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Ritz’s renovations. He makes his way over to Palais-Royal, and strolls the seventeenth-century arcades, poking in boutiques, antiques and leather goods and artisan jewelry. He buys a tee shirt for Chloe, with the picture of a terrier whose name apparently is Gigi. His wife is fond of terriers. Though not quite fond enough to own one; Chloe doesn’t think she’d be a good parent to a dog.
    There are a handful of wine bars strewn about the northern end of Palais-Royal, and he has a glass of white with appetizers at one, an airy room with light wood and big windows. He walks around the corner to a smaller, more crowded
bar à vins
, a place he’s been before. He watches the crowd through the huge mirror while he eats spicy lamb stew and drinks a barnyardy red, perched on a leather stool at the battered bar, scribbling in the suede-covered notebook he bought in Florence, pliable and worn and filled with notes he has scrawled on all seven continents. It’s a perfect little thing, his notebook.
    The lamb stew is nearly flawless—marginally overseasoned—as is the room, dark and intimate, walls lined with a diagonal zigzag of wooden shelving that holds hundreds of bottles, and worn leather, and bare wood tables with mismatched hotel flatware, and scratchy old jazz on a turntable that gets jostled once in a while, a screech and a skip, customers straightening their spines, but it’s part of the thing, the ethos.
    “Ca était, monsieur?”
the bartender asks.
    “Formidable, Pierre. Formidable.”
    The room is filled with an appealing assortment of women wearing chic skirts and high heels, and the accompanying men in wavy hair and silk scarves, laughing and arguing and jabbing each other with the tips of their fingers and the force of their convictions. Will likes it here.
    Paris is one of those places where Will can’t help but imagine living. He’s always doing this, weighing the possibility of living here, of living there, the pros and cons of occupying some town or another, living a different life. This is what travel is for: dipping your toes into unfamiliar waters, seeing if it suits.
    He often needs to fight the urge to write that he’d love to live somewhere—the Marais or Malibu, the Dordogne or the Cotswolds. This sentiment is not what readers want; it’s not experiential. But even though he never makes the case explicitly, he’s pretty sure the idea emerges: this would be a fine place to inhabit an alternative universe.
    Will pays his check, says good night to Pierre, and steps out to the quiet nighttime street.
    There are parts of Paris where the after-dark life is dense and loud, taxi-hailing and making-out, cigarette smoky and cell-phone loud, “
J’arrive!
” But this part of the 1 ère
arrondissement
isn’t. Will walks a very long, very quiet half-block before he freezes—
    He left his notebook on the bar.
    He spins, retreats in that rushed distracted way of anyone who has left behind something important, not paying much attention to anything else. Certainly not enough to notice the big guy walking toward him, studiously not meeting Will’s eye.
    —
    Will meanders through the mostly deserted streets, lost in himself, until the not-so-distant sounds of a woman’s yelp and a slamming door drag him back to awareness. Sometimes he’s too oblivious to the threats that lurk in the late streets of big cities. He looks over his shoulder now, quickens his pace.
    Back in his hotel room, amid plush velvet and a surfeit of throw pillows, gleaming chrome fixtures and virgin white tiles, the solitary quiet of this generic cocoon, Will’s regrets return. Everything that had raced through his mind while the plane plummeted is now occupying his consciousness again like political protesters, chanting loudly, refusing to be ignored, presenting the united front of this message: he should be happy, but he’s not.
    Will wants everything to be perfect. He wants the perfect wife, the perfect kids, the perfect old