Paris by the Book(6)

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 you, 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.