Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  Layered meanings aside, we retold our dancing escapade on soccer sidelines for months. Remember when the cops came . . . ? It was one of many Milwaukee stories that didn’t translate in Paris. I tried it with Molly and she frowned; to her New Zealand ears, all stories about America seemed to involve police or guns or both. But she said her church’s Zumba class was talking about doing a girls’ night out; did I want to come? I shook my head.

  It’s so hard to get out at night, I told her. The girls need minding, the store needs minding. . . .

  * * *

  —

  For months I’d been asking the girls to brainstorm some way to increase foot traffic in the store. I’d come to realize that specializing in dead authors, mildly quirky as it was, was also dumb: dead authors didn’t give readings; we never had events; other than Molly, most of our customers were over sixty years old. I suggested Ellie and her friends stage readings of late greats. “Sure,” she said (a word that, like many in her dwindling English vocabulary, only ever meant its opposite), and set about working with Asif to plan an evening focused on developing apps by and for teens. We stocked precisely no books on this subject.

  No matter. On the appointed evening, the store was more full than it had ever been. Even Madame came down to take a look (once she heard the topic, she grimaced and withdrew). I wondered how Ellie had come to know so many people so much older than she was—and then realized that they weren’t any older; the twenty or thirty attendees she and Asif had mustered were classmates, teens, but teens who wore heels, blazers, scarfs, beards, soccer shirts, abayas, jeans, eye-catching eyeglasses, and everywhere, smiles. Also smiling, if a bit more warily, were Daphne and the twins, who perched at the one corner of the counter that wasn’t covered with food. I’d been worried Ellie would ask to serve wine, but she hadn’t and, in any case, gripped a mug of tea as she worked the crowd; she (and Daphne, too, it seemed) had the start of a cold. And then the bell over the door rang as the “special surprise guest”—the event’s speaker—arrived.

  Declan.

  What was not a surprise was that they loved him. He knew this demographic. As it turned out, he did not know that much about coding—but this was admitted with laughter and received with even more. Business school was teaching him a few things about marketing, however, that he was happy to share and everyone was happy to hear. When things later broke up, pictures were taken, addresses exchanged. Not a book was bought—or for that matter, mentioned—but Ellie thought it such a grand success I could only agree.

  Declan stayed to help clean up. Daphne took the twins upstairs. Ellie walked Asif to the Métro. Declan explained that he’d not told me he was coming because Ellie had asked him to keep it a surprise. He said he’d hoped that was okay. He hoped I was okay. He hoped Ellie was okay. That everything was okay, because it had gotten weird a while back.

  I said it wasn’t weird, nothing was, though everything was. There was still no verifiable sign of Robert in Wisconsin—no ATM withdrawal, no CCTV appearance, no word that our Milwaukee renters had reported him outside on the porch. But there was every other sign of him in Paris. And that reminded me that I was still married, to a missing person. I felt like I was getting second-guessed all the time, because I could hear Robert’s voice all the time: you’re letting Ellie wear that? You’re letting Daphne read that? You’re serving frozen food for dinner again?

  Yes, yes, and definitely yes (French frozen food may be this country’s greatest gift to civilization since Balzac).

  And now I heard my voice ask an entirely different sort of question.

  Declan, do you want to go dancing? Some expat friends of mine were meeting up, I said, and his French could be handy. In fact, I said, it would be handy if he could recommend a place, because—

  And then I heard Robert say nooo! But faintly, because it was hard to hear him over Declan, who’d just said yes! And that he would run home, change, text me with some ideas, couldn’t wait, see you soon. Then he was gone.

  The truth was, I had no expat friends going dancing, but I’d had a fun night in the store, I’d enjoyed seeing him, I wanted to blow off steam—more accurately, I felt like I might explode. I quickly texted Molly to see if I could make my lie true: dancing? Now?

  I sometimes thought in Paris about texting Robert’s phone, though I knew it was sitting in an evidence locker somewhere, its battery long dead.

  Molly texted back: Leah, it’s almost midnight!

  Behind me, at the rear of the store, a cough.

  Ellie. How long had she been standing there?

  Ellie coughed again. “Don’t say it,” she said.

  I knew other dads who’d prayed that they would have sons, shook their heads at the thought of girls. Robert loved his girls. Told gatherings that his should be the last generation with men. Told me that he was proud to have “overcome” his orphan DNA. He made Ellie and Daphne “miXXtapes” (CDs, actually) that featured only female artists. He wanted his girls to take on the world. I wished that he could see they were ready to.

  And I wanted him to see that they seemed to regard me as a test run, Ellie especially.

  I needed his help. I needed his appreciation for what I’d done in his absence.

  I needed to go dancing. “Don’t say what?” I said.

  “It’s not from kissing Asif,” she said.

  “Okay . . . ?”

  “The cough. We were getting teased by our friends. He had a cold. Now I have a cold. So people think—but I don’t want you to think—not that I care—”

  “Asif’s a lovely young man,” I said.

  “Don’t say that,” Ellie said.

  “Your cough’s from the river,” I said. She shrugged. A small provocation, but enough to spur me on. “What made you fall from the railing?” I asked.

  Another cough. This one fake.

  “It wasn’t on purpose,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “It was Daphne,” she said.

  I nodded. “She shouted . . . ,” I said, trying to lead Ellie to fill in the blank.

  “She shouted what she always shouts,” Ellie said.

  “She never shouts.” Like father, like daughter.

  “When you cross the street without her or run up the sidewalk ahead of her or the twins color on one of her favorite books,” Ellie said, “she’ll yell aaaah or ‘stop’ or ‘look at me!’”

  “She didn’t shout, ‘look at me!’”

  “She wanted to, though,” Ellie said. “She was jealous of me up on the railing, getting all the attention.”

  “She’s not the jealous type,” I said.

  “Yeah, well,” Ellie said.

  “Well, what?”

  Ellie waited a beat. “She’s not Declan’s biggest fan,” she said.

  “This is changing the subject,” I said.

  “Not really,” Ellie said. “Not if we’re talking about jealousy.”

  “We’re not,” I said.

  “She said as long as Declan’s around, Dad’s not coming back,” Ellie said.

  “What?” I said.

  “He’s not coming back, is he?” Ellie said, instantly hushed, earnest. “Dad?”

  All that effort to pretend Robert dead, and I’d told myself this was how it needed to be. But looking at Ellie, I saw that I had needed them to pretend, too, to believe, that he was alive.

  Her right ear—the ear closest to me, the one my insufficient words were reaching first—the tiniest strand of hair had fallen across it, and all I wanted to do now was go to her, tuck it behind her ear. As a baby, it had taken her so long to get her hair, and then it came in—and came and came and came, and I’d never been able to keep up since. She’d grown up in Paris, and I’d been proud of that, her style, her strut, her poise. I’d had none of that at her age. I’d had a bar towel and a roomful of rheumy men who calle
d me kid and, later, other things. Nothing I couldn’t handle, but I’d grown up too fast.

  Maybe Ellie and I had more in common than I thought.

  And so: fuck. I’d wanted my girls to be girls for as long as they wanted to be girls. That Ellie no longer was, was my fault. Paris’s. Robert’s.

  “Oh, Ellie, I don’t know if Dad’s coming back,” I said, and it was almost a relief, to finally say something about Robert that was completely true.

  It bought me nothing. “You haven’t heard from him?” she asked.

  “Ellie,” I said, “I would tell you.”

  “Would you?”

  “Ellie.”

  “You know something,” Ellie said.

  I know you fell, I thought. I know that river is called the Seine. I know the Eiffel Tower is five kilometers away and Milwaukee, six-and-a-half thousand. I know that your eyes, like Daphne’s, like his, are gray. I know I see him in you. I know I see him every day. Every day I see you. I see you and I think, how could it be possible that he’s dead?

  “I don’t,” I said, because—did I? I didn’t. Not for certain. Nothing that I could let her hang her hopes on. Or mine. Not yet.

  She looked at me forever. “You never do,” she said, and began to climb the stairs.

  How to explain what happened next? I then went dancing with Declan despite my daughter being sick and angry with me.

  Or, more truth: I went because she was.

  * * *

  —

  Declan and I texted back and forth for hours—what had seemed like a fun, spur-of-the-moment idea required much more planning, and waiting, than I would have thought. Declan said of course it did; no place worth going to was worth going to before midnight. So I napped, and then paced, and then made coffee, and then listened to the girls sleeping—no coughing—and paced some more. I shouldn’t go. I shouldn’t have gotten into it with Ellie. I should have had a proper talk with Daphne. And so I told myself I would, tomorrow; I’d talk with Daphne first thing, and Ellie, too. And it would be a better conversation than any tonight because it would come the morning after I’d danced off some stress. Robert took writeaways? I would pioneer danceaways.

  Declan finally sent word that a three-wheeled minicab—a very unofficial, and app-based, taxi service he’d learned about from a kid earlier that night at the store—would meet me in about twenty minutes.

  I wandered the shop floor. I liked having the store and its stock to myself. As a kid, I’d put myself to bed most nights after a peck on the cheek, after which my mom went back to helping Dad in the bar. I buried myself in books. Not just my beloved Red Balloon companion book but whatever the library had, whatever I could buy for a quarter at rummage sales. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys and The Phantom Tollbooth and almanacs of the Olympics and a solitary 1960s-era encyclopedia, the C volume, which I managed to write just about all my elementary school reports out of: “Cheese,” “Chess,” “China,” “Coal,” “California,” “Cardiology,” “Civil War,” “Cinema.”

  That “Cinema” later caught my fancy in grad school was a natural progression, a smug professor once informed me: I’d led such an impoverished childhood. But I hadn’t. I’d seen the world, “lived” in France. I liked films (but only on big screens; televisions only ever remind me of the bar) but will always love books.

  I briefly worried Robert’s disappearance would sour this love—I watched books, or the business of books, slowly ruin him. So it was a great surprise that the business of books, weak as our bookstore’s was, went so far to sustain me. But it did.

  A grad school friend had once made me jealous on Facebook with a photo of her grinning next to a barn. She’d left school for Hollywood and television: I wrote this last week, they built it this week!

  I’m no longer on Facebook (it asked one too many times, “Are you in a relationship?”) but if I was, I would post a photo of the store, because it was better than what my former friend had posted. Not just because a bookstore was better than a barn, but because the bookstore, like Paris, and like, bizarrely, Robert’s unfinished manuscript, was real.

  I should not have liked being reminded daily of the manuscript, of Robert, of the fact that there are not only better ways to make money in Paris but also better ways to lose money. But it’s such a lovely store. It’s such an intimate profession. I like Carl, Shelley, Molly, and my other customers fine. But I love a dim yellow light in the corner, a chair beneath, and in it, just me and the book, at home in the world.

  I’ve never told the girls this, but one reason I like our geo-organizing of the store is that it reminds me of Robert’s and my adventures across Wisconsin, the ability to travel such distances—from Moscow to Cuba—in hardly any time at all. But what I also liked of those cities, of every last one of our books, is the hope buried deep within them. Paris, France—or Paris, New York—didn’t work out? That’s fine. Try Paris, Wisconsin. Such hope is resilient; every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there’s a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe-deposit box for civilization.

  Like that cave in Norway—Norway, Norway, not Norway, Wisconsin—where they bank the seeds that will save the planet: deep in my bookstore, we stock those same seeds. It doesn’t have to be a large store, just a good one. Our store has a few thousand volumes. They range from 10 words to 200,000. Let’s call the average 50,000. I have millions, maybe a billion words in stock. When apocalypse comes—and it does all the time now—come call. Out of my billion, we’ve got a word or two that will get things going again. Start anywhere. Start with “bonsoir.”

  As Madame now did. She shimmered into view like a thought taking shape. She’d been in the store’s rear corner and was now emerging to meet me.

  “Oh, you gave me a fright,” I said.

  Madame raised her chin. “Bonsoir,” she said again.

  “Bonsoir, Madame,” I said. “Je suis désolée,” I said. And then: “excusez-moi de vous déranger.” Carl called this second sentence a five-word disarmament treaty; always apologize for disturbing them, even when it is you who have been disturbed.

  It worked. “No,” she said, “I am sorry. I have need to illuminate the light. But I do not like. I do not wish the street me to see, and . . .” She went behind the counter as though preparing to ring me up. The light was just enough for us to see each other’s faces, an outtake from an old film. “I used to come down when I cannot to sleep,” she said. “Et vous . . . ?”

  “And me,” I said, pretending insomnia had drawn me here, too. I wasn’t going to tell her I was going out with anyone, least of all the man who’d drawn a crowd to her store earlier that evening to talk about “apps.”

  I told myself that if the minicab pulled up now, I’d ignore it, pretend it wasn’t for me. I’d go upstairs, text Declan, tell him plans had changed.

  I started again. “And . . .”

  But I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. Over the winter months, Madame had retreated steadily from us and, to a degree, from Annabelle and Peter, though she occasionally visited them at George’s place. But we saw her less and less on the shop floor, on the building stairs. At first, I’d chalked up Madame’s absences to her exploring her newfound freedom—and she did visit friends outside Paris, and once took the Chunnel to London—but I’d lately begun to wonder if she’d come to regret taking us in, letting me take the reins. (She did not seem to regret taking our money, enabling her travels as it did.)

  “Oui?” she said, waiting.

  “‘Thanks’ is what I wanted to say,” I said. “Mille mercis.”

  She leaned on the counter to look more closely at me. I have no idea how old she was, seventy or eighty or a twenty-year-old yoga instructor who’d gone prematurely gray. “‘Thank you,’ yes, but for what? Why is this?” she said. />
  “For—for this,” I said. “For the apartment, for letting me buy into the store. For the books.”

  She smiled. With her eyes, anyway. And she pointed to her eyes now, a cue, which it took me a moment to recognize.

  “And the cream! Yes.”

  “It is working,” she said.

  It wasn’t, I wasn’t using it, but I nodded. Paris was what was working. I was working. I had not made a film yet, but I had found us a place to live, myself a place to work, the girls a school. My French was meager, but I’d mastered enough to sell a book or buy a baguette, or a scarf, or running shoes. I used those shoes four days out of seven to run along the Seine, which meant the weight I’d lost was not entirely due to stress and anxiety. I was living in Paris, France. To be able to say so is its own Olympian accomplishment. Maybe two or three other cities worldwide inspire similar envy. Paris, Wisconsin, is not one of them.

  I don’t know how or if Madame knew I was lying, but her eyes stopped smiling. She studied me, she looked outside, she drew a deep breath. “I am silly,” she said.