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

Work, that was the verb, the noun, the word I should have paid attention to, that I should have featured when we told our engagement story in the years after. But we didn’t, we’d focus on other aspects of that night. We would say how it would have been nice if the moon really had been full, because then it might have been bright enough to find his car keys, which we’d somehow lost and wouldn’t find until the dull light of dawn. And we’d say we filled those dark hours prior as best we could, tuning the level of innuendo to the level of our listeners. But the truth is, we spent most of the predawn dark working out the details of our life to come, which, for me, were prosaic, or as he (ever the editor, particularly of me) termed them, poetic. My demands: we would have children, two; he was not allowed to die before me; one day he would take me to Paris, the real one. And he should be sure to keep up with his writing. And me.

He thought. I watched him while he did, wondering then if he was thinking about whether or not he agreed with what I’d just said. But now I think he was trying to figure out how to phrase what he would say next, which came out this way: that he was a “work in progress”; that he wasn’t entirely the bright-eyed eager boy who’d chased me from a store and subsequently toured me through Wisconsin’s roll call of world capitals; that he himself was still chasing something; that he didn’t know what that was yet; that if we committed to a life together, he would nonetheless need time away, a day, an hour, a weekend, time alone, to do his work, his writing, to chase his challenge. He’d been born alone, he said grandly, and—

I know what you’re after, I said, and he looked up with such relief I almost told him what I knew in my bones was true about him—what I, then, there, naively loved about him—which was that he, too, was ever ready to leap, that his work, his real work, was a kind of falling, and the challenge was not how to evade the end—because all falls end the same way—but how to fall well, to fall brilliantly, to light up the sky like the moon as you passed.

But I didn’t have those words then, and so he kissed me, and I kissed him, and the sun rose and a truck honked and the keys appeared and I thought, I don’t know what he’s after and I thought, I can’t wait to find out and then my brain stopped thinking and my heart stopped beating and I was all stomach, which only knew what it knew then, that we’d been pulled aloft, that we were suspended, weightless, cresting, not how long the feeling would last.

We married, we honeymooned (in Sevastopol, of course, a waterfront chunk of Wisconsin’s Door County), and then Robert took a “honeymoon from our honeymoon,” a quick sprint away to get some writing done while I returned home.

This did not bother me. It pleased me, actually. Energized me. It confirmed my prediction, or more plainly spoken, my desire: I’d landed the boy with the smile, the dream, the restlessness that I took to be artistic, necessary. Mine, all mine. If, post-honeymoon, he’d put his feet up in front of the TV (mine) and held the bowl (his) above his head for more popcorn as I puttered about the apartment (his), I think I would have shot him.

I don’t know what he got done on that first dash away, nor on any of the trips that he took after. I do know that he disappeared all the time. I called these jaunts “writeaways,” a term whose crassness—or aptness—irked him to no end. But I wasn’t irked that he left; it was part of the deal. He could have said, “I told you so,” but he never did because I never complained. Because all the other parts of the deal had held, too, even kids, which he’d been nervous about, not because he didn’t want them, he said, but because he wasn’t sure “the universe” wanted him to have them. Let the universe decide, I said, and it did. We had two daughters, and we proved to be surprisingly good parents.

In my case, I think my parenting success was by accident, but in his case, it was definitely by design. Books came and went from the library. He took classes at the Red Cross and the Y. We became parents who could be counted on to organize the school’s silent auction, babysit the class lizard over spring break, organize the nit-picking party when lice descended (but we should not have served alcohol to the parents; the sight of tequila makes me itchy to this day). And when real tragedy descended, we pitched in then, too. When a first grader was struck in a crosswalk, Robert delivered a eulogy people remembered, and stopped me about, hand flat on my forearm, for years after. If we lived in Milwaukee, I bet they would still. And I bet the crosswalk I painted—which embarrassed the city into subsequently painting an official one—still shines nice and bright. My memories of those days do, too. Each birthday celebrated in our household felt like another victory: we did it!

I almost wanted someone to give me a medal—it could be small, like the ones they give mothers here in France who have four kids or more—for all my various parenting accomplishments, including not running a tavern in our living room, as my parents essentially had, and not raising my daughters as underage barbacks. Never once did our girls have to empty ashtrays, haul glassware, bang on the ice machine to make it cough up more cubes. And this showed, or I was sure it did, on our girls’ faces: they smiled a lot. The world smiled back.

Not that we saw much of the world, though. Despite Robert’s vow, we never got to Paris, not even back to a Wisconsin one. That said, the prospect remained, not unpleasantly, on the horizon of our lives, greatly encouraged, of course, by Ludwig Bemelmans and Albert Lamorisse.

The girls’ experience with Lamorisse was mine to curate, and the results were strange. Though we had ready access to the film, our daughters, like me, preferred the book and insisted, in their earliest toddler days, on “reading” it to me. Those are Robert’s quotation marks, and it’s true, the girls did not yet know how to read. But they nevertheless pretended to, and did so intently, not with real words but unintelligible whispers whose soft, husky sibilance reminded me of skates cutting across pond ice. Hush, hush: Robert called it Whisper Theater and professed not to know why I loved it so. What needed explaining? The girls’ milky breath on my cheek, their bodies knitted with mine on a beanbag or a bed, the three of us sometimes so exhausted by Lamorisse’s story that we fell asleep together, especially nights when Robert was away. If he was there, he’d nudge me awake and I’d pretend to be grateful as he squired us all to our individual beds. But nights he wasn’t there, nights I’d surface from sleep around 2:00 or 3:00 A.M. with the girls still beside me, I’d lie awake in the most beautiful insomnia I’ll ever know, the book flat across us, and on either side of me, little breaths huffing fast or slow as dreams required.

But as they grew, as they learned to read, they fell harder for Bemelmans. It wasn’t really a fair fight. Lamorisse’s oeuvre is smaller, weirder (1965’s Fifi la plume, anyone, where a Parisian cat burglar finds a nightgown, a circus, sprouts wings?). Bemelmans, though he could be equally strange—a 1953 Holiday magazine Robert bought on eBay featured a cheery Bemelmans illustration of a murderer dismembering a corpse in a Paris attic—provided endless entertainment. Madeline backward and forward, of course, versions in Spanish and German and French and a coveted one in Chinese. And long before I thought them ready, Robert read to them from Bemelmans’s essays and sketches written for adults, which recount various adventures, loves, and losses, including that of his brother, Oscar, who plummeted to his death in an elevator shaft at the Ritz in New York. Dark stuff. But also funny stuff, obscure stuff, enough to firmly establish Bemelmans as a member of our family, something like the ribald grandfather who occasionally upsets Mom. Lamorisse, meanwhile, served as the uncle whose exploits are legendary but who is rarely seen. Both dead too soon. Both inescapably intertwined with France.

Which is why, when the girls were old enough, when we had time enough, when we had money enough—well, of course: we’d go. I even took French classes (actually, the same introductory class, many times) and enrolled the girls in a magnet school that offered French immersion (they progressed rapidly, or Daphne did). And I stayed employed, my unfinished film studies degree having somehow qualified me for a job writing speeches and PowerPoint presentations and making the occasional (stunningly scripted and shot) video for the university president.

What I mean is, I did my part.

And Robert did his. He organized carpools and dentist appointments and 3:00 A.M.. laundry when vomiting or bed-wetting required. He was an excellent cook and involved the girls in the cooking. Juicebox-size trophies he’d won for coaching tiny teams bejeweled our bookshelves.

He navigated all this uncomplainingly, if distantly, as though he was studying these various activities rather than taking part in them. And I studied him. I learned to predict when he’d feel the need to disappear—it was like a simmering, a swelling, though that’s not quite it, because there was never a sense that anything might explode. Instead, he’d just announce that he needed some “time,” and off he’d go. He worked in spurts, taking off on a Thursday, say, and coming back Saturday. Or he’d leave predawn Sunday and return at bedtime. In the meantime, he’d have found a hostel or lodge or a convent. A coffee shop or a planetarium. He’d come home dazed, bedraggled, happy-tired, like a runner post-race. Again, I never complained or questioned: a day away, an hour, a weekend, time alone to do his work. It was what we had agreed.

But what we’d also agreed was that he’d always leave a note. We never received communications during his time away, but always a note before he went away. Three words, be back soon, was the custom, unfailingly appended with an estimated time of return that was unfailingly accurate. And it worked. For years. We didn’t ask other people to understand (especially after I’d made the mistake of offhandedly mentioning Robert’s frequent absences on some soccer sideline, leaving other mothers aghast). Children of firefighters and surgeons and sailors get used to their parents’ unusual schedules; so did ours. Dad’s off writing, Daphne would say if she found the note. He loved hiding these in places the kids might find them, a fortune-cookie-size slip taped to the back of a toothbrush, a purple Post-it tumbling out with the Cheerios. “Be back soon!” Ellie might chirp.

I’d been forewarned. We’d had that deal. And I didn’t want to go back on it, even as his career took one wrong turn after another. That was how art worked. And it was important for me that he live the life of an artist, a writer. I didn’t begrudge him time away, but I somehow begrudged him his anxiety, his exhaustion. Failures aside—or included!—he was living the dream. Couldn’t he smile more? And maybe cook and freeze a dinner before he left?

What he did leave, for me, were books. Not every time, but many times, since the very beginning. Something to tide me over while he was gone was the idea, I think—but only think, because the few times I pressed him on why he’d left this or that book, he looked at me oddly. Because I wanted you to read it. So I did. Katherine Anne Porter’s Pale Horse, Pale Rider was the first—World War I, TB sanitariums, delirium, lost love—I swooned for it even as I worried he was trying to tell me something: did he, too, have a terminal illness? No, he said again (and again): I just wanted you to read it. So I did, and later, William Maxwell’s So Long, See You Tomorrow and Aidan Higgins’s Helsingør Station and James Welch’s Fools Crow and William Kennedy’s Albany novels and Grace Paley’s Manhattan stories and Octavia Butler and Muriel Spark and so much Alice Munro. I can’t remember them all. I don’t even have them all—some were just library books he later returned. For a while, I gave him films in return, but that was an inconvenient age when balancing a screen on your stomach would have crushed you; he never seemed to find the time to watch. I didn’t mind. I liked the books, I liked talking about them, but I also liked that it was okay not to talk about them; it wasn’t a test. It was, instead, a kind of gift, a treat, like breakfast in bed. I felt catered to, and so when the books began to peter out, when he began to leave without leaving them behind, I grew uneasy.

Where once Robert had sauntered the aisles of bookstores and libraries with a proprietary air, now he slunk through them, or avoided them altogether, eager to avoid embarrassments like the one Daphne once put him through during a playdate visit to a bookstore: taking a little friend by the hand, Daphne went over to the E’s to brag on her father’s behalf. But there, between Alexandre Dumas, Lawrence Durrell, and . . . Umberto Eco, there was no Eady. Of course not, Robert said quickly, and dragged them over to the children’s section. But here there were no E’s at all. The shelf went straight from Lois Duncan’s I Know What You Did Last Summer to Walter Farley’s Black Stallion. Both favorites of Daphne’s, but that was beside the point today. “Where are your books, Daddy?” Daphne asked, or so she told me later.

She wasn’t the only one asking. Especially because Robert’s pursuit of “what’s next” had devolved into an increasingly feeble series of experiments, like the trilogy with an unconventional conceit: the first book was pitched at his younger readers, the second for not-quite-adults, the third for readers who thought of themselves (or were thought to be) adults. The idea was to reel in a new adult audience without losing hold of his old younger one. Or, that was the publisher’s idea; Robert was less sure.

Thus began a new season. Of being less sure of everything, of stumbling, wandering, of yet more experiments that were rebuffed and abandoned. It wasn’t that he bruised easily—more that his earnestness, his artistness (I’m looking for words other than cluelessness), left him forever vulnerable.

Over time, it seemed that everything wounded. He’d taken up sailing through the college and loved it—and then they instituted a safety requirement that you had to sail with someone. The girls’ resurgent complaints about our lack of pets (Robert had allergies) wore at him as never before, as did the neighbors and their pets. For the sake of intellectual engagement (his claim), for the sake of human interaction and distraction (my claim, and correct), he’d agreed to teach a class up at the university, but campus inanities bothered him disproportionately—one had to pay for one’s own toner, for example, which he said punished the productive.

And I bothered him. I’m not sure why. The therapist didn’t know, either. And maybe that was the reason why I troubled him so: I’d convinced Robert to see a therapist. Actually, the compromise was that we would both go see someone, together. Which turned out to be fine. For me. In our sessions, Robert mostly squirmed or sighed; I brought pen and paper, took notes, asked for tools. We wound up with an entire “toolbox,” albeit one filled with simple things. Exercise. Meditation. Plus, “alone time,” which Robert liked having validated, and “advance notice,” which I liked having validated: the latter meant that you were supposed to give your partner a heads-up about things you wanted to discuss. We will fight about your time away tomorrow was how I jokingly summarized it. The therapist asked if I felt like I relied on humor too much.

For the longest time, laughter had been the one thing that had worked reliably for us. I’m not the world’s best laugher myself—it may be from all those years of hearing fake, beer-fueled laughter in the tavern—and it’s made me a connoisseur. No one laughs better than my children. I once told Robert I wanted to bottle it. He said I’d need a lot of bottles, then. But by the time we were in that tiny room with the humorless therapist, any bottles I’d stockpiled would have gone dusty from disuse. I knew from moment one that I’d married a man for whom life was a struggle. It was, again, why I married him. To see him struggle through it through art. To help him. Because doing so would help me. What I didn’t realize, and maybe no one does as they tenderly slip on smooth wedding bands, is how much it would hurt.

The therapist said we could discuss that next time, but we stopped going. And Robert stopped giving advance notice. Of what he wanted to fight about, about when he wanted to run off and work. I swallowed my complaints. When we married, I thought I was the one tagging along for the wild ride. An author! An explorer! A man whose mysteries only unlocked more. All in a minor key, of course, but I liked that; minor was manageable.

But no, apparently I’d been the one providing the wild ride, and he the passenger. I was the woman who’d run from the store with a book. When actual squalling children arrived, though, we didn’t spend evenings talking books in bars. We were busier than ever, and he was more desperate than ever. I saw it in his eyes, in his hands each time he returned from one of his absences: he clutched fewer and fewer pages. It had once been part of the routine, his brandishing pages at reentry, a thick folder, a bulging manila envelope. But now it was sometimes a single rolled page, two, stuck out of a back pants pocket like a flyswatter. I didn’t know what to do. Should I steal more books? Should I steal a look at what he was writing?

I should have, but I didn’t. I was too afraid. He swore blank pages didn’t spook him, but they did me when they were his. Also blank: the notepad in the kitchen where he’d always left those notes. Always. And then, once, twice, he didn’t. And then came the next-to-last time.

On that occasion, after he’d been gone from the house for roughly twenty-four hours, I went looking. It was Ellie’s idea that I should check his campus office, though she wanted me to go check for my sake. She was curious about the lack of a note but not haunted by it. Pages, quantity or quality, didn’t matter to the girls; they had a faith in their father’s weirdness. Eccentricity reassured them that he was still unique, and uniquely theirs.

When I found him—leaving his office, just where Ellie had said he’d be—he was walking to the elevator. And he said nothing to me, so I said nothing to him. He pushed the down button. The elevator came. He got in. I followed.

I did not like being on campus this late. It reminded me of my grad school days, and reminded me how they had ended, which was slowly, badly, as one professor after another asked what I wanted to do after I got my degree. The answers I gave did not satisfy. Them or me. Teach? A teaching assistantship convinced me no. Research? I was going blind reading blurry microfilm in the library basement. I had wanted to make my own film, but school had robbed me of the confidence of saying so, even to myself. When I quit and took up speechwriting, I didn’t need a therapist to point out that I’d found a job that involved hiding behind someone else. And if a therapist had pointed that out, I would have pointed out that speechwriting paid good money.

Being on campus late also reminded me of when things went wrong at work, when I had to stay after hours to fix a speech or presentation because the president’s mood or the university’s finances had changed. Mindful of my own family’s finances, ever more my responsibility, I would stay such nights as long as required, inserting as many Lincoln or Lombardi quotes as required. My boss favored both men, though the two of them had maddeningly little to say about tuition freezes or the depreciation of an aging physical plant, such as the Brutalist office tower where Robert and I now stood. Here was where the campus imprisoned its humanities faculty. The building’s one working elevator was so old that triggering an emergency stop after the doors closed involved pulling out a wooden knob, which I did.

“This is the third time now that you’ve left without a note,” I said. “Not a word. Nothing.”

“I think that will set off alarms?” he said, staring at his feet, nodding at the button.

“You already have,” I said. “We had a deal. We’ve always had a deal, the best fucking deal any husband—any writer—ever had. An hour away, a day away, anytime, anywhere—”

“Unless there’s a tournament—”

“—you only have to leave a note. And fuck off about tournaments”—he said I swore too much, and I did—“five bucks says you don’t even know what kind of ball they’ll use at Ellie’s next match.”

“That’s a trick question?” he said. (Fine: chess.)

“What are you doing?” I said. “Go running. Go sailing. Take some time. But enough with this ducking out here and there. Let’s get you some real time, a week—”

“I’ve never done a whole—”

“You’ve never not left notes,” I said. “The girls notice—they—we all get scared, okay?”

In truth, I hadn’t been scared. I’d been angry. But when I said it, I saw it, that he hadn’t really gone this time, nor the two times before—he hadn’t gone, but was going.

He looked at me, at the elevator doors shut tight, at the compartment’s ceiling and the water that disconcertingly pooled in the light panel there. He looked at the worn walls, the scuffed floor; he was wedged in a corner, gripping a side rail with each hand.

“Listen,” he said.

I interrupted him. I said the thing you say to kids, the lie you lie to shut them up.

I mean I said, “I know.”

He shook his head. I kept lying.

“It’s all right,” I said. He wouldn’t look at me. “It’ll be all right.”

He closed his eyes, I reached out to him, he whispered, “I’m so sorry.”

“Campus police,” the intercom blared. “What’s your emergency?”