The kitchen, living area, and my bedroom are on the floor above the girls. With higher ceilings and more elaborate architectural detail, this is the étage noble. But in our building, the resident noble, Madame Brouillard, commands the top two floors, which have much better light. She lives on one and her own private collection of books lives just above, or so she once told me. For the longest time, I’d never ventured farther into her apartment than the small sitting room just inside the door (which, like the building, like so much of Paris, looks just like authors and artists have long led you to think: late-sun yellow, delicate furniture, lace, an old crystal lamp atop a tiny table).
Paris, in other words, like Madame’s promises to show me the top floor, is a challenge, an invitation, a city that doesn’t distinguish between the two. It may be why my conversations with Madame often ended abruptly. Or it was because she knew, long before I did, that the trap I’d set was not for customers but for my vanished husband—and that it had ensnared me instead.
* * *
—
It is faintly ironic I find myself running a bookstore, because almost twenty years ago I was caught running from one, a stolen item in hand. And ironic that I’ve ever chased any man anywhere in Paris, because on that long-ago night, my husband was chasing me.
Please change the set. Unroll a new sidewalk, erect a different storefront, lower a fresh backdrop. Gone is the Eiffel Tower, and arriving in its place is—nothing, really. Blue skies, clouds if you like. A simple city skyline. Steeples here and there, some smokestacks, but otherwise, clip-art buildings. After all, we’re no longer in Paris, but Milwaukee.
And there, on my left hand, no ring. We’re not married yet, my husband and I. Two moon-pale Midwesterners, we don’t even know each other, which makes it awkward that he’s just accosted me on the street—a series of heys! dopplering ever closer until I had to turn—about something I have clutched in my right hand. A book. I’m not hiding it, mind you. (I’m not hiding it because I couldn’t—it was about ten by twelve inches, a children’s book, with a bright red balloon on the cover.)
“Hi,” he said with half a smile. “I think you forgot to pay?” He now crinkled half his face to go with his half smile, which was good. It gave him some creases, which gave him some years. He was short, fair, slender but athletic. I’d taken him for seventeen. On his high school’s cross-country team. Now I added four years. Later he would add four more: twenty-five. Incredible.
“Oh, I pay,” I said. “I pay every day.” I got ready to rant about men accosting me on the sidewalk, about men everywhere accosting women everywhere on all the sidewalks of the world—but it wasn’t true, not for me, not there, not then.
What was true was that I was embarrassed. Embarrassed I’d stolen something—I’d never stolen anything before—and embarrassed that I’d stolen a children’s book. And I was embarrassed I was so poor. I was almost twenty-four, and I had exactly that many dollars in my checking account. I would have more on Monday when I received my grad student stipend, but until then, I had twenty-four dollars, two suspended credit cards, and a surplus of anger. The university library had inexplicably closed early, and I’d decided that I needed the book version of Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 movie, The Red Balloon, at that very moment to finish my master’s thesis on the great (and quite curious) man. Never mind that I knew by heart every frame of this classic Paris film and every page of the companion book—indeed, its every cobblestone and cat (one living, black, another on a building’s poster, white).
Many people my age briefly shared my obsession as kids, thanks to rainy-day recess copies of the film that saturated American elementary schools in the 1970s and ’80s. I noticed that, as years passed, those children moved on. I knew I had not, and would not. That book was my first love. Like a crush, a companion, a boyfriend of the type I wouldn’t really have, ever. That book, that film, understood me. Or so I felt. I knew that I understood it. And moreover, I understood its Paris. For other girls (and the odd boy), Paris meant flowers and romance and accordions wheezing. The Red Balloon has none of this. It’s beautiful, but bracing. Some find it sweet, but I didn’t like sweet things as a child and I don’t much now. I’m surprised more people—like the staff of the Milwaukee bookstore I was stealing from—don’t realize the obvious. Red is the color of warning.
I wish I myself had paid more attention to that warning. I was in grad school then for film studies—film criticism—but had started in filmmaking, because I did want to make something, and Lamorisse made it look so easy. It wasn’t, especially when I discovered my filmmaking program disdained narrative. How much better The Red Balloon would have been, they said, had it been solely that: a close-up of a balloon for thirty minutes—or thirty hours! No dialogue. No actors. Just balloon. What do you think, Leah? I thought I’d transfer to film studies, and did. There they told me I needed to be interested in films other than The Red Balloon and cityscapes other than Paris. For a while, I let them think I was. But I couldn’t sustain the fiction; in a very short time, I would burn out, give up. Or as I liked to think of it, give in, and to a private truth: I was mostly still interested in making my own film. I didn’t know how, when, or what it would be. I did know where it would take place: far from Wisconsin.
And far away from this boy accosting me on the street outside a bookstore.
I ran.
Doc Martens do not make for good running shoes, especially when purchased at Goodwill, a size and a half too big. I worried my pursuer might think I’d stolen them, too. I worried that I was worried what he would think.
When he finally caught up to me, the first words out of his mouth were two I myself was about to say.
“I’m sorry?”
He was beautiful. I know there’s a delicacy about the word. There was a delicacy about him.
“It’s okay,” I said, neatly absolving him for something that I had done.
He’d been in line at the cashier when he’d seen me slip the book out of the store. He’d told them to add it to his bill, impulse-bought still another book, and then he’d chased me. “Take it,” he said now, though I already had.
“I’m not sure I want it anymore,” I said, looking at it, lying.
“Can I—can I buy you a coffee?”
“How about a beer,” I said, “unless you’re worried I’d steal that, too.”
He wasn’t, or maybe he was, because he kept a grip on his glass at the bar when we met later that night. He was nervous or thirsty or knew this about himself: his hands, if left unoccupied, would flutter, rise, fall, paint shapes familiar and not. He’d run a hand through his hair and nod, or rub his face and frown, or draw a letter on the table, another in the air. It was how he spoke. It was how he smiled. It was nerves, yes, but of a generalized sort, at least at that point, and my goal soon became to have him be nervous about me. I wanted to see, and feel, what those hands could do.
And he had these eyes. Gray, but the right iris was stained with a tiny burnt-orange splotch I felt compelled to comment on.
He briefly closed his eyes in reply. “It’s meaningless,” he said, “in humans. But in pigeons? Eyes? A big deal, especially if you race them, which I don’t, but it’s how you tell them apart, how you know which one’s yours.”
And at that moment, I did.
“So, Paris?” he said, now tapping The Red Balloon, which lay on the table between us. I winced, I think invisibly. Tap, tap: it felt like little thumps to my chest.
Robert explained that his own favorite children’s stories were by Ludwig Bemelmans. The Madeline series.
In an old house in Paris
That was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls
In two straight lines. . . .
I shook my head. Once upon a time—first or second grade—those would have been, had been, fighting words. The hats, the bows, the uniforms? The two straight lines?
But on my future husband plowed. He thought I should be, had to be, a Bemelmans fan, given my interest in Lamorisse: “both artists, before—and after—anything else!” In his hands appeared a copy of the first Madeline book. Which he had purchased for me. To go with the book I’d stolen.
He slid Madeline alongside The Red Balloon, both books flat on the tiny table between us. I looked down at the covers and then around at the bar.
“Everyone is definitely jealous of the date I’m on,” I said.
Untrue. But I was definitely anxious. I was protective of my passion, my Paris. So much so, I’d long put off going. Poverty had helped me stall, but so had a cynical certainty that the Paris I’d find would disappoint. It wouldn’t be the 1950s Paris of The Red Balloon. It wouldn’t be as rhapsodically bleak. The balloon, if I found one, if one found me, would pop long before I reached the final page.
(There are many ways to describe cowardice. This is one.)
“The way I see it,” he said, continuing as if I’d not spoken, “and I didn’t see it until just now, actually, looking at the books side by side: it’s weird, isn’t it?”
He was weird, of course, and that only slew me more. In grad school, the default was that the default did not make sense. Our lives were dispiriting, impoverishing, and largely nocturnal, so we thrilled to what illuminations there were, even if they flickered in strange ways. Especially if they did. I looked at him, carefully. He looked at the books.
“It’s two different ways of looking at the world,” he went on. “One city—”
“I don’t buy that,” I said, though I did like a good fight.
“You’re either a Madeline person or a Red Balloon person,” he said. (I didn’t buy this then either, but genetics bears him out: both our daughters would have his eyes and preference for Bemelmans.) “Paintings, or photographs. Paris in color, or black and white.”
“The Red Balloon is in color. It’s all about color.”
“But its palette—its Paris—is all gray,” he said.
“You’re looking at the book. Those photographs are just stills. The film is different.” And thus I outed myself as the budding (fading) film scholar, whose budding (fading) thesis was that The Red Balloon wasn’t just any film, and its auteur, Lamorisse, not just any filmmaker but the French filmmaker of mid-century France. In his landmark two-volume What Is Cinema? André Bazin goes on for pages about Lamorisse. And I quoted the critic who quoted the famed director René Clair, a Parisian native who supposedly said he would have “traded his whole career to have made this one short film.”
“Then you get it!” Robert said.
I did not, but nodded cautiously.
“It’s the same with Bemelmans,” he said, not to me, but the book. “He’s so—I mean, I’ve always loved this about him—do you know about his backstory, too?”
What was there to know? Bemelmans was all there on the page. That was the difference between Robert’s hero and mine.
“I’m guessing he’d be horrified his book had become a beer coaster,” I said.
“He wrote it in a bar,” he said, looking up. “Pete’s Tavern. Manhattan? Still there, I think.”
“You’re not—a student? A grad student?” I said.
Now, a smile.
“I was,” he said. “Creative writing. But I quit. When I sold some things.”
“Furniture?”
“A book. Books? Ones I wrote.”
Yes, I heard the plural. Books. And now his name, Robert Eady—it had taken him this long to tell me. I decided to wait to tell him mine was Leah. Make him earn it, or at least ask.
I shook my head. Out of ignorance, not spite, though it was fine if that was unclear.
“You’re not my audience,” he said. “I mean, currently.”
“Technically, I am. Currently.”
“Technically,” he said, “the books are for kids—adolescents, younger side?” He described a series of books that started in a “middle school in the middle of the country.” The first was called Central Time, and central to its plot was the absolute absence of any adults—no teachers, no parents.
“Clever,” I said. He replied with a new smile, somehow forced or braver. “What’s next?” I asked. “Mountain Time?”
“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Because I think I’m already done with all that, or going to be. I’m looking to do something—different.”
I sat back and studied him, his eyes: strange and beautiful, proud and nervous, excited and worried, all at once. When I later found out that he, like me, had lost both his parents, I thought: that’s where it comes from, that look; I see it in the mirror more mornings than not.
“Like, okay, Bemelmans?” he said. I was listening. But I was also consuming him, taking a hit off him, getting the slightest bit high. He was just so animated, electric, and weird, and wiry, and what was under that shirt? I wanted a cigarette. I wanted him to light it for me. I had two left. Did he smoke? We could share! But how to get him outside?
He was still talking. “Bemelmans must have done fifteen different things in his life—waiter, author, illustrator. A million things. But comes to realize, what he really wants to do—serious art, oil paintings. It pushes him to the brink, this challenge—and he pushes through. He does it. He made plenty off writing, off Madeline, and he respected that work—he respected those readers—he never stopped writing for them, I mean, on his deathbed, even—but he lived for those paintings.”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” I said, hoping he would, “but—was Bemelmans right to?”
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Robert said, “but were you right to steal that book? Don’t even answer, actually, because obviously you were—the book, the movie, Lamorisse, the art—it all means that much to you.”
“You’re making it sound grander than it is,” I said.
“I’m not making it sound grand enough! I don’t know Lamorisse as well as you do—but he—he didn’t stop with this one film, right?”
He didn’t, but I shrugged. “He died young. In a helicopter.” Robert nodded. “North of Tehran,” I added, both because it was true and because I thought it would get us off topic.
“Iran!” Robert shouted. The bar, which had gotten an eyeful, was now getting an earful. Robert nodded even more eagerly, as though Mideast helicopter crashes were what he had been getting at all along. “So, a lot like Bemelmans, right?” he said. “Restless.”
I wanted to disagree. “Restless” wasn’t my thesis. But it was Robert’s—and I could see, dimly, then brighter, that it might just have been Lamorisse’s, once upon a time. Lamorisse had made a beautiful film. And a handful more. And he’d made wine and ceramics and patterned fabrics, together with his family, in the hills above Saint-Tropez. He invented the board game Risk. And an aerial camera system called Helivision that the makers of the James Bond film Goldfinger had used, and so, too, Lamorisse, in the skies above Iran’s Karaj Dam, shooting a documentary for the last shah. I had no idea where Lamorisse had planned on going after Iran.
“I’m taking that book back to the store,” I said.
“Which one?” he said.
“Both,” I said.
“They’re paid for,” he said.
Robert carefully took Bemelmans’s Madeline and tucked it in my bag. As I said, I had never been a Bemelmans fan, not even as a child, but seeing that sunny book slip away caused something to slip in me.
The Red Balloon depicts a Paris that is gorgeous but also bleak: a young boy befriends a magical red balloon as large and round as a beach ball; they explore the city for roughly thirty-two minutes; then bullies fell the balloon with rocks. There are few deaths in cinema as excruciating as the balloon’s, whose once-smooth surface puckers hideously as it shrinks and falls to the ground. This all lasts just seconds, or as any child watching will tell yo
u, just longer than forever.
But in the Madeline books, Paris always shines, even in rain or snow, even beside a boy in a bar. If I’d let Bemelmans’s book speak, I knew what it would say: it’s okay if you’ve not finished your graduate degree and have no job prospects—come play in Montmartre! I loved Bemelmans.
I had not slept in a week. I was behind in my writing. I was, I vaguely felt, behind in my grieving. Two years dead then, my parents, and they still came to me regularly when I slept, and more disturbingly, when I was awake, never confronting me directly but always flashing in the background, like above-the-title actors now working as extras. I worried they saw me now: I’d stolen a book I didn’t really need, only to discover I needed it too much. Because I’d recently vowed I would no longer be the type to let someone see me cry, I excused myself, pointed vaguely to the bathroom, and when I reached it, locked myself inside.
Later, too late, I let myself out, went back to where we’d been sitting, and discovered he’d paid, he’d left, he’d left the book, my book, The Red Balloon, on the table. My beer, half-drunk, was waiting, too. I asked a waitress to bring something stronger. When that arrived, I opened the book and went through it, page by page, reimagining my whole project. How had I missed how much the camera—Lamorisse—loved the young protagonist, Pascal, played by his own son, Pascal? How much Lamorisse loved Paris? Loved to fly?
I stopped on page 13. There, on a full-page photograph of the apartment building where Pascal lives, someone with a careful hand had inked: 2559 Downer Avenue. The photo was from Paris, but the address was right around the corner from where I sat.
And farther up the page, above the window that Pascal’s mother or grandmother leans out of in order to dispose of the pesky balloon, Robert had written: 5A.
Finally, in the balloon itself, four words: Meet me in Paris!
Paris. I’d grown up there. Or rather, with the help of Lamorisse’s film and book, I felt I had. It did not matter that I’d been an only child in a rural Wisconsin town so small it had only one tavern, which we owned and lived above, although the weight of the place—the alcohol, the smoke, the arguments—sometimes made it feel like we lived beneath. When I opened the book version of The Red Balloon (which I preferred to the film, because the book was something I could enjoy privately, repeatedly, while the film required the assistance of a librarian, teacher, or parent), the bar and the crossroads and its blinking yellow signal disappeared. I was in France.
Paris by the Book Page 2