The new year crept in while we were on salads and cheeses still, and then there was the flurry for champagne, and toasting, and I had red wine in my glass, and Marc’s was empty, in fact, but it didn’t matter, what with the chin-chins and the clinking while looking one another in the eye because no one wants seven years’ bad sex. We went up to the terrace, where the wind was blowing up a bluster, and the Eiffel Tower in front of us fizzed like a gold-and-diamond sparkler at a dusky dinner outdoors.



Paris is always good, and it seems to get better every time. I was at the Café de l’Industrie with Maud, early in the new year, we were tucked into a corner with a small yellow lamp, and she was fiddling with her hair, all practiced insouciance, and she said, “…So, are you moving to Paris or what?” “Could you show me that by-the-way look again?” I said, and one of us – both of us? – snorted. The thing is, Paris is always good, I know, because it is untouched by the concerns of work and laundry. There is that, but there is also the quiet understanding, somewhere in me, that Paris is good because, hang it all, Paris is Paris.



Laurence had taken off to Hawaii – blonde hair, check; surfboard, check – so we holed up at her place in the Tenth for a week. Down one end of the street, there was the little wine shop and the homeless people camped out by the canal. Down the other end, there were jeans on sale, and a windowful of mismatched lamps. We were up two spirals on the narrow, curving staircase. Mornings, the slight winter light came in through large windows. The living room was very cold – all the better for hibernating, with two covers and an old Vanity Fair, in bed.



We drank outdoors, indoors, we snacked in the street, we dined in backstreet bistros and fancy restaurants with cheese trays the size of the table. One muted afternoon we poured sugary mint teas from silver teapots while the waitstaff lunched. We were sitting by the radiator. There was one other man in the restaurant. He had a hat, I seem to remember, and a newspaper.



There was a large pitcher of sangria between four, one night at Bar 10, while Olive fed the jukebox; and another night we were squished in a corner when Hughes came by. Hughes has wild hair and a big laugh, and we squished some more to make room. Emily said Marc said Bar 10 is where you go to pick up American au pairs, but it was hard to spot them, if they were there, through the cigarette smoke. Bar 10 is where I go to pick up a mini chorizo tartine on the end of a toothpick.