I put it now in the window with a little sticker that said, in English, FREE.
I looked at my watch; time for some tea, maybe the computer. E-mail from the U.S. usually didn’t start arriving until late afternoon, Paris time, which I liked—it gave me a chance to clear out my inbox before the next batch arrived. It was mostly spam anyway. I had few Parisian e-mail correspondents; France, like Ellie, seemed to have moved on to texting long ago. But still, I received a few French e-mails every day, usually from Electre, this magical online service that helps stores like ours reach millions more readers (or it would if I could figure it out) and advertisers like Bongo (which sells gift cards—in Belgium—in boxes; it seems to make a difference).
And today, an e-mail with no subject line.
E-mail could count as “advance notice,” that long-ago therapist said. Here’s something I want to talk about. I said that sounded like an avoidance strategy—it is an avoidance strategy—but it’s true, just scanning your inbox headers gives the eye, the mind, a moment to think.
Sometimes, especially if the subject line is blank, it’s not long enough.
Leah, it’s been so long, too long, so long I don’t know if I can explain
Or you decide that you don’t want to read it at all, that you’re so overcome with disbelief you’re forced outside of your body, and thus unable to do anything more than stand there and watch yourself click DELETE.
Which is what I did.
A message from Robert had arrived in my inbox and I had deleted it.
The kettle whistled and I got up and turned it off. I rooted about for some tea, and settled on chamomile. It wasn’t until the water began puddling on the floor, scorching my feet, that I realized I was completely missing the cup, and then I set down the kettle and looked at the floor, where I noticed the cup in shards. It must have fallen—when, I couldn’t say.
Perhaps, too, the person who was sending the e-mail was not Robert but someone impersonating him—his real name was embedded in the e-mail address, but it wasn’t any of his old e-mail addresses—in which case I’d been perfectly right to delete it.
But it wasn’t an impersonator.
It really was Robert.
And I really knew this because once I found my way back to the computer and looked and found that folder I’d never explored much before—the Trash—I rescued his e-mail from there and opened it. It was brief, so brief that one could make the case that nothing there provided evidence this was indeed him. One could make the case, but I wouldn’t. Because it was finally too much. And because no one would have more cause to impersonate Robert than Robert himself: he had done so for years.
It was Robert, then, and he was writing me, and he was promising that we would see each other soon.
Robert.
What surprised me now was how much this hurt.
Where was—joy? Or relief, or even some indignant pride? I had been right. The girls had been right. He was alive!
He was alive, and that hurt, because that meant he’d been alive all this time. It meant that he’d only leave again.
Because that’s what he wrote:
Leah, it’s been so long, too long, so long I don’t know if I can explain it, even to myself. I do know I want to try. And so even though this is short notice, and probably too much to ask, I think we should meet soon, before I go. I really do—
I fixated on those last three words, I really do, because those were what convinced me, that painful, awkward earnestness. It was Robert. And fixating on those last three allowed me to not fixate, not just yet, on the three before, before I go.
I opened a window to write a reply and then closed it.
How do you write someone who no longer exists? He wasn’t dead—Eleanor could argue with me, and maybe the police, too, but I knew, just as the girls had known these past months in Paris. He was alive. Here was this e-mail. But I also knew that the Robert I’d known, the man I’d married, even if he showed his face, even if I touched him, that Robert wouldn’t be there. I’m making it sound like a question of physics; it’s not. It’s just time plus distance, times Paris, minus love . . .
Maybe it is physics. Physics is the most mind-bending of the sciences, and I was having a hard time bending my mind around this fact: Robert, alive.
Not only alive, but apparently feeling emboldened enough to flit back into our lives. And out again.
I opened the reply window once more. The cursor waited.
He was in Paris?
Those two words he’d written—meet soon—made it sound so.
Although Chicago was only eight hours by air.
Timbuktu, just seven.
He could be anywhere.
He was here.
He was right here, and I was going to meet him.
No. No?
No; or not yet, because what I needed to do first was call Eleanor.
* * *
—
And Eleanor’s first thought was to call the embassy: they could send Marines. That’s who the ambassador called on in an emergency, and if this wasn’t one, what was?
But what was this? That was the question Eleanor returned to once she’d settled down. When I called her hotel, she’d flown to the store, brusquely kicked out a customer, and studied the e-mail with her reading glasses on and then with them off.
“People impersonate other people online all the time,” she said.
“All this time, he was alive,” I said. “Is alive.”
“Neither of us are the least bit good with computers,” she said, staring at the screen. “It’s really not for us to say if this is genuinely him.”
“It is for me to say. I’m his wife. Eleanor? It took me too long to accept the truth, but I did. I was right.”
Eleanor, who’d arrived shaken, turned paler still. “And if I have my chronology right,” Eleanor said, “the girls were ‘right’ before you. Or rather, they were never wrong. Because they never convinced themselves he was dead.”
I shook my head; I wasn’t sure where this was going, but wanted to stop it before it went where it shouldn’t. “Eleanor—”
I didn’t have to even finish the thought.
“Of course. Absolutely not,” Eleanor said. “They can’t see him. Not this meeting. Not until we know it is him.”
“It is!”
“Do you—do you want me to meet him?” Eleanor said, sounding uncharacteristically unsure.
“Do you want to meet him?”
She shook her head.
“No, I do not,” she said. “I would do this for you, because I would do anything for you, but I do not want to meet him because I am enraged at him. I have that luxury. I am not his wife. I am not the mother of his children. I can indulge a pure, uncomplicated anger.” She flared her nostrils, I think unconsciously. Had Robert actually been there, a brick across the head couldn’t have hurt him more than the stare she now summoned. “What I think is also entirely beside the point. How do you feel?”
I felt queasy and nervous, furious and afraid, sad, and most unexpectedly, somewhere deep in my feet, a tremor that felt like the first flutterings of—what could not be happiness. And yet.
“Very strange,” I said.
Eleanor looked at the e-mail one more time, scrolling up and down, deliberating. She asked if I’d gotten other e-mails. I checked; I hadn’t. She said to check again. I said the next time I went into my e-mail, it was going to be to write him one.
“Okay,” Eleanor said. “Maybe we don’t call the Marines, or even the police, just yet. But we must have a plan.”
And so we worked one out, starting with what to tell the girls: nothing, we agreed. Possibly nothing ever. Nothing, anyway, until we found out more. And to do that, I’d have to meet with him. In some public place, Eleanor insisted, where she herself would lurk nearby, along wi
th—
Well, was I sure I didn’t want to call the embassy? Perhaps they could just send “a small Marine,” she said, “in civilian clothes—”
“The Marines have more important things to do,” I said.
“Is there anyone?” Eleanor asked.
I thought of Laurent. George. My three customers. Declan.
“No,” I told Eleanor.
“We’ll make do, then,” Eleanor said: a park, not too big, not too small, one with people. And benches. I would sit on a particular bench, and Eleanor and/or the cavalry would sit on another bench nearby.
I told Eleanor that a husband and wife should be allowed some time à deux.
“But,” Eleanor said, “I just want to be there, to see . . .”
I waited.
But she just repeated herself, to herself: “To see,” she said softly.
And that broke me. She wanted to be present for me, but she also wanted to be there for Robert. That she would be there, in close physical proximity, to support me in the aftermath of whatever happened would be a boon. But that she would see him, too—that was the real reason she wanted to go to the park.
And, I saw now, the real reason she had come to Paris. If she’d really, truly, exhaustively thought he was dead, she’d have sent the forms right away, just as she’d once sent that unfinished manuscript, the pages that once proved to her that he was alive.
“So be it,” I said. “But you can’t spook him. I’m certain that if he sees you—or a passing policeman, or a strapping crew-cutted Marine lounging nearby, bayonet fixed—he’s going to keep walking.”
“He won’t see me,” Eleanor said. “I shall be wearing the sunglasses the hotel gave me.”
“Parfait,” I said, and rose, feeling confident. This lasted until I was standing. I felt dizzy.
“Why now?” Eleanor said. “I can almost understand everything but that. Why does he want to come back and talk with you now?”
* * *
—
Perhaps he wanted to know why the magazine had taken so long preparing that piece. At the time, they’d told us the issue would be out in mere weeks. Robert, knowing what he knew of publishing, didn’t believe this, and given my old neighbor’s plaintive e-mail to Eleanor, it seemed like he’d been right not to believe her.
But back then, it was rush, rush, and the reporter, exceptionally eager, exceptionally young, sent Robert—his hero, it turned out—that early draft, sans photographs, just days after the visit.
Robert hated it, especially the tone.
Well, I didn’t like Robert’s. It was late at night, I’d been asleep.
It’s like the writer thinks he knows me! he said. On the basis of one afternoon!
And one pony, I said. I didn’t open my eyes. I could feel him sitting on the edge of the bed. The mattress slouched toward him.
How does anyone get a right to say who you are, what you are? he said.
I opened my eyes. I married you, I said.
Leah—
For who you are.
Were, he said.
Husband. Father. Are. I closed my eyes again.
You married a writer, he said. And I don’t think I am anymore.
I married a shoplifter rehabilitationist, I said. A kid-friendly kitchenista. A children’s-stories-set-in-Paris connoisseur.
(And he was all those things. And more. Some days, it was impossible to think about leaving him. Other days, it was all I thought about.)
I mean, he said.
I waited.
At heart, he said.
I waited.
I married you for your heart, I said. You, your heart, mine. Your dreams, ours. That’s what I mean, mean . . .
I trailed off as mean began to mean its other meaning.
I felt, heard him stand.
I miss when—when we—I miss you, he said softly.
I wonder now if he meant “her,” that other wife, the one I once was, the one who’d fallen for the flicker in his eyes, the one who hadn’t worried what kind of fire such a flicker would start, what it would burn, how long it would take to fully catch fire.
Or the wife he later imagined, from that other life, that other Paris.
That other book.
But I’m right here, I said, and rolled over.
That’s what makes it so hard, he said.
* * *
—
Eleanor reluctantly went back to her hotel to prepare. She’d wanted to stare over my shoulder as I drafted my reply, but I repeated my earlier refusals and somehow finally struck a tone she found worth heeding.
After two minutes passed before an empty screen, I was even more glad Eleanor wasn’t by my side. And here I’d been worried she would second-guess everything I’d say. Instead, I found I had nothing to say whatsoever. I heard the bell over the door jangle; for the first time, I did not answer. Or rather, for the first time, I didn’t feel guilty about not answering it. Let the customer feel ignored. Let the customer ransack the store if she wanted to. I’d hire on Molly full-time.
Allo, allo? I heard after a minute passed. Then the floor creaking its pirate-ship creak. Then muttering. Then the bell again as the customer left.
Robert never suffered writer’s block, or so he once claimed in a five-year-old interview published in a magazine that actually was printed: I do not understand what people mean by writer’s block unless it’s a real, physical thing. If it’s in your mind, great—that’s where the words are, too. Just peer over the wall. He got plenty of mocking hate mail after that; one student even gave him a brick that he’d labeled with a Sharpie: writer’s block. Robert used it as a bookend.
As two minutes sitting before the computer turned into twelve and then twenty, I began to wonder: is this what happened? That a block finally came to afflict Robert, and when it did, its effect was total. That he’d peered over the wall one day and found nothing, nothing of value whatsoever. Robert would quibble with that “of value.” If there was such a thing as writer’s block, it was simply perfectionism by a clumsier name. Words were words. Creativity was creativity.
But I was more sympathetic to Robert’s antagonists than his admirers on this point. There are days that a mess of words must seem irredeemably that, a mess.
I typed: Do you remember the contretemps over writer’s block?
I deleted that and typed, Contretemps—it’s hard to remember now what French words I used back home and which I’ve acquired here. But do you remember the contretemps over—
And I paused, because I no longer gave a fuck about writer’s block.
Over students’ use of profanity in their papers, and—
I didn’t care about that either. I was stalling. I was writing and blocking at the same time, all because I wanted to write, do you remember the whole raging battle about sleep, about SIDS, about “Back to Sleep,” and how we were supposed to put baby Ellie down on her back, but then a nurse whispered to us late one night—so early we were still in the hospital—“put her on her side” and you nodded, and the nurse left, and then we tried it, we went over to the layette where the nurse had just laid Ellie on her side, and Ellie was—she was just a peanut then, a slip of a thing, and she wobbled and rolled straight over onto her face. And you snatched her up, and she awoke crying, and it felt like hours later she fell asleep on your chest, facedown of course, burrowed into you, and we looked at each other, and I swear we both had these eyes full of tears, ready to cry, but then one of us—was it you? It would have had to have been you, I was so tired—started laughing. Just the tiniest little laugh, but then both of us were, and try as you might, you couldn’t hold it in, and you laughed and that bucked her awake, sweet girl. And she didn’t cry then, she just opened her eyes wide and stretched an arm, the way you do when you’ve had yourself a solid little nap, and you said something like
“that can’t be a bad thing, waking up to laughter.” And it really wasn’t. I don’t remember ever waking anyone up that way again or being awoken that way myself, but I remember that moment there in the hospital, every last atom of it. I remember you had been so nervous about whether we should even have kids, and I remember you holding her and saying, “you were right.” I remember her and you and the almost-dark and the punch-drunk laughter and thinking, saying, “I give it all up. Whatever wonders were due me in life, whatever peace, I surrender them because I have known this.” And you said—god, when did you say it?—“no, Leah, don’t give any of it up.” I remember the whispering, that you whispered it. So maybe it was there in the hospital. Our baby sleeping and you saying don’t give anything up. And I remember thinking that you were right, that no supernatural bargains should be made involving our daughter and I remember thinking you were wrong, that I would sacrifice anything for her, everything, whatever the cost. And years later, when you left—left me, all of us, while we were sleeping—I wondered if the bill had finally come due.
I lie unasleep now, an ocean away from that life, and marvel at that bargain, how readily I struck it, how long it held. And I wonder if I can yet again mortgage whatever good I have coming to me. Because I want to, I want to say it, I want to say once more that I give it all up, just to get you back, to get us back, to get our family back to whole and your life back to what it was with us.
I do so want to meet you. But if we do, know I will ask: what could I have done? Because our children—they still make me laugh. And Ellie is still beautiful when she sleeps and sleeps only on her stomach.
And Paris conjures magic enough to confound whatever, whoever might come collecting.
I paused.
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