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I began to write:

Is it possible to change your outer geography without disrupting the inner geography? The travels within yourself? Today I traveled back to my past and forward to a future shaping itself somewhere at the edge of my thoughts. But I also traveled to a place less often visited: the childlike purity of the ticking moment.

5

FIVE EXTRAORDINARY DAYS

Dear Alice,

Yesterday I had a big breakthrough, one that made me feel like a true Parisienne: I entered the Café Flore as though I belonged there. Instead of moving awkwardly, like a timid outsider, through the crowded terrace, I strode to my table with all the icy hauteur and conspicuous self-regard of Simone de Beauvoir. It seemed to work, this new attitude. Within minutes I assumed my new role as one of the café insiders, passing judgment on all who entered. Is belonging that simple? A matter of attitude? Or is attitude just another form of self-deception?

Love, Alice

For several days the spring rains had moved back and forth across Paris with enough force to send even those with raincoats and umbrellas scurrying for cover beneath café awnings. “So much rain means Paris will be very green this summer,” said Monsieur Jacques one day while I waited out a sudden storm inside his tiny newsstand. Still, despite his prediction, I was totally unprepared when a week later on a fine, fresh morning I walked out of my hotel to find lush green grass covering all the narrow sidewalks. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating.

I looked around to see if people were walking on the grass. They were. In fact, no one was paying much attention to what seemed to me quite an extraordinary event. Gingerly, I stepped out from the hotel doorway and onto the green that carpeted the sidewalk. I bent over to examine it. Just as I was about to pluck a blade of grass, an elegantly dressed woman passing by said, “It is carpet, madame. Green carpet put down by the art and antiques galleries to celebrate Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.”

She pointed to the nearby corner, where the rue de l’Université met the rue des Saints-Pères. “See, madame, the hanging trees?” I followed her gaze upward to the overhead wires. Small, decorative trees—boxwood and holly and some flowering white plant that I couldn’t identify—hung upside down from the wires. “They mark the streets of the celebration,” she said. “What we call the Carré Rive Gauche.”

Without waiting for a reply the woman nodded and walked on, her high heels sinking ever so slightly into the green of the carpeted sidewalk.

Although I was grateful for her explanation, it raised more questions than it answered.

As I walked toward the Musée d’Orsay—navigating the green carpet with far less aplomb than my French counterpart—I struggled to translate the phrase “Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.” Five days. Five days of something. Five days of the extraordinary object. That was it. But what did it mean? And who was celebrating whatever it meant? And what was the Carré Rive Gauche?

It was strange, the feeling that suddenly seized me: here I was, on a tiny ancient street in Paris, a grown woman embarked on a reallife adventure, yet all I could think of was Nancy Drew. As I grew up, I had helped her solve The Clue in the Crumbling Wall and The Secret of the Old Clock; now it was she who walked beside me, ready to tackle The Mystery of the Five Days of the Extraordinary Object. It was a pleasant feeling, perhaps because it connected the two parts of me: the woman and the girl I once was.

The girl gave way to the woman, however, when I turned the corner and saw Naohiro standing in front of the museum, waiting for me. He had not yet seen me. Impulsively, I stepped into the shadows of a café doorway so I could observe him without being seen. He is waiting for me, I thought, studying him. In his black, open-necked shirt and black pants he looked like a dancer, his body lithe but powerful, his stance gracefully relaxed. He is waiting for me, I thought, and it is