THEY ARRIVE at Orly airport in the usual gray drizzle. Sophie Blind in her traveling cape, a child dancing at each side, the oldest forging ahead with one of the huge straw baskets in which they put the heavy things—knives, shells, camping equipment, the typewriter, the iron wrapped in still-damp beach towels. What plane are we going on next? the children ask. Swissair? Pan Am? Air France? Lufthansa? Why don’t we ever go Air India? We’re not taking any more planes. This is where we’re staying. Settling for good. The mother’s tired and distant voice continues in the taxi racing along the quay, while Paris monuments sprout up around them.
They stand before a building under construction. The last floor, where the windows have been put in, she points. A five-floor walkup. I knew it. I just knew it! Joshua comments, hoisting the straw basket. It’s good for your heart, Toby says. Why do they start at the top? Jonathan asks.
The place is not quite ready; the workers are just putting in the moquette. No, they can’t go in till they’re finished in the evening, but a lot of things have arrived—boxes and suitcases stacked against the wall beside the door, and some letters on top of the trunk. Did Daddy write? Why doesn’t she open it? Not on the stairway.
They walk out on the boulevard: TABAC, BOULANGERIE, kiosks pasted with last month’s concert announcements, the Credit Lyonnais, the urinals; and single file through narrow side streets: DÉFENSE D’AFFICHER on pocked walls; yes it’s all there, rivulets streaming along the gutter and the little man in the blue tablier guiding the garbage toward the sewer hole with his whisk broom; at the next turn Notre Dame appears. So what are we going to do? At least it stopped raining. Go to a movie?
She writes to her lover while they sit in a corner café waiting for the workers to finish. Rereads his note, tears up her own. Arrived this morning in the usual gray drizzle and found your note...she starts a new sheet. Isn’t it time to go, Mum?...Paris is not the same. She crosses out the line and crumples the page.
Yes, there is a carpet under the brown wrapping paper. What fun for the children to rip it off and roll. Gold, if Jonathan insists. Shade called moutarde, when she chose it last year. No furniture? Who needs furniture. On a gold rug they eat, play and sleep. Good thing they brought their butane gas camping equipment till they finish putting in the pipes and the inspecteur du gaz comes around to...
The children are curious. Who sent her that fat letter from New York she is reading while the spaghetti boils? Who is Ivan? they ask. Is he rich? Is he good-looking? Will you marry him? I want to marry a rich man, Toby says. You’re rich aren’t you? Jonathan says. Joshua is never going to marry. Eating on the floor Japanese-style, who are they, these little people? We’ll need some furniture, Toby insists. For guests. What do you think? We’re going to have parties here. It’s true you can’t invite people properly till you at least have some chairs.
But people come anyway. X who heard she was no longer living with Ezra. Y who heard from Ezra that she is living in Paris now. Z who heard from X. They’ve been waiting all these years. Pointless to apologize, Je ne me suis pas encore installée. The carpet is perfectly suitable. It’s out of the question. She can’t, the children might awake. She can’t, she’s exhausted. She can’t, she must unpack. She can’t, she has fifty letters to write. No, she can’t, she must work on her book; she can’t tell them what it’s about. She must sleep. She must really write those letters. To Ezra. Can’t. Business letters. Can’t. To her lover in New York. Can’t. Finish unpacking. Can’t. Can’t sleep. Can’t work. —What is the proper way to dispose of a wedding gown one can’t give to one’s daughter or daughter-in-law? No proper way.
The plaster still hasn’t dried. Can’t dry in this damp...“Quartier pittoresque et malsain,” as the Guide Bleu said. Long after midnight she paces in her fur coat.
Where are you going, Mum? Joshua stands blinking in the hall on his way from the toilet. To a ball in her nightgown, where else? She waits till he has scurried under the sheet in the next room before she puts out all the lights.
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The room is crowded with people in party dress. They pass in and out. Some are out drinking on the terrace. The doors have been thrown open and the sun pours in.
Wake up, it’s Wedding Sunday! shrieks a flushed blond woman. Her nude, prominently veined arm upraised waving a chiffon scarf like a general rallying an army, she sweeps across the room, a maenad, leading a group of seedy European intellectuals in her train. They cast furtive glances at the silver trays of garnished hams being carried out on the terrace while noting the disorder in the room: the unmade bed, old magazines, castoff garments, dirty cups and full ashtrays on the floor and the furniture. It’s an artist’s room, someone explains. Little girls stand around the desk rummaging through the stacks of papers and notebooks. Their cheeks are rouged and their eyes lined with blue eyeshadow. Such little girls wearing makeup! one of the guests laughs disapprovingly. They begin to throw the papers around while from the terrace the opening bars of a piano piece come through faintly.
Just then the Bridegroom enters in black, followed by his clan, a noisy procession of bearded men to the seventh generation. They swagger and lurch about, dragging their boots, flushed and perspiring under their kaftans, they press
