And They Loved

Prologue

Ten years ago I went to Paris because I could not finish a book.

It was October. I had been working on the same novel for two years and the book had stopped under my hands. I would sit at my desk in Jackson and look at the pages and the pages would look back. Nothing was wrong with them, exactly. Nothing was right either. I had reached the place a writer sometimes reaches where the work is no longer moving and the writer does not know whether to push it or to leave it alone.

I left it alone. I bought a ticket to Paris. I had been to Paris twice before and I had loved it both times in the way one loves a city one does not live in. I told myself I was going to walk for a week and read in cafés and let the streets do whatever they were going to do for the book, and that if nothing came of it I would at least have walked in Paris for a week, which is not a small thing for a woman to give herself at forty-five.

I did not, on that trip, find a way through my novel.

I found something else.

On the fourth afternoon I was walking on a small street in the sixth arrondissement, the kind of street that has three bookshops on it because Paris is a city that still allows three bookshops on a small street, and I went into one of them. I do not remember now what made me choose that one over the others. The window, perhaps. A particular light coming through the glass at a particular angle. Above the door was a wooden sign with two lines lettered on it. The first line, in larger letters, read Librairie du Seuil. Beneath it, in smaller letters, the subtitle: Librairie du Seuil et du Passage. I went in.

The shop was small. Two rooms. Books from floor to ceiling, the way old bookshops in Paris still are. There was a smell of paper and dust and the quiet that comes from a place where people have been reading for a long time. A man was at the desk, reading. He looked up when I came in.

He was old. I want to say in his seventies, though I could not have placed his age exactly. He had the kind of face on which the years had settled deeply, in lines and in a stillness around the eyes. He looked at me for a moment longer than the moment a bookseller looks at a customer who has just walked in. He looked at me the way a doctor sometimes looks at a patient who has just sat down — with the brief still attention of a man whose work is to see what is in front of him. Then his face settled, and he said, in good slow English, "I have the book you need." I had not asked for a book. I had not said anything yet.

I came to understand later, though only later and never entirely, that his shop was not an ordinary bookshop. He was a man whose work was to know what readers needed and to give them the books that would help. I do not know how he had come to this work. I do not know whether there were others like him in other cities. I have never asked. He did not, that afternoon, tell me anything about himself. He stood up from the desk and came around to where I was standing, and he pointed past me to a corner of the second room, a corner I had not yet looked at, where a small bookcase stood under a window.

"There," he said. "On the second shelf."

I went. I do not know why I went. I could have laughed, or said something polite, or browsed the front of the store first the way a person does. I went to the corner. I knelt down to the second shelf. There were perhaps thirty books on it. I do not remember why I picked the one I picked. My hand went to it the way a hand sometimes goes to a thing it has already decided on without telling the rest of you. It was not larger than the others. It was not in better condition. It had no jacket. It was a small old hardcover, dark cloth, the title stamped in gold on the spine, faded but still readable.

It said And They Loved.

I took it out.

I opened it to the title page. I do not remember the author's name. I have tried, since, to remember it. I cannot. Even before what happened later, the name did not stay in my mind. I have come to think this was not an accident.

I closed the book and brought it to the desk. The bookseller did not say anything more. He took the book from me, looked at it briefly, and named a price that was lower than the price I would have paid for any old hardcover in any shop in any country. I paid him in the bills I had in my pocket. He wrapped the book in a single sheet of brown paper and tied it with a piece of string. He handed it to me.

He said, "Read it slowly."

I said, "I will."

I left the shop.

I want to say that at the time I knew what was beginning. I did not. I was a woman who had bought an old book in a bookshop in Paris, the way women on trips to Paris sometimes buy books, and I was already thinking about what I was going to have for supper. I walked back to my hotel with the brown-paper parcel under my arm. I put it in my suitcase that night. I lay in bed and thought about the bookseller and his look and what he had said and what I had bought. The encounter sat in me with a quality I could not name. I had been in many bookshops in many cities. I had never been in one where the bookseller had looked at me like that, or said what he had said, or named a price as if the price did not quite matter. I told myself, lying there, that I had imagined the strangeness, the way one imagines strangeness on a trip, in a foreign city, when one is tired and a little lonely. By morning I had decided I would go back to the shop and look at it again. I would not buy anything. I would simply look. I wanted to see if the shop was the way I remembered it.

I went the next afternoon, around the same hour. I walked the same small street in the sixth. I came to where the shop had been.

The shop was not there.

Or rather, the door was there, and the building was there, but the door was a different door, and the window beside it held no books. The window was a small empty window with a tasteful curtain behind it and nothing visible inside. Above the door there was no sign. I stood across the street and looked at it for a long time. The buildings on either side were the buildings I remembered. The boulangerie at the end of the block was the boulangerie I remembered. I had walked the right street. I had come to the right address. The shop was simply not there.

I crossed the street and tried the door. It did not open. There was no lock visible, no handle to turn. The door simply did not give.

I stood at the door for a moment longer. I do not remember what I felt. I think I felt something close to embarrassed, the way one feels embarrassed when one realizes one has gone the wrong way. But I had not gone the wrong way. I had come to the place where the shop had been. I knew it had been here. I had the brown-paper parcel back at the hotel to prove it.

I went back to my hotel. I did not try to find the shop again. I understood, in some way I could not have explained at the time, that I was not meant to find it. I had been given what I had been given. The shop had done its work with me and was done.

I flew home three days later.

I did not open the book on the plane.

I had decided, somewhere on the way home, that I would open it in my own house, in my own light, when I was ready. I do not know why I decided this. The decision arrived in me the way decisions sometimes arrive — without being argued for, without being chosen exactly, as if the book itself were already telling me how to handle it.

I came home to Jackson. I unpacked. I put the brown-paper parcel on the corner of my desk. It sat there for two days. I looked at it. I went about my life. I went to the coffee shop. I sat at my desk and looked at the novel I could not finish. I did the laundry. I called Sam. Twice in those two days I picked up the parcel, weighed it in my hand, and put it down again.

On the third evening I made myself a cup of tea. I went to my desk. I untied the string. I unwrapped the paper. I sat down with the book on my lap and I opened it to chapter one.

That is where this story begins. Or rather, that is where I would say it begins, if I were telling it as a writer. As the woman I was at forty-five, sitting in my chair in Jackson with a book in my lap that I did not yet know was a book about my own life, I was simply a woman about to read.

I am going to tell you what happened.

I have not told it before. Sam knows most of it, because Sam was there for most of it and because I told her the rest. Alex knows the parts that involve him, which is most of them, but not the parts that came before. No one else has heard any of it. I have been carrying it for ten years.

I thought, at the time, that I had simply been given a book.

I was wrong.

I am ready now.

Chapter One

I sat with the book on my lap for a moment before I read. It was nearly nine at night. The lamp on my desk was the small green-shaded lamp I had used for ten years. The light from it fell on the book in my lap and made the dark cloth look softer than it had looked under the brighter lights of the shop in Paris.

I want to be honest with you about how I felt, sitting there.

I was tired. I had been tired since I got home. Jet lag does not let go of me the way it used to, in my thirties, when I would fly somewhere and bounce back in two days. At forty-five it took a week. I was on the third day of the week. I was tired and a little nervous in a way I could not have named. The package had been on my desk for two days. I had picked it up twice and put it down. I had decided to open it now and I was uncertain whether I had been right to wait or whether I had been right to open.

I read the title page again. And They Loved. The author's name underneath, which I read and which did not stay. There was no dedication. I turned to chapter one.

I read the chapter through.

I am not going to tell you, in this telling, what the chapter said. I came to understand that the chapters of that book were private to me, in a way I will explain as we go. I will tell you what was in them only as my life came up to meet them, and then only the parts that mattered. For now I will say only that the chapter was four pages long, that the prose was contemporary and plain, that the chapter described a woman in a small unnamed town doing the kind of small things a woman does on an ordinary day.

I closed the book when I had finished.

I did not, that night, fully understand what I had read. I had a feeling. The feeling was something like the way one feels when one has met a stranger and is not sure whether one has met them before. Not déjà vu exactly. Adjacent to it. The chapter had felt familiar in a way I could not place. I told myself I was tired and that tired readers see themselves in books. I closed the book and set it on the corner of the desk.

I went to bed.

I did not sleep well. I lay in the dark and the chapter sat in me. I thought about the bookseller and what he had said. I have the book you need. I thought about going back to the shop and finding it gone. I thought about the chapter and the woman in it and the sense I had of having met her somewhere. By the time I fell asleep I had decided I would think about it in the morning and that the morning would clear it up.

I slept badly and woke at six.

I lay in bed for a few minutes, the way I do, and then I got up. I went into the kitchen in my robe and made coffee. I poured it into the green mug I had used every morning for years. I sat down at the kitchen table.

I drank the coffee. I watched the morning come in over the yard.

The chapter had said that.

I sat at the table for a moment longer, with the coffee in front of me. I had read the chapter the night before and the line about the morning had passed over me without my noticing it. Now I was inside the line. I was the woman watching the yard. I held the mug a little tighter, the way one holds a thing one has just become aware of, and I noticed — I noticed because the awareness had begun to make me notice — that the mug was green. The chapter had said the mug was green. Or it had said the woman drank from a green mug. Something close. I was not sure of the exact wording. But the detail had been there. The book had said the mug was green and my mug was green. I had been drinking from this mug for a decade.

I told myself it was nothing. Many people have kitchen tables with windows. Many people watch the morning come in.

Many people drink from green mugs.

Many people, though, do not drink from a particular green mug they have used every morning for ten years and find that the mug has been described in a book they bought in Paris.

The bell I had been hearing was less distant.

I finished the coffee.

I read for a while at the table — the same novel I had been reading before Paris, picked up where I had left off. I was not really reading it. I was thinking about the book on my desk. After a while I made oatmeal. I washed the dishes.

I went to my desk.

The manuscript was there, the novel I had been failing to finish for two years. I sat down. I read the page I had been on yesterday. I read the page before. I read the page after. I picked up a pencil and made a small mark in the margin and put the pencil down and stood up.

That had been in the book.

I had read it last night. I had read the line and not particularly noticed it. There was no reason to notice a line about a writer making a pencil mark in the margin of her own manuscript. Writers do that all day. I had read it and turned the page. Now I had done it. I had made the mark and put the pencil down and stood up, all without thinking, all in the natural order in which I had done such things on every morning for years, and the chapter had described it.

I stood at the desk for a moment.

I went into the kitchen and made another cup of coffee.

That had been in the book too.

I made the coffee anyway. I made it because I always made a second cup at this hour. I made it because the book having said I would was not a reason to refuse what I had been doing every morning for ten years. But I made it knowing, now, that the book had said it. The bell was less distant than it had been at the kitchen table half an hour earlier.

I came back to the desk with the coffee. I sat down. I looked at the manuscript. The manuscript looked back. That had been our relationship for two years and the trip to Paris had not changed it.

That had been in the book too. The woman in the book had had a manuscript that looked back at her. The chapter had used those exact words.

I felt, for the first time that morning, that I was being read.

I sat at the desk with the coffee in front of me and the manuscript in front of me and the book at the corner of the desk in its dark cloth, and I tried to think.

Four things in one morning. The watching of the yard. The green mug. The pencil mark. The manuscript looking back. The chapter had said all four, in print, the night before, in a book that was old and had been on a shelf in a Paris bookshop for I did not know how long. I had read them and not noticed them, particularly, because they had been ordinary things written about an ordinary woman. Then I had done them, in the same order, in the same morning, in my own house.

I told myself, again, what I had been telling myself in pieces all morning. Generic. Ordinary. Many writers do these things on ordinary mornings. The chapter was about a woman like me and I was a woman like her. We would do similar things.

It was true.

It was also not enough.

I sat at my desk and I drank my coffee and I knew, in some part of me that was below the part doing the talking, that whatever I told myself was not going to be enough.

I want to tell you that I did something dramatic. I did not. I sat at my desk for another hour. I tried to work on the manuscript and I failed. I got up. I put on my coat. I walked to the coffee shop.

The chapter had said the woman walked to a coffee shop.

I knew this as I walked. I had read it the night before and I was now walking to my coffee shop in the way the chapter had described — six blocks down and one over, the corner across from the small park, the sidewalk damp from the night's frost. The chapter had described the walk. I had thought, last night, that of course it had. Many writers walk to coffee shops. Now I was walking to mine and the description of the walk was in me and I knew it was happening.

I went into the coffee shop. I ordered black coffee in a ceramic cup. I sat in the corner by the window. I did not write. I did not read. I sat and watched the few people on the sidewalk through the window and I thought about being back.

I was glad to be home and a little sorry to be home, in the way one is sorry, and glad, when a trip has ended.

That was the chapter's line. The chapter had not been four pages of generic writing about a generic woman. It had been four pages of my morning and afternoon, in advance, in print, in my hands at home on my desk.

I sat at the corner table and drank my coffee. I did not get up. I sat there for a long time.

I am going to tell you what I thought about, sitting there, but I want to be careful about how I tell you, because what I thought about that morning in the coffee shop was not anything I had to put into words yet. I had a closed book at home on my desk that contained a chapter that had described my day. I was inside that day. I was the woman who was watching the few people on the sidewalk through the window. I was the woman the chapter had been about.

The bell I had heard at the kitchen table was no longer distant.

I did not know what to do.

I sat at the corner table for an hour and a half and did not move. I did not order another cup of coffee. The man behind the counter — I had known him for four years, his name was Daniel — looked over at me once or twice and then left me alone, the way he always did when he could see I was working something out. He was a good man. He had taught himself, over four years of having me as a customer, when not to ask.

Around two I stood up and put on my coat and walked back to the house.

I did not, that afternoon, do much of anything. I sat at my desk. I looked at the manuscript. I did not look at the closed book on the corner of the desk, though I was aware of it. I did not call Sam. I had thought, walking home, that I should call Sam, and I had decided, by the time I came up the stairs to my house, that I was not yet ready to call her.

I was not ready, that day, to make what was happening into a thing I told someone else about. I was not ready to hear my own voice describe it. I needed, for one more day at least, to hold it alone and let it settle into me and become a thing I could speak.

Sam came over for supper that evening.

She brought a bottle of wine and a paper bag of vegetables from her back garden because she always brought something. We made pasta. We sat at the kitchen table and ate. I told her about Paris. She asked the small good questions she always asked. I did not tell her about the book.

The chapter had said this. The chapter had said the woman did not tell the friend, that the friend brought wine and vegetables, that they made pasta, that the woman did not know why she did not tell.

I did not know either.

Sam left at ten. I washed the dishes. I went into my office and stood at the desk and looked at the closed book on the corner.

The chapter had ended somewhere. It had been four pages. I did not remember now, after the day I had had, how it had ended. I picked up the book and opened it to chapter one again and I read the last page.

The chapter ended with the woman going to bed.

I went to bed.

Just before I turned off the light I made myself a small promise, lying in the dark. I would not read chapter two until something in chapter one had not yet happened. The day's chapter was almost over. The woman had gone to bed. I had gone to bed. There was nothing left for the chapter to say. But I was going to wait, anyway, until I had been awake again — until tomorrow morning had come and the chapter was fully finished — before I read the next.

I would let the chapter close. Then I would read the next.

That was the rule.

I lay in the dark and made the rule and held it. I slept, eventually. I do not remember when.

In the morning the chapter was finished. The woman had woken up — the chapter had not said how — and the chapter was done. I was outside it now. I was a woman who had lived through a chapter of a book and was no longer in that chapter. The book was on the corner of my desk. Chapter two was on the next page.

I made coffee. I drank it at the kitchen table. The chapter was finished. The watching of the yard was now my own and not the book's. I was, for the moment, alone again in my own house, in my own life, before whatever was going to come next came.

I sat at the table for a long time before I went to my desk.

I went to my desk.

I picked up the book.

I opened it to chapter two.