Paris by the Book(96)

Strange, then, that the only clue I have supporting this theory is how he edited himself into his own manuscript. For the longest time, the fact that his prize application synopsis has the wife disappearing confused me. Because obviously I hadn’t, and didn’t. And equally obvious, I thought, was that I was the husband, the speechwriter, and he was her, was Callie. The wife is a novelist, after all, or wants to be one. She’s restless, edgy, and maybe forty-one percent crazy. True, she’s better on her feet (on the page) than he was, more forceful, strong, smart. But those are changes, or improvements, I would have made, too.

Another notion came to haunt me, however, something even more obvious: that the wife was the wife, that she was me. Because I had disappeared. He had stayed. Not in any physical sense but in the dream sense, in the sense we’d had one, a dream, or he had, and we’d started moving toward it that first night when I followed him home from the bar. I’d followed him and followed him, through page after page, year after year, and at some point, he must have thought I said no. In myriad ways, I did. No, we can’t go for drinks tonight—we’re helping coach this or that practice. No, you shouldn’t keep experimenting in ways to lose money, because it seems to be costing you your mind as well.

No, you’re not a failure. I said that, too. But he came to believe something else.

And I don’t know what happened then, or precisely when it happened. If family life simply overtaxed him; or whether he thought, I’m the only true dreamer left in this marriage, I need to grab whatever balloon floats by, even if it bears me away; or whether all of it, art, life, its intersections, came to feel like foolishness.

I do know that, like the fictional Callie, I grew angry, I grew frustrated, I fled.

I fled without going anywhere. I fled fiction for real life, however pale a second prize or destination that is. I wrote speeches, I made videos. I didn’t make my film, but I didn’t stop reading—I read the books he gave me, I read shelves full of books I found on my own. I still believed in make-believe. But he must have believed otherwise, and must have believed that that left him the sole presider over a fictional land wholly his own, one he could be present in only by not being present. That’s why he couldn’t leave us via something as prosaic as divorce. It’s why he couldn’t stay away from us in Paris.

We were his creation. And he, everlastingly, ours.





CHAPTER 18


Eleanor left. A year passed. Spring returned. Robert did not.

And then—

I’m telling things out of order again.

What happened was this.



* * *



—

I lost my husband.

Robert’s disappearance was more profound this time. Somehow, when he left, he managed to leave my imagination, too. I no longer thought I saw him out of the corner of my eye, or in photographs from The Red Balloon, or in the pages of his own books. No messages, scribbled or otherwise, appeared. It felt like our fault. Like his appearance in Paris had been solely through the force of my will and the girls’ longing—that that was all that had ever caused him to be among us, in fact, for eighteen years. That’s untrue, of course, but legally . . .

Legally. After much consultation with Eleanor, I shared with the girls what the police had told me. Or rather, I shared one tiny piece of it. I said the police had explained that if there is no sign of someone for seven years, that person can be declared dead. In other words, I left out the sailboat story, the partial one that the police had pieced together, the one Robert himself had partially corroborated. And without the story, there was nothing. Nothing of him in Paris or Milwaukee—or in their faces. I’d expected screaming or tears, hands at my throat. Nothing, just flat incredulity.

“So we have to wait?” Ellie said.

“Well, it can be accelerated,” I said. What was I saying? I listened as I stumbled on. “If the police believe—Eleanor says—there’s this process.”

Daphne looked confused. “The process makes him”—I waited for her to say the word, but she didn’t—“not alive?”

“Well,” I said, “legally, I suppose it does.”

“Legally?” said Ellie. Her favorite part of Paris was proving to be the constant parade of manifestations—demonstrations and strikes, on behalf of workers, the Romani, immigrants, students—the city fostered.

“But if he did come back?” Daphne said.

That question mark again, that bent pin.

“I guess there’s another . . . process,” I said.

“What’s a ‘process’?” Daphne said. As Molly once warned, we were all losing our English a word or two at a time. Days before, trying to explain the Vélib’ bike-share system to some tourists, I’d been unable to summon kickstand. They’d thought I was talking about soccer. Which, of course, is football.

But there was another word we’d all somehow lost, in French and English: père, father, papa, dad. I noticed that when Robert came up now, it was only ever as he, as in:

“He’s not coming back.” This was Ellie, and this was a phrase that, as I turned it over and over in the days following, seemed to render superfluous any legal petition.



* * *



—

We lost the store.