a tempest and a teapot

Go away for a couple of weeks, and when you come back, the president is getting a divorce. This week’s cover of Elle France is all Cécilia Sarkozy, curled up catlike in a dark sweater and riding boots, proclaiming “Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir” (I want to live my life without lying). This, and a Paris Match exclusive, just days after the president’s office at the Elysée Palace issued a terse announcement and a “M. and Mme. Sarkozy will not be commenting publicly.” Just one of the many things that makes Madame such fun to watch. Allow yourself to imagine, just for a moment, the same thing unraveling in the US. Well, no, you can’t. And frankly, in spite of the well-known collective Gallic shrug at the private life of politicians (so sensible), this is not exactly par for the course here, either. Discretion being the better part of valor and all that. It’s quite the pyrotechnic flameout for the thoroughly modern president, and everyone’s enjoying the show.

While the president was acquiring a vacancy in the master suite and a very public headache, I got myself a new teapot. It is made of tempered glass and has a fine tracing of cherry blossoms painted along one side. The design of the teapot, called an Egoiste (see, there’s a link here somewhere), dates back to the earliest days of fine tea-drinking. The small pot, which holds enough water for about two and a half cups of tea, nestles into the top of a wide-mouthed teacup (also painted with cherry blossoms, if you were curious). The nesting feature says not only “this is mine and mine alone,” but also warms the teacup. Neat. I’ve seen pictures of Egoiste teapots in silver filigree as well as, of course, Sèvres and Limoges.

My own Egoiste teapot has a flaw – it is missing its lid – and therein lies the tale of why a house that also shelters the Engine of Destruction would contain a teapot made of barely-more-than-eggshell-thick tempered glass. Just before we left on vacation, I decided to take my visiting cousin to my favorite teashop, a tiny gem I discovered on the walk to my ob/gyn’s office (all things have their rewards). The shop doesn’t serve tea, only sells it, but behind and to the left of the counter is a tiny table and chair where the shopmistress can sip a cup and read chapters of a novel while waiting for custom to arrive. When I saw that, I fell in love. Madame herself is nothing less than adorable – finchlike in manner and in the way she wears one piece of bright color, with a touch of restraint – and she loves tea. Even though I am at heart a Tetley’s tea bag kind of girl – it’s better suited to my habit of leaving half-drunk mugs of tea all over the house – I have bought obscenely expensive tea from this shop at regular intervals just for the pleasure of the purchase.

My cousin wanted to buy some flower tea for her girls, and my teashop, of course, sells their version of the latest tea phenomenon in little silk sachets with a satin bow. So, while she browsed the different possibilities, I decided to take the time to examine the shop’s collection of tea-related merchandise. These include a large number of cast-iron teapots, in various sizes, a bit of porcelain, and then the tempered glass. Ignoring everything I’ve ever read or heard about the clumsiness of pregnant women (and my own ample evidence of same), I reached straight for the cherry blossoms. And as soon as I had it in my palms, my hands quivered, the pot shook, and the lid leapt off like a fish, shattering on the wooden floorboards.

I insisted on buying the teapot, of course, over the distressed noises of Madame, who kept saying, “Oh, ça m’ennuie ce qui vous a passé!” (literally, “it annoys me that this has happened to you!”) as she whisked up the glass bits, wrapped up the teapot, and threw in a flower tea sachet for my pains. I told her it was like getting an unexpected present for myself, and that I was lucky that the teapot was still usable. She pressed her hands together and told me she still wished it hadn’t happened this way – and I think she really meant it.

I, on the other hand, was just saying all those things to make her feel better and cover my embarrassment, while promising myself not even to look at the Visa charges I had incurred for my pains. But I surprised myself on the walk home by actually being excited about the teapot. Living in France for me has been an interesting confrontation with my relationship to the pleasure principle. Paris is a city of luxuries, both big (the couture shops on the Avenue Montaigne) and small (chocolate, tea, silk scarves), but they all have the common denominator of being understated, complicated, and requiring for their enjoyment a certain education in taste and a belief in the mysticism of the experience, not to mention the expense. Perhaps it’s just a reaction to my Calvinist upbringing, but I’ve always liked my pleasures a little faster, brighter, cheaper, inserted directly into the vein. I want to be the sort of person who can make a meal off of an exquisite pair of coffee-colored calfskin boots for ten years, but I’m actually the person who loves the petroleum product faux-motorcycle boots bought at the flea market for ten euros. I’m much more magpie than modiste. And while I appreciate the understated – the smooth hair, the browns and grays that make you notice the cut of the clothes – I sometimes feel a little stifled by the lack of cheap thrills, and undermined by the realization that I just look better, dammit, with messy hair and mismatched clothes. It’s just the way it is. But somehow buying a superfluous teapot that I broke myself, covered in red flowers, no less, made me feel like I was turning a corner. That perhaps I’ve been in Paris long enough now to stop playing the invisible – and monochrome – tourist, and be the person that I am. Je veux vivre ma vie sans mentir.

Image is a teapot-shaped gas station on an old US highway. Yep, that's pretty much me.

rainy day wishes

It’s been seeping rain here in Paris for the last several days – the kind that works its way down into the deepest sidewalk cracks and releases odors that have been hiding there, possibly for centuries. When I take Lucy out for a quick walk, which consists of ducking and weaving between awnings for a long block, her nose quivers with barely suppressed passion for all the ghosts who have gone before. It’s a depressing fact – you can still see the Eiffel Tower through the mist, but when it rains in Paris everything smells a little like pee.

In dubious concert with the weather, we’ve also had the first strike of the season, courtesy of the cab drivers. The taxis blocked off most of the Left Bank, it felt like, driving up and down and beeping their horns, and wreaking havoc with the bus routes. I missed any announcements by newspaper or radio while stumbling around in my usual morning fog, and only discovered the strike while vainly trying to get across the river by bus to join the American Library in Paris. Well, actually not vainly – when the bus stopped for good a few blocks shy of the river, I got out and walked, a vision of fertile loveliness with damp hair, no umbrella, and completely unsuitable-for-the-weather ballet slippers. And not one of the striking taxis took a moment of pity. I made accidental eye contact with one of them, who looked back at me as if to say “Lady, I got nothin’.”

This in a city where the only times I have been propositioned (it’s three and counting, now) have been since I was visibly pregnant. It’s as if all the negative points I am assigned for non-glowing hair, stains, and unacceptable choices in footwear are knocked out of the park by the bonus of “rollicking good breeder.” It’s a little disconcerting, but nice, after the bizarre contradictions of being pregnant in the US, where you are invisible until the moment you touch a cup of coffee or start to eat a piece of soft cheese, and the pregnancy police zoom in. I like the louche appreciation, even if it’s just because I’ve proven capable of bearing the heir to the throne. (Pregnancy also breaks down the otherwise unbreachable rules against sharing personal information with strangers here. Yesterday the boulanger smiled at me and said, “You’re getting nice and large, madame. Another boy?” I was so startled I almost dropped my baguette).

But I digress. The point is, I made my way through rain and strike to the library, which bears out within its walls the comforting familiarity of every public library at home, including the New Yorker cartoons and newspaper articles taped to the pillars as inside jokes between librarians. There’s a research room, a children’s room, a periodicals section, and of course the rows upon rows of hardcover fiction in crinkly plastic covers. I got a memoir by Penelope Lively, Margaret Atwood’s latest, another book I can’t remember but was on my list, and a board book about monster trucks for G. I even remembered to bring my carryall bag.

I love the part in A Moveable Feast where Hemingway discovers Sylvia Beach’s lending library. She lets him take his first set of books without paying, and when he gets home he and his wife get completely carried away by the new imaginative (and gastronomic, of course – that old connection between words and food) horizons that access to books implies.

“We can walk anywhere and we can stop at some new café where we don’t know anyone and nobody knows us and have a drink,” Hemingway says.

“We can have two drinks.”

“Then we can eat somewhere.”

“Don’t forget we have to pay the library.”

“We’ll come home and eat here and we’ll have a lovely meal and drink Beaune from the co-operative you can see right out of the window there with the price of Beaune on the window. And afterwards we’ll read and then go to bed and make love.”

“And we’ll never love anybody else but each other.”

“No. Never.”

Poor Hemingway, even knowing all that he did to wreck things for himself. We’re actually going to Beaune this weekend, so we’ll have to raise a glass of Burgundy in honor, pregnancy police be damned. And the next time it rains, I’ll be able to stay home and read.


*Hemingway quotation from A Moveable Feast, Scribner edition, copyright 1964 by Ernest Hemingway Ltd.