Paris in Love: A Memoir

by Eloisa James

  I just bought six small china ramekins, three pale asparagus and three dark plum, at our local hardware store. They have delicate handles and were made for crème brûlée, but I’m going to make individual lemon tarts in them, and dust them with sugar through a fleur-de-lis stencil—which I discovered in the same place. Hardware stores offer far better souvenirs than tourist shops can dream of; every time you use your hot pink whisk, for example, it will remind you of Paris.

  Last night I came down rue Richer at eight o’clock, when the light starts to go golden and the shopkeepers hang out on their doorsteps, ready to lock up. Prancing in front of me was a three-year-old in a candy-stripe dress, white shoes with butterflies, and hot pink sunglasses perched on her head. She was stopping before each shopkeeper to call “Bonsoir!” while her mother waited patiently with the stroller.

  With the family in Italy, no one interrupts me; there are no squabbles; there isn’t any laundry. My academic book grows every day, and my Lose-Parisian-Pounds diet is on track. The problem is, I just can’t sleep. My body knows all this silence and empty space is wrong. The light around the curtains this morning was colorless, like the froth on a wave, as if even that signaled the absence of what matters most.

  Today I succumbed to rampant curiosity about Claude’s life, and actually telephoned my uncle Malcolm back in Minnesota. (Malcolm was one of Claude’s nephews.) It turns out that Claude mostly wrote literary fiction, but he tried genre fiction as well; Malcolm recalled, for example, a novella about a paranormal device that turned parts of Duluth into a tropical paradise. Claude’s father was convinced that his son had remarkable literary talent and set up a trust that allowed him to enjoy an intellectual life in Italian villas. (The comparison with my mother is painful, but I’m consoling myself with the fact that if Mom had had the cash, she would certainly have underwritten my literary attempts, whether she considered them deserving or not.) Claude died on a trip to Minnesota, when he went fishing with the author Sinclair Lewis and caught a staph infection. Claude, Uncle Malcolm concluded, “was effete in the sense of outdoor stuff like fishing.” I’ve always hated fishing. I may parallel Claude in many ways, but this last is one I intend to avoid.

  This evening I stopped at Number 37 rue des Martyrs, the uninspiringly named Bar le Select. I sat down outside and drank a glass of excellent wine. In the States, I would feel odd drinking alone at a bar, but here it feels absolutely natural. I happily watched poodles and Parisians parade past. I am alone in the most enchanting city in the world, and at this moment, it’s as if the locals strut by just for my pleasure.

  Tennis camp finished yesterday, and the kids are in Florence with Marina for a few days before returning to Paris. “I lost the tournament, Mama,” Anna reported last night. Then she perked up: “But I hit my teacher with a ball right in the forehead!”

  Today I reached a landmark: I am back to my weight before I encountered the vast and luscious temptations of Paris. And that’s a good thing, because I happened past the atelier of Joséphine Vannier, the chocolate artisan who made my wonderful Cinderella shoe. She also creates boxes made entirely from dark chocolate and decorated in edible paint. They are about the size of small jewelry boxes; I bought one in amethyst, with meticulously painted gold curlicues on top.

  Alessandro is now back in Florence after two weeks in the mountains with Milo, who was given no prosciutto treats for the duration, a cruel hardship indeed. Marina counted up and weighed the 80 diet food pellets that Alessandro had been giving him each day and announced that Milo had been starved, because the vet had prescribed 120. Everyone calmed down after Milo was hoisted on the scale and discovered to have lost … nothing. Niente. A sumo wrestler would be proud to have such a metabolism.

  I’m going to a big writers’ conference in Florida in a few weeks, and I’m anticipating being cold, because I know the hotel will be air-conditioned to arctic levels. To be prepared, I’ve bought a charcoal gray coat made of crinkly material that you can roll up and shove in a handbag without ruining it. It’s Japanese, frightfully sophisticated—and 100 percent polyester. When I was growing up, polyester was practically a four-letter word.

  Since I’m alone, I’m not bothering to cook, and luckily the frozen food store, Picard, sells heavenly heat-and-eat meals. But today I bought a fresh entrée in Monoprix because the esteemed chef Joël Robuchon “made” it. Out of the box, it turned out to be a little casserole in an adorable china baking ramekin.

  We are a No-Electronic-Games-System household. Anna called up from Italy, very excited. “Mama, I had a vision!” I inquired about this miraculous event. “I was staring into space, and suddenly I just saw myself playing the new Harry Potter game. The portable one.” Her vision will never become reality, but I do love how she claimed paranormal backup.

  I went to the Musée Jacquemart-André by myself today. On my earlier visits, I was accompanied by friends and the audiotape; this time, though, I was responsible for no one’s happiness but my own, and wandered in silence through all the rooms. I am very fond of a marble statue of a little girl rather improbably caressing a dove. Although she’s stark naked, her hair is elaborately braided and fixed with a bow. I love her plump tummy and stubby toes.

  Alessandro and the children are back from Italy. We had sushi last night instead of frozen food, and I slept until 6:30 instead of 5:00. Anna has figured out what she wants to be when she grows up—a cake decorator. “I absolutely looove fondant,” she told me. Then she asked whether you have to go to college to decorate cakes. Absolutely. Haven’t you heard of that class? Fondant 101.

  The idiotic workmen on the floor above us just loaded a heavy bag of cement into our tiny elevator, causing all the cables to snap. It plunged five floors to the ground and has to be completely rebuilt—a repair that is scheduled to take place in August. After we leave. We’re looking at three whole weeks of four flights of stairs going down, and four flights going up. Hauling groceries upstairs without an elevator is one thing; the idea of moving out without an elevator makes me want to run up a flight and turn into a profanity-spewing American she-devil—the kind seen in foreign films and sometimes homegrown films, too. The Devil Wears French Underwear.

  It’s intolerably hot in Paris. My study is a little room sandwiched between our bedroom and the living room. It has one set of big windows, looking directly into the sun. So I drew the curtains. Now the room is hot and dark, like a sauna version of the Bat Cave. I just stripped to my bra and undies, and I’m still too hot to write.

  Home from Italian tennis camp, Luca is putting up a strenuous battle against going to the French equivalent. This is all to no avail, as it’s already been paid for, but he won’t stop arguing about it. I know he’s scared stiff, but I look at his cheekbones and remind myself that French women—no matter how young—are connoisseurs of male beauty. He’ll be fine.

  Friends Kim, Paul, and Summer are visiting from New York. Summer is a bewitching eight-year-old with the peaked chin and wild laughter of a wood elf—basically, an Anna doppelgänger. Within hours, they were holding hands, wreathing their arms around each other while walking. At bedtime, Anna informed me that Summer is different from other girls. “How so?” I asked. “She doesn’t do what I say.” I suggested that Summer may be even more fun to play with because she has her own ideas. Anna is still thinking this over.

  There are places in the world that do not live up to their billing; Giverny, the site of Monet’s blurry, lovely paintings, is not one of them. We are just back in Paris after being enchanted by water lilies with deep pink hearts, poppies with translucent pink petals, cascades of coral roses. This may be heresy, but I think that Monet’s gardens are more beautiful in reality than they are in paint.

  Today Anna went to camp, so Kim and I dropped Summer off in a park with her dad while we went shopping. Returning later to collect them, we were met with a forked stick jutting from a mound of earth, pale green leaves flapping in the wind like tiny sails. “A funeral mound,” Summer announced.
We looked respectfully at the grave, which turned out to house a deceased Tic Tac. RIP.

  Last night our visiting friends took us to a two-star Michelin restaurant, Carré des Feuillants. We began with flutes of rose-colored champagne and white asparagus. I had flaky turbot dressed with a thin line of caviar. The black-on-white effect made me think of a chic wedding cake, but it tasted delicately of the sea, of butter and cream: the very cooking that made Julia Child fall in love with France.

  Alessandro hauled Luca, protesting every inch of the way, to Gare de Lyon to catch a train to French tennis camp. In the campers’ designated waiting area, Alessandro overheard another father say something in Italian to his son, but Luca wouldn’t allow him to make contact. “I think he’s embarrassed by me,” Alessandro told me morosely. You think?

  We just visited a jewelry workshop, Commelin, which began making charms, by hand, in 1880. Even though it’s not a retail store, they welcome visitors. We watched an artisan creating exquisite enameled squares that will someday become a chessboard. I succumbed, and started charm bracelets for Anna and my two nieces with teeny gold Eiffel Towers.

  Paris is so hot that the white plaster walls of the building opposite my study window shimmer, slightly out of focus, as if they belonged on an Aegean island overlooking the sea. We have no air-conditioning, and of course the elevator is still broken. Yesterday the construction workers who broke the elevator smashed one of the stained-glass windows in the stairwell. For the first time, I can think about leaving Paris without feeling a pang of sadness.

  For years, Anna’s biggest ambition has been to have five children and live in the suburbs with a new minivan. Whenever she mentions this, she generally throws in a petition for a younger sibling. We have visitors right now who include three children—ages two, six, and eight. Anna just told me that she’s not having any children, ever.

  One of our visitors, Damiano, is a six-year-old with Down syndrome who has captured Alessandro’s heart. Walking down the street, Damiano holds Alessandro’s hand tightly. Whenever there are stairs to be navigated, he unfolds his arms upward with a beaming smile, as if he were a sunflower and Alessandro the sun. And my husband melts and scoops him up, every time.

  Luca just texted from his camp in the French Alps—the Tour de France whizzed through, and he saw Lance Armstrong! At least, he thinks he saw Lance; it was all a blur. It sounds as if the bicycles were zooming down the mountain buzzing like evicted hornets.

  The sun was shining as I went out for a run this morning. I had scarcely entered the door back at home when the sky went dark and rain started to pummel the street. Across from my study it sluiced down the gray roofs, pouring onto hapless pedestrians below, and bounced white off the street.

  Alessandro and I just babysat Damiano and his siblings while their parents did some sightseeing. Damiano caught us hugging and decided he wanted to see more. With an impish grin, he kept finding Alessandro and tugging his hand to bring him wherever I was, so Alessandro could give me a hug and a kiss. And then Damiano would climb in my lap to do the same. It was a very blessed afternoon.

  Last night, we sat at a café and watched as a gentleman in his eighties asked a young woman if she was the pharmacist across the street. Then he pulled out a condom and asked how much they cost in her pharmacy. Seeing everyone around him grinning, he gave us a smirk (and a figurative twirl of his mustache) and said, “These things are getting more expensive every day! I’m going to her pharmacy, if they’re as cheap as she says.”

  Luca called from French tennis camp, which is apparently far, far better than Italian camp. For one thing, there are girls. French girls. Didn’t this salient fact occur to him when he was making our life miserable insisting that he would not go and we couldn’t make him?

  Today is rainy, cool, and windy. The sky is silvery gray, like the watered silk skirts of a Victorian lady, long widowed, and still regretful.

  I am going to miss French supermarkets. Things I adore: fresh gazpacho and cucumber soups (found next to the orange juice), chicken bouillon in muslin sachets, ditto bouquets garnis, and individual servings of pesto, perfect for quick pasta.

  Yesterday I had a little party for my French readers. We had pink champagne garnished with red currants, and pink cookies, and talked about books and children and Paris. And Anna politely chatted with my guests! She did not read, although her Harry Potter book was hidden at her back throughout.

  ROSE

  A few years ago a friend invited me to her house to meet another friend of hers, an academic named Rose, who was being treated for recurrent ovarian cancer, had read my romances, and wanted to meet me. I’m fairly familiar with this phenomenon: people who pride themselves on negotiating (for example) the thousand-plus pages of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest turn to romance fiction when they can no longer bear the smell of bleach, the tick of the IV, and the bad news.

  So I girded my loins for a less than cheerful encounter with an emaciated and wan cancer patient. But instead, Rose sat at the head of the table, round and rosy, bellowing with laughter and wearing a huge platinum Marilyn Monroe wig. I learned later that her own hair was black and she wore it cropped short and standing straight up, bleached on the ends so she looked like a blown dandelion. But she liked to wear the Marilyn wig now and then because, as she explained, it’s impossible to pity a woman wearing a stylized wave of 1950s curls. At least not because of her terminal status.

  I fell in love with her wig and her laugh—outward signs of remarkable courage. We became BFFs, with all the irony that term implies. Every once in a while Rose’s doctors would make noises about how perhaps the day had come when the cancer had finally beat out the chemo. But then they would try a different drug, and through it all she kept teaching, and translating poetry, and traveling to Latin America to discover new poets. Once she called me from the top of a Peruvian mountain. She sounded as if she were next door. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said. “You must come before you die.”

  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 i
n 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.