Paris by the Book(79)

“I’m not going to spoil the day,” Robert said, continuing to whisper, though no one else was around. “I just wanted you to know as soon as I knew.”

I looked at him, incredulous at what I was hearing, incredulous at the almost excited look on his face.

“You do know I’m proud of you,” I said, though I wasn’t. “No matter what,” I said, though this mattered right then, quite a bit.

“Leah,” he said—that voice again. “No toolbox.” The therapist’s toolbox. At that point, I’d almost forgotten it. I was surprised he hadn’t. He’d given no “advance notice,” for example, that he’d decided to quit writing. I tried to remember if there was a hammer in the toolbox. If so, I might pull it out now. Did I “rely on humor” too much? No, because that wasn’t funny. So no hammer, but I did recall that we were to “speak affirmatively.”

“Fine,” I said.

A final item from the toolbox: holding each other’s hands during difficult moments or conversations (not “fights”). He reached out to take mine. I snatched it away.

“This is not how couples fight,” I said.

“We’re not fighting,” he said. “And I thought you’d be—I thought you’d be happy for me?”

“Happy?” I wasn’t sure if this was more toolbox talk; the therapist had a thing about happiness: a false god or goal, or something like that. I couldn’t recall exactly. Contentment, equilibrium, that was what you were supposed to be after. “I’m happy when you’re working.”

A breath.

“I’m not happy when I’m working,” he said.

“Maybe that’s how you know it’s work?” I said.

“You’re not making sense,” he said.

“I’m not? What doesn’t make sense here is what you want me to say, or do. Do you want me to say ‘hooray, you’re abandoning your gift!’ or ‘no, honey, don’t do it, don’t’? Tell me, and quickly, because the next scene in this script involves a happy child.”

He turned away.

He was struggling. That I understand. We understood. But he never seemed to understand how hard it was on us. Lonely Sisyphus he thought himself, pushing that rock up the hill each morning. But he was too tired to notice that when it came rolling back down the hill each night, it threatened to crush the three of us waiting there.

“Mom!” Now it was Daphne shouting. The anthropologist in me had long noted they never shouted for Dad, except when he returned from an absence of any length whatsoever. An hour, a day, a week. His arrival ever worthy of exultation.

“Okay, I don’t know where this crisis came from,” I said, “but if this is about the stupid article—no one will read the article. A few will look at the pictures. And by ‘few’ I mean us.”

“That’s not the point,” he said. “I’m tired of—”

Tired: that was a word from another box, the deep, wide one any couple gets on its wedding day, the one you fill with everything, good or bad, that comes into your lives every day after. It’s an emotional trousseau, except you keep adding to it. And if you add too much of one thing—too much angst or melancholy or exhaustion—and too little of other things, like stress-free golden birthdays, or successful manuscripts that become successful books, or successful “experiments” that establish new trajectories, it bursts open, spilling its contents all over the floor, making a mess just hours before the guests are supposed to arrive.

“That is the point,” I said. “I know what you’re tired of. What I don’t know is what I’m supposed to do about it.”

A beat elapsed where no one in the house said or screamed anything. The refrigerator hummed, and out front, a car door opened and shut. And maybe this is when Robert’s next book, his final book, began, when he finally began to write, really write, even as he quit, right there in that room, right behind those eyes looking at me, in his right iris that flash of color that had first inflamed me, marked him for me, this man I loved because he had all those question marks, including that one he’d once appended to that extraordinary word: marriage?

Yes, I’d said then. Straight into his shoulder, I’d been hugging him so hard. I’d been so happy.

And maybe I should have hugged him now, held his hand as instructed. But then I would have missed what he did next, something that made me endlessly grateful at the time, although it shouldn’t have. I should have recognized it for what it was—the start of something irreversible, the steady unpacking of that trousseau until its every corner was bare.

But I didn’t see that. I saw this: a smile. His. A tiny smile, a half smile, maybe even a smile from the toolbox, which said willing your facial muscles to grin sometimes cued a sympathetic response in your psyche.

I’d gotten angry, exasperated, I’d asked him what am I supposed to do? And now he said “nothing.” I smiled (he was smiling). He turned slightly, and the little kaleidoscopes that were his irises turned, too. He turned back. The color returned. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Nothing.”

And then he got the cake and the flowers and—who knows how, on such short notice—a pony, who carried Daphne and her friends straight from our yard into the page proofs of a magazine Eleanor had brought to Paris and shown to me beside a children’s playset in a cramped green plot behind a Turkish crêperie. I’d thought they’d spiked the piece; I’d heard the print edition had never gone to press. I’d checked the blog once or twice since coming to Paris and saw that it, too, had gone dormant. And the editor and I had had a falling-out after she’d sent e-mails with invoices after the party: a “misunderstanding.” I’d protested, she’d protested, and finally, I began having my inbox automatically route her e-mails to the Junk folder. I’d thought that was that.