I must have looked dazed, because he turned his attention to Daphne and explained about the temperature and time, how she would know it was done, how it would be a true tragedy if we cooked it too long. He then explained that we would need to get some shallots and haricots verts—green beans—next door and a good burgundy one door farther down. “Madame,” he said, turning to me and continuing in English, “a little wine for the girl, aussi. She is the good help.” Daphne smile-frowned and turned away, and though I’d sworn off being surprised by anything anymore, I was startled by what I thought I’d just seen: Daphne flirting? The butcher then gave us, free, six strips of terrifyingly rich bacon—and a little sachet of spices, which he told Daphne to sprinkle on her mère as necessary, as the lovely lady was looking a bit grave. Daphne gave a quick, high laugh, said merci and good-bye, and then led us from the store. I smiled at the butcher as we left. He raised an eyebrow—he thought I was flirting—but I wasn’t. I was proud. Of Daphne, and, immoderately, of myself. I’d gotten her this far. Physically, emotionally. Strong enough to navigate Paris. Kind enough to tolerate me tagging along.
“I don’t know why everyone doesn’t live here,” Daphne said as we walked home, packages hanging off us like ornaments.
“It’s crowded enough,” I said as someone banged into me, but Daphne didn’t hear. She was already ahead on the sidewalk, smoothly navigating the crowd. She looked more and more like Ellie; the two of them looked less and less like their parents. I was glad I hadn’t successfully brought about a meeting between them and their father. I was devastated that he wasn’t here to see the young women they’d become.
As we opened the door to the bookstore, it was dark, which was good, because it hid my face. Daphne said we should have Eleanor visit again—had I seen the sign in her hotel announcing that it had been “refreshed”?
I had, but had wondered at my French, because when I peered inside, the lobby still looked dusty and airless, full of fake movie bric-à-brac, its deep maroon walls making you feel like you’d wandered into some darker corner of the human heart.
Then again, I’d noticed one new item on the wall that had once borne a poster of The Red Balloon. It was gone, and in its place a poster for another Lamorisse film, The Lovers’ Wind. Daphne had seen it, too. “I’ve never heard of it,” she said. I said I would tell her about it after dinner. But then she forgot, thank goodness.
Parts of The Red Balloon were bleak, but as a whole, it was uplifting, if not inspiring. The end of Lamorisse’s life was not.
* * *
—
It is 1968, hardly a dozen years after he had known heady success, and Albert Lamorisse’s career has diminished considerably, to the point that he now finds himself producing a film for the shah of Iran.
Lamorisse sleeps poorly and suffers nightmares about dying, about falling, about water.
And this is precisely what happens when, in the midst of filming a tricky shot of the Karaj Dam that Lamorisse wanted to avoid—but the shah insisted; he wanted a documentary that would show how modern and advanced his kingdom is—Lamorisse’s helicopter becomes entangled in power cables and crashes, killing Lamorisse, age forty-eight. Navy divers descend in search of the bodies.
The film stock survived, however, and eight years later, Lamorisse’s widow and son—Pascal, one-time child star of The Red Balloon, now in his twenties—edited the Iranian footage based on Lamorisse’s notes. It features all the long, lingering panoramas Lamorisse loved, and almost nothing the shah wanted. The shah fled Iran January 16, 1979. Almost a month to the day later, Lamorisse became an Academy Award nominee once again, posthumously, this time for Best Documentary, for The Lovers’ Wind.
So all the more piercing, my unfinished thesis argued, is the seven-minute collection of outtakes Lamorisse’s remaining Iranian crew assembled as a kind of postscript to the full-length documentary. It contains every last thing the shah wanted, and somehow—the way the images are intercut, sped up and slowed down, brought close or pushed away—manages to indict the shah for Lamorisse’s death with every frame.
Knowing the story of Lamorisse’s life isn’t necessary to appreciate the film, but it helps, especially around the 00:02:30 mark, where the montage abruptly cuts to some B-roll of a laboratory. Right before a test tube begins to fill with what looks like watered-down blood, a man in a white coat reaches to the top of a skinny glass pipe. And there, apropos of nothing, or rather, everything, briefly swells a red balloon.
And so the hotel’s poster reminded me, though I should not have needed reminding: clues are always present, should one care to look.
* * *
—
I went downstairs to tidy up while the girls did their homework.
I wouldn’t miss this part of owning a bookstore. Picking up after people is never fun. Not if it’s your own family, not if it’s the stream (or trickle) of customers who march through your store. Granted, our store was organized idiosyncratically, but why customers chose to reshelve books upside down, or spine in, or horizontally instead of vertically, I do not know. It wasn’t laziness; some of their efforts clearly took effort.
I started with the Madeline display, as it had been in particular disarray for some time, with many of its dolls missing. Sold, I hoped, though probably a few Madelines and Pepitos had walked out on their own, too. I admit that our Bemelmans books had, on the whole, gotten less attention from me after Robert left the twins, the store. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious thing. Or maybe it was. Or maybe, tonight, it was the glass of wine I’d brought down from the dinner table.
The sidewalks outside were clear, and I was thankful for that. I wasn’t interested in putting on a show as I picked up and restaged the windows. The Madeline and Pepito dolls had little Velcro pads on their hands, and I put that feature to use. I pinned Pepito’s legs under an omnibus Madeline edition that I’d propped on a chair, and had him reaching down to rescue Madeline. Their heads weren’t moveable, so that meant while Pepito’s face was fixed staring at her, Madeline’s stared straight out the window with a grin. I liked that. And then I looked it all over and swapped the dolls’ places so that Pepito was the one in distress. I liked that even more. And I put a Red Balloon nearby to give him options for his escape.
Enough playing with dolls. I sorted through our Paris bookcase, pruning as I went. Hemingway’s Moveable Feast I moved to the Illinois shelf. We’d sell less of him there, but that was fine with me. While in the Midwest shelves, I found a mis-shelved James Baldwin and brought him back to France. And M. F. K. Fisher was in Michigan—her birthplace, but it was high time she returned to Paris, too. She loved the city—and, strangely, the station restaurant at the Gare de Lyon, which Ellie had run through shouting during her search for the twins. I knew Fisher would have helped had she been there. Fisher wrote about food, and that led me to Julia Child, whom I expatriated from the Boston shelves—where she sat uncomfortably anyway—to shelve beside Fisher in France. And Monique Truong! I went and fetched her from New York. Not among the deceased, thank god, but I made an exception for her because I loved her book about Gertrude Stein’s Vietnamese cook so much—The Book of Salt belonged in Paris. I brought these women from their various locales and made room on the Paris shelves by displacing as many men as possible. So long, F. Scott! Adieu, Ford Madox! Au revoir, Robert Eady!
Robert Eady?
I stopped. Our Milwaukee section—and we did have one—featured none of Robert’s work anymore, just books on typewriters (invented there) and Carl Sandburg (once, like me, a speechwriter there).
But this was in Paris. This was not Central Time.
I picked up the book. This was new.
A new novel by Robert Eady.
A new novel, Paris by the Book. No pseudonym. By Robert Eady.
There was not enough light to read. There was just enough.
I opened the book.
Robert had
revised and finished the manuscript.
It still started the way I remembered:
They loved their lives and where they lived, but still they wondered, what happens next?
And then I stopped, and closed the book, and looked at the cover. No Eiffel Tower, brave decision on the publisher’s part for a Paris book, just a close-up of—a store like ours. That is, it was our store, but someone had had their way with Photoshop, and that was fine. The tangle of vines (cf. Madeline) was a nice addition. But the name—the store’s name was the same, The Late Edition. I couldn’t tell what was in the window—that would have given me a clue as to when the photo was taken—but it was definitely our store.
In France, there is a term, self-fiction, that translates into “autobiographical fiction,” but not quite. I’ve always thought the English phrase carried a whiff of condescension or criticism with it, and self-fiction doesn’t do that at all; it serves more to illuminate something we all do, or should do, and constantly, which is to edit and organize our lives until we find a narrative that suits us, completes us. I’ve left out until now the detail that Robert, in that moment in our conversation when he took credit for writing I’m sorry in that book, his eyes flicked away from mine, and I’d thought, he’s lying.
Was he? I’m not sure. I’m not even sure it matters, only that mine’s the better version, that he’d written I’m sorry in that book because he was sorry. Then he’d put his book back on the shelf, a message in a bottle he’d never actually expected to bob our way—and once it did, he’d stolen it back.
But we’d bobbed his way, and as he’d told me in the store, he’d watched as much as he could while we did bob, fascinated by what seemed like a hallucination—one that, some days, was more fully realized than others: we seemed to be running the store he’d written, we were living above it, we’d made a new family. I wondered if he’d seen the twins—or George—or Declan. Maybe one night Robert had walked by and seen Ellie and Daphne laughing—laughing!—in the front window as Declan regaled them with some story. The scene would have looked so warm and the laughter so genuine, Robert would have stopped to marvel at it, but then would have quickly urged himself on, so as not to be spotted.
Had he seen these things? Had he seen Declan? How many times? On the bridge, for example, where Daphne saw Robert? But Robert insisted he’d been nowhere near that day, and I preferred that version, too. And the manuscript, back in Milwaukee, back in the math department’s print queue, the family who buys the store in France? I had let him tell me about it, but hadn’t told him Eleanor had found it: I didn’t want him to say that he’d not intended us to read it, much less follow it. I didn’t want him to say, “I’m sorry,” again. Because, strange as it was to have done so, I liked what I’d done with that manuscript, that life, this one. I’d changed jobs, continents. I’d figured out a way to feed my family, with food both frozen and fresh.
The result was two healthy, heroic daughters.
And one beautiful bookstore whose shelves creaked under the weight of several thousand books.
For a little while more, anyway.
I opened Robert’s book once again, and this time started from the beginning, the endpapers—a nice map, they paid extra for that—and then a blank page, and then a title page, then an epigraph from Gertrude Stein, and then the dedication.
To the one I lost.
EPILOGUE
And I lost myself in that book.
Back and forth I went in those pages, which meant going back and forth in my memories of Paris, and Milwaukee. I marveled at what he’d done. Not only the writing but also the book’s appearance in our store. Had he put it there? He must have. I didn’t know for sure and couldn’t. I’d had Asif pull the cameras out months before. I did not regret the decision. This was why I’d had him pull the cameras; I didn’t want to be haunted. It’s also why I didn’t tell the girls about the book. The next time I saw Robert, if there was a next time, I wanted us all to see him, and I wanted us to see him not in the margins of a book, screen, or crowd, but full on, in person, walking through the front door.
Had he?
The book was cheaply bound and marked ADVANCE READING COPY—NOT FOR SALE. A publicity galley, then. Though it seemed equally possible that the packaging, the binding, like the story inside, was Robert’s own doing. That he’d written such a book and then crafted this means of “publishing” it was hardly beyond him; in fact, it seemed to be the very essence of him, right down to the “About the Author” page in back, which, beneath those three words, was blank but for two letters: tk. Not French texting slang but an old publishing abbreviation. Don’t be fooled by the k. Tk: it means “to come.”
* * *
—
Summer came. Crowds came. And then more crowds came, because Robert’s book came. The galley he’d left me wasn’t a one-off art object but the first of what turned out to be many, many, many copies. For Robert’s book had been published by a real publisher, and then magically caught a ride on one of those comets that occasionally illuminates the twilit universe of publishing. The story of the family in Paris who takes over a failing bookstore struck a nerve—with bookstore owners, anyway. And with people visiting Paris. This was even before the Times ran its article. But then they did, and the Guardian ran theirs and even Le Monde theirs in the Thursday books roundup, and then the story, like the book, was everywhere.
Most articles cited our store as the book’s “inspiration”; one account also mentioned that the store’s original proprietor, Marjorie Brouillard, was a writer herself, with a new project on the way “after a silence of many years.” When I read this, I offered her my sincere congratulations and told her we would be out of her way soon. I said I’d heard Madame Grillo was thinking of taking the storefront space.
Madame Brouillard did not respond right away. I thought she didn’t want to admit that she’d contacted Madame Grillo about the space. I knew she had, though, because Madame Grillo had told me: a second store, and just for brooms!
But Madame Brouillard watched me sweeping up each night after the crowds, she reviewed the sales figures, she calculated what percentage she might receive come month’s end. “You do not have to leave immédiatement,” she said, as though she’d never suggested otherwise. She began her way up the stairs, offering her usual taut smile, but—and this was new—her eyes smiled, too. It wasn’t the night cream. She had a parting question for me, en français, her words almost shy for a change: and . . . has the publisher, by chance, found a . . . French translator for your husband’s book?
* * *
—
When the first box of Robert’s novel arrived, I split it open privately, in the back office, and turned to the back flap to find out what had come of “to come.” Only this: no photo, a very short bio. It doesn’t even mention his previous titles, only that this is his last, that he disappeared two years ago sailing Lake Michigan and is presumed dead.
When I asked the publisher who had told them this, they said I had.
When I said I hadn’t, they forwarded the e-mails “I” had sent them, including the one where “I” had sent them the full manuscript for their consideration. They said they were glad we were back in touch because “my” prior e-mail address had stopped working, and they wanted to confirm a few matters. Was my contact person at the Milwaukee Police Department, where “I” had sent them to corroborate the story of Robert’s fate, still correct? Was it okay to send the police the copy they were asking for, free?
Was the information about making royalties payable to me, in Paris, still current?
Did I know how I was going to explain this to our daughters?
* * *
—
That last question was mine, of course. Daphne and Ellie were very upset when they read the flap. They were almost more angry than sad; they were convinced that the police had somehow gotten their way, that the forms and “pr
ocess” to declare Dad dead had somehow ground forward without my permission. Then they thought I had given permission, and that was even worse. But I hadn’t. And when they asked, yet again, if their father really was alive, I said, “I don’t know,” which was also true.
I did lie, or maybe it wasn’t quite a lie, when Ellie said, “so it’s our choice”—that is, our choice to believe whether or not Robert was alive. I said yes, even though I wanted to tell them that it wasn’t, it hadn’t been, that Robert had chosen and, for his own terrible reasons, not chosen us.
One conversation, of course, with Ellie and Daphne did not settle the matter of their father’s disappearance or “death.” Neither did fifty. Skype conversations with a Seattle psychologist Eleanor found for the girls did help, and still do. To hear the girls describe it, they’ve reached a truce. Not their word at all, but it captures things for me: a truce with their father, with the truth, with the psychologist. The good doctor will not insist their father is dead; they will not insist on continuing to search Paris for him.
The psychologist says this is healthy, that the time for searching is past. The psychologist doesn’t know about the spoofed e-mails to the publisher and nor do the girls; when Ellie and Daphne asked how the book came to be, I said it seemed as though their father had finished and sent the publisher a manuscript before he disappeared, and that now, the publisher couldn’t find him, and neither could I. If pressed, I repeat the psychologist’s mantra. The time for searching is past.
Paris by the Book Page 31
