Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  When Robert comes on-screen downstairs, he’s moving more quickly. He looks around the store, sees no one, mouths an easily decipherable “fuck!” (have Leah and the girls just left again? he must be thinking), and leaps for the door, one bound, two, bangs into the corner of a table, three, he’s at the door. He tears it open. Upstairs, the twins don’t appear to hear the wild jangling; they’re too engrossed in their reading. Downstairs, Robert leans out the door. He looks up the street toward Madame Grillo’s and the Métro. He looks down the street toward the Hôtel du Cinéma and the Seine. Back and forth, back and forth. He goes just outside the door now. The sun on the glass makes him hard to see. He checks his watch, looks inside, looks up at the second floor. He looks up the street, down, and then light and lens align, and the camera catches his face full on. His eyes flash. He turns away.

  He makes one last scan of the street. And then he chooses, and then he walks.

  I rewound and watched this last moment a dozen times. Back and forth.

  I let my finger pause on the screen, which cued a feature I didn’t know the software had: delete recording?

  My decision took far less time than Robert’s.

  * * *

  —

  What did Robert want? I ask this less and less. Not because I’ve become more certain of some particular answer, but because searching for it has exhausted me; my thinking has broken down, perhaps because his did. Perhaps because, bleak as it is to say, he had no model for parents—for adults—living past a certain age. (Neither did I, but then, I had Eleanor.) I do know that he wanted a career, and with it, recognition, some measure of it anyway, but by a yardstick he was always changing—young readers, old readers, readers who enjoyed wiping words clean from a screen—thus ensuring he’d always come up short. And his frustration—his fear—finally swelled to the degree that he felt his only option was to edit himself out of his own life.

  Strange, then, that the only clue I have supporting this theory is how he edited himself into his own manuscript. For the longest time, the fact that his prize application synopsis has the wife disappearing confused me. Because obviously I hadn’t, and didn’t. And equally obvious, I thought, was that I was the husband, the speechwriter, and he was her, was Callie. The wife is a novelist, after all, or wants to be one. She’s restless, edgy, and maybe forty-one percent crazy. True, she’s better on her feet (on the page) than he was, more forceful, strong, smart. But those are changes, or improvements, I would have made, too.

  Another notion came to haunt me, however, something even more obvious: that the wife was the wife, that she was me. Because I had disappeared. He had stayed. Not in any physical sense but in the dream sense, in the sense we’d had one, a dream, or he had, and we’d started moving toward it that first night when I followed him home from the bar. I’d followed him and followed him, through page after page, year after year, and at some point, he must have thought I said no. In myriad ways, I did. No, we can’t go for drinks tonight—we’re helping coach this or that practice. No, you shouldn’t keep experimenting in ways to lose money, because it seems to be costing you your mind as well.

  No, you’re not a failure. I said that, too. But he came to believe something else.

  And I don’t know what happened then, or precisely when it happened. If family life simply overtaxed him; or whether he thought, I’m the only true dreamer left in this marriage, I need to grab whatever balloon floats by, even if it bears me away; or whether all of it, art, life, its intersections, came to feel like foolishness.

  I do know that, like the fictional Callie, I grew angry, I grew frustrated, I fled.

  I fled without going anywhere. I fled fiction for real life, however pale a second prize or destination that is. I wrote speeches, I made videos. I didn’t make my film, but I didn’t stop reading—I read the books he gave me, I read shelves full of books I found on my own. I still believed in make-believe. But he must have believed otherwise, and must have believed that that left him the sole presider over a fictional land wholly his own, one he could be present in only by not being present. That’s why he couldn’t leave us via something as prosaic as divorce. It’s why he couldn’t stay away from us in Paris.

  We were his creation. And he, everlastingly, ours.

  CHAPTER 18

  Eleanor left. A year passed. Spring returned. Robert did not.

  And then—

  I’m telling things out of order again.

  What happened was this.

  * * *

  —

  I lost my husband.

  Robert’s disappearance was more profound this time. Somehow, when he left, he managed to leave my imagination, too. I no longer thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye, or in photographs from The Red Balloon, or in the pages of his own books. No messages, scribbled or otherwise, appeared. It felt like our fault. Like his appearance in Paris had been solely through the force of my will and the girls’ longing—that that was all that had ever caused him to be among us, in fact, for eighteen years. That’s untrue, of course, but legally . . .

  Legally. After much consultation with Eleanor, I shared with the girls what the police had told me. Or rather, I shared one tiny piece of it. I said the police had explained that if there is no sign of someone for seven years, that person can be declared dead. In other words, I left out the sailboat story, the partial one that the police had pieced together, the one Robert himself had partially corroborated. And without the story, there was nothing. Nothing of him in Paris or Milwaukee—or in their faces. I’d expected screaming or tears, hands at my throat. Nothing, just flat incredulity.

  “So we have to wait?” Ellie said.

  “Well, it can be accelerated,” I said. What was I saying? I listened as I stumbled on. “If the police believe—Eleanor says—there’s this process.”

  Daphne looked confused. “The process makes him”—I waited for her to say the word, but she didn’t—“not alive?”

  “Well,” I said, “legally, I suppose it does.”

  “Legally?” said Ellie. Her favorite part of Paris was proving to be the constant parade of manifestations—demonstrations and strikes, on behalf of workers, the Romani, immigrants, students—the city fostered.

  “But if he did come back?” Daphne said.

  That question mark again, that bent pin.

  “I guess there’s another . . . process,” I said.

  “What’s a ‘process’?” Daphne said. As Molly once warned, we were all losing our English a word or two at a time. Days before, trying to explain the Vélib’ bike-share system to some tourists, I’d been unable to summon kickstand. They’d thought I was talking about soccer. Which, of course, is football.

  But there was another word we’d all somehow lost, in French and English: père, father, papa, dad. I noticed that when Robert came up now, it was only ever as he, as in:

  “He’s not coming back.” This was Ellie, and this was a phrase that, as I turned it over and over in the days following, seemed to render superfluous any legal petition.

  * * *

  —

  We lost the store.

  I can’t say Madame’s announcement, almost a year to the day that Robert walked out of The Late Edition, was a surprise. She and I had spoken less and less, and when she spoke to me, she often did so through George. Do this, do that. I didn’t. I knew what she wanted me to do was make money—unable to make our originally negotiated payments, I was supposed to pay a percentage of our sales each month as a way of settling our debt—and she couldn’t believe how badly the store was doing. Or so George said. I asked him for his own business insights. Don’t own a bookstore, he said. I pointed out that we had to.

  He said that though he’d wangled us a second year on our visas, a day of reckoning might be coming.

  And so it did.

  Madame found me one quiet morning in the store and as
ked if I might come upstairs. I’d not visited her apartment since we’d made our first arrangements. And needless to say, I’d never been all the way up to the attic, the “book floor,” which Madame, early on, had often suggested I might visit. But she’d never said when, and it lay beyond a locked door I’d not dared approach (Ellie had, of course; that’s how I knew it was locked).

  Madame unlocked the door, and I followed her up.

  Blue toile wallpaper, a repeating pattern of hunters and stags, enclosed the room, puckering at the seams. A single round window the size of a café serving tray caught a piece of a gray sky. An oriental rug worn through to its warp lay in the middle of the space, which was small, hunched under the roof. A wooden table, almost as large as the door we’d just stepped through, stood on the carpet, along with a single chair. Atop the table, a blotter, a pen cup, some pages. Some covered in handwriting. Some not.

  There were no books.

  That is, there were no shelves and shelves of books as I’d imagined. There was, instead, a single low bookcase, mostly empty, less than a meter wide and not half as tall. Atop it, a yellow Larousse dictionary and a small cameo portrait of a girl. On the shelf beneath, a dozen books, all identical but for numbers on their spines. Madame handed me one. The cover smooth, soft leather dyed green. The pages were gilt-edged, old gold.

  Inside, a single word on a single page: Un. One.

  She looked to me to see if I understood.

  I did; I was once a writer’s wife. Un. One. Chapter 1. She did not have to remove the rest of the carefully stockpiled journals to show me that those pages were blank, too.

  “Madame,” I said. “I had no idea.” She took the book and put it away. “I didn’t know you were a writer. Un écrivain?”

  She sniffed. I wondered if I’d said it wrong. Masculin ou féminin?

  “Un écrivain écrit,” she said. A writer writes.

  And she had not. She’d always wanted to, since she was a child, since she was younger than Annabelle. But so many things had gotten in the way. Life, her daughter, Sylvie. (And Sylvie’s father had gotten himself well out of the way—had vanished—before Sylvie was even born. No wonder Madame thought she understood me, and my invisible husband, so well.) Needing to support herself, her child, had gotten in the way, and so she’d gotten herself a job in a bookstore on a street named for the patron saint of writers. In time, she came to own the store, the apartments above, the building. She had everything.

  She had twelve gilt-edged green-bound volumes of nothing.

  She thought the bookstore would inspire her. Instead, it took all of her time.

  And then we came along, she said.

  She looked at me to be sure I understood. She was speaking French but that wasn’t the problem. I stared back blankly. She sighed and continued, annoyed she had to clarify.

  We were the problem.

  “I thought, selling you the store, this will give me more time. The time, the liberté, I did not have for so many years. But you did not give me the time. Falling in rivers, hospitals, police. So busy! So noisy. This last year, more quiet, but—in the store, too quiet. And the books.” She paused, as though working out the next sentence in English. “This is the problème. The books down there, louder and louder every night. ‘What have you done today, Madame?’ they ask. ‘Where is the book?’”

  And I thought, where is the exit?

  I also felt something else: that I finally understood Robert’s writeaways in a way I hadn’t before. Claustrophobia has many sources. We were just one.

  But it was the one Madame focused on now.

  “Leah,” Madame said. “This is what I am trying to say: you must leave.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, turning to go. “Of course!”

  Madame shook her head. “No,” she said. “The apartment, the store. I am sorry, all of it.”

  “Madame?”

  “You bought the business, yes,” she said. “But not the building. And so now—you move.”

  I’d heard of other expats evicted on short notice by their French landladies; such negotiations had been almost a subspecialty of Declan’s. But I’d never thought that . . .

  We had an understanding, an agreement, a bond—this wasn’t about—this was about books. Wasn’t it? “Find a new place for the store? For us to live? What about our special visas?”

  “I do not know,” Madame said. “Especially for an American, this is not easy. Perhaps George can help. Perhaps you can go home, to America. I know people who will buy the stock, the books, all of it. This is the time,” she said, and sighed. “When you first come, I think, ‘this is what she needs to do, this store—’”

  “And the twins,” I said.

  “They are older now,” she said. “George has need of you not so much.” It was true. “And you need—you need more. I need more.”

  “I—I don’t understand,” I said, though, degree by degree, surveying the empty room, I did.

  Madame looked at her tiny bookcase and then back at me. “Many years,” Madame said, “and now few. Je suis à court de temps,” she added. “Do you understand what that means?”

  * * *

  —

  I did. It meant I could take the rest of the day off. I went downstairs, accepted a package from Laurent, and then endured a headshake from him as I prematurely flipped the sign to FERMÉ.

  In the past year, I’d finally gone on a date with him, as doing so had seemed inevitable. It went poorly, as was also inevitable. He took me to a chain restaurant that specialized in hamburgers and told me I’d have to learn how to cook before we got married. But he would pay, he would pay, he’d repeated, as though I’d been badgering him. So I paid for dinner and left him at the table. I didn’t get deliveries for two weeks. When they resumed, he said he forgave me: if I wanted to pay for things, that was absolutely fine. I said if he wanted to be friends, just friends, that was absolutely fine.

  I said this in French, and he looked at me like I’d mixed up some key piece of syntax, and I suppose I had. I was plumb out of friends.

  When Robert left that second time, it was as though everyone had been waiting for his cue. Carl came by to announce somberly that he’d received his new posting—Côte d’Ivoire. He gave me a wallet-size copy of his official portrait—brown-blazered, American flag at his right—and kissed me, on both cheeks. As I delicately pulled away, he held on to my elbows. Stay strong, he said. I tried to, but then Shelley, the quiet retiree from New Orleans, departed, too. No kissing, just an exhale. Her husband had summoned her home. I suppose it’s time, she said.

  When Molly announced that she and her family were leaving, she said it was past time. And it was—for me to fire her. She had been a hapless employee and, it turned out, a bad customer. The week before she left, she returned two boxes of books I’d not known she’d bought. “Just add the refund to my final paycheck,” she said.

  “But we don’t do refunds,” I said.

  She looked at me, confused. “But I’ve been giving customers their money back for months?”

  I thought about calling Declan, but did not. We’d seen each other for coffee two or three times in the past year, but just coffee. Never wine. Never back to the apartment after. We told each other that it was so busy, we were so busy, Paris was so busy. When we parted we said à bientôt, which means both “soon” and “good-bye.”

  And so I strode away from my meeting with Madame Brouillard, up the street, alone. Up the street—not down toward the Seine, toward Notre-Dame, that prettier Paris. I wanted ugly.

  Except it wasn’t ugly. Wherever I walked, it was terribly beautiful, and I do mean terribly, because sometimes you want the landscape to reflect your soul, you want the skies and streetlights and doorways of every building you pass to frown, turn a shadowed jaw to you, look pale and gaunt. But Paris, even when the sky is gray—it was sunny today, so
blue above that tourists and locals alike kept stopping to look up—effortlessly, ceaselessly, annoyingly generates magic. I looked down. A faint smell of urine rose from some crevice.

  I’ll be home in three days, Napoleon famously wrote Josephine; don’t wash.

  Before coming to Paris, I’d always understood that line as nothing more than the plea of a lovesick, sex-mad soldier with the mildest of kinks. After living in the city, I understood it differently, and not just because I’d waited longer than three days. The ideal, the real, they’re all mixed up here there’s no point in teasing them apart; they’ll only come at each other again.

  Finally turning, I passed my favorite abandoned storefront, the one with the ladder, the apple, the splatters of paint. It had sat dark for a year, and once, when I could bear to do so, I’d pressed my face to the glass and had seen that the apple, too, had gone. Of course. But tonight, it had its light on, and inside stood a new ladder, a new apple atop it. Green. And with it, a sign above the door, in English: THE APPLE STORE. It would be only a matter of time before Apple got wind and shut it down. But here, now, the apple shone, and I tried the door, found it open, and entered. I called out bonjour and received no reply. Everything smelled clean and light. I took the apple. I took a bite. I looked around for the hidden camera as I chewed but saw none, which is, I suppose, the point of hiding. I went home.

  * * *

  —

  Which was where? Milwaukee. We could figure out a way to stay in Paris, I thought, but I also knew that we already had done that once, and doing so had led to this dead end. (Or in French, impasse.) Raising kids is about raising yourself as a grown-up, and I was enough of one now to know, unlike Robert, when to leave.

  I dragged Daphne on a trip up to the rue de Rivoli to buy one of the boucherie’s ready-to-go rotisserie chickens. I wondered if FedEx would be able to deliver it hot to our home in Milwaukee. I don’t think I was tearing up over this prospect, but when I placed my order, the butcher looked at me like he knew something was wrong. In Paris, the empathy of butchers and pharmacists cannot be underestimated, and indeed, the boucher now offered his prescription: I must buy a rôti—a roast, pork, he had one right here, stuffed with apricots and prunes, just put it in the oven.