beau geste

G and I went to fetch S home from work early on New Year’s Eve so we could spend the afternoon together. The bus ride home shuttles for several stops between the Champs-Elysées and the rue du Faubourg St. Honoré – one of the swankier shopping streets – so we are often treated to some pretty rare plumage getting on and off the bus. That afternoon, a pair of older women got on the bus a couple of stops after we did, carrying a few tastefully muted and very expensive shopping bags.

The younger of the two women was wearing an elegant but not very interesting ensemble of camel-colored coat and tortoiseshell glasses that both matched her hair. Her older companion, however, was luxuriating in the privilege of having crossed the line from femme d’un certain age right on into grande dame, taking no prisoners along the way. She wore an ankle length black fur of curly lamb trimmed with silver fox at the collar and cuffs. Underneath were black leather boots with two-inch heels. It was an astonishing coat and I couldn’t take my eyes off it, not least because I was afraid that any minute G would dart off across the bus yelling “bear, bear!” and try to pet it. The curly lamb caught the light every time she shifted and made her whole form seem to shimmer and sparkle, like someone’s very classy fairy godmother.

The women had gotten onto the bus in the middle of an animated conversation and, taking two facing seats across from us, continued it throughout the bus ride. Mostly the younger woman talked and the older woman nodded, occasionally signaling a comment by pointing the pair of gloves she was holding in her right hand. They started arranging their parcels for departure a stop or so before the Etoile. In the moment before standing to go, the grande dame reached up and patted her hair gently with her cupped right hand, and I was filled with a sudden wave of nostalgia.

I can remember almost every older woman in my life making this same gesture at one time or another (generally not while wrapped in silver fox) – whether it was in preparation for a night out, a quick check in the mirror, or, more often, a nearly unconscious moment of reckoning between one activity and another, as if to say “There, that’s all settled.” It’s a lovely little movement, even if it has more to so with the hairstyle it is protecting than the air of restraint and elegance it suggests, and it’s a shame that it’s probably doomed to pass from our lives with the speed and inexorability of the dodo. I don’t want to start setting my hair in curlers or changing my clothes for dinner, nor do I mourn the kind of baggage that way of life could provide in spades. But seeing it here still made me smile.

I was talking to a friend last night about how it would be so much easier sometimes if we were able to wear only one of the many hats both assigned at birth and accumulated over time – daughter, mother, person-with-too-much-education, girl raised in the south, traveler. It’s not much to whine about, but the noise in the metaphysical closet is sometimes a bit too overwhelming to leave much room for grace. Next time I feel like tearing my hair out, I’ll try to remember to pat.

sapin de noel

We decided to dispose of our Christmas tree in the dead of night on New Year’s Eve. It had done as valiant a job as could have been expected of a last-of-the-lot, discounted tree in the face of a toddler, a dog, and a fiercely radiator-heated apartment. When the grocery store clerk sold me on the tree – no doubt spotting my eye for an end of season bargain – he was quick to praise its olfactory benefits (oh, madame, il sentira comme la fôret! – oh, madame, it will smell like the forest!), while glossing over its probable life span in our home. When I asked him if it were likely to last until Christmas – at the time it was about a week before – he glanced nervously at G in his stroller and pronounced, “Quinze jours, bien sur.” Fifteen days.

He was right about the smell, anyway – every needle that dropped, in profusion, on our living room floor smelled wonderfully of pine and frost and the outdoors, the poor tree’s last gasp of its origins. In Paris, most Christmas trees are sold at the florist, wrapped up tightly in netting to give the appearance of a tall, skinny mummy. I find it charming that you can buy a Christmas tree at the florist, though I guess it’s really just the city version of a garden shop, but it’s an expensive charm in our neighborhood, especially, and so we took advantage of the large, American-style supermarket down the street with its bank of less delicately netted, but much cheaper, trees. My mother-in-law was still here with us, bless her, and I was suffering a bout of decidedly unromantic sciatica, so anyone strolling the rue des Belles Feuilles around three o’ clock a week before Christmas was treated to the vision of the small parade of me pushing G in his stroller at a glacial pace with my mother-in-law trailing behind us, hoisting the tree, like the cut-rate version of Birnam Wood, bewaring the ides of December. It’s hard to express the depths of my shame.

Clunking along with the stroller was a hanging plastic bag holding the buche, a flat piece of log with a hole gouged in it for the whittled end of the tree to be fitted into. Now, I’m sure that there is some methodology of tree preservation that goes along with the log – it’s certainly prettier, and a lot less sloshy, than the metal Christmas tree stands I’m used to, and it goes up with a lot less swearing. But short of spritzing the branches with mineral water and hope, I’m honestly not sure what it is. Our tree turned out to be the sensitive sort, and if you so much as looked at it unkindly it released a dark shower of needles shivering to the floor. By Christmas Day it was a bit unsightly, and by New Year’s it had passed on to disreputable. It was so dry I was sure that anyone drinking a glass of brandy in its vicinity would produce enough fumes to send it, and us, up in flames. So when S said, “It’s time,” I was happy to divest the tree of its few garlands and tin foil star in preparation for the disposal.

I had wondered, privately, how we would ever get the thing out of doors and out of our apartment without releasing a drift of needles that would risk alienating all of our neighbors and the gardienne. But S had already thought this through. “I’m just going to open the window and drop it out,” he told me.

Now, we live only on the second story, but even that short drop bears the appreciable risk of being over a narrow sidewalk with parked cars to one side and large plate-glass shop windows to the other – neither a good option for breaking the fall of a used Christmas tree, not to mention how you might explain that, in French, to an insurance agency. We considered for a moment what would be the best angle of descent, and finally decided it would be safest to remove the buche from the bottom of the tree rather than to depend on it as ballast. We waited until G was in bed, opened the window, and did a quick check for passersby before S squatted on the sill and hurled our tree into oblivion. Then he leashed up Lucy and took her with him to drag the tree over to the unofficial “dumping spot” down the street (I suppose the theory was that Lucy could defend him against any well-meaning citizen who might yell at him for improperly disposing of holiday waste).

By the time they came back inside, I had swept up a pile of needles big enough to fill a decent-sized, fragrant pillow. “Oh, my God,” S said, looking at it. “When I dropped the tree out the window, it lost the rest of its needles. I mean, every single one. What I dragged over to dump was nothing but a bare branch.” For some reason, this struck me as completely hilarious – what other kind of tree would we manage to buy in Paris than one that would wind up naked, lying on a dump, well before Epiphany? – and I started laughing helplessly. The next morning, out with Lucy, I would see a legion of dumped trees of varying sizes, all lush with needles and in much better shape than our tree had been even when I bought it (our own bare tree had been moved, for unknown reasons, and by an anonymous reveler, to rest gently against the side of a parked car).

In the meantime, after we swept up, we did manage to wake up G in time to walk over to the Eiffel Tower in time to ring in the New Year with a cast of thousands. In addition to the twinkle, there were a lot of noisemakers, champagne in plastic glasses, and homemade fireworks – an altogether satisfying experience for a small boy. When we got home, he didn’t even notice that the tree was gone.

*this really is our tree. I was not kidding.

bright lights, big city

Since we slid past the winter solstice over a week ago, the days have been getting longer, but I don’t think anyone has noticed yet. It’s still dark when we wake up and dark again by a few minutes past naptime. Paris really pulls out all the stops on holiday lighting – the Champs-Elysées is a corridor of blue lights and icicles, and I’ve recently learned that even my beloved electric light trees in our local fountain are the product of a city-sponsored contest, “Paris Illuminates Paris,” which has invited lighting designers to unleash their imaginations on city streets since 2004. The spangly tree-of-lights display at Place Victor Hugo actually has a title – “Sapin Féerique” – though come to think of it I’m not sure if that refers to the metal trees G and I watched get hoisted in the fountain with a crane, or the lights in the real, bare trees surrounding the place. Frankly, these look flung up a bit too casually for a “lighting designer” (it’s what I like about them), but maybe they are going for a total effect.

The whole “by design” nature of the lights is a testament to a well-administered modern city, but it kind of puts a kink in my romanticized imagining of Paris as having organically evolved over the centuries to feed the felt needs of the human psyche, boiled down to a longing for light, especially in winter. And yet, what makes it less magical that this patient illusion of beauty is planned and worked for (and who did I think put up the lights? Elves?)? After all, other than the benefit of a river running through, Paris is short on beauties of geographical accident and long on those that are the cumulative effort of human imagination, carefully tended over time. And when you add to that how far north we actually are, and the vagaries of Parisian weather – let’s just say it isn’t the quality of the eternal sunshine that gives us the “city of light.” Instead, even without the holiday extravagances to carry us through the dead zone of the shortest days, there are streetlights and river lights and the most beautifully lit monuments known to man. At night the decorative statuary on the Grand Palais actually looks as if it is on the verge of rising into the heavens. The crown jewel, for me, anyway, is the Eiffel Tower, which, in addition to being lit constantly with the usual dramatic monument fare, twinkles for absolutely no reason at all, every hour on the hour, for ten minutes. The effect is just glorious – almost enough to make me believe in god, and certainly enough to earn my undying gratitude to Mayor Bertrand Delanöe, who caved to public demand and extended the twinkles indefinitely past their splashy debut for the millennium. When our little neighborhood darkens the holiday lights in mid-January, I’ll depend on the Eiffel Tower to get me through – February, particularly.

And then…we’ll have a new baby in a few weeks, and it’s prompted us to start having conversations about what our life might look like when we go home to the states, as ultimately we must. We talk about it as “going back” even though physics and experience tell us there is no such thing. My life here in Paris still feels so new that I expect things to be different every day – when I called to make an appointment at the salon where I last had my hair cut, oh, nine months ago, I was utterly surprised that the same person who cut it before was still there, would still be able to cut it again. While it seems normal, expected even, that two or three small storefronts across from us have already closed and reopened as new entities – the suspicious video shop is now a real estate agent; the unfriendly toy store is, as of tomorrow, a lighting supply. Yet somehow my vision of home, like any place left behind, is frozen in amber. When we left the states I was barely a mother; we’ll return with two little boys, not babies, even. So I don’t know if it will be more disconcerting for things to seem completely familiar or completely changed. Stranger still, I’m sure, is the huge place Paris will occupy in our imagination once we’re gone, in inverse proportion to the faint blip we’ll leave on the register of the city. “Our” Paris will be its own reflection, no deeper or truer than any, giving the lie to the faint sense of ownership or belonging that we feel over the average tourist. The specific memories that, to us, belong to Paris forever – G’s first steps, nighttime visits to Notre Dame and the Latin Quarter, the action of lifting a stroller onto a thousand Paris buses – will simply close over without a ripple into Paris’ collective consciousness. Which is fine; they’re our memories, not Paris’.

We’ve been getting the annual check-ins with friends and loved ones, cataloguing a year in which, again, we’ve failed to keep in touch the way we might have or wanted to. Mostly blessedly ordinary lives and passages, moreso because of the few wrenching changes we’ve heard about, which leave me sad for days. Even if a calendar is no more significant than a way for humans to keep tally, some people we love are coming into 2008 with too much left behind and too heavy a load to carry forward. I’ll be thinking of them when we pop a clandestine bottle of champagne and, weather willing, wake our son to let the tiny lights on the Eiffel Tower illuminate the first few minutes of our new year.

Bonne année, everyone.

early mornings

It’s been a long, hard pull this month, and we’ve been up a lot in the wee hours, not just contemplating our existential condition. Almost exactly one month ago today, we were having a quiet post-bedtime dinner with friends when G appeared in the doorway, blinking a little against the bright lights. It seems that in one lightning flash all the strategic engineering for not only climbing out of his crib but also for opening the bedroom door had fallen into place. No wonder he looked a little shocked. None of us has been able to recover equilibrium since.

At first, G just seemed bewildered that a couple of simple physical acts could so thoroughly displace his world. We moved his mattress to the floor of his room, and for the first two nights he reluctantly went to sleep there, albeit with many interruptions and a final relocation to our bed. Then he just became enraged.

The crib exodus happened to fall exactly in step with a nasty virus brought home from the garderie that felled both G and me, as well as a ten-day separation from S, who had to go back to the US for a conference. It’s not that G didn’t want to sleep, it’s just that it’s hard to achieve a state of steady regular breathing, let alone unconsciousness, when the world as you know it has completely shifted under your feet (and your mattress), and you’re too small to be able to blow your nose by yourself. There was a lot of screaming. We were both sick and miserable, and I alternated attempts at comfort with desperate fantasies of child abandonment. It got to a point where I would find him leaning against the wall in the hallway, eyes half closed, wailing, “Close your sleepy eyes! Close your sleepy eyes!” It’s a line from a lullaby I sing him, but it punts in well as a cri de coeur. When his eyes were open and he wasn’t wailing, he looked hard at me as if he wanted to do me extreme violence, and often did, hitting me with a force that underlined his frustration that the one person who ought to be able to do something about this was clearly falling down on the job.

Mme. Marron, who with her family graciously hosted us through the worst of the stint, put her hand on my shoulder at one point and said gently, “He’s going to be really interesting to have dinner with in eighteen years. It’s what you have to hold on to.” That and being able to drink again in about six weeks.

In the last week, we’ve achieved a tenuous balance that involves G going to sleep – s-l-o-w-l-y – in his “new” big bed (the single bed from our spare room, tarted up with some splashy IKEA textiles and a stuffed hippo), and then coming in to sleep with us at about 2 am. Our bed, she is very crowded, and no one is really getting what I would call a good night’s rest. Some nights I have taken to just giving up and getting up – it makes me much less grumpy than lying there with eyes wide open. I read, I stare out the window, I rustle around the kitchen – but mostly just enjoy the suspended silence that is the one reward of this fractured schedule.

One of the last few mornings, much to our surprise, Lucy and I actually found ourselves out on the streets at five a.m. I was up because G. was in bed with us, flinging limbs across my rapidly decreasing corner of mattress and banishing me to the study. Lucy was up because I was up; her dim sense of the circadian, whatever they may say about dogs, being completely undone by anyone being out of bed with the lights on. After I had been reading in the study for about half an hour, I heard her heave off the bed and start a restless tap-tap-tap across the bedroom and down the hallway. A couple of minutes later, she poked her head anxiously into the opposite door of the study, her eyes saying, “Hey, Vertical Human, time to get going.” So I pulled on a sweater and jacket over my pajamas and we went out.

And it was a beautiful early morning. I’m not often up at this hour, let alone outside. This time of year (or maybe every time of year, how would I know?) it’s still pitch dark, and in the mists the streetlights look like giant fireflies. You can understand why a thousand ersatz paintings have tried, and failed, to capture the same mysterious effect. At five o’clock the middle of the night is bumping elbows with the crack of dawn – while there weren’t many of us out, we were evenly divided between those just waking up and those just finishing their evening. On the first corner, a man was delivering eggs to the bakery; the next doorway spit out two men with rumpled hair and glasses, papers under their arms. They shook hands and wished each other a bonne fin de nuit.

At the end of the block, I could see a young man and a much older man walking arm in arm, with some difficulty, as if the older man were being supported as they made their way along. As Lucy and I got closer, though, and stepped aside to give them room on the sidewalk, it became clear that it was actually the older man doing the supporting, ramrod straight and impeccably dressed in a camel hair topcoat, cordovan dress shoes, and a cravat – a cravat! – at 5 a.m. The young man, in a black leather jacket, was listing hard, and singing to himself – coming off the end of a long night, I supposed. I hesitated to acknowledge them, from a combination of learned Parisian reserve and the clear the protective anonymity of that time of day. The older man kept his eyes grimly set forward and Lucy and I kept going.

But then, at the end of another turn around the block, punctuated by enthusiastic grate-sniffing and other business, we met them again, coming off the place. This time there was no way to maintain polite ignorance – we had to speak to each other. By this time the young man had stopped singing to himself and was just hanging heavily against his supporter, head down. The older man hesitated briefly, and in that moment it occurred to me that this was no one-off drunken airing out but something of a nightly ritual, the evidence of who knows what hidden sorrow. It was impossible to determine their relationship to each other – friends? lovers? father and son? – but I could feel the weight of it, and its shared sadness, pressing against us in the cold air. I held Lucy to one side and said “Bonjour, monsieur.” He glanced down at my belly and then back up at my eyes. And then, instead of saying anything, he inclined his head and tipped an imaginary hat to me – the most courtly of gestures at the strangest of moments – before walking on.

I don’t know if he was wishing me well against the cold of the morning, or against the whole future of 5 am and the things it might bring. But I hurried home to the warm apartment where my boys were just stirring, waking from a restless night that suddenly seemed easy. And for the millionth time since G was born I wondered how we ever survive, these brittle piles of bones covered with such fragile, fragile skin.

strike out

I’ve been working on something intelligent to say about the strikes in Paris vs. the strikes in Hollywood, the weather, and some things I’ve been reading, but they will all have to wait. It’s 4:00, it’s raining, and my toddler still has no pants on – that’s just the kind of day it’s been. If I weren’t eight (almost) months pregnant, it would be time for a toddy; instead, I’m taking myself out for a cup of tea. Tune in tomorrow.

Or maybe Thursday.

In other news, G (pantsless, of course), was negotiating a particularly tight spot between the sofa, my legs, and the coffee table this morning, in order to get to the toy he had shoved between the sofa cushions. After a moment’s contemplation, he decided, finally, to shove the coffee table a few inches backwards and delicately step over my ankles. In the middle of the procedure, he looked up at me, beamed, and said, "Excusez-moi, mommy."

At least one of us is learning French. And I even got the respectful vous. I take it where I can get it, boys.

tie me up, tie me down

The nostalgia for my prenatal yoga class back in Washington finally drove me to search out a yoga studio here in Paris, though I was dubious about what the results might be. No offense to the francophone yoga practitioner – while I admire with all my being the ascetically toned “serious” yoga body, I do love my yoga to come with a healthy soupçon of affirmation and aromatherapy. And, preferably, some tinkling bells. I haven’t spoken very much with my inner self lately, but I find it comforting to assume I have one. This is really not very French at all, unless it involves a leather couch and an hourly rate.

The yoga studio in our neighborhood is on the main shopping avenue running up to the Arc de Triomphe. It’s actually more than a studio – it’s an Institute, which provides teacher training to its most serious students along with reluctant classes for the hoi polloi. The main space has big windows facing onto the street – discreetly shielded by sheets of frosted glass, installed to about halfway up, like bifocals – between a small brasserie and a shop selling fancy underwear. But you enter the studio through a courtyard door, accessed by a wrought-iron, glass-plated gate (When I went to the class for the first time, I actually got stuck in the courtyard on the way out. Most Parisian exterior doors have a wall button that you have to push in order to be let out of the building. Try as I might, I could not find the button for this exterior door, and only managed to succeed in opening the glass-plated window in the wrought iron – which of course I could not get to close again. I had to wait for my rescue, Estragon-like, until someone else was coming in the building, all the while being fanned by the cold wind gusting in through the wrought iron).

There are heavy red velvet curtains just inside the door, to keep out the cold, which you push through to get into a foyer with a small reception desk facing a set of bookshelves on which you are meant to leave your shoes. All this was familiar enough that I did not let myself be deterred by the extensive health questionnaire I was asked to fill out as precursor to yoga pour femmes enceintes – in France, pregnancy is a condition, which accords you all sorts of privileges and special treatment that I accept guiltily and gratefully, but may the anger of the gods fall upon you should you lift anything heavier than a hatbox or a champagne bottle. I only began to worry a little upon entering the studio space itself. It’s in what used to be the main salon or ballroom in the building’s previous life, still hardwood parquet floors with a grand fireplace and lots of decorative plasterwork. But directly beneath the plasterwork the walls are hung with wooden boards, which themselves in turn are hung with ropes and various tackle-like equipment. Silence reigned in the studio, even as a teacher or two appeared along with a few more lumpen pregnant women. I just stood in the middle of the room in my yoga pants, waiting, as the rest of the women started dragging out mats and pads and bolsters and strange looking wooden contraptions. Finally one of the teachers told me rather gently to sit down over there.

The yoga teachers (named Helga, Nanette, and Alexandrine) do not dress in the height of yoga chic or ballet tights, as I might have imagined. Instead they wear tee-shirts printed with the Institute logo and short, gathered knit bloomers. The whole effect is very Soviet-era gymnastics team, equal parts severe and silly. The teachers are presided over by Madame, who is married to the studio founder, is invested with an iron rod in her spine, and wears a skirt instead of the bloomers. She didn’t stay for the whole class, but every time she drifted into the room all the teachers suddenly looked like they were being tasered.

The fact that I noticed this at all is something of a wonder, since most of my conscious thought was taken up in absorbing the truly strange things that were happening to me. Instead of beginning with music or any sets of vaguely meditative stretches, the little clutch of teachers clustered around me and busily set to with a mass of straps, pillows and wooden blocks, arranging me and my limbs over the back of a low wooden arch in an uncomfortable back bend and then using the straps to fasten me in place. All of this happened with a minimal exchange of words – as happens often here, I felt like I had stumbled into a system whose rules had been inscribed in everyone else’s DNA, and that it could only be incomprehensibly rude for me to question what I ought to know already and would certainly come to understand in time if I were only patient and attentive. So by the time I thought to weakly raise my voice – what happens if there is a fire alarm? – the teachers had already moved on, in their bloomers, to the next pregnant woman and were out of range.

This went on for the next silent hour-and-a-half, and I moved from the wooden arch to a folding chair to a sort of balance beam to finally hanging from one of the wall-ropes like an untidy side of beef. I had a pounding headache, which I mentioned hesitantly to Helga, the most approachable-looking of the teachers. She scurried off to consult with Madame, with whom she returned, and they both stood gazing at my shoulders for a few minutes, frowning. Apparament it was all a question of posture, and the answer to the question was that mine was very bad. Madame sucked in her breath, planted her feet on either side of me, and wrenched my shoulders into the proper position while Helga exerted an equal but opposite pressure on my spinal column. I gasped, and Madame tut-tutted – “It is difficult the first time but it will be better when the muscles are re-educated.”

At that point Nanette, the smallest teacher, took the opportunity to ask Madame what she ought to do next with her particular pregnant lady. Without letting go of my shoulders or turning her head, Madame hissed, “Nanette, I am sick and tired of telling you one hundred times what you should already know. Go away.” Poor Nanette slunk away, and I wanted to. Re-education indeed.

It’s clear to me that the problem isn’t really the yoga, but actually about managing the sense of disjunction that is always present under the surface as a foreigner in another country. Most of the time I find the displacement exhilarating, a tonic. But the class was the first time that instead of a displacement I felt a dislocation, like a phantom limb wrenched out of joint. I thought, maybe I just don’t belong here. And of course, I don’t. That’s the point. But I like to feel more in control of my stranger-ness, and I suppose there was something distressingly literal about being tied up in a dark room where no one would talk to me.


I stayed through to the end of the class, and even came to one more – no one could say I didn’t try – but the next week I checked out a prenatal yoga video from the American Library featuring a long-legged blond Californian in a catsuit who softly coaches me through the poses while sitting next to a running stream. G and I watched the video together the first time through, comfortably ensconced in a pink armchair and letting our inner selves imagine the actual work of stretching.

note to handbasket: we’re on our way to hell

G has reached a new milestone this week – he now understands the concept of bribery.

On Monday morning, during the usual contortionist stroller-wrestling match, I finally crouched down next to him and in my best soft-mommy voice said, “Now, sweetheart, I need for you to be a good boy and cooperate because mommy is very tired. If you can climb into your stroller all by yourself like a big boy, mommy will give you a trick-or-treat” (we have a bag full of more or less nasty/wonderful Halloween candy in honor of the holiday, which isn’t really celebrated here. Since G hasn’t really had candy before – though he’s had his fair share of pastry and cookies, mind you – we’ve taken to calling all of it “trick-or-treat”).

G stared at me for all of three seconds – what brave new world is this? – and then crawled right into his stroller. Just like that.

So I gave him some candy.

Since then life has been pretty merry in our fallen, candy-trading universe. My happiness has taken on the sheen of a snack-sized Snickers, at least until God strikes me down with a parenting manual blow-to-the-skull.

Or all of our teeth rot out of our heads.