The Road to Domestic Bliss Is Paved With Dealing (and Some Dessert)

I’d be remiss not to share some of our weekend adventures with Nicole and Mark, our second guests in the new place. As Candice was truly here at the beginning, she had only seen the apartment’s true form begin to take shape. In the weeks between her departure and N’s parents’ arrival, we’d set up the majority of our space, but still had a laundry list of finishing touches to apply. N+M were more than happy to help with the final phases of home improvement, as they’re practically pros – they redecorate, rearrange, and embellish their space more frequently than one changes a Brita filter. And as many of you know, their taste is unconventional and totally killer.

N+M had generously offered to have curtains and pillowcases made for us in Indonesia, as fabric and labor costs are “la rupee de sonsonnet” (a lovely idiom which roughly translates to a drop in the bucket) compared to retail prices in France. The silk pillowcases slid onto our couch pillows perfectly and are now awaiting their new home on our recently purchased sofa, which won’t arrive until January. The curtains, as beautiful as they are to behold, were not as much of a cinch to set up. The velvet fabric was too heavy for the curtain rod holders we’d already taken great pains to screw into the walls. After a failed attempt at hanging them – which nearly resulted in ripping all the hanging apparatuses out of the walls – Nate, Nic, and Mark spent the better part of Friday marching back and forth between our place and the nearest hardware store in order to implement the sturdiest solution. I arrived home (after my traumatic Metro experience) to discover that they’d just finally succeeded. Phase one of home improvement was complete.

Creaky floorboards and an irritable downstairs neighbor spurred the next phase on. The first night of N+M’s visit was spent quietly schmoozing, dining, and otherwise chillin’. As we got up to begin bedtime prep, we were surprised to hear a knock on the door. It was the downstairs neighbor, with semi-crazed desperation in her eyes. “Have you been moving furniture?” I was flabbergasted. We’d already realized that the floorboards were old and noisy, but we’d barely moved an inch for the past couple hours. After calming her down, we resolved to get some wall-to-wall carpet for our living room, the most used room in the apartment. We planned to go to a nearby store, where we could find carpeting in bulk, on Saturday morning. Cut to me, Nate, and Mark hoisting a 15’ roll of carpeting on our shoulders for the 10-minute walk home through narrow streets and raucous crosswalks.

If only that were the hardest part of Operation Carpet. Nate and I braced ourselves for the subsequent task – taking apart all of our carefully constructed work in the living room. Bookshelves were emptied, electronics were unplugged (and obviously there were more than a few cables what with N’s monstrous computer center), and nearly all the furniture was removed from the room so the carpet could be unrolled, cut, and installed. Nate and Mark expertly took care of business, and now we can proudly say that it really ties the room together.

While the gentlemen worked on Operation Carpet, the ladies concentrated on decoration. We spent quite a while finding the perfect spots for our masks, puppets, artwork, and other bric-a-brac. Nic’s stylish eye and my laser-sharp focus were whipped up into a frenzy that eventually consumed Mark (we had lost Nate to a nearly catastrophic reassembly of his computer scene, as one of his machines wouldn’t power up again for hours). After lots of tweaks, we had produced a chic and definitively bobo ambience throughout the apartment. Home improvement was more or less complete! Exhausted, we four sat down for dinner at 11pm and while extremely satisfied with all our hard work, we vowed to relax and enjoy Paris on Sunday.

And so, on a brisk yet gorgeous afternoon, we braved the Metro (almost fully back to normal) and headed to St-Germain, the heart of the Left Bank and an area that I’ve barely explored since our arrival in August. Mark’s lovely sister, Pat, and brother-in-law, Howard, were visiting Paris, so we met for brunch at one of Paris’s most elegant and legendary tearooms, Ladurée. It’s a Paris institution, and while the restaurant is nothing to shake a stick at, Ladurée is more widely known for its pastries and chocolates. These confections are so preciously packaged and branded that we felt we’d wandered into Willy Wonka’s factory by way of Tiffany’s. We were seated in an airy room with murals of 18th-century garden scenes and feasted on some heavenly delights. My salad was comprised of ingredients so fresh they were virtually straight out of the veggie patch…soooooooo good, but merely foreplay for the food-gasmic desserts that followed. As Ladurée prides itself on its macarons, I had to try the mini-macaron sampler plate. These are NOT your bubbe’s kosher-for-Passover variety of macaroons. On the contrary, they are little sandwiches of sweet, airy coconut-infused pastry with a cream center. They come in an array of dazzling flavors and colors; I had chocolate with fruits rouge, rose petal, cassis-and-violet, and crème de caramel. I don’t even remember what everyone else ordered for dessert, so good were these dainty little treats.
We recovered from our decadent brunch wandering through the streets and hidden courtyards of St-Germain, soaking up the autumn sun and live jazz wafting through the streets.