Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  Eleanor raised her glass. “I had no idea I was prying,” she said. I looked at her. “I mean, I did. But I really was just curious if he was from Ireland, because—”

  “Iowa,” I said. “He’s in Paris studying for an MBA, but he’s from Iowa.”

  “Oh, for godsakes,” Eleanor said, and leaned back. “Why didn’t you say that in the first case? I taught there for a year. The world would be a better place if it was given over to Iowans. There’d be no more war, we’d go to bed on time and drive on very tidy roads, yielding every so often to proud and capable Amish and their carriages. We’d eat a lot more pork, true, but I found that, prepared well, it’s quite tasty.” She speared a fleshy square of orange-flecked red. “As is this,” she added. She nodded to the bottle, and so I poured her a final sip of wine, and then myself one, too. There was no way we’d make it back in time to welcome the girls home from school. I got out my phone to text Ellie, to tell her we were delayed, that Molly was manning the store, and that homework should be done before anything else.

  I felt Eleanor watching me but didn’t look up until I’d hit SEND.

  “Just Ellie,” I explained, waving the phone. I wanted to prove to Eleanor, if not myself, that I was the kind of mother who always kept her kids apprised of her whereabouts.

  “Do you talk to her about Robert?” Eleanor said. “She’s never been the fragile type, my goddaughter, but nonetheless—”

  “She’s a cool customer,” I said. “Not like Daphne.” My memory, merciless, flashed a picture of Daphne in the hospital, hot with fever.

  “Cool she may be, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t want to talk,” Eleanor said.

  “They both do,” I said. Flatly, because this was something I felt more than knew. Some days, I felt like we’d portioned out the stages of grief from one of those books: Daphne, to judge from her silences and haunted looks, had taken sadness; Ellie, anger; and I, of course, denial.

  The look on Eleanor’s face told me that she’d read my uncertainty perfectly. “May I show you something?” she asked, wiping her hands.

  “Please don’t,” I said.

  She reached for my phone and then handed it back to me. “Make it do the Internet thing.”

  “What?”

  “The—I hate this word—browser. Open the browser.” I did, and she took it back and painstakingly typed something in, waited for it to load, narrating what she was doing all the while. “You know Ellie’s class project? Photography.” I shook my head. “I wondered as much. She is, of course, very talented.” She handed the phone back. Ellie had produced a photo blog—Paris street scenes, close-ups of various addresses. I sighed with relief. So this was just about a blog (another awful word), about a hidden talent of Ellie’s that wasn’t hidden at all: I’d been through her phone the night before I’d gone to Ménilmontant. I’d known she was skilled, that she had an eye.

  “She is very talented,” I said, flicking through the photos. I liked how Ellie had avoided the usual suspects—no Eiffel Tower or Sacré Cœur here, just random businesses and signs around Paris. A certain weary bleakness pervaded. My kind of girl. Lamorisse’s, too, though she’d dispute that. But that wasn’t what Eleanor was getting at.

  “Leah,” Eleanor said gently, and took the phone. She put it flat on the table between us and began swiping through the photos once more. “Do you see?”

  I leaned closer. Had Eleanor—had Ellie—caught him on film, too?

  It took a moment, but then I saw what Eleanor saw. Not in every photo, not always in the center, but—there it was. I picked up the phone. And there. And there. The shoe store. The restaurant. The upholstery shop. On the door. The awning. The sign. The menu. Boutique Robert. Restaurant Robert et Louise. Robert Four. Chez Robert. Editions Robert. Robert et fils.

  “Oh my god,” I said to the phone, to Ellie, wherever she was. I looked around the sunny garden, at the happy twins, at the laundry on the line of the neighbor behind. I saw everything. But I’d not seen how my own child—my oldest—ached. I’d not seen how much she saw. “This is terrible,” I said, once I’d found my voice again.

  Eleanor shook her head. “It’s beautiful is what it is.” I put the phone down. I had to stop looking. “But it does mean—she misses him,” Eleanor said.

  “I know—I knew that—Eleanor, I’m not a monster—”

  “I know you know,” Eleanor said. “But I also know that they don’t know, not what happened to their father. And this is the result.” She turned the phone facedown before starting again. “Telling them that the police think—know—that he died, this isn’t going to be easier, especially at first, but eventually it will be better.”

  “And then, once we tell them he’s dead, Ellie will stop taking photos of ‘Robert’ around Paris?”

  “She may very well take them for the rest of her life. You should at least buy her a decent camera; she’s got a future.”

  “Eleanor—”

  “You all have a future. But if you don’t accept that he’s dead, then she won’t accept it, and Daphne won’t, and the mystery’s going to pull on all of you forever.” She picked up the phone and, with some increasingly hard tapping, figured out how to close the blog. “And down the line, pull in ways that may not be as beautiful as this.”

  So it was time.

  “Make your case,” I said quietly. “That he died.”

  Eleanor took a deep breath. I did, too, but it caught, and it was a moment before I could exhale.

  “It’s not mine,” Eleanor said, and took the folder out of her purse. The report inside was poorly written, but otherwise, all was as Eleanor said. A boat had been signed out. The same boat had been found. No body had been found, but since the “subject’s” disappearance, “no evidence of life,” online or off-, had been found either. It was the department’s recommendation that the surviving spouse petition the court to have “the missing person” declared dead, given that he had faced “imminent peril”—a 922-foot-deep Great Lake—and “failed to return.”

  I pushed the folder back to her. I didn’t say that what unsettled me most were his fingerprints. Not prints they’d lifted from any suspicious surface, but prints they’d had on file—I think from his driver’s license or passport. I couldn’t say, only that the whorl of lines, its interruptions and breaks, its careful contours, seemed so undeniably him, despite the fact that I’d never seen these prints before. They reminded me of his eyes, that burst of color in the one. They reminded me of him.

  “I don’t know what to think, Eleanor,” I said.

  She bent down and rustled through her purse, returning with a handkerchief, which she handed to me. I had no idea what to do with it. Ding, ding: that warning bell buses sound. I heard it now, that folder on Ellie’s phone. The one I’d not opened. “Dad.”

  Eleanor mimed patting her cheeks. I was crying.

  “Leah,” Eleanor said.

  I bent to my purse to look for tissues I knew weren’t there. But I kept looking, to hide my face, and I heard Eleanor leave the table, say something to the twins about “Nutella,” and then return. I heard the door to the restaurant creak open, slam shut, and then it was quiet. I straightened up.

  Eleanor looked at me carefully. “Okay, crying finished, children sated, Paris paused,” she said. “Now is your chance. Make your case. The police have made theirs. Hold forth.”

  After a moment, I began.

  “I don’t know what to say,” I said. “I mean, for months, I made myself believe he was dead. And up until the ‘clues’ or ‘signs’ or ‘hallucinations’—whatever we want to call them—up until those started arriving, I’d almost done it. I’d almost willed him dead, in my mind. I never believed it, not soul-deep, but I came to—understand it. Intellectually. It made sense.”

  “‘Sense,’” Eleanor repeated.

  “Until it didn’t make sense. Until pretendi
ng he was dead no longer made things easier, but stranger. That’s where I am now. That’s why this report . . .” Didn’t apply, I wanted to say, as though it was a matter of jurisdiction, as though what happened in Milwaukee had no bearing on Paris.

  “Leah, it’s just that—I’m worried that if you don’t—”

  “Eleanor—fine,” I said. “If you’ve come to Paris to get me to sign some form, and by signing that form, you think that Robert will indeed disappear, then I will sign it. We’ll delete him. He’s no more than a character in a manuscript, at this point, right? A film.”

  “Leah,” Eleanor said.

  “Because it’s easier to say that than to ask, what kind of man leaves his family like that? I’m not talking about the sheer burden of abandonment—the doubling of parental duties, the stress of not just doing all the laundry but dealing with every single fucking crisis that children can produce—I’m talking about the withdrawal of love. You fall for someone, he falls for you, you marry, and then he gets tired of it all and doesn’t have the decency to tell you. Or to die. Instead, he lingers on, he lurks, he haunts you, keeps you from moving on despite your very best efforts to do so. He decides to continue to live the life he had before, just this time from the other side of the window, outside looking in? The police say he’s dead. Can they also make sure he stops coming around?”

  “Leah,” Eleanor said again, just interruption enough to make me stop and think—why was he coming around? But I could also hear Eleanor say it: you, dear—the girls. He’s coming round because he loves you.

  But she wasn’t saying that. She was saying he was gone.

  “Eleanor,” I said. “I understand. They think he’s dead. Now you think he’s dead. And yes, I can understand this. I just can’t pretend to believe anymore. Where’s the evidence? I know the evidence is that there is no evidence, but—”

  “But there is . . . this,” Eleanor said. She pulled out another folder, hesitated, and then opened it and laid the contents between us. “I’m switching topics,” she said. “Or maybe not.”

  In another minute or so, we would grimace at each other, collect the twins, pay the bill, and march the whole way home hardly exchanging another word. She’d go to her lodgings and I to mine, and I’d see to dinner and bedtime alone, and then I’d descend to the little office behind the store, turn on the desk lamp, and sit there, surrounded by dust and dark, and open the folder once more.

  But that was all to come. There, then, in kind Mr. Erdem’s backyard, she looked at me looking at what she’d taken out—and then quickly apologized and began to stuff it back inside the folder. “Damn it,” she said. “That was awfully stupid.”

  * * *

  —

  It was. But it was my stupidity more than hers, and it started, or rather, ended, over a year ago, the day Robert quit writing.

  This was March, just weeks before he quit our family. I remember the day, the moment, quite specifically, as it was Daphne’s twelfth birthday. We were having an unusually large party. He made his announcement to me privately a few hours before the festivities were to start. I’m done, he said. I’m done with writing. With paper, with pens, keyboards, with—

  Great, I said. A pause followed. He said, I’m not sure you heard me, and though I had, I stopped and waited, because I also hadn’t. I was devoting a very small percentage of my brain to listening to Robert, in part because that had become my habit of late, in part because I was focused on the contents of our refrigerator: what did we still need to get at the store, what could be thrown out, what would I say if the photographer wanted to take a picture of this, too?

  The photographer. About which more in a moment, but for now, know that somewhere along the way, Robert’s agent—long gone at this point—had said that one problem plaguing my husband’s career was that he wasn’t enough of a “brand.” Not enough readers knew who he was.

  I had dutifully rolled my eyes, said my lines, but he’d shaken his head and said, Leah?

  That was all, but that was enough. I would become familiar with the tone, which mixed question with complaint, a tone familiar to more than one married couple in the world. But into Robert’s variation crept something new, something I hadn’t quite identified then but now think of as nostalgia, longing, loneliness. The way he said my name sometimes—the way he said it every time I’d not responded adequately to some existential plea—made me think for a moment that we weren’t speaking to each other in the same room but over a telephone line, long distance, back when it used to cost money: the voices muffled and anxious at every second that went expensively slipping by. I’d not gone anywhere, but it felt, even to me, like I’d moved away.

  And so I listened carefully when he said my name the morning of Daphne’s birthday, because the inflection mattered; Leah could mean “what did you think of that Times piece I sent you about that (successful/famous/wealthy/laureled) author” or “I didn’t sleep last night and can’t do the chore you just asked of me” or, as of that morning, “what’s going on?”

  Awkwardly, this. A neighbor who’d had success with a local neighborhood news blog—mostly because it featured photos of absolutely everyone in the neighborhood—was raising money to take it into print. She’d chosen my husband, minor celebrity (ever smaller) that he was, to be the debut cover subject and had sent an incredibly young reporter to interview him days before. Today a photographer was coming.

  This was bad timing, as it was not only Daphne’s birthday but her Golden Birthday, the magical date when your age aligns with the calendar date of your birth (Daphne, born on the twelfth, was turning twelve) and parents in Wisconsin and neighboring territories are obligated to make a massive fuss. Massive. It was to be a day without rival, something like Christmas and the Fourth of July crossed with the rare return of Halley’s Comet, except your Golden Birthday would never, ever come again. I knew parents who had booked restaurants and ponies, and had heard stories of twenty-one-year-olds who went to Las Vegas (and never returned). Ellie, when she had turned nine on the ninth, had asked us to fly her first-class to Disneyland. But we couldn’t afford that then, and we had even less money now. Daphne wanted a pony ride. Robert was offering, instead, a make-your-own-book party. He’d move our thirty-dollar inkjet printer down to the dining room table and everything!

  So it was not a good day for the photographer to come. But it was the only day the editor-neighbor could get the guy—she was bartering for him—and so she bribed me: what if she had an advertiser give us flowers? I hesitated. Lots of flowers, she said. I pointed out the house was crowded enough for this “golden birthday”—and then she squealed: an idea! A new nail place had been begging for exposure—how about an on-site “spa day” for Daphne and her little guests? The photographer would shoot Robert, then Daphne and her guests for a future story and—

  And so waivers had gone into the envelopes along with the invitations. Moms called with questions, but mostly thought it fun: tallying appearances in the blog was a local pastime. No one opted out.

  Except, that morning, Robert.

  I closed the fridge. His jobs today: retrieve the cake (on us) and flowers (free, but delivery not free), and sweep the porch. Easy. Much easier, anyway, than building a little pen for a pony in the backyard, which Daphne irrationally held out hope for: the pony could get a pedicure. They’d braid his mane.

  “Let’s not talk about quitting,” I said. “Even as a joke,” I added, giving him an out. I waited to see if he’d take it. He did not. I could be, and now was, inordinately proud of controlling my tone. Robert had no sense of timing whatsoever. He might hit on you as you were attempting to shoplift a children’s book, he might disappear from your life years later while out for a run, he might tell you he was quitting writing the day a magazine was coming to photograph him for a story about being a writer.

  “Not a joke,” he whispered.

  “Mom!” Ellie’s warning voice
, singing from the second floor: Daphne was experimenting with clothes. There was a photographer coming, after all. (As Ellie never let us forget, we had wound up at a local pizza place for Ellie’s golden birthday, not a photographer in sight.)

  “I’m not going to spoil the day,” Robert said, continuing to whisper, though no one else was around. “I just wanted you to know as soon as I knew.”

  I looked at him, incredulous at what I was hearing, incredulous at the almost excited look on his face.

  “You do know I’m proud of you,” I said, though I wasn’t. “No matter what,” I said, though this mattered right then, quite a bit.

  “Leah,” he said—that voice again. “No toolbox.” The therapist’s toolbox. At that point, I’d almost forgotten it. I was surprised he hadn’t. He’d given no “advance notice,” for example, that he’d decided to quit writing. I tried to remember if there was a hammer in the toolbox. If so, I might pull it out now. Did I “rely on humor” too much? No, because that wasn’t funny. So no hammer, but I did recall that we were to “speak affirmatively.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  A final item from the toolbox: holding each other’s hands during difficult moments or conversations (not “fights”). He reached out to take mine. I snatched it away.

  “This is not how couples fight,” I said.

  “We’re not fighting,” he said. “And I thought you’d be—I thought you’d be happy for me?”

  “Happy?” I wasn’t sure if this was more toolbox talk; the therapist had a thing about happiness: a false god or goal, or something like that. I couldn’t recall exactly. Contentment, equilibrium, that was what you were supposed to be after. “I’m happy when you’re working.”

  A breath.