this week at our house

It’s sleep deprivation central around our house these days. Yesterday afternoon I was looking for some extra clothes hangers for the laundry, and I couldn’t get into the hall closet. The previous day we had had a talk about trying to leave the closet keys (very popular items in the toddler set, as they are old fashioned skeleton keys that look like they might unlock the Treasures of the Universe) in the same place all the time, on top of the bookshelf in the study, next to the television, so as to avoid the frantic and futile search that happens five minutes before we absolutely have to leave the house, every time.

And yet, when I looked there, the keys were not. Also not on the mantelpiece of our bedroom (another likely culprit) or in plan C, the broken coffee mug that holds change in the living room. So I called S at work.

“Hi honey. Any idea where the closet keys are? I looked in all the spots and I can’t find them.”

“Oh, they’re in the closet on the high shelf. G was messing around this morning and I was just trying to get them out of his way quickly.”

“Inside the closet, really?”

“Yes, definitely.”

“The closet that I closed after you left, because G was still messing around in it?”

“That would be the one.”

“With the keys locked inside it.”

“Um, yes.”

We actually have a spare key to the closet, somewhere, and the babysitter and I spent a half hour looking in every drawer, under every bed, and behind every piece of furniture in an attempt to locate it. But it was not until I sat down on the floor (and almost fell asleep on it) and tried to imagine our apartment from the perspective of someone under two feet tall, that I found it in the third place I looked – inside the fireplace, under the screen. Unfortunately that kind of role-playing is not exercising any success in locating a very large suitcase that has gone missing, seemingly under our noses, and which we thought to use in our transatlantic flight, tomorrow. We’re good, we bought a new suitcase, but if we happen to have lent ours to you any time in the last few months, would you let us know?

In completely other news, the prince is currently out of residence. Two mornings ago when we walked past the villa, three taxis were idling outside and the entrance doors were flung wide open, revealing a fleet of suitcases lined up in the hall (suitcases: plain black Samsonite; hallway: plain white marble, like a bank entrance; more disappointment, all around.). We never saw the prince, but by midafternoon the kitchen was shuttered, the staff door empty of lurkers on cigarette break, and the security guards melted into air, leaving only their car behind them. The car, a battered old Peugeot 205 (but red), would be hard-pressed to challenge a perpetrator operating only on his own speed. And then, this morning, the car was gone, too. I miss him, our neighbor the prince.

As you may have guessed from the royalty, we’ve landed in a neighborhood a bit outside our batting range. Inasmuch as the washed and unwashed are always rubbing elbows in a city, we’re still the ones dependably bringing down property values every time we step outside. It makes for fantastic window voyeurism, especially at night when all the chandeliers are lit. One neighbor appears to have a Brancusi in the living room; another has covered the wall above the marble fireplace in the salon (normally occupied by a gilt mirror) with a flat screen plasma television at least five feet across. There’s no accounting for taste.

But my favorite neighbors are the family just across the street. Though we’ve never met, our street is only about 20 feet wide, so that when the drapes are open we’re afforded pretty intimate views of each other’s lives. They are a multigenerational family who have long, exuberant Shabbat dinners every other Friday night. The action shifts from the salle à manger to the salon and back again quite effortlessly, like the bubbles shifting in a lava lamp – one minute everyone is around the table, the next the kids are dancing in the living room, talking on cell phones, and then the older men open the windows and lean out for a smoke.

All of this takes place in a lovely apartment of grand proportions decorated in high baroque. All the furniture has feet, the wallpaper in the dining room has painted foliage, and if it can be gilded, well, why not? It’s all clearly expensive, yet has a free-for-all quality that makes me sure this is a fun house to live in. I often wonder what they think of us, looking across the way at the same vintage molding, accented only by IKEA. Oh, and Legos. It must be a little confusing.

As a way of preserving privacy, I’m sure, we never acknowledge each other, even when our eyes happen to meet in the middle of opening or closing a window. This little ruse helps to maintain a sense of dignity when you’re halfway through dressing after a shower and realize you forgot to pull the drapes. Or just walking around your apartment in your husband’s t-shirt carrying a half-naked baby. We all pretend we’re not looking, but of course we are.

The other day, for example, I noticed that the drapes to the petit salon (normally not on public view) in the other apartment had been left open, and stopped for a long moment to stare in. I saw the green velvet drapes, the lovely red sofa backed up against the window, the brass lamps – and, on the opposite wall, what could only have been a portrait of Madame in her prime, 40 years ago. And when I say prime, I mean: Not. Dressed. It wasn’t a reclining nude – hardly – but instead Madame was seated bolt upright, swathed lightly in a diaphanous veil, staring straight out at the viewer with one of those early Gainsborough portrait looks that says “Gaze on this if you dare.”

I was so startled I had to go back into the kitchen for a second cup of coffee, and when I had recovered sufficiently to return to our living room the drapes were drawn again, blotting my view and any chance the neighbors had to see the coffee stains dribbling down my shirt. I think we would like each other if we met, I have always felt sure of it, after a year of watching the Friday night dinners through the window. But if it happened now, what on earth would I say? There really are no words.

Tomorrow we will be flying over the ocean for the first time since G was a baby, to celebrate a family wedding we couldn’t be happier about and to see people we love who haven’t seen G walk or talk and will hold B for the first time. And I will get to meet my nephew, born just a few weeks after B, which makes me so excited it almost makes the world spin faster. But did I mention that it is the whole ocean we will be flying over? And that we will be very high above it, and that it is very deep? Part of me would rather strap on a pair of wings, hold my babies tight, and hope for the best. But you have to do it, and hope for the best, and for patient people in airport security. We’ll be back next week.