Paris in Love (9 page)

It’s raining. Our neighborhood homeless man hasn’t moved from where he sits on the sidewalk, next to the Métro stop, but he cocked one big umbrella over himself, a smaller one over his
dog, and a third over his belongings. The umbrellas look like wildly colorful mushrooms sprouting from the pavement. From down the street, they seem to bloom, low and colorful against the gray buildings.

Alessandro and Luca sat down at the dining room table after school and wrestled with Luca’s architectural drawing homework. After what seemed to be a great deal of exertion, they brandished a complicated looking plan, replete with circles and arrows and lines in all directions. “How on earth did you do it?” I asked. “We mostly copied it from the book,” Alessandro admitted. I practiced wifely virtue and didn’t say anything about professorial views of plagiarism.

One of Alessandro’s friends from college, Donatella, is attached to the Italian Cultural Institute here. It’s her birthday, so we’re going to dinner at Ladurée, a restaurant on the Champs-Élysées that was founded in the 1800s. They are famous for their patisserie, which made the pastel-colored
macarons
for Sofia Coppola’s film
Marie Antoinette
. We’re planning to dress to the nines and drink a lot of champagne.

Anna, looking at my Facebook fan page: “Can you switch that picture?” “Yes,” I say. “Then why don’t you put me there?” “You? Why would I put you there?” “Because I’m your Mini-Me. I just need some glasses and no one would know.” A point of fact: she just turned eleven, she’s blond, and she weighs about four pounds. I’m forty-seven, a redhead, and weigh considerably more.

At Ladurée, I had fabulous fish with ginger fennel. The only disappointment, oddly enough, was the dessert, chosen from a ten-page menu. We read every single offering, and I finally chose a rum cake. It was soggy and arrived in a plastic cup, so it had the general aura of coming from an inebriated vending machine. Ladurée’s own brand of rosé champagne went some way toward amelioration.

We walked past a group of Parisian teenagers laughing boisterously in the street, and Alessandro pointed out that we never laugh like that anymore. These days happiness is quieter, captured perhaps in one of the kids laughing, or the bliss of hearing a favorite song when I actually have time to listen to it.

It’s school break, so I took Anna and her friend Nicole to the Marais. We had brunch at Des Gars dans la Cuisine, a chic little restaurant on rue Vieille-du-Temple with large, low windows lined with red-cushioned window seats. The girls had hamburgers, gussied up with a touch of nouvelle cuisine. With great kindness, the waitress brought out little pots of applesauce for them. Unfortunately, the moment she turned her back they declared scornfully that applesauce was for babies, so I had to eat both pots so that the waitress would not feel snubbed.

Our children are driving us mad. As a surprise, Alessandro came home today with train tickets for London, dated tomorrow.
Apparently it’s only about two hours by Eurostar, through the Channel Tunnel.

The Eurostar that runs between London and Paris has full security; consequently, we almost missed the train. We collapsed into our seats and then spent a lively two hours as the children battled over one copy of
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
, regardless of the fact they’d both read it several times. In a low moment, a jostled arm led to an airborne flood of hot tea landing on Alessandro’s pants in just such a spot as to suggest that he needs Depends. This led to the revelation that he brought only that pair for the next three days.

In the late afternoon we set out for Big Ben. But it was rush hour in the Underground, and we finally fled the crowd. We got lost in a big park, a helicopter hovering overhead. Alessandro thought he recognized Buckingham Palace, but it turned out to be the back of an apartment building. We were all making fun of him when we saw a motorcycle cop zoom by ahead, and then another one. Alessandro started running toward the street, shouting, “The Queen!” We all ran after him, laughing hopelessly and shouting insults. But he was right! Her Majesty Elizabeth II was riding along in a Rolls-Royce, bolt upright, a dorky scarf tied securely under her chin. This was a highlight of our trip, though the children were truly impressed only after a taxi driver confided that he hadn’t seen her in eleven years of driving.