“I wasn’t planning on spinning out of control,” I said.

“Good,” said Helen, acidly businesslike. “So, Freddy,” she asked, “how are you doing? Was it a bad breakup?”

And for the next forty-five minutes we discussed the ins and outs of Freddy’s relationship.

• • •

And then my parents arrived. My mother had felt odd on the plane, bloated, and wondered, while she unpacked, whether it was just a problem with the cabin pressure. My father thought she should see a doctor (my father believed at that time in doctors). “Settle whatever it is,” he said. “Don’t spend a week in Saint-Paul being uncomfortable.”

“Perhaps it was just the plane, Leonard,” my mother said to him.

My father thought it was best to be sure. “You’ve never felt odd on planes before,” he said. “It was a very smooth flight.”

My mother wavered.

“Better to see a doctor in Paris than to get stuck with a doctor in Saint-Paul,” said my father. And while my mother continued unpacking, he telephoned friends in Paris and in New York so that he could select a duly qualified physician.

My mother started on that thing she did, ordering flowers and putting out the odds and ends that somehow transformed the place into her room. The square travel bag on the desk, and the silk bathrobe thrown over a chair, and the felt-tipped pens and a book on an end table, and the makeup brushes in the bathroom, reflected forever in facing mirrors, and the dry-­cleaning papers in the wastebasket, and the little travel clock and the manicure set with two emery boards by the bed, and the great suitcase in the corner—it was all at once ours. Even the smell of bath powder and roses and clean silk blouses conjured home. Other guests who came to stay in that room found only the Louis XV furniture, and never saw how it looked when it was really lived in and full of my mother, how its whole quality changed when, by the end of four days, it was softened further by roses just beginning to drop their petals. My mother had to stop the maids from throwing away those roses; she loved them when they had opened too far and always kept them a day longer than the French staff thought fitting. In fact, that last day of the roses was her favorite.

After my mother had unpacked, my father went downstairs to confirm the week’s restaurant reservations and car bookings with the concierge. Freddy was sitting on my mother’s bed and she was looking for her reading glasses when Helen and I stood up to say good night. We both kissed my mother and Freddy, and then we headed for the door, where we paused for a second while Helen checked to make sure that she had our room key.

“So, Freddy,” said my mother in an offhand way when she heard us opening the door. “Any news from Melanie?”