise’s claims to be heaven on earth were somewhat exaggerated (the presence of a number of classy prostitutes added an obvious complication), but we had a wonderful time. We swam with dolphins, who were supremely uninterested in us but wildly captivating, like the most beautiful people at a New York cocktail party. We had massages in a small garden walled with flowering trees, and kicked around on the beach at twilight. We drank margaritas, and Rose recited poetry to me in Spanish, a language I do not speak. She was always recommending Latin American novelists and poets, and I always promised to read them, and I never did.

Even then, after years of fighting cancer, she was beautiful: lush, charismatic, full of charm. “I think that waiter has a crush on me,” she told me. And she was right, about him and about our taxi driver, too. Dominicans looked straight past me—tall,
thin, pale, boring—but their faces lit up when they met Rose. She burst with life and Spanish and shining skin. They didn’t have the slightest idea she was dying.

But we both knew that trip to Paradise would be our last together. Rose came to see us in New Jersey just before we departed for France, in June. Loving soul that she was, she had never breathed a word about the unfairness of my optimistic prognosis in comparison to hers, the fact that doctors whisked away my cancer and set me free to live in Paris while they could not conquer hers. We did talk about the fearsome oddness of the two of us—and my mother—being diagnosed with cancer. It felt like a crapshoot, but the black number seemed to be turning up with terrifying regularity.

By this point, Rose had decided to refuse further treatment, and instead she was touring hospices, with as much focused interest as she had researched resorts in the Dominican Republic. I knew it was her decision to make, but I felt selfish, too. I managed to stop myself from pleading with her to reconsider that decision, but I did beg her to visit us.

She shook her head. “I’ll call you,” she told me, “when you need to come.” Her phone call asking me to fly back came sooner than I had imagined, just a few months into the fall.

My mother had been supremely courageous at the end, a stance made easier because she was completely looped on painkillers. She drifted away as drunk as a lord: she told me that there were horses galloping on her covers and tangling with her toes. One night I handed her the phone so that she could speak to my sister, far away in New Jersey. “Why are you parked in a car at the end of my driveway?” she demanded. Her last days were full of imagination; she said that a beloved brother, dead some eight years, was waiting for her in the hallway.

In that situation, one weeps for oneself. “I’m having a good death,” she announced, a few days before she stopped talking.

But Rose … Rose did not have a good death. As it happened, the first day I arrived at the hospice she took that miracle drug, whatever it is, and informed me with a giggle that there were tiny blue butterflies dancing all around my head. But for her the side effects turned out to be even worse than the pain—which meant no more butterflies, no galloping horses … just the clear awareness that death was agonizing days or hours away. The last thing my mother had said to me was that I had a beautiful smile. I’m not sure whether she knew exactly who I was at that moment, but I was so happy to have given her that smile. The last thing Rose said to me was goodbye.

I told her as ferociously as I could that I expected her to wait for me on the other side of whatever bridge she was about to cross. “Do you hear me, Rose?” I demanded. There were tears sliding down her face. She loved Anna and Luca almost as much as Alessandro and I do, so I made her promise that she would meet my children, too, if by some awful twist they went before me. And then there was nothing else to say, so I cried my way down the corridor of the hospice, into my rental car, and back to the airport.

Rose died a few days later, having said goodbye to everyone, tidied up her affairs, and found a home for her cat.

A short time later, back in Paris, a book-size parcel arrived for me. It was from Rose, a last dash of the loving attention she gave so freely. It took me a while to force myself to open that package: I couldn’t bear that it was the last letter, the last present. I thought she had sent me one of those Latin American novels I always promised to read. But instead it was W. G. Sebald’s
Austerlitz
, a novel about grief, memory, the longing to remember, and the longing to forget.

I have spent this year in a kind of Paradise, though one without dolphins or beaches or mountaintops. I often thought of Rose—her Marilyn curls, her big laugh, her fearless
before you die
—while I walked the streets of Paris, and I missed her.

The impetus to move to Paris, to sell the house and the cars and simply fly away, sprang from my mother’s death and my own brush with cancer. But I wonder if I would have acted on the idea without lessons learned from Rose.

So this book is my phone call—not from the top of a mountain, or even the top of the Eiffel Tower: the “here” is negotiable.

It’s so beautiful here. You must come before you die.

This morning Anna said, casually, “I’ll make myself breakfast.” Afterward she reported washing her plate and glass. When I asked if she wanted me to run a bath, she said, “No, I’ll do it.” It was like seeing a movie version of Eloise, in which she suddenly leapt ahead ten years—delightful and frightening at the same time. Though, of course, Eloise would be terrifying at any age.

Yesterday we went to the huge flea market, Clignancourt, looking for a special object to remind us of Paris. We were wandering around looking at antiques when we found a do-it-yourself chandelier store. You choose a base, and then add colored fruits in Bohemian crystal. Their examples seemed to suggest that restraint, color-wise, was a good idea: a chandelier in red and gold, say, or blue and violet. We started with a brass base, and then added violet and gold pears, glowing red bunches of grapes, amber apples, and strings of crystals. It’s crazily wonderful.

Luca has a best friend at camp, a boy who sounds like a caricature of an emotional Frenchman. “He has a crush on this girl,” Luca reported. “And I kind of do, too. I think she may be looking at me. But I told him that I would back off.” Behind-the-scenes détente, teenage division.

Anna is on Chapter Eight of the novel she’s been working on, a riveting tale of naughty children and a runaway pig. Recently she added a new character, a frilly French orphan named Lucille, and today she proposed a chapter that would flash back to Lucille’s mother reading to her. “Too sad,” I objected. “Mama,” Anna said impatiently, “this is a novel! There has to be some crying.”

Our last night in Paris … Florent suggested dinner at one of his favorite restaurants as a way to celebrate our year. Apparently he and Pauline went there for a proper date, post–lemon tart. Le Bistrot du Peintre turned out to be an old-fashioned French bistro on avenue Ledru-Rollin—small and Art Nouveauish—that hasn’t succumbed to the tourist trade and was crowded with Parisians. I had a gazpacho, followed by delicate haddock and new potatoes in a mustard vinaigrette that I thought about all the way home. It was a splendid way to say goodbye to a fabulous year.

Driving back to Florence, we stopped for a night in Beaune, a beautiful walled city in Burgundy. For supper Luca had escargots, which smelled so wonderful that Anna begged and pleaded for one. I was looking at the menu and said, “Anna, look, they have ice cream!” She wailed, “I don’t want ice cream; I want snails!” We ordered more escargots, and champagne (without orange juice) to celebrate: a year in Paris has done wonders for our children.