Paris by the Book: One of the most enchanting and uplifting books of 2018

Once a week, I chase men who are not my husband. (After everything, I do this still.)

I should not, but there are many things I do that I should not—smoke, own a bookstore, pay for French lessons I always find ways to skip—and this is one. I walk my daughters to school, stare past the parents staring past me, and start my search for that day’s man.

I’ve sometimes begun right there on the sidewalk, trailing a fellow parent, a father, as he frees himself from the clutch outside the massive school door. More frequently, I walk up to the teeming rue Saint-Antoine and sift the passing crowd. Some mornings I find someone to chase right away. Some mornings it takes all morning. Some mornings I follow someone for a while, usually someone just like my husband, or as close as I can manage, or bear—the ink-black hair, the narrow shoulders, the hands that can’t stay in pockets, the head that can’t stop turning every way but mine—only to lose interest when some errant detail distracts. My husband would never wear blue glasses. My husband would never not yield a taxi to a pregnant woman. My husband would never steal a magazine from a newsstand, an apple from a greengrocer, a book from a bouquiniste. My husband would never—and I saw this once on one of my forays, a dad I’d trailed from the school door—kiss a woman not his wife.

Some mornings I find no one. This always surprises me, though I suppose what should surprise me more is all those other mornings when everything is right, when I find a man within a half kilometer of wandering, when I’m able to follow him for a good long while.

Following these men should be more difficult than it is; it’s not. Paris is a crowded city, far more so than travel ads and posters portray, and I—well, although I’m fit, have long legs, and helplessly project the “stay away” vibe men adore, I am forty-two, roughly twice the age of any woman who interests men here.

So be it. Invisibility suits me, serves me.

Every so often, too often, the authorities will issue a special warning, a reminder: we must be watchful. And so I am, and so others must be, but I’ve learned I’m never more invisible than in the wake of such warnings. I do not look like anyone whom anyone thinks to look for.

Even on those days, on any day, it can become awkward if the man I am pursuing leaves the main streets for narrower ones. On busier boulevards, I have trailed someone as close as a meter or two behind, close enough to see the thickness of his hair (my husband’s, so thick), smell his cologne (my husband, none, not ever), taste the smoke coming off his clothes if he smoked (my husband, when he smoked, always lied about doing so, and I always uncovered the lie this same way, a scent, a sniff—but still, a reminder that yes, he could lie).

On the quieter streets, I will let the distance stretch a block or more. I’ll ponder what I would do if it really were my husband up ahead: embrace him, take up his hand, hold tight as I kick him, cuff him, ask him why and what and where. But it’s not him, it’s never him, so I’ll study the shops, I’ll study my phone, I’ll read the historical markers and put any man I’m chasing at ease: c’est juste une autre touriste perdue.

Once (and only once), it finally happened. A man I followed confronted me.

This was six months after we’d first arrived. Not so long ago. Long enough; I was different then. So was Paris.

Still, I should have known. I did know—I’d known he was going to be trouble from the very start, because he looked too, too much like my husband. Same hair, same glasses, same smile. He gave that smile to a woman at the Apple store beneath the Louvre (almost as popular, as crowded, as the museum above) and that was what caught my eye, that lopsided grin: I didn’t even see it was my husband’s doppelgänger until I did, and then I couldn’t not chase him. He circled the Louvre pyramid’s subterranean twin, inverted like an arrow pointing down, as if to say, this is the place—which isn’t wrong—and then he moved smoothly past all the other temptations for sale in the underground mall there (coffee, toys, luxury toilet paper), before reaching the spot where everyone must decide: down deeper to the Métro, or up to the surface?

And had he descended, I would have let him be, because I wasn’t looking for a Métro chase that day. This was an unplanned mission. I’d only meant to buy my daughters—Ellie, sixteen at that point, and Daphne, fourteen—new charging cords; the cheap knockoffs I’d bought them had failed. I wanted to do something right for a change, and be home, cords in hand, when they arrived from school.

But he didn’t descend, he climbed, and at the top of the stairs, he did something that made no sense. Instead of continuing on to the crowded rue de Rivoli, he doubled back into the vast plaza the wide wings of the Louvre embrace. He must have wanted just one more look.

So did I.

After a minute or two, he checked his watch and then chose a new path back out to the world, the Passage Richelieu, a colonnaded pedestrian tunnel that burrows through the Louvre’s French sculpture galleries. Glass walls allow passersby a free peek, no lines.

Would he look? No.

I couldn’t not, but pausing almost made me lose him, and I had to skip a step or two to catch him as he exited, crossed the street, and started north along the rue de Valois.

And now I set before him another test. If he turned right toward the Banque de France, I would drop him immediately; if left, into the Palais-Royal, with its gorgeous gardens and stately rows of trees that I might weave among, I would follow.

He turned left. So did I. He walked faster. I tried not to. He exited through a forest of columns in the northeast corner. Now west, then north; we passed the gates of the Bibliothèque nationale Richelieu, where black-clad pods of researchers and staff milled about on the sidewalk, in the courtyard, attending to the better work of talking, smoking, sipping coffee from tiny plastic cups. Onward. The old stock exchange. Banks. Cafés. Coin dealers and les philatélistes, and I began to think that he was going to walk all the way to Montmartre and that I would walk all that way, too. Because.

Because even I will admit that Paris is a theater, ornate, gilded (if worn at the edges), and to live here is to spend most of your time waiting outside to get in, or, once in, to wait staring at the stage, wondering when the rich red curtain will rise. And then something happens. The lights dim, people hush, something somewhere stirs, and you know the show is finally about to start.

I’m talking about the drifts of flowers cascading from window boxes high above the hidden side street; or the busy museum corridor where you realize a statue is staring right at you, just at you, and that its still smile is still sly after centuries; or the meal when the simplest ingredients on a plate before you (perhaps you made it yourself, following the ebullient butcher’s instructions to the letter) combine to best, in one bite, anything you’ve ever eaten before. You wait and wait for the curtain to rise, precisely because you don’t know when it will, where it will, or what will appear.

A man, say. Your husband.

I texted Ellie. I told her I would be late, to unlock our store, flip the sign to OUVERT-OPEN to attract the rare customer—

And here, the man I was following interrupted.

Oui? he said.

Not a proper hello at all. I’d been too busy with my phone. I’d kept walking but not kept watch. And now, here I was, this man before me, speaking to me, as had never happened before.

He stood too close. His breath smelled sharp. Pedestrians, dogs, deliverymen, trottinettes swirled around us, rocks in a river.

Non, I said. Non, when I should have said, I’m sorry, and in English, so he would know I was stupid. But I’ve had more practice with non than any other word in France, and so he took me for a local. His voice fell a register as he asked, in French, what was I doing, following him?

Here is what I did not say. That I had lost my husband. That I’d spent the first months going through all the stages various pamphlets and websites and too many books said I would go through—shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, despair—except that I cycled through them repeatedly, rapidly, never quite making it to the acceptance stage invariably promised.

Until I did make it to that final stage, or rather, until I came to accept something else, that the temporary situation I’d found for my family—running a Parisian bookstore we live above—could or had become permanent.

And so began some new stages. French stages. Which, like so much else over here, can feel analogous to things American but turn out to be profoundly different. In America, you see a man who resembles your husband and smile sadly to yourself. In France, you chase him.

In America, you think, well, of course you’re curious—it’s like an unfinished book.

In France, I knew it was because of an unfinished book.

In America, you say, I lost my husband, and everyone thinks they know what you mean.

In France, they know better. When I say I lost him, they don’t say, I’m so sorry.

They say, where did he go?

And so when I answered the man I’d been chasing, I spoke quietly and clearly, and told him what I told the police when I was still talking to the police.

I said, I’m looking for my husband.

What I did not say next, because at the time, the time of this story, my story, I could not yet have known?

My husband is looking for me.

PARIS, WISCONSIN (#ulink_224367a9-ab3c-5d4a-b095-9212b9df4f54)

CHAPTER 1 (#ulink_6391fad2-8d3d-5401-8933-fbbb06019440)

I’ve long considered the front of our bookstore a trap, one carefully set.

This is as it must be. Although we are in the wearyingly popular Marais district, we are in the lower Marais, closer to the Seine but farther from the falafel stands and crêperies, the pedestrian streets, and thus the crowds, and thus, customers. One side of our block is almost entirely taken up with the blank back wall of a monastery, which may or may not be occupied. Despite all the bells, I’ve never seen a monk on the sidewalk. Opposite the monastery, a succession of shops like ours, peering out from the ground floors of anonymous flat-front buildings in various shades of cream forever staining yellow. High above, zinc roofs slowly bruise black, windows shrug away shutters. Here and there appear flowers, or their remains. So, too, wrought iron railings, or their remains.

And our store, bright red, like an apple, a wound.

The store has always been red, but it was deeper, bluer, more toward the color of Cabernet when I first saw it. It was my choice to update it to cherry, almost fire truck, red. This caused a mild scandal even though I’d cleared it with our landlord, the store’s original proprietor, Madame Brouillard; one painter quit on me before he got started and another quit after scraping and priming. Upon the recommendation of my UPS driver (and unofficial street concierge), Laurent, I finally hired a Polish man who spoke almost as little French as I did and thus didn’t care what anyone thought. I asked Laurent what he thought when the job was done. Laurent looked up and down the street. The painter had not only gotten exactly right the clarion red I wanted, he’d layered what looked to be thirty-six coats of clear lacquer on top. The place shone as if it had been enameled in molten lollipop.

Laurent said I should sell them, lollipops.

I shook my head.

He shook his.