Paris by the Book(42)

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“Why did she say ‘we are four’?” Declan asked as we settled into a sidewalk café nearby.

The fourth member of my family—Robert—flashed before me, but fortunately, so did our waiter, who took our order and returned moments later. Cups, saucers, spoons were quickly and quietly arrayed before us with all the precision of a dinner at Versailles. You don’t have to tip, insist the American guidebooks I grudgingly stock. They want Americans to think they’re supposed to leave a tip, but you don’t have to; they’re paid perfectly well. I tip. I am American. The system relies on someone overpaying. Even when I receive bad service—when I am ignored—I’m comfortable with paying for that, too. No one checked on me for an hour; I was able to finish a book plucked from our Hoosier shelf, George Sand’s Indiana.

Declan’s question hung in the air, but to answer it would have been to break a sidewalk café rule, one almost as strict as not tipping: don’t speak, not at first. Acclimate. Survey your surroundings. I did. Paris cafés force you to; the seating unerringly faces the street. Attempting to rearrange things so you face your companion isn’t so much forbidden as it is impossible, given how little clearance exists between tables.

In front of us, a sanitation worker in green coveralls banged by with a cart, followed by three impossibly tall, alarmingly young women—models?—all in white. I like to watch people watch people in Paris; it’s a hobby, like bird-watching, a study of color and carriage. I like to see what attracts, who distracts. I myself was so distracted by these three—were they triplets?—I failed to see that Declan was staring, not at them but, patiently, at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Not at all,” Declan said. I waited for him to begin a new conversational gambit, but no. We are four. I’d have to do the math for him, and so I did, explaining how Daphne had added two sisters and two twins to make “four,” how four children might as well be forty, but not really, because they were all so well-behaved—most of the time, anyway, and—

And maybe because he heard me stumbling, he finally did decide to change the subject, segueing into a riff on all the badly behaved kids he encountered in his role as a study-abroad program fixer—his job was to get students to and from the airport, help them jump lines at the Louvre, extricate them from disputes with landlords, bouncers, and occasionally, the police.

I asked what sort of training prepared him for such a job, and he smiled and said none that he’d done. He’d started, and quit, a JD, an MFA in poetry, an MAT with a focus on French. Now he was enrolled in an international MBA program, which he was enjoying more than he’d thought he would.

“Really?” I said.

He laughed, not a happy laugh. “Maybe not,” he said, and looked around. “But I’m enjoying France.”

“Even when the phone rings at 2:00 A.M.?” I don’t know why I was pressing; some of Daphne’s latent animosity must have infected me on the way out. “Sounds hellish.”

We were at an outdoor café, the coffee was fine, we wouldn’t be troubled for the bill for another six hours unless we summoned the waiter ourselves, and when the bill came, it would only be a few euros. Cheaper than Starbucks in Milwaukee. It wasn’t raining.

This is all a long way of saying what Declan then said more directly: “I have my problems with Paris, but this is no hell.”

I liked him. Not just because he’d rescued me in Ménilmontant, but because he was rescuing me here, again, in the Marais. The stakes were lower now, or higher; there was no immediate crisis, just a lingering one. I had my daughters, I had the twins, I had my three customers-cum-friends, I had the elderly Madame Brouillard, but I was lonely, and I was in Paris.

Paris can feel like a city of pairs. Not just romantic pairs, though it has those in abundance, but friends going arm in arm down the sidewalk, catching a quick word outside the tabac, laughing on the way up the Métro stairs, bending toward each other at tiny tables like ours. The cynic says the tables are the diameter of a dinner plate because they want to cram so many in; the romantic, or maybe the realist, believes it’s just part of a long-running Paris social experiment: force them to sit just inches apart, and let’s see if they really talk.

But I was out of practice with small talk. My three “friends” were no good at it. Carl was like radio; you were just supposed to listen. Shelley, perhaps because she lived by herself, was comfortable with quiet, and some weeks, we’d exchange books but barely ten words. I’d liked that. More, anyway, than when Molly came in and demanded more gossip than I ever had.

Beyond the store—I should have made friends, but hadn’t. Hanging out with expats would have required discussing life back home, which would have required discussing Robert. Hanging with French friends would have required French.

So I didn’t know what to say. I looked around. The city really does look different when you are with someone. And I was. And I should have just enjoyed that. I was enjoying that. And so was he, by the looks of things. I asked him about grad school. Des Moines. His work. He told me about being nervous about what came next.

Because I was nervous about the exact same thing, I took that as my cue and told him about the store, Milwaukee, my life. I said I’d lost my husband. I lowered my eyes. Not because I was pious or even pretending to be, though it would be convenient if it looked that way. The truth was—the truth was that I had lost Robert, and more disorientingly, lost my means of thinking about him. After my coffee with Daphne, I could no longer pretend, to myself, that Robert was gone forever. I looked up now to see if I could still sell the story to strangers. Declan looked somber. And unlike me, trustworthy. I wanted to ask him, to tell him, the thing is, I don’t know. I used to tell myself he was dead, but only because it was easier. Now it’s not.