The Paris Wife

TWENTY-TWO

What followed was the longest night of my life. The mountains closed in as we headed into Switzerland, and blackness fell. I thought about how I would tell Ernest the work was gone, but I couldn’t imagine it. There were no words.

When we finally pulled into Lausanne the next morning, and I saw Ernest on the platform with Steffens right beside him, it was all I could do to stand and walk toward them. I was crying. Ernest looked at Steffens and shrugged as if to say, Who can understand a woman, but then I couldn’t stop and Ernest knew something was very wrong.

Still, it was ages before I could say the words. Steffens excused himself, telling Ernest he’d phone to arrange a meeting. When he was gone, Ernest made me sit down at a café table near the entrance of the station. All around us couples and families kissed good-bye or bade each other farewell, and they seemed so painfully untroubled to me. A fresh wave of tears came.

“What is it?” Ernest asked again and again, first worried and tender, then angry, then worried again. “Whatever it is, we’ll get through it. Nothing can be that bad.”

But it was. It was exactly that bad. I shook my head and cried harder, and it went on this way until finally I was able to tell him about packing the case and stowing it for the journey.

I didn’t need to say more. His face grew pale and very serious. “You lost it on the train.”

“It was stolen out from under me.”

He nodded, taking it all in, and I watched his eyes carefully, how they changed and steadied, changed and steadied. He was trying to be brave for me, I knew. Because he wasn’t sure what I’d do.

“You couldn’t have packed everything. Why would I need it all?”

“If you were going to be making changes in the originals, I thought you’d want the copies, too, so that everything would be right.”

“You must have left something,” he said.

I shook my head and waited. Would he snap from the strain and fly into a rage? I’d certainly earned that. I’d taken what was his-what was most his in the world-without his asking me to, as if I had that right. And now it was gone.

“I have to go back. I need to know it for myself.”

“I’m so sorry, Tatie.” I shook with remorse and heartsickness.

“It’s going to be all right. I made it. I can make it all again.”

I knew he was bluffing if not outright lying, but I held him tight and let him hold me, and we said all the words people say to each other when they know the worst has come.

Late that night, he boarded a train back to Paris while I waited in Lausanne in a wet knot. Steffens took me to dinner and tried to calm my nerves, but even with several whiskeys in me, I jangled.

He was gone for two days and sent no cable. But just as I could see myself reaching into the cupboard over and over, packing everything away in the valise, I could see him coming into the quiet apartment and discovering for himself that it was all really gone.

Turning on all the lights, he first looks at everything in plain sight, the table and the bed, the kitchen. He looks at the floor and walks between the two rooms slowly, saving the cupboard until he’s seen everything else, because that’s the last place, and there won’t be anywhere to look after and no hope left at all. He has a drink first, then another, but finally he has to see it. He puts his hand on the knob and pulls the door open and then he knows everything. There isn’t a page left in the cupboard. Not a note or a scrap. He looks and looks, standing there, wrenched out and hollow. As desolate as the cupboard is, that’s how he is too because the pages belong to him and are him. It’s like someone has taken a broom to his insides and swept them out until everything’s clean and bright and hard and empty.