Paris by the Book(40)
I tried some of my own less-perfect French, and they turned, softened: ah, an Américaine. Then they shouted at Declan again. He started to respond, and then stopped, coughed, and restarted. This time I understood him better, though (or because) his French had gotten worse, his accent much more American.
The rangers exchanged a glance before addressing Declan again, not shouting now: vous êtes Américain aussi?
Yes, he said, in English, it seems we’re both Americans. The rangers took a deep breath, shook their heads, as though to take it all in. Americans in Ménilmontant: what will happen next?
A hospital, I thought, but Declan whispered to me, say we’re fine, and so I did, and then I sat. Beside Declan, so I could see his wound—just beneath his chin, it was hardly an inch, but gaped open terribly. I decided that it would need stitches but that those stitches would mend well, and the scar would give him character, though he hardly needed more of that.
* * *
—
After moving to Paris and taking over a bookstore, I read fewer and fewer books about Paris. And far fewer, about anything, by men. Shelley, the retired teacher from New Orleans, encouraged me in this. Some weeks, when I would hand over whatever book I’d picked out for her that week—and for her, gender (or genre) didn’t matter, so long as it was set in Paris—she would hand me a book in return, usually one she’d brought with her from Louisiana. To a degree, she filled Robert’s old role, bookgiver in chief. But her inspiration was more mundane than Robert’s ever had been. Her houseboat could accommodate only so large a library, she said, before it would sink; she couldn’t take on more books without offloading others. Whatever the cause, Shelley is how I came to develop a crush on Alice Mattison (American, b. 1941), who in one story writes of a high school teacher whose class “found sex everywhere, even the Gettysburg Address. But it was more than that. If spiders made love on a window . . . they’d pick Ms. Feldman’s window.”
What I mean is, I’m not sure Declan and I would have noticed each other in Winnipeg. Or Milwaukee. But in Paris, in the aftermath of a mugging, I found myself helplessly noting his looks, and that he’d noted mine. And of course, in France, there was another crucial detail that had not been true in Milwaukee (nor Winnipeg, though I did want to visit there thanks to another author Shelley once handed me, Carol Shields).
“A bookstore?” Declan said. “You own a bookstore in Paris?”
During our post-police discussion, I’d kept things focused on him, at least until my phone had started chiming with texts and I’d announced that I had to get back to the store.
What store? Bookstore. Really?
Really. I told him the name, the address. I told him about our Bemelmans display. I told him about what had drawn me to Ménilmontant (that is, I’d told him about The Red Balloon, not about Robert). I felt myself losing my way—and so skipped ahead; I told him to stop by the store sometime. I did caution him that “it’s not what you think,” but I didn’t know what he thought, not really. His tone was a mixture of admiration, envy, surprise—familiar enough, at least coming from Americans, but to this he added a new, fresh, slightly unsettling ingredient: hunger.
“It’s exactly what I think,” he said, and I have often wondered since exactly what he meant, if he knew how those words stole from his mouth and over to me, in and around my ears, down my neck to my spine, and then skittered all the way, all the way down me, like spiders.
Oh, Ms. Feldman, I thought.
But of course the only person to blame for what happened next was me.
* * *
—
More unpleasant, or unsettling, than spiders: Ellie asking how I’d enjoyed Ménilmontant.
This, though I had decided not to mention anything about my adventure; I said I was late because I’d gotten turned around on the Métro, a known weakness of mine. (I use it too infrequently; I love this city and can’t see it from underground.)
But Ellie’s ability to pin me down—geographically, at least—was not a known strength of hers. How had she known where I was?
“Here,” Ellie said, fingers fox-trotting across her phone. A giant pulsing red dot appeared. That was distracting enough that I missed the background picture—which was a satellite map of our street, rue Sainte-Lucie-la-Vierge, with us in the bull’s-eye. “See, it’s found you.”
This took a moment. “You can track me?” I asked.
“Could you be a little less surprised?” Ellie said. “You asked for this feature when we signed up for the plan.”
“I did?”
“Oui,” Ellie said. “You bought the forfait familial, right? Then it’s automatic with all our phones.”
Ellie looked away, but the shame was wholly mine. Of course she tracked me. She was already down one parent. She turned back, tried out a smile: “So,” she said, “what’d you find?”
CHAPTER 8
People complain it’s hard to find things in our store, but others say that’s what they like about our store. When I took it over, years of neglect meant that there was almost no organizational system evident whatsoever. I enlisted the girls’ help to reshelve things by genre and then alphabetically by author, but Ellie complained it was taking too long and suggested we do something she’d seen in a magazine: shelve everything by color. Daphne said that was stupid, Ellie said she was stupid, Daphne said Dad would think it was stupid, and then I intervened and said the first thing that came to me—that we’d organize the store by country. Because what organization we had inherited consisted of a single bookcase featuring books about Paris.