Paris by the Book(23)

“The wife, and stranger still—okay, let me finish.” Eleanor dropped her voice, caught up in the performance. It was almost fun to listen to, to hear someone else get swept away by another’s prose and magic, even if it was only a synopsis. It reminded me that Robert had possessed that magic. It reminded me that it had possessed me once upon a time. It made me realize, briefly, that something similar was happening again, here on a crowded sidewalk in a distant city, my girls behind glass, my husband behind words someone was reading to me. “‘There’s no sign of her,’” Eleanor read. “The wife, he means. ‘There’d been no warning. The police, the embassy, are no help. The father prepares to head home; the children resist. The father’s compromise: a final trip to the bookstore where they were to have worked.’ Whereupon they find a ‘clue.’”

“A clue—Eleanor! All this time you’ve had me on the phone—why didn’t you just—what in god’s name is the clue?”

“It doesn’t say. That’s where it ends. By design, I assume. Indeed, that’s the contest’s conceit. But here’s what I think of as a clue: the synopsis and manuscript differ. I’m not sure why, and this is only after the speediest of reads, but it appears Robert changed the manuscript before writing the cover letter. Or maybe after. What I mean is, in the manuscript, there’s just this one material change: it’s no longer Callie, the wife, who leaves. It’s . . .”

She paused.

“Well, it’s the husband,” she said. “I don’t know if that’s a clue or the opposite of one. But otherwise, for all this talk of clues in the cover letter, there’s no explicit discussion of clues in the manuscript itself. Maybe he forgot. More likely, as I said, things changed. We don’t even know if he sent it in, after all—perhaps this was just a rough draft.”

We didn’t know anything, she said, but I knew this: it sounded like Eleanor was gloating. She’d had a hunch that Robert was alive and well somewhere, and this somehow proved that.

But it didn’t. We’d found my husband’s manuscript. Not my husband. This manuscript wasn’t evidence he was alive. Unfinished, it was evidence he was dead.

Wasn’t it?

Eleanor could endure my silence no further. “Oh, but of course,” Eleanor said, thinking she’d figured out why I’d paused. “I have anticipated your very desire. My able assistant has already scanned in the whole thing, cover letter and all. And she e-mailed it to you along with Daphne’s passport page. Maybe that’s why it took so long. No matter—Ellie messaged me while we were talking, said she’d gotten it, was printing it.”

“Ellie? Eleanor, you should have . . .” I turned to look through the glass again. Ellie’s workstation was empty. I looked at the line for the bathroom; no.

And then I saw my two daughters, sitting at a little round table, Daphne bent over Ellie bent over a messy pile of pages—bent, anyway, until Ellie looked up, saw me looking at her, and opened her mouth.

I opened mine, too, but nothing came out. My grief books were no help here; none of them discussed partial manuscripts that churned out of printers in Paris. What could I tell my girls that they would believe now? Their father wasn’t gone, he’d come back? Or their father had come back and gone again? Or their father, my husband, was sitting right there on the table, just beneath those words, staring out at us? I wanted to go in and stuff the pages back into the printer. I wanted to gather them up in one giant, messy pile and hug them to me, and not let go: I’m sorry I thought you were dead! I’m sorry you ran away. I’m sorry I said I would—

And then I looked around, and the pages became pages again, and my girls became fatherless again, and I thought, I’m sorry I thought you were back.



* * *



—

Here is my own synopsis of what happened next, pared to the minimum and thus truer than Robert’s: pay, taxi, room, read, argue, cry, call, embassy, cry, call, read, argue, argue, call, call. Stay.

Stay?

Stay in Paris. The girls’ idea. Or, Eleanor later argued, their father’s.

I had not read anything of Robert’s in manuscript form in quite a long time. (I’d once made the mistake of reading a manuscript of his in bed and falling asleep—a perfectly common event in any reader’s life, but, as I learned, unacceptable for an author’s wife.) His words, once bound into a book, always seemed settled, set.

Reading him in double-spaced, 12-point Times Roman was an entirely different experience, and not just because he fussily preferred throwback typewriter fonts: the words here seemed jittery, loose, like a photograph in a tray of developer that refuses to fix.

The manuscript wasn’t bad; I’ll get that out of the way immediately. It didn’t sound like him, but then, none of his books for adults—and this was one—really did. But I hardly focused on that, so distracted was I by the fact that he’d written something. He’d gone away, and come back waving pages!

And on those pages, a message. To us. This was the girls’ opinion, and one they held fast to, despite the cover letter to the prize competition. The book was a message and the message was this: go to Paris, stay in Paris. (Come to think, that may be the synopsis for every book ever set in Paris, even the ones—and there are many, even a majority—about leaving.)