by Eloisa James
When I arrived at college, straight from a Minnesota farm, I was terrified by the kids in cashmere and linen who had spent their holidays skiing in the Alps. The memory of those boys—“euros,” we called them, long before that word defined a continent’s currency—remained repressed until yesterday, when I took Luca shopping. He picked out three things in five minutes: dark red jeans, a crinkly pink T-shirt, and a torso-hugging, finely knit sweater. He now looks precisely like the boys who petrified and intimidated me … because he is one. I have given birth to the enemy.
I have developed a fail-safe way to cook fish with skin: you first cut a crisscross pattern in the skin. Then you rub the flesh with a seasoning mixture containing at least a hint of curry (Galeries Lafayette has a freshly ground mixture labeled “couscous”). Heat some olive oil over a high flame and sauté the fish skin side down (if it’s a whole fish, turn it once). When it’s browned, pour lemon juice over it and pop it in the oven for five minutes if it’s not already white and flaky. This will give you a crisp, crackling skin and a faintly exotic flavor that even children will enjoy.
I’m sitting at my desk, just before seven in the morning. The sky outside my study window is a kind of pearl blue, so pale that it looks like the shadow of blue, or the memory of blue. Swallows are swooping over the rooftops across from me, flashing black across the sky and disappearing again.
I am having a new experience with the book I’m writing, a Regency version of Beauty and the Beast. Ordinarily I slave over my characters’ lines, endlessly rewriting them. But this book is different. It’s as if I were describing a movie happening right before me, which makes me feel oddly delirious.
Months in Paris have done nothing for my appalling French. This Sunday in church I was singing along merrily, half-thinking about the words. So nice, I thought, here we are singing that Jesus freed the fish: “nous libérant du péché.” … No, no, that can’t be right. Maybe it’s a union song and Jesus freed the fishermen. Alessandro informs me that Seigneur Jésus freed us from sin. Sins, not sardines.
Florent and Pauline have finally broached the subject of romance with each other. Alas, when he laid his heart at her feet, she replied that she wasn’t ready for a long-term commitment. He replied that she was like a lemon tart that he could see in a window but couldn’t eat. He won my heart with that metaphor—though Alessandro pointed out (again) that if Florent were Italian, he would be in the patisserie and picking up the tart already.
It’s getting warmer in France, and Parisian women have broken out their shorts. They go to work in the morning wearing tight knee-length shorts, often cuffed (and sometimes even in denim). These are combined with dignified jackets and high, high heels. The result is—rather to my surprise—stylish rather than skanky.
I have finished my version of Beauty and the Beast! To celebrate, we went out to our local Thai restaurant and discussed titles. Because my hero was inspired by the television program House M.D., the kids are championing “The Cranky Cripple and the Bodacious Bride,” but my editor tossed that for When Beauty Tamed the Beast. I like it, though I’m secretly afraid that my hero remains untamed as ever.
I was sitting at a café when an adorable two-year-old toddled past, wearing black tights, a black-and-white checked dress, and a black sweater. And a black barrette. No wonder Parisians are effortlessly sophisticated—they learn the virtues of a little black dress when we’re all still wearing Disney T-shirts emblazoned with pink rhinestones and sunglasses to match.
I always jog down rue La Fayette, so that I can stop in front of Graziella, a minuscule store with two or three garments at most in its window. Everything they design and sell is striking, with flair and drama. The pieces, especially a coat with a flared collar and fabulous buttons, bring to mind an old Katharine Hepburn movie.
We are sending Luca and Anna to Italian tennis camp. Luca will follow that up with two more weeks of French tennis camp. He’s furious about our social planning. Given his druthers, he would sleep all day and be on Facebook (or worse) all night. But we retain sovereignty, for a little while longer.
THE HORROR THAT IS THE SCHOOL PLAY
My mother often said that her life ambitions were to marry a poet and become a ballet dancer. I have to suppose it was thwarted ambition that led to my sister and me being given dancing lessons. I have one memory, mercifully dim, of performing in a school play. I was an autumn leaf, prancing across the elementary school cafeteria with brown crinkly paper bobbing at my waist. I felt lumpish and decidedly unleaflike, and I was dismally aware that a gift for dancing hadn’t emerged in my gene pool.
My children have inherited my regrettable genes: we’re the spear carriers of school productions, ready to swell a chorus or play an attendant lord, or even, if needed, the Fool—but nothing more ambitious. This year, for the Italian school’s production in French, Anna did not even achieve the level of the Fool. Luckily, her aspirations are commensurate with her thespian talents, so she was unperturbed when assigned the roles of a clock and a fly.
On the morning of the performance, she dressed all in black, as befits a fly. The only black T-shirt she has is emblazoned with the Ramones, so we instructed her to turn it inside out before going onstage, to ensure that the audience wouldn’t think she was a punk insect. Her speaking responsibilities were small, but she did have to announce the time twice—in French, as she pointed out in a last-minute fit of nerves. Tic-tac!
On the way to school I asked her what the play was about, but she didn’t seem to really know. She told me, rather uncertainly, that there was an old woman who died. It sounded like a Grimms’ fairy tale to me. Wasn’t there an old woman who ate a fly and died? But Anna assured me that she wasn’t eaten.
That afternoon Alessandro and I arrived early for the performance and found Anna buzzing around the gym in her black outfit, now rounded out by a purple beak. This seemed remarkably unlike the flies I have known, and on inquiry it turned out that she’d mistaken her role—she wasn’t a fly after all, but a little devil who buzzes around the dying woman as part of a bad dream. The plot was starting to sound oddly grim, even Kafkaesque. We settled in our seats to enjoy Dora the Dead as opposed to Dora the Explorer.
The ten-year-old “old lady” was recognizable front and center, wrapped in a blanket. But that was the last thing we understood. For one thing, Italian children babbling in French are none too intelligible. For another, the plot was made yet more obscure by the children’s creative interpretations of their roles. A rather disaffected young girl, for example, kept taking long drafts from an (empty) wine bottle. I never figured out what her relationship to the dying woman was, or why she was courting inebriation, although Anna later informed me she was the narrator.
The plot grew even murkier as the inevitable technical glitches occurred. The mechanism drawing the curtain got stuck and started banging. The actors glanced upward and nervously continued jabbering in a way that suggested they comprehended about 50 percent of their lines, and really didn’t mind if we in the audience comprehended zero. Devils came and went, dancing angels appeared, the clock’s alarm went off (we enjoyed that), the drunk strode around the stage muttering. The audience began to have fits of laughter at inappropriate moments, which rattled the already perplexed actors.
The performance was slowly moving toward Anna’s big moment—the clock’s declaration of the time—when the “old lady” suddenly up and died. The other performers seemed rather surprised, but they gamely gathered around as she threw off her blanket and danced, in a rhythmic interpretation of heaven.
It turned out that the actress had grown befuddled and died two acts too soon. But by the time her error was recognized, it was beyond salvation. There was a general feeling (especially in the audience) that once the main character is dead, the play is over. It’s time to draw the final curtain.
Anna never did get to say her big line, so she announced it at dinner instead. “Il est neuf heures.” She said it very well.
The students
in Florent’s middle school have started calling Pauline Madame Selig (his last name), because the two of them spend so much time together. This is an interesting development. Teenagers are wickedly astute observers of adults; they perceive these two as a couple already. Now only Pauline needs convincing.
Alessandro and I deserted the children for the evening and took ourselves out for dinner at a tiny new restaurant called Saveurs & Coïncidences, subtitled “The Cuisine of the Good Senses.” Our waitress was married to the chef; she told us that her husband had long dreamed of opening a restaurant where the food was so fresh that they had no need of a refrigerator. Some of the dishes were good and some were only so-so (Italian men—not to mention names—should just stop ordering risotto in other countries, because it never measures up), but the passion was unmistakable. And while Madame talked, a little boy in an appropriately sized chef’s apron poked his head out of the kitchen.
We went to a big sports store today to buy many white garments for the children to wear at camp. Anna used her painfully saved allowance to buy a hot pink spelunking lamp that straps to her forehead. “For reading Harry Potter books under the covers,” she told me. Someday, just maybe, she’ll learn not to alert the policeman before she commits a crime.
Today I went online to try to rootle out some facts about Claude. Pages from the Book of Paris was his first book; after that he wrote novels and more nonfiction, including something entitled Opinions, which has—enticingly—chapters entitled “Pornography” and “Meditations on Woman.” I shudder to imagine what Claude thought of pornography, not to mention what he would have made of my novels. But I also found a review in which his Paris memoir was damned with faint praise for its “racy sketches.” My mother never liked my romances, which she labeled “that sex stuff.” Yet obviously my ignominious talent for “racy sketches” is hereditary—and stems from her side of the family!
Today we went to a fun, tiny museum, the Musée de la Vie Romantique, housing furniture and keepsakes that belonged to the writer George Sand. Frankly, the art isn’t noteworthy, though the reconstruction of her drawing room is fascinating and made the visit worthwhile. That, and sitting down for a cup of tea in the little tearoom in the garden. A lush flowering vine with orange-red flowers hung over a brick wall at our backs, as if Nature herself were taunting the artists whose work she’d outdone.
Florent told Alessandro about a terrific Vietnamese restaurant called Minh Chau, so we went there for dinner last night. Ten tables barely fit into the space, and the food comes from the floor above, down a steep winding stair. It’s shabby, decorated with plastic flowers, and a bit claustrophobic—but the food! I had an amazing carrot and coriander salad to start, delicately seasoned and scrumptious, followed by chicken with ginger so good that we almost licked the plates. The bill? The equivalent of fifteen dollars!
Alessandro went to Austria to give a talk at a university there and brought me back a box of bonbons, with Mozart’s face on each one and marzipan cake inside. I asked, “These are good for my diet, right?” The professor assured me that they’re calorie-free, and who am I to argue?
I was crossing my favorite bridge, Pont Alexandre III, this morning, and paused to say hello to the statue of the laughing mer-boy. Two tourists passed me, both holding small video recorders in front of their faces. They turned the cameras this way and that, desperate to record everything, as if documentation was somehow meaningful in itself. I want to experience where I am and what I’m seeing, not view it only through the eye of a camera, for canned viewing later.
Florent came to dinner again and told me that Pauline is extremely beautiful, very intelligent, and fascinating to talk to. She’s twenty-six, which doesn’t sound too young to me for a long-term relationship. Florent certainly looks much younger than forty-one; I originally assumed he was around thirty. He has such a delightful, shy French charm. I wish he would immigrate to the United States and marry one of my friends. We could serve lemon tarts at the wedding.
On our evening walks, Alessandro and I generally wander down my favorite shopping street, rue des Martyrs, passing Autour du Saumon—a shop that sells nothing but salmon. Yesterday we went in and had a serious conversation about six or seven types of smoked salmon before selecting one. We gobbled it up (delicious!), but I have never met a smoked salmon I didn’t like, so perhaps all that deliberative, oh-so-French decision making was wasted on us.
The end of the school year is here, and I gather that Florent’s middle school colleagues will have a long meeting and then, as per local custom, a much longer dinner, before they all disperse for the holidays. Alessandro doled out more Italian romantic advice, emphasizing direct physical action. Florent and his beloved have done nothing but talk for hours every time they meet; Alessandro thinks it’s time to move to kissing. “Love is not made of words,” he told me. A very male point of view.
It is Anna’s last day of school, and I will walk home, down rue des Invalides, over Pont Alexandre III, say goodbye to the laughing mer-boy and Mr. Churchill, at least for now, walk through the lovely park by Concorde … Sweet “last times” pile up in my mind: the last time I hugged my mother, the last time I dried Luca off after a bath (now he towers over me), the last time I read aloud Goodnight Moon … I am still reading aloud to Anna, because I can’t bear to think of the last book.
The final school assembly, held before all parents, was a harrowing occasion. Paralyzed by nerves, Anna got stuck halfway through reading her story aloud and burst into tears. Domitilla jumped up to give her a long hug and then, as if tears were catching, burst into inconsolable tears herself because Anna was leaving Paris. How things have changed since last fall, when Domitilla was Enemy Number One!
Last night a little half block near us held a street party, with a band specializing in American hits from the seventies and eighties. We kept our bedroom windows open, the better to enjoy the free concert. One song that will forever remain in my memory is their rendition, with strong French accents, of “Play that funky music, white boy. Wew—hewwww!” We were hysterical with laughter. At some point, Luca burst into the room howling: “Listen! They’re trying the White Stripes now!”
Viviane invited us over for dinner last night. The meal began with her rendition of an appetizer she’d recently eaten at a three-star Michelin restaurant (to die for) and ended with a cake that she bought from “the best patisserie in Paris”—Dalloyau on boulevard Beaumarchais. The inside was in various layers: a tart raspberry mousse, topped with a delicate lemon layer, surrounded by pistachio sponge cake with a gorgeous stenciled pattern in raspberry sugar. The top was glossy with a pale lemon sheen and held a delicate arrangement of berries. The next day we marched to that patisserie, bought the same cake, and took it home to devour.
The one thing that has cast a pall on my happiness here has been my hair; it’s truly been the Year of Bad Hair. First I was given bright gold highlights, then a young lady troweled on platinum blond dye. The disapproving hairdresser who followed that disaster managed to create one of her own, turning me a garish orange with vegetable dye. Now that dye has faded, except near the scalp, where I am still carroty. Desperate searching online has revealed an English-speaking salon, StylePixie. Their website announces, “For hair emergencies please call the salon.” I called the salon.
Musée Carnavalet is the museum of the history of the city of Paris, and that means everything plus the kitchen sink is thrown into its nearly one hundred rooms. They are mostly historically authentic rooms, removed from their original sites and reinstalled here: Louis XVI’s salon bleu, Marie Antoinette’s drawing room, Marcel Proust’s bedroom. Given the choice, I have to admit, I’d choose gawking at famous people’s bedrooms over great art every time (the sign of a superficial mind, obviously).
Huzzah! Florent’s end-of-school dinner wore on into the night … eating, drinking, smoking, celebrating. In the end, he and Pauline left the restaurant together and walked around the city. They wandered from the Bastille down rue du
Faubourg-Saint-Antoine, then turned up boulevard Voltaire to République, talking madly, walking until dawn. Finally, when the sun was just pink over the Seine, Pauline looked at him and said, “You compared me to a lemon tart that you could not eat.” He nodded. She opened her bag, and nestled in the bottom was a perfect little lemon tart.
A SLICE OF PARISIAN SUMMER
This morning I saw the family off to Italy; for the next two weeks, Alessandro will stay in Italy while the children are in tennis camp. I am remaining in Paris to write, write, write. As I reentered the apartment, it came to me that I’ve never been the one left behind; generally I’m the one who travels. Silence swelled in the apartment until it drummed in my ears. But now rain is pouring down the windows, and soon I will take my polka-dot umbrella out for a walk through city streets. Silence, with rain, is a friendly sound.
StylePixie Salon turned out to be the answer to my prayers. From the moment I entered and spotted a heap of U.K. women’s magazines, I was happy. And after Victoria, the owner, assessed the ghastly situation on my head and delicately put in two or three different shades so as to tone down the orange and mask the platinum, I was in heaven.
