Paris by the Book(28)

I stopped when her face soured. Did amok mean something different in French?

“You,” she said, “look much older than you are.” She paused. “Why? This is wrong.”

We’d not been in France long, but there were specific aspects of Paris that I already knew I would miss. The food, for one, the fact that any food anywhere, even from a cart, a storefront, seemed better than anything I’d be served in a good restaurant back home. But this directness—granted, no one had been this direct with me yet, but I’d come to feel that the most of the many kindnesses I’d received had been on behalf of the girls. I’d come to feel that behind these various fleeting conversations and interactions had lurked the very question this woman was now asking: what is wrong?

I wouldn’t miss such questions back home. It was one thing the Midwest did quite well, which was to keep any kind of intimacy far at bay, well behind closed smiles. Here was the opposite. Intimacy came quickly. Smiles slowly.

While she was waiting for me to answer, she took a pad from the counter and wrote down the address of a store and the name of what turned out to be a particular brand of night cream.

“It is expensive,” she said. “But it is necessary to buy.”

It was a silly thing to tear up over—a glance at the paper revealed she’d recommended something I could have found in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet, a Helena Rubinstein product—but I did, because all this was again (always) about money, and about Paris, and about being alone.

She let out an annoyed puff and went to the front of the shop, where she flipped the sign to FERMé, or closed, and locked the door. The thunk was disproportionately loud, like a portcullis had fallen.

I should have felt trapped but instead was filled with the sudden desire to open up. “We had thought—they had wanted, my daughters, to spend the rest of the year here,” I said to Madame. “Three months. And so I thought—well, for an hour or so yesterday”—why was I telling her this? I don’t know, only that French frankness is contagious—“I thought I might have figured it out; I was going to keep the job I had in the States, but I was going to telecommute—I’m not sure how to say that in French—”

“The telephone, yes,” she said, impatient. “I this understand.”

“Well—no, not quite, but—”

“It is not working?” she said.

“No,” I said, “it is not working.”

Madame nodded upstairs. “And the father is—gone?” she said. “The older one tells me this.” Madame nodded, as if to confirm my unspoken answer: these things happen. Men disappear. If eyes can say this much—and Madame’s could—I was almost sure that hers added, good riddance. Madame resumed speaking: “The younger one tells me they are looking.” Now there was no mistaking what she thought: looking for Dad was a bad idea. “I need help,” she said. “To work.”

I looked around. I looked outside. Locking the door had been unnecessary. It was not busy. Given the age—the smell—of the room, it did not seem like the store had been busy in some time. Madame saw me looking.

“This is why I need help,” she said.

We were standing at the counter. She stood perfectly straight, one hand at her side, the other resting lightly on a stack of books. Whatever Madame needed help with, it wasn’t poise.

“How much does it pay?” By her startled expression, I saw I’d spoken aloud. Upstairs, meanwhile, I thought I heard something I hadn’t in a very long time—the throaty music of my daughters, laughing. I moved closer to the sound and thought, what I should be asking was how much I could pay her. For an hour, a day, a year. To make my girls my girls again.

“Enough,” she said.

I didn’t understand.

“The money,” she said. “The job-money is enough.”

Enough, my least favorite word in the world.

“I—I can’t believe I’m talking about this,” I said. I couldn’t hear the girls anymore. “You are kind—I think you’re offering something, apologies if you’re not—and apologies for asking about pay—but, anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re about to leave. Our flight’s tonight.”

I wondered if she’d heard the laughing upstairs, before. She wasn’t smiling. “Do not,” she said.

“Mrs.—Marjorie,” I said. “Thank you, but—”

“Madame,” she said: I should not have presumed to use her first name.

“Madame,” I tried. “We can’t just—our visas don’t—”

This time I stopped again, but for a different reason. A knock on the glass. Was it Robert now? I didn’t look.

“You lose the time,” she said.

And I was losing time. If Robert was dead, why should we go back to Milwaukee? Maybe the manuscript wasn’t a clue but an exhortation: start! First stop, Paris, then, the world.

Paris. It was real, and I was really here. Back in the States, back when I’d been younger, I remember thinking that if I ever did get to Paris, France, everything would be instant—I would be instantly fluent, instantly at home, instantly, fundamentally translated. But it hadn’t been like that, it wouldn’t be like that. It was like the hour hand of a clock, like a slow river that seems stopped until you put a finger to the surface of the water. Flowing toward me now, a bookstore. An apartment. Books, and a new life without Robert. And, strangely, with him.