Paris by the Book(30)
Like buying it? you try.
Because you want to try this: trade Milwaukee for Paris, a bereft life for a busy one, $51,000 or some portion thereof for a down payment, for the stock, the store, the building.
Madame shakes her head, coughs. Not the building.
But the store, she says, and stops, and, for only the second time that fall, smiles.
The story begins when you pay to paint the store red.
* * *
—
Paris subsumed us. Navigating the schools, the city, the store, sorting out what our lives now were took all our time, and what often felt like all our breath. I never slept so well as I slept those first autumn months in Paris, and I never had less reason to: my mattress was filled with what felt (and smelled) like sand; sirens pulsed past all night; rats fought noisy nocturnal battles behind our building.
I slept because I was exhausted. Running a bookstore, even a failing one, requires enormous effort. Especially when it comes with twins.
The twins: age seven, Madame’s grandchildren, Annabelle and Peter. Their care and feeding, after and sometimes before school, were our charge. Their mother, Sylvie, was estranged from Madame, divorced from the twins’ father. She lived in Abu Dhabi, remarried to a sheikh.
Their father, George, unmarried, lived in Paris. Daphne and Ellie (and Annabelle and Peter, and mutedly, Madame) adored George. Crisp, British, impeccable manners and dress, Starbucks cup forever in hand. Daphne initially thought he was a barista; in truth, he was trying to make partner with a large consulting firm. Daphne also worried that he might try to become my partner, not in the store but in life, until Ellie bluntly disabused her: he’s gay. (He was; he’d told me. And when I’d helplessly raised an eyebrow—so why did you marry Madame’s daughter?—he shrugged and said, “people change.”) He compensated us exorbitantly for the twins’ care; I caught a glance or two between him and Madame that suggested they knew the store alone couldn’t sustain us all and that it was his duty to fill the gap.
And he also considered it his duty to sort out our visas, extending our stay from ninety days to at least a year. This should have required our departure and reentry, followed by much waiting in line at the Préfecture de Police, examination of our finances, our health, and our language skills. But George, armed with corporate knowledge and money, found us a back door, with the help of a “friend”—and a law that expedited long-stay visas for foreigners who’d bought businesses. The law had expired, but supposedly they were piloting a new version that required a local partner. George got us enrolled. So long as Madame had a say, we could stay.
For good measure, George had invoked an entirely separate visa program covering au pair work. His “friend” later told him this proved unnecessary in our case, but I would argue the opposite. The twins proved essential to our lives in Paris. We didn’t have them every day—sometimes George kept them; sometimes they flew to see their mother, who inevitably returned them ahead of schedule—but we had them frequently, sometimes even overnight. I liked having them with us, and not simply because they distracted us. They were quiet, good-natured. They followed directions preternaturally well, a trait I credited to the amount of time they’d spent acquiescing to the crisp, firm kindness of international flight crews. And like the seasoned travelers they were, they didn’t engage in indiscreet conversation. They never asked where Daphne and Ellie’s father was, perhaps because George himself was often airborne and their mother’s new life so distant it was almost fictional. They must have complained to George about missing their mother. But they never said a word to me. And so I accepted that they accepted their lot. That we all did.
I see now that that was a blind spot, a foolish one. Maybe the twins weren’t a distraction but a deception; the more I witnessed their own tranquility, the more I found it easy to think that Daphne and Ellie weren’t immediately interested in finding their missing parent, either. Entirely untrue. But what was true was that as school put more demands on the girls, as they gradually did make French friends and their social lives (mostly Ellie’s) grew more complex, the girls had less idle time to devote to wondering where their father might be, and when, as that poignant theory held, Robert might join us.
And as the weeks wore into months, as the twins became their siblings in all but the most strictly legal of ways, as the girls became true Parisians in all but the most strictly legal of ways, the poignant theory wore away. It wasn’t that the girls forgot Robert—not a day went by that his name, or work, didn’t somehow scent the air—but that the muscle the body devotes to longing (I understand it’s in, or behind, the heart) stiffened from less strenuous use.
Daphne, for example, had dutifully continued writing in the diary Eleanor had given her so long ago, though the writing became more exterior, professional—notes on Paris and children’s books for Dad’s article, which she’d present to him as soon as he arrived. As such, she didn’t seem to care if we peeked into the diary or not; it sat on the store counter near the caisse and I would glance at it week to week, a paper blog, to see what about Paris was catching her eye: the severely trimmed trees, the thick jade green of the Seine, a weeks-long debate about precisely which bridge Bemelmans had painted Madeline as falling from, and a running tally of how many Madeline-aged schoolgirls she’d seen in hats, ribbons, or school uniforms of any kind (zero).