Paris by the Book(41)

It worked. That is, it shut the girls up. It’s a strange way to organize a store and I recommend it to no one. Genres get jumbled and disputes abound: should Shakespeare sit by Thomas Mann? Yes, if it’s The Merchant of Venice and Death in Venice. But Hamlet goes next to Kierkegaard. Graham Greene’s Quiet American sits by Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and some waterlogged Lonely Planet guides to Vietnam. Greene’s Power and the Glory, on the other hand, goes next to Octavio Paz in Mexico. In short, suspect judgment rules. Chess books, Russia. Space exploration, United States. Physics, Germany. Ellie puts books she can’t find a place for in Switzerland and, because she’s still attached to her original suggestion, books with green covers (and occasionally Graham G. himself) in Greenland. Daphne’s catch-all is Antarctica; she’s also the author of little signs around the store that invite indignant browsers to reshelve books as they see fit.

I honestly think our system, capricious as it is, sells more books. I guarantee the man who came in looking for Thirty Seconds over Tokyo hadn’t meant to buy Basho’s Narrow Road (or a tattered copy of James Clavell’s Shogun, for that matter), for example, but he did.



* * *



—

That said, with Declan coming, I had a sudden urge to rearrange the entire store in some more professional manner so it would look like I knew what I was doing. He’d been so impressed: you own a bookstore in Paris? It would be awkward if he mistook the shop for performance art.

He didn’t, but things still quickly grew uncomfortable the day he came by. Daphne had joined me to homework-procrastinate. (And to check if Ellie had moved Little Women away from Massachusetts to Paris, which she regularly did to drive Daphne crazy.)

Declan and I exchanged greetings, and I told Daphne I’d met him in Ménilmontant.

“How?” Daphne asked.

I didn’t believe in Robert’s telepathy, but I do believe in empathy, and when Declan looked at me and Daphne, he understood what to say next: nothing about muggers or bakers, which was good, because I’d told the girls nothing about that aspect of my trip to Ménilmontant. Declan rumbled through something, in English, about how he—or I—or we—had been looking for the Métro. Daphne nodded to me, and said to him she’d never been in that neighborhood but she’d heard that it was hard to find the Métro stops up there.

She said this in French, which was a test. A simple one, administered hundreds of times across Paris every day. Do you speak French? That question is never asked directly; rather, a shopkeeper or waiter or baker speaks to you in French and you answer in French or you don’t.

But beyond shouting the obligatory bonjour, we never administered it in our store. Or I didn’t. What was Daphne up to? Declan responded in French. I listened. Declan kept talking. What was he up to? Daphne responded, French conversation ensued.

“You speak excellent French,” Declan finally said to Daphne, in English.

Equally fluent in nonverbal French, Daphne twitched her lower lip (disdain, mild to medium) and turned to me, chin slightly raised. I’m not that fluent, so I wasn’t sure what the chin meant, though it seemed to be a mixture of pride, curiosity, and something along the lines of I think you think he’s cute.

It looked like Daphne was about to soundlessly add, what’s going on here?—so I quickly said to Declan, aloud, “they both do.”

“Both?” he said.

And the pang I felt then was unfamiliar to me—why should I feel embarrassed to admit that I had children? Because I’d be less of a catch? I didn’t realize, not quite, that I was looking to be caught.

“My kids,” I said. “I have two.”

Daphne watched our exchange with extreme care. I could see her slow down the film we were all in so that she could monitor each syllable that came out of our mouths and every crease in our faces. We were on the cusp of finding her father, I think she thought. She had already seen him around town. But now something else was happening. What?

I wanted to know, too.

Declan, because he had a sense of decorum, or timing, turned to Daphne and asked her, quite formally, if he might borrow me for a while—he’d helped me find the Métro entrance up in Ménilmontant, he said, but I had helped him buy his ticket when he found he was short on change. He now wanted to repay the favor and buy me coffee.

I found myself a tiny bit in awe. He’d invented a perfectly plausible story on the spot, pretended he (and I) needed Daphne’s permission to leave, and he’d paid Daphne the great respect of continuing to speak to her in immaculate French.

Or what I thought of as immaculate. It was a great embarrassment to the girls how my language skills lagged behind theirs. It was a great inconvenience to me. I had taken lessons offered by the city, by people who’d plastered flyers on poles, by a woman in Beirut who taught via Skype. I usually lasted one or two sessions. I was too advanced to begin where they always wanted to begin, and too much a beginner to do things like Daphne was doing now, correcting Declan’s French: the verb he’d used for repay wasn’t correct, she explained.

“Daphne,” I said. I meant to scold her, but what I mostly felt was envy.

But she only had eyes, clear and alert ones, for him, and he for her.

“And,” she said, ignoring me, “nous sommes quatre.” With that, she bid us adieu and went to return Little Women to its place alongside Dickinson, Thoreau, and Carl Yastrzemski.