Paris by the Book(52)

I shook my head.

“May I quote an expert to you?” Eleanor asked. “I’m afraid I must, as it’s about a topic I know nothing about, which is children. This expert told me the seriousness of a young child’s injury is proportional to the time that elapses between incident and scream. Minor things, the cry comes right away. Major things, the scream is a long time coming because so much else is at work: there is the child’s gradual recognition of what’s happened, there is the drawing in of extra air to deliver a scream at extra volume—”

“I told you this,” I said.

“I know you did,” Eleanor said.

“Did I address the worst-case scenario, where no sound at all comes, ever?”

She didn’t flinch. “You did not. Because who would speak of death, even hypothetically, in regard to her own family?”

I did flinch. I did have to pause before I spoke. And when I did, I found my own breath mostly gone, and with it, the force of my anger. That is, I was still furious—with Eleanor, with Robert, with my daughters even, for resurrecting him, however hallucinatorily—but I was tired, too. That’s why I saw him in the pages of that book. That’s why I felt his eyes on me, all the time. It wasn’t because he was alive and in Paris. It was because I was exhausted and alone.

“He’s not a child,” I said. “He didn’t fall. We’re not waiting for Robert to scream.”

“No, we’re not,” Eleanor answered. “We have Daphne, who thinks she saw him—sees him. We have you, who saw a note scribbled in one of his books. We have one hundred pages of a manuscript that I found, describing a family who sound a hell of a lot like one I know,” she said.

We’ve reached a turning point: I waited for Eleanor to say it. But she said something else, something that made me realize Eleanor and the girls had reached that point long ago, and it was time for me to.

“We’re not waiting for him to make some noise,” Eleanor said, “because he already has.”





CHAPTER 10


Robert was a quiet person; it came with the job, he said. I can remember him shouting three times, I think, in our married life. Once when Daphne, six, broke free and scored the winning goal for her coed soccer team; another time when Ellie, ten, won the spelling bee (on scrumptious); the third, and most unusual time, was at the end of an evening we’d spent with some of our fellow soccer parents. As such evenings in Milwaukee occasionally go, one drink led to a dozen, and around 11:00 P.M., calls were made to sitters to buy a little more time, because someone had had the brilliant idea that we’d go dancing.

I loved dancing, perhaps because I’d come to it late; I’d only started going out in grad school and so was in my dancing adolescence. That’s not a term, but it’s how I behaved. Pre-kids, I’d dragged Robert out once or twice, and he’d been game but not great. After that, I mostly went out with my old grad school girlfriends, and as they grew older or left town, I didn’t go out at all. And now here we were, judgment impaired, dancing: nothing special, just the back of a bar, but the DJ was bribable and the music was great. Robert and I danced like clothes on a line in a storm. We put on a show for the twentysomethings, the regulars, who tolerated us because we were entertaining and because they knew we were never coming back. But maybe it was one of them who called the police, who arrived around midnight saying they’d gotten complaints about noise. The lights went on, the music off. Robert stood in the center of the room and shouted: Noooooo! There was a deep and sudden silence after that, cued by the cops, who didn’t know Robert was harmless, a writer, a dad. They watched him intently. So did the room; so did I. I was grinning because I was drunk and it was funny to see Robert so alive, but then I wasn’t grinning because as the o’s trailed on, I heard everything else pent-up in him; no was not only a complaint about the music stopping, but also the magic he’d once lived under. Maybe I’m reading too much into the moment, but it’s what a writer’s wife does. That, and go to her husband, take up his hands, kiss him, and then theatrically turn to the cops, the crowd, pretending it was all a show, and bow. Good night, folks!

Layered meanings aside, we retold our dancing escapade on soccer sidelines for months. Remember when the cops came . . . ? It was one of many Milwaukee stories that didn’t translate in Paris. I tried it with Molly and she frowned; to her New Zealand ears, all stories about America seemed to involve police or guns or both. But she said her church’s Zumba class was talking about doing a girls’ night out; did I want to come? I shook my head.

It’s so hard to get out at night, I told her. The girls need minding, the store needs minding. . . .



* * *



—

For months I’d been asking the girls to brainstorm some way to increase foot traffic in the store. I’d come to realize that specializing in dead authors, mildly quirky as it was, was also dumb: dead authors didn’t give readings; we never had events; other than Molly, most of our customers were over sixty years old. I suggested Ellie and her friends stage readings of late greats. “Sure,” she said (a word that, like many in her dwindling English vocabulary, only ever meant its opposite), and set about working with Asif to plan an evening focused on developing apps by and for teens. We stocked precisely no books on this subject.