Paris by the Book(87)

“Maybe we could go—for a walk?” Robert said.

I felt faint. I needed something to steady me, us, and then I looked up and saw that we were in a bookstore. My bookstore. My books. My life, now.

“Do you want to see the store first?” I said, my voice hollow. He nodded. I’d been sitting on the floor; I got to my feet, pretending not to see the hand he extended.

We stepped along gingerly, like we’d just tumbled out of a lunar module. Or maybe it was that we were scuba divers, a strange feeling of being both totally immersed but totally encapsulated, separate. It’s the only explanation I have for why we didn’t immediately start talking about the girls, where he’d gone, where he was going. We didn’t talk because we couldn’t, not yet.

And so the bookstore spoke up. Around us raged thousands upon thousands of pages of argument. Of stories. Of journeys. Of husbands and wives and spiders in classrooms in Connecticut. I told him Alice Mattison was selling well, and he smiled. I pulled down Grace Paley for him and he saddened. He flipped to “Wants” and started to read it, and I did, too, and then we both couldn’t. He closed the book. I described our quirky geographic shelving system, and he said it sounded brilliant. I took him to Sweden, showed him Tove Jansson, and before I could explain who she was he said, Moomin!—and of course. Robert knew books. He loved them, and couldn’t resist as the shop pulled him in deeper.

I’m so sorry, Robert said, not because he’d gone but because, I knew, he had come back and was about to go again.

I went to England. He followed me, but then stopped mid-store, as though afraid what I would pull down next. So was I. Before I knew what I was doing, I reached down an armful of cheap Shakespeare paperbacks and threw them at him. And the rest of the row. And another. And some hardbacks. And more paperbacks. And then Canada, for a giant book, Sculpture of the Eskimo, which thudded against him. Alice Mattison flew well, as did Grace Paley. The women knew their way. I went to the window display of Madeline books. They threw easy and fast, like Frisbees, like fine china, like saw blades. I couldn’t find The Red Balloon, but here was a book about lollipops. Some books were too heavy to throw; they fell. The others tumbled about him. For a while, he let them pile against him, and then, as the barrage continued, he cowered and I bounced them off his shoulder, his back, his head. Please stop, he said, and I did, not because he’d asked but because I was exhausted. The door rang open. A French voice said, “bonjour?” I roared back, “fermé!” The person left. Robert went to the door, locked it, and turned the sign. I went behind the counter and sat, head in my hands, and let him do whatever it was he was doing. Picking up, it sounded like. And when he was done, there was a silence, like he was waiting for me to look up at him again, but I didn’t. I heard the quiet tramp of his shoes up the spiral staircase to the children’s section. He was gone five minutes or an hour. When he came down, I finally raised my head. His face was red, from crying, shame, or the books. One lucky volume had given him a good scrape down his cheek and another had caught part of an eye.

“Can we talk?” he said, sounding like the old Robert, with the old question marks.

And me sounding like the old me: “okay.”

“Here?” he asked.

“Here,” I said, and waited for him to tell me why he’d disappeared.

Instead—and this was a final clue—he told me how.

That early April morning in Milwaukee, he’d gone out for his normal dawn run, no great adventure on his mind. Then he’d passed the harbor, he’d seen the boats.

It was too windy a day. But also too stormy a season, at least for him, at least creatively. Too stormy and too long. Ludwig Bemelmans had found oil painting in the last part of his life. He did so almost with gritted teeth, the work taxed him like nothing before, but at least he had found something that fed him, freed him. There in Milwaukee, Robert was still gritting, still looking.

Looking, specifically, at the harbor that morning. There was the water, the boats, and the solution: before doing anything else, he would clear his head with a morning sail. No one was about, but he had the gate code, knew where they hid the key to the gear shed. He got everything he needed (except the required companion sailor), signed out a boat in the log, nosed his way out of the marina, then the harbor, and this all felt so good, he had a wild thought: I’ll sail clear across the lake to Michigan! A sailaway writeaway. It was a small boat—too small—but he wouldn’t be the first to do it. With winds the way they were, he’d make it across in a little less than a day. And he almost did. But then an errant wave took hold of the bow and yanked. Into the water he went, though not before the mast knocked him unconscious.

The lake revived him, but Robert couldn’t right the boat. He spent the night crouched atop the upturned hull, waves sometimes tumbling him back into the water. It was late spring, but the water felt like winter. With each successive tumble he grew colder, weaker, less certain he’d be able to climb back atop the hull, less certain he still wanted to.

But then it was morning, and with light came land. “I got to the shallows, the beach,” he said, “and that’s when it started—when the world and I—when things stopped making sense. I stumbled out of the water, soaking wet, walking through this little park, then some trailer neighborhood. It didn’t look like Wisconsin—it definitely wasn’t Milwaukee—but I thought, I can’t have made it to Michigan. And at first, I didn’t want to ask. It was eerie. I saw people, but it was like they didn’t see me.”