Paris by the Book(33)

Ellie, afraid (like me) of what I would say next, tugged at Asif. With an exchange of au revoirs, he bundled her out the door and ducked his head at me, a deferential salute. Annabelle ran to the glass and thumped on it as they passed. I saw Ellie wait—I saw Ellie impress herself with her own magnanimity—while Asif paused, grinned, and pressed his hand against Annabelle’s, the glass between them. Then Asif turned, Ellie turned, and they left, marching up the street, away from the Seine, their hands swinging achingly close to each other, knuckles brushing, heads tilted just so.

I don’t know which side of the family deeded Ellie her mane, but I’ve always hoped she (or he) was pleased with the result. Ellie’s hair, the brightest black imaginable, is a mammoth, bouncing mass, planetary, rich and wild. I hoped Asif would keep her safe, but I knew her hair would. Her bearing would. Anyone who came at my daughter should know they were tangling with royalty.



* * *



—

I went back to Bemelmans’s old wine bar once. Just me, by myself, midafternoon. I could have called Molly, but one thing that Paris, city of couples kissing everywhere, does surprisingly well is cater to solitary diners. And drinkers. I ordered the paté. Some wine? Sure. Maybe that would fortify me enough to press for more about the missing murals. The chagrin d’amour.

Wine had fortified me years before. I remembered getting through three-quarters of a bottle one early evening with Robert. This was, needless to say, pre-daughters, pre-wedding, in fact, pre-Wisconsin World Tour, but rather in the middle of those very early weeks after we’d met outside the bookstore, when we spent most of our time naked, knocking about in the dark amidst his books.

“You’re lying,” I said.

I was sitting on the floor of his apartment when I said this, and I had been for the better part of an hour—which had followed an hour I’d spent waiting for him at my apartment before that. We’d been supposed to have dinner. He’d said he had to finish something. I’d decided to come over and stare him down until he did, or offered me his apartment’s one chair.

“I’m not,” he said, staring at his work. “I really am trying to finish—”

But that wasn’t what I’d been talking about.

“About your parents,” I said.

During our early days, and nights, together, we’d done the whence-me new couples do and bonded over the fact that we were both orphans—that Robert, like me, had lost his parents. His parents’ departure was more tragic than mine. Car crash, dead before the paramedics arrived. I’d thought my parents’ own relatively gradual departures (dad, years, mom, months) by wasting illnesses (lung cancer, from years of secondhand bar smoke) infinitely cruel, but what Robert described sounded exponentially worse. I’d hugged him. Gripped him, really, as I was gripped by the fact that I’d found someone, finally, whose orphanhood was worse than mine.

And yet, a week or so later, there on the floor of his apartment—

“What do you mean?” he asked.

And yet, “what do you mean” is not what someone who has lost two parents in a fiery wreck says. Moreover, there was something off about him and this loss. I would have expected some sort of comradeship, some sort of connection between us, a shared shock at discovering the world’s suddenly revealed wrongness, with the way that, sun or rain, each new day didn’t seem to care that our parents were dead. No one cared, not like me. I was slowly learning to navigate this new reality, but I couldn’t see any of this process in Robert. True, my parents had been gone only two years then and his, four, but still, the loss was like yesterday, wasn’t it?

Had his really died in a car crash four years ago? Or had they died some other way?

Or had they not died at all?

I asked him.

Now he stopped and turned from his work. He didn’t answer. There was a long silence that, the longer it ran, seemed to be an invitation to retract my question. I put the cork in the bottle. I wanted more than anything to leave.

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “Not really.” I watched him get angry, and then lose that anger in the face of mine: he’d lied to me, after all. “I’m sorry?” he said. “The thing is—I—I didn’t know we were going to be—together?”

Three weeks old then, our relationship.

“You thought, when you caught me, ‘awesome, shoplifters are usually good for a one-night pity fuck,’” I said.

“I wasn’t thinking that.”

“What do you mean, ‘I don’t know’? Tell me that much,” I said, “before I go.”

“Leah,” he said. “Don’t go.” So quiet then. I didn’t move. “It’s a lot to get into on a first date,” he said, “what happened. My life. I’m sorry I lied, though. It was easier, but—I’m sorry.”

“Easier? Fuck you.”

“Easier than saying, ‘I don’t know what happened to my parents,’” he said. “Please stop saying ‘fuck.’”

He left the chair for the floor.

“The crazy thing is,” he said, “I thought, ‘wow, for once, you know what? I do have a way, a means of’—that night, with the books, the bar, I thought you were beautiful—I think you’re beautiful—I think you swear too much but, I thought, ‘the Bemelmans book, Madeline, is right in front of us. Use that!’ I mean, that’s never happened on a date before.”