Paris by the Book(89)

He had stood across the street from our store, he said, and stared inside, awestruck, terror-struck. His unfinished manuscript come to life: finding us was evidence he’d finally lost his mind. He ran away, but he couldn’t stay away. He started a hundred e-mails to me, to Eleanor, but deleted each one. We’d have thought he was crazy, he said. One day, when there was no sign of us, just some old woman at the register, he’d gone in, scribbled an I’m sorry in a book of his. At last, he’d found a book of his on the shelf.

“And I put it in the window after that,” I said.

“Did you know it was me?” he said.

I said nothing.

“You did,” he said.

“I did,” I said. “But I also thought it couldn’t have been you.” Or shouldn’t have been.

“I—that’s how I felt, about all of it. The girls—Ellie, Daphne”—he could barely speak the words—“I wasn’t even sure it was them. They’re so . . .” I wanted to say, we weren’t sure it was you, but of course the girls had been, long before me. “I thought, it couldn’t be them behind the glass, it couldn’t be you behind the glass. But it was you behind the glass.”

“And still you didn’t reach out.”

He shook his head: “You would have—I thought you would—it would—all disappear. Samuel Taylor Coleridge—this is crazy but—there was this prize—it doesn’t matter. Coleridge, this famous poem, he had it all in his head, ready to write, got fifty-four lines down, and then—someone walked in—the dream disappeared.”

“We didn’t.”

“I was sure you would. I got as close to the bubble as I could without popping it.”

“Until now.”

“Leah, I don’t know how to say . . .” He drew a little circle on the counter. Just like Daphne. “But you all looked, you look very happy here,” he said.

“‘Happy’?” I said, indignant, because I’d become that Parisian. Happiness is an American emotion, if not affliction. It prevents Americans from seeing how difficult this city, its people, its landlords, UPS drivers, and doctors are, how dangerous its bridges, its river, its bookstores. How fragile its every last stone, story, or film.

And yet, as I’d been reminded, Charlemagne used to walk here. And Bemelmans and Lamorisse and Gertrude Stein and Pablo Picasso and Joan of Arc and Marie Curie and Edith Wharton and Janet Flanner and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Sylvia Beach, and now me. And Robert.

“We are happy,” I said slowly. “Not happy all the time, but the girls have figured some things out. It’s been an adjustment. We’re still adjusting.” I could see the words piling up ahead of me, and I stumbled as I tried to avoid saying them: “and, and now, now that you’re back, it’ll be, we’ll be . . .”

And there it was. The pause. The moment when his eyes, after finding every last place in the store but my face, finally found my eyes. Found them, watched, and wondered. Was this the real Leah?

Was this the real Robert? Was this really our life? And how much better would it be with him back? He could—we could—Robert could get an apartment nearby, maybe. We’d work something out.

That pause, and then Robert spoke.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

“No,” I said. “No—listen, Robert—the girls . . .” Was this why he’d surprised me midday, to be sure the girls would be away at school?

“They’re—they’re doing better without me.”

“You can tell that from the sidewalk, from stalking us?”

“Leah, I’m sorry—of course—I miss—there’s not even a word for what I feel—”

“‘Guilty’? ‘Ashamed’?” He nodded, but I shook my head. “Fight,” I said, and I meant with me, against me, but also, of course, for me.

“Leah—all those writeaways,” he said. “I thought they were as much for you all as for me.”

“Fuck you.”

“I did!” he said. “I needed them—yes. Absolutely. More and more. But I needed them because working at home—or seeing you all at home after working—I saw you see my face, and—I—I didn’t like what I saw there. When the girls needed help, they never called for me.”

“‘Dad! Daddy!’ echoed through the house the minute you came home!”

“But they—”

“But they leapt into your arms.”

“And every time, I thought I’d drop them. I thought I’d disappoint them. I knew I was disappointing you.”

“You did not.”

He stared, waited for the lie I suddenly couldn’t say.

“You said I was dead,” he said.

“What?”

“The lady up the street here, sells mops?” he said. “I asked what time the bookstore opened and she said she didn’t know, ‘sometimes open, sometimes close, but hard for her, bookstore lady; her husband dead.’”

“For the longest time,” I said, “I tried to convince myself you were.”

He laughed, or tried to. “For the longest time, I was sure, too. I mean, up until five minutes ago, when you started throwing those books. They hurt—”