Paris by the Book(100)

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.