We were up by half past eight, the light streaming in through Maud’s floor-to-ceiling glass-paned doors, and the figs in the fig tree out back dangling off the top branches like fat little packets of promise.



Sunday in the Seventh arrondissement sounded of stone buildings and silent, slate-grey eaves. We hung a left out the building and a right down the block, then followed the train tracks to the market at La Motte-Picquet Grenelle. Here, the steam rose off wide paella pans bubbling and delicious and the cheese men stood proud behind their displays. We bought a chocolate croissant and a raisin snail from a little old lady, then stood back to consider our strategy over second breakfast. How do you approach an unknown market? Do you shop from the stall with the longest queue? Do you patronise the one where the housewives gather? “Look,” Laureen said, “all the old people are shopping at that stall.” Wrinkled hands sorted through the tumbling mountain of deep-red cherries, placed blushing apricots one by one in brown paper bags. “Old people,” she said, “are thrifty.” There is a phrase I have learnt from the English, and it is this: Fair enough. I cradled a melon in the crook of my arm while Laureen scooped cherries into a thin paper bag. We reached for a bunch of radishes smart like a huddle of pink-clad choirboys.



Sunday, and Paris was ours for the taking. We took the métro to the Marais, to its tightly packed buildings leaning into medieval streets. “I am keeping an eye out for David Sedaris,” Laureen said, while we sat over coffees outside at La Perle, so I kept an eye out, too, but in the back of my mind I was nervous we would see him and I would have nothing to say. “Hello, David Sedaris,” we would say – and this would’ve been after we’d pointed and silently screamed – but then where would we go from there? “Nice job, David Sedaris”? “Nashville loves you, David Sedaris”? If I were Maeve, I suppose I could have said, as she did to Olive, when she was but three and a bit, “You are the funniest man in all of funny town.” Then, like Maeve, I could have poked him. “Poke.”

I sipped my espresso and we kept our eyes out. We saw a man dressed as if he were headed for a jungle safari, and we saw a woman carrying a small dog on top of her handbag, but we did not see David Sedaris. We went into Mariage Frères instead, to sniff in giant canisters of tea. “Do you speak English?” Laureen asked the store assistant behind the handsome wood counter. He was dressed in a linen suit and a smile. “Bien sûr,” he said, and when we told Marc this the next day, at lunch in Place Sainte-Marthe, he said, “Instead of saying ‘Of course’ he said ‘Bien sûr‘?” Mais oui.

On rue des Rosiers the crowd swelled around the service windows of the falafel joints as if there’d been a run on chickpeas while we’d had our noses buried in Darjeeling. A fast-speaking man with a notepad in his palm strode up and down through the masses in front of L’As du Fallafel, and he didn’t ask if we wanted a falafel sandwich so much as assumed it. “Falafel. Falafel.” he said. “Five euro. Falafel.” “I have never seen this place this mad before,” I said to Laureen, “and I don’t know who this man is,” but we handed over our five euros each all the same and hoped for the best. The man did not bolt with our ten euros; the best, not ten minutes later despite the length of the queue, tasted of hot, crumbly falafel, of soft, smoky eggplant, of hummous and harissa. We sat in the playground down the street, half in the shade and half out of it. It was Sunday. We were in Paris. I had on a skirt designed for summer.



Like a certain kind of girls gone wild, then, we took off through the city, crossing the sparkling river and heading for the Sixth. In Ladurée, we shrieked and gasped in the tiny chocolate boutique tucked away in the back. Pastel-coloured chocolate mice lined up next to chocolate-dipped langues de chat. The glass-topped display cases by the side held bottles of almond-scented bath gel topped with macaron-shaped tops. A small black umbrella with a curved wooden handle, an elegant thing, hung from a shelf; the shop boy obligingly opened it to reveal a gay macaron print. “Oh my god,” we said, and “Oh my god,” and “Look, oh my god.” “If Olive were here,” Laureen said, “he would walk out right now.” “It is true,” I said. “He would walk out and stand right there, just there, in front of the display window, and smoke a cigarette, so we could see his contempt through the glass.”

We did not have all day to pal it up with the Ladurée staff, however: we have places to be! People to see! A party for tea! We quick-stepped across boulevard Saint-Germain to bathe in the butter- and sugar-scented air at Gérard Mulot. Is this what butter- and sugar-scented air does to one?, I ask, for we were to walk away with a kilo of peach and almond tart in a pink paper bag. “S’il vous plaît,” I had said to the po-faced shopgirl, and I will pause here to say that except for the beaming man who once gave me a free macaron when I stopped in for a baguette, the store assistants at Mulot have consistently proven themselves a reluctant lot. This is even though they work in butter and sugar, and in front of the shiny-, almost mirror-surfaced chocolate delight called the Coeur Frivole.

“S’il vous plaît,” I had said, “could you show us what a kilo of tart looks like?” I had said this in French, because we were in France, and it was only polite. She had responded with limp karate-chop gestures over the glossy-peached pay-by-weight sheet of tart. “From there all the way to there?” I had said, then, because, even to one who will admit she is no good with the perception of dimensions, the girl’s estimate seemed surprisingly large. “Oui,” she had said, and had begun to turn away, already having lost interest in us. “Then we will take just half a kilo,” I had said, and this is when she slid the tart out from the display case and called to her colleague. “Jérome,” she said, or “Loïc,” I forget, “if I want to cut half a kilo – ?” as if she had not just indicated to us the implications of a full kilo, as if the hand motions she had made before had been but robot dancing moves to accompany the Daft Punk music in her head. Jérome-Loïc adjusted her knife so that it was poised on the edge of a sliver. “Wait,” I said, “wait, wait,” for a sliver does not a tea party make, plus I remembered the expanse she had marked out before, as if it had been parcels of verdant land I had flown over in a single-engine Cessna. “We’d like more,” I said, “like,” – and here with my hand I pushed the air so that she would move her knife over. “A bit more,” I said, my hand helplessly pushing at the air, then, finally, “OK.” She put the portion on the scale and handed me the receipt showing that we were purchasing, almost to the gram, a proud kilo of tart.

“So,” I said to Laureen later, as we carried the pink paper bag out of the store, “So,” I said, because what else was there to say, “this is what a kilo of tart looks like.”



It was all for the best, really, for after we got it back to Maud’s;

after we jiggled the key in the lock and realised, us on the outside and Maud on the inside, that the lock wouldn’t budge;

after Jeanne came by with her lemon biscuits on a tray under a kitchen towel, with her smiling eyes and her funny hair, and jiggled the key in the lock some more;

after we whammed the door and cajoled it, after Maud slid us oil-smeared keys under the door to try again and again, after she called the locksmith, then, upon Jeanne’s suggestion, made some tea;

after the locksmith showed up and put a hole in the door and let us – hot, thirsty, thumbs sore – in;

after we got back to Maud’s, you see, it was very nice to have a hearty slab of peach tart in the garden, on a round table hidden under bowls of apricots and cherries, under jams and sweet pastes, under a large teapot, under plates of Maud’s home-made fruitcake and cheese loaves, under the tray of Jeanne’s lemon biscuits, a motley heap of irregular shapes ranging in shades from beige to dark brown –

“What flavour are these?” I’d asked, pointing to the light-coloured ones, and she’d said, “Lemon.” “And these?” I’d asked, pointing to the others. “Lemon.” “Ah,” I said. “Yes,” she said. Later, she offered one to the locksmith. “Did you make this biscuit?” he said, having taken a bite. “Yes,” she said, “do you like it?” “No,” he said, and then he said, “I think it is best I am honest with you.”

– under all this, and a small dish of shortbread biscuits infused with tea and hibiscus flowers. The Cantal held court.

Hector came, and Bastien, and Michelle and Gab and Schmio, and we nattered and chortled till the neighbours shushed us, till dusk fell, and till the sky was dark and the lights came on in the flats upstairs. We drank tea till ten, maybe, or eleven, I remember only that it was quiet by then, and Schmio and I spoke softly so as not to wake the trees. It was too dark to see the figs by then, but they were there, still, and would be revealed in the morning light.

We drank mojitos downstairs at Freud, at the one table that always clears in time. “Let’s be young,” Henny had said, and we had whooped and sauntered over to Freud. So slouchy a bar, Freud, so scruffy, and with such sweet, sweet mojitos. We nursed our drinks as long as we could, and then we went up the stairs and out into the night, chilly now, and turned to go our separate ways.



The next morning I was on the train to Paris with Laureen. “We need something for these coffees,” she said – we had paper cups of coffee on the pull-down tables in front of us, and a couple of back issues of Gourmet – and reached into her silver tote for a bag of Tunnock’s caramel wafer biscuits. Like magpies, we’d been drawn to the shiny red-and-gold foil wrapper when we saw it on the shelf in the store. “Still original size,” the packet read on its front, and, on the side, with some pride, “More than 4,000,000 of these biscuits are made and sold each week.” “Well,” Laureen said, unwrapping with little ceremony, “four million people can’t be wrong.”

Truly, they cannot. Inside the red and gold foil wrapper – I smoothed it out on the table afterwards, of course, and tucked it away for safekeeping – was a biscuit crisp and chewy, just this side of sweet, and infused, if you are me, with the slightest memory of those red-foil-wrapped, air-filled chocolate wafer biscuits you found at every child’s birthday party in 1980s Singapore.

(Wafers in the tropics, eh? They inevitably came to their sad and flaccid end: Sometimes you’d bite into a biscuit and, instead of crunching through the wafer layers, discover a consistency rather like sinking your teeth into chocolate-covered cotton wool. “Chao hong,” we’d say – an untranslatable Hokkien phrase meaning, essentially, that the humidity'd won again – but we’d just as likely go on to eat the whole thing, it was strangely addictive that way.)



We unwrapped the red-and-gold foil wrappers, Laureen and me, and we popped our ears when the train went so fast our bodies couldn’t keep up, and, almost two o’clock at Gare du Nord, when we saw Maud in the crowd at the end of the platform, it was like unwrapping the best red-and-gold foil wrapper of all. “Ouais!” I said, because I couldn’t help it, and the woman in front of me turned to look. Maud had on a vintage seersucker suit the colour of candy; a baguette, we were to find, was perched on the dashboard in her little Peugeot. We tumbled into the car and whizzed through the city: we jerked the wrong way down a one-way street and hung a wide left, then vroomed along the quais of the Seine behind a Roman Holiday girl in a pink helmet and billowing sky-blue skirt riding pillion on a scooter.

Paris in the summer is a party with iced cakes and cream desserts. The sun catches, twinkles in shiny confetti.



We bought a lot of cheese that first day, from the nice ladies at Quatrehommes, including a stinky Livarot circled in rush leaves for me and a sultry double-cream Brie for Laureen. The tray marked “Fontainebleau” was empty – there was but a doily on the silver tray – but Maud got the lady to make us some for the road. “It is like eating clouds!” Maud said, by way of introduction, and we watched the cheesewoman carefully pipe molehills of cream into small Styrofoam cups and wrap them up in gauze. These we carried home – well, Maud carried them home, wearing her candy-coloured seersucker suit, for I was carrying a couple of kilos of cheese – to eat in the garden out back. We dribbled redcurrant jam onto white, we scooped up teaspoonfuls of cream to eat with thick bitter-orange jelly. I don’t know if it was like eating clouds, but it sure was like – exactly like – eating cream. Lots of cream. We made tea in an Aladdin teapot. We ate – there is no way around it – cream by the spoonful. (Where is the book titled French Women Eat Cream, I ask you.) In an hour and a half dinner would be on the table.



We met Hector at Le Pré Verre, later, where we scored seats on the banquette. The doors were open to the evening. “Maud is looking for a parking space,” we said. “She was going to park in a loading zone,” we reported, nibbling on olives, “but we told her her car might not still be there when we came out.” Hector gave us a look in which disdain mingled openly – flirted, even – with pity. “It is Saturday night,” he said. “I have parked straddling a loading zone and a pedestrian crossing.” “Well,” I said, and I stabbed another olive with a toothpick while Maud circled the neighbourhood outside, “that will teach her to listen to the non-Parisians.”

It was nearing midnight by the time we headed home, Maud having pulled out of her loading-zone parking spot and trying, now, not to run the yellow lights. I was in shotgun and Laureen was in the back; the chocolate truffade in our bellies was settling in for the night. Traditionally an Auvergnat speciality of potatoes and cheese, the truffade had been reinvented, this night, in dense slabs of dark chocolate. We’d eaten it dipped in a pool of sesame-tinged milk. We’d eaten it with a molasses ice cream the taste of the exotic. It was sweet and rich and lickable all at once, the kind of thing served on small, gold-edged plates at an outdoor table under a chandelier of diamonds and lit candles hung from the trees. We’d alternated with spoons of a sweet-tart rhubarb compote, and then we’d returned, inexorably drawn, to the truffade. My brain was turning into truffade. Left brain, right brain: truffade, truffade.



It was nearing midnight, and we were driving westward through the city, to the Eiffel Tower blue against the night. We went by it once, then twice, and when, at midnight exactly, it began to twinkle, we yelled (“Oh my god!”) and then fell silent before the wonder. “This,” I said, unsilent, “is just great.” The Eiffel Tower was steel made delicate like lace, I traced the curve of its arch in my mind, it – the tower – was sparkle blue on deep blue. This was the first day.

Thirty pounds bought us a cheap ticket on the first train to Paris. At 5:27 in the morning, some four weeks ago, Olive and I were in our seats; by 10:30 we were walking out of the boulangerie on avenue Parmentier, breaking a warm croissant in two. Like the ill-fated Hansel making his way through the fairytale forest, we left a trail of croissant flakes in our wake. “Do you see how my fingers are glistening with butter?” Olive said. He was pleased. Lucky for him the witch in her gingerbread house was not waiting for him.

We wove through the crowd at the Friday market on the boulevard Richard Lenoir. We ducked left and right through the thick of people with their market baskets and their little dogs, and the stalls were piled high with fish and cheeses and many-coloured fruit on display. Wild we were with the promise of Paris, and the city was tinted the colour of holidays.



There were a goodly number of strong espressos that day – taking the first train of the day will do that to you – and still we fell into bed for a two-hour nap late in the afternoon, waking to the light dusky through curtains the shade of dandelion clocks.

This was the calm.

Near midnight the next day, CC arrived from Sydney, pulling her red patent crocodile-leather stewardess bag behind her into the Gare du Nord as if she were a xinyao star. “Ouais!” we said, me and CC, at the train station, and “Ouais!” we said again when we woke the next morning. We had luxurious, decadently scented massages to get to, and beyond that a city of patisseries was calling.



Days we walked in the sun or rode the handsome Vélibs, balancing gingerly and screaming with glee down the boulevards. Well. One of us was screaming with glee and I think I need not tell you which one it was. We cycled single file, Olive in the front, CC in the middle and me bringing up the rear, and when I yelled “Vélib!” it echoed off the buildings and their black balustrades. “Vélib!” I yelled down the streets, or “Ouais!” or “This is great!” and, late one night, after dinner with Marc and Em and Oli and Kris in the Marais, as our bikes skipped down the cobblestones and we cruised through a moonlit Place de la Bastille, as we crossed the Pont d’Austerlitz and Paris was left and right and straight ahead, it really was great. Our cheeks were pink from exertion and the night breeze. “This,” I said to CC as we parked our bikes, “is what it is to be alive!” “My knees are still wobbly,” she said.



Days we walked in the sun, I say, with a hot and giant crêpe in our hands, or a small paper bag of sugar-studded chouquettes; even, once, a tray of delicate mini tartines we eventually sat on the pavement to eat, our sneakers resting on a speed bump. One Saturday we carried two kilogrammes of cheese for dinner that night. Mid-afternoons we collapsed, more often than not, at any one in a line of welcoming tables in any one in a line of welcoming teahouses. On days grey and damp we fell into the teahouses, too, for we are not, CC and me, two to discriminate. At Mariage Frères the lime cake was light like lime clouds.



Such hijinks and japes, such jolly adventures! One cold morning we woke and CC said, “There is a lot to pompi-see and Pompidou.” We queued for an hour at Beaubourg and, once in, needed fortification at the museum café before we could go on. At the Musée des Arts décoratifs, we read the menu at their chi-chi museum café – “Il sont quatre, ils sont fumés... La mer était leur berceau,” read one of the items – before we snorted and delved into the lunchtime clamour at the sandwich shop across the street.

At the Luxembourg gardens we leaned back in reclining chairs; in Montmartre Olive took us up and around the winding streets; through Saint-Germain and the Marais and on the boulevard des Capucines and down by rue Montorgeuil, we looked at the window displays like pigtailed children in front of so many sparkling candy shops. We touched and admired, we ooh’d and we aah’d.

“We cannot go in here,” I said, as we paused in front of a thing shop on rue Jacob. “It will be the ruin of us.” Things are the ruin of us, and we were already holding one little tome on cooking with orange blossom water, one slim monograph on cooking with honey, a couple of Arcimboldo postcards – though none of the man who is made up of fish, from whose nobly sloping pate fine corals reach out, from the back of whose head a tiny shrimp is balanced – and a sizeable Ladurée bag containing a fine selection of viennoiseries. There was a brioche in there. There was a chocolate-pistachio croissant in there. There would have been a blackcurrant-violet macaron in there as well, but we had already eaten it in the street. “It will be the ruin of us,” I said as we pushed the door open, and when we left the store I was holding a cotton tablecloth edged in blue and dotted with wild strawberries.



We criss-crossed the city and skipped up the steps in the métro. (We took the bus to the Bon Marché.) We pretended we lived in the Musée Picasso, and we made to shout up the wide staircase for the maidservant. One evening, as the wind chilled us to the bone, we stood in line, my CC and me, shuffling forwards with numb feet, to make it up the Eiffel Tower sparkling in the night.

It was as cold as stars up on that viewing platform, and the city and her lights twinkled below us. There was a year coming to an end and a year beginning but from up there you couldn’t see where they came together. The wind was teasing my scarf, and my hair whipped ’round my face. Down on the ground, we knew, the vendors under their neon signs had fairground crêpes for sale, and paper cones of hot fries.

It’s not so hard getting used to running on Paris time, so that where once upon a time I couldn’t help but arrive five minutes early, I now turn up eight after the hour for a one-p.m.-ish brunch date. We sat in the Saturday sun, Maud and me, and there were the pigeons flying about ’round Place Saint-Sulpice, and the woman and her quilted Chanel handbag on the rattan café chair next to me. My Orangina winked, catching the light.

Saturday night we turned left into a secret, the streets were shining from rain and the city, we turned left, me and the boy, and I was wearing a magenta dress, we turned left for rue de la Main d’or, dark but for the glow at the Petits Joueurs. Inside, drawings on the walls, and a fillette de vin on our small square of table. Olivier is the chef with the belly and the ponytail, the dark eyes. With delicate fingers he garnishes the greens at the bar just before he calls out, “En sortie !” If you are lucky, it will be your dinner en sortie de la cuisine, a salad with grilled chorizo, or a duck confit hot and salty with golden potatoes crispy just so.

In Paris, I stretched and blinked into the softness of Saturday afternoon. The rain’d stopped by then, and Julia Sarr was singing, low, in the still air. It was that kind of stillness, you know?, that floating bliss?, and for a second I wasn’t sure if I was still dreaming.

There were pizzas and Prosecco later, a train and a train away, and then the winged boy in the Bastille, golden in the night.

Sunday morning, I was reading comics in bed while the boy in the kitchen called out to ask if I wanted a Nutella tartine or a raspberry one. “Tous les deux,” I said, and then he brought out a pot of tea as well.

Seems like spring has sprung, finally, so it is warm enough for a girl to walk about bare-legged in metallic purple pumps. Sunday, the 21 bus took us to the Jardin de Luxembourg, where little boys and little girls floated littler sailboats in the fountain. À pied means we followed our feet to Gérard Mulot, where the boy pointed towards the macarons and said: “Et prends un passion-basilic, ou ptetre deux.” He turned his back, then—so innocent, he is! So trusting!—and suddenly we were walking out of the shop with two passion-basilic, an orange-gingembre, a rose-groseille, an electric citron, and a dreamy purple mûre in a little pink box. The other pink box—because you know there was another pink box—held an amaryllis, because of the name, and because the amaryllis is fresh raspberries on a macaroon floor propping up a macaroon ceiling.

Right before we left, the boy gestured at a white-haired gent and said, in my ear: “C’est lui.” “Monsieur Mulot?” I said. “Oh my god,” I said, because sometimes you get so excited you can’t speak French, “this is so huge! Mais qu’est-ce qu’on doit faire avec ces renseignements??” “We should take a photo!” I said, and the boy laughed, and then gently but firmly steered me outside.

This reminds me that a couple of weeks ago in London, the boy leaned across the table at Carluccio’s and very quietly said, “There is a pop star sitting right behind you.” So calm, he is. It turned out it was M.I.A. “Oh my god!” I said. “This is so huge! What should I do with this information?” He said I could turn around and look, but I knew if I did, she would immediately look up and make eye contact right then, I have that sort of luck. And then I would only have had the wits about me to say: “Galang galang galang.”

Sunday in Paris, with M.I.A. nowhere in sight and M. Mulot hard at work in his atelier, there was time for a late-afternoon picnic by the sea. We sat on the mossy stone by the Square du Vert-Galant on the Ile de la Cité, opposite the sapeurs-pompiers barge, while the wind blew on the water and the tourist boats sailed by. I had my shoes off, because I had nowheres else to be.

We danced; we danced and it was the new year, and there was Champagne, and Champagne, and dancing. “Tu peux m’inviter chez toi,” I said, so he did, and in the new year we walked hand-in-hand.

In the new year, phone calls were made all around town, and everyone decided to stay in bed. There was Nutella in bed, after all, and tea, and lemon yoghurt. Later, a nap later, two naps later, there were the fairy lights of rue Mouffetard, and Paris Paris Paris from the upstairs balcony. Slate roofs stretched left to right while a fine rain started to fall.



Still just a whisper into the new year, the sky was blue, and we were a good-looking group in black and red, Maud and me and Jeanne and Vio and Tom and Gregory, looking for a lunch by the Canal Saint-Martin.

Tom drove us around the city’s traffic jams, even through the Louvre a little, before we settled into Café Marly for fresh mint teas. We found a galette des rois in some boulangerie on the boulevard Saint-Germain, and—I don’t know how—managed to carry it home whole, the puff pastry and the almond and the sugared crust, without leaning in and taking a bite out of the crisp sweetness. Later, after the sun had set, up the curling staircase at Tom’s, a bed under a slanting skylight, while outside rue de la Huchette continued in non-stop lights and bustle.



The mornings and the afternoons and the nights seemed like one long beautiful day; we slept so little, and each moment melted one into the other. In that last hour before the train, Gab knew something was wrong, and Maud knew what it was. For someone who travels as much as I do, I sure haven’t gotten used to leaving.

“It is snowing!” he’d texted, an hour before I got on the train. “Du chocolat chaud alors pour le dîner,” I’d texted back. Some three hours later, we were grinning at each other through the crush at Gare du Nord, then the scooter ride, stockinged knees exposed to the winter night, and home to a bowl of Nesquik, saveur choco noisettes.



Maybe there are no words to talk about Paris. I could tell you about the Saturday snow, and I could tell you about the roast chickens and the cheese displays at the market. I could tell you about Adrien coming over to play backgammon. About Hector and the Petit Robert. About Marc, and kirs cassis, and the utter charm of the Librarie Forgeot.



I could tell about the Portuguese brandy, and black coffees out of yoghurt pots. About the fig éclair at Fauchon, about fancy sandwiches and a religieuse à la rose at Ladurée. About the crêpes, maybe—une salée et une sucrée; or about the chocolate tasting at Pierre Marcolini. I will tell about this last one, actually—only that I thought we were going to get one of each, but Gab said, because he is wise, to get four of each.



Oh, I could tell about Gab and Olive and Yaya and Gigi and Fab. About Benjamine and Nadja. About Elaine and Bob and Sascha. About Boris and Christel and Fabienne, and the fury in the night. I will tell about this last one, actually—only that I was offered cocaine, and that this had never happened to me before. It was at the moment that the music stopped, of course, also the moment that everyone happened to stop talking. “Uh. Did you just ask me if I wanted some cocaine?” I said, into the sudden silence. “Yes.” “Um. No? Thank you?” “Okay.”



I could tell, I guess, about the fashion photographer who wanted to take my picture, or about the baker down the street who invited me to Tunisia to ride a camel, and to meet his mother. “La prochaine année vous venez,” he said, and handed over a sweet chouquette.



I could tell about hours spent reading in the hammock; about Milo curling up against my back, at five in the morning, like comfort and safety. Ronronner, to purr. I could tell about the party, late night in the Nineteenth. And actually, I will tell about this last one. Paul knew someone who knew someone, and somewhere behind the big iron doors there were running steps and screaming, and no one could hear us banging to gain entry. Inside, finally, there was a ping-pong table in the shape of a country, and three girls dancing to “Hey Ya”. There was paint spilled on the concrete floors, and a large, filthy tarpaulin hanging from the ceiling. The deejay kept crashing his iBook. La traquenard, a trap.



There are all these things I could tell about, but I don’t know that any of them could really tell the story of Paris. Because how to talk about the spicy, burnt smokesmell that infuses everything; or about the sharp, waking wind as we scooter through the streets; or about all the words that remain unsaid between us?

I was quite miserable, in quite an unexpected way, coming back to London Wednesday night, even with everything I know is good here. The rain was starting on the skylight sometime ’round midnight, and I was on the phone with CC, and she said: “Maybe you could go to Paris once a month.” And the rain was still coming down ’round one in the morning, and the room was spinning, I was so fatigued, and still I was on the phone with Maud, and she said: “There is a Eurostar ticket on the SNCF Web site for seventy-five euros.”

Here. I will tell you this. The only way to come back from Paris is to get a return ticket illico presto. December thirty-first, party of the year, and we’re gonna be dancing, in Paris.

The sky was blue all day today like fortune smiling on our heads. We are lucky kids, me and Tom and Maud, being out of school and out of work.



Tom called this morning with an invitation to MoMA. “And I have a car,” he said. “So we don’t want to go to MoMA,” I said, “we want to go to California.” But to MoMA we headed, running a red light, speeding across the Manhattan Bridge, idling in traffic, muttering at other drivers, watching the pedestrians at the stoplights.



The new MoMA is cool, people. Really, really cool. Everybody run, don’t walk. Um, also, best to take the subway so you don’t have to pay forty-three dollars to park in a midtown garage. Yowtch. No, but, the space is incredible, what with the cut-out walls and open areas everywhere and the green helicopter hanging out. We furrowed our brows at the Pollocks, we scoffed at a goofy Dalí, we admired Ruscha’s Standard Oil Station series. In front of Leger’s “Three Women,” Tom said, “That’s sexy.” He said, “It’s like a naked tea party.”

Then we were hungry, so we drove down to Chinatown. Viola Wills’s “If You Could Read My Mind” came on the radio, which we like because of the rousing disco chorus. Maud shook her head at me and said, accusingly, “Pop junkie.” “You say it like it’s a bad thing,” I said, then leaned back and sang along: “I don’t know where we went wrong / but the feelin’s gone / and I just can’t get it back. . .”

Waiting for a table at Great N.Y. Noodletown, we looked into the kitchen in the back, where two whole pigs hung from the ceiling. They were being prepared for roasting, I think. A man was brushing them down with glistening. In my mind, I could taste the salty, crispy skin. Our waiter was a round, smiling man like a char siew bao. And the thing is, we are fond of char siew baos as is, but we like char siew baos a lot when they bring us seafood porridge, and sauteed dou miao, and stirfried eggplant with garlic, and beef in black pepper sauce.

We dropped Maud off at the Christmas tree in Washington Square Park after, and then Tom dropped me off in SoHo, where I made a quick stop in Dean and Deluca for a small loaf of cranberry bread and some fancy honey, ’cause a girl likes breakfast. Down Broadway, the evening sky was striped shades of pink like Paul Smith was in charge.

Home, showered, clean, smelling of flowers and white tea.

I’m kind of beat. This is the first quiet moment I’ve had since I got back from Paris Tuesday night. You’d think I’d be used to traveling by now, all these aller-retours in my life, but it is still a lovely surprise to me that I can wake up in one city and go to bed in quite another.

Oh, Paris. They know what they’re doing over there. And a girl sure can get up to a lot in a little more than four days, even with waking up around noon most mornings. In Paris, there was a Sunday walk along the Canal Saint Martin, with its curved wooden bridges round like pumpkins. Round one corner, the Antoine et Lili storefronts winked in pink and green and yellow. On rue du Faubourg du Temple, there was the gorgeous Sixties futuristic silver storefront of Robert et René, butchers, in which the day’s prices are announced in white plastic press-in letters on a black board: bifteacks bavette 11.40; aiguillette 11.40; divers 11.40; hache 7.13. There was a sit-down and a café crème in Les têtes brûlées, poring over some Belgian murder scandal in Paris Match. There was chancing upon the new Satrapi, which is funny and sad and good reading all around. There was staying up till three chatting with Gen, because we are girls, and we like to do so. There was picking out eight small, sweet-smelling clementines at a fruit stand and putting them in a crisp brown paper bag, feeling the comfortable heft in my hand. There was a jaunt through the parc des Buttes Chaumont, watching the ducks like white flecks on the pond. The graffitti on one pavilion read, in Chinese, “She is the luckiest one.” There was the Tunisian patisserie, where it was hard to choose. There was ice skating at the Hôtel de Ville, where Britney was blasting on the loudspeakers, and where there was a lot of falling. “J’aurai des gros bleus demain,” I said to Gab, but the bruises showed up within hours, and, man, it’s been a while since I’ve banged up my knees like this. These are some kind of souvenirs de Paris, all purple and magenta and blue, wholly frightening. There was a surprise visit from Clem, which necessitated delighted screaming down an echoing hallway, and big hugs. There was a Panda. Tuesday morning, there was a last petit suisse with some of Gab’s mum’s mirabelle jam in a blue-and-white porcelain bowl.

Nearing New York, there was the sunset from the plane, the sun orange blazing disappearing. Then there was the city, blurry spots of light through the mist and condensation. My head was pressed against the window, and I realized I was smiling, I was so happy to be home. At one point there was only a pure, smooth blackness, and I couldn’t tell what was sky and what was sea. It looked like we were descending toward water, toward nothing, really, but I didn’t feel too bad about it.

Roissy. Airport café. 11:52 a.m. Perched on a bar stool at a high round table. The leftover crusts of a prepackaged sandwich, the last cold sip of a mediocre café au lait in a paper cup. Gold tinsel garlands taped to the glass wall, the barest minimum of holiday cheer. Disembodied, unemotional, the soundtrack is a wave of flight announcements in alternating languages. I am not broken, but I am a little dented.

Early this afternoon I headed down rue du Faubourg du Temple with its Vietnamese take-out joints and and its African bric-a-brac stores and its signs for Turkish kebab sandwiches and fries. All around, a comfortable bustling neighborhoody cacophony. Through the Tenth and the Third, I skirted the Eleventh, flirted with the Fourth. In a boulangerie in the Marais, the radio was tuned to Nostalgie, week-end de Seventies Non-Stop.

I found a flea market on rue Perrée, the tables laden with delight and loveliness: a red rotary phone, a handheld mirror in a gold frame, a little green lamp on a metal stand, a old tin that used to contain black cherry pastilles, a porcelain salt dish with a squirrel attached. So this is where the buyers at Anthropologie come when they say that they just happened to come across such-and-such over a weekend in Paris—this, before they send the thing off for mass reproduction at a workshop in India. Around the corner, a man appraised the offerings at one stand: “Oh là là! Oh là là! Oh là là là là!”

Along the Seine, joy is poking through the bouquiniste stands. I thumbed through one guy’s brilliant collection of 1950s and ’60s children's literature—several Martines, a stack of Super Boy magazines, tales of horses and goats and a duck with a red ribbon round his neck, some Enid Blyton translations—before finally coming away with Le Dimanche de la vie, bound in coarse yellow linen with the title and author name stamped on the front in dignity and gold. It became clear I’d spent too long poring over books when I realized my feet were so cold I could barely feel them. Uh, is that frostbite? Unlike many an unlucky mountain climber, I found myself right then in front of la Samaritaine. It was warm in there, and I hear there's a Mariage Frères upstairs, but I didn’t make it past the women’s department on the first floor. I tried on a pink corduroy skirt from the sale rack at Agnès B, but the gathers that were adorable while the skirt was on the hanger were foolishness on me.

And then I was late to meet Gab, but I figured, Eh, French time. I booked it West along the Seine, speeding by two old dudes passing me in the opposite direction, who glanced at me wonderingly, probably thinking I had to have been a bit touched to be flurrying along instead of promenading on a Saturday afternoon.

We hopped one of Gab’s bateaux parisiens as the lights came on around the city. What is nice is: Every bridge illuminated in the evening mist. Fancy living rooms lit up in houses along the river. Fairy lights dancing in the trees. The Eiffel Tower having lost its head in the fog. Door number 13, tucked under a bridge like cuteness. Spaces for summer sambas. The shaa-shaa-shaa of the water outside. House boats, little and big, and especially the one with the car parked on deck.

Later, on rue des Bons Enfants, a black plastic bag fell out of the sky. Gab picked it up, reached in, and took out a star-shaped key, Paris is incredible that way. We let ourselves in the door on the corner. Upstairs, Manel gave me a peach-cassis tisane and a pink Ladurée macaron. “The O.C.” in French was on TV, and then some game show that necessitated the boys yelling at the box: “Oeil! C’est oeil, pédé!!” At one point Sophie couldn't find her Gauloises. I imagined her cat was sitting in the other room lighting up a fag, narrowing its eyes at us through the smoke. Perched on the sofa next to the radiator, cradling my mug of tea, I felt the fatigue creeping up on me. I had such a desire to close my eyes.

Back in Belleville, I craved English reading material. A magazine. A women’s magazine. With lots of pictures. Gimme a break, sometimes a girl just feels like her head’s been working overtime. It occured to me that maybe what I needed was a big bowl of pho. And some nems. And jasmine tea. I popped out to the Vietnamese joint at the end of the street with my new Queneau. Mmmm. Aahhh.

All day the sky has been greywhite like a goosedown comforter. I can't wait to be in bed tonight, snuggled down deep under real covers.

He was late coming to get me at the airport, but when he got there he traded me my weekend bag for a bag containing a croissant and a croissant and a giant raisin swirly thing. The thing is, we like a boy who cares about baked goods.

The RER ticket machines taunted us for a good many minutes while we debated if it’d just be easier to go to Marseille instead of Paris. In the city, heading toward the stairs leading out of the métro, I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes. “Go,” he said. I bounded up the steps, two at a time, into the day.

Home on rue de l’Atlas, there was yoghurt and homemade quince jam, and black coffee out of clay yoghurt cups. There was a very small fashion show highlighting corduroy pants with very fashion pockets. There was chilling out wrapped up in a Brazilian hammock.

Later, up several flights on a curving wooden staircase on rue du Buisson Saint Louis, we broke into Gab’s mum’s confiture cabinet. Squat jars, faceted jars, curved jars, fat jars, the jammy reds and thick oranges and deep yellows were labeled with blue ballpoint on small white labels. The shelves sagged, seemed to sigh contentedly. Or maybe that was me. . .

We picked Gen up from the Alliance Française and then headed to lunch at Hector’s crêpe place. We laughed at the Trapèze galette—ham, emmenthal, pineapple—and then I ordered it. Hector poured us ciders, then brought us Nutella crepes with hearts painted on them in Nutella brush strokes.

Hanging out in Paris with Gab means back streets like the sweet discovery of a secret book. There are twists, there are turns. Everything seems new and old at the same time. Unexpectedly, the gloriousness of Gérard Mulot loomed in front of us—and just too bad ’cause there we were, our little bellies full with crêpes. Later, we headed up the narrow, curving rue de la Montagne Sainte Geneviève. At Crocojazz, Gilles was pleased to see us. He opened the glass cabinets with a key tied on a cord around his neck. Gab got to go behind the counter to turn up the volume on the hi-fi. A thick glass ashtray balanced on a shelf of records. The small shop was blues and smoke.

Hector came to pick us up after, then there were coffees and a mauresque under toasty heat lamps. Gab said he was going to be late to work. He leaned back in his chair and took another drag on his cigarette.

Well, so, sometimes a girl gets it in her head to do a thing, and then she does it.

So we’re at Maud’s place on rue du Buisson St. Louis in the Tenth, and somehow there’s a durian in the kitchen, and suddenly I’m alone at the table singing Eric Carmen’s “All By Myself” and everyone else is on the other side of the room debating if it’s more like rotten leeks or onions or papaya or tuna salad left in the sun, and now India’s crying.

Okay, back up. So Maud and I are walking down the street, coming from our émission spéciale on Gab’s radio station, and we’re hungry, and there’re all these Chinese Vietnamese epicieries, and so clearly we need to buy a durian, ’cause Maud’s never tried one, and okay, sure, why not. Why not turns out to be because it costs twenty euros, but we hand over the cash anyway and lug the mutha home. I think Maud may have a sense of je regrette right after we plunge a big knife through the spiky armor and split the fruit open—“It looks like brains, it looks like aliens, it looks like snort” she moans through strokeface—but she tries it anyway, face scrunched up, and then quickly washes her mouth out. India takes more persuading, but eventually takes some of the yellow flesh in her mouth, and then quickly moves on to a bowl of mint tea. I forget to warn the girls about durian burp, but they discover the phenomenon on their own. Surprise!

I leave Paris tomorrow, c’est chiant, j’suis grincheuse, c’est pas du tout cool, tu vois? A week ago this time we were driving to Maud’s country house in Prades, and when we arrived there was hot soup on the table, and salad from the garden, and cheese, and the best rhubarb tart ever. The week of paradise, the drives at mad speed curving through the hills, les cows!, le swimming in the lake, singing into the wind, falling asleep in the sun, louche comme louche, the secret florentins, le WC dehors, les sorties grand-mères, Louis Prima and Bobby La Pointe and Supertramp and, always, les Strokes. Maud’s house, with its white iron gates and its driveway through the trees; the worn curving staircase right when you come in; the kitchen, always warm and smelling tasty—of chocolate cake or lamb couscous or steamed fish or gratin aux choufleurs or lemon tart—and dinners crowded around the long wooden table, cheeses always at the ready. In the mornings, the big room still smells of fire from the night before.



Like the dwarfs, we were seven. Clem—Timide—cute and sweet and the younger brother, master of the fire, master of the coffee, when we parted he said, “Putain, cette petite meuf.” Mais j’adore. After each meal, his clarion call: “Un petit café?” “Ouaaiis.” Maud, oh, but, Maud. C’est Prof, c’est clair. India—Grincheux—knitting by the fire. There was the night after dinner, in a chorus, we sang of her baking skillery. The next day, there was a lemon tart on the table, crowned with a ring of crushed pistachios. Schmio était Dormeur, who slept in later and later each day, and then went outside to sun. Part two of les amoureux, Mauro, l’espagnol, l’espaniard, lovely and smiling, c’est lui Simplet, who made a raw egg lemon-flavoured fake ice cream that could have killed us all, and one day at Shopi returned to the shopping cart, inexplicably, triumphant with a cauliflower. Gabriel, Atchoom, allergic to every bit of nature around us, the fat peonies, the sweet roses, the trees years old, the thick grass dotted with daisies and yellow dandelions. Gab with the langourous eyes, the messy curls, the smile like you share a secret. Le foot under a deep blue blanket, a Kinder egg broken into two at Shrek en français in Aurillac, chords on the grand piano before being called to dinner.

I think I have to go now, there is a couscous dinner in the plans. Good-bye France, ç’a été trop bon, mais trop too much. À toute. . .

The thing about blogging in Paris is that then you are blogging in Paris instead of, I dunno, doing anything else out and about in Paris. Inside: hot, with bespectacled thirteen-year-old boys playing games on linked computers and yelling, at various intervals, “À la style Matrix!” and “Merde!!” and “Je meurs dans le Matrix!” and, I swear this is true, “Ai-yi-yi-yi-yi-caramba!!” Outside: blue skies and sunny sun and Berthillon ice creams and sorbets everyday—blackberry today, pear yesterday, Gianduja chocolate with orange peel the day before; a succulent sandwich grec-frites-salade in the back of some greasy hole-in-the-wall in the Bastille; a crêpe Nutella-banane, before a fat slice of hot banana covered in Nutella fell on my nice blue dress; afternoon tea at Fauchon as if we are Japanese ladies; a panino jambon-fromage-tomate with the birds in a shady spot at the Jardin de Luxembourg; the unexpected treat of a petit macaron cassis-violette from Ladurée, a sweet, cool round of heaven on a hot day; so many cafés crèmes at so many cafés.

Also outside is: hanging out in the Marais looking at the cute boys and their cute sneakers; shopping for groceries at Monoprix like I live here; being hit on by French boys while buying sweet red cherries at the market. All good things. Abrupt, sorry, have to go, out of internet café money.