Paris by the Book(46)

Otherwise, le récit vous suit, Madame said: the story follows you.

She was right, but looking across at Declan, I realized she was also wrong. The story followed regardless. The goal was to make sure it didn’t outpace you.

“So—did you—do you—” Declan started.

“No,” I interrupted. Because I didn’t date—what would the girls think!—but as soon as I said the word, I realized I was saying it to myself: no, not until you know what’s happened to Robert.

Seconds passed.

“Are you—talking to yourself?” Declan asked.

“DHL,” I tried.

“I’m sorry?”

“I was imagining calling and switching from UPS.”

“You’re funny,” he said.

“Just keeping my options open,” I said, which made me think, uncomfortably, of a book I had ordered for Ellie—ostensibly for sale in the shop but very much for her—the Girls’ Guide to Dating with Dignity. It was for high school students. The cover looked punky and fun, and I liked the publicity materials. Madonna had endorsed it!

She’s grandmother-old, Mom, Ellie said, and that was the last she interacted with the book. But I read it with great fascination. If only I had had such a guide in high school, college, and beyond. I’d dated with very little dignity. I hadn’t made it easy for myself, true. I was smart and proud of it, into subtitled cinema, and, for three weeks, the marching band (I played the euphonium, something else I will never tell Declan, or Ellie). The book’s first rule—its overall thesis, really—was be straight with your guy. I’d blown past that one, of course. But one of the subrules to this was—and this astounded me—tell him that you like him. Just like that. And the book cautioned that he might say that he didn’t like you, or not as much, or not in the same way, and that was fine—a whole chapter followed about how to have a good cry and the value of good friends during such a time, but the book made helpfully clear that all this was normal, and most of all, healthy, and that none of this could happen unless you started with the truth.

The book, significantly, had nothing to say on the subject of husbands who may or may not be dead. “I really like you, Declan,” I said, and waited. For someone to walk up to us with a clapper and yell, cut! For Daphne to materialize and ask me to say what I’d said in French. For Ellie to disgustedly shake her head. For Robert to come out from the kitchen and say, but I said I was sorry.

“I—I like you?” Declan said.



* * *



—

Maybe only I heard the question mark. But I later heard him quite clearly when he asked if he could come over sometime while the girls were at school. I said why and yes and he arrived with flowers and wine, and I turned the fermé sign on the front door—because it was lunchtime, because Madame Brouillard was out that day and couldn’t cover—and we went upstairs.

“To Lamorisse’s birthday!” Declan said.

I didn’t pretend it wasn’t a date. I didn’t pretend it was. I didn’t pretend Robert was dead, and I didn’t pretend he was downstairs, either. I did pretend that Declan had gotten Lamorisse’s birthday right, though he was off by four months.

The wine was amazing. So, too, the lingerie Molly had brought by earlier that week. Lingerie was her husband’s go-to gift every birthday, Christmas—every other Tuesday, apparently—and she had more than she could ever want. Need. I, meanwhile, was someone who clearly did need, I think she said. And: “have fun.” Inside the still-wrapped box had been a half camisole the weight and width of a tissue.

I’d taken the box out that morning, before Declan came over, before I’d gotten dressed. I went to the mirror and stared: I had lost weight since Robert had vanished, and lost more in France. I had thought I looked drawn, but Declan had reliably, if cautiously, complimented my appearance each time we met, and I looked carefully at myself now. Still the same constellations of moles, still the same tummy that had seen two pregnancies, two daughters, the same body that had done all the work asked of it, and which I increasingly thought stared back at me with a weary now what?

Now this, apparently: wine finished, we paged through The Red Balloon’s companion book of photographs in my kitchen.

What was I doing in my kitchen with this man and this book?

Laughing. Listening. Dying. We reached the last page. We looked up at each other. He couldn’t have seen the camisole arranged just so on the bed in the other room, but he was looking like he had. I looked back down. I paged back to the start.

You love this book, Declan said.

Film, I said.

Balloon, he said.

I exhaled.

I like the balloon fine, I said softly, speaking now to the book’s opening spread, a photo of Pascal on Ménilmontant’s steep stairs, gazing up at his balloon, the cat looking, too, a shot that’s not in the film. I love this Paris, I said.

Declan stared at the page, leaned in closer—to me, to the book. Look, he said, we’re in the picture! Smoothing the book flat, Declan pointed to two faint shadows in a doorway. There was nothing there; he was just having fun. I suddenly wasn’t. I can’t believe we didn’t see him! Declan said, referring to Pascal, to Ménilmontant, but all I could see, in a part of the photograph I swear I’d never seen before and which Declan showed no sign of seeing now, was a murky figure looking out a window.