Paris by the Book(88)

I wondered what those people saw. A soaking-wet stranger walking past their windows? I guess I would have decided I hadn’t seen him, either. As long as that man keeps walking, they must have thought, maybe he’ll keep walking out of our lives. And he did.

“I walked myself dry,” he said. “Which made me only more invisible. It gave me an idea. The idea. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about sailing when I started running that morning, and I wasn’t thinking about Michigan when I started sailing.”

But he said he had been thinking, a lot, about how he “clouded our lives,” and so once he started going, he let himself keep going. Because he’d had the sudden sense while jogging that morning that if he’d rounded the corner and headed home—or if he’d turned the sailboat around an hour into his trip—if he’d gone back to Milwaukee at that instant, who knew what would happen?

Even he didn’t know, just that it would not be good. He’d reached “that place.” He didn’t say where it was or what he meant, but he didn’t have to. It wasn’t on our old maps. It was in his head; it had overtaken his head, actually, and now it stole, terribly, into mine. I saw what he saw, what he’d thought through, what would leave his body prone on some floor, or lowered by firemen from a rafter. Or something else. There were so many ways.

But there were so many reasons, three in particular, why not to do this, think this.

“You would have never . . .” I started to say, but stopped, because, of course, he hadn’t. I’d wanted evidence he’d loved the girls. This was. But also wasn’t.

He shook his head. “And I didn’t want—I didn’t want medicine, doctors, a hospital; there would have been a hospital for sure, right?” He pointed to his head. “A mental—?” He couldn’t say it. “Someplace like that. Someplace that would have only made it worse. And I wasn’t—I wasn’t sick, I was just . . .”

Selfish, I thought. Or, put another way, yes, sick. Head-sick enough to leave a family who loved him.

But he was well enough, there in Michigan, to find his way to a shelter. And if he’d stayed longer there, the police probably would have found him, but someone came looking for pickers the next morning. Berries. One kind, then another. I waited to hear him talk about desperate attempts to reach us, but instead I heard about six weeks of blast-furnace sun, black nights in cinder-block dorms. He wasn’t the only guy there who didn’t have papers, didn’t want to talk, was willing to work for half the pay, cash, as a result. And then the crop was in. The crew was moving on, moving south. He thought he’d go with them. But first, home: he wasn’t going to pick berries forever, but he decided he was going to be on the road for a while. Some kind of permanent writeaway. New material, a new project.

And so, he said, “I had to find you. To tell you. In person.”

I tried to imagine how such a preposterous scene would have unfolded. Exactly, I decided, as it was unfolding now.

Another scene, one more haunting, more vivid: his post-Michigan return to Milwaukee, our neighborhood, our home. His discovery that we weren’t there.

He said he’d walked the little retail strip near our house, his identity cloaked by sunglasses, long hair, weeks’ worth of beard, and no one noticed him. No one noticed him and he noticed no “missing!” or “have you seen?” posters and we were gone. He began to feel soaking wet again.

I found it hard to believe him. I found it harder not to. Still, I tried.

“You came back? All you had to do was walk up the street—ring a doorbell, ask the renters, or the neighbors,” I said. “Walk up to campus and ask Eleanor—”

He shook his head. “Eleanor would have eaten me alive.”

“And then helped you—”

But he didn’t need Eleanor, he said. He’d figured it out for himself. (He spoke more quickly, quietly now, as though talking to himself.) We were gone. Gone-gone. And there was only one place we could have gone. Paris. Those tickets. He’d said he wouldn’t buy them, but then he had; he’d hidden the code in the cereal box, and we must have found it. He’d wanted to be there for that moment, and he hadn’t been. But that didn’t mean the girls and I wouldn’t still follow through. Did it? We were doing our part. He’d have to do his.

And so he had. I looked at him. He’d gotten money, a passport, a ticket—all of this without triggering a single alert on a single screen. Or maybe the police hadn’t put him on a watch list. Maybe, at some crucial juncture, the authorities had thought me the liar. The wife, she was the crazy one. Who wouldn’t run away from this lady?

In Paris, he found his way to, of course, a bookstore. He’d heard Shakespeare and Company had a cot or two for bookish people passing through, so long as you didn’t mind a few chores, and he didn’t. His first free afternoon, he went looking, preparing himself for the likelihood he’d never find us.

It took him all of an hour.

He found us, but he didn’t come in, because he was beyond certain now that he was hallucinating. He’d wandered past our house in Milwaukee, except it wasn’t our house anymore. Renters lived there. I had once threatened to leave, he said—I didn’t nod, didn’t blink, just listened—had I? What happened when? What had happened? He was no longer sure. Back home, before everything got really bad, he’d started this manuscript about a family in Paris. And so once he was in Paris, he’d gone to this street he’d picked off a map while writing—Saint Lucy, the patron saint of writers!—which meant Madame’s store didn’t surprise him, he’d seen one like it online, that’s why he’d set the story here, but—inside—these people—they looked like us.