Paris by the Book(81)
It was funny when I read it, but walking by with Eleanor and the twins in the day’s last light, the corner seemed grim. We walked on.
Crossing the Seine into the Marais, I thought of Sylvia Beach and her beautiful bookstore, shuttered, the story goes, after she refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. She did not wear the yellow star Jews wore, but her young friend and assistant, Fran?oise, did, and wandering the city as a pair, they faced together the same restrictions all Jews faced—no cafés, no movies, no theaters, no transportation but bicycles, and no sitting on benches. One day, picnicking outside, they took special care to sit on the ground rather than the bench nearby. It was an anxious meal.
The officer never got his book. Or the store. Within hours of the officer’s angry departure, friends had helped her move and hide its entire contents. They even painted over the sign outside. The Nazis still found Sylvia, however, and packed her off to an internment camp for six months. Hemingway himself later claimed to have “liberated” the store as the Nazis fled, but Sylvia was spent; though she lived another eighteen years, the store never reopened under her ownership.
Ludwig Bemelmans and Sylvia Beach died just four days apart. I sometimes wonder if they ever met. They must have, even if they spent much of their lives on different continents; it’s impossible to imagine that, in a city this intimate, two people who should find each other never do.
CHAPTER 15
Eleanor did sleep in the next morning, which was just as well. I had a strange sort of hangover that I tried to hide from the kids as I bundled them off to school. It was partly the wine-soaked afternoon in Erdem’s backyard, but it was also the magazine. It had made me sad to see it—leafing through again, I saw I’d pocked the pages with a tear or two—but I felt different this morning.
But Milwaukee . . .
I looked at the pages once more.
Milwaukee paled in so many ways compared to Paris I hadn’t realized that I’d let my memories of our stateside lives go pale, too. But there, on those pages, was evidence: Milwaukee had been marvelous. And so was our family. We had had it in us to smile. Even after arguing, even on that crazy, terrible, funny day, the four of us, we’d figured out a way to grin (and nail a cover shoot). And a photographer had figured out a way to show us as we really were—not beset by chess tournaments and manic weather and a writer who’d lost his way, but a family who could, on occasion, goof around, get along.
We’d been okay.
I went back to the couples therapist just once after Robert disappeared. I wanted to make a confession. I left having made two. The first was that I’d caught myself feeling something terrible about Robert’s departure—hard as it was, tearing as it was, there were minutes during the day, sometimes as much as an hour, when I felt relieved. Life with Robert could be hard; life without him was, too, but you didn’t have to double-check the forecast as much to see if, as your husband sometimes thought, the world really was coming to an end that day because a 150-word paragraph wasn’t taking shape. I waited for the therapist to uncap her pen and get out the big red book where she kept a list of the world’s worst wives. She didn’t. Instead, she said, “that’s rational,” and since I don’t like agreeing with anyone, particularly therapists, I said, “well, let me tell you what’s irrational, which is that, despite everything, I don’t regret marrying him.” My second confession, and one I’d not known I’d had in me until I blurted it out.
But as I said it I knew it, and not just because our marriage had produced two females who, I firmly believe, will someday save the planet. I had loved our marriage, I’d loved us. I’d loved our creaky house. I’d loved Milwaukee, its bars and its bookstores. I’d loved Robert’s cooking shows. I’d loved that the trailer that unloaded the pony had also deposited a goat because, as Robert said, “what’s a pony without a goat?” I didn’t know, but it turns out having a pony with a goat and all the ensuing smiles is like winning the world’s largest prize, and the one day out of one thousand when things did go right for Robert—a great review, or sale, or that the goddamned comma he’d spent the week moving around had finally settled into the right spot on the page—is an even better prize, but the best was being married. It really was.
“And you still are married,” the therapist said, which is when I decided I wasn’t going to see her again.
In the overcrowded U.S.A./New York section of our bookstore is shelved Grace Paley (an author whose books Robert gave me so often I sometimes forgot I hadn’t ever met her in person). His favorite story of hers, “Wants,” became mine; it charts the rise and fall of an entire marriage over a scant 791 words. Early on, the husband and wife are young and poor, living in an apartment whose walls are so porous it’s impossible to avoid smelling the neighbors’ breakfast. Years later, they unexpectedly meet again; the husband, now her ex, crows about his plans—which include a sailboat—and says bitterly to her: “You’ll always want nothing.”
Sailing aside, Robert was never that husband. And I wasn’t that wife, but as the story wife later protests, so will I: I did want, do want something, many things, including to have one day made a film that wasn’t about synergy; to have raised brave, independent daughters; to have read and loved every book on the shelves of my store.