Paris by the Book(7)

I loved the world of The Red Balloon because it was nothing like mine. Its streets were tight and strange, lumpy with cobblestones, crowded with odd vehicles and, on one memorable page, cockaded police on horseback. Maybe any kid who looks out on a quiet Midwestern intersection day in and day out would find this fascinating. But I also loved the book for reasons all my own. For much of my childhood, I was on my own. So was the book’s young protagonist. The balloon was his only friend. This book was my only friend. I don’t know if I was ostracized because my parents ran a bar, or if I had ostracized myself, the girl who knew the date of Bastille Day, the girl who advocated the junior high offer French (the only foreign language option was German, K–12). Day after day, I watched Pascal run through Paris, following the balloon, the balloon following him, me trying to follow both of them, frustrated that I couldn’t get any closer than 4,127 miles away.

But Robert’s apartment was only blocks away, barely enough time for one cigarette. Meet me in Paris, he’d written. When I arrived, all I found was a spare studio with no furniture, save a chipboard wooden desk and a mattress on the floor. A previous tenant’s bleached strand of Tibetan flags draped out his apartment window like an escape ladder.

Robert looked surprised to see me. I was surprised to see books piled everywhere, teetering, tumbling like stalactites (he corrected me: stalagmites) across the well-worn maple floor, which almost groaned with pleasure as I later did.



* * *



—

Half of Paris looks like Pascal’s apartment building in The Red Balloon, especially along the street where I now live, which I often walk to clear my head. Or, rather, fill it. Maybe it’s only bookstore owners who do this, but when I walk, I gather up as many stories as I can carry. I look, and listen, and wonder: where are those sirens going? Who dropped that orange glove on the sidewalk? That couple walking toward me: is she married to him—or, given the way his eyes dart to me, are they having an affair? Why is this window full of dusty movie memorabilia? Is that onion or garlic or shallots I smell? From that window? From every window? Olive oil or butter? (Butter, surely; the city runs on it.) Does that dangling course of Tibetan flags lead to a book-mad apartment like the one I once visited in Milwaukee?

I don’t know. I don’t go up to strange apartments anymore.

But my street! My sooty, pretty street, my bright red store, and, two doors up from us, a bright white store that sells mops. Very fine mops, but still: only mops. I once asked the owner, an Italian, Roman, Madame Grillo, why she limited herself so; she looked at me and said, but you—sell only books?

Behind every storefront, then, a story.

This is true even farther down the street, toward the Seine, where more of the storefronts are closed, or empty. Not long after we took over the bookshop, it looked like a new business was moving in to one of the vacant spots; the windows were cleaned, and inside, a painter appeared. And never reappeared. He left behind an old wooden stepladder, battered and covered with decades of paint splatter: rust red, brown gold, a dozen different kinds of blue. And atop it, a single apple. I decided he must have been an art student moonlighting as a painter—a painter, I like to think, moonlighting as a painter—because the apple’s placement was so perfect, and so, too, its appearance: small, round, barn red, with a pale, freckled green tonsure around its stem. The resulting tableau was perfect, a still life, and further proof that on every block in Paris, there is at least one store, door, window, sign, or even brick whose exquisiteness gives pause. Not for nothing does the French expression for window-shopping, lèche-vitrine, translate literally as “window-licking.”

Which is gross. Or would be, anywhere but Paris.



* * *



—

Every trap requires bait. For months, mine had sat just inside the lower left of the store’s front window. A copy of a book. Not Madeline nor The Red Balloon but one of Robert’s, that first Central Time, a like-new copy I’d found in the store early on, mistakenly wedged amid the U.S. travel guides. Without even pausing to crack the cover or ask Madame how she’d come by it, I moved the book to the front and left it there, trying not to think what I meant by it. A candle lit, a porch light left on, a mailbox flag flipped up, a signal. Every so often, someone would ask to buy it, and I’d refuse.

But eight months after our arrival in Paris, twelve months after Robert disappeared, it was the prospective buyer who refused. She handed it to me and asked if I had another, “clean” copy in back; this one had been scribbled in. I shook my head. I should have been nicer to her. As I said, we had a steady if meager stream of customers, but only three I would call regulars. An American man, older, from the embassy, who stopped in each week for mysteries. A young mom from New Zealand who came for kids’ books but mostly for talk. And a retired art teacher from New Orleans, who lived and painted on a houseboat and told me to hand her something new, price no object, each week. I always did, but I’d never handed her, or the others, Robert’s book.

So on this occasion, I should have been more polite, but I wasn’t. I was distracted by what this customer—a stranger to me—had found on the title page. A scribble, two words.

I’m sorry.

Close enough to be Robert’s handwriting, shaky enough to make me wonder.

When I finally found my voice, what I said surprised me even more: “Half off. Do you want it? Because I—”