Paris by the Book(13)

The therapist said we could discuss that next time, but we stopped going. And Robert stopped giving advance notice. Of what he wanted to fight about, about when he wanted to run off and work. I swallowed my complaints. When we married, I thought I was the one tagging along for the wild ride. An author! An explorer! A man whose mysteries only unlocked more. All in a minor key, of course, but I liked that; minor was manageable.

But no, apparently I’d been the one providing the wild ride, and he the passenger. I was the woman who’d run from the store with a book. When actual squalling children arrived, though, we didn’t spend evenings talking books in bars. We were busier than ever, and he was more desperate than ever. I saw it in his eyes, in his hands each time he returned from one of his absences: he clutched fewer and fewer pages. It had once been part of the routine, his brandishing pages at reentry, a thick folder, a bulging manila envelope. But now it was sometimes a single rolled page, two, stuck out of a back pants pocket like a flyswatter. I didn’t know what to do. Should I steal more books? Should I steal a look at what he was writing?

I should have, but I didn’t. I was too afraid. He swore blank pages didn’t spook him, but they did me when they were his. Also blank: the notepad in the kitchen where he’d always left those notes. Always. And then, once, twice, he didn’t. And then came the next-to-last time.

On that occasion, after he’d been gone from the house for roughly twenty-four hours, I went looking. It was Ellie’s idea that I should check his campus office, though she wanted me to go check for my sake. She was curious about the lack of a note but not haunted by it. Pages, quantity or quality, didn’t matter to the girls; they had a faith in their father’s weirdness. Eccentricity reassured them that he was still unique, and uniquely theirs.

When I found him—leaving his office, just where Ellie had said he’d be—he was walking to the elevator. And he said nothing to me, so I said nothing to him. He pushed the down button. The elevator came. He got in. I followed.

I did not like being on campus this late. It reminded me of my grad school days, and reminded me how they had ended, which was slowly, badly, as one professor after another asked what I wanted to do after I got my degree. The answers I gave did not satisfy. Them or me. Teach? A teaching assistantship convinced me no. Research? I was going blind reading blurry microfilm in the library basement. I had wanted to make my own film, but school had robbed me of the confidence of saying so, even to myself. When I quit and took up speechwriting, I didn’t need a therapist to point out that I’d found a job that involved hiding behind someone else. And if a therapist had pointed that out, I would have pointed out that speechwriting paid good money.

Being on campus late also reminded me of when things went wrong at work, when I had to stay after hours to fix a speech or presentation because the president’s mood or the university’s finances had changed. Mindful of my own family’s finances, ever more my responsibility, I would stay such nights as long as required, inserting as many Lincoln or Lombardi quotes as required. My boss favored both men, though the two of them had maddeningly little to say about tuition freezes or the depreciation of an aging physical plant, such as the Brutalist office tower where Robert and I now stood. Here was where the campus imprisoned its humanities faculty. The building’s one working elevator was so old that triggering an emergency stop after the doors closed involved pulling out a wooden knob, which I did.

“This is the third time now that you’ve left without a note,” I said. “Not a word. Nothing.”

“I think that will set off alarms?” he said, staring at his feet, nodding at the button.

“You already have,” I said. “We had a deal. We’ve always had a deal, the best fucking deal any husband—any writer—ever had. An hour away, a day away, anytime, anywhere—”

“Unless there’s a tournament—”

“—you only have to leave a note. And fuck off about tournaments”—he said I swore too much, and I did—“five bucks says you don’t even know what kind of ball they’ll use at Ellie’s next match.”

“That’s a trick question?” he said. (Fine: chess.)

“What are you doing?” I said. “Go running. Go sailing. Take some time. But enough with this ducking out here and there. Let’s get you some real time, a week—”

“I’ve never done a whole—”

“You’ve never not left notes,” I said. “The girls notice—they—we all get scared, okay?”

In truth, I hadn’t been scared. I’d been angry. But when I said it, I saw it, that he hadn’t really gone this time, nor the two times before—he hadn’t gone, but was going.

He looked at me, at the elevator doors shut tight, at the compartment’s ceiling and the water that disconcertingly pooled in the light panel there. He looked at the worn walls, the scuffed floor; he was wedged in a corner, gripping a side rail with each hand.

“Listen,” he said.

I interrupted him. I said the thing you say to kids, the lie you lie to shut them up.

I mean I said, “I know.”

He shook his head. I kept lying.

“It’s all right,” I said. He wouldn’t look at me. “It’ll be all right.”

He closed his eyes, I reached out to him, he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”