Paris by the Book(47)
As I said, this image, this angle, is not in the film, only the book. In the film, the scene on the stairs occurs under overcast skies. The title photo in the book is so sunny you can almost see the ghostly orange balloon Lamorisse inflated inside the lacquered red one to make the color pop brighter. The trick works; you don’t focus on anything else.
Which may be why I’d never seen this figure up at the margin, in the window—a nose, a hand, a face, my husband.
Incroyable, Declan said, still joking, not seeing what I was seeing, because no one could; the photograph had been taken years before my husband had been born. Lamorisse could not possibly have taken a photo of my husband. Which was strange, because he had. Incredible?
Incredible, and I said so, in English.
Just the one word of Declan’s in French and just the one of mine in English, but English then did what English does in Paris, start a tiny tear in whatever waking dream you’ve been enjoying, the cute café now just a tourist trap, the sketch artist just another American, the friend you met mid-Ménilmontant-mugging now just a friend. I said I had to do some things. Declan waited until I looked up. I did and apologized. He looked sad and then smiled, and when I saw him out—professionally, no embrace beyond a quick, firm squeeze of his tricep—I kept the fermé sign up and locked the door. I looked at the empty spot in the store window Robert’s book had once occupied, and then I went through my secret bookcase door to the back room, sat down, and did what the Girls’ Guide recommended, which was cry until you’re out of tears. At which point, the guide said, stop.
CHAPTER 9
Stay together, said the guide as we set out in the “feetsteps” of Madeline. So far, so good. Given the flyer’s amateurishness, I hadn’t expected much, but here we were: a tour guide, tourists, two British twins, an Iowan, and a mother and two daughters from Milwaukee who wanted far more out of this tour than it could ever provide. Hold on! the guide shouted, and I almost shouted back, no kidding.
Hold the hands, he amended, now looking specifically at Daphne. Daphne was standing next to Declan and looked at him. Declan looked at me. That meant none of us were looking at Ellie, who let go of Peter and Annabelle in order to swoop in and pull Daphne away. Ellie, who’d never held Daphne’s hand ever. Ellie, who may or may not be telepathic but still managed to silently shout don’t you dare to Declan.
But it was too late. I’d already dared. I’d invited Declan along. Because Daphne had said I could, because I felt bad about the awkwardness in my kitchen on Lamorisse’s not-birthday, and because—this will sound ridiculous, but it was entirely true—I wanted that awkwardness to continue.
Whatever trick of the mind had placed Robert in that photograph had unnerved me. Declan, despite, or because of, my attraction, had steadied me. (And was he attracted to me? The Girls’ Guide had a whole section on Signals! that I was too shy to consult.) Patting Declan’s arm on the way out hadn’t been so much a way to be in physical contact with him—well, it was somewhat—as it was to prove to myself, to whomever was watching, that Declan was real, here in the flesh. Robert was not.
The tour guide, a young man, spoke a sturdy, mirthless English. He clearly had no great love for Bemelmans’s creation; this was just a way to make money. Peter asked him what his name was. The guide pretended not to understand Peter’s French. Annabelle whispered to Peter the name of a French children’s book character they hated—somehow the guide understood that, and told them to be quiet. Annabelle then asked me, in English, for a stick. Not an unusual request—she was our budding naturalist and would poke anything, alive or dead—but this did not bode well.
As we walked east along the Seine, away from Notre-Dame, my girls could not stop noting all the erreurs.
“He keeps calling her Madeleine, Mom,” Daphne complained. Peter and Annabelle volleyed the name back and forth. Daphne had a point. The book’s rhymes don’t work if you don’t pronounce the name as it is (mis)spelled, Madeline, like get-in-line, and instead pronounce it as it “should” be pronounced, comme en fran?ais, like Mad-lenn. Daphne had brought her own book and kept checking it. “And there are twelve little girls in two straight lines.”
“Twenty-four!” said Peter.
“No,” started Daphne, “it’s—” and gave up.
Straight lines of any kind were the least interesting aspect of Madeline, or Bemelmans, for my girls. They loved the squiggles, the animated looseness of Bemelmans’s art, the pages that looked like he’d scratched them out in thirty seconds (though they were often the result of thirty drafts, Robert said), but most of all the fact that, pretty as Paris was, danger lurked around every corner: in the first book of the Madeline series, in hardly 350 words, there’s a robbery, a wounded soldier, blood-speckled mist roaring from a tiger’s mouth, a snowstorm, a rainstorm, an ambulance ride through the legs of the Eiffel Tower, and, of course, a dead-of-night appendectomy. Both Daphne and Ellie had trick-or-treated as Madeline various times in Milwaukee, but they had had little time for the hats and bows I assembled: they preferred to show off the tiny appendix scars Robert drew on their abdomens (with a Sharpie, which even I had to admit nicely echoed Bemelmans’s pen-and-ink drawings).
The girls never articulated their love of Bemelmans to me—Robert sometimes tried to—but they didn’t have to; I saw them live it. And now on this tour, I was seeing it anew, as our guide spoke one falsehood after another.