So I didn’t know what to say. I looked around. The city really does look different when you are with someone. And I was. And I should have just enjoyed that. I was enjoying that. And so was he, by the looks of things. I asked him about grad school. Des Moines. His work. He told me about being nervous about what came next.
Because I was nervous about the exact same thing, I took that as my cue and told him about the store, Milwaukee, my life. I said I’d lost my husband. I lowered my eyes. Not because I was pious or even pretending to be, though it would be convenient if it looked that way. The truth was—the truth was that I had lost Robert, and more disorientingly, lost my means of thinking about him. After my coffee with Daphne, I could no longer pretend, to myself, that Robert was gone forever. I looked up now to see if I could still sell the story to strangers. Declan looked somber. And unlike me, trustworthy. I wanted to ask him, to tell him, the thing is, I don’t know. I used to tell myself he was dead, but only because it was easier. Now it’s not.
“That’s gotta be hard,” he said. “And with kids . . .”
Kids, yes. The girls. A steady anxiety, but also a handy transition, and so I launched into a single-parenting confessional I hadn’t known I’d had in me: something about food, cooking, diet, dieting, everyone ate well in Paris but me. I should do better by my girls. And those twins.
“It’s like they speak a different language, kids,” Declan said. “I mean, I’m not that old. . . .”
He paused. I’m not sure if he wanted me to ask, or protest, or—what I felt most keenly—if he wanted me to blurt out my age. I did not.
“You’re making an odd face,” he said. Odd? I wanted a mirror to see what odd meant. How many wrinkles crosshatched the corners of my eyes, my mouth.
Declan’s own mouth was slightly agape now; he was waiting for me to say something. Anything.
I opted for the latter.
“Well, speaking of odd,” I said, “of different languages? Up in the park, you spoke this beautiful French to those policewomen who were hassling you, and then you changed something, not just your accent but how well you spoke. You suddenly sounded like you didn’t really know French well. You sounded American. You sounded like—” I was going to say me, but his face had turned “odd,” too, that open mouth now closed, lips set in a line.
“Whom they preferred me to sound like,” he finally said.
“Why would they not want you to speak French well? I’m sure the one thing this city wants from me more than anything else is to speak French perfectly.”
Declan leaned back. I thought I saw a smile arrive, but then it left, and he looked somber. “The ‘city’ wants different things in different places. From different people.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Not okay,” Declan said. “The problem up there in Ménilmontant is that I was speaking French too well. I was speaking like I’d been speaking it all my life, like I’d grown up in Africa. And for Africans here—hell, even black people born in Paris—it can sometimes be a rough ride. As you saw. So I put on my American accent.”
I picked up my cup to sip at it, to stall, but among the many French skills I’ve not mastered is how to nurse a drink—coffee, wine, whatever—two, three slugs, and I am done. Part of the reason is the dollhouse crockery used here. Part of it, then, was how thirsty I was.
“I get taken for American all the time,” I said, “and that’s not always great.”
“Your country has done a lot of stupid shit.”
“But you’re American, too.”
“I’m a black American. Paris has been better to, and for, black Americans for years. Jazz, G.I.’s, but even before that. It’s not parfait—”
“Though your French is,” I said.
“It’s good. I’m proud of it. Look, I am fluent,” he said. “But I still make mistakes. So does France. So does Paris.” He took up his café. “I suppose I shouldn’t love it. And sometimes I don’t.”
“And now?” I said.
“Now,” he said, “I do.” He looked at me.
I stared at my cup. Empty, no reflection, and none needed. I knew how I felt: embarrassed. And excited.
And suddenly, quite young.
“How old are you?” I said.
* * *
—
“Forty?” Daphne said later that night after I’d returned home. In the wake of Declan’s visit to the store, Ellie had asked how old he was, and Daphne had ventured a guess after the twins, who had guessed 107.
“Thirty-one!” I said. Daphne was too young to be a good judge of age, but I corrected her too rapidly. Not so much that she noticed, but Ellie definitely did.
“You asked him his age?” Daphne said.
“It came up,” I said.
“That seems like a very personal thing to ask,” Daphne said.
“Did you tell him how old you were?” asked Ellie.
“How old are you?” asked Peter.
“We’re getting off topic,” I said.
“No, you are,” Ellie said. “I thought we were looking for Dad.”
“Our dad is in Beijing!” Annabelle said.
“Ellie,” I said, “listen.”
Ellie shook her head and, as had become our custom for discussions involving the ever-absent George, took Peter and Annabelle over to an old globe that spun in a corner of the store.
“It wasn’t a date,” I said to Daphne, though I needed to say it to Ellie, now out of earshot.
Daphne looked confused. “What wasn’t?”
“Coffee with that man, the man who helped me. Declan. He was just saying thanks.” Or was I? I couldn’t remember the cover story.
Daphne nodded, looked over at Ellie, who still had her back to us.
“Did you tell him about Dad?” Daphne asked.
Even a split-second pause would say the wrong thing, so I immediately said yes.
Which turned out to be the wrong thing.
Daphne smiled. “Good,” she said, and pulled a much-folded piece of paper from her pocket. A new clue? “Because it sounds like he could help us find him.”
It was not a clue, but a map, albeit one Daphne thought might just lead us to more clues. The map appeared on a flyer that had been dropped off at the store earlier, advertising an opportunity to “walk in the feetsteps of Madeline.” Never mind that in his books, Ludwig Bemelmans sent Madeline and her classmates back and forth across all Paris, gamboling in the Tuileries on one page and then three kilometers away atop Montmartre the next. Never mind that an obsession with Bemelmans ran deeper in Ellie than Daphne. I’d followed my obsession with Lamorisse to Ménilmontant, and I’d not come back with their dad.
Worse, I’d come back with another man entirely.
“Can we take the tour?” Daphne asked, five words, one breath.
“Daphne,” I started to say. Ellie and the twins were returning from the globe. In a moment, I’d hear from Ellie that it had been a bad idea for me to go to Ménilmontant, just as it had been a bad idea for Ellie herself to go, just as it had been a bad idea for us to come to Paris, the globe was out of date, it was stupid to organize the store by countries, and: men were idiots.
But for now it was still quiet, still just Daphne and me, still enough time for Daphne to whisper and be heard by me alone: “I think he found the note.”
“Who—what note, sweet girl?” I said.
“The one on the pillow,” Daphne said. The one in Milwaukee, she meant, the one I didn’t leave. The one that said what Daphne said now. “‘Meet us in Paris!’”
I looked at her. I looked to see if I could see the abandoned daughter I had been after my parents had died, my brain simmering in constant low-level frenzy, where are they where are they now I just need to ask to say I just need to know if—
Daphne did not look like this. Her eyes glinted, her no
se crinkled. She had no reason, she said, to think what she thought; she just had a feeling, she said, you know?
She—she actually did this—she smiled.
All I could do was nod.
I’m sure it looked like I was agreeing, though all I knew now was how much I didn’t know. I didn’t know why Ellie was angry. I didn’t know what—or whom—Daphne thought she was seeing around Paris. I didn’t know why Declan had been in Ménilmontant, nor why seeing him after for coffee felt like a date, which it definitely wasn’t.
I told myself the police had still found no clues—no trace—none. I told myself to keep holding out for proof. Proof: not perhaps-sightings or false twinges or notes left on a pillow or scribbled in a book.
I told myself to remember what was real and what was not.
I told myself to ignore the fact that, increasingly, I could not.
* * *
—
Realizing this, I should have proceeded more cautiously. But what was incautious about agreeing to go on a Madeline walking tour in three weeks’ time? Or to go out with Declan for a “nice” meal a week before the tour? His idea. Strictly business. We’d discuss the upcoming Madeline tour. Just from the looks of the flyer, it seemed like we could do a better job, he said. My local expertise, your book expertise . . .
Not that expert, I protested, but what I really wanted to protest, to discuss, was another smaller word, we. What were we up to?
I wondered exactly that as an opaque glass door slid open in the first arrondissement and we stepped into the Ballon Rouge, a restaurant that I’d read about—who hadn’t?—but never visited. Though the name, in this context, referred to a particular type of wineglass, Declan felt very clever about his invitation: once he’d discovered my interest in Lamorisse, the man and film had become a steady subject. Declan also seemed quite pleased to insist on the meal being his treat.
It was early afternoon and the restaurant was empty. We were seated by the sommelier, a bald man in a tight black T-shirt. He wore a monocle I belatedly realized was a tattoo.
He and Declan were business school classmates, I discovered. I wondered if they’d done a case study on flowers, their cost and effect. In the center of the room, beneath a cylindrical skylight wide enough to accommodate a Titan rocket, bloomed what looked like ten thousand flowers. Purple, purple, every last shade. Lavender hydrangeas foamed out of pots. Indigo delphiniums shot lancelike from impossibly tall and slender glass vases. Orchids. Dahlias. And also fat pink peonies with faces as furrowed—and as big—as the girls’ the day they were born. The prix fixe here was 250 euros a person; with wine, I’d seen reports it could climb as high as 1,000 euros. As it turned out, today’s bill—as Declan knew going in—would be zéro; the restaurant was testing its late-spring menu with “friends and family.”
“Even the wine’s free,” Declan said as a bottle arrived. Wine? We were having wine. I thought I should decline—coffee was one thing but wine another, and—and I told myself to calm down. And that the wine would help me do that.
The sommelier showed us the label, which we nodded over dutifully. I smiled up at him, he grimaced down. We were doing something wrong, but I didn’t really care; I’ve always felt, in exchanges like this at Paris restaurants, particularly over wine, that it’s my job to do something wrong. To do otherwise is to dash expectations, deny the sommelier some righteous pleasure, the kitchen some titters. The cork came out with a loud thwop and Declan pushed his glass toward the sommelier, who smiled and shook his head and nodded to me. Declan smiled. I smiled. We were all smiling. The sommelier emphatically splashed some wine into my glass. As I reached for it, I considered that I’d not seen enough female sommeliers in France, how there needed to be more, how I might myself study to become one. I watched as the wine surged up the sides, caught all the light in the room and—
The sommelier lifted the glass to his lips, sipped, chewed, nodded, and finally meted out a tiny smile. Then he decanted the rest of the bottle into a large wide-bottomed carafe that looked like it had been stolen from a laboratory.
I held up my glass. “To business school,” I said.
“And Paris,” Declan said.
“And wine.”
“And food,” Declan said, as the first plates arrived.
* * *
—
Part of what makes it hard to cook in Paris—apart from the fact that every last soul here does it better than I do—is that Robert was our chef at home.
Fatherhood brought this out in him. Prior to children, I don’t remember what we ate, or his taking much of an interest in food. I think we drank most of our calories. But when I became pregnant with Ellie, he became one of those dads who, abetted by too much time in the OB waiting room with too many maternity magazines, nags his wife to eat better. And I became one of those wives who bristled at the guilt being served. I said if he wanted us—me and the baby—to eat better, he could shop and cook. He considered this, and apologized for not figuring it out sooner. No better place to start proving himself fit to be a parent than in the kitchen.
And so we ate fresh, we ate healthy, we ate global. As the girls grew, he expanded his efforts. Banh mi for lunch, zipped into their reusable lunch bags. Borscht for dinner, ladled into their unbreakable bowls. Sometimes we’d have Eleanor over, and Robert and the girls would play cooking show: they were the cooks, Eleanor the celebrity guest (I was the audience). She ate it up. They ate it up.
Saturday, they’d set off to farmers’ markets, ethnic markets, libraries. Cookbooks came and went, and with them, trends. We ate vegan, we ate paleo, gluten-free, pesca-centric, Afro-centric. We ate equatorial. We ate tropical. Raw. Grilled. One-pot meals. Ten-plate tapas. Slow cookers. Flash-fryers. I had matching aprons made for them and he bought the girls floppy white chef’s toques. They wore all this with pride. I was proud of them—and Robert in particular. They were making meals, but also memories. I ignored the voice in my head that said that this was what procrastination tasted like.
* * *
—
Whenever Robert went away, we ate leftovers, or what the girls called, not quite disparagingly, “mom meals.” But the girls and I had actually eaten relatively well since coming to France, mostly because it was impossible not to. We’d never eaten as well as Declan and I did at the restaurant, though, and given the price, I knew I never would again. First Declan’s friend had brought vegetables—tiny plate after tiny plate. White and green asparagus, then a creamy concoction studded with little green jewels that turned out to be frozen peas. Cucumber in sesame oil. Then on to the fish: tuna with lemon, followed by a butter custard garnished with smoked salt. A ceramic spoon bore us a single bite of sea bass, here swashbucklingly called loup de mer, wolf of the sea. Chard and onions. A clear soup, bouillon, boring until the first sip, when it turned out to be—coconut. Basque veal. And now, ginger, two cubes. One a solid raw chunk, the other solid sorbet. Strawberry mille-feuille.
I finished not just full, but exhausted. Eating this meal was as physically passionate a thing as I’d done since coming to France. That I sensed that this had not been “strictly business” gave the meal an even greater charge, and when Declan offered to walk me home, I surprised us both by hailing a cab and pulling him into it. We needed to—see some books, now.
But because he is always keeping an eye out for me, even, or especially when I wish he would not, Laurent, my UPS man, was lying in wait. He’d been trying to make the day’s delivery, and I wasn’t in the store, and Madame wouldn’t come down.
I apologized, but Laurent didn’t quite listen; he was busy watching Declan head into the shop with a box he—Declan—had offered to take inside. I’m fairly certain that was against the rules, but Laurent had never been one to turn down help. He’d accepted Peter’s and Annabelle’s offers before.
“This is good you hire a man,” he said once Declan was inside.
“He’s just a friend,” I said.
“This is good you hire a friend,” Laurent said. He gave a little smile. I was a little drunk. After pouring our first glasses, the sommelier had said, in English, that the wine would be like “licking silk.” It had been.
“That’s all?” said Declan, already returning.
“Maybe not,” Laurent said. He turned to fiddle with the roll door for a while—just to make things awkward—and then finally nodded, once, raised his eyebrows, and drove away.
“He’s interesting,” Declan said.
“He brought me flowers the first week,” I said. “An opening gift. And then flowers the second week, at which point I woke up and saw that he was looking for a date.”
“Oh,” Declan said, as flummoxed as I suddenly was.
I’d spoken without thinking this through. During conversations with Declan subsequent to my first, I had built a tidy wall around Robert. He went only by “my husband” and I stuck to my first story, the simple story: I lost him. In doing so, I was only telling Declan what I told any other stranger: I lost my husband very suddenly, very young. And they would look at the ring I still wore (just the simple wedding band) and say, such a tragedy, and the matter would rest. Or they would ask, how? And I would say, I’d rather not talk about it. And the matter would rest.
Madame Brouillard knew more—slightly more. I hadn’t even told her that Robert was an author. I’d simply said that I’d had a husband, he’d disappeared. And when she asked how, I said the police suspected suicide and that I did, too. She herself was the one who urged me to start saying aloud something I’d only said in my head: he died.
Otherwise, le récit vous suit, Madame said: the story follows you.
She was right, but looking across at Declan, I realized she was also wrong. The story followed regardless. The goal was to make sure it didn’t outpace you.
Paris by the Book Page 14