Paris by the Book(78)

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It was. But it was my stupidity more than hers, and it started, or rather, ended, over a year ago, the day Robert quit writing.

This was March, just weeks before he quit our family. I remember the day, the moment, quite specifically, as it was Daphne’s twelfth birthday. We were having an unusually large party. He made his announcement to me privately a few hours before the festivities were to start. I’m done, he said. I’m done with writing. With paper, with pens, keyboards, with—

Great, I said. A pause followed. He said, I’m not sure you heard me, and though I had, I stopped and waited, because I also hadn’t. I was devoting a very small percentage of my brain to listening to Robert, in part because that had become my habit of late, in part because I was focused on the contents of our refrigerator: what did we still need to get at the store, what could be thrown out, what would I say if the photographer wanted to take a picture of this, too?

The photographer. About which more in a moment, but for now, know that somewhere along the way, Robert’s agent—long gone at this point—had said that one problem plaguing my husband’s career was that he wasn’t enough of a “brand.” Not enough readers knew who he was.

I had dutifully rolled my eyes, said my lines, but he’d shaken his head and said, Leah?

That was all, but that was enough. I would become familiar with the tone, which mixed question with complaint, a tone familiar to more than one married couple in the world. But into Robert’s variation crept something new, something I hadn’t quite identified then but now think of as nostalgia, longing, loneliness. The way he said my name sometimes—the way he said it every time I’d not responded adequately to some existential plea—made me think for a moment that we weren’t speaking to each other in the same room but over a telephone line, long distance, back when it used to cost money: the voices muffled and anxious at every second that went expensively slipping by. I’d not gone anywhere, but it felt, even to me, like I’d moved away.

And so I listened carefully when he said my name the morning of Daphne’s birthday, because the inflection mattered; Leah could mean “what did you think of that Times piece I sent you about that (successful/famous/wealthy/laureled) author” or “I didn’t sleep last night and can’t do the chore you just asked of me” or, as of that morning, “what’s going on?”

Awkwardly, this. A neighbor who’d had success with a local neighborhood news blog—mostly because it featured photos of absolutely everyone in the neighborhood—was raising money to take it into print. She’d chosen my husband, minor celebrity (ever smaller) that he was, to be the debut cover subject and had sent an incredibly young reporter to interview him days before. Today a photographer was coming.

This was bad timing, as it was not only Daphne’s birthday but her Golden Birthday, the magical date when your age aligns with the calendar date of your birth (Daphne, born on the twelfth, was turning twelve) and parents in Wisconsin and neighboring territories are obligated to make a massive fuss. Massive. It was to be a day without rival, something like Christmas and the Fourth of July crossed with the rare return of Halley’s Comet, except your Golden Birthday would never, ever come again. I knew parents who had booked restaurants and ponies, and had heard stories of twenty-one-year-olds who went to Las Vegas (and never returned). Ellie, when she had turned nine on the ninth, had asked us to fly her first-class to Disneyland. But we couldn’t afford that then, and we had even less money now. Daphne wanted a pony ride. Robert was offering, instead, a make-your-own-book party. He’d move our thirty-dollar inkjet printer down to the dining room table and everything!

So it was not a good day for the photographer to come. But it was the only day the editor-neighbor could get the guy—she was bartering for him—and so she bribed me: what if she had an advertiser give us flowers? I hesitated. Lots of flowers, she said. I pointed out the house was crowded enough for this “golden birthday”—and then she squealed: an idea! A new nail place had been begging for exposure—how about an on-site “spa day” for Daphne and her little guests? The photographer would shoot Robert, then Daphne and her guests for a future story and—

And so waivers had gone into the envelopes along with the invitations. Moms called with questions, but mostly thought it fun: tallying appearances in the blog was a local pastime. No one opted out.

Except, that morning, Robert.

I closed the fridge. His jobs today: retrieve the cake (on us) and flowers (free, but delivery not free), and sweep the porch. Easy. Much easier, anyway, than building a little pen for a pony in the backyard, which Daphne irrationally held out hope for: the pony could get a pedicure. They’d braid his mane.

“Let’s not talk about quitting,” I said. “Even as a joke,” I added, giving him an out. I waited to see if he’d take it. He did not. I could be, and now was, inordinately proud of controlling my tone. Robert had no sense of timing whatsoever. He might hit on you as you were attempting to shoplift a children’s book, he might disappear from your life years later while out for a run, he might tell you he was quitting writing the day a magazine was coming to photograph him for a story about being a writer.

“Not a joke,” he whispered.

“Mom!” Ellie’s warning voice, singing from the second floor: Daphne was experimenting with clothes. There was a photographer coming, after all. (As Ellie never let us forget, we had wound up at a local pizza place for Ellie’s golden birthday, not a photographer in sight.)