Paris in Love (61 page)

For years, Anna’s biggest ambition has been to have five children and live in the suburbs with a new minivan. Whenever she mentions this, she generally throws in a petition for a younger sibling. We have visitors right now who include three children—ages two, six, and eight. Anna just told me that she’s not having any children, ever.

One of our visitors, Damiano, is a six-year-old with Down syndrome who has captured Alessandro’s heart. Walking down the street, Damiano holds Alessandro’s hand tightly. Whenever there are stairs to be navigated, he unfolds his arms upward with a beaming smile, as if he were a sunflower and Alessandro the sun. And my husband melts and scoops him up, every time.

Luca just texted from his camp in the French Alps—the Tour de France whizzed through, and he saw Lance Armstrong! At least, he thinks he saw Lance; it was all a blur. It sounds as if the bicycles were zooming down the mountain buzzing like evicted hornets.

The sun was shining as I went out for a run this morning. I had scarcely entered the door back at home when the sky went dark and rain started to pummel the street. Across from my study it sluiced down the gray roofs, pouring onto hapless pedestrians below, and bounced white off the street.

Alessandro and I just babysat Damiano and his siblings while their parents did some sightseeing. Damiano caught us hugging and decided he wanted to see more. With an impish grin, he kept finding Alessandro and tugging his hand to bring him wherever I was, so Alessandro could give me a hug and a kiss. And then Damiano would climb in my lap to do the same. It was a very blessed afternoon.

Last night, we sat at a café and watched as a gentleman in his eighties asked a young woman if she was the pharmacist across the street. Then he pulled out a condom and asked how much they cost in her pharmacy. Seeing everyone around him grinning, he gave us a smirk (and a figurative twirl of his mustache) and said, “These things are getting more expensive every day! I’m going to her pharmacy, if they’re as cheap as she says.”

Luca called from French tennis camp, which is apparently far, far better than Italian camp. For one thing, there are girls.
French
girls. Didn’t this salient fact occur to him when he was making our life miserable insisting that he would not go and we couldn’t make him?

Today is rainy, cool, and windy. The sky is silvery gray, like the watered silk skirts of a Victorian lady, long widowed, and still regretful.

I am going to miss French supermarkets. Things I adore: fresh gazpacho and cucumber soups (found next to the orange juice), chicken bouillon in muslin sachets, ditto bouquets garnis, and individual servings of pesto, perfect for quick pasta.

Yesterday I had a little party for my French readers. We had pink champagne garnished with red currants, and pink cookies, and talked about books and children and Paris. And Anna politely chatted with my guests! She did not read, although her Harry Potter book was hidden at her back throughout.

A
few years ago a friend invited me to her house to meet another friend of hers, an academic named Rose, who was being treated for recurrent ovarian cancer, had read my romances, and wanted to meet me. I’m fairly familiar with this phenomenon: people who pride themselves on negotiating (for example) the thousand-plus pages of David Foster Wallace’s
Infinite Jest
turn to romance fiction when they can no longer bear the smell of bleach, the tick of the IV, and the bad news.

So I girded my loins for a less than cheerful encounter with an emaciated and wan cancer patient. But instead, Rose sat at the head of the table, round and rosy, bellowing with laughter and wearing a huge platinum Marilyn Monroe wig. I learned later that her own hair was black and she wore it cropped short and standing straight up, bleached on the ends so she looked like a blown dandelion. But she liked to wear the Marilyn wig now and then because, as she explained, it’s impossible to pity a woman wearing a stylized wave of 1950s curls. At least not because of her terminal status.

I fell in love with her wig and her laugh—outward signs of remarkable courage. We became BFFs, with all the irony that term implies. Every once in a while Rose’s doctors would make noises about how perhaps the day had come when the cancer had finally beat out the chemo. But then they would try a different drug, and through it all she kept teaching, and translating poetry, and traveling to Latin America to discover new poets. Once she called me from the top of a Peruvian mountain. She sounded as if she were next door. “It’s so beautiful here,” she said. “You must come before you die.”