LIAM CALLANAN is the author of the novels The Cloud Atlas and All Saints. His work has appeared in Slate, The New York Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Forbes, Good Housekeeping and elsewhere. He lives in Milwaukee with his wife and three daughters, and teaches in the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s creative writing program and at Warren Wilson. Visit Liam’s website at www.liamcallanan.com
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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Liam Callanan 2018
Liam Callanan asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © April 2018 ISBN: 9780008273675
To the one I found
It is inevitable that when we really need someone we find him. The person you need attracts you like a magnet. I returned to Paris, after these long years spent in the countryside and I needed a young painter, a young painter who would awaken me. Paris was magnificent, but where was the young painter?
— Gertrude Stein
Paris, 1945
Contents
Once a week, I chase men who are not my husband. (After everything, I do this still.)
I should not, but there are many things I do that I should not—smoke, own a bookstore, pay for French lessons I always find ways to skip—and this is one. I walk my daughters to school, stare past the parents staring past me, and start my search for that day’s man.
I’ve sometimes begun right there on the sidewalk, trailing a fellow parent, a father, as he frees himself from the clutch outside the massive school door. More frequently, I walk up to the teeming rue Saint-Antoine and sift the passing crowd. Some mornings I find someone to chase right away. Some mornings it takes all morning. Some mornings I follow someone for a while, usually someone just like my husband, or as close as I can manage, or bear—the ink-black hair, the narrow shoulders, the hands that can’t stay in pockets, the head that can’t stop turning every way but mine—only to lose interest when some errant detail distracts. My husband would never wear blue glasses. My husband would never not yield a taxi to a pregnant woman. My husband would never steal a magazine from a newsstand, an apple from a greengrocer, a book from a bouquiniste. My husband would never—and I saw this once on one of my forays, a dad I’d trailed from the school door—kiss a woman not his wife.
Some mornings I find no one. This always surprises me, though