An Exact Replica of a Figment of My Imagination_ A Memoir - Elizabeth McCracken [7]
I’d lived for nine years in Somerville, Massachusetts: now Edward and I began to move. For four years, we relocated every few months, to Iowa City, Paris, Ireland, Iowa City, Berlin, small-town Denmark, Iowa City, Paris. We chased jobs and fellowships and wine and museums, lived in midwestern sabbatical sublets, a thatched cottage that had sheltered Brecht in the 1930s, next door to hard-partying students, in a German villa made over into housing for American academics. Somewhere in there we got married at the small stone church at the bottom of Edward’s parents’ driveway. The village vicar officiated, backed up by an American rabbi my mother had ordered off the Internet.
My favorite of our dwellings was our last apartment in Paris, the first home of my first pregnancy. We’d had a list of things we wanted in a place to live: space for two desks, maybe a guest room, maybe a tiny balcony, without a doubt an elevator for certain unsteady relatives. Then we answered an ad in an expat paper. The building was next to the Jewish Museum and around the corner from the Pompidou Centre. We punched the code we’d been given over the phone into the pad by the door, walked five flights of stairs that got narrower and wobblier until we were at the top in a low-ceilinged hallway, rang a bell, and were let into a seventeenth-century high-ceilinged cartoon garret filled with antique furniture. It fulfilled none of our requirements. We loved it immediately. Just then another would be renter showed up, a yellow-clad lawyer from Boston, with wooden skin and leaden hair and the official dreary insinuating underfed brittle aura of a number 2 pencil. We understood that she meant us ill. “We’ll take it,” Edward told the landlady, a tall woman from Amiens who raised mules and taught English to small boys. “Wonderful,” the landlady answered, and the lawyer said in disbelief, “It’s fine for one person. But two?”
“We’re writers,” I said apologetically. “We’re supposed to live in a garret in Paris.”
She snorted. “Everyone in Paris is a writer.”
The kitchen was small and overlooked the dining area; the guest room was a treacherous loft over the living room; the tub was a slipper bath, half-sized but deep, with a step to sit on, the perfect place to read. Above the bed, where I worked, sitting up, was a ceiling of herringbone beams. Through the bedroom window you could see the turrets of the National Archives; through the dining room window, the chimney pots of Paris.
I was working on a malingering novel, since abandoned (for a while I said, “It died,” but not anymore), and Edward on an enormous one. We’d write in the morning, Edward in the dining room and me propped up in bed, and then I’d persuade him to go out to lunch, where we’d order a carafe of wine, and then we’d wander and spend money and not get back to our books till the next morning.
After some months of this, my novel collapsed. I panicked: How would I ever write again? How could we afford to keep living in Paris at this rate? To talk me down from the cliff, Edward suggested the country, where life would be beautiful, cheap, and dull, and we’d have no choice but to work. All right, I said. We found three possible properties on the Internet; we drove out to look at them. The first was a millhouse that had been converted into a restaurant and was now being converted back into a house; from the windows we could see the landlord’s apartment, which seemed overly cozy. The second, also a millhouse, had an intermittent rat problem. “Coypou,” the landlady explained, and Edward said, “Oh, coypou,” as though this constituted a particularly prestigious sort of rat problem. The third was Savary. Beryl, the landlady, showed us around. Preposterous! we thought. Who needed four times as many toilets as occupants? But the price was right, and we signed a lease that started in three months, and we went back to Paris.
Two weeks later, I sent