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pulling out my reporter’s notebook. A man sitting outside the museum impersonating the Mona Lisa; a dog roller-skating alongside his master; two women, identical twins who appeared to be in their seventies, dressed in matching pink outfits by Chanel; a man in a tall baker’s hat bicycling along the quai d’Orsay, a wedding cake balanced in the bike’s basket.
    What great stories there are in Paris, I thought, half-convinced I should phone an editor and see if I could sell some ideas. The other half of me, however, stepped in quickly to remind me of why I came to Paris in the first place:
Remember
, this voice whispered,
you’re here to take a break from seeing life as “newspaper stories.”
    But it was a difficult habit to quit. I loved my work; it was an important part of my identity. In the twenty years I’d been a reporter, I’d met people and gone through doors that were opened to me only because of my job. I’d met Princess Diana at the British Embassyon her first trip to the United States in 1986 and interviewed Elie Wiesel in his New York apartment just after he’d won the Nobel Prize. I’d done stories on mothers who murdered their children, and spent four months in a psychiatric ward chronicling the life of a young psychiatrist. I’d profiled artists and actors and scientists and what I liked to think of as “extraordinary” ordinary people. I could think of no job more fascinating.
    But the work has its perils: spending large chunks of time immersed in another person’s life makes it easier to lose track of one’s own place in the world. I was determined not to let that happen on this trip.
    Still, when I saw a performance artist climbing a thirty-foot beanstalk constructed of green plastic, it took real self-discipline to talk myself out of doing an on-the-spot interview with “Jacques and His Greenstalk.”

    On the way back to my hotel I passed a shop near rue Bonaparte that featured in its windows several mannequins dressed in Chinese cheongsam-style dresses. One particularly caught my eye—a beautiful black silk number with a mandarin collar and elegant frog fastenings that ran down the left side of the dress. When I moved closer to the window I saw the silk was subtly patterned: raised silk threads, gossamer as spiderwebs, formed what looked like black-on-black calligraphy. The effect was both elegant and mysterious, a design that revealed itself, like a secret, only to the intimate observer. Impulsively, I walked into the shop.
    “Bonjour, madame,”
a voice sang out from somewhere in the back of the shop. It was a pleasant custom, the way French shopkeepersgreeted each customer personally, and one that ran counter to any notion of the French as rude and unfriendly.
    “Bonjour,”
I sang back. Then to my utter surprise I heard myself say: “I’d like to try on the black dress in the window. Well, I mean, not the one in the window but one like it in my size.”
    “Oui, madame,”
she said, eyeballing me from head to toe—the typical French approach, I had learned, in determining size.
    That was all right with me. The truth is, I was sure that no size existed in this particular dress that would fit me, so unforgiving was its narrow cut. Still, for some reason, I was willing to give the dress a chance, even if—
quelle horreur!
—it meant humiliating myself in the eyes of the salesclerk.
    As I waited for her to bring the dress, I wondered what was behind my sudden need to acquire a glamorous black silk cheongsam. Was it the challenge of meeting Liliane—the exotic, fabulous-looking, man-attracting Liliane—at La Villa? The idea almost made me laugh out loud.
    “Here it is, madame,” said the saleswoman, interrupting my thoughts. She hung the silk dress in a small room and ushered me in, tactfully leaving me alone to try it on.
    Without much optimism I removed my slacks and blouse. I slipped the dress on over my head. To my surprise it kept on going, undeterred even when it