THE ROOM THAT looked musty and mothballed in the glare of an outside streetlamp and the dreary haze of my exhaustion takes on new life in the light of the morning. The wallpaper is a soft yellow fabric that matches an upholstered chair in the corner and the pillows I swept off the bed in a bleary-eyed huff last night. Now, the entire hotel room looks like a Cézanne painting, wide brushstroke swatches the color of sunrise.
My mom is already awake, tightening the laces on her gym shoes.
“I’m sorry about yesterday,” she says as I emerge from the bathroom post-shower (and post-exploratory use of the squat porcelain bidet).
“’S okay,” I say. I wonder what I should be wearing today. Lena had said something about skirts. Did I bring a scarf? I wish I remembered to bring a scarf.
My mom clears her throat. “I’d love to show you the Paris I remember. I studied abroad here! You know that, right?” It sounds like she’s reciting a speech she rehearsed.
I eye my sketchpad and watercolors. “I had sort of planned to go the Delacroix museum today—”
“We can do that too! Afterward. Let’s do breakfast, a few shops. I have to take you to the bakery I went to every day when I was in college. And then the Delacroix museum?”
The prospect of breakfast and a bakery is pretty persuasive. And, as long as we go to the Musée Delacroix afterward, I figure I can allow myself to be seduced by a flaky croissant and a tour guide who knows Paris better than I do, even if she hasn’t been back in twenty-five years. To be honest, there are not many things I would not be agreeable to if a croissant is offered first. “It sounds like a plan.”
* * *
I’m significantly happier than I thought I would be, sitting across from my mom, drinking the hot chocolate from Ladurée, a drink so thick it reminds me of the molten chocolate they use in fondue kits. I don’t remember ever drinking something so rich or delicious, and I’m almost positive that if I tested it, my spoon would stand upright in my cup. The waiter served it to us in silver pots, making me feel like Marie Antoinette. Early-in-her-reign Marie Antoinette, before the whole terrified-of-peasants-storming-Versailles thing. Ladurée hot chocolate is pure, unadulterated pre-French-Revolution-I’m-an-Austrian-princess-living-in-a-Sophia-Coppola-movie-of-excess-and-indulgence. Plus, it would be difficult to drink without a head.
“So, what’s your first assignment from your grandfather?” My mom stirs a quick pour of skim milk into her black coffee. Not even in Paris will she break her diet. “Shouldn’t there be something for you to work on?”
I opened Grandpa’s first envelope this morning, peeling away the orange flap and ripping the metal clasp straight off in my eagerness to see what was inside. I found a handwritten letter and another, smaller envelope. Written in Grandpa’s signature handwriting—all capitals, like an architect—was a message to me:
BIENVENUE À PARIS! WELCOME TO THE CITY OF LIGHTS! DO NOT OPEN YOUR ASSIGNMENT (ENCLOSED ENVELOPE) UNTIL AFTER YOU VISIT THE MUSÉE D’ORSAY. I’D SEND YOU TO THE LOUVRE, BUT I CAN’T STAND THOSE GHASTLY PYRAMIDS OUT FRONT.
—RP
“He wants me to visit the Musée d’Orsay. It’s closed today, so I figure that’s on the agenda for tomorrow. Museum in the morning, art project in the afternoon.”
“He didn’t want you to go to the Louvre?” she says, furrowing her brow. “See the Mona Lisa?”
“No, he says he prefers the Musée d’Orsay.”
My mother’s expression changes slightly. She signals a waiter with pockmarks on his cheeks and orders two chocolate croissants in surprisingly good French. “It’s overrated,” she says in a mock whisper once the waiter is out of earshot. “The Mona Lisa. About the size of a postage stamp. And so crowded it’s impossible to get a good view.”
“Yeah,” I say. “I mean, I’m more excited for the Delacroix museum. And it’s closed tomorrow, so Delacroix today, d’Orsay and assignment tomorrow.”
My mother does the distracted nod of a person who is ready to move on to another subject. “If we have time today, I’d love to hit the Longchamp store—I’m sure they’re cheaper in Paris, even if we have to convert from euros.”
My face must fall, because my mom quickly backtracks. “Delacroix,” she says. “Was he the one who painted ballerinas?”
“No,” I answer, trying my hardest not to sound too condescending. “He did, like, horses. And harems. Things that were really exotic for the time. Like from North Africa.”
My mother nods like she’s trying to understand, and a small sliver of gratitude opens inside me.
The truth is, Delacroix’s art isn’t even what attracted me to the museum. I don’t even think it holds a large collection of his paintings. But the museum is located in his former home, and it’s been left almost entirely intact. Visiting Delacroix’s house, I’ll be able to see the windows that filled his studios with light, the counters where he left his half-open paints, the mirrors he pursed his lips in front of when he agonized over whether his work was any good. I need to see it to believe that it was real—that a real artist lived in Paris and painted real things after he brushed his teeth and made eggs for breakfast. That he’s not just a name in a textbook. That I could be like him one day.
I don’t explain this to my mother, who I know would immediately point out that I’ve been to Grandpa’s house plenty of times. She won’t understand that a struggling artist from Naperville, Illinois, who worked at a car dealership and painted in his basement until he quietly established a major foothold in the art scene at age fifty is very different from a bohemian soul who spent his life in Paris, focused on nothing but his art.
Not that Alice asks me anything else about Delacroix. Instead, she stares at the green streak in my hair, absentmindedly playing with the front few inches of her own hair.
“Why did you do that to your hair? Doesn’t the bleaching destroy the cuticle?”
“No, I think my cuticle is perfectly healthy.” I eye her hair, more auburn than it used to be but still a pretty red unlike my mousy, nondescript brown. If I had inherited my mother’s hair, I probably wouldn’t have dyed my own.
Alice raises her eyebrows. “At least you’ll be over this”—she selects her word like it’s a macaron—“look by the time you’re applying for jobs.”
“Probably not, because this ‘look’ is what I like.” I take another sip of hot chocolate and let it sit on my tongue, partly to savor it and partly to keep me from saying something I’ll regret later.
“I’m just saying,” she starts again, “there wasn’t anyone at my office—” She stops herself midsentence. I look up, and her eyes are on me. “Let’s not fight this morning. We’re in Paris and it’s beautiful, and we should enjoy it.”
“Okay,” I say. And I mean it.
My mom calls over a waitress, a girl with skin that looks so perfect she doesn’t even need makeup and eyelashes like a cartoon skunk. Are all French girls this pretty? Is that why fashion magazines write about them (“Eat Breakfast like a French Girl!” “The Seven Style Essentials French Girls Want You to Know!”) like they’re mythological creatures?
“Excuse me, is this skim?” she says, lifting up the tiny silver pitcher of milk the waitress had brought with her coffee.
“Crème,” the waitress says, expressionlessly.
My mother visibly recoils. I wish I could sink into my chair and slither out the door. I wish I could move to a different table and pretend I never met the Ugly American complaining about the crème they bring for coffee.
“I need skim, please,” she says and hands the confused waitress both the cream and the cup of coffee that has been ruined by an unacceptable fat content.
“Crème for the coffee,” the waitress says. “Yes, milk.”
“Well,” my mother says, “is it milk or cream?”
The waitress looks at my mother, looks at me, then at the dairy in the tiny pitcher, then back at me. “Uh, milk?” she says. “Yes. Milk.”
My mother sniffs. “See, but you said it was cream, and now I’m worried it’s actually not milk.” She hesitates for a moment and then turns back to the waitress with a fake smile. “You know what? I’ll just get a cup of tea.”
The waitress raises her eyebrows but takes the dishes and heads off.
“So rude,” my mother says when the waitress is out of earshot.
“No, you were rude,” I say, and then I try to backtrack. “I mean, just go with the flow. It’s fine.”
“If I’m paying for coffee, I want it to be the way I want it. I don’t want to have to argue about whether I’m drinking milk or cream.”
“Fine,” I say.
I’ve already finished my hot chocolate by the time the tea arrives at our table. The awkwardness in the air is thicker than the richest cream you could buy in Europe.
* * *
Being in Paris makes me wonder how a place like Evanston, Illinois, even retains the will to live. How can any city dare to take up space and ink on a map when it doesn’t have cobblestone streets and robin’s-egg-blue roofs, or house a flurry of people too important to notice how beautiful everything is? None of the architecture in Paris has the clean, antiseptic lines of a suburb. The whole city vibrates with a density of culture and personalities that have built up, like rock sediment layering on top of itself, for centuries. An entire city block of street artists selling postcard-size paintings to tourists; a German couple affixing a lock to a bridge over the Seine; a school group giggling and shoving each other across the cobblestones; a man walking a cat on a leash. The place is pulling apart at the seams and sewing itself back together a million times a second.
I feel like Harry Potter when he goes through the brick wall behind the Leaky Cauldron and enters Diagon Alley for the first time: I wish I had better sight, better smell, better hearing, senses that haven’t even been discovered yet, so that I could capture the feeling of this city in a way that won’t eventually fade from my memory.
We pass a tiny bookshop, barely a full storefront, its sign a faded purple and its facade a bright blue: La Belle Hortense.
In the window sits a dense collection of books—some are familiar, most are not—with covers that could pass as a modern art installation. Without even venturing inside, I can imagine the smell (leather and stiff paper and Christmas trees and patchouli oil) and the countless stories that have unfolded just behind the shop’s glass window. I imagine anarchists meeting, ripping out pages surreptitiously; tourists falling in love; couples hiding from the rain; lonely souls looking for sanctuary. They all exist at once in that tiny place.
I hesitate, pulled toward the store by an invisible energy.
“Do you want to go inside?” my mother asks. I do, but as I pull toward the window, I notice the lights are off and bar stools are upside down on tables like strange fairytale antlers. “It’s closed,” I say. “Hours are seventeen to two.”
“Five P.M. to two A.M.,” my mother translates.
It’s a bar. A literary bar where, from the look of the counter, you pick up a new paperback and read while sipping a glass of wine. In that moment, I imagine an entirely new life for myself, where a faceless fiancé and I are regulars at La Belle Hortense, and the owner knows exactly which new releases I’ll be interested in and the exact right wines with which to pair them.
“We can come back!” my mom says, and I nod. But the truth is there are some places where you don’t quite belong yet. There’s no place here, in this bookstore that’s only open in the evenings, for Nora Parker-Holmes, the high school student from Evanston. I could walk inside, sure, but I’d be a tourist in every sense of the word. I’m not the me I need to be to belong in La Belle Hortense, and the realization fills me with a hollowness that I can’t quite describe.
My mother and I spend the afternoon wandering and shopping. Mom takes me to Longchamp and buys me a navy blue purse that I never would have bought for myself, with a price tag that makes me a little nervous for the both of us (“It’s a vacation,” she says. “We’re in Paris. Buy it where it’ll mean something to you!”).
After we walk through the chilly cavern of Notre Dame (and pick our favorite of the slack-faced gargoyles perched outside), we climb to the top of Montmartre and sit on the steps outside the white church, gazing down on the rooftops of the entire city. We’re surrounded by other people—tourists, locals, students—doing the same thing, but it’s still hard not to feel like we’re doing something special, something singular.
“I used to come here to study,” my mother says. “I’d just sit on these steps and read.”
“Did you read in French?”
Mom gives me a small smile. “I was supposed to! I did buy an English translation of a Zola book I was supposed to read, I do remember that.”
“Were you an English major? I didn’t know you were an English major.”
I try to imagine my mom, younger—not much older than I am now—her red hair in a ponytail, sitting on these very steps reading Shakespeare and Émile Zola, writing papers. It’s nearly impossible to picture. The closest I can get is an image of Alice, middle-aged, sitting in a college lecture hall.
“I was a semiotics major,” she says. “I don’t know if those programs even exist anymore.”
“I’ve never heard of it.” I don’t offer that I don’t actually know what the word “semiotics” means. Instead I say, “So, what did you want to be when you grew up? I mean—”
“I wanted to be a lawyer.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but she looks at me with a sad, sideways smile.
Of course. No—Alice Parker never would have wanted to be anything that didn’t involve wearing a pantsuit and black shoes that clack on linoleum floors and ordering people around. It’s no wonder she’s never even opened her mind to the possibility that my career could be something else.
We sit on the steps for a few more minutes while a pigeon picks at crumbs perilously close to our feet.
It’s a warm summer afternoon, with a slight breeze carrying laughter and shouts from across the steps. We have an expansive view of the city beneath us like a doll set. It should be a perfect moment. I know that. But my mind keeps circling through concerns like an endless carousel: Mom is hiding something. Spin. She planned to come on this trip from the beginning. Spin. I bet she worked something out with Grandpa. Spin. What are Lena and Nick doing right now? Spin. Has he told her? Spin. I bet he told her. Spin. She’s going to hate me. Spin. Mom is hiding something. And around and around and around.
I clear my throat and check my phone. “Two thirty,” I say. “The Delacroix museum closes at five—we should start heading over.”
Mom stares out at Paris for a few seconds, and I wonder whether or not she heard me. Just as I’m about to repeat myself, she says, “One last place. There’s one more place I want to take you quickly—just for a quick coffee. We’ll be done by three and head over, plenty of time!”
“So, it’s a coffee shop?”
“Sort of. It’s . . . a bit of everything. I was there quite a lot when I studied here. It’s on the Rue La Fayette.” Her eyes search back and forth in the sky like she’s trying to remember something. I can’t tell whether it’s a good or bad memory. “Called Le Henrique,” she adds. “Hold on, let me check my phone.”
She pulls me toward a shady awning to get out of the way of the steady parade of tourists. She types infuriatingly slowly, and my hands itch to take the phone from her and do it myself. It’s like the Apple store teaches all parents the same terrible way to use their iPhones: Be sure to spend at least thirty seconds on a single word. Oh, and only use one finger while you type—it’ll drive your kids crazy!
“It’s not listed,” she murmurs, more to herself than to me. “Maybe I’m forgetting the name. Le . . . Honorie?”
“Wait, you don’t know the name? How are we supposed to know where we’re going?”
“I remember where it is,” my mother says.
“This better not take too long,” I say. It comes out harsher than I mean it to. Impatience has a way of calcifying my words. Luckily, she spares me a response.