On Heat, Again

plus some little Paris pleasures

Writing about Paris and heat waves last month, I thought seriously about leaving out a sentence in which I hedged a little but predicted that the heat wouldn’t last. Well. The heat didn’t last but it returned, and for our first week in the city temperatures were in the mid-nineties every day. Parisian wisdom says to keep the windows and blinds closed, and we tried, but the spacious, well-equipped apartment we’re renting came without sufficient window coverings, so really there was nothing we could’ve done. We had two fans and bought a third. Outdoors, if you could stay in the shade you’d be ok, mostly. What surprised me most about the heat, besides how relentless it was, was what it did to my brain. Running errands, I found I needed to transfer some heavy items from a paper shopping bag to a canvas bag, and to make room for them I needed to put some lighter items in the paper bag, and I simply could not figure out how to make it work. In the cafés where last summer I translated like a maniac, my working time compressed into energetic and very limited intervals, this summer I just sat there while the ice cubes in my Perrier melted, unable to think. (I’m translating the last book by Stéphane Bouquet, so grief played its part in my stupidity, still does.) When it came time to pay our afternoon babysitter, neither my husband nor I could multiply.

Finally we did something we’ve never done before: the weekend before Bastille Day, we rented a car from the Gare de Lyon and drove to Normandy, where we were able to find a cheap AirBnB in Bayeux, probably because the famous tapestry had just departed for England. Our apartment was airy and cool, with a view directly onto the cathedral. The beaches were windy and wide, the water shallow and mild; the toddler ran immediately into the surf without hesitation or fear. We all tried some sea snails and had cider and / or ice cream in the afternoons and slept well and felt our wits return to us.

Now we have one more week here. Temperatures are expected to rise again, and—another first—we looked into changing our flights to go home earlier, although I think we’ll stay. We’d had a vague plan to spend every July in Paris, and for so many reasons I hope we can still do it. I used to leave Paris with an incredible feeling of sadness, not sure if I’d be able to come back. Then for the past, I don’t know, ten years or so, as I’ve started translating, as I’ve had a stable-enough income to be able to manage it, I’ve felt more sanguine: au revoir, Paris, not adieu. This summer, I feel a lot of anxiety. I’ll be back, certainly, but a month of working and parenting in a city we all love seems a riskier proposition. I don’t know.

Two years ago, traveling with Julian as a baby, I wrote up a list of cheap, tiny delights in this city. Last year I was too struck by the bounty of this place in the face of the world’s meanness to do so. This year once again I wanted to give a little tiny catalog of pleasures, again perhaps for no other reason than to document them as things that once were possible.

An Elegant Sandbox

This summer we have fallen into an unlikely morning routine: after a trip to the bakery, Walt and Julian take the metro each morning from where we are in the 19^th to the Place des Vosges, a straight shot. I meet them there a little later in the morning and take over while Walt goes to a café to write, and Julian and I hang out by the sandboxes until it’s time to head home for lunch. In all my years of Place des Vosges people-watching, I never even noticed the two sandboxes until last year. This is not a sandbox to which you can go to make friends—it’s mostly the offspring of the neighborhood bourgeoisie accompanied by their nannies, and I was very tickled when someone asked if we lived nearby (imagine!)—but it is a scenic, even elegant, one. This year I bought the toddler his very own set of sand toys, and they come everywhere with us, just in case. Paris playgrounds are not places to make friends with other parents, but I did strike up a conversation with a woman from Colombia, accompanying her son at a Marais playground, and she was horrified when I said that we did not have sandboxes in the US. “But…what about their development?” she wondered. I didn’t know sandboxes were so important for development, but I get it: good for the senses, I think, and for learning to share toys, for the imagination, and probably also for the immune system.

Paris Plages

Joke’s on me for this one too: for years, my friends and I would mock even the idea of the Paris Plages, or the Paris Beach. A beach along the Seine, how silly, how gross. It is silly and gross. But hear me out, self of 20 years ago: if there’s a heat wave and you have a toddler, and you can’t eat dinner in your apartment because it’s too hot to cook or even eat inside, too hot to do anything but sleep in front of a fan, but you do need dinner—you could do worse than one of the cafés up on the Bassin de la Villette, which all put out acres of picnic tables and serve perfectly fine food even before 7pm. Julian scrabbles in the white dust under the tables with his little cars when he’s done eating, or we take turns watching the boats with him and pointing out the canal detritus, or watching the swing dancers, intent on their leisure as only the French can be, or the zip-lining kids waving their limbs back and forth over the canal. I’m still iffy on the idea of swimming in the river or the canal but some days, when I’m walking along between the twin movie theaters at Stalingrad, the water looks blue and sparkles, almost inviting, and I can imagine Paris managing sort of a Copenhagen thing, cleaner and more swimmable, and it’s not terrible.

Fleur d’Oranger Brioche

Ok, this isn’t free, but I know of two bakeries around the corner from each other near the rue Crimée in the 19^th where you can buy fleur d’oranger brioche, which means it’s probably caught on elsewhere too. It’s as good as it sounds, it’s heaven, it’s less than 2 euros for a nice round soft doughy chunk. This is not a sweet pastry, which is what makes it work: the fleur d’oranger is a scent, not a flavor, and it doesn’t “taste like perfume” (this is what Julian said when he tasted a fleur d’oranger babka roll, too sweet) but like you replaced the half the milk in your brioche with some kind of divine nectar, the milkiest orange-blossom tenderest pastry it is possible to imagine.

The Metro

I’ve always kind of loved the Paris metro, maybe because living in Paris was the first and really only time I was part of the 9ish-5ish schedule, and I was very lonely, and it made me feel like part of something to be leaving and coming home with all the other people leaving and coming home. I like the noises and the particular metro smell—not piss, I mean, but the smell of the metro itself—and the way you can get almost anywhere you need to be in 20 minutes and the way everyone is mostly silent on the train but also intensely aware of everyone else. The surprise of the summer: my kid is maybe the only person who loves the Paris metro more than I do! He likes to climb into one of the little fold-down seats by the window and press his face to the glass; he solemnly surveys the other passengers, makes eye contact, smiles; once we’re off, he likes to have a seat in the station to watch the train disappear down the tunnel. I like the metro even more for how the Parisians enjoy his enjoyment. Alas, while Cleveland has a world-class art museum and a world-class orchestra, it does not have a world-class public transit system, and we will all miss living without a car starting again in August.

And a miscellany of other tiny things that made us happy: a watermelon granita at Glaster, more watermelon than the most watermelon of watermelon, seeds and all. Free watermelon samples at the marketplace, free chouquettes for the kid from the nice bakers. Supermarket gazpacho from the carton. A spray bottle, to fill and mist the baby pigeon stranded in the courtyard, who seems to enjoy this. Pillowcase dressing: I bought a white cotton shift at a thrift store for ten euros and a loose white short-sleeve for three, and they’re what I’ve worn most often. “Green macarons”—pistachio or other—wherever we can get them. A bookstore that’s also a boat. A guy riding up and down the canal with a giant speaker on a scooter, sitting on the speaker, playing reggae very loud. Despite everything, the endless evenings.