Down we plummeted through Ménilmontant. One staircase, two. The baker disappeared.
A landing or so below, the two young men who’d been staring at me earlier roused and tackled the purse snatcher.
And then they seized my ally-of-the-moment, Monsieur le Champignon. I couldn’t tell why, although politicians had been battling with each other, and the police, about racial profiling; I hoped I wasn’t on the front lines of a skirmish here.
They released the thief first. He ran off, leaving behind the bag of money he’d stolen and my purse. They released Monsieur le Champignon second, who stood his ground and reached for the purse to give to me. They shouted at him; he shouted back. One held him at bay while the other went into bag and purse and extracted fifty euros from each.
They smiled and spoke. French, but with an accent I couldn’t source nor entirely understand. What’s more, their smiles, menacing, somehow deafened me, and Monsieur le Champignon, whom they were once again restraining—now with the help of a small knife—had to translate.
Monsieur le Champignon I understood easily: his English was perfect, as would befit a valedictorian from Roosevelt High School in Des Moines, Iowa. These details I learned later, along with his name, Declan.
At this point, though, Declan had more important information: he says this is their “pourboire”—their tip? Their finder’s fee. Have you called the police? You’re getting robbed twice. He turned to the men. Leave her alone, he said.
Then something happened, and suddenly Declan was bleeding, they were running, he was running after them.
And he would have caught them, too, had not two women from an Accueil et Surveillance squad, park rangers of a sort, stopped Declan. I caught up and tried to explain who really was at fault, but unfortunately played my role—frightened, confused American—too well, and they started shouting at Declan. He answered them evenly. They frowned. I frowned. I’d understood what he’d said well enough to know his French was letter-perfect.
I tried some of my own less-perfect French, and they turned, softened: ah, an Américaine. Then they shouted at Declan again. He started to respond, and then stopped, coughed, and restarted. This time I understood him better, though (or because) his French had gotten worse, his accent much more American.
The rangers exchanged a glance before addressing Declan again, not shouting now: vous êtes Américain aussi?
Yes, he said, in English, it seems we’re both Americans. The rangers took a deep breath, shook their heads, as though to take it all in. Americans in Ménilmontant: what will happen next?
A hospital, I thought, but Declan whispered to me, say we’re fine, and so I did, and then I sat. Beside Declan, so I could see his wound—just beneath his chin, it was hardly an inch, but gaped open terribly. I decided that it would need stitches but that those stitches would mend well, and the scar would give him character, though he hardly needed more of that.
* * *
—
After moving to Paris and taking over a bookstore, I read fewer and fewer books about Paris. And far fewer, about anything, by men. Shelley, the retired teacher from New Orleans, encouraged me in this. Some weeks, when I would hand over whatever book I’d picked out for her that week—and for her, gender (or genre) didn’t matter, so long as it was set in Paris—she would hand me a book in return, usually one she’d brought with her from Louisiana. To a degree, she filled Robert’s old role, bookgiver in chief. But her inspiration was more mundane than Robert’s ever had been. Her houseboat could accommodate only so large a library, she said, before it would sink; she couldn’t take on more books without offloading others. Whatever the cause, Shelley is how I came to develop a crush on Alice Mattison (American, b. 1941), who in one story writes of a high school teacher whose class “found sex everywhere, even the Gettysburg Address. But it was more than that. If spiders made love on a window . . . they’d pick Ms. Feldman’s window.”
What I mean is, I’m not sure Declan and I would have noticed each other in Winnipeg. Or Milwaukee. But in Paris, in the aftermath of a mugging, I found myself helplessly noting his looks, and that he’d noted mine. And of course, in France, there was another crucial detail that had not been true in Milwaukee (nor Winnipeg, though I did want to visit there thanks to another author Shelley once handed me, Carol Shields).
“A bookstore?” Declan said. “You own a bookstore in Paris?”
During our post-police discussion, I’d kept things focused on him, at least until my phone had started chiming with texts and I’d announced that I had to get back to the store.
What store? Bookstore. Really?
Really. I told him the name, the address. I told him about our Bemelmans display. I told him about what had drawn me to Ménilmontant (that is, I’d told him about The Red Balloon, not about Robert). I felt myself losing my way—and so skipped ahead; I told him to stop by the store sometime. I did caution him that “it’s not what you think,” but I didn’t know what he thought, not really. His tone was a mixture of admiration, envy, surprise—familiar enough, at least coming from Americans, but to this he added a new, fresh, slightly unsettling ingredient: hunger.
“It’s exactly what I think,” he said, and I have often wondered since exactly what he meant, if he knew how those words stole from his mouth and over to me, in and around my ears, down my neck to my spine, and then skittered all the way, all the way down me, like spiders.
Oh, Ms. Feldman, I thought.
But of course the only person to blame for what happened next was me.
* * *
—
More unpleasant, or unsettling, than spiders: Ellie asking how I’d enjoyed Ménilmontant.
This, though I had decided not to mention anything about my adventure; I said I was late because I’d gotten turned around on the Métro, a known weakness of mine. (I use it too infrequently; I love this city and can’t see it from underground.)
But Ellie’s ability to pin me down—geographically, at least—was not a known strength of hers. How had she known where I was?
“Here,” Ellie said, fingers fox-trotting across her phone. A giant pulsing red dot appeared. That was distracting enough that I missed the background picture—which was a satellite map of our street, rue Sainte-Lucie-la-Vierge, with us in the bull’s-eye. “See, it’s found you.”
This took a moment. “You can track me?” I asked.
“Could you be a little less surprised?” Ellie said. “You asked for this feature when we signed up for the plan.”
“I did?”
“Oui,” Ellie said. “You bought the forfait familial, right? Then it’s automatic with all our phones.”
Ellie looked away, but the shame was wholly mine. Of course she tracked me. She was already down one parent. She turned back, tried out a smile: “So,” she said, “what’d you find?”
CHAPTER 8
People complain it’s hard to find things in our store, but others say that’s what they like about our store. When I took it over, years of neglect meant that there was almost no organizational system evident whatsoever. I enlisted the girls’ help to reshelve things by genre and then alphabetically by author, but Ellie complained it was taking too long and suggested we do something she’d seen in a magazine: shelve everything by color. Daphne said that was stupid, Ellie said she was stupid, Daphne said Dad would think it was stupid, and then I intervened and said the first thing that came to me—that we’d organize the store by country. Because what organization we had inherited consisted of a single bookcase featuring books about Paris.
It worked. That is, it shut the girls up. It’s a strange way to organize a store and I recommend it to no one. Genres get jumbled and disputes abound: should Shakespeare sit by Thomas Mann? Yes, if it’s The Merchant of Venice and Death in Venice. But Hamlet goes next to Kierkegaard. Graham Greene’s Quiet American sits by Marguerite Duras’s The Lover and some waterlog
ged Lonely Planet guides to Vietnam. Greene’s Power and the Glory, on the other hand, goes next to Octavio Paz in Mexico. In short, suspect judgment rules. Chess books, Russia. Space exploration, United States. Physics, Germany. Ellie puts books she can’t find a place for in Switzerland and, because she’s still attached to her original suggestion, books with green covers (and occasionally Graham G. himself) in Greenland. Daphne’s catch-all is Antarctica; she’s also the author of little signs around the store that invite indignant browsers to reshelve books as they see fit.
I honestly think our system, capricious as it is, sells more books. I guarantee the man who came in looking for Thirty Seconds over Tokyo hadn’t meant to buy Basho’s Narrow Road (or a tattered copy of James Clavell’s Shogun, for that matter), for example, but he did.
* * *
—
That said, with Declan coming, I had a sudden urge to rearrange the entire store in some more professional manner so it would look like I knew what I was doing. He’d been so impressed: you own a bookstore in Paris? It would be awkward if he mistook the shop for performance art.
He didn’t, but things still quickly grew uncomfortable the day he came by. Daphne had joined me to homework-procrastinate. (And to check if Ellie had moved Little Women away from Massachusetts to Paris, which she regularly did to drive Daphne crazy.)
Declan and I exchanged greetings, and I told Daphne I’d met him in Ménilmontant.
“How?” Daphne asked.
I didn’t believe in Robert’s telepathy, but I do believe in empathy, and when Declan looked at me and Daphne, he understood what to say next: nothing about muggers or bakers, which was good, because I’d told the girls nothing about that aspect of my trip to Ménilmontant. Declan rumbled through something, in English, about how he—or I—or we—had been looking for the Métro. Daphne nodded to me, and said to him she’d never been in that neighborhood but she’d heard that it was hard to find the Métro stops up there.
She said this in French, which was a test. A simple one, administered hundreds of times across Paris every day. Do you speak French? That question is never asked directly; rather, a shopkeeper or waiter or baker speaks to you in French and you answer in French or you don’t.
But beyond shouting the obligatory bonjour, we never administered it in our store. Or I didn’t. What was Daphne up to? Declan responded in French. I listened. Declan kept talking. What was he up to? Daphne responded, French conversation ensued.
“You speak excellent French,” Declan finally said to Daphne, in English.
Equally fluent in nonverbal French, Daphne twitched her lower lip (disdain, mild to medium) and turned to me, chin slightly raised. I’m not that fluent, so I wasn’t sure what the chin meant, though it seemed to be a mixture of pride, curiosity, and something along the lines of I think you think he’s cute.
It looked like Daphne was about to soundlessly add, what’s going on here?—so I quickly said to Declan, aloud, “they both do.”
“Both?” he said.
And the pang I felt then was unfamiliar to me—why should I feel embarrassed to admit that I had children? Because I’d be less of a catch? I didn’t realize, not quite, that I was looking to be caught.
“My kids,” I said. “I have two.”
Daphne watched our exchange with extreme care. I could see her slow down the film we were all in so that she could monitor each syllable that came out of our mouths and every crease in our faces. We were on the cusp of finding her father, I think she thought. She had already seen him around town. But now something else was happening. What?
I wanted to know, too.
Declan, because he had a sense of decorum, or timing, turned to Daphne and asked her, quite formally, if he might borrow me for a while—he’d helped me find the Métro entrance up in Ménilmontant, he said, but I had helped him buy his ticket when he found he was short on change. He now wanted to repay the favor and buy me coffee.
I found myself a tiny bit in awe. He’d invented a perfectly plausible story on the spot, pretended he (and I) needed Daphne’s permission to leave, and he’d paid Daphne the great respect of continuing to speak to her in immaculate French.
Or what I thought of as immaculate. It was a great embarrassment to the girls how my language skills lagged behind theirs. It was a great inconvenience to me. I had taken lessons offered by the city, by people who’d plastered flyers on poles, by a woman in Beirut who taught via Skype. I usually lasted one or two sessions. I was too advanced to begin where they always wanted to begin, and too much a beginner to do things like Daphne was doing now, correcting Declan’s French: the verb he’d used for repay wasn’t correct, she explained.
“Daphne,” I said. I meant to scold her, but what I mostly felt was envy.
But she only had eyes, clear and alert ones, for him, and he for her.
“And,” she said, ignoring me, “nous sommes quatre.” With that, she bid us adieu and went to return Little Women to its place alongside Dickinson, Thoreau, and Carl Yastrzemski.
* * *
—
“Why did she say ‘we are four’?” Declan asked as we settled into a sidewalk café nearby.
The fourth member of my family—Robert—flashed before me, but fortunately, so did our waiter, who took our order and returned moments later. Cups, saucers, spoons were quickly and quietly arrayed before us with all the precision of a dinner at Versailles. You don’t have to tip, insist the American guidebooks I grudgingly stock. They want Americans to think they’re supposed to leave a tip, but you don’t have to; they’re paid perfectly well. I tip. I am American. The system relies on someone overpaying. Even when I receive bad service—when I am ignored—I’m comfortable with paying for that, too. No one checked on me for an hour; I was able to finish a book plucked from our Hoosier shelf, George Sand’s Indiana.
Declan’s question hung in the air, but to answer it would have been to break a sidewalk café rule, one almost as strict as not tipping: don’t speak, not at first. Acclimate. Survey your surroundings. I did. Paris cafés force you to; the seating unerringly faces the street. Attempting to rearrange things so you face your companion isn’t so much forbidden as it is impossible, given how little clearance exists between tables.
In front of us, a sanitation worker in green coveralls banged by with a cart, followed by three impossibly tall, alarmingly young women—models?—all in white. I like to watch people watch people in Paris; it’s a hobby, like bird-watching, a study of color and carriage. I like to see what attracts, who distracts. I myself was so distracted by these three—were they triplets?—I failed to see that Declan was staring, not at them but, patiently, at me.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“Not at all,” Declan said. I waited for him to begin a new conversational gambit, but no. We are four. I’d have to do the math for him, and so I did, explaining how Daphne had added two sisters and two twins to make “four,” how four children might as well be forty, but not really, because they were all so well-behaved—most of the time, anyway, and—
And maybe because he heard me stumbling, he finally did decide to change the subject, segueing into a riff on all the badly behaved kids he encountered in his role as a study-abroad program fixer—his job was to get students to and from the airport, help them jump lines at the Louvre, extricate them from disputes with landlords, bouncers, and occasionally, the police.
I asked what sort of training prepared him for such a job, and he smiled and said none that he’d done. He’d started, and quit, a JD, an MFA in poetry, an MAT with a focus on French. Now he was enrolled in an international MBA program, which he was enjoying more than he’d thought he would.
“Really?” I said.
He laughed, not a happy laugh. “Maybe not,” he said, and looked around. “But I’m enjoying France.”
“Even when the phone rings at 2:00 A.M.?” I don’t know why I wa
s pressing; some of Daphne’s latent animosity must have infected me on the way out. “Sounds hellish.”
We were at an outdoor café, the coffee was fine, we wouldn’t be troubled for the bill for another six hours unless we summoned the waiter ourselves, and when the bill came, it would only be a few euros. Cheaper than Starbucks in Milwaukee. It wasn’t raining.
This is all a long way of saying what Declan then said more directly: “I have my problems with Paris, but this is no hell.”
I liked him. Not just because he’d rescued me in Ménilmontant, but because he was rescuing me here, again, in the Marais. The stakes were lower now, or higher; there was no immediate crisis, just a lingering one. I had my daughters, I had the twins, I had my three customers-cum-friends, I had the elderly Madame Brouillard, but I was lonely, and I was in Paris.
Paris can feel like a city of pairs. Not just romantic pairs, though it has those in abundance, but friends going arm in arm down the sidewalk, catching a quick word outside the tabac, laughing on the way up the Métro stairs, bending toward each other at tiny tables like ours. The cynic says the tables are the diameter of a dinner plate because they want to cram so many in; the romantic, or maybe the realist, believes it’s just part of a long-running Paris social experiment: force them to sit just inches apart, and let’s see if they really talk.
But I was out of practice with small talk. My three “friends” were no good at it. Carl was like radio; you were just supposed to listen. Shelley, perhaps because she lived by herself, was comfortable with quiet, and some weeks, we’d exchange books but barely ten words. I’d liked that. More, anyway, than when Molly came in and demanded more gossip than I ever had.
Beyond the store—I should have made friends, but hadn’t. Hanging out with expats would have required discussing life back home, which would have required discussing Robert. Hanging with French friends would have required French.
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