Paris by the Book(80)

But no, sitting in my office, taking out the pages Eleanor had printed off, I saw that this was that. The editor had e-mailed Eleanor: “I hear you might know now how to reach Leah & Robert?” The editor explained how she’d once had a magazine, how it had failed, how we’d fallen out—she didn’t mention the invoices—and that she felt bad about the whole thing but wanted to send along the unpublished page proofs of “what might have been.”

We’d seen an early draft—just the text, and it had been unpromising. But this was the whole package. WRITE AROUND THE CORNER, chirped the headline on the cover. There was no mention inside that Robert had disappeared; that was part of what so unsettled me. It was both a glimpse into our past and a snapshot of an imaginary present: a family in Milwaukee. A house, a mom, a dad.

What unnerved me more, what later kept me awake in Paris, were not the words but the photographs. They were gorgeous. I don’t know if they used a special camera or computer, or if the photographer was on leave from Vogue, but the colors, our faces, the detail, all of it was like liquid briefly stilled. Robert’s solo portrait was handsome, but there were more photos. Of the party. The pony. Of Daphne astride the pony, scared but grinning, a grin that would stay on her face, and mine, for days.

And finally, a photo of our whole family. They’d chosen a shot of us trying to figure out a shot. We are in the living room, and we’re deciding if we should sit or stand, tightly together or loosely apart, smiling or serious. Daphne appears to be the only one who’s listening to instructions: she’s standing up straighter than any of us, but she thinks what we’re doing is funny, and it shows. And maybe it’s the makeup the spa folks were playing with, but her color looks ten times better than it ever has here in Paris. Ellie, meanwhile, is mortified, but excited; she has one hand on Daphne’s shoulder, her other hand is starting to move toward the camera; she’s either saying wait or now! I’m behind them with what maybe only I would recognize as my game face—what would be clear to anyone is that I’m inordinately pleased. I look like something had been accomplished, and something had. We’d weathered our argument. The pony had shown up. Robert had shown up, and not just physically. And the result? The girls look beautiful. Robert looks at ease. He’s possibly happy. He’s clearly proud of his family. His lips are just parted; he’s about to say something.

What?

I don’t know. Only that a month later, I’d threaten to leave. And he would.



* * *



—

Eleanor has a toolbox for arguments, too. I’m not sure if she’s aware of this, but I am, as I am of the fact that it contains only two tools: a patient, penetrating gaze and, in case of emergency, distraction.

As I said, our walk home from Erdem’s was almost wordless, but not quite: after failing to get me to answer even the mildest questions—are the sidewalks always this busy? Is this weather often this maritime?—Eleanor finally asked a question she knew I’d have to acknowledge, as it was about a bookstore.

“Would it be too much trouble to—I’m no good at maps, but I looked earlier, and I’d swear it’s right around here—might we stop by Shakespeare and Company? Just to see?”

Looking back, it’s interesting to think what we might have seen had we stopped by, but I lied and said we were nowhere near it. She raised an eyebrow, but that was the last I heard from her until we walked up to our store.

I don’t envy Shakespeare and Company their success. It’s the only Paris bookstore, English-language or otherwise, most Americans know (if they know any bookstore here), and, to judge from his manuscript, it’s the only one Robert knew. Although the description of the store in Robert’s manuscript eerily anticipated what became The Late Edition, the truth is, it was more directly a description of Shakespeare and Company. He describes it as being green, for example, as having a small fountain nearby. And he describes it as busy, something no one would have ever described Madame’s store as being. And of course, Shakespeare and Company is busy; they have a history—Sylvia Beach, who founded the store’s first iteration, published James Joyce’s Ulysses, championed Hemingway, and thrived until World War II forced her to close. Another store later claimed the name, and an endless stream of backpackers and tourists (and some locals) have prowled their aisles since.

Not me, though. I’d walked by once or twice but never went inside, finding the parallels to Robert’s manuscript somehow spookier there.

Five hundred meters away, however, was the lesser-known landmark that Ellie had once marched Daphne and me (and Asif) over to, Bemelmans’s old bar in the rue de la Colombe, just northwest of Notre-Dame. I steered us in that direction now, confident that the stop—and the story of Ellie’s enterprising research—would make Eleanor forget about Shakespeare and Company.

But as we reached the corner, all I could do was remember. In the months since we’d first visited this corner, I’d done my own enterprising research, curious as to what “chagrin d’amour” had forced Bemelmans to sell the bar. I’d found nothing; in his own account, he describes being dispatched to Paris in 1953 by Holiday magazine to draw the city’s down-and-out, and subsequently falling in love with a bar that catered to them.

He bought it, with an eye toward improving the premises and thus the clientele. It proved to be a disastrous decision financially, but his essay recounting the experience is affectionate and lighthearted. At one point, he and his contractors realized that they were not going to be able to update the plumbing, due to the discovery of an underground pre-medieval aqueduct built to service Notre-Dame. As a result, for his grand reopening party, Bemelmans commissioned two limousines—one labeled MESDAMES and the other, MESSIEURS—that spirited his guests off to neighboring apartments to do their business.