Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  “I’m not happy when I’m working,” he said.

  “Maybe that’s how you know it’s work?” I said.

  “You’re not making sense,” he said.

  “I’m not? What doesn’t make sense here is what you want me to say, or do. Do you want me to say ‘hooray, you’re abandoning your gift!’ or ‘no, honey, don’t do it, don’t’? Tell me, and quickly, because the next scene in this script involves a happy child.”

  He turned away.

  He was struggling. That I understand. We understood. But he never seemed to understand how hard it was on us. Lonely Sisyphus he thought himself, pushing that rock up the hill each morning. But he was too tired to notice that when it came rolling back down the hill each night, it threatened to crush the three of us waiting there.

  “Mom!” Now it was Daphne shouting. The anthropologist in me had long noted they never shouted for Dad, except when he returned from an absence of any length whatsoever. An hour, a day, a week. His arrival ever worthy of exultation.

  “Okay, I don’t know where this crisis came from,” I said, “but if this is about the stupid article—no one will read the article. A few will look at the pictures. And by ‘few’ I mean us.”

  “That’s not the point,” he said. “I’m tired of—”

  Tired: that was a word from another box, the deep, wide one any couple gets on its wedding day, the one you fill with everything, good or bad, that comes into your lives every day after. It’s an emotional trousseau, except you keep adding to it. And if you add too much of one thing—too much angst or melancholy or exhaustion—and too little of other things, like stress-free golden birthdays, or successful manuscripts that become successful books, or successful “experiments” that establish new trajectories, it bursts open, spilling its contents all over the floor, making a mess just hours before the guests are supposed to arrive.

  “That is the point,” I said. “I know what you’re tired of. What I don’t know is what I’m supposed to do about it.”

  A beat elapsed where no one in the house said or screamed anything. The refrigerator hummed, and out front, a car door opened and shut. And maybe this is when Robert’s next book, his final book, began, when he finally began to write, really write, even as he quit, right there in that room, right behind those eyes looking at me, in his right iris that flash of color that had first inflamed me, marked him for me, this man I loved because he had all those question marks, including that one he’d once appended to that extraordinary word: marriage?

  Yes, I’d said then. Straight into his shoulder, I’d been hugging him so hard. I’d been so happy.

  And maybe I should have hugged him now, held his hand as instructed. But then I would have missed what he did next, something that made me endlessly grateful at the time, although it shouldn’t have. I should have recognized it for what it was—the start of something irreversible, the steady unpacking of that trousseau until its every corner was bare.

  But I didn’t see that. I saw this: a smile. His. A tiny smile, a half smile, maybe even a smile from the toolbox, which said willing your facial muscles to grin sometimes cued a sympathetic response in your psyche.

  I’d gotten angry, exasperated, I’d asked him what am I supposed to do? And now he said “nothing.” I smiled (he was smiling). He turned slightly, and the little kaleidoscopes that were his irises turned, too. He turned back. The color returned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing.”

  And then he got the cake and the flowers and—who knows how, on such short notice—a pony, who carried Daphne and her friends straight from our yard into the page proofs of a magazine Eleanor had brought to Paris and shown to me beside a children’s playset in a cramped green plot behind a Turkish crêperie. I’d thought they’d spiked the piece; I’d heard the print edition had never gone to press. I’d checked the blog once or twice since coming to Paris and saw that it, too, had gone dormant. And the editor and I had had a falling-out after she’d sent e-mails with invoices after the party: a “misunderstanding.” I’d protested, she’d protested, and finally, I began having my inbox automatically route her e-mails to the Junk folder. I’d thought that was that.

  But no, sitting in my office, taking out the pages Eleanor had printed off, I saw that this was that. The editor had e-mailed Eleanor: “I hear you might know now how to reach Leah & Robert?” The editor explained how she’d once had a magazine, how it had failed, how we’d fallen out—she didn’t mention the invoices—and that she felt bad about the whole thing but wanted to send along the unpublished page proofs of “what might have been.”

  We’d seen an early draft—just the text, and it had been unpromising. But this was the whole package. WRITE AROUND THE CORNER, chirped the headline on the cover. There was no mention inside that Robert had disappeared; that was part of what so unsettled me. It was both a glimpse into our past and a snapshot of an imaginary present: a family in Milwaukee. A house, a mom, a dad.

  What unnerved me more, what later kept me awake in Paris, were not the words but the photographs. They were gorgeous. I don’t know if they used a special camera or computer, or if the photographer was on leave from Vogue, but the colors, our faces, the detail, all of it was like liquid briefly stilled. Robert’s solo portrait was handsome, but there were more photos. Of the party. The pony. Of Daphne astride the pony, scared but grinning, a grin that would stay on her face, and mine, for days.

  And finally, a photo of our whole family. They’d chosen a shot of us trying to figure out a shot. We are in the living room, and we’re deciding if we should sit or stand, tightly together or loosely apart, smiling or serious. Daphne appears to be the only one who’s listening to instructions: she’s standing up straighter than any of us, but she thinks what we’re doing is funny, and it shows. And maybe it’s the makeup the spa folks were playing with, but her color looks ten times better than it ever has here in Paris. Ellie, meanwhile, is mortified, but excited; she has one hand on Daphne’s shoulder, her other hand is starting to move toward the camera; she’s either saying wait or now! I’m behind them with what maybe only I would recognize as my game face—what would be clear to anyone is that I’m inordinately pleased. I look like something had been accomplished, and something had. We’d weathered our argument. The pony had shown up. Robert had shown up, and not just physically. And the result? The girls look beautiful. Robert looks at ease. He’s possibly happy. He’s clearly proud of his family. His lips are just parted; he’s about to say something.

  What?

  I don’t know. Only that a month later, I’d threaten to leave. And he would.

  * * *

  —

  Eleanor has a toolbox for arguments, too. I’m not sure if she’s aware of this, but I am, as I am of the fact that it contains only two tools: a patient, penetrating gaze and, in case of emergency, distraction.

  As I said, our walk home from Erdem’s was almost wordless, but not quite: after failing to get me to answer even the mildest questions—are the sidewalks always this busy? Is this weather often this maritime?—Eleanor finally asked a question she knew I’d have to acknowledge, as it was about a bookstore.

  “Would it be too much trouble to—I’m no good at maps, but I looked earlier, and I’d swear it’s right around here—might we stop by Shakespeare and Company? Just to see?”

  Looking back, it’s interesting to think what we might have seen had we stopped by, but I lied and said we were nowhere near it. She raised an eyebrow, but that was the last I heard from her until we walked up to our store.

  I don’t envy Shakespeare and Company their success. It’s the only Paris bookstore, English-language or otherwise, most Americans know (if they know any bookstore here), and, to judge from his manuscript, it’s the only one Robert knew. Although the description of the store in Robert’s manuscript eerily anticipated what became The Late Edition, the truth is, it was more directly a description of Shakespea
re and Company. He describes it as being green, for example, as having a small fountain nearby. And he describes it as busy, something no one would have ever described Madame’s store as being. And of course, Shakespeare and Company is busy; they have a history—Sylvia Beach, who founded the store’s first iteration, published James Joyce’s Ulysses, championed Hemingway, and thrived until World War II forced her to close. Another store later claimed the name, and an endless stream of backpackers and tourists (and some locals) have prowled their aisles since.

  Not me, though. I’d walked by once or twice but never went inside, finding the parallels to Robert’s manuscript somehow spookier there.

  Five hundred meters away, however, was the lesser-known landmark that Ellie had once marched Daphne and me (and Asif) over to, Bemelmans’s old bar in the rue de la Colombe, just northwest of Notre-Dame. I steered us in that direction now, confident that the stop—and the story of Ellie’s enterprising research—would make Eleanor forget about Shakespeare and Company.

  But as we reached the corner, all I could do was remember. In the months since we’d first visited this corner, I’d done my own enterprising research, curious as to what “chagrin d’amour” had forced Bemelmans to sell the bar. I’d found nothing; in his own account, he describes being dispatched to Paris in 1953 by Holiday magazine to draw the city’s down-and-out, and subsequently falling in love with a bar that catered to them.

  He bought it, with an eye toward improving the premises and thus the clientele. It proved to be a disastrous decision financially, but his essay recounting the experience is affectionate and lighthearted. At one point, he and his contractors realized that they were not going to be able to update the plumbing, due to the discovery of an underground pre-medieval aqueduct built to service Notre-Dame. As a result, for his grand reopening party, Bemelmans commissioned two limousines—one labeled MESDAMES and the other, MESSIEURS—that spirited his guests off to neighboring apartments to do their business.

  It was funny when I read it, but walking by with Eleanor and the twins in the day’s last light, the corner seemed grim. We walked on.

  Crossing the Seine into the Marais, I thought of Sylvia Beach and her beautiful bookstore, shuttered, the story goes, after she refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. She did not wear the yellow star Jews wore, but her young friend and assistant, Françoise, did, and wandering the city as a pair, they faced together the same restrictions all Jews faced—no cafés, no movies, no theaters, no transportation but bicycles, and no sitting on benches. One day, picnicking outside, they took special care to sit on the ground rather than the bench nearby. It was an anxious meal.

  The officer never got his book. Or the store. Within hours of the officer’s angry departure, friends had helped her move and hide its entire contents. They even painted over the sign outside. The Nazis still found Sylvia, however, and packed her off to an internment camp for six months. Hemingway himself later claimed to have “liberated” the store as the Nazis fled, but Sylvia was spent; though she lived another eighteen years, the store never reopened under her ownership.

  Ludwig Bemelmans and Sylvia Beach died just four days apart. I sometimes wonder if they ever met. They must have, even if they spent much of their lives on different continents; it’s impossible to imagine that, in a city this intimate, two people who should find each other never do.

  CHAPTER 15

  Eleanor did sleep in the next morning, which was just as well. I had a strange sort of hangover that I tried to hide from the kids as I bundled them off to school. It was partly the wine-soaked afternoon in Erdem’s backyard, but it was also the magazine. It had made me sad to see it—leafing through again, I saw I’d pocked the pages with a tear or two—but I felt different this morning.

  But Milwaukee . . .

  I looked at the pages once more.

  Milwaukee paled in so many ways compared to Paris I hadn’t realized that I’d let my memories of our stateside lives go pale, too. But there, on those pages, was evidence: Milwaukee had been marvelous. And so was our family. We had had it in us to smile. Even after arguing, even on that crazy, terrible, funny day, the four of us, we’d figured out a way to grin (and nail a cover shoot). And a photographer had figured out a way to show us as we really were—not beset by chess tournaments and manic weather and a writer who’d lost his way, but a family who could, on occasion, goof around, get along.

  We’d been okay.

  I went back to the couples therapist just once after Robert disappeared. I wanted to make a confession. I left having made two. The first was that I’d caught myself feeling something terrible about Robert’s departure—hard as it was, tearing as it was, there were minutes during the day, sometimes as much as an hour, when I felt relieved. Life with Robert could be hard; life without him was, too, but you didn’t have to double-check the forecast as much to see if, as your husband sometimes thought, the world really was coming to an end that day because a 150-word paragraph wasn’t taking shape. I waited for the therapist to uncap her pen and get out the big red book where she kept a list of the world’s worst wives. She didn’t. Instead, she said, “that’s rational,” and since I don’t like agreeing with anyone, particularly therapists, I said, “well, let me tell you what’s irrational, which is that, despite everything, I don’t regret marrying him.” My second confession, and one I’d not known I’d had in me until I blurted it out.

  But as I said it I knew it, and not just because our marriage had produced two females who, I firmly believe, will someday save the planet. I had loved our marriage, I’d loved us. I’d loved our creaky house. I’d loved Milwaukee, its bars and its bookstores. I’d loved Robert’s cooking shows. I’d loved that the trailer that unloaded the pony had also deposited a goat because, as Robert said, “what’s a pony without a goat?” I didn’t know, but it turns out having a pony with a goat and all the ensuing smiles is like winning the world’s largest prize, and the one day out of one thousand when things did go right for Robert—a great review, or sale, or that the goddamned comma he’d spent the week moving around had finally settled into the right spot on the page—is an even better prize, but the best was being married. It really was.

  “And you still are married,” the therapist said, which is when I decided I wasn’t going to see her again.

  In the overcrowded U.S.A./New York section of our bookstore is shelved Grace Paley (an author whose books Robert gave me so often I sometimes forgot I hadn’t ever met her in person). His favorite story of hers, “Wants,” became mine; it charts the rise and fall of an entire marriage over a scant 791 words. Early on, the husband and wife are young and poor, living in an apartment whose walls are so porous it’s impossible to avoid smelling the neighbors’ breakfast. Years later, they unexpectedly meet again; the husband, now her ex, crows about his plans—which include a sailboat—and says bitterly to her: “You’ll always want nothing.”

  Sailing aside, Robert was never that husband. And I wasn’t that wife, but as the story wife later protests, so will I: I did want, do want something, many things, including to have one day made a film that wasn’t about synergy; to have raised brave, independent daughters; to have read and loved every book on the shelves of my store.

  But more than anything, I had, for the longest time, wanted Robert to be healthy, to be happy. To be here.

  He wanted to be elsewhere.

  I think I was resisting Eleanor’s pronouncement, the police’s determination, that Robert was dead because acquiescing wouldn’t just mean putting Robert to rest but would announce that we’d been profoundly not okay. Whatever he’d needed from us, we’d not provided. And whatever we’d needed from him . . .

  But he’d gotten what Daphne wanted, the pony. And the photographer, the picture. And I had other pictures. I had boxes of them. I had memories. The magazine proofs were just one of many, many pieces of evidence that I had of a happy life. Chasing him out of tha
t very first bar after he’d chased me and my stolen book, that had not been a mistake.

  And neither had been imagining him dead. Nor, more lately, convincing myself that he was alive. I wasn’t crazy; I was cycling. And eventually the cycling would stop, and I’d come to rest. Alone. In the aisles of a bookstore in Paris.

  * * *

  —

  So I practiced that life: I stood in the store and sold maps of France, London, Europe, and the Baltics to a tanned-gold couple from Napa and told them where to eat. I sold a copy of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast to a young man whom I surprised in the act of tearing pages from it. I sold ten copies of The Great Gatsby to a young woman who said she was a tutor assigned to an American film production company shooting in Paris; I told her to be sure to stop back. She said she’d bring along the young stars and rattled off their names—I knew enough to nod and smile, but otherwise recognized not a syllable of what she’d said.

  I was not a bookseller authentique, but—I was learning how to impersonate one. I would sometimes practice on Shelley, the most patient of my three customers. I once pressed upon her Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, the story of two women artists living companionably in the same house, doing their art. Shelley knew Jansson’s books for kids, which feature strange trolls—Swedish, hippoish—called moomins, but didn’t know Jansson had “written for grown-ups.”

  “Not all grown-ups,” I said, “just the artists.”

  Shelley came back the next week and, houseboat equilibrium be damned, bought everything else I had of Jansson’s, including a few stray Swedish-language editions.

  Today I was short on artists, though not strange children’s books. I saw someone had liberated Le Poids d’un chagrin—The Weight of a Sorrow—from the French children’s book section and left it by the register. The book fascinated Peter and horrified me: the book depicts sorrow as a massive hairball on muddy green pages, a sorrow so gros qu’il m’a dépassé, submergé, dévoré, un chagrin si lourd à porter que pour m’en sortir, j’ai dû le grignoter à mon tour. Or, as Peter once earnestly tried to translate for me—sometimes the sadness is so big it eats me up, um, heavy door I can’t get through, I try to leave but I can’t, and so I snack? No, nibble away—and I asked him to stop.