Paris by the Book(9)

Some mornings, awaking to the washed linen light that arrives after a rain, hearing a motorbike buzz past and then a bird, then two, then many, and then smelling every last human smell from patisseries to pee, I wonder, too: am I really, after all these years—am I really in Paris?

Because I’ve been fooled before.



* * *



—

Two months after the night Robert caught me shoplifting—two months we’d spent doing little else than making love (toppling books every time), splitting beers in bars, and eating when we had money for that, too—I found out that a travel grant I’d put in for, planned for, fully expected was all mine, would not come through. I’d have to go to Paris some other year. I raged, I wept, I waited at the curb at the appointed hour for when Robert said he would be there to take me to Europe.

Because Robert had said it was ridiculous that I’d not been to Paris.

And I’d said, it is.

And he’d said, we have to fix this right away.

And I’d said, we do.

There was a pause, and we both just sat there and fed the silence like it was a fire, and when it got hot enough, too hot, he spoke: “I’ll pick you up at five tomorrow.”

There are many things a young woman thinks about when she is packing for Paris, for her first trip overseas. I thought about how this was something I’d wanted to do since I was eight, since that wet week when the teacher showed The Red Balloon during recess four days out of five. I thought about how the film had hypnotized and haunted me in a way that that other piece of Parisian kid fare, Madeline, never did, because Madeline was plucky and colorful and small, and—as a kid, anyway—I’d only ever felt like the film’s Paris did, gray and sad and saddled with hope. I thought about how lonely I had been growing up, and how it turned out that that loneliness didn’t even compare to how I felt now that I was twenty-four and my parents were gone—the word might as well mean its opposite, for it had been two years at that point and I thought of them every day, but especially this day: Paris!

Mom, Dad, I met a boy, and he’s taking me to Paris. And my parents, sweet and forgiving, parents so kind, so square, it drove me mad, they would have said “wow” because they would have thought, unlike me, that this boy really was taking me to Paris. Of course he wasn’t.

I told myself this. I told my dead parents this—sometimes they passed by on the sidewalk below my apartment balcony, looking busy, preoccupied, oddly never looking up—I said it out loud. “It’s fine that we’re not really going to Paris. It’s sweet that he promised to take me. It will be an adventure, wherever we go.” I kept to myself that I’d gone to the pharmacy earlier that day and gotten my photo taken, and then the post office for a passport application, where they told me what I already knew, that you couldn’t get a passport at a post office in an hour. What they didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that it didn’t matter what anyone thought, not the postmaster, not the pharmacy photographer, nor my parents’ ghosts pacing. I just knew, because only one thing had ever been true in my life and it was this: I was going to Paris. And I’d just met the boy who would take me.



* * *



—

And there he was, 5:00 P.M. on the dot, double-parked beneath my apartment window. He honked and waved and held aloft a bottle of wine. “Ah, Paree!” He told me what that meant, but he didn’t have to; no one knew intro-textbook French better than I.

But that afternoon we didn’t go à Paris, we went to . . . Belgium. And then: Wales. And then Norway. Berlin. Montreal. Dunkirk, Gibraltar, Stockholm. Moscow. Even, one Friday months later, Cuba.

And we went to every last one of these places without leaving the state of Wisconsin. The village of Belgium lies just south of Sheboygan. Cuba City, south of Platteville. Montreal, an old mining company town, sits up near Lake Superior. Wales, a wilderness of suburban cul-de-sacs, west of Milwaukee. And so on. Different cities, different weekends. His idea, and I let myself be charmed by it, how it obscured the fact that we couldn’t afford to leave the state.

And some of the places were charming: Stockholm, Wisconsin, all five blocks of it, is almost as pretty as postcards I’ve seen since of its namesake. William Cullen Bryant insisted that the Wisconsin Stockholm’s wide, slow stretch of the Mississippi River “ought to be visited by every poet and painter in the land.” So said a plaque. And so, here I am, Robert said.

And here I am, I thought there, and elsewhere, including those towns whose great green tides (of corn and soy) William Cullen Bryant had not endorsed, nor the swing sets we sometimes found ourselves lolling on in empty, forgotten playgrounds, nor the quiet main streets we went down, hand in hand. (I loved holding hands with him—he was good at it, made it somehow seem the essence of humanity, which I suppose it is.) I was twenty-four, the adventures were cheap, the trips were fun and sometimes funny. Robert was going places. If I stuck by his side, I would, too. I would even, in my way, help. His kids’ books had just been a start. A good start. At that point, they paid for gas and sometimes a cut-rate motel or campsite. His books sold okay, I gathered, but I also gathered that they didn’t sell for much. Not enough to take us to Paris, anyway.

Paris, France, that is. Paris, Wisconsin, we tried twice, two different Parises in two different corners of the state. The first one, southeast, just off the interstate to Chicago, disappointed. Flat and brown, blanched houses buttoned up against the last days of summer. The librarian told us this Paris was named by its earliest white settler, a man named Seth. He’d named it for Paris, New York, which sits ten miles outside Utica, if you’re curious. I wasn’t.