Paris by the Book(31)

But Daphne’s entries eventually grew more spare, going from daily to weekly to whenever. The last entry, just a single question, was weeks old now: are there NO cats in Paris? There had to be, but it was true I’d not seen a cat in Paris since the last time I’d seen The Red Balloon.

I detected a change in Ellie as well. It wasn’t that she was moving on, but she was definitely always in motion now, and never more so than the Saturday she led us to no. 4, rue de la Colombe, a tiny corner of the ?le de la Cité, that sliver of Paris that occupies an island in the Seine. A little wine bar, empty.

“So?” Daphne said.

“Ludwig Bemelmans, the Madeline guy, used to own this,” Ellie said.

“A bar?” Daphne said.

While Daphne wandered closer to inspect a plaque on the wall, Ellie explained she’d read all about it in one of Bemelmans’s “books for grown-ups”—and I briefly wondered if the girls really had cooled to their father’s memory. I wondered if I wanted this cooling to occur. It meant less angst on their part, but, uncomfortably, more on mine. I’m not sure if I realized until then that I’d outsourced hope to them, partly because I wasn’t sure what I was hoping for. Finding Robert’s book, that scribbled I’m sorry, had been such a shock that the animal part of me had tried to sell the book right away—it was too much to imagine the person I’d imagined was dead was alive. But then, when the book did disappear, it was worse. I’d tried telling myself that, absent the book, everything was the same as before. But it wasn’t. I was thinking about Robert, what might really have happened to him, more than ever.

And Ellie, apparently, was thinking about Bemelmans.

“Did the book say he sold it because of a bad love affair?” Daphne said, squinting at the plaque.

“What?” Ellie said.

We all studied the plaque now. A timeline of significant dates in the building’s history ran all the way back to 1297, but the one that had caught Daphne’s eye was for 1953, when one Ludwig Bemelmans, “peintre et écrivain américain,” had taken over the bar only to turn around and sell it to a young couple soon after “à cause d’un chagrin d’amour.” This translated to “heartbreak,” they agreed, but a debate ensued as to just what, or who, had broken Bemelmans’s heart.

They were talking, my two daughters, in English and French, they were falling for a story, stories, just as their dad had, and so when Daphne said, Dad would love this, I nodded, because she was right. Because she wasn’t using the past tense.

“I love it,” Ellie said with a snort.

According to the plaque and website and the Bemelmans essay Ellie had read, the great man himself had decorated the walls inside with murals. Reason enough to investigate further, Daphne and I thought, though Ellie wasn’t sure.

And inside, the owner wasn’t sure either, only that no trace of the supposed murals remained. Ellie spun on her heel and said we should leave immediately. The owner protested. We should take a seat; his paté was particularly good. Then he turned to Ellie and with a look that revealed this was not their first meeting—surprise one—asked where her petit ami was.

Surprise two: Ellie had a boyfriend.



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—

Surprise three: she would bring him by the shop some night to introduce us.

Until then, everything was deferred with shrugs. They’d met at school. His name was Asif. His dad was the Canadian naval attaché. They were “just friends” and had been to Bemelmans’s old bar “just once,” had not had any wine or the paté, just Cokes.

I couldn’t tell if I’d just heard five lies or fifty, and wished Robert had been there to hear her, too: not because he’d ferret out the truth (he was terrible at that) but because here was another milestone, the first boyfriend, that would pass without him. Daphne looked on in awe, either at the effortlessness of Ellie’s audacity or at the impossibility that even half what her older sister had said was true.



* * *



—



But it was. A few days after we visited Bemelmans’s bar, Asif arrived at the store at closing time to meet us, receive my belated approval, and take Ellie out on a date.

While Ellie prepared upstairs, I went to the back room, letting Daphne play shopkeeper—a role she loved, and perhaps took more seriously than I did—and listened for the bell above the door. The first time it rang, it was Molly, the young mom from New Zealand, dawdling on the way home to take over from the nanny. As soon as Molly heard what was afoot, she begged to stay and meet The Boyfriend. I sent her away and returned to the office. Sitting down helped. Checking my e-mail did not.

I looked for a book to distract myself instead, which reminded me once again that I was missing a book, Robert’s. I missed Robert at that moment, but I was surprised to find that I especially missed his proxy: of all the books to steal in the store, why had someone taken his old Central Time volume?

Had he taken it back?

Did that mean he was taking his I’m sorry back?

Did that mean he was alive, in Paris?

The rising anxiety felt somewhat akin to what I felt on sleepless nights, and so I retrieved my most reliable cure, an 1888 Paris guidebook we inexplicably had six copies of, Walks in Paris, by Mr. Augustus John Cuthbert Hare. I had liked Mr. Hare from the moment I read the subhead he’d slapped atop the book’s initial pages, which dealt with cabs and hotels and where to eat: dull-useful information. His walks were endless (the book runs 532 pages), borrowed abundantly and shamelessly from other authors, lamented all the gorgeous buildings French “folly” had failed to save, and featured at least one murder, suicide, or otherwise fraught historical death per page. From him, I’d learned that the quite undistinguished-looking rue des Lions around the corner was indeed where once the “large and small lions of the king were confined.” I particularly liked that “and small.”