Paris by the Book(82)

But more than anything, I had, for the longest time, wanted Robert to be healthy, to be happy. To be here.

He wanted to be elsewhere.

I think I was resisting Eleanor’s pronouncement, the police’s determination, that Robert was dead because acquiescing wouldn’t just mean putting Robert to rest but would announce that we’d been profoundly not okay. Whatever he’d needed from us, we’d not provided. And whatever we’d needed from him . . .

But he’d gotten what Daphne wanted, the pony. And the photographer, the picture. And I had other pictures. I had boxes of them. I had memories. The magazine proofs were just one of many, many pieces of evidence that I had of a happy life. Chasing him out of that very first bar after he’d chased me and my stolen book, that had not been a mistake.

And neither had been imagining him dead. Nor, more lately, convincing myself that he was alive. I wasn’t crazy; I was cycling. And eventually the cycling would stop, and I’d come to rest. Alone. In the aisles of a bookstore in Paris.



* * *



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So I practiced that life: I stood in the store and sold maps of France, London, Europe, and the Baltics to a tanned-gold couple from Napa and told them where to eat. I sold a copy of Hemingway’s Moveable Feast to a young man whom I surprised in the act of tearing pages from it. I sold ten copies of The Great Gatsby to a young woman who said she was a tutor assigned to an American film production company shooting in Paris; I told her to be sure to stop back. She said she’d bring along the young stars and rattled off their names—I knew enough to nod and smile, but otherwise recognized not a syllable of what she’d said.

I was not a bookseller authentique, but—I was learning how to impersonate one. I would sometimes practice on Shelley, the most patient of my three customers. I once pressed upon her Tove Jansson’s Fair Play, the story of two women artists living companionably in the same house, doing their art. Shelley knew Jansson’s books for kids, which feature strange trolls—Swedish, hippoish—called moomins, but didn’t know Jansson had “written for grown-ups.”

“Not all grown-ups,” I said, “just the artists.”

Shelley came back the next week and, houseboat equilibrium be damned, bought everything else I had of Jansson’s, including a few stray Swedish-language editions.

Today I was short on artists, though not strange children’s books. I saw someone had liberated Le Poids d’un chagrin—The Weight of a Sorrow—from the French children’s book section and left it by the register. The book fascinated Peter and horrified me: the book depicts sorrow as a massive hairball on muddy green pages, a sorrow so gros qu’il m’a dépassé, submergé, dévoré, un chagrin si lourd à porter que pour m’en sortir, j’ai d? le grignoter à mon tour. Or, as Peter once earnestly tried to translate for me—sometimes the sadness is so big it eats me up, um, heavy door I can’t get through, I try to leave but I can’t, and so I snack? No, nibble away—and I asked him to stop.

I put it now in the window with a little sticker that said, in English, FREE.

I looked at my watch; time for some tea, maybe the computer. E-mail from the U.S. usually didn’t start arriving until late afternoon, Paris time, which I liked—it gave me a chance to clear out my inbox before the next batch arrived. It was mostly spam anyway. I had few Parisian e-mail correspondents; France, like Ellie, seemed to have moved on to texting long ago. But still, I received a few French e-mails every day, usually from Electre, this magical online service that helps stores like ours reach millions more readers (or it would if I could figure it out) and advertisers like Bongo (which sells gift cards—in Belgium—in boxes; it seems to make a difference).

And today, an e-mail with no subject line.

E-mail could count as “advance notice,” that long-ago therapist said. Here’s something I want to talk about. I said that sounded like an avoidance strategy—it is an avoidance strategy—but it’s true, just scanning your inbox headers gives the eye, the mind, a moment to think.

Sometimes, especially if the subject line is blank, it’s not long enough.

Leah, it’s been so long, too long, so long I don’t know if I can explain

Or you decide that you don’t want to read it at all, that you’re so overcome with disbelief you’re forced outside of your body, and thus unable to do anything more than stand there and watch yourself click DELETE.

Which is what I did.

A message from Robert had arrived in my inbox and I had deleted it.

The kettle whistled and I got up and turned it off. I rooted about for some tea, and settled on chamomile. It wasn’t until the water began puddling on the floor, scorching my feet, that I realized I was completely missing the cup, and then I set down the kettle and looked at the floor, where I noticed the cup in shards. It must have fallen—when, I couldn’t say.

Perhaps, too, the person who was sending the e-mail was not Robert but someone impersonating him—his real name was embedded in the e-mail address, but it wasn’t any of his old e-mail addresses—in which case I’d been perfectly right to delete it.

But it wasn’t an impersonator.

It really was Robert.

And I really knew this because once I found my way back to the computer and looked and found that folder I’d never explored much before—the Trash—I rescued his e-mail from there and opened it. It was brief, so brief that one could make the case that nothing there provided evidence this was indeed him. One could make the case, but I wouldn’t. Because it was finally too much. And because no one would have more cause to impersonate Robert than Robert himself: he had done so for years.