“A clue—Eleanor! All this time you’ve had me on the phone—why didn’t you just—what in god’s name is the clue?”
“It doesn’t say. That’s where it ends. By design, I assume. Indeed, that’s the contest’s conceit. But here’s what I think of as a clue: the synopsis and manuscript differ. I’m not sure why, and this is only after the speediest of reads, but it appears Robert changed the manuscript before writing the cover letter. Or maybe after. What I mean is, in the manuscript, there’s just this one material change: it’s no longer Callie, the wife, who leaves. It’s . . .”
She paused.
“Well, it’s the husband,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s a clue or the opposite of one. But otherwise, for all this talk of clues in the cover letter, there’s no explicit discussion of clues in the manuscript itself. Maybe he forgot. More likely, as I said, things changed. We don’t even know if he sent it in, after all—perhaps this was just a rough draft.”
We didn’t know anything, she said, but I knew this: it sounded like Eleanor was gloating. She’d had a hunch that Robert was alive and well somewhere, and this somehow proved that.
But it didn’t. We’d found my husband’s manuscript. Not my husband. This manuscript wasn’t evidence he was alive. Unfinished, it was evidence he was dead.
Wasn’t it?
Eleanor could endure my silence no further. “Oh, but of course,” Eleanor said, thinking she’d figured out why I’d paused. “I have anticipated your very desire. My able assistant has already scanned in the whole thing, cover letter and all. And she e-mailed it to you along with Daphne’s passport page. Maybe that’s why it took so long. No matter—Ellie messaged me while we were talking, said she’d gotten it, was printing it.”
“Ellie? Eleanor, you should have . . .” I turned to look through the glass again. Ellie’s workstation was empty. I looked at the line for the bathroom; no.
And then I saw my two daughters, sitting at a little round table, Daphne bent over Ellie bent over a messy pile of pages—bent, anyway, until Ellie looked up, saw me looking at her, and opened her mouth.
I opened mine, too, but nothing came out. My grief books were no help here; none of them discussed partial manuscripts that churned out of printers in Paris. What could I tell my girls that they would believe now? Their father wasn’t gone, he’d come back? Or their father had come back and gone again? Or their father, my husband, was sitting right there on the table, just beneath those words, staring out at us? I wanted to go in and stuff the pages back into the printer. I wanted to gather them up in one giant, messy pile and hug them to me, and not let go: I’m sorry I thought you were dead! I’m sorry you ran away. I’m sorry I said I would—
And then I looked around, and the pages became pages again, and my girls became fatherless again, and I thought, I’m sorry I thought you were back.
* * *
—
Here is my own synopsis of what happened next, pared to the minimum and thus truer than Robert’s: pay, taxi, room, read, argue, cry, call, embassy, cry, call, read, argue, argue, call, call. Stay.
Stay?
Stay in Paris. The girls’ idea. Or, Eleanor later argued, their father’s.
I had not read anything of Robert’s in manuscript form in quite a long time. (I’d once made the mistake of reading a manuscript of his in bed and falling asleep—a perfectly common event in any reader’s life, but, as I learned, unacceptable for an author’s wife.) His words, once bound into a book, always seemed settled, set.
Reading him in double-spaced, 12-point Times Roman was an entirely different experience, and not just because he fussily preferred throwback typewriter fonts: the words here seemed jittery, loose, like a photograph in a tray of developer that refuses to fix.
The manuscript wasn’t bad; I’ll get that out of the way immediately. It didn’t sound like him, but then, none of his books for adults—and this was one—really did. But I hardly focused on that, so distracted was I by the fact that he’d written something. He’d gone away, and come back waving pages!
And on those pages, a message. To us. This was the girls’ opinion, and one they held fast to, despite the cover letter to the prize competition. The book was a message and the message was this: go to Paris, stay in Paris. (Come to think, that may be the synopsis for every book ever set in Paris, even the ones—and there are many, even a majority—about leaving.)
In Robert’s manuscript, the family does stay. Despite their grand plans to travel the world, when the father disappears, they go no farther than Paris. They don’t go home, either. There’s a passage where one of the fictional daughters talks about “missing person protocol,” about how it’s best to “go where the one who’s missing liked going”: this resonated deeply with Ellie and Daphne. I wanted to point out that this was taken almost word-for-word from a conversation we’d once had at the Milwaukee Humane Society, where the topic had been the neighbor’s missing dog and the destination a park. I wanted to say this but then didn’t, because, among other things, when they’d found the dog, he was dead.
The mom in the manuscript manages, and the girls do, too. The bookstore that initially rebuffed the family takes pity on them in the wake of Dad’s disappearance and offers them jobs; the mom finds an apartment nearby; the girls enroll in schools. Every so often, mother and daughters take to the streets and walk a route lifted from a Madeline book. Many Paris landmarks have cameos, and some less familiar spots, too.
There is occasional talk of clues. But as Eleanor said, no specifics.
* * *
—
We revised our trip’s remaining itinerary to follow the manuscript’s pages. But just as quickly, the girls’ interest in the itinerary waned and so did mine. We’d seen most of Paris’s top tourist sites; we’d seen a lot of tourists. We’d not seen Robert.
We had eaten a lot of Nutella crêpes, however. Ellie and I now sat on a bench along a swept path in the Tuileries Gardens just west of the Louvre and watched Daphne search for that hour’s ration. We’d expected to find dozens of crêpes carts here but instead encountered countless informal exercise classes, running and leaping amongst the trees and tourists. Ellie had ordered Daphne to go ask someone where we could find food. I’d told Ellie Daphne wasn’t her servant and Ellie had said, no, she wasn’t: she was our translator. And it was true; the past few days had proven Daphne’s superior language skills.
The afternoon was especially hot, which I hoped meant we could forgo further conversation. Across the way, Daphne tentatively approached an older couple. They listened to her with grave, attentive faces.
“Mom,” Ellie said, “if we go back home—”
“To our apartment?” In addition to its prime spot between the busy hospital and noisy train station, the apartment had a half bath in the hallway shared with the neighbors.
“Blech,” Ellie said. “To Milwaukee.”
“‘If’?”
“You know what I mean,” Ellie said, and I decided I didn’t, not yet. “Anyway, we should leave Daphne behind.”
Again, it was hot, and we were in dappled shade, which must have looked pretty, but a solid concrete roof would have done more to protect us from the sun. Our brains were baking, Ellie’s especially.
“That’s sweet, Ellie,” I said, and straightened up. Apparently, it was time for a talk after all. “Daphne’s your sister.” Ellie kept staring at Daphne. “Ellie,” I said, “I know it’s been hard but—”
“But that’s not what I mean,” Ellie said. “Look at her. She’s, like, thriving over here.” And Daphne was. She had moved on from the older couple and was now in an animated conversation with two tall teenagers, everyone nodding, laughing, pointing this way and that.
“She’s really good at French,” I said.
“No,” Ellie said. “I mean, yes, but, like, she’s really good at the whole French thing. Not just the
talking, but the doing, the . . .” She sat back. “I don’t know.”
“Ellie,” I said, expecting, hoping, to be interrupted, because I had nothing to say.
“All my friends keep asking if we’ve found him,” Ellie said, softer now. “If he’s come back.” She looked at Daphne. “If we’re coming back.”
I tackled the least provocative part of that. “We are,” I said. “Just three more days, okay? Then we’ll be—”
“Actually—if Daphne stays,” Ellie said, sitting up straight, “I want to stay with her.” Her face was flush, sweaty strands of hair slicked to her forehead.
“Daphne’s not—Ellie—no one’s—okay,” I said at last. “I know this has been—is hard.”
“I don’t want to go back,” Ellie said. She was speaking to the air, to Paris, not me. “Not right now, and not three days from now, and maybe not for a while. I don’t want to go back because—because Dad isn’t there, and I—I don’t want to—I don’t want to be that girl, the one with the ghost parent. I don’t want to say a thousand times, um, no, I don’t know.” Now she turned to me. “I don’t want to have people say they’re sorry for me.”
This was awful. But it was almost a relief to talk about something I knew how to talk about—girl gossip; I was not in the midst of an international parenting crisis, just an old-fashioned domestic one. “Ellie,” I said, “it means they care.”
“It means they have no fucking clue!” Ellie said, and we both blinked. “Do you know how many friends so far have told me stories of losing a pet? Like, six. Three cats, I think, dogs, a ferret.”
“Ellie. Sweet girl. They—”
She coughed and cried a bit and shoved away the arm I tried to drape around her shoulders. People turned. When she spoke again, her volume fell again by half, almost to a whisper.
“He didn’t—hate us, did he?” she said.
Mothers’ hearts break different ways, that’s not a surprise. What always surprises me is that there’s always a new way for them to be broken. “No,” I said. “Sweetie. Love. No.”
“He wanted us to come here?” Ellie said.
“I don’t—it seems—I don’t know,” I said.
“The book—those pages, though. It seems like—it’s like a clue?” Ellie said.
No, it’s not a clue, I could say, and we’d go home. Or, rather, I’d go home alone, because if I said it wasn’t a clue, that there was no hope of finding her dad, I’d lose her—both girls—forever. But if I said, yes, it is a clue, then—
“What do you feel?” I said. It was a favorite question of Robert’s, something he got from one of those parenting books, or something he just knew to ask.
“You sound like Dad,” Ellie said.
“Well?” I said.
Ellie shifted.
“I feel like it’s a clue,” she said.
* * *
—
In another three minutes, Daphne would arrive with directions on where to find the very best takeaway crêpes nearby, as well as a plan for our final hours in Paris, one that sounded innocent but wound up changing absolutely everything.
Before all that, though, this: Ellie, pressing, waiting, wondering where her mother stood.
“And you?” Ellie said. And I thought: I can answer this. It’s just an unfinished manuscript. They’re just pages. Ellie didn’t, couldn’t, wait. “Do you feel he’s alive?” she said.
I quickly said yes, the easier answer.
Except it wasn’t. In the United States, it had been easy, or at least expeditious, to pretend he was dead. But here in Paris, with each passing page—each passing day—it wasn’t. Nothing was easy here. Everything was Robert here.
Ellie smiled. I tried to smile back. I said I would be a moment, and then I found a toilet, where I threw up.
CHAPTER 5
After that customer had presented me Robert’s book, the one with the I’m sorry scribbled inside, I remembered I’d once asked Robert why he’d set that novel in middle school. Didn’t everyone hate middle school?
That was why he’d set it in middle school, he’d said. His book offered an escape.
But schools, strangely, would prove our escape during our first days in Paris, although I don’t think any of us thought of it that way. Not initially. Not me. Maybe Daphne knew what she was up to all along when she proposed we stop sightseeing and start school-shopping instead. Let’s pretend we’re moving here! Why not, I thought? I’d gotten good at pretending.
That most of the schools, like most of Paris, were shut tight for August did not deter Daphne and Ellie; working from a list a bemused tourist office employee gave us, we marched from one school to another. We peered through windows when we could and made sophisticated determinations as to the school’s quality based on the size of the door, the age of the paint job, the presence of graffiti, and what online reviews had to say.
On one occasion, we found a door ajar in an otherwise barricaded archway. Ellie pulled us through, and where I’d expected a foyer or hallway, we found a quiet courtyard with a dry fountain in one wall and a small lemon tree opposite in a giant wooden box on casters. A wide tunnel beyond opened into a broader, startlingly modern space—some sort of athletic field, artificial turf, countless lines gracefully arcing this way and that, delineating the games and sports of what seemed to be another world.
A woman appeared, my age but more stylish, more serious, slim skirt, dark hair with an unembarrassed strand or two of gray, all pulled tightly back. Ellie said bonjour and then nervously switched to English to explain that we were moving to Paris and so looking at schools.
I broke in to say that that wasn’t exactly true.
The woman turned to me with a face like iron, silent. Even the girls took notice. She turned back to them. It’s not a simple thing, she said to them. And here, appropriately enough, began our French education: no rarely means no, but more often no, this won’t be easy. If you want it, you must work for it. Because nothing is easy. And nothing was more remarkable than watching as the woman took each girl by the hand—even too-old-for-this Ellie—and led them inside.
There we learned that this was a collège—roughly equivalent to junior high, for ages eleven to fifteen—and that the school was a public one and thus free.
On our way out, I tried to explain to Ellie and Daphne that every other aspect of Paris would not be free—including the school’s cafeteria, or cantine, whose menu (we were given a copy from last May) always included a cheese and dessert course and such delicacies as “navarin d’agneau printanier”—spring lamb stew.
Daphne suggested I get a job in Paris.
Ellie pointed out that I already had one; couldn’t I just do it here?
* * *
—
I’m not sure if it was Eleanor who had put that idea in Ellie’s head or vice versa; but after I called Eleanor, she immediately put it in the head of my boss, an old friend of hers. Whereupon, as Eleanor might say, the hours to our departure ticked away while a brief torrent of e-mails and calls went back and forth beneath the ocean.
In retrospect, my ambivalence may have doomed the proposal,which was that I would telecommute. That, or the fact that I’d never been all that enthusiastic about the job itself during the long years I’d toiled there. I did love the campus benefits—early on, I especially liked the on-site child care staffed by Early Childhood Education majors—and I loved the hours. As I said, I did work late some nights, but otherwise, 5:00 P.M. was a long day, 5:30, the equivalent of midnight. But the work was numbing, and the president had grown less interested in making what I liked making most—those short videos—and more interested in speeches, texts, words. That made me anxious. Over my years as a speechwriter, I’d gone from thinking there was a limitless supply of synonyms for, say, the word synergy, to believing that such linguistic resources, at least as existed in my own head, were
finite—and that one day soon I might come upon the last bullet point possible for synergy, and I’d be fired.
Which would be disastrous. I didn’t love my job, but I loved having a job. I was proud of having a job. I was proud of supporting our family—and supporting a fellow artist. And I did believe that, that Robert and I were fellow artists. That I wasn’t doing my art yet, not really, was fine. Robert said so. I said so. I was patient. The girls were young. Life was busy. And Robert was struggling, and I watched that struggle, and I worried about it when I had time to worry. One struggling artist endowed a family with a certain nobility (I told myself, entering speechwriter mode). Two struggling artists, on the other hand, would only endow a family with debt.
And so would staying on in Paris with no income. We couldn’t stay. (And certainly couldn’t stay longer than the ninety days our tourist visas allotted us.) Still, it was curiously calming to see the girls excited about something, however far-fetched.
So when the final word about telecommuting came from the university—“no”—I wasn’t surprised I felt disappointed. I was surprised, however, that some hidden message seemed to lurk between the lines of the e-mail I received. If I didn’t hurry back, would my job even be there for me to claim?
I said nothing to the girls. Not yet. As far as they were concerned, their battle was won, the first skirmish anyway, which was convincing Mom that Dad was findable, was perhaps looking for us, was—surely!—nearby. And look! A bookshop. “His”? We went in. Nope.
And another. No.
France has 2,500 bookstores, and that afternoon, Ellie and Daphne were determined to visit as many as possible. It’s not the worst way to see Paris. Parisians treat their bookshops a bit like they treat their bakeries: they are both commonplace and important, not something to fetishize—it’s just bread, they’re just books—but still due extra respect. The electrical grid, the sewer system: these are essential things, but books, baguettes—if they disappeared tomorrow, one might as well disassemble the Eiffel Tower and drain the Seine.
Paris by the Book Page 8
