Paris by the Book(14)

“Campus police,” the intercom blared. “What’s your emergency?”

“Let’s get you home,” I said.

I know I need to find a way to say why I loved him still, even how I loved him. I know it’s not enough to point to two children’s books in a bar—or two daughters in a drafty house and almost twenty years and seventy-four birthday cakes and 150-odd doctors’ appointments, eight zoo field trips, ten million sports practices, one chess tournament, one violin and two retainers gone missing, one thousand times our children were told you have the coolest dad ever and one strange, delightful evening at Carnegie Hall onstage with Daphne’s entire second-grade class, who, under his tutelage, had won a national poetry-writing award, cash money, enough to adopt a blind tortoise from a turtle rescue group the class named Milton, because when Adam and Eve leave Eden in Paradise Lost—which Robert somehow read, parts of, anyway, with all those seven-year-olds—they do so “with wandering steps and slow.” And because Milton was blind. And because I loved my husband so very much I fell for a metaphor as bright and red and urgent as a STOP button in an elevator.

“Help is on the way,” the intercom said.

“Don’t worry,” I hushed. He shook his head. I stood. I pushed the STOP button in. The elevator lurched downward.

“It’s too late,” he said.

I brushed the hair from those eyes, and looked for him. There he was. Somewhere. And somewhere inside, something hurt. I fantasized about being able to reach down inside him, to reset some switch, turn some dial, push or pull a button that said stop. I wanted to help him that much. I loved him that much. Enough to say what I said then.

“We’ll escape!”

But we didn’t, of course.

Until he did.





CHAPTER 3


Robert disappeared from our home in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, twelve weeks before my daughters and I arrived in Paris. The exact moment and means were never a mystery: very early, on foot, out the back door. His departure raised no alarm; he was a runner and liked early mornings best. And it wasn’t worth much more notice when he didn’t return for breakfast; occasionally he ran long.

When he later missed dinner, I reminded myself that he’d sometimes get consumed by a project, so much so that he’d forget to charge his phone (which he made reluctant use of regardless). After still no sign of him that night, I decided that he’d gone off on one of his “writeaways.” Ellie and Daphne asked if he’d left a note. He had not.

And then I discovered he had, a very short one. Six letters.



* * *



—

The first person I called when Robert disappeared was Eleanor. It’s not quite correct to call her my friend. Nor is it correct to call her Ellie’s godmother—we never had her baptized—but both insist Eleanor is. What is true is that back when I was in graduate school, I’d taken some English classes and she was the department chair. I went to her to complain about a grade I’d gotten from another professor, and over the course of an hour, she convinced me both that the grade I’d received was, if anything, too generous and that if I spoke as plainly and fearlessly on paper as I did in person, I’d never have cause to complain about a grade again. She was right, but I still knocked on her office door regularly ever after, even once I’d quit my program: I was sure she could resolve my life’s larger complaints as readily as she had my academic ones.

“Leah,” Eleanor said after one particularly long afternoon. “I’m not the chair of your life.” I smiled, and smile now at the memory. It was the only time she ever lied to me.

Not that I believed all the things she told me, such as, your parents don’t hate you. I told myself that they did, as they’d died before I’d had a chance to apologize to them for being a terrible daughter. Their deaths came within months of each other my third semester in graduate school, my father after a long illness and my mother after a short one. For the record—and as they themselves would surely protest—I wasn’t a terrible daughter. I had been bothered by them for being so old for so long, for not providing me siblings, for living in rural Wisconsin, for not having more money, and finally, for assuring me it was “just fine” if I didn’t go to college (neither of them had). So many grievances, and so minor, and yet, during their illnesses prior to their deaths, I’d fancifully expected to be in some way relieved when they departed.

I was, of course, ruined. I paid for an elaborate funeral few attended and a massive joint headstone that would have embarrassed them. That used up just about all the money they’d left me; they’d mortgaged the bar to pay for my undergrad degree at a private college, a misspent five-year experience (I’d flunked much of freshman year, including French) I thought I could justify by doubling down and attending graduate school.

Other professors resisted the in loco parentis part of the job, but for Eleanor, avowedly single, childless, ageless, it was the job. She tidied up my grad school exit; found me that campus speechwriting job; told me, when I showed her the picture of my parents’ gaudy grave (I don’t know why I did this, but I had to, I kept it behind my license in my wallet), that I was a good daughter and, when I wailed in protest, told me she was sorry we weren’t graveside right then. I asked why. She said that would allow her to break off part of the outsize stone and hit me over the head with it.