* * *
—
To fly anywhere these days means navigating, first, a gauntlet of questions.
Did you pack your own bags?
Did anyone ask you to carry something for them?
Has your bag been in your possession the entire time?
But the most difficult one came from Daphne.
“Did you leave Dad a note?”
“Yes,” I said, which was untrue.
Ellie, who had been pretending not to follow our discussion as she played with her new phone, tilted slightly closer to us, eyes still focused on her screen.
“I did, too!” Daphne whispered loudly. “I left it on my pillow.”
This was too much for Ellie. Earlier, when Daphne had gone to a bathroom near the gate, Ellie had asked: is Dad coming back? Tell me the truth, now—Daphne can’t hear you.
Ellie had not been satisfied with my I hope so and even less so by my I don’t know. I braced for the follow-up, is he alive? My answers would have been no different: I hope so; I don’t know. But somehow I knew that her just asking the question would make everything different.
But here, now, Ellie was pressing Daphne, not me. “You left the note on your pillow?” Ellie asked.
“Yes?” Daphne said, not quite seeing the blow that was coming.
“You didn’t write ‘be back soon,’ did you?” Ellie said, furious now. “Like he always did? Because that would be so clever.”
Daphne’s eyes filled, but she didn’t break her sister’s stare. She just let the tears, when they came, pulse down her cheeks one by one in silence.
Ellie stood and stormed away toward a scrum awaiting a Florida flight.
Daphne fell into my shoulder. I pulled her close. What’s always amazed me as a mother is that even as your children grow, they still fit. Infant or tween, their chins can find their own individual ways to burrow into your shoulder, your arms, your chest. And then you breathe in and they breathe out, and our molecules are all mixed up again, indivisible once more.
Daphne wriggled in deeper, mole-like, which meant I had to have her repeat what she said to make out the words: “What did your note say, Mom?”
I stiffened, just the slightest bit.
My note, before I’d torn up three different drafts and thrown every last one into the trash, had said that we missed him, we loved him, we were worried about him, please call, please write, please tell us what happened, why this happened, how we can keep this from happening again. My note said I love you and but you make it harder and harder to do so and we need to talk, and we did, but as I scratched one underline after another under that word, I remembered that we never would, because he was—had to be? the police seemed to think? the funeral director’s books seemed to suggest?—dead.
I thought of the boy in the bar with the books, the boy who’d loved Bemelmans, the boy who’d bought me a book about a balloon, the boy who said we’d go places. And we had. And now he had.
But where?
Daphne looked up at me, and so I told her what I’d written, which I hadn’t:
Meet us in Paris.
CHAPTER 4
What I should have felt when we first landed in Paris is obvious: Paris! Paris! Paris! Here were the routes I’d traced with a finger on childhood atlases, as though some miniaturized version of the city might bas-relief beneath my fingertips. It never had.
And it didn’t now. When Robert left, it turned out he had taken something—a small thing, perhaps, but still, an important thing: the exclamation point that had always followed the city’s name, at least for me. From the looks of the girls, he’d taken it from them, too.
Paris. Somewhere around here someone had once made a movie about a red balloon. Someone else had sat sketching schoolgirls marching about in two straight lines.
And back in Milwaukee, some couple had once argued whether Paris was best depicted in color or black and white. Now I saw—
That the city was spectacular. That it couldn’t and wouldn’t not be, and if I or my girls missed that exclamation point, we were missing the larger point. Paris wasn’t a painting, or a movie, or a poster. It wasn’t a prize. And now that we’d arrived, it was no longer a dream, either. It was real.
Then why didn’t it feel that way?
* * *
—
Well, in part, because it was so tyrannically hot. Those first August weeks in Paris, the heat staggered us. Even saying the month’s name in French—août—felt, and sounded, like a little cry for help.
Not that anyone could have heard us above the din—the city was a city, and this fact somehow surprised us, too: how noisy it was, and at all hours. That I’d booked us a hot, cramped apartment between a hospital and train station did not help. During our daytime adventures, we’d sometimes find a narrow, anonymous passage and duck into it, in pursuit of nothing other than silence.
What surprised me most was how kind the city was to us. Nothing prepared me for this (though the girls, fed on Madeline, assumed it their due). I’ve experienced various Parisian unkindnesses since, but I’ll never forget those first days here when so many strangers seemed so warm, even courtly, especially toward the girls. Shopkeepers, museum guards, passengers on the Métro. Men gave up their seats; women stopped me to compliment my daughters’ beauty; bakers dropped a tiny chocolate (and then, with a wink, two, three) into the bag with our croissants. And the third Nutella crêpe? Free for the beautiful lady—who apparently was me. Paris in August is empty but for tourists, but the Parisians who’ve stayed behind need those tourists, they needed us. And, I was slowly letting myself believe, we needed them.
* * *
—
But with just four days left in Paris, we also needed Daphne’s passport.
It was gone. Eleanor’s fault: she’d told me that the first step in raising strong, independent women was to give them responsibility, starting with their boarding passes and passports.
Ellie misplaced her boarding pass between TSA and the plane in the United States; Daphne had lost her passport that morning in Paris. No idea how, where, just that it was gone. Also gone, and more devastatingly: the nascent confidence Eleanor’s plan had begun to instill in her. The State Department could help us with the passport, but I wasn’t sure who would reissue Daphne’s pride.
Not me, because I’d lost almost all of my own, having forgotten to bring the passport photocopies Eleanor had insisted I make. Fortunately, she’d insisted on keeping a set as well, and when I called that afternoon, she said she had the copies right at hand.
I waited for “I told you so,” autotext she keeps tucked in her cheek.
But instead: “I’m so glad you called,” Eleanor said. “I have something to tell you—unless—is this costing you thousands, this call?”
It wasn’t; Ellie had known to acquire these chips hardly bigger than a beauty mark that, once inserted into our phones, somehow made calling and texting and surfing cost next to nothing, or so she said.
“Not thousands, but . . .” But I needed to hurry Eleanor along; Ellie was bored and Daphne’s face was blotchy with tears and shame. Both were eavesdropping avidly. “Eleanor? The passport’s number. That’s all I need.”
We were sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, a destination I’d put off, partly to hold it in reserve as a grand finale, partly because I hadn’t realized climbing it, especially at peak season, required an advance reservation.
And partly because—this is silly, or maybe not—I’d long ago envisioned climbing to the top and planting a kiss on Robert once there. Look who’s made it to Paris, France, from Paris, Wisconsin! Eighteen years, and here we are!
And we were. I let my eyes travel up the structure and squinted. It looked even hotter up there, that much closer to the sun.
“Nonsense,” Eleanor said. “It’s better to have the pag
e itself,” Eleanor said. “I’ll FedEx it to you.”
“That will cost thousands,” I said.
“Thousands?” Daphne squeaked. Daphne worried about money for reasons that were obscure to me—had Robert and I once argued over finances in her presence? In Milwaukee, she had collected jars and jars of change. And if we were ever in a bookstore and she saw a discount sticker on one of Robert’s books, she took it off.
“No—Daphne, it’s okay,” I said. “It’s just that Aunt Eleanor wants to mail us a paper copy of your passport, and—”
Ellie exhaled long and slow. “Wow,” she said finally, and stood. Eleanor’s cumbersome suggestion proved just how old she was. But this moment proved to me just how old Ellie had become. She was about to turn fifteen then, a teen. Witness the exhale, the “wow,” the shimmering disdain, but most of all, the sheer height of her: when your child achieves (or exceeds) your height, you come to feel barely half their size. Ellie and I could now look each other in the eye. We could wear each other’s clothes. She dwarfed me. “Just, wow,” Ellie elaborated. And with that, she took the phone from me, explained to Eleanor what was needed—scan, upload, send—and then ended the call, brought up a map, and led us to a nearby Internet café.
Such cafés are all but extinct now and this one should have been then. It was un-air-conditioned, unpleasant, filled with young men who should have spent their last euros showering instead of surfing. The room rang with conversations in a dozen languages, but rules were rules—the manager pointed to a sign, in English, NO PHONE TALKING—so I was ordered out to the sidewalk when Eleanor called back.
“You’ll have it in a moment, I expect,” said Eleanor. “But can I use that moment?” she asked. “Like I said, I may have found something.”
I stared into the café; Daphne stared back; Ellie stared at her screen; the manager stared at my girls.
And an ocean away, Eleanor began to explain that the man whom we thought had disappeared without a trace had left behind a substantial one. Not six letters, but one hundred pages.
* * *
—
“It’s some sort of—well, manuscript, I guess,” Eleanor said. “With a cover letter. Addressed to a prize competition. It arrived earlier via campus mail, from the math department. My assistant’s theory is that Robert must have tried to send something to our department’s central printer ages ago—it’s time-stamped March, a month before he vanished—and the document turned left instead of right at some digital intersection, spitting itself out at a random printer across campus.”
“March?” I said. “It’s August.”
“Five months, five hundred yards,” Eleanor said. “That’s about right for campus mail. Speaking of, has my e-mail arrived?”
I tapped the café window; Ellie looked over—as did half the café—and shook her head. “No?” I said.
“Shoot,” she said. I heard clicking. “Resending. In the meantime, let me read just a paragraph or two, because it’s so very . . .”
And here my waking dream began in earnest—or I’d been dreaming since arriving in Paris, or since Robert left.
“Okay. ‘Please find enclosed my submission for the Porlock Prize,’” Eleanor read, and then paused. “Never heard of such a thing. Mind you, I lead a sheltered life. ‘It is’—this is him now—‘per the guidelines, a manuscript that, in the spirit of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great “Kubla Khan,” lies unfinished due to the author having been interrupted during its production.’ Let’s be clear,” Eleanor said, “Coleridge wasn’t ‘interrupted,’ despite his claim that a ‘person from Porlock’ had ruined his poem; no, he was—well, speaking of brains, actually—”
“Eleanor, Eleanor, I lied,” I lied. “This is an expensive call. And I’ve left the girls on their own in—”
“Shush,” said Eleanor. “The competition, it turns out, is sponsored by a brain surgeon. In Grand Rapids, Michigan. Do you know what’s a telltale sign of a health care system out of control? Neurosurgeons making so much money they endow literary prizes.”
“He’s a neurosurgeon?” I said.
“So says the Internet. Which also says one of the reasons for his starting the contest was that he’d done research on the brain’s ability to handle interruptions.”
“Eleanor—”
“Clever! You interrupted. The man has a point. Okay—let’s see, skimming, another paragraph of throat-clearing, some vague groveling—it’s a little unseemly—it’s also very much Robert, I have to say, but—here ’tis. The synopsis.”
“Eleanor, do we have to do this now? Over the phone?”
“It’s short,” she said.
“So is our time here,” I said.
“That’s my point,” Eleanor said. “The story—Leah, it’s set in Paris.”
Moments before, the humidity had made it seem like there was too much air. Now it felt like there was none.
“I thought so,” Eleanor said, marking my silence. “So here goes: ‘Young Robert and Callie Eady’—yes, he uses real names, or his, anyway; I don’t know what’s up with ‘Callie’; makes me think of Caligula—‘exhausted with their life in Wisconsin’—I’d say that’s overstating things, no?—‘decide to take a year off with their daughters’—no names given—‘and travel the world.’ She’s a novelist, by the way, and he’s a speechwriter—ho, ho! That’s my ‘ho, ho.’ I’ll read on. ‘Once around and then home, much improved, in no small part because the plan is to work their way around the world.’ Okay, and now we get some sheep in New Zealand, grape-picking in Chile, etc., etc., teaching and coaching at a school in Zambia—”
“Eleanor!”
“Yes, yes,” she said. “Anyway, none of that turns out to be crucial. But this is: ‘Their trip stalls’—Robert’s words again—‘almost as soon as it starts. Crossing the Atlantic to France, they fetch up in Paris’—really not sure about that ‘fetch up’—‘where their plans to staff an English-language bookstore fall through. To bide time, they spend days wandering the city, quickly abandoning traditional guidebooks to follow paths laid out by the children’s books and films their two daughters love, chiefly Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline books and’—you knew this was coming, didn’t you?—‘Albert Lamorisse’s The Red Balloon.’—Leah, are you listening?”
I was not. Or I was, but not to Eleanor. I was listening to Robert, through words read by Eleanor, trying to make out the words behind the words.
“I admit,” Eleanor said, “it doesn’t sound like him.”
It did and it didn’t. It was true that Robert’s recent experiments had been increasingly esoteric—a term he found “judgmental”—and he had been exploring the creation of electronic texts, including an e-book app wherein a finger swipe not only turned pages but erased words. Academics loved it. Techies, too. And some students, some of them his old fans. In short, lots of people who didn’t spend much money on books. Which was good, because the app was free. A variety of fame resulted. But he no longer seemed much interested in fame, or much else anymore. And I no longer—well, I didn’t understand. I told him so. He tried to explain: So finishing the book will mean—could mean—finishing it off, you know? I did, and excitement briefly flared in me. A large part of me also thought it was nonsense. But we were deep in a difficult season, and I wanted something to celebrate, and nonsense would do. It would be like the old days, our early days, when the less sense an act, a notion, a thought was, the more sense it made. Chase a shoplifter from a bookstore! Marry a man who loved Madeline! Live for art! Make something. And we had. And now we were—erasing that art? That life? Finished, Robert had said, like—
I know, I’d said, and I’d thought I had known, but now—now in Paris, this. This “prize” or contest, which was all about unfinishing? This didn’t sound like him, not the synopsis, not the contest.
Unless—was the whole thing—was this an experimental work of an entirely new order?
He’d not only made up a new novel but a competition? Eleanor had found the contest’s website, but maybe Robert, mad puzzler that he was, had generated that, too.
“It’s a lot to take in, I suppose,” Eleanor said. “I think I hear you breathing. I’ll keep going. There’s not too much more. Though—steady yourself. ‘But as the weeks wear on,’ he writes, ‘Paris wears them down, and the family dynamic frays.’ And it would, wouldn’t it? ‘The girls fight. The parents fight. And then, one morning, Robert comes home from a run, and she’s gone.’”
“Wait—who’s gone?” I said.
“You are listening,” Eleanor said. “So, yes, this is the curious part. She’s gone, this Callie character—the wife.”
“The wife?”
“The wife, and stranger still—okay, let me finish.” Eleanor dropped her voice, caught up in the performance. It was almost fun to listen to, to hear someone else get swept away by another’s prose and magic, even if it was only a synopsis. It reminded me that Robert had possessed that magic. It reminded me that it had possessed me once upon a time. It made me realize, briefly, that something similar was happening again, here on a crowded sidewalk in a distant city, my girls behind glass, my husband behind words someone was reading to me. “‘There’s no sign of her,’” Eleanor read. “The wife, he means. ‘There’d been no warning. The police, the embassy, are no help. The father prepares to head home; the children resist. The father’s compromise: a final trip to the bookstore where they were to have worked.’ Whereupon they find a ‘clue.’”
Paris by the Book Page 7