Paris by the Book(98)

“And the twins,” I said.

“They are older now,” she said. “George has need of you not so much.” It was true. “And you need—you need more. I need more.”

“I—I don’t understand,” I said, though, degree by degree, surveying the empty room, I did.

Madame looked at her tiny bookcase and then back at me. “Many years,” Madame said, “and now few. Je suis à court de temps,” she added. “Do you understand what that means?”



* * *



—

I did. It meant I could take the rest of the day off. I went downstairs, accepted a package from Laurent, and then endured a headshake from him as I prematurely flipped the sign to FERMé.

In the past year, I’d finally gone on a date with him, as doing so had seemed inevitable. It went poorly, as was also inevitable. He took me to a chain restaurant that specialized in hamburgers and told me I’d have to learn how to cook before we got married. But he would pay, he would pay, he’d repeated, as though I’d been badgering him. So I paid for dinner and left him at the table. I didn’t get deliveries for two weeks. When they resumed, he said he forgave me: if I wanted to pay for things, that was absolutely fine. I said if he wanted to be friends, just friends, that was absolutely fine.

I said this in French, and he looked at me like I’d mixed up some key piece of syntax, and I suppose I had. I was plumb out of friends.

When Robert left that second time, it was as though everyone had been waiting for his cue. Carl came by to announce somberly that he’d received his new posting—C?te d’Ivoire. He gave me a wallet-size copy of his official portrait—brown-blazered, American flag at his right—and kissed me, on both cheeks. As I delicately pulled away, he held on to my elbows. Stay strong, he said. I tried to, but then Shelley, the quiet retiree from New Orleans, departed, too. No kissing, just an exhale. Her husband had summoned her home. I suppose it’s time, she said.

When Molly announced that she and her family were leaving, she said it was past time. And it was—for me to fire her. She had been a hapless employee and, it turned out, a bad customer. The week before she left, she returned two boxes of books I’d not known she’d bought. “Just add the refund to my final paycheck,” she said.

“But we don’t do refunds,” I said.

She looked at me, confused. “But I’ve been giving customers their money back for months?”

I thought about calling Declan, but did not. We’d seen each other for coffee two or three times in the past year, but just coffee. Never wine. Never back to the apartment after. We told each other that it was so busy, we were so busy, Paris was so busy. When we parted we said à bient?t, which means both “soon” and “good-bye.”

And so I strode away from my meeting with Madame Brouillard, up the street, alone. Up the street—not down toward the Seine, toward Notre-Dame, that prettier Paris. I wanted ugly.

Except it wasn’t ugly. Wherever I walked, it was terribly beautiful, and I do mean terribly, because sometimes you want the landscape to reflect your soul, you want the skies and streetlights and doorways of every building you pass to frown, turn a shadowed jaw to you, look pale and gaunt. But Paris, even when the sky is gray—it was sunny today, so blue above that tourists and locals alike kept stopping to look up—effortlessly, ceaselessly, annoyingly generates magic. I looked down. A faint smell of urine rose from some crevice.

I’ll be home in three days, Napoleon famously wrote Josephine; don’t wash.

Before coming to Paris, I’d always understood that line as nothing more than the plea of a lovesick, sex-mad soldier with the mildest of kinks. After living in the city, I understood it differently, and not just because I’d waited longer than three days. The ideal, the real, they’re all mixed up here there’s no point in teasing them apart; they’ll only come at each other again.

Finally turning, I passed my favorite abandoned storefront, the one with the ladder, the apple, the splatters of paint. It had sat dark for a year, and once, when I could bear to do so, I’d pressed my face to the glass and had seen that the apple, too, had gone. Of course. But tonight, it had its light on, and inside stood a new ladder, a new apple atop it. Green. And with it, a sign above the door, in English: THE APPLE STORE. It would be only a matter of time before Apple got wind and shut it down. But here, now, the apple shone, and I tried the door, found it open, and entered. I called out bonjour and received no reply. Everything smelled clean and light. I took the apple. I took a bite. I looked around for the hidden camera as I chewed but saw none, which is, I suppose, the point of hiding. I went home.



* * *



—

Which was where? Milwaukee. We could figure out a way to stay in Paris, I thought, but I also knew that we already had done that once, and doing so had led to this dead end. (Or in French, impasse.) Raising kids is about raising yourself as a grown-up, and I was enough of one now to know, unlike Robert, when to leave.

I dragged Daphne on a trip up to the rue de Rivoli to buy one of the boucherie’s ready-to-go rotisserie chickens. I wondered if FedEx would be able to deliver it hot to our home in Milwaukee. I don’t think I was tearing up over this prospect, but when I placed my order, the butcher looked at me like he knew something was wrong. In Paris, the empathy of butchers and pharmacists cannot be underestimated, and indeed, the boucher now offered his prescription: I must buy a r?ti—a roast, pork, he had one right here, stuffed with apricots and prunes, just put it in the oven.