Paris by the Book(95)

“Don’t get fresh with me,” Eleanor said, and that somehow made me smile.

I lifted the no-eating-anywhere-but-the-kitchen rule, and we wolfed down one of Picard’s more American creations—Penne rigate au jambon et fromage, the polyglot label cloaking mac and cheese with bacon bits—while we watched Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s 2007 homage to Lamorisse, Flight of the Red Balloon, which Eleanor had checked out of her hotel’s lending library.

We didn’t finish. Deep into the film, dinner discarded and forks sticking to pillows and carpet, Peter and Annabelle falling asleep, Daphne watching intently, Eleanor watching all of us intently, Ellie got up and turned it off.

“There’s not enough balloon,” she said.



* * *



—

Among other things, Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s film involves an absent (though not unreachable) father. I don’t know if that’s the real reason Ellie turned it off. I also don’t know the real reason Robert left. I do know what I saw, and that was someone who was very afraid. Maybe then, there, he was only afraid of me, but I think he was afraid of all of us, of how much we loved him. Of how much that love required his presence. And I think—strangest of all—that he was afraid of Paris. He was afraid of the magic here, which had not only made his wife into a bookstore owner and his daughters into Parisiennes, but his fiction into reality.

Except it hadn’t, not word-for-word. At one point, for example, not long after Robert’s manuscript has the little bedraggled family arrive in Paris, they go exploring. Somewhere along the way, while licking shop windows in an unnamed neighborhood, the wife peels off; the children and father march on ahead. This is foreshadowing of a sort; the husband will disappear in another twenty or so pages.

But first there’s this: the wife finishes with whatever her distraction was and wanders up the street after her family. It’s some time before she finds them, but then, there they are, arrayed behind the glowing window of a gelato store, in grinning conversation with the staff inside. This flavor or that flavor or both?

The wife has been gone for a good long while, so the obligation is to duck into the shop, all smiles and apologies. But she doesn’t. She stands outside and watches them. The shop is bright, her family, too. If she entered, the composition would slip; the bubble, in Robert’s words, would pop: the text makes clear that she can almost see, feel, the world sloping and the shop with it.

The wife studies the scene for so long that she’s still outside when the family exits. Surprise and delight ensue. The children hold up their paper cups, their spoons: taste, taste, taste!

The husband says to her, I’ll go back inside, I’ll get you your own, what do you want?

The scene ends there. It’s up to us to imagine the wife’s answer, the look on her face, the shape her mouth made as she opened it, or if she opened it at all.



* * *



—

Robert said something when he was in the store with the twins. I saw this on the surveillance video. Not to the twins: while he’s reading to them upstairs, a customer arrives and Robert must hear the bell—there’s no sound on Asif’s system—and he goes to the top of the spiral staircase. And pauses. What he must have thought then: that the time had come, that I’d come back with the girls. He pauses, he looks at the twins, who’ve taken over reading the book to themselves, he looks around the room as if checking for another exit. He looks down the stairs. (Below, whoever it was—the camera doesn’t catch them, they must not have come in far—has already left, likely because they were never issued a bonjour.)

Robert says something and then takes the first step down.

The twins don’t look up, so he must not have been speaking to them. Maybe Robert hadn’t said anything aloud. But he’d wanted to say something, one word, several—I saw his lips move. I couldn’t, not for the life of me, read them.

When Robert comes on-screen downstairs, he’s moving more quickly. He looks around the store, sees no one, mouths an easily decipherable “fuck!” (have Leah and the girls just left again? he must be thinking), and leaps for the door, one bound, two, bangs into the corner of a table, three, he’s at the door. He tears it open. Upstairs, the twins don’t appear to hear the wild jangling; they’re too engrossed in their reading. Downstairs, Robert leans out the door. He looks up the street toward Madame Grillo’s and the Métro. He looks down the street toward the H?tel du Cinéma and the Seine. Back and forth, back and forth. He goes just outside the door now. The sun on the glass makes him hard to see. He checks his watch, looks inside, looks up at the second floor. He looks up the street, down, and then light and lens align, and the camera catches his face full on. His eyes flash. He turns away.

He makes one last scan of the street. And then he chooses, and then he walks.

I rewound and watched this last moment a dozen times. Back and forth.

I let my finger pause on the screen, which cued a feature I didn’t know the software had: delete recording?

My decision took far less time than Robert’s.



* * *



—

What did Robert want? I ask this less and less. Not because I’ve become more certain of some particular answer, but because searching for it has exhausted me; my thinking has broken down, perhaps because his did. Perhaps because, bleak as it is to say, he had no model for parents—for adults—living past a certain age. (Neither did I, but then, I had Eleanor.) I do know that he wanted a career, and with it, recognition, some measure of it anyway, but by a yardstick he was always changing—young readers, old readers, readers who enjoyed wiping words clean from a screen—thus ensuring he’d always come up short. And his frustration—his fear—finally swelled to the degree that he felt his only option was to edit himself out of his own life.