LITMIR.BIZ

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He’d changed after that. Worked harder, become practically obsessed with whatever he was writing. I thought about a woman he’d interviewed for the series about the new economy. He’d found her under a bridge in Brooklyn. She talked about how she was going to get back her job as chief accountant very soon, and then she’d bring home her three kids and move back into an apartment in Park Slope. Under all the layers of clothing she carried a cell phone so the company would be able to reach her. It had neither a SIM card nor a battery. Patrick had spent three nights out there. When he came home he tossed and turned in bed, talking in his sleep. ‘You have to call Rose,’ he said. ‘You have to call Rose.’ I had pictured Rose as some secret cutie until I saw the article and realized she was the woman who lived under the bridges in Brooklyn. That was what he dreamed about at night.

      I shut the last drawer, and the desk resumed its closed, orderly guise.

      Hadn’t he ever mentioned the name of the hotel? Not even once?

      I fixed my gaze on the row of books above his desk.

      Hemingway.

      Patrick had said something about Hemingway the last time he called. About the bar where he’d gone. I hadn’t paid much attention because I didn’t give a shit about Hemingway. I would never have gone to that bar, even if he’d still been alive. But Patrick had also mentioned Victor Hugo.

      He was sitting at the window of the hotel and looking at … what? A grave? The place where Victor Hugo was buried.

      I kicked my feet to make the chair roll across the floor to my own work area, and pressed the keyboard of my laptop. The screen woke out of sleep mode.

      I’d seen Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, both the musical and the films, but I had no idea where the author was buried.

      I typed ‘Victor Hugo’ and ‘grave’ into Google and pressed search. From the first hit I recognized the name that Patrick had mentioned. The Panthéon. I clicked on Wikipedia. Panthéon was Greek for ‘all gods’. It was originally a church, but after the French Revolution it was turned into a mausoleum for national heroes. In 1851 Foucault had hung a pendulum from the dome to prove that the earth rotates. Victor Hugo was buried in crypt number twenty-four.

      Impatiently I scrolled down to the technical structural details.

      Patrick had said that he could see the dome from his window. The building was eighty-three metres tall. I pictured how it must rise above the rooftops. There could be hundreds of hotels that boasted of such a view.

      But Patrick could also see the university through the window. The Sorbonne. Did you know people live up there under the eaves? I typed ‘Sorbonne’ and ‘Panthéon’ and ‘hotel’ in the search box.

      The first hit was for the Hôtel de la Sorbonne. I felt a shiver race through my body. A feeling that Patrick was getting closer. I was pulling him towards me.

      A click from the door, his footsteps across the floor, and everything would return to normal again. Breakfast and work. Watching American Idol with half an eye in the evening. Days passing, nights when I was able to sleep. The sound of him breathing next to me.

      The hotel’s website appeared on the screen. ‘Near the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, and the Luxembourg Gardens’. The clock in the upper right corner of the screen told me it was approaching one a.m., which meant six in the morning in Paris. I tapped in the phone number, picturing in my mind the sun rising above ponderous stone buildings with gleaming cupolas.

      ‘Hôtel Sorbonne. Bonjour.’

      The voice on the phone sounded slightly groggy, half-asleep.

      ‘Good morning,’ I said. ‘I’m trying to get in touch with a guest who may be staying at your hotel.’

      A lengthy and rapid reply followed.

      ‘Do you speak English?’ I asked. ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall.’

      A long silence on the phone. I watched the clock change from 00.53 to 00.54. Tuesday, 23 September.

      ‘No Cornell.’

      ‘Cornwall,’ I said, enunciating carefully. ‘He’s an American journalist.’

      But I heard only a buzzing sound in my ear. I wondered how Patrick could stand it over there. But he spoke fluent French, of course, so he didn’t have to put up with being treated like something the cat had dragged in.

      On the website of the next hotel on the list, the Cluny Sorbonne, they boasted about speaking English. The description further said: in the heart of the Latin Quarter, within walking distance of Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the Louvre.

      ‘I’m looking for an American named Patrick Cornwall. I’m not really sure, but I think he’s staying at your hotel.’

      ‘No, he’s not.’

      I clicked back to the search list. Were there more Sorbonne hotels?

      ‘I’m afraid he has checked out.’

      ‘What did you say?’

      ‘He has checked out.’

      I grabbed the armrest and held on tightly.

      ‘When was that?’

      ‘And who, may I ask, is calling?’

      I was just about to say ‘his wife’, but something stopped me. Shame. I felt my cheeks flush. I suddenly saw the situation from the other end of the phone line. France was a country in which even the president had secret lovers and got away with it. And I was the abandoned wife.

      ‘We’re colleagues at the magazine,’ I said. ‘And I’m sitting here with a travel invoice that I can’t quite decipher. That’s why I need to speak to him. So I can send him his money.’

      I sounded like a real bureaucrat.

      ‘Just a moment.’ An eternity passed as the clerk paged through the information in a ledger or a database or whatever they used in the Old World. I heard a clattering somewhere in the background. Maybe they were setting the tables for breakfast.

      ‘It was last Tuesday,’ he said finally. ‘September sixteenth.’

      A week ago. The same day the envelope was mailed. I took a deep breath.

      ‘Were you on duty when he left the hotel?’

      ‘Yes, of course. He was happy to be going home to New York. He said he missed his wife. I told him that he should bring her with him next time he comes to Paris. It’s the romance capital of the world, after all.’

      ‘Are you sure about that? That he was going home to New York?’

      I gripped the phone even harder.

      ‘Yes. He said that quite clearly. We almost had a quarrel about the fact that he was so eager to leave us.’

      ‘Did he say anything else?’

      ‘Just that he would stay with us the next time he’s in Paris.’

      I ended the call. The silence pressed against my skull. At any second it would explode. Fragments of information would scatter across the floor. Checked out. Back home to New York. The baby money. The positive pregnancy test. We never pay advances.

      Restlessly I paced the apartment. Took some juice out of the fridge and drank from the bottle.

      Where had he gone? Why had he lied about where he was going? And if he was telling the truth, why hadn’t he come home?

      On the kitchen counter were the remains of the snacks I’d eaten over the past few days. Since the kitchen was just a corner of the bedroom, we always did the dishes before we went to bed so we wouldn’t have to look at leftovers when we got up in the morning. But now there was a small pyramid of empty yogurt containers. And I thought I noticed that they were starting to smell. The smell grew. Dirty glasses and cutlery, salad packaging and pizza

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