Paris by the Book(4)

“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.