Paris in Love (32 page)

Luca’s New Year’s resolution was to pass ninth grade. Translating arcane verb forms from Latin into Italian (which he speaks fluently but conjugates with difficulty); creating detailed architectural drawings; going to one-man plays in French … this year is stretching him in ways that he never imagined. He would be the first to tell you that he didn’t need any such stretching. But today he aced exams on classical theater and math!

Over the years of raising children I was forced to give up baths for rushed showers, unable even to pee without someone outside the door, wailing. These days, as soon as Anna is in bed, I seek refuge in steaming water. The pages of paperback romances, along with my fingers and toes, wrinkle the way they used to when I was fifteen; my body feels strong, buoyant, unscarred.

This morning Anna and I walked down our narrow little street in the near dark on our way to school. Suddenly a huge flock of starlings swooped down low, flying over our heads between the building to our right and the conservatory to our left, their wings black against the pearly sky. Just before rue du Conservatoire dead-ends in a row of tall buildings on rue Richer, they all turned around and flew back, close enough that we heard the whir of their wings, as if angels swooped down to visit two blocks of a Paris street.

Anna came home from school teary. She was yelled at in French class for misplacing her homework, in Italian class for secretly
reading Harry Potter, in math class for flubbing her exercises, and was kept in at recess for berating a boy who wrote her name on the board (it’s unclear why he felt moved to do so). “There was one good class,” she said, sniffling. “In English, I was the only one who spelled ‘The orange bag is in the bedroom’ correctly.” Forgive me if I don’t get too excited.

Anna had a sleepover guest last night, her friend Nicole. They played Monopoly until Nicole said (in French), “Told you I was great!” and Anna answered (in English), “Let’s jump on my bed!” This morning I made pancakes, which Nicole promptly rolled up like crepes; Anna followed suit. I am dazzled by the novelty of my daughter’s life, but she is not. “When are we going home?” she just asked. “You said a year, and we’ve been here two years already, easy.”

Alessandro and I walked to our covered market today and discovered that the very first narcissus of the year are for sale. They’re sweet-scented, pale yellow with bright orange centers, and smell indisputably of spring. We bought some, and when we walked outside, snow was falling. My spring flowers arrived home dusted with a bit of winter.

The right aisle of our church is the province of elderly men seeking handy access to the bathroom. A worthy gray-haired burgher with a generous stomach and a walrus mustache always sits just to the right of the altar. Anyone on his way to the bathroom pauses to shake hands with him and exchange a quiet
word. Monsieur la Moustache looks like the mayor in an old French movie: the Mayor of the Men’s Room, the Lord of the Lavatory.

When you exit the station at Champs-Élysées, before you reach the commercial end of the street, you walk a long path adorned with a revolving pop culture exhibition presented on huge placards. Earlier this year, there were blowups of vintage
Vogue
covers. Now? Clint Eastwood. It’s odd to find the raw western antihero himself gracing Paris’s most iconic street.

My father is recovering from a broken hip; wanting to give him something both beautiful and useful, Alessandro and I headed out to Cannes Anciennes de Collection, a cane shop with Chinese canes carved with birds, and antique French canes topped with cheerfully naked nymphs. We found a fascinating walking stick, made for a country vet around 1900. The top unlatches to reveal a secret stick, used to measure the height of a horse. My grandfather was a farmer, and my father still hankers after open fields; this will make him very happy.

The Invalides Métro station at 8:30 in the morning smells like buttered toast, which makes me remember my mother, slathering butter onto homemade bread. Today Anna said dreamily, “I love this brand-new croissant smell.” I realized that she is creating her own buttery memories, to be recalled decades from now.