When it comes you will know it, when it comes you will
know it, Jon repeated to himself. It came and went and he didn't know it
until two stops past. He had counted before he got on the metro. Eight
stops. And he counted because he wasn't able to see the signs on the wall
in the metro halls, the bodies crammed together, a mob of Parisian heads
surrounding him and crowding the door in the evening's busiest hour. So
he counted and stood in the middle and subtracted one at each stop. He
had three to go and that's when he began repeating, when it comes you will
know it. And then he started thinking about Estelle at home in the apartment,
sitting next to the telephone, organizing their flyer campaign for high-traffic
street corners and bus stops and metro lines and now he realizes he's two
stops past.
"Goddamn it," he mumbles and a man holding a
bag of groceries looks at him blankly.
The plan was for Jon to be in prime position to hand out
the flyers in the Gare du Nord metro station before the six o'clock crowd,
but he stopped for a drink that became three. He knows Estelle won't know.
She won't leave that phone in case the police call and she trusts him to
do this right but he had to have a drink. He can't help but have a drink
before he goes into the metro with a stack of orange flyers that have a
picture of his nine-year old daughter in the middle, surrounded with AIDEZ-NOUS
a RETROUVER JENNIFER written in bold black letters. He simply can't help
it.
The metro stops and he bumps out of the door with a pack
of others. He moves with the crowd along the passageways of the rue Montmarte
stop. It takes going up and down stairs and through a rounded hallway to
get to the other side of the tracks. People are everywhere and in a steady
shuffle, ready to get home, put up their feet, have their dinner, read
their paper. The train arrives and this time he concentrates, gets on late
so he can stand near the door, see out of the window. Back two stops to
Gare du Nord where five metro lines and half of Paris collide and there
is every kind of face-old, pretty, tired, laughing, cynical, white, brown,
round, thin, childish, hollow. No matches for Jennifer. No little girl
with thin, wavy hair and brown eyes, wearing jeans and a pink backpack
and her heavy coat. Two months and nothing. Two months of her dancing in
his head in this outfit. He stops at the foot of the escalator where people
cluster in an impatient pack and passes out the orange flyers. Some take,
some ignore. The ones that take fold and stuff it without looking, maybe
will find it later when they reach into their pockets or purses as they
pay for bread on the walk home, will say to themselves, "Where did
this come from?" And he wonders the same. This day, this moment, this
getting here, this standing at the escalator. Where did this come from?
This slow, slow ticking of the clock. The crowd thins as the time between
trains expands and out of a stack of two hundred flyers, he keeps five
to post on the exits that lead up into the streets.
He gets onto the escalator and the woman on the step in
front of him sees what he's holding and says, "I have seen this. On
the news. You haven't found her yet?"
Jon shakes his head and says, "Not yet."
"You should go on television again," she says
and turns away. He feels confident that if universal law allowed it, he
could put his hands around her neck and choke her until her mouth was dry.
The walkways' and intersections' exits and entrances are
organized chaos and he is nearly knocked down over and over working his
way through the traffic. When he's done sticking up the last one, he looks
at his watch and times for thirty seconds, then counts how many people
look at their flyer.
Two. Which is up one from last week when he posted at
Gare de L'Est.
He gets on the metro and heads back home. At the café
on the end of his street Monsieur Conrer serves him another drink and when
he goes into the apartment Estelle is perched on a stool next to the phone
in the kitchen, cigarette in one hand and red marker in the other. She
looks up, smokes, then says, "How'd it go?"
---
They have stopped sleeping in the same room because they
don't sleep. Estelle takes the couch and Jon lies in the bedroom. He hears
her all hours of the night-pacing, opening the refrigerator door, changing
channels. Jon tries to trick himself into sleeping by imagining they're
on a long vacation and Jennifer is left behind with friends. Sometimes
Estelle will come into the bedroom and crawl over close to him, rest her
head on his chest, curl herself into a ball. She is a combination of smells-of
perfume, of cigarettes, of coffee. But she doesn't ever stay curled next
to him for long.
On empty afternoons, when alone in the apartment, each
of them has tried to go into Jennifer's room and make her bed, put her
shoes away in the closet, close the teen fashion magazine lying open on
her nightstand. Jon had laughed when she held it to him in the bookstore
and said she needed it. "Need? Nine is a single digit number. That
information is for girls with double-digit birthdays." She looked
down at it, ran her hand across the glossy cover, as if she could feel
herself in the perfect face staring back at her. "Let's just pretend
I'm twelve," she said. He took it and made her promise not to tell
her mother. Which she did the moment they walked in the apartment. Later
that night, with Jennifer asleep between them on the couch, Estelle had
reached over and playfully smacked the back of Jon's head and said, "Don't
rush her."
So they go into the room, but tiptoe around the way it
is. Careful not to disrupt her life. They keep the door half-open, giving
themselves a glimpse of the life that was as they walk down the hallway.
Even life upside down has its routine. Estelle stays at
home on high alert but Jon has to go to work because the earth keeps spinning.
So he shows up at L'Ecole Des Langues at nine a.m. every weekday morning,
goes to his desk, assorts his tasks for the day, and then the knocks and
bumps of an office distract him until he walks back into the street in
the evening. His co-workers can't figure out how to treat him. Too normal
and they risk apathy. Too sympathetic and they become patronizing. What
he gets are overly cautious smiles when he's handed a fax or offered a
smoke or asked about something he should have done already. Hidden sympathy
in tiny gestures that he appreciates but he would rather them kick a hole
in the side of his desk and scream, "What the fuck is the world coming
to!"