Paris by the Book(5)

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?