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.