Paris by the Book(26)

I’m not sure if it was Eleanor who had put that idea in Ellie’s head or vice versa; but after I called Eleanor, she immediately put it in the head of my boss, an old friend of hers. Whereupon, as Eleanor might say, the hours to our departure ticked away while a brief torrent of e-mails and calls went back and forth beneath the ocean.

In retrospect, my ambivalence may have doomed the proposal,which was that I would telecommute. That, or the fact that I’d never been all that enthusiastic about the job itself during the long years I’d toiled there. I did love the campus benefits—early on, I especially liked the on-site child care staffed by Early Childhood Education majors—and I loved the hours. As I said, I did work late some nights, but otherwise, 5:00 P.M. was a long day, 5:30, the equivalent of midnight. But the work was numbing, and the president had grown less interested in making what I liked making most—those short videos—and more interested in speeches, texts, words. That made me anxious. Over my years as a speechwriter, I’d gone from thinking there was a limitless supply of synonyms for, say, the word synergy, to believing that such linguistic resources, at least as existed in my own head, were finite—and that one day soon I might come upon the last bullet point possible for synergy, and I’d be fired.

Which would be disastrous. I didn’t love my job, but I loved having a job. I was proud of having a job. I was proud of supporting our family—and supporting a fellow artist. And I did believe that, that Robert and I were fellow artists. That I wasn’t doing my art yet, not really, was fine. Robert said so. I said so. I was patient. The girls were young. Life was busy. And Robert was struggling, and I watched that struggle, and I worried about it when I had time to worry. One struggling artist endowed a family with a certain nobility (I told myself, entering speechwriter mode). Two struggling artists, on the other hand, would only endow a family with debt.

And so would staying on in Paris with no income. We couldn’t stay. (And certainly couldn’t stay longer than the ninety days our tourist visas allotted us.) Still, it was curiously calming to see the girls excited about something, however far-fetched.

So when the final word about telecommuting came from the university—“no”—I wasn’t surprised I felt disappointed. I was surprised, however, that some hidden message seemed to lurk between the lines of the e-mail I received. If I didn’t hurry back, would my job even be there for me to claim?

I said nothing to the girls. Not yet. As far as they were concerned, their battle was won, the first skirmish anyway, which was convincing Mom that Dad was findable, was perhaps looking for us, was—surely!—nearby. And look! A bookshop. “His”? We went in. Nope.

And another. No.

France has 2,500 bookstores, and that afternoon, Ellie and Daphne were determined to visit as many as possible. It’s not the worst way to see Paris. Parisians treat their bookshops a bit like they treat their bakeries: they are both commonplace and important, not something to fetishize—it’s just bread, they’re just books—but still due extra respect. The electrical grid, the sewer system: these are essential things, but books, baguettes—if they disappeared tomorrow, one might as well disassemble the Eiffel Tower and drain the Seine.

None of the stores we visited looked anything like the one Robert described in his manuscript. That did not dissuade enterprising Ellie from inquiring repeatedly about her father’s whereabouts. She was frustrated that her classroom French came off more clumsily than Daphne’s; I tried to explain to Ellie that even perfect fluency wouldn’t necessarily mean people would understand what she was after.

What we’re after, she mumble-corrected me, but eventually, she stopped asking booksellers about her dad. And, to a degree, she stopped looking. While I used my phone to discreetly research the cheapest means of reaching the airport the next day, Ellie and Daphne wandered the aisles, lost in the books.

I have strange children. Or the world wanted me to think that way, at least when we lived in Wisconsin: my girls grew up loving to read. True, they liked milk, understood football, and were as bewitched by screens—TV screens, movie screens, and most definitely phone screens—as everyone else. But they were strange in that they loved reading above all else. I once found Elizabeth George Speare’s Witch of Blackbird Pond on the shampoo shelf in the shower. I rinsed the soap scum off, fanned the pages, told Ellie I suspected her and she shrugged. The book reappeared in the shower the next week. And maybe the only way to read about the Salem witch trials is under a steady stream of water.

But that afternoon in Paris, books were more backdrop than anything. Ellie and Daphne ran their hands along the spines (it’s a family trait, I fear; they just like touching them, as if to reassure themselves, yes, there they are) but pulled down very few volumes. Instead, they talked. To each other, and when I drifted close enough, to me. Brave words, foolish words: they talked of staying for a month, a year, a school year. They wouldn’t miss their friends, because they had FaceTime and Skype. Their friends would be jealous because Paris was cool and French boys were cute. (Over-the-shoulder selfies in pursuit of a boy in the background were taken frequently.)

Back onto the street. Down one block, then the next. Across one bridge, then another. I’ll tell them at the next intersection, I thought: remember, we’re going home. I believe—no, I think—your father is not here. No. Do it at dinner. The airport. Some distracting place. Some quiet place. A chapel. A closet. Our economy-class seats.