Paris by the Book(97)

I can’t say Madame’s announcement, almost a year to the day that Robert walked out of The Late Edition, was a surprise. She and I had spoken less and less, and when she spoke to me, she often did so through George. Do this, do that. I didn’t. I knew what she wanted me to do was make money—unable to make our originally negotiated payments, I was supposed to pay a percentage of our sales each month as a way of settling our debt—and she couldn’t believe how badly the store was doing. Or so George said. I asked him for his own business insights. Don’t own a bookstore, he said. I pointed out that we had to.

He said that though he’d wangled us a second year on our visas, a day of reckoning might be coming.

And so it did.

Madame found me one quiet morning in the store and asked if I might come upstairs. I’d not visited her apartment since we’d made our first arrangements. And needless to say, I’d never been all the way up to the attic, the “book floor,” which Madame, early on, had often suggested I might visit. But she’d never said when, and it lay beyond a locked door I’d not dared approach (Ellie had, of course; that’s how I knew it was locked).

Madame unlocked the door, and I followed her up.

Blue toile wallpaper, a repeating pattern of hunters and stags, enclosed the room, puckering at the seams. A single round window the size of a café serving tray caught a piece of a gray sky. An oriental rug worn through to its warp lay in the middle of the space, which was small, hunched under the roof. A wooden table, almost as large as the door we’d just stepped through, stood on the carpet, along with a single chair. Atop the table, a blotter, a pen cup, some pages. Some covered in handwriting. Some not.

There were no books.

That is, there were no shelves and shelves of books as I’d imagined. There was, instead, a single low bookcase, mostly empty, less than a meter wide and not half as tall. Atop it, a yellow Larousse dictionary and a small cameo portrait of a girl. On the shelf beneath, a dozen books, all identical but for numbers on their spines. Madame handed me one. The cover smooth, soft leather dyed green. The pages were gilt-edged, old gold.

Inside, a single word on a single page: Un. One.

She looked to me to see if I understood.

I did; I was once a writer’s wife. Un. One. Chapter 1. She did not have to remove the rest of the carefully stockpiled journals to show me that those pages were blank, too.

“Madame,” I said. “I had no idea.” She took the book and put it away. “I didn’t know you were a writer. Un écrivain?”

She sniffed. I wondered if I’d said it wrong. Masculin ou féminin?

“Un écrivain écrit,” she said. A writer writes.

And she had not. She’d always wanted to, since she was a child, since she was younger than Annabelle. But so many things had gotten in the way. Life, her daughter, Sylvie. (And Sylvie’s father had gotten himself well out of the way—had vanished—before Sylvie was even born. No wonder Madame thought she understood me, and my invisible husband, so well.) Needing to support herself, her child, had gotten in the way, and so she’d gotten herself a job in a bookstore on a street named for the patron saint of writers. In time, she came to own the store, the apartments above, the building. She had everything.

She had twelve gilt-edged green-bound volumes of nothing.

She thought the bookstore would inspire her. Instead, it took all of her time.

And then we came along, she said.

She looked at me to be sure I understood. She was speaking French but that wasn’t the problem. I stared back blankly. She sighed and continued, annoyed she had to clarify.

We were the problem.

“I thought, selling you the store, this will give me more time. The time, the liberté, I did not have for so many years. But you did not give me the time. Falling in rivers, hospitals, police. So busy! So noisy. This last year, more quiet, but—in the store, too quiet. And the books.” She paused, as though working out the next sentence in English. “This is the problème. The books down there, louder and louder every night. ‘What have you done today, Madame?’ they ask. ‘Where is the book?’”

And I thought, where is the exit?

I also felt something else: that I finally understood Robert’s writeaways in a way I hadn’t before. Claustrophobia has many sources. We were just one.

But it was the one Madame focused on now.

“Leah,” Madame said. “This is what I am trying to say: you must leave.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, turning to go. “Of course!”

Madame shook her head. “No,” she said. “The apartment, the store. I am sorry, all of it.”

“Madame?”

“You bought the business, yes,” she said. “But not the building. And so now—you move.”

I’d heard of other expats evicted on short notice by their French landladies; such negotiations had been almost a subspecialty of Declan’s. But I’d never thought that . . .

We had an understanding, an agreement, a bond—this wasn’t about—this was about books. Wasn’t it? “Find a new place for the store? For us to live? What about our special visas?”

“I do not know,” Madame said. “Especially for an American, this is not easy. Perhaps George can help. Perhaps you can go home, to America. I know people who will buy the stock, the books, all of it. This is the time,” she said, and sighed. “When you first come, I think, ‘this is what she needs to do, this store—’”