Paris by the Book(29)

More knocking. I looked to the front of the shop. A tall man, not Robert. Two children, not mine. She started toward them, but then turned back to me. I studied her face, curious because it had changed, somehow . . . gotten younger? Perhaps the cream really did work.

Or, I finally realized, it was because her mouth, just the corners, was it . . . ? It was—the barest start of a smile.

“Madame Ea-dy,” she said, trying out my name as she put a hand to the door. “Commen?ons.” We begin.



* * *



—

Or so Madame said then. But this is my story, not hers, and so it begins months later, with a theft.

It is eight months since Madame has handed over the keys to the store and the empty apartment above, eight months since I have handed in my resignation at the university, seven months since I have made the twin discoveries that I love all books but not all customers, six months since Daphne and Ellie have fallen into a friendless French funk and begged to return stateside, five months since I asked them about flights home only to have them ask if I was crazy, four-plus months since our tourist visas have expired . . .

And just two weeks since the customer retrieved that Central Time book of Robert’s from the window. The book with the scribbled I’m sorry, the message that made it strangely hard to keep pretending that he was dead, that he wasn’t in Paris, wasn’t watching us, wasn’t trying somehow to reach us and for some reason couldn’t do so directly. The message that meant everything, in other words.

Unless it meant nothing at all.

After that customer had presented me with Robert’s book, after I, in a stunned stupor, offered to sell it to her for half price, after I’d looked up and found the customer gone but the book still there, I’d come to my senses. Up the book went to my bedside table for safekeeping.

But this proved a terrible choice, because Robert’s book woke me up, kept me up, night after night. It wasn’t just the I’m sorry, though I studied that plenty—were those his r’s? Didn’t he have a thing about using contractions? Did the y look particularly rushed?—it was the story itself. Again, the book was written for kids, but I could still read it and hear him, and more to the point, see him.

Night after night, open or shut, the book buzzed. Robert said the book offered escape and yet I couldn’t escape it. So I moved it back down to the store, back to its usual place, in the window—bottom, left, front, bait.

I convinced myself that was progress. I was moving on. For example, when standing at the register, I no longer felt the book looking back at me, a milestone I eventually chose to celebrate by going over to the window to look at it anew.

It was almost a year to the day that he’d disappeared.

The book was gone.

We begin, Madame had said that first night in the store, but the truth is that this is when our life in Paris began, when Robert’s book disappeared, and with it, so much else of what I’d believed about what our lives had been, and would be.





PARIS,

FRANCE





CHAPTER 6


Robert said that for many of his students, beginning was the hardest part. But for him, the beginning was the easiest, because he knew he’d always be able to come back later and edit. The only important thing about beginning was beginning; it’s when you finish that you realize where you really started. Or something like that.

Robert and I began in a bar in Milwaukee. Or better to say that our family began a few years later in a house nearby. Or that our lives in Paris began on a quiet street lined with quiet stores, in a particular one whose broad window framed a yellowing and dusty tumult of books.

Or maybe it’s better to begin not with the books, but the kids.

The two children who’d been pounding at the glass that first day? They soon came to sit at the counter, coloring, reading—because Madame is their grandmother. More than that, she is their primary caregiver, a task that tires her.

So this was why she needed help, this was why she had encouraged us to take the empty apartment above the store. We thought we were living out a narrative Robert had written us into; it turned out, Madame was writing us into hers, a story where she was slowly and steadily relieved of her burdens—these charming children, this charming store—by the magical woman and two daughters who arrived from America.

Madame does not believe in fairy tales, and nor, for that matter, does Eleanor: it’s not a question of belief, I’ve heard Eleanor say more than once. But here is what I believe. Stories provide a frame, a form, a mold. And a good story, one that’s retold for generations, demands you pour the messy contents of your own life into it to see what happens as it hardens and sets.

Word arrives from Eleanor about a check, and then a check arrives, too: $3,000 from the Porlock Prize, which Robert has somehow won, which means that with stretching and scrimping and some savings (and some of Eleanor’s savings), you will be able to stay in Paris for a whole semester, before you all head home to reality, Milwaukee, for good, come Christmas.

But come Thanksgiving, a second forwarded letter arrives with a check “for the balance”: $51,000, signed “Sam Coleridge.” You think about framing it, but instead, you cash it, and it clears.

The story begins, then, on the day you’d planned to announce your pre-Christmas departure, when you instead ask Madame about investing some money in the store. With an eye toward one day assuming—control? This does not translate well.