Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  None of the stores we visited looked anything like the one Robert described in his manuscript. That did not dissuade enterprising Ellie from inquiring repeatedly about her father’s whereabouts. She was frustrated that her classroom French came off more clumsily than Daphne’s; I tried to explain to Ellie that even perfect fluency wouldn’t necessarily mean people would understand what she was after.

  What we’re after, she mumble-corrected me, but eventually, she stopped asking booksellers about her dad. And, to a degree, she stopped looking. While I used my phone to discreetly research the cheapest means of reaching the airport the next day, Ellie and Daphne wandered the aisles, lost in the books.

  I have strange children. Or the world wanted me to think that way, at least when we lived in Wisconsin: my girls grew up loving to read. True, they liked milk, understood football, and were as bewitched by screens—TV screens, movie screens, and most definitely phone screens—as everyone else. But they were strange in that they loved reading above all else. I once found Elizabeth George Speare’s Witch of Blackbird Pond on the shampoo shelf in the shower. I rinsed the soap scum off, fanned the pages, told Ellie I suspected her and she shrugged. The book reappeared in the shower the next week. And maybe the only way to read about the Salem witch trials is under a steady stream of water.

  But that afternoon in Paris, books were more backdrop than anything. Ellie and Daphne ran their hands along the spines (it’s a family trait, I fear; they just like touching them, as if to reassure themselves, yes, there they are) but pulled down very few volumes. Instead, they talked. To each other, and when I drifted close enough, to me. Brave words, foolish words: they talked of staying for a month, a year, a school year. They wouldn’t miss their friends, because they had FaceTime and Skype. Their friends would be jealous because Paris was cool and French boys were cute. (Over-the-shoulder selfies in pursuit of a boy in the background were taken frequently.)

  Back onto the street. Down one block, then the next. Across one bridge, then another. I’ll tell them at the next intersection, I thought: remember, we’re going home. I believe—no, I think—your father is not here. No. Do it at dinner. The airport. Some distracting place. Some quiet place. A chapel. A closet. Our economy-class seats.

  Our pending departure glowed brighter and brighter in my brain until it was a headache, more than a headache, really, more like a hangover, which I suppose it was. Arriving in Paris had delivered the initial buzz, and then the fantastical idea of somehow staying—this touring of schools, neighborhoods—had gotten me drunk.

  And now it was the morning of the last day and we were out walking and what was Robert doing across a narrow street from me in a nameless store?

  Robert.

  I squinted to be sure; he’d lost weight, had new glasses I didn’t much like and a new haircut I did. I didn’t startle or scream; what happened next happened too fast. He’d been looking down at something on a table, and then he looked up at me, saw me looking at him, and smiled a slow smile, and then returned to browsing. Like I said, this took almost no time, just long enough for me to realize it wasn’t Robert.

  Now I saw something else, something even stranger than the man I’d mistaken for Robert: behind him were two girls the same age as our daughters. Wait. Those were our daughters. I’d forgotten that they’d asked to go across the street into some store.

  And it wasn’t some store. It was, finally, Robert’s store. It was not the color Robert’s manuscript had specified, and it was in the Marais, not across the Seine, as he’d described. But otherwise: the narrow edifice, the luminous windows, the carefully lettered LIBRAIRIE, all of this appeared in his manuscript.

  A debate Robert and I occasionally took up was the role of coincidence in fiction—especially his fiction. He favored it. His books often relied on it. I said it was barely plausible in his novels for kids and wholly out of place in his adult work. I may have drawn a line from this to his reviews, sales, and so on.

  He said real life was ruled by coincidence. If anything, his fiction didn’t rely on it enough.

  I said, enough. And then I swore. And then he left.

  Whoever swore first lost: his rule. Whoever left first lost: my rule.

  * * *

  —

  Daphne and Ellie set upon me as soon as I entered, each pulling in different directions. Not that there were many directions to go: had we stretched out our arms end to end, the three of us could have almost spanned the store.

  But we could not stretch our arms out; the space was filled floor to ceiling with books. A long, broad wooden counter ran along the right side just inside the door, like an old-fashioned grocer’s. Atop this counter, more books, piled in varying heights. The floor was unusual—wide, heavy wooden planks answered footsteps with creaks and knocks, like the deck of a very old ship. I felt like I was swaying, anyway. Everything—every last book—seemed both about to fall and yet perfectly placed. If this was disorder, it was a very precise disorder, and it was also very precisely something else, something I’d read, come to life. More than that, it was an earlier chapter of my own life, come to life once more: the books, the disorder, the teetering stalagmites of paper. It even smelled like Robert’s old apartment.

  But not every detail matched the memory, or the manuscript. I didn’t recall the filigreed spiral iron staircase that Daphne was pointing to; she said there was an upstairs, a children’s section with books en français! Robert’s manuscript did not have this. Nor did Robert’s store have what Ellie was calling a “secret door,” a bookcase in the rear of the room that slid forward on casters. Behind this was a tiny space, the proprietor’s office.

  And here she was, the proprietor. She’d greeted me earlier with a bonjour and then let the girls tug me about. But now she was at my elbow, perhaps because Ellie was showing off the store’s inner sanctum.

  “Hello,” the woman said, her voice round and low. She ducked her head slightly without losing eye contact. “Marjorie Brouillard.”

  “Ellie!” shouted Daphne from the top of the stairs. “You have got to see this.”

  Ellie ran away.

  “Hi,” I said to the proprietor. “Leah Eady.” I shook my head. “‘Hi’? I’m sorry. Bonjour. Or—I should probably say—pardonnez-moi.”

  She shook her head, which made me think I’d gotten that wrong, too.

  And I saw that I had: I needed to beg pardon not just for myself but the whole unruly three of us. Scrolling through old microfilmed Cahiers du Cinéma in the library basement had taught me many things, but not necessarily plural pronouns and imperative verb inversion. “Oh!” I said. “Pardonnez-nous.”

  Again, from Robert’s manuscript: the bookstore is run by a Frenchman, a handsome middle-aged widower. Maybe the manuscript didn’t say handsome. But I definitely do recall sensing that the French widower and the abandoned wife were on a collision course, that in the pages Robert had yet to write, they’d embrace, a relief for them and readers both.

  But my real-life relief was meeting Madame. It had felt odd while reading to think that Robert had been somehow setting me up.

  And yet—and this felt far more odd—this was the shop from Robert’s manuscript.

  “They are très jolies,” Madame said, looking upstairs. “They—is this the word? They ‘favor’ you,” she added. “Yes,” she said, before I could.

  We stood there for a moment; I struggled to find something to say in French, until I remembered we were speaking English.

  “You are kind,” I said. “I apologize for not following them into the store sooner—letting them run amok—”

  I stopped when her face soured. Did amok mean something different in French?

  “You,” she said, “look much older than you are.” She paused. “Why? This is wrong.”

  We’d not been in France long, but there were specific aspects of Paris that I already knew I would miss. The food, f
or one, the fact that any food anywhere, even from a cart, a storefront, seemed better than anything I’d be served in a good restaurant back home. But this directness—granted, no one had been this direct with me yet, but I’d come to feel that the most of the many kindnesses I’d received had been on behalf of the girls. I’d come to feel that behind these various fleeting conversations and interactions had lurked the very question this woman was now asking: what is wrong?

  I wouldn’t miss such questions back home. It was one thing the Midwest did quite well, which was to keep any kind of intimacy far at bay, well behind closed smiles. Here was the opposite. Intimacy came quickly. Smiles slowly.

  While she was waiting for me to answer, she took a pad from the counter and wrote down the address of a store and the name of what turned out to be a particular brand of night cream.

  “It is expensive,” she said. “But it is necessary to buy.”

  It was a silly thing to tear up over—a glance at the paper revealed she’d recommended something I could have found in my grandmother’s medicine cabinet, a Helena Rubinstein product—but I did, because all this was again (always) about money, and about Paris, and about being alone.

  She let out an annoyed puff and went to the front of the shop, where she flipped the sign to FERMÉ, or closed, and locked the door. The thunk was disproportionately loud, like a portcullis had fallen.

  I should have felt trapped but instead was filled with the sudden desire to open up. “We had thought—they had wanted, my daughters, to spend the rest of the year here,” I said to Madame. “Three months. And so I thought—well, for an hour or so yesterday”—why was I telling her this? I don’t know, only that French frankness is contagious—“I thought I might have figured it out; I was going to keep the job I had in the States, but I was going to telecommute—I’m not sure how to say that in French—”

  “The telephone, yes,” she said, impatient. “I this understand.”

  “Well—no, not quite, but—”

  “It is not working?” she said.

  “No,” I said, “it is not working.”

  Madame nodded upstairs. “And the father is—gone?” she said. “The older one tells me this.” Madame nodded, as if to confirm my unspoken answer: these things happen. Men disappear. If eyes can say this much—and Madame’s could—I was almost sure that hers added, good riddance. Madame resumed speaking: “The younger one tells me they are looking.” Now there was no mistaking what she thought: looking for Dad was a bad idea. “I need help,” she said. “To work.”

  I looked around. I looked outside. Locking the door had been unnecessary. It was not busy. Given the age—the smell—of the room, it did not seem like the store had been busy in some time. Madame saw me looking.

  “This is why I need help,” she said.

  We were standing at the counter. She stood perfectly straight, one hand at her side, the other resting lightly on a stack of books. Whatever Madame needed help with, it wasn’t poise.

  “How much does it pay?” By her startled expression, I saw I’d spoken aloud. Upstairs, meanwhile, I thought I heard something I hadn’t in a very long time—the throaty music of my daughters, laughing. I moved closer to the sound and thought, what I should be asking was how much I could pay her. For an hour, a day, a year. To make my girls my girls again.

  “Enough,” she said.

  I didn’t understand.

  “The money,” she said. “The job-money is enough.”

  Enough, my least favorite word in the world.

  “I—I can’t believe I’m talking about this,” I said. I couldn’t hear the girls anymore. “You are kind—I think you’re offering something, apologies if you’re not—and apologies for asking about pay—but, anyway, it doesn’t matter. We’re about to leave. Our flight’s tonight.”

  I wondered if she’d heard the laughing upstairs, before. She wasn’t smiling. “Do not,” she said.

  “Mrs.—Marjorie,” I said. “Thank you, but—”

  “Madame,” she said: I should not have presumed to use her first name.

  “Madame,” I tried. “We can’t just—our visas don’t—”

  This time I stopped again, but for a different reason. A knock on the glass. Was it Robert now? I didn’t look.

  “You lose the time,” she said.

  And I was losing time. If Robert was dead, why should we go back to Milwaukee? Maybe the manuscript wasn’t a clue but an exhortation: start! First stop, Paris, then, the world.

  Paris. It was real, and I was really here. Back in the States, back when I’d been younger, I remember thinking that if I ever did get to Paris, France, everything would be instant—I would be instantly fluent, instantly at home, instantly, fundamentally translated. But it hadn’t been like that, it wouldn’t be like that. It was like the hour hand of a clock, like a slow river that seems stopped until you put a finger to the surface of the water. Flowing toward me now, a bookstore. An apartment. Books, and a new life without Robert. And, strangely, with him.

  More knocking. I looked to the front of the shop. A tall man, not Robert. Two children, not mine. She started toward them, but then turned back to me. I studied her face, curious because it had changed, somehow . . . gotten younger? Perhaps the cream really did work.

  Or, I finally realized, it was because her mouth, just the corners, was it . . . ? It was—the barest start of a smile.

  “Madame Ea-dy,” she said, trying out my name as she put a hand to the door. “Commençons.” We begin.

  * * *

  —

  Or so Madame said then. But this is my story, not hers, and so it begins months later, with a theft.

  It is eight months since Madame has handed over the keys to the store and the empty apartment above, eight months since I have handed in my resignation at the university, seven months since I have made the twin discoveries that I love all books but not all customers, six months since Daphne and Ellie have fallen into a friendless French funk and begged to return stateside, five months since I asked them about flights home only to have them ask if I was crazy, four-plus months since our tourist visas have expired . . .

  And just two weeks since the customer retrieved that Central Time book of Robert’s from the window. The book with the scribbled I’m sorry, the message that made it strangely hard to keep pretending that he was dead, that he wasn’t in Paris, wasn’t watching us, wasn’t trying somehow to reach us and for some reason couldn’t do so directly. The message that meant everything, in other words.

  Unless it meant nothing at all.

  After that customer had presented me with Robert’s book, after I, in a stunned stupor, offered to sell it to her for half price, after I’d looked up and found the customer gone but the book still there, I’d come to my senses. Up the book went to my bedside table for safekeeping.

  But this proved a terrible choice, because Robert’s book woke me up, kept me up, night after night. It wasn’t just the I’m sorry, though I studied that plenty—were those his r’s? Didn’t he have a thing about using contractions? Did the y look particularly rushed?—it was the story itself. Again, the book was written for kids, but I could still read it and hear him, and more to the point, see him.

  Night after night, open or shut, the book buzzed. Robert said the book offered escape and yet I couldn’t escape it. So I moved it back down to the store, back to its usual place, in the window—bottom, left, front, bait.

  I convinced myself that was progress. I was moving on. For example, when standing at the register, I no longer felt the book looking back at me, a milestone I eventually chose to celebrate by going over to the window to look at it anew.

  It was almost a year to the day that he’d disappeared.

  The book was gone.

  We begin, Madame had said that first night in the store, but the truth is that this is when our life in Paris began, when R
obert’s book disappeared, and with it, so much else of what I’d believed about what our lives had been, and would be.

  PARIS,

  FRANCE

  CHAPTER 6

  Robert said that for many of his students, beginning was the hardest part. But for him, the beginning was the easiest, because he knew he’d always be able to come back later and edit. The only important thing about beginning was beginning; it’s when you finish that you realize where you really started. Or something like that.

  Robert and I began in a bar in Milwaukee. Or better to say that our family began a few years later in a house nearby. Or that our lives in Paris began on a quiet street lined with quiet stores, in a particular one whose broad window framed a yellowing and dusty tumult of books.

  Or maybe it’s better to begin not with the books, but the kids.

  The two children who’d been pounding at the glass that first day? They soon came to sit at the counter, coloring, reading—because Madame is their grandmother. More than that, she is their primary caregiver, a task that tires her.

  So this was why she needed help, this was why she had encouraged us to take the empty apartment above the store. We thought we were living out a narrative Robert had written us into; it turned out, Madame was writing us into hers, a story where she was slowly and steadily relieved of her burdens—these charming children, this charming store—by the magical woman and two daughters who arrived from America.

  Madame does not believe in fairy tales, and nor, for that matter, does Eleanor: it’s not a question of belief, I’ve heard Eleanor say more than once. But here is what I believe. Stories provide a frame, a form, a mold. And a good story, one that’s retold for generations, demands you pour the messy contents of your own life into it to see what happens as it hardens and sets.