Paris in Love Read Online Free Page A

waves, the sound of home.

    Every Peter Pan has his Hook, Harry Potter his Malfoy … Anna’s nemesis is Domitilla, the young lady who slapped her on the playground. Domitilla is a talkative Italian with a propensity for hogging the spotlight (which Anna prefers to reserve for herself). “She is devilish,” Anna told me, very seriously, this morning on the way to school.

    “We’d like white wine,” Alessandro tells our wine seller, Monsieur Juneau. “What are you eating?” M. Juneau inquires. “Fish.” “What kind of fish?” “Halibut with mint and lemon,” I report. “And on the side?” “Potatoes.” “Small or large?” asks Monsieur. (Who knew
that
mattered?) “Small.” Our menu rolls off his tongue, sounding like the
carte du jour
at a three-star Michelin restaurant. “The wine for you,” he says, lovingly plucking down a bottle. At home, the fish is disastrous, but the wine, a revelation.

    Luca has caught a virus, and declared pathetically this morning that there was only one thing in the world he could bring himself to eat: Froot Loops. I picked up Anna at school, and we detoured to a small store called the Real McCoy, which caters to homesick American expats. Jackpot! We bought brown sugar, marshmallows, and Froot Loops. Luca ate three bowls.

    Ballerinas fall out of the conservatory on our street, eager for a smoke. They cluster around the steps, hip bones jutting. Today, two of them are resplendent in pink tutus, absentmindedly stretching their hamstrings.

    I worked hard this afternoon on
A Kiss at Midnight
, my reimagining of
Cinderella
. My heroine is flat-chested, poor thing, and part of her transformation involves a pair of “bosom friends” made of wax. These accoutrements are thoroughly historical, and great fun to write about. I gave her so many misadventures that I felt very glad to have gone through with reconstruction surgery, so I don’t have to walk around wearing a wax tata.

    Today Alessandro had his first meeting with a Frenchman from the “conversation exchange” website. His name is Florent, and he wants to learn Italian because he bought a plot of land in a tiny village near Lucca, in Tuscany, and he plans to build a house there. But mostly because he is in love with a waitress he met in the village. Apparently she is very, very shy and reserved.

    We woke this morning to a sheet of rain pouring into the street, with the kind of concentrated intensity that made me think, drowsily, that our bedroom could be behind a waterfall: a dim and cool cave, our big windows a pane of moving water.

    Today Anna was kicked out of her math class and sent to the hallway to “think about herself.” I asked her what she thought about. In lieu of self-examination, she planned a new Sims family, but admitted that she was afraid I would kill her before she got to make it.

    A concerned friend has just written from England to inform me that her son’s economics reading included the fact that 650Parisians are hospitalized every year due to dog-poo-related accidents. After living here for almost two months, I am not surprised by this datum. The good news is that we are not (yet) among the fallen.

    I walked home at dusk, and everyone I passed was munching a baguette. The pavement looked as if hundreds of lost children had scattered crumbs so they could find their way home again.

    Anna’s archrival, Domitilla, just returned from her grandmother’s funeral in Italy. Apparently Domitilla glanced above the coffin and saw Jesus suspended in the air. Anna’s comment: “I was pretty surprised to hear that.” But another classmate, Vincenzo, chimed in and said that he knew about a boy with no legs at all who went to church and prayed, and after seeing a white-bearded man in the air, got up and walked. “So that was better than just seeing Jesus,” Anna pointed out.

    My publisher is in town on her way to the Frankfurt Book Fair, and she took me to lunch at Brasserie Lipp, where Simone de