Paris by the Book(12)

I’d been forewarned. We’d had that deal. And I didn’t want to go back on it, even as his career took one wrong turn after another. That was how art worked. And it was important for me that he live the life of an artist, a writer. I didn’t begrudge him time away, but I somehow begrudged him his anxiety, his exhaustion. Failures aside—or included!—he was living the dream. Couldn’t he smile more? And maybe cook and freeze a dinner before he left?



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What he did leave, for me, were books. Not every time, but many times, since the very beginning. Something to tide me over while he was gone was the idea, I think—but only think, because the few times I pressed him on why he’d left this or that book, he looked at me oddly. Because I wanted you to read it. So I did. Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider was the first—World War I, TB sanitariums, delirium, lost love—I swooned for it even as I worried he was trying to tell me something: did he, too, have a terminal illness? No, he said again (and again): I just wanted you to read it. So I did, and later, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Aidan Higgins’s Helsing?r Station and James Welch’s Fools Crow and William Kennedy’s Albany novels and Grace Paley’s Manhattan stories and Octavia Butler and Muriel Spark and so much Alice Munro. I can’t remember them all. I don’t even have them all—some were just library books he later returned. For a while, I gave him films in return, but that was an inconvenient age when balancing a screen on your stomach would have crushed you; he never seemed to find the time to watch. I didn’t mind. I liked the books, I liked talking about them, but I also liked that it was okay not to talk about them; it wasn’t a test. It was, instead, a kind of gift, a treat, like breakfast in bed. I felt catered to, and so when the books began to peter out, when he began to leave without leaving them behind, I grew uneasy.



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Where once Robert had sauntered the aisles of bookstores and libraries with a proprietary air, now he slunk through them, or avoided them altogether, eager to avoid embarrassments like the one Daphne once put him through during a playdate visit to a bookstore: taking a little friend by the hand, Daphne went over to the E’s to brag on her father’s behalf. But there, between Alexandre Dumas, Lawrence Durrell, and . . . Umberto Eco, there was no Eady. Of course not, Robert said quickly, and dragged them over to the children’s section. But here there were no E’s at all. The shelf went straight from Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer to Walter Farley’s Black Stallion. Both favorites of Daphne’s, but that was beside the point today. “Where are your books, Daddy?” Daphne asked, or so she told me later.

She wasn’t the only one asking. Especially because Robert’s pursuit of “what’s next” had devolved into an increasingly feeble series of experiments, like the trilogy with an unconventional conceit: the first book was pitched at his younger readers, the second for not-quite-adults, the third for readers who thought of themselves (or were thought to be) adults. The idea was to reel in a new adult audience without losing hold of his old younger one. Or, that was the publisher’s idea; Robert was less sure.

Thus began a new season. Of being less sure of everything, of stumbling, wandering, of yet more experiments that were rebuffed and abandoned. It wasn’t that he bruised easily—more that his earnestness, his artistness (I’m looking for words other than cluelessness), left him forever vulnerable.

Over time, it seemed that everything wounded. He’d taken up sailing through the college and loved it—and then they instituted a safety requirement that you had to sail with someone. The girls’ resurgent complaints about our lack of pets (Robert had allergies) wore at him as never before, as did the neighbors and their pets. For the sake of intellectual engagement (his claim), for the sake of human interaction and distraction (my claim, and correct), he’d agreed to teach a class up at the university, but campus inanities bothered him disproportionately—one had to pay for one’s own toner, for example, which he said punished the productive.

And I bothered him. I’m not sure why. The therapist didn’t know, either. And maybe that was the reason why I troubled him so: I’d convinced Robert to see a therapist. Actually, the compromise was that we would both go see someone, together. Which turned out to be fine. For me. In our sessions, Robert mostly squirmed or sighed; I brought pen and paper, took notes, asked for tools. We wound up with an entire “toolbox,” albeit one filled with simple things. Exercise. Meditation. Plus, “alone time,” which Robert liked having validated, and “advance notice,” which I liked having validated: the latter meant that you were supposed to give your partner a heads-up about things you wanted to discuss. We will fight about your time away tomorrow was how I jokingly summarized it. The therapist asked if I felt like I relied on humor too much.

For the longest time, laughter had been the one thing that had worked reliably for us. I’m not the world’s best laugher myself—it may be from all those years of hearing fake, beer-fueled laughter in the tavern—and it’s made me a connoisseur. No one laughs better than my children. I once told Robert I wanted to bottle it. He said I’d need a lot of bottles, then. But by the time we were in that tiny room with the humorless therapist, any bottles I’d stockpiled would have gone dusty from disuse. I knew from moment one that I’d married a man for whom life was a struggle. It was, again, why I married him. To see him struggle through it through art. To help him. Because doing so would help me. What I didn’t realize, and maybe no one does as they tenderly slip on smooth wedding bands, is how much it would hurt.