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

This is true even farther down the street, toward the Seine, where more of the storefronts are closed, or empty. Not long after we took over the bookshop, it looked like a new business was moving in to one of the vacant spots; the windows were cleaned, and inside, a painter appeared. And never reappeared. He left behind an old wooden stepladder, battered and covered with decades of paint splatter: rust red, brown gold, a dozen different kinds of blue. And atop it, a single apple. I decided he must have been an art student moonlighting as a painter—a painter, I like to think, moonlighting as a painter—because the apple’s placement was so perfect, and so, too, its appearance: small, round, barn red, with a pale, freckled green tonsure around its stem. The resulting tableau was perfect, a still life, and further proof that on every block in Paris, there is at least one store, door, window, sign, or even brick whose exquisiteness gives pause. Not for nothing does the French expression for window-shopping, lèche-vitrine, translate literally as “window-licking.”

Which is gross. Or would be, anywhere but Paris.

Every trap requires bait. For months, mine had sat just inside the lower left of the store’s front window. A copy of a book. Not Madeline nor The Red Balloon but one of Robert’s, that first Central Time, a like-new copy I’d found in the store early on, mistakenly wedged amid the U.S. travel guides. Without even pausing to crack the cover or ask Madame how she’d come by it, I moved the book to the front and left it there, trying not to think what I meant by it. A candle lit, a porch light left on, a mailbox flag flipped up, a signal. Every so often, someone would ask to buy it, and I’d refuse.

But eight months after our arrival in Paris, twelve months after Robert disappeared, it was the prospective buyer who refused. She handed it to me and asked if I had another, “clean” copy in back; this one had been scribbled in. I shook my head. I should have been nicer to her. As I said, we had a steady if meager stream of customers, but only three I would call regulars. An American man, older, from the embassy, who stopped in each week for mysteries. A young mom from New Zealand who came for kids’ books but mostly for talk. And a retired art teacher from New Orleans, who lived and painted on a houseboat and told me to hand her something new, price no object, each week. I always did, but I’d never handed her, or the others, Robert’s book.

So on this occasion, I should have been more polite, but I wasn’t. I was distracted by what this customer—a stranger to me—had found on the title page. A scribble, two words.

I’m sorry.

Close enough to be Robert’s handwriting, shaky enough to make me wonder.

When I finally found my voice, what I said surprised me even more: “Half off. Do you want it? Because I—”

Because I what? Even I listened to find out. But I couldn’t finish the sentence, and when I looked up, the customer was gone.

CHAPTER 2 (#ulink_0adc44a4-c171-577d-9ebc-fd1c68ec2ebb)

My daughters don’t consider the store a trap, but onlookers could be forgiven for thinking they do, given the way the girls run from the building each morning as though the façade were about to snap shut.

It doesn’t, it won’t, it’s the school door’s prompt closing they fear, and so off they run, me tailing, often to the pealing of bells. Each morning, long after 7:00 A.M., seven bells sound in the monastery across the street, and then seven minutes later come six bells from a church we’ve dubbed Saint Someone. It sounds like it’s only a few blocks away, but we’ve never found it; maybe it really is in a different time zone. Suffice to say, if we ever hear either building’s bells and are not already out on the sidewalk, we are late. “Sweet girls!” I call, the last endearment the girls permit me, and only in English, so that no one understands.

“Mom!” Daphne shouts. She is my younger daughter, twelve when we first arrived, perpetually in search of a headband. And I might miraculously produce one, only to have her protest, “This isn’t the good one. It’s too loose—”

“Your brain has shrunk!” This is her sister Ellie, two years Daphne’s senior. And Ellie is taunting her with the legend of the teacher who supposedly once prowled their school with a ruler, measuring the skulls of students who were doing poorly: if you do not work, your brain will shrink. Back in the States, we’d kept track of our girls’ heights with numbers penciled on the doorjamb. When I tried to resurrect that tradition in Paris, Daphne insisted I measure the circumference of her head. That’s when I learned about this story. For the record, Daphne’s teacher—young, gorgeous, kind but not indulgent, extremely serious—does not do this. More important, Daphne’s brain is fine. If anything, it may be, like her heart, a shade too large.

“Courez!” Ellie shouts. This translates to “run!” but also a private joke: the girls studied French for years in the States. Or Daphne did. Ellie mostly waited for class to be dismissed each day, which their tired teacher always did with one word, this one, Courez!

Out the door and up the street we go. Ellie first, me after, Daphne chugging along behind us both.

Ellie is tall, slender, as though consonants—those leggy double l’s—were destiny. Daphne is shorter, denser: no less lovely than her sister, though the world awaits the person who can convince Daphne of this. She is shy, smart, and reads far above her age. Daphne once told me that Edith Wharton was her best friend and cried when I told her Edith had died almost a century ago. Mornings like this, regardless of what her teachers have assigned, Daphne will lumber up the street bearing half her weight in books. Ellie only ever burdens herself with a phone.

Madame Grillo is often cleaning her sidewalk as we pass. She takes great delight in our morning routine: “courez, les filles, courez!” She gave Daphne and Ellie their own mops when we moved in. Ellie gave hers to me. Daphne used her mop so often she asked for a new one that Christmas.

“Bonjour, Madame,” I call as we hurtle by.

“Les Américains toujours passionnants!” she calls back, although I’m not quite sure that’s what she means. Neither of us is a native French speaker; Ellie insists we are not passionnants but pressés. Regardless, I like Madame. I think she likes us, or at least the daily show we provide.

If we run hard and the lights favor us—although the lights, too, seem to know we are American, and enjoy making life that much more difficult—we will make it to school just before the doors close. This is a fraught moment, whatever your nationality; one does not want to be locked out. And if you are more than twenty minutes late, you are sent to a special room, something like detention, but whose French name is emphatically more grim: permanence. But today, succès. The girls disappear into the building, never glancing my way, so mortified are they that I’ve accompanied them: parents don’t belong here. Few come. And those who do almost never go in; with few exceptions, parents are expected to stay outside.

So I do, and this leaves me to study the lunch menu, which is prominently posted on the outer wall. Cassoulet today. And for dinner? The school does not serve dinner, but the woman who heads our school takes a particular interest in food, and so sometimes posts suggestions about what les parents should serve, based on what our children have been fed earlier. Tonight: poulet, chicken. Non frit, a note clarifies, I assume just for me: not fried.

I’m sure there’s no conspiracy—Carl, the older man from the embassy who loves mysteries, says there always is—but the boucherie I will pass on the way home will already be setting up its sidewalk rotisserie, the chickens beginning to turn, the fat beginning to drip on the potatoes and onions glistening in the foil tray far below. Ellie was briefly a vegetarian; these very potatoes and onions paved her return to meat. I will turn into our street, and depending on the day and the season, a gaggle of lost tourists will block the sidewalk. Ellie tells me (because, I suspect, someone tells her) such tourists in our midst mean we don’t live a “real” Parisian life, but I’m not sure she knows what she means. Carl, fiftysomething, single, says the real Paris no longer exists, which is why he lives thirty minutes out, in a charming village I really should visit. Shelley, the retired teacher who is quite happy her husband remains in New Orleans and happier still that he sends her a monthly allowance, says Paris only gets real when it rains. Molly, the New Zealand mom, doesn’t care if it’s real or not, and doesn’t care to learn much French, since she’s the “trailing spouse” and her husband will be relocated in two years. “Everyone leaves,” she says, and jokes about leaving her kids—three under three—behind.

Some mornings, awaking to the washed linen light that arrives after a rain, hearing a motorbike buzz past and then a bird, then two, then many, and then smelling every last human smell from pâtisseries to pee, I wonder, too: am I really, after all these years—am I really in Paris?

Because I’ve been fooled before.

Two months after the night Robert caught me shoplifting—two months we’d spent doing little else than making love (toppling books every time), splitting beers in bars, and eating when we had money for that, too—I found out that a travel grant I’d put in for, planned for, fully expected was all mine, would not come through. I’d have to go to Paris some other year. I raged, I wept, I waited at the curb at the appointed hour for when Robert said he would be there to take me to Europe.

Because Robert had said it was ridiculous that I’d not been to Paris.

And I’d said, it is.

And he’d said, we have to fix this right away.

And I’d said, we do.

There was a pause, and we both just sat there and fed the silence like it was a fire, and when it got hot enough, too hot, he spoke: “I’ll pick you up at five tomorrow.”

There are many things a young woman thinks about when she is packing for Paris, for her first trip overseas. I thought about how this was something I’d wanted to do since I was eight, since that wet week when the teacher showed The Red Balloon during recess four days out of five. I thought about how the film had hypnotized and haunted me in a way that that other piece of Parisian kid fare, Madeline, never did, because Madeline was plucky and colorful and small, and—as a kid, anyway—I’d only ever felt like the film’s Paris did, gray and sad and saddled with hope. I thought about how lonely I had been growing up, and how it turned out that that loneliness didn’t even compare to how I felt now that I was twenty-four and my parents were gone—the word might as well mean its opposite, for it had been two years at that point and I thought of them every day, but especially this day: Paris!

Mom, Dad, I met a boy, and he’s taking me to Paris. And my parents, sweet and forgiving, parents so kind, so square, it drove me mad, they would have said “wow” because they would have thought, unlike me, that this boy really was taking me to Paris. Of course he wasn’t.

I told myself this. I told my dead parents this—sometimes they passed by on the sidewalk below my apartment balcony, looking busy, preoccupied, oddly never looking up—I said it out loud. “It’s fine that we’re not really going to Paris. It’s sweet that he promised to take me. It will be an adventure, wherever we go.” I kept to myself that I’d gone to the pharmacy earlier that day and gotten my photo taken, and then the post office for a passport application, where they told me what I already knew, that you couldn’t get a passport at a post office in an hour. What they didn’t know, couldn’t know, was that it didn’t matter what anyone thought, not the postmaster, not the pharmacy photographer, nor my parents’ ghosts pacing. I just knew, because only one thing had ever been true in my life and it was this: I was going to Paris. And I’d just met the boy who would take me.

And there he was, 5:00 P.M. on the dot, double-parked beneath my apartment window. He honked and waved and held aloft a bottle of wine. “Ah, Paree!” He told me what that meant, but he didn’t have to; no one knew intro-textbook French better than I.

But that afternoon we didn’t go à Paris, we went to . . . Belgium. And then: Wales. And then Norway. Berlin. Montreal. Dunkirk, Gibraltar, Stockholm. Moscow. Even, one Friday months later, Cuba.

And we went to every last one of these places without leaving the state of Wisconsin. The village of Belgium lies just south of Sheboygan. Cuba City, south of Platteville. Montreal, an old mining company town, sits up near Lake Superior. Wales, a wilderness of suburban cul-de-sacs, west of Milwaukee. And so on. Different cities, different weekends. His idea, and I let myself be charmed by it, how it obscured the fact that we couldn’t afford to leave the state.

And some of the places were charming: Stockholm, Wisconsin, all five blocks of it, is almost as pretty as postcards I’ve seen since of its namesake. William Cullen Bryant insisted that the Wisconsin Stockholm’s wide, slow stretch of the Mississippi River “ought to be visited by every poet and painter in the land.” So said a plaque. And so, here I am, Robert said.

And here I am, I thought there, and elsewhere, including those towns whose great green tides (of corn and soy) William Cullen Bryant had not endorsed, nor the swing sets we sometimes found ourselves lolling on in empty, forgotten playgrounds, nor the quiet main streets we went down, hand in hand. (I loved holding hands with him—he was good at it, made it somehow seem the essence of humanity, which I suppose it is.) I was twenty-four, the adventures were cheap, the trips were fun and sometimes funny. Robert was going places. If I stuck by his side, I would, too. I would even, in my way, help. His kids’ books had just been a start. A good start. At that point, they paid for gas and sometimes a cut-rate motel or campsite. His books sold okay, I gathered, but I also gathered that they didn’t sell for much. Not enough to take us to Paris, anyway.

Paris, France, that is. Paris, Wisconsin, we tried twice, two different Parises in two different corners of the state. The first one, southeast, just off the interstate to Chicago, disappointed. Flat and brown, blanched houses buttoned up against the last days of summer. The librarian told us this Paris was named by its earliest white settler, a man named Seth. He’d named it for Paris, New York, which sits ten miles outside Utica, if you’re curious. I wasn’t.

It was in Wisconsin’s second Paris, however, in the state’s lonelier, hillier southwest, that we got engaged.

That had not been the plan, but as we wandered this second Wisconsin Paris—we had found it on a map, tiny print, but once there, could find no roadside signs to corroborate—I remember thinking, I will marry this man, just five words, which led to eighteen years, two daughters, and, to date, two continents. How to explain, then? Just the magic of the map. That the whole world, once so distant, was suddenly in reach. I knew this wasn’t his doing—it was settler Seth’s doing, the doings of so many others—but it felt like Robert’s magic, like ours, like we could do anything, even conjure Paris from the grass.

Which we did under a full moon not far from the western state line. Here was the second Paris, Wisconsin, here was nothing more than a highway wayside with a gravel parking spot, a picnic table, a tree, a fifty-five-gallon barrel rusting with trash, here was where I said, propose now.

He said nothing.

I added, now or never, because I knew (every fan of The Red Balloon knows) magic is transient.

“Marriage?” Robert said.

Was he asking for my hand, or clarification?

I pretended I didn’t understand it was the latter.

“Yes!” I said.

He looked away, up at the moon, which it turned out wasn’t so full, but almost full, an egg missing or hiding its yolk. And then he did, or said, the strangest thing: “But, Leah—how would that work?”