Paris by the Book(37)

Sometimes, I caught myself crying. So did other people. Once, a girl not much older than Ellie, waiting with me for the light in order to cross the street, looked over and asked if I was all right. In French, in English. I swear I did not know I’d been thinking about Robert, much less crying about him. The light turned green. The girl was on a bike. She waited for me to answer. A bus waited behind her. Ding, ding: the warning bells of Parisian buses sound like they’ve been stolen from a boxing ring but still manage to clang so merrily it’s almost music (until the driver, patience spent, finally uses the horn). The girl pushed off. Then, as now, I wiped my face. I decided not to open “Dad.”

Instead, I found the folder that contained tonight’s images. I saw that Ellie and Asif had stopped at the chocolatier at the top of the street: Snap, tongues, an outstretched arm. A shot of Asif eating, smiling. A shot of Ellie kissing him on the cheek. A shot of a bus. A shot of an empty street. Another empty street, one I didn’t recognize, and the blue street-name placard on the nearest building unintelligible. A shot of Ellie pointing at a mural painted on the side of a small apartment building—it was hard to make out, but then I saw it, a giant red balloon, wrapping around the building’s top left corner.

Then a shot that was a blur; something had jiggled her arm. Another fumbled shot, another, a whole rapid-fire sequence of them, murky or light-blown, all blurry. And then what looked like Asif’s hand, stretched toward the lens as if to cover it up.

And then, on her phone, a video she’d taken, time-stamped tonight. Its first frame was pitch black.

But when things became visible, I became so absorbed that I failed to realize that the sound, which I should have muted, might draw someone to see what I was doing.

Ellie.

She came up behind me and didn’t say a word until she reached over, stopped the video, and took the phone. “Nice,” she said, cool and quiet.

“Ellie,” I said.

“I mean, I guess, you did have that rule. I just didn’t think—while I was sleeping, Mom?” she asked. “How long have you—”

“Ellie, never,” I said. “This is the first time. I just wanted to—Daphne said—”

“Daphne?” Ellie said. “Daphne said what?”

“Nothing, El, nothing about you anyway, she was more talking about—” Ellie circled around the tiny table and sat across from me. “She said you were looking for him,” I said. “Dad.”

“What?” Ellie said.

“Shh,” I said, nodding toward the sleepers’ rooms.

“Yeah, keep it quiet,” Ellie said. “Maybe mute the fucking phone next time you’re snooping.”

“Ellie!”

“Mom!” Ellie said. “When were you going to go looking? It’s May, nine months since we got here, thirteen since he’s been gone. Daphne’s like, ‘she’s going, she’s going looking when we’re at school, maybe,’ and I said, ‘okay, then why isn’t she telling us about it,’ and Daphne’s all, ‘well, maybe she’s not finding him.’ And I said, ‘well, maybe she should look harder.’” Ellie started flicking through her phone.

Do you talk about me behind my back all the time, I wondered, or just when I’m screwing up? I wanted to ask this, but couldn’t, so instead I said, “Is Asif okay?” I’d not seen much of the video, but enough to see Asif take a spill.

Ellie looked up at me. “Yeah.”

“Because it looked like he tripped? He fell?”

“It wasn’t pretty, but yeah,” Ellie said, eyes back to the phone.

“Are you sure he—”

“Asif is fine, Mom,” Ellie said. “Super embarrassed. Though he shouldn’t have been—that rat was as big as a dog. I jumped, too—if I hadn’t, I could have caught Asif before he fell.”

“Where were you filming? It looks like some sort of park.”

“Oh, Mom, c’mon,” Ellie said.

She scooted her chair back around the table toward me. All wasn’t forgiven, but for the briefest moment, I pretended it was: she was right here, next to me, she was warm and alive and safe, and she’d moved beside me so that if she’d wanted to, she could hug me.

She didn’t. Instead, she pressed PLAY.



* * *



—

Ménilmontant. Paris’s Alps, an almost vertical stretch of the city, long famous as a film neighborhood: the light’s good up there. Jackie Gleason shot a maudlin vanity pic, 1962’s Gigot, in Ménilmontant and played the title role, a mute clown. Famed director Dmitri Kirsanoff’s silent-film masterpiece Ménilmontant, supposedly Pauline Kael’s favorite film of all time, was shot there in 1924–25; its violence still shocks. And of course, thirty years later, The Red Balloon. Lamorisse knew what he was doing when he set his “children’s” film in Ménilmontant. He needed the light, sure, but the dark, too.

Ellie’s own video was exceptionally dark and fairly short. She narrated it now; she’d long wanted to visit le quartier du ballon—the balloon neighborhood, our slang, not Paris’s—but she reminded me that I’d long been opposed; it wasn’t “safe.”

And it wasn’t, or so other parents in our timid corner of the Marais assured me: Ménilmontant wasn’t wealthy and hadn’t been for centuries. Who knew what happened there at night?