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My seventh-grade French teacher, Madame Fleuriot, wore brown nylons, high heels, and yielding sweaters. She had a bouffant hairdo of cotton candy that melted in the rain when she forgot her kerchief. Madame’s bosom was substantial: a single body. I remembered it bobbing around the room. Who knows what the other boys thought about Madame, but there was something I found intriguing—her high laugh, her dismissive tone. When we didn’t know a French noun’s gender, Madame Fleuriot mocked us. Wasn’t it obvious, the pen’s masculinity? The crockery’s curves?

In her class, we learned that most of life in France wasn’t intended for children. Madame would sigh, “You are too young to understand.”

At the end of the year, Madame Fleuriot threw us a party. She hung tricolore ribbons in the windows and taught us how to make crêpes. All the butter seemed to relax Madame’s posture. She reclined on her desk and swung her feet. She told us, If ever we were lucky enough to visit Paris …

Just the word “Paris,” she was undone a bit.

Around that time, my mother brought home Charade, a murder mystery set in Paris with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. First time we watched it, in the den, my mother announced that Charade was her favorite movie.

It was the first time I’d heard her say she had a favorite anything.

Mom taught nursery school; Dad sold textiles. We lived in hell: suburban Connecticut. One year, when I was fourteen, my parents took me and my little sister, Leslie, for a week’s vacation in Paris. Our hotel, near Place Saint-Sulpice, was minuscule. Leslie and I barely got our luggage into the room. That first morning, we were staggering from jet lag. Our mother was already in the dining room; she looked primed. Back at home, she’d said what she wanted most from Paris was the coffee, the morning coffee. She ordered café au lait, très noir. When the coffee was ready, the waiter brought it out on a silver tray and served it ceremoniously, pouring espresso from one little pot, milk from another, the two streams melding in the cup.

My mother held the coffee below her nose. Her cheeks flushed.

I’d never seen my mother as a woman before, a woman powerfully contented.

That’s when I began drinking coffee. I was hung up on every little thing. I loved Paris, and felt straightaway at home. Not to be grandiose, but it seemed like the city had been waiting for me. The air was adhesive, hot, and fragrant, and we walked the city up and down and saw everything. Even my sister got into it: she ate from every crêpe stand we passed. My mother would say afterward, “I don’t think she ate a single meal inside a building.”

Toward the end of the week, at a men’s store that resembled a cottage, my dad told me to choose something for myself, anything. I picked a red-and-white shirt with a button-down collar—the first piece of adult clothing I’d ever wanted to wear.

Too quickly, we were back in Connecticut.

In school, Madame Fleuriot’s video days were notorious. Our lessons were based on a program, Voix et Images de France (Voices and Images of France), that featured a family in Paris called the Thibaults, who lived at number 10 Place d’Italie. Monsieur Thibault was an engineer—Monsieur Thibault est ingénieur. Madame Thibault, a homemaker, took care of the children, Paul and Catherine, who looked miserable. There were two college students in the lessons, Robert and Mireille, who were also boyfriend-girlfriend. Mireille was a hot blonde, maybe nineteen. Every episode, she wore the same red skirt and white blouse—big tits, big hips, long hair, and if Robert was infatuated with Mireille, so were we.

For example, one day, visiting the Tuileries Gardens, Mireille took a table at an outdoor café. Spring in Paris, too good to be true, how lovely! But she was thirsty—well, who wouldn’t be?—so Mireille ordered a kir royale. However, ooh la la, when the waiter returned with her drink, he spilled the whole thing down her front.

“What’s so funny?” Madame Fleuriot said, pausing the VCR. She studied the screen, where Mireille’s breasts and nipples were plainly showing through her blouse.

“Ah, you boys,” Madame said, “please, grow up.”

Madame laughed and relaxed, one hand perched on the TV cart. Mireille remained paused, pendulous.

“Now, a kir royale,” Madame said. “You know this? It really is delicious. You’re too young, of course.” How we disappointed her. “In Paris, children do not drink to get drunk. Excuse me. Now, kir royale.”

“Kir royale,” we said.

“Mostly it’s champagne,” Madame said, “but with cassis, just a few drops? It’s really wonderful. On a summer afternoon?”

Later in the year, Madame showed us a 1980s French movie called La Boum. At one point in the film, some teenagers go to the cinéma, and a boy sticks his penis into a popcorn box so the girl sitting next to him will jerk him off. But we weren’t shocked. We were turning fourteen, we knew about those sorts of things. Stuff like that happened in Paris. Plus, it wasn’t cool to make a big deal about anything.

“French” became an umbrella term for me, describing things I liked before I knew why I liked them. But Paris was different. Paris was an umbrella, a dream I carried around in case the weather turned bad.