Paris by the Book(3)
Laurent said I should sell them, lollipops.
I shook my head.
He shook his.
We sell books. Gold letters say this on the window. BOOKSHOP to one side, LIBRAIRIE ANGLOPHONE to the other. In the middle, our name, a debate. It had been named for the street, which is named for Saint Lucy. This confuses people; across town, there is another street named for her. More confusion: Lucy is the patron saint of writers, but Madame Brouillard said the name sometimes brought in religious shoppers, and most times, no one at all. Once upon a time, she insisted to me, the street had been crowded, not just with book buyers but booksellers. One by one, the stores departed, and many left their stock behind with Madame. The English-language volumes, not the French. The dross, not the treasures. And needless to say, the dead, not the living. She had hardly anything by living authors.
I suggested rechristening the store The Late Edition. Late as in we would henceforth specialize in authors who, unlike their books, were dead.
She didn’t like it, but she let me proceed, as one of her keenest pleasures is bearing a grudge. I sometimes think it’s why she let me, who knew little about bookstores (and even less about French), assume control of a bookshop she’d owned for decades. And it’s likely why she watched with interest as the dead-authors angle turned out to be just the sort of Paris quirk travel writers craved (who are quick to note that I make living-authors exceptions for children’s books and books of any sort by women).
Madame pays Laurent off the books to bring more stock from storage units outside Paris, where she’s piled the leavings of her predecessors. Laurent says there aren’t enough customers in the world for all the books waiting there.
And Madame had a very small share of the world’s customers. When we took over the store, the running joke was that we were down to three. Two Americans and one New Zealander, who also formed the sum total of my friends in Paris: another joke. And whenever my daughters made it, I would smile to hide the hurt. Not only was it a stretch to call the three “customers,” but even more so to call them friends. Still, I was grateful they occasionally bought books.
The truth is, in modern France as in modern elsewhere, Amazon sells books (and snow tires); bookstores sell coffee. Or, the profitable ones do. Those with bookstores that only sell books have a tougher time. It is slightly easier in France, although Amazon’s smirk is almost as ubiquitous here as it likely still is in Milwaukee, where my girls and I lived until recently. (Unless two years is not recent? Some days it feels like twenty years. Other days, twenty minutes.) Enlightened France, however, regulates discounting books (or attempts to) and, even more cheering, occasionally provides independent bookstores financial support. Such aid favors the selling of new books, but Madame Brouillard had long ago figured out a way to benefit, by running a second, smaller bookstore that sold new titles in French. It just happened to coexist inside a bookstore that sold used books in English. The French store specialized in children’s titles and was in the front half of what looks like the building’s second floor but is actually a cramped mezzanine.
The back half of the mezzanine, flimsily walled off, became my daughters’ bedroom, which, if they left the door open upon leaving, sometimes became an ersatz English-language children’s bookstore: Daphne once complained someone was stealing her old Beverly Cleary books. I’d been selling them without asking buyers just where they’d picked them up.
The kitchen, living area, and my bedroom are on the floor above the girls. With higher ceilings and more elaborate architectural detail, this is the étage noble. But in our building, the resident noble, Madame Brouillard, commands the top two floors, which have much better light. She lives on one and her own private collection of books lives just above, or so she once told me. For the longest time, I’d never ventured farther into her apartment than the small sitting room just inside the door (which, like the building, like so much of Paris, looks just like authors and artists have long led you to think: late-sun yellow, delicate furniture, lace, an old crystal lamp atop a tiny table).
Paris, in other words, like Madame’s promises to show me the top floor, is a challenge, an invitation, a city that doesn’t distinguish between the two. It may be why my conversations with Madame often ended abruptly. Or it was because she knew, long before I did, that the trap I’d set was not for customers but for my vanished husband—and that it had ensnared me instead.
* * *
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It is faintly ironic I find myself running a bookstore, because almost twenty years ago I was caught running from one, a stolen item in hand. And ironic that I’ve ever chased any man anywhere in Paris, because on that long-ago night, my husband was chasing me.
Please change the set. Unroll a new sidewalk, erect a different storefront, lower a fresh backdrop. Gone is the Eiffel Tower, and arriving in its place is—nothing, really. Blue skies, clouds if you like. A simple city skyline. Steeples here and there, some smokestacks, but otherwise, clip-art buildings. After all, we’re no longer in Paris, but Milwaukee.
And there, on my left hand, no ring. We’re not married yet, my husband and I. Two moon-pale Midwesterners, we don’t even know each other, which makes it awkward that he’s just accosted me on the street—a series of heys! dopplering ever closer until I had to turn—about something I have clutched in my right hand. A book. I’m not hiding it, mind you. (I’m not hiding it because I couldn’t—it was about ten by twelve inches, a children’s book, with a bright red balloon on the cover.)