Paris by the Book(55)

I’m no longer on Facebook (it asked one too many times, “Are you in a relationship?”) but if I was, I would post a photo of the store, because it was better than what my former friend had posted. Not just because a bookstore was better than a barn, but because the bookstore, like Paris, and like, bizarrely, Robert’s unfinished manuscript, was real.

I should not have liked being reminded daily of the manuscript, of Robert, of the fact that there are not only better ways to make money in Paris but also better ways to lose money. But it’s such a lovely store. It’s such an intimate profession. I like Carl, Shelley, Molly, and my other customers fine. But I love a dim yellow light in the corner, a chair beneath, and in it, just me and the book, at home in the world.

I’ve never told the girls this, but one reason I like our geo-organizing of the store is that it reminds me of Robert’s and my adventures across Wisconsin, the ability to travel such distances—from Moscow to Cuba—in hardly any time at all. But what I also liked of those cities, of every last one of our books, is the hope buried deep within them. Paris, France—or Paris, New York—didn’t work out? That’s fine. Try Paris, Wisconsin. Such hope is resilient; every town, every book, is a way to say, look, there’s a new way, a different way. Every book in a bookstore is a fresh beginning. Every book is the next iteration of a very old story. Every bookstore, therefore, is like a safe-deposit box for civilization.

Like that cave in Norway—Norway, Norway, not Norway, Wisconsin—where they bank the seeds that will save the planet: deep in my bookstore, we stock those same seeds. It doesn’t have to be a large store, just a good one. Our store has a few thousand volumes. They range from 10 words to 200,000. Let’s call the average 50,000. I have millions, maybe a billion words in stock. When apocalypse comes—and it does all the time now—come call. Out of my billion, we’ve got a word or two that will get things going again. Start anywhere. Start with “bonsoir.”

As Madame now did. She shimmered into view like a thought taking shape. She’d been in the store’s rear corner and was now emerging to meet me.

“Oh, you gave me a fright,” I said.

Madame raised her chin. “Bonsoir,” she said again.

“Bonsoir, Madame,” I said. “Je suis désolée,” I said. And then: “excusez-moi de vous déranger.” Carl called this second sentence a five-word disarmament treaty; always apologize for disturbing them, even when it is you who have been disturbed.

It worked. “No,” she said, “I am sorry. I have need to illuminate the light. But I do not like. I do not wish the street me to see, and . . .” She went behind the counter as though preparing to ring me up. The light was just enough for us to see each other’s faces, an outtake from an old film. “I used to come down when I cannot to sleep,” she said. “Et vous . . . ?”

“And me,” I said, pretending insomnia had drawn me here, too. I wasn’t going to tell her I was going out with anyone, least of all the man who’d drawn a crowd to her store earlier that evening to talk about “apps.”

I told myself that if the minicab pulled up now, I’d ignore it, pretend it wasn’t for me. I’d go upstairs, text Declan, tell him plans had changed.

I started again. “And . . .”

But I wasn’t sure what I was going to say. Over the winter months, Madame had retreated steadily from us and, to a degree, from Annabelle and Peter, though she occasionally visited them at George’s place. But we saw her less and less on the shop floor, on the building stairs. At first, I’d chalked up Madame’s absences to her exploring her newfound freedom—and she did visit friends outside Paris, and once took the Chunnel to London—but I’d lately begun to wonder if she’d come to regret taking us in, letting me take the reins. (She did not seem to regret taking our money, enabling her travels as it did.)

“Oui?” she said, waiting.

“‘Thanks’ is what I wanted to say,” I said. “Mille mercis.”

She leaned on the counter to look more closely at me. I have no idea how old she was, seventy or eighty or a twenty-year-old yoga instructor who’d gone prematurely gray. “‘Thank you,’ yes, but for what? Why is this?” she said.

“For—for this,” I said. “For the apartment, for letting me buy into the store. For the books.”

She smiled. With her eyes, anyway. And she pointed to her eyes now, a cue, which it took me a moment to recognize.

“And the cream! Yes.”

“It is working,” she said.

It wasn’t, I wasn’t using it, but I nodded. Paris was what was working. I was working. I had not made a film yet, but I had found us a place to live, myself a place to work, the girls a school. My French was meager, but I’d mastered enough to sell a book or buy a baguette, or a scarf, or running shoes. I used those shoes four days out of seven to run along the Seine, which meant the weight I’d lost was not entirely due to stress and anxiety. I was living in Paris, France. To be able to say so is its own Olympian accomplishment. Maybe two or three other cities worldwide inspire similar envy. Paris, Wisconsin, is not one of them.

I don’t know how or if Madame knew I was lying, but her eyes stopped smiling. She studied me, she looked outside, she drew a deep breath. “I am silly,” she said.