Paris in Love (27 page)

Luca has started twice-a-week night classes in French. Because he is bilingual, he has a beautiful accent, but he is still far behind the rest of the ninth-grade class, most of whom have at least one French parent. “What are the other students like?” we asked at dinner. “Older,” he said, with a mischievous grin, and then
refused to say anything other than to observe that their lives were more interesting than his.

Yesterday I ventured back into the Great Sales. I found myself in a dressing room next to a teenager cheerfully driving her mother crazy by trying on sexy clothing.
“Oh, là là!”
Maman cried; from her description the skirt was as high as her daughter’s armpit. The next outfit wasn’t much better.
“Oh, là là!”
Maman exclaimed.
“Oooh, là là!”
For my teenager’s part, Luca slouched off to school today with hair like a toilet brush; it’s so nice to know that teenagers are the same the world over.
OOOH, LÀ LÀ
, indeed.

The huge lingerie department at Le Bon Marché was crowded with tables of markdowns, women ruffling through them as intently as if they were looking in a box of old photographs for their first love. I discovered that French women wear undies of pink pleated satin, fanciful white lace, and translucent pearly silk, but they don’t wear cotton. I left empty-handed, unable to give up my Jockeys for Her for these delectable hand-wash-only confections. Still, I find myself thinking about the bras … perhaps it is time to turn my back on cotton.

Paris is triggering one of the friction points in my marriage. Our apartment was built in the 1700s, and the windows are original.
Brrr
. Alessandro turns the heat down; I hike it back up. He says the heating bill will impoverish us, but I insist on being warm. We have been having this battle for sixteen years. Hopefully, we will have it for many years to come.

Milo is a dog with an undiscriminating palate; today he shredded—and then ingested—a plastic baby bottle belonging to a purring stuffed bear. Anna has been flinging herself around the apartment, melodramatically announcing that now her baby will
staaarve
.

Luca told me he didn’t want to do his homework “because there is no point because in 2012 we will all be blown into dust,” and he will have wasted his time in school. I asked where he learned this crucial and terrifying information, and he admitted “crazy people on the Web. But,” he added, “crazy people are often right.” Cruelly, I continue to ruin his brief time on earth by insisting he study the Romans.

Yesterday our priest’s solo singing during the Mass wavered up and down; a bit later he suddenly dropped a sentence about the importance of baptism, said he felt ill, and walked out. In the United States, the congregation would have instantly started chattering to each other. But the French are utterly composed; the whole church waited silently, and five minutes later another priest dashed in, announced that all was well, and smoothly took up the sermon on baptism.

T
his morning the snow was coming down fast in rue du Conservatoire, slanting sideways and turning the gray slate roofs the color of milk. I leaned against my study window, idly thinking about how passionately children love snow, when I realized that I was peering down at a group of Parisian women in the street below, engaged in the rapid-fire kissing of a wintry hello. Growing up on the farm, we’d braved snowstorms in puffy coats (preferably lurid orange, the better to avoid being targeted by a hunter who’d killed a six-pack rather than an animal); these women wore dark coats belted tightly around their slim waists. As they bent toward each other, pecking like manic sparrows, their scarves flashed magenta, lavender, dull gold. From my vantage point, far above them, they looked like inhabitants of a different world, as dissimilar to me as a gaggle of peacocks to a turkey.

One year, when we had even less money than usual, my mother took down the dining room curtains, which were printed with fifteenth-century sailing ships, and made back-to-school dresses for my sister and me. Even though the politically correct contingent
wouldn’t turn Christopher Columbus from saint to devil for another twenty years, I was an early adherent of the Loathe-the-Conquistador club, thanks to being forced to wear the
Niña
, the
Pinta
, and the
Santa María
all that year, snow or shine.

The Parisiennes in my street had never worn dining room curtains. You could just tell. The moment I allowed that certainty to sink into my mind, unfortunate scenes from my high school years lit up in my memory like a horrible TV show from the seventies. My prom party was held in a gravel pit, though I don’t remember the party nearly as vividly as I do the dress I wore—sadly, I find this to be true of many occasions. I had earned the money for it waitressing at DeToy’s Supper Club. The manager made us wear polyester dirndl skirts and white blouses that pulled down over our shoulders; we looked like von Trapp wannabes. I took my waitressing money and bought a prom dress in the precise shade of pink that would most clash with my hair. My date brought me a bouquet of nearly dead roses. I had to cradle them in the crook of my elbow, but their heads kept slipping off my arm like a drunken woman being carried to bed.

Over the years I’ve tried to explain to Alessandro what growing up on a farm in the upper Midwest, outside a town of 2,242 people, was like. He’s never quite been able to grasp it. He grew up in Florence, Italy, and his experience in, and with, America is largely limited to the East Coast. Furthermore, he has an annoying way of trying to top my stories. If I describe the trauma of circling the gym in a salmon-colored dress to the dulcet strains of “Stairway to Heaven,” he’ll counter with a tale about a family trip to Switzerland.

Thus, when I received an invitation to my twenty-five-year high school reunion a few years ago, it seemed the perfect moment to introduce him to my past. We arrived in Madison to
find that its population had shrunk by more than half. There was one pickup truck halfway up Main Street and—I kid you not—a tumbleweed rolling toward us. I peered at Alessandro to make sure he registered the symbolism, but his face was lit up, reveling in the possibility that gunslingers might leap out from behind the Shear Salon, à la spaghetti westerns that he’d grown up with.

The reunion itself was held in the VFW lounge, which was in a basement. I told myself that it was all going to be different. I was a
professor
now, not to mention a
New York Times
bestselling writer. I could hold my head high; my failure to make the cheer-leading team was far behind me. But alas: the painful glaze of humiliation that plagued me in high school rushed back the moment I saw the same clusters of people, still talking together, two and a half decades later. Though, of course, the subjects of those conversations had changed. “She fired that shotgun right through the ceiling,” one of my classmates whispered. “She was hoping to hit that worthless husband of hers—he was carrying on an affair right in her bed—but instead she shot the sheriff. Got him right in the foot.” I was opening my mouth to ask what the sheriff was doing in the assailant’s bedroom, but she had already moved on. “You did hear about Lindsey-Ray, didn’t you?” I shook my head. “She moved in with seven or eight gay men down in Minneapolis,” she said, “and then got pregnant. Kind of a miracle birth, doncha think?” The drinks had turned out to be vodka with a splash of juice, and Alessandro grew very cheerful, periodically circling back to me to report on his conversations like a slightly drunk Garrison Keillor. “Did you talk to that woman who already has six grandchildren? Amazing!” He shook his head in disbelief. We had barely recovered from toilet training, so he hadn’t noticed that procreation can start early.

After what felt like yet another four-year ordeal, the evening’s
program got under way. A class member who now happened to be the mayor of Madison started awarding prizes. I honestly can’t remember why I won a prize; as with the prom, a sartorial detail eclipsed the main event. When I walked to the front of the room, I was presented with a huge, dingy pair of men’s boxer shorts, stapled to two slats of wood, with a rope slung on the top. A “Norwegian handbag,” the mayor called it. I carried this object back to our table, trying to smile like a good sport.