Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  If you thought we couldn’t change, we could—we did—we will.

  And then I wrote, have you?

  And then, nothing.

  And then: come back—just say how. Just say when.

  I don’t get interviewed about writing, but if I did, I would say that what writers need fear most is not writer’s block but writer’s knives, some hammered and sharpened against that selfsame block, able to cut through anything.

  Was I wrong to cut everything but the last six words of what I’d just written?

  Everything. I cut the story of Ellie, of laughter, of wagers, of magic. I cut “Dear Robert” and “Love, Leah.”

  I cut “come back.”

  I cut everything until I was left with this, which I sent:

  Just say how. Just say when.

  CHAPTER 16

  After a minute passed with no reply, I distracted myself by texting Eleanor: sent word, awaiting word. She immediately called and wanted details, and I told her there were none. I’d not proposed a meeting place; I’d asked him to. Eleanor began to lecture me on negotiations, how women too often fail at them and how they can and should succeed—the thrust seemed to be take the initiative, so I did and hung up on her. I felt bad and texted apologies. She texted back: this is what I mean, she said. Never apologize.

  I checked my inbox again—the French term boîte de réception is so fussy, and so lovely—nothing. The bell over the door rang. I clique’d on my boîte de réception. Rien. Nothing. I wished that I’d shut the store while I sorted this out.

  Now my phone rang. Robert? (How?)

  No, just Eleanor.

  To have not greeted one customer so far that day was a forgivable lapse, at least for an expatriate American shopkeeper. To have let two enter the shop without my calling out the required bonjour was almost grounds for deportation. But if I didn’t take Eleanor’s call, she’d only call again. And again.

  I shouted a bonjour to the invisible woman (just a guess; it was quiet; men are noisy). No answer. She must have been in the far front corner or have climbed the stairs to the children’s area. “Je suis désolée, I just have to take this call,” I announced as I maneuvered out of the tiny back office. “Une minute.”

  I answered the phone. “Bonjour,” I said. “I’m sorry; hello. I’m juggling things here.”

  “How many things?” Eleanor asked.

  “Just—a customer, somewhere—”

  “I’ve been thinking about our—about your plan,” Eleanor said, “about leaving the girls out of the meeting. I think this is wrong. This is not just about you—it is about all of you, as a family. He needs to realize that.” She paused again. “You need to realize that.”

  “Eleanor—” I said.

  “No,” she interrupted. “I’m certain about this. I think there’s a way to stage-manage it so that you—so that you meet him first, but then—and we don’t have to do this with a lot of spycraft—you and he meet on some bench, and the girls and I will be at a playground a short distance away with the twins, unless, and I advise this, we redeposit the tiny two with their own feckless father for the day, but in any case, once contact has been made, once you are absolutely sure it is him, you just—walk him on over to us.” Off-loading the twins was a good idea, but otherwise, I hated this plan, and I’d told her so earlier. “Do you understand?” she asked.

  “Eleanor—” I said, and broke off, finally having encountered my customer.

  “Say you’ll meet him after school, today. And you know what? It’s fine if we have the twins in tow—let him think you’ve been busy. Because you have. And don’t worry for a moment that you are hallucinating when—if—you see him, because I shall be there, too.”

  I had not been breathing then, not for a long while, and now finally drew a very deep breath in order to speak. But I couldn’t.

  “You forget, my dear, how easily I contend with silence,” Eleanor said. “So it’s agreed. I’ll meet the girls right outside the door of the school and the twins outside theirs, Ellie and I will sort this all out, and then we’ll go straight to a convenient, strategic park or square. I have a map. I have your brilliant girls. Okay, Leah?” I said nothing. “Oh, you’re impossible. Here’s what you say now: thank you, Eleanor, sounds good, good-bye.”

  “Good—bye,” I said, my voice hoarse and high.

  And she may have said something else; I don’t know, because I put down the phone, facedown, as though it was an old-fashioned handset, the kind that used to have a cord and a cradle and a reliable, expectant dial tone.

  I heard such a tone now, it was all I could hear, and it was so loud it felt like I was vibrating, like the whole store was vibrating, like I might fall if I didn’t grab hold of something, so I did—that is, I grabbed hold of my customer, not a woman but a man, one who seemed as stunned as I was.

  So I hugged him. I hugged him on and on, until, finally, slowly, fearfully, as though one or both of us might break, Robert hugged me back.

  * * *

  —

  I was hugging a stranger. The spread of his shoulders was wider, his chest thicker. His chin found my shoulder where it should have, but it only rested lightly there, it didn’t fit. His hair, thinner, didn’t smell like him. He didn’t smell like him. When he spoke, though, the voice was his, and so, too, the eyes . . .

  It wasn’t a hallucination. He was real. He was Robert, and he was no longer my husband.

  “Welcome back,” I said, almost inaudibly.

  He shook his head, almost invisibly.

  “Welcome to Paris,” he said.

  And I laughed, one laugh, which became crying, which became hacking bent-over sobs. I hadn’t cried like this since my parents’ funerals and I’m not sure I cried as hard then. I cried so hard now it hurt, burned my throat, burned the muscles of my abdomen, my ribs. Seeing Robert for the first time in forever: he hadn’t died; I was about to. It was too hard. It was too much.

  He didn’t know what to do. He said my name softly, he put a tentative hand on my shoulder, he finally went in search of tissues, and then I had my breath again. I couldn’t speak, but I could see him, and the tissues, and it was better. I closed and opened my eyes. Still there, Robert. So, too, the roar in my ears, though subsiding. Not quite enough to make out what he was saying, but enough to hear my own heart, thump, thump, thump, enough to hear me say, “Robert?” And then the roar subsided further, and I could hear him speak.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  I nodded.

  “Are you—are you all right?” I said.

  I looked at him looking at me. It was him, but it was also not him. He looked concerned, but also curious, like, hey, this is interesting. As opposed to, hey, this is Leah.

  “Maybe we could go—for a walk?” Robert said.

  I felt faint. I needed something to steady me, us, and then I looked up and saw that we were in a bookstore. My bookstore. My books. My life, now.

  “Do you want to see the store first?” I said, my voice hollow. He nodded. I’d been sitting on the floor; I got to my feet, pretending not to see the hand he extended.

  We stepped along gingerly, like we’d just tumbled out of a lunar module. Or maybe it was that we were scuba divers, a strange feeling of being both totally immersed but totally encapsulated, separate. It’s the only explanation I have for why we didn’t immediately start talking about the girls, where he’d gone, where he was going. We didn’t talk because we couldn’t, not yet.

  And so the bookstore spoke up. Around us raged thousands upon thousands of pages of argument. Of stories. Of journeys. Of husbands and wives and spiders in classrooms in Connecticut. I told him Alice Mattison was selling well, and he smiled. I pulled down Grace Paley for him and he saddened. He flipped to “Wants” and started to read it, and I did, too, and then we both couldn’t. He closed the book. I described our quirky geograp
hic shelving system, and he said it sounded brilliant. I took him to Sweden, showed him Tove Jansson, and before I could explain who she was he said, Moomin!—and of course. Robert knew books. He loved them, and couldn’t resist as the shop pulled him in deeper.

  I’m so sorry, Robert said, not because he’d gone but because, I knew, he had come back and was about to go again.

  I went to England. He followed me, but then stopped mid-store, as though afraid what I would pull down next. So was I. Before I knew what I was doing, I reached down an armful of cheap Shakespeare paperbacks and threw them at him. And the rest of the row. And another. And some hardbacks. And more paperbacks. And then Canada, for a giant book, Sculpture of the Eskimo, which thudded against him. Alice Mattison flew well, as did Grace Paley. The women knew their way. I went to the window display of Madeline books. They threw easy and fast, like Frisbees, like fine china, like saw blades. I couldn’t find The Red Balloon, but here was a book about lollipops. Some books were too heavy to throw; they fell. The others tumbled about him. For a while, he let them pile against him, and then, as the barrage continued, he cowered and I bounced them off his shoulder, his back, his head. Please stop, he said, and I did, not because he’d asked but because I was exhausted. The door rang open. A French voice said, “bonjour?” I roared back, “fermé!” The person left. Robert went to the door, locked it, and turned the sign. I went behind the counter and sat, head in my hands, and let him do whatever it was he was doing. Picking up, it sounded like. And when he was done, there was a silence, like he was waiting for me to look up at him again, but I didn’t. I heard the quiet tramp of his shoes up the spiral staircase to the children’s section. He was gone five minutes or an hour. When he came down, I finally raised my head. His face was red, from crying, shame, or the books. One lucky volume had given him a good scrape down his cheek and another had caught part of an eye.

  “Can we talk?” he said, sounding like the old Robert, with the old question marks.

  And me sounding like the old me: “okay.”

  “Here?” he asked.

  “Here,” I said, and waited for him to tell me why he’d disappeared.

  Instead—and this was a final clue—he told me how.

  That early April morning in Milwaukee, he’d gone out for his normal dawn run, no great adventure on his mind. Then he’d passed the harbor, he’d seen the boats.

  It was too windy a day. But also too stormy a season, at least for him, at least creatively. Too stormy and too long. Ludwig Bemelmans had found oil painting in the last part of his life. He did so almost with gritted teeth, the work taxed him like nothing before, but at least he had found something that fed him, freed him. There in Milwaukee, Robert was still gritting, still looking.

  Looking, specifically, at the harbor that morning. There was the water, the boats, and the solution: before doing anything else, he would clear his head with a morning sail. No one was about, but he had the gate code, knew where they hid the key to the gear shed. He got everything he needed (except the required companion sailor), signed out a boat in the log, nosed his way out of the marina, then the harbor, and this all felt so good, he had a wild thought: I’ll sail clear across the lake to Michigan! A sailaway writeaway. It was a small boat—too small—but he wouldn’t be the first to do it. With winds the way they were, he’d make it across in a little less than a day. And he almost did. But then an errant wave took hold of the bow and yanked. Into the water he went, though not before the mast knocked him unconscious.

  The lake revived him, but Robert couldn’t right the boat. He spent the night crouched atop the upturned hull, waves sometimes tumbling him back into the water. It was late spring, but the water felt like winter. With each successive tumble he grew colder, weaker, less certain he’d be able to climb back atop the hull, less certain he still wanted to.

  But then it was morning, and with light came land. “I got to the shallows, the beach,” he said, “and that’s when it started—when the world and I—when things stopped making sense. I stumbled out of the water, soaking wet, walking through this little park, then some trailer neighborhood. It didn’t look like Wisconsin—it definitely wasn’t Milwaukee—but I thought, I can’t have made it to Michigan. And at first, I didn’t want to ask. It was eerie. I saw people, but it was like they didn’t see me.”

  I wondered what those people saw. A soaking-wet stranger walking past their windows? I guess I would have decided I hadn’t seen him, either. As long as that man keeps walking, they must have thought, maybe he’ll keep walking out of our lives. And he did.

  “I walked myself dry,” he said. “Which made me only more invisible. It gave me an idea. The idea. I mean, I wasn’t thinking about sailing when I started running that morning, and I wasn’t thinking about Michigan when I started sailing.”

  But he said he had been thinking, a lot, about how he “clouded our lives,” and so once he started going, he let himself keep going. Because he’d had the sudden sense while jogging that morning that if he’d rounded the corner and headed home—or if he’d turned the sailboat around an hour into his trip—if he’d gone back to Milwaukee at that instant, who knew what would happen?

  Even he didn’t know, just that it would not be good. He’d reached “that place.” He didn’t say where it was or what he meant, but he didn’t have to. It wasn’t on our old maps. It was in his head; it had overtaken his head, actually, and now it stole, terribly, into mine. I saw what he saw, what he’d thought through, what would leave his body prone on some floor, or lowered by firemen from a rafter. Or something else. There were so many ways.

  But there were so many reasons, three in particular, why not to do this, think this.

  “You would have never . . .” I started to say, but stopped, because, of course, he hadn’t. I’d wanted evidence he’d loved the girls. This was. But also wasn’t.

  He shook his head. “And I didn’t want—I didn’t want medicine, doctors, a hospital; there would have been a hospital for sure, right?” He pointed to his head. “A mental—?” He couldn’t say it. “Someplace like that. Someplace that would have only made it worse. And I wasn’t—I wasn’t sick, I was just . . .”

  Selfish, I thought. Or, put another way, yes, sick. Head-sick enough to leave a family who loved him.

  But he was well enough, there in Michigan, to find his way to a shelter. And if he’d stayed longer there, the police probably would have found him, but someone came looking for pickers the next morning. Berries. One kind, then another. I waited to hear him talk about desperate attempts to reach us, but instead I heard about six weeks of blast-furnace sun, black nights in cinder-block dorms. He wasn’t the only guy there who didn’t have papers, didn’t want to talk, was willing to work for half the pay, cash, as a result. And then the crop was in. The crew was moving on, moving south. He thought he’d go with them. But first, home: he wasn’t going to pick berries forever, but he decided he was going to be on the road for a while. Some kind of permanent writeaway. New material, a new project.

  And so, he said, “I had to find you. To tell you. In person.”

  I tried to imagine how such a preposterous scene would have unfolded. Exactly, I decided, as it was unfolding now.

  Another scene, one more haunting, more vivid: his post-Michigan return to Milwaukee, our neighborhood, our home. His discovery that we weren’t there.

  He said he’d walked the little retail strip near our house, his identity cloaked by sunglasses, long hair, weeks’ worth of beard, and no one noticed him. No one noticed him and he noticed no “missing!” or “have you seen?” posters and we were gone. He began to feel soaking wet again.

  I found it hard to believe him. I found it harder not to. Still, I tried.

  “You came back? All you had to do was walk up the street—ring a doorbell, ask the renters, or the neighbors,” I said. “Walk up to campus and ask Eleanor—”

  He shook his h
ead. “Eleanor would have eaten me alive.”

  “And then helped you—”

  But he didn’t need Eleanor, he said. He’d figured it out for himself. (He spoke more quickly, quietly now, as though talking to himself.) We were gone. Gone-gone. And there was only one place we could have gone. Paris. Those tickets. He’d said he wouldn’t buy them, but then he had; he’d hidden the code in the cereal box, and we must have found it. He’d wanted to be there for that moment, and he hadn’t been. But that didn’t mean the girls and I wouldn’t still follow through. Did it? We were doing our part. He’d have to do his.

  And so he had. I looked at him. He’d gotten money, a passport, a ticket—all of this without triggering a single alert on a single screen. Or maybe the police hadn’t put him on a watch list. Maybe, at some crucial juncture, the authorities had thought me the liar. The wife, she was the crazy one. Who wouldn’t run away from this lady?

  In Paris, he found his way to, of course, a bookstore. He’d heard Shakespeare and Company had a cot or two for bookish people passing through, so long as you didn’t mind a few chores, and he didn’t. His first free afternoon, he went looking, preparing himself for the likelihood he’d never find us.

  It took him all of an hour.

  He found us, but he didn’t come in, because he was beyond certain now that he was hallucinating. He’d wandered past our house in Milwaukee, except it wasn’t our house anymore. Renters lived there. I had once threatened to leave, he said—I didn’t nod, didn’t blink, just listened—had I? What happened when? What had happened? He was no longer sure. Back home, before everything got really bad, he’d started this manuscript about a family in Paris. And so once he was in Paris, he’d gone to this street he’d picked off a map while writing—Saint Lucy, the patron saint of writers!—which meant Madame’s store didn’t surprise him, he’d seen one like it online, that’s why he’d set the story here, but—inside—these people—they looked like us.

  He had stood across the street from our store, he said, and stared inside, awestruck, terror-struck. His unfinished manuscript come to life: finding us was evidence he’d finally lost his mind. He ran away, but he couldn’t stay away. He started a hundred e-mails to me, to Eleanor, but deleted each one. We’d have thought he was crazy, he said. One day, when there was no sign of us, just some old woman at the register, he’d gone in, scribbled an I’m sorry in a book of his. At last, he’d found a book of his on the shelf.