“Yes,” she said, “you do. Every time I turn on the radio these days, there’s some Lucy Jordan woman singing about how her life has been wasted because she never rode through Paris with the top down and the wind blowing in her hair. You are in Paris right now! You’ll look back on this moment when you’re fifty and gloat because you haven’t wasted your life!”

Well, I’d look back on living in Tahiti and Spain and gloat at not having wasted my life. Paris I wasn’t so sure about. “You can’t joyride through Paris with the top down. It’s too cold, it’s usually raining, and you wouldn’t have the wind running through your hair, you’d be stuck in a traffic jam with dozens of angry drivers honking all around you.”

“You’re violating the myth of Paris with a little bit too much reality for me,” Anna said. “Do you want me to come visit you in the spring or not?”

I sighed. It’s not like I wasn’t trying. As a graduate student, I should have been spending my time in classrooms and the library, but I was afraid to let my sister down. I had a moral obligation to love Paris and to enjoy every minute of it, and I couldn’t do that in a classroom or in a library. So I went to the theater and saw Marivaux acted in the centuries-old Hôtel de la Monnaie that could have been the real setting for his comedy of manners. Period-dressed actors greeted us at the door as if we were house-guests along with the characters in the play, and a period-dressed chamber orchestra played Lully as we climbed the wide stone steps to the room in which the play would take place. The next night, I heard Corneille declaimed in grandiose alexandrins in a tiny stale theater with an audience of a dozen and one actor who smelled so bad we knew whenever he was waiting in the wings. I got off work afternoons and said, “Hey, I haven’t seen Monet’s Rouen cathedrals in days,” and strolled into the Musée d’Orsay, installed myself in a chair, and just stared for an hour at those extraordinary paintings and all the heads that kept blocking my view of them. Before, I had only ever seen Monet on greeting cards and as a poster on my dentist’s bathroom wall. Bless Valérie for my art historian card. I lived in fear that one day some security guard would look at the card, squint at me suspiciously, and ask some trick question. “What’s the point of such-and-such in the Pompidou?” he would ask. I’d try to stammer out something logical, which would be a dead giveaway, and the jig would be up. I wouldn’t be imprisoned, but when Parisians sniff at you the humiliation scars you for life.