qui peut y résister?

Our neighborhood is starting to wake up again this week, at the beginning of the rentrée. The ghost town was strangely peaceful, but I’m enjoying the new noise and bustle, especially the sound and sight of children everywhere (how could I not have noticed that G.’s voice was the only child’s I heard for almost a month?). The bakery downstairs, which we missed more than I care to admit, reopened Monday morning. We can smell baking bread again when our windows are open, and more importantly, we have renewed access to the city’s best baguette tradition – guidebooks be damned. The bakery lady has returned from her holiday tanned to exactly the same shade as the crust of this favorite baguette (while I am as pale as only someone who has spent the entire holiday month of August in a rain-soaked city can be), and she had a special smile for G. and me when we came in. And the cheese shop, oh the cheese shop – even the fresh paint job doesn’t compete with the smell of S.’s favorite Livarot.

It’s a different case at the butcher next door, which also opened on Monday morning, a week later than advertised (who’s counting days when you’re on vacation?). Here is where I have to admit that I haven’t yet visited a French butcher, that while it is among my goals to begin regularly patronizing a butcher before we leave France, I am intimidated by butchers and cuts of meat in general, and by this butcher in particular. He is young and attractive and stands in the doorway of his shop smiling out over his bloodstained apron in what can only be described as a confident leer. In the shop display window, alongside the dried sausages and foie gras, there are photographs of the fancy restaurants that he supposedly supplies. But I don’t really believe this is his business at all. I’m convinced that behind the heavy wooden doors at the back of the shop, there is no meat locker, but instead a boudoir hung in red satin awaiting the discreetly paying customer. For one thing, there are hardly ever any customers in the shop. When there are, it is always elegantly dressed women of a certain age who never leave with any packages. For another, the little “Be back later” sign on the door has four small clock faces decorated with a lipstick print instead of numbers, over which is inscribed the motto: “Le boeuf de mon boucher, qui peut y résister?” Yes, that really does translate literally to: “My butcher’s beef, who can resist it?” Me, I think I can.

This morning I noticed that the butcher has added to his display window several large, artily framed photographs (perched on easels, no less) of disturbing, glistening stacks of raw meat. I’m not sure how this fits into my gigolo butcher theory, but it does something to me. I wonder what else September has in store for us.

daytripping

I had an outing. Over the weekend I drove down to Fontainebleau with a friend who needed to recharge her car battery after a month’s vacation. S. agreed to manage the small person for the afternoon, so there were no extra diapers or car seats involved. The little town of Fontainebleau is about an hour’s drive from Paris, but it seemed like we were there even before we’d caught up on the summer’s activities. One exit off the autoroute, a roundabout, and a few blocks of narrow streets and there she blows (blew?) – several generations of French kings’ elaborate fantasia of a hunting lodge. My uncle Charlie would have taken one look and said, “What were those boys thinking?” And not a deer in sight.

After all the additions, Fontainebleau isn’t actually that much smaller than Versailles, but it seems like it’s on a much more intimate scale. It might just be that the tourist traffic is so much lighter, even in August, that you can walk along at your own pace instead of being borne aloft by the crowd surge. You can even pause halfway along Francis I’s grand gallery (built mainly so he could go from his bedroom to church without going outside) and look in both directions without getting knocked down. There’s the bedroom where Anne of Austria held court, and the completely fabulous ballroom conceived by Francis but not built until after his death (the ballroom, in turn, has almost completely walled in the beautiful late medieval chapel with hundreds of naughty – not medieval -- cherubs painted on its coffered ceiling). The horseshoe staircase where Napoleon made his departure for Elba (Adieu, mes enfants!), and the redecorated bedroom suite where he kept the Pope imprisoned until he signed the Concordat.

With that many bits of overlaid history, there are bound to be some ghosts. I saw mine everywhere. He was small and blond and had the exact facial expression of one of the putti on the chapel ceiling. When he wasn’t flirting with the museum guards (why else would they be smiling?), I heard his footsteps on the King’s Staircase, which I felt distinctly that he must have needed to climb up and down exactly twelve times all by himself. We came into the palace guardroom just after he left it, the velvet rope still gently swaying and the giant Sévres urn on the center table shifted several inches closer to the edge. And when we stumbled onto a concert demonstration of baroque French opera, it was certainly he who caused the young singer to miss a beat, by scrambling down the aisle and straight up onto the stage…Clearly, I have a problem.

The last time I came to Fontainebleau was during my first and last real trip to Paris before we moved here. I was still in college, on a trip that started in Spain and ended up in the Netherlands, and I stopped in Paris for a week to visit my friend who had just started her graduate school research. She was living with some unfriendly nuns on the Left Bank, and my visit coincided with that of some other friends of hers who were driving a car back from Luxembourg to London. We decided to drive down to Fontainebleau for the day, and after visiting the chateau and walking in the forest, we made our way slowly back to Paris. We stopped along the Seine and went swimming (well, some of us did) in our underwear, and when we had dried out we had dinner at a little riverside restaurant, on the lawn, as the sun was setting. I had snails for the first time.

This time, my friend and I drove straight back to Paris. As we entered the parking garage, I bought some ice cream and noticed the carousel that would surely be the main attraction if we bring G. back here sometime. Across the street, a wedding party was gathering in front of the park gates to have their photos taken in the garden. The bride and groom were in cream silks, and most of the rest of the party were in similar shades of summer, except for one very, very fat woman in heavy black crepe with a bright fuchsia shawl and a matching ostrich feather in her hair. I thought about her all the way home.

escape artists

When we moved to Paris, we made the difficult decision to leave one of our dogs behind. Ruby was – and still is – an exuberant lab with a funny face and a sweet personality. But we just couldn’t keep her at home. At least a couple of times a week I would glance out the window and see her, either in the act of scrambling over the fence or already running full bore down the middle of the street. We built a six-foot fence; she dug under it. When people came to visit, she bum-rushed the door. It became a familiar sight for either S. or I to be circling the alleyways within a four-block radius of the house, trying to find the trash can that would stop Ruby in her tracks and allow us to wheedle her home. In the meantime, our other dog would stand at the window or in the yard, dumbstruck. A fellow shelter adoptee, her attitude seemed to be, “hey, two squares and we get to sleep on the bed. What the heck is your problem?” When we brought Ruby home, she always seemed happy to be with us, but not repentant, either.

Having a baby in the house only complicated matters. I had privately sworn to myself not to abandon our first set of dependents in favor of the human one. I had deeply absorbed the earnest animal shelter lectures about Responsibility Forever and Not Giving Up When it Gets Hard. But the mad dash around the alley got complicated with the added logistics of a floppy newborn to negotiate, and I had visions of locking all of us out of the house by accident in the middle of winter, me half-dressed in my bedroom slippers, G in a flimsy onesie, Ruby triumphant. And did I mention that she was also a terrible, lunging leash-walker and was unpredictably aggressive with other dogs?

On the other hand, Ruby was fabulous with G. Endlessly patient and gentle, she would lie on her side for an hour and make a living cradle while G. kicked his feet in the air and batted at her ears. That kind of trust and patience was something that took our other dog much longer to develop – she spent months circling the baby at a safe distance, and even now, having reached a co-dependency détente which revolves around shared and discarded food, she will still occasionally give me looks that say, “I am only doing this for you.” Ruby never did anything for us – she did things because she wanted to, but she always did them with joy.

When G. was about three months old, Ruby broke free from her leash, ran across a park, and forced S. to execute a pavement face-dive in order to stop her from going after an elderly poodle. Our already significant nightmares about Ruby roaming the streets of Paris suddenly assumed some Technicolor detail, possibly leading to an international diplomatic incident. And so now Ruby lives in the mountains, on a farm – really, with one of S.’s cousins – and we live here.

But in a bit of the universe’s glorious irony, she is still with us, in toddler form. There is no park gate, no doorknob within reach of a handy chair, that G. cannot breach. We’ve all become very accustomed to his rear view, speeding away as fast as his short legs can take him. He does it all with absolute glee, and when he cackles I swear I hear Ruby barking.

My glamorous life

Besides the obvious challenges of managing carsickness on public transportation, maintaining some vague sense of personal style while wearing maternity clothes and carting around a toddler, and keeping myself from eating my body weight in Haribo Tropical Fruit ( a mystical urge, really), it’s gotten to that stage in this new pregnancy where sleep is not my friend. Normally I am one of those lucky people for whom sleep is a nearly instantaneous two-step process; I lie down, I fall asleep. Over the years this has caused a lot of abruptly abbreviated conversations and snide comments from my spouse, who is of the slower to sleep variety. It’s usually not a good idea to try to talk to me about anything meaningful after 11 pm. – you won’t get much.

But not now. Both the permanently stuffy nose and the indigestion (don’t ask), get worse when I lie flat, so I usually start the process of delaying the inevitable by moving the dog, propping up on a pillow, and pretending to read for a minute, while actually thinking about the common sense misfire of now having to raise two children who are likely to outweigh me before their combined ages add up to five (will I have to stand on a chair to project authority?). When I think I might be sleepy enough to counteract the discomfort, I wiggle down in the bed, shove the dog out of the way again, and try to assume a position that might be conducive to rest. Lately this has involved extra pillows. The other night, all my moving and shaking seemed to be accompanied by an inquisitive silence from the other side of the bed, whose occupant was attempting to remain as still as possible in the process. Finally, after a last energetic round of piling, punching, and shoving, came the question: “Are you building a fort?”

Yes, I am.

Liberty

G. got his cast off a few days ago. His time in the cast roughly coincided with the amount of time the computer spent in repair purgatory, so we’ve all been stumping around the house in grumpy moods lately. By the time of the cast removal, G. had become impressively skilled at using the cast as counterweight, which enabled him to walk around the house pirate-style, swing himself up onto chairs and furniture, and threaten me at diaper-changing time.

Without the cast he’s now a little reduced, as if he’s lost his superpower and special costume all at once. He will only gingerly put weight down on his new, noodly leg, and prefers to sit on the floor in a sort of moody, yogic squat until someone comes to pick him up. I think we have a few more days of grumpy left.

In the meantime, our entire neighborhood has emptied out for the August vacation. Many of the shops have posted cheerful, handwritten notes wishing everyone “bonnes vacances” and mentioning the date of return. Other have just slammed down the security shutters as if they don’t care when they might come back. We’re down to one bakery (the snooty one) and two grocery stores, but it’s hard to feel deprived about walking an extra block for bread. Paris is left to us and the tourists, and I’m kind of enjoying it, thinking of all the crowded, hectic places I might be instead. I also like the idea that, however removed it might be from reality, the wheel of commerce could just stop turning for awhile, or could turn somewhere else, and everything will be, well, just fine. Like a world where even Sisyphus might catch a break.