13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [78]
What sort of utterly bizarre man calls himself Sir? What sort of utterly bizarre man writes to himself and then posts himself his own letter, bothering to cancel a stamp and wait for it to come back to him?
The letters are all addressed to Dear Sir. They are all signed Trevor Stratton, except for the last one that trails directly off into the same sort of strange content that follows the other letters. When she flips through the text, it makes her smile in utter delight. It looks quite familiar to her, though of course she has never seen it before; she knows it like something that might have come to her in dreams. But where is his last signature? This bothers her. She skips through the entire packet to the last couple of pages and reads the following:
Off the Record
Paris, June
Josianne is sitting at her desk quite bored when a clerk from the mailroom comes up to her bearing an armload of envelopes.
What?
No.
The tricky monkey. He is even worse than she is! She loves him to pieces. The blood rushes madly around her heated body as she reads on, gripped by an elated vertigo. She skips down to the present moment and reads the following:
She skips down to the present moment and reads the following:
How do you like them? I wrote them for you. I think they belong to you a little, too. Don’t worry, darling, I won’t tell anyone you opened my mail. Come to me. I am in my office.
With love,
Trevor Stratton
Afterword
When I was a little girl growing up in Paris in the early 1980s, an old woman who lived a few floors up from my apartment died alone. Her name was Louise Brunet. She had no remaining relatives to come fetch her belongings, so the landlord had to clear them all out. He let the other tenants in the building scavenge through her stuff and take home silverware, jewelry, whatever they wanted. My mother salvaged a small box filled with mementos: old love letters from WWI, mesh church gloves, dried flowers, a rosary—many objects worth nothing but memories. This box is the sepulchre of Louise Brunet’s heart. The story behind the objects is lost; the objects are now the story.
As I have carried this strange box through life and across the world, I have always intended to make a book out of it. This book now exists; you hold it in your hands. The Louise Brunet depicted within it is a fiction; the real Louise Brunet is irretrievable. Still, she gave me the stars. I merely drew the constellations.
Additional Images
If you pay close attention to some of these photographs, you can see that certain people are not who Trevor says they are. Trevor is quite fanciful. You can also see, before the Great War, remnants of the nineteenth century in people’s dress and demeanor. After the war, the remnants are gone. From posed portraits in professional photography studios to more candid snapshots, hems rise, hats disappear, faster exposure times allow people to smile for the camera. The earliest of the photographs is just about a century old; the latest looks from about fifteen years after. In fifteen years, will we too be gazing at the camera from an entirely different world? Should we hope so? There is nothing for us to do but hope, as Louise once did when she scrawled at the bottom of a photograph of a statue in a cemetery, “Little Saint Teresa, pray for us.”
Acknowledgments
I am deeply indebted to Reagan Arthur, my editor, for her care and kindness with this novel. Thanks also to the great team at Little, Brown for all their hard work. I owe eternal gratitude to Bonnie Nadell, my agent, for her belief in my work and her guidance. And of course, oodles of love to Harris Shapiro, the best husband a woman could ask for.
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Welcome
Dedication
On the Record
A photograph