Paris by the Book(34)

“Never?” I said. I didn’t feel beautiful. “I would have thought that your standard shtick. What kind of woman doesn’t fall for the boy who loves books written for little girls?”

“They weren’t,” Robert said. “And I don’t. I mean, I do love Madeline. And Bemelmans in general. But I also love—Johnny Tremaine. Anne of Green Gables. David Copperfield. . . .”

And—fuck—a dozen other books about orphans.

Robert only had tattered toddler memories of his mom. Nothing of his dad. Or so he thought. His mother had died, but not in a crash, or a car crash. Overdose. His birth certificate did not list a father. Sometimes he remembered things, sensations—sunshine, the beach. Sometimes the smell of cigarettes: Marlboros, he’d since determined. But so many memories of so many foster homes since had supplanted everything else. There had been two, three almost-adoptions, but after a while, he’d just gotten too old. He’d been told to “ride it out.” He had, and he swore it was only recently he’d learned the expression wasn’t write it out.

There on the floor, he was everything I was not: sober, serious, not crying. He’d learned to like being alone, he said. He’d learned to like reading. He’d liked Madeline because not only were there no parents but everyone seemed to get along in Madeline’s tidy, iron-cotted, light-filled dorm. He’d slept in rooms just like that, he said, and it had never been like that.

“But”—I wasn’t calling him on his lies anymore, because they weren’t lies, I could see that, the way his eyes had gone stone in the telling, but there were other things I couldn’t see—“didn’t she, didn’t Madeline have parents? Wasn’t it just supposed to be a boarding school, where she was?”

Robert nodded, a smile coming to his face, along with some color. “And I liked that,” he said. “It was like she was choosing to grow up without parents. I liked to imagine that I’d chosen, too. In that—in those places, places where I was—all you want is to be able to choose. Clothes, lunch, school. Something, anything.”

He paused.

“And that’s everything?” I finally asked.

He said nothing, just shut his eyes. And then he went back to his little table and his work and he sat and I sat and after a while, he turned off the light and came to me and kissed me, behind one ear, then another, whispering I’m sorry and believe me.



* * *



—

Daphne asked if we might have some coffee while we waited for Asif and Ellie to return from their date.

Successive parenting failures in Paris: one, to cocoon the girls from the city enough that they went to bed at a normal hour; two, to cocoon them from the city enough that they didn’t adopt its ubiquitous vices. In Ellie’s case, cigarettes. Ellie protests she only wants to have them on hand for friends who want them, which I half believe because she herself doesn’t directly reek of smoke, and because I’m too tired to discipline her effectively. I pick my battles. She bathes, goes to school. Succès.

Daphne’s vice is more curious. Coffee. Yes, she’s too young. But she favors decaf, and only ever just the one cup at a sitting—a petite French-size cup, not a massive American jeroboam of the stuff—served to her at a café or by her own mother on a night like this, the twins safely in bed upstairs, her older sister unsafely at large in the city, her mother’s mind unsteadily roaming from one continent to another.

With the distraction of Asif, the scribbled I’m sorry in Robert’s book, and the twins coming and going, I knew I’d not given Daphne nearly enough time. She seemed pleased to have it now. She took down her special mug from the cabinet, Daphne-size, cryptically labeled: biz. I thought it was some dot-com tchotchke Ellie had found at a marché aux puces—literally (and epidemically) a market of the fleas—but no, it was from a real shop and had real style, I subsequently found out: biz was French texting slang for bises, kisses. And I wanted to do just that as she moved quietly about—coffee, cream, sugar, a saucer, a tiny spoon; she loved the ceremony as much as the first sip—I wanted to kiss her, and not the ever-fraught French bises on the cheek (one for someone you just met, two for an old friend, or one for a man, three for a woman? I forever did it wrong) but a kiss planted American mom–style, right on the crown of her head.

“Do you miss Dad, Mom?”

And yes, coffee made Daphne seem more grown up, and grown up suited her. She was born an old soul. I’d had serious, adult conversations with her since the day she was born. That look that infants have, that deep, unembarrassed, unhurried gaze they can give you, as though they are patiently waiting for you to say something worth responding to? Daphne never lost that look.

“I do, sweetie,” I said, and did not look at Daphne. She and Ellie have Robert’s eyes. And though Daphne’s come complete with her own (smaller, brighter) splotch of color in her right iris, her eyes have none of his furtiveness. He had such wonderful eyes, Robert, and I forever urged him to do more with them, like look at me.

“Do you?” Daphne said. I checked to see how much of her coffee was gone. There was an ashtray on a high shelf I dearly wanted to use. More than one night I’d rifled through Ellie’s purse, looking for cigarettes.

“Daphne,” I said. I did not want to answer this question. I did not want to have been asked it. “What’s going on?” I said, and watched her decide not to answer this. Yet.