Paris by the Book(10)

It was in Wisconsin’s second Paris, however, in the state’s lonelier, hillier southwest, that we got engaged.

That had not been the plan, but as we wandered this second Wisconsin Paris—we had found it on a map, tiny print, but once there, could find no roadside signs to corroborate—I remember thinking, I will marry this man, just five words, which led to eighteen years, two daughters, and, to date, two continents. How to explain, then? Just the magic of the map. That the whole world, once so distant, was suddenly in reach. I knew this wasn’t his doing—it was settler Seth’s doing, the doings of so many others—but it felt like Robert’s magic, like ours, like we could do anything, even conjure Paris from the grass.

Which we did under a full moon not far from the western state line. Here was the second Paris, Wisconsin, here was nothing more than a highway wayside with a gravel parking spot, a picnic table, a tree, a fifty-five-gallon barrel rusting with trash, here was where I said, propose now.

He said nothing.

I added, now or never, because I knew (every fan of The Red Balloon knows) magic is transient.

“Marriage?” Robert said.

Was he asking for my hand, or clarification?

I pretended I didn’t understand it was the latter.

“Yes!” I said.

He looked away, up at the moon, which it turned out wasn’t so full, but almost full, an egg missing or hiding its yolk. And then he did, or said, the strangest thing: “But, Leah—how would that work?”

Work, that was the verb, the noun, the word I should have paid attention to, that I should have featured when we told our engagement story in the years after. But we didn’t, we’d focus on other aspects of that night. We would say how it would have been nice if the moon really had been full, because then it might have been bright enough to find his car keys, which we’d somehow lost and wouldn’t find until the dull light of dawn. And we’d say we filled those dark hours prior as best we could, tuning the level of innuendo to the level of our listeners. But the truth is, we spent most of the predawn dark working out the details of our life to come, which, for me, were prosaic, or as he (ever the editor, particularly of me) termed them, poetic. My demands: we would have children, two; he was not allowed to die before me; one day he would take me to Paris, the real one. And he should be sure to keep up with his writing. And me.

He thought. I watched him while he did, wondering then if he was thinking about whether or not he agreed with what I’d just said. But now I think he was trying to figure out how to phrase what he would say next, which came out this way: that he was a “work in progress”; that he wasn’t entirely the bright-eyed eager boy who’d chased me from a store and subsequently toured me through Wisconsin’s roll call of world capitals; that he himself was still chasing something; that he didn’t know what that was yet; that if we committed to a life together, he would nonetheless need time away, a day, an hour, a weekend, time alone, to do his work, his writing, to chase his challenge. He’d been born alone, he said grandly, and—

I know what you’re after, I said, and he looked up with such relief I almost told him what I knew in my bones was true about him—what I, then, there, naively loved about him—which was that he, too, was ever ready to leap, that his work, his real work, was a kind of falling, and the challenge was not how to evade the end—because all falls end the same way—but how to fall well, to fall brilliantly, to light up the sky like the moon as you passed.

But I didn’t have those words then, and so he kissed me, and I kissed him, and the sun rose and a truck honked and the keys appeared and I thought, I don’t know what he’s after and I thought, I can’t wait to find out and then my brain stopped thinking and my heart stopped beating and I was all stomach, which only knew what it knew then, that we’d been pulled aloft, that we were suspended, weightless, cresting, not how long the feeling would last.



* * *



—

We married, we honeymooned (in Sevastopol, of course, a waterfront chunk of Wisconsin’s Door County), and then Robert took a “honeymoon from our honeymoon,” a quick sprint away to get some writing done while I returned home.

This did not bother me. It pleased me, actually. Energized me. It confirmed my prediction, or more plainly spoken, my desire: I’d landed the boy with the smile, the dream, the restlessness that I took to be artistic, necessary. Mine, all mine. If, post-honeymoon, he’d put his feet up in front of the TV (mine) and held the bowl (his) above his head for more popcorn as I puttered about the apartment (his), I think I would have shot him.

I don’t know what he got done on that first dash away, nor on any of the trips that he took after. I do know that he disappeared all the time. I called these jaunts “writeaways,” a term whose crassness—or aptness—irked him to no end. But I wasn’t irked that he left; it was part of the deal. He could have said, “I told you so,” but he never did because I never complained. Because all the other parts of the deal had held, too, even kids, which he’d been nervous about, not because he didn’t want them, he said, but because he wasn’t sure “the universe” wanted him to have them. Let the universe decide, I said, and it did. We had two daughters, and we proved to be surprisingly good parents.

In my case, I think my parenting success was by accident, but in his case, it was definitely by design. Books came and went from the library. He took classes at the Red Cross and the Y. We became parents who could be counted on to organize the school’s silent auction, babysit the class lizard over spring break, organize the nit-picking party when lice descended (but we should not have served alcohol to the parents; the sight of tequila makes me itchy to this day). And when real tragedy descended, we pitched in then, too. When a first grader was struck in a crosswalk, Robert delivered a eulogy people remembered, and stopped me about, hand flat on my forearm, for years after. If we lived in Milwaukee, I bet they would still. And I bet the crosswalk I painted—which embarrassed the city into subsequently painting an official one—still shines nice and bright. My memories of those days do, too. Each birthday celebrated in our household felt like another victory: we did it!