Paris by the Book(99)

I must have looked dazed, because he turned his attention to Daphne and explained about the temperature and time, how she would know it was done, how it would be a true tragedy if we cooked it too long. He then explained that we would need to get some shallots and haricots verts—green beans—next door and a good burgundy one door farther down. “Madame,” he said, turning to me and continuing in English, “a little wine for the girl, aussi. She is the good help.” Daphne smile-frowned and turned away, and though I’d sworn off being surprised by anything anymore, I was startled by what I thought I’d just seen: Daphne flirting? The butcher then gave us, free, six strips of terrifyingly rich bacon—and a little sachet of spices, which he told Daphne to sprinkle on her mère as necessary, as the lovely lady was looking a bit grave. Daphne gave a quick, high laugh, said merci and good-bye, and then led us from the store. I smiled at the butcher as we left. He raised an eyebrow—he thought I was flirting—but I wasn’t. I was proud. Of Daphne, and, immoderately, of myself. I’d gotten her this far. Physically, emotionally. Strong enough to navigate Paris. Kind enough to tolerate me tagging along.

“I don’t know why everyone doesn’t live here,” Daphne said as we walked home, packages hanging off us like ornaments.

“It’s crowded enough,” I said as someone banged into me, but Daphne didn’t hear. She was already ahead on the sidewalk, smoothly navigating the crowd. She looked more and more like Ellie; the two of them looked less and less like their parents. I was glad I hadn’t successfully brought about a meeting between them and their father. I was devastated that he wasn’t here to see the young women they’d become.

As we opened the door to the bookstore, it was dark, which was good, because it hid my face. Daphne said we should have Eleanor visit again—had I seen the sign in her hotel announcing that it had been “refreshed”?

I had, but had wondered at my French, because when I peered inside, the lobby still looked dusty and airless, full of fake movie bric-à-brac, its deep maroon walls making you feel like you’d wandered into some darker corner of the human heart.

Then again, I’d noticed one new item on the wall that had once borne a poster of The Red Balloon. It was gone, and in its place a poster for another Lamorisse film, The Lovers’ Wind. Daphne had seen it, too. “I’ve never heard of it,” she said. I said I would tell her about it after dinner. But then she forgot, thank goodness.

Parts of The Red Balloon were bleak, but as a whole, it was uplifting, if not inspiring. The end of Lamorisse’s life was not.



* * *



—

It is 1968, hardly a dozen years after he had known heady success, and Albert Lamorisse’s career has diminished considerably, to the point that he now finds himself producing a film for the shah of Iran.

Lamorisse sleeps poorly and suffers nightmares about dying, about falling, about water.

And this is precisely what happens when, in the midst of filming a tricky shot of the Karaj Dam that Lamorisse wanted to avoid—but the shah insisted; he wanted a documentary that would show how modern and advanced his kingdom is—Lamorisse’s helicopter becomes entangled in power cables and crashes, killing Lamorisse, age forty-eight. Navy divers descend in search of the bodies.

The film stock survived, however, and eight years later, Lamorisse’s widow and son—Pascal, one-time child star of The Red Balloon, now in his twenties—edited the Iranian footage based on Lamorisse’s notes. It features all the long, lingering panoramas Lamorisse loved, and almost nothing the shah wanted. The shah fled Iran January 16, 1979. Almost a month to the day later, Lamorisse became an Academy Award nominee once again, posthumously, this time for Best Documentary, for The Lovers’ Wind.

So all the more piercing, my unfinished thesis argued, is the seven-minute collection of outtakes Lamorisse’s remaining Iranian crew assembled as a kind of postscript to the full-length documentary. It contains every last thing the shah wanted, and somehow—the way the images are intercut, sped up and slowed down, brought close or pushed away—manages to indict the shah for Lamorisse’s death with every frame.

Knowing the story of Lamorisse’s life isn’t necessary to appreciate the film, but it helps, especially around the 00:02:30 mark, where the montage abruptly cuts to some B-roll of a laboratory. Right before a test tube begins to fill with what looks like watered-down blood, a man in a white coat reaches to the top of a skinny glass pipe. And there, apropos of nothing, or rather, everything, briefly swells a red balloon.

And so the hotel’s poster reminded me, though I should not have needed reminding: clues are always present, should one care to look.



* * *



—

I went downstairs to tidy up while the girls did their homework.

I wouldn’t miss this part of owning a bookstore. Picking up after people is never fun. Not if it’s your own family, not if it’s the stream (or trickle) of customers who march through your store. Granted, our store was organized idiosyncratically, but why customers chose to reshelve books upside down, or spine in, or horizontally instead of vertically, I do not know. It wasn’t laziness; some of their efforts clearly took effort.

I started with the Madeline display, as it had been in particular disarray for some time, with many of its dolls missing. Sold, I hoped, though probably a few Madelines and Pepitos had walked out on their own, too. I admit that our Bemelmans books had, on the whole, gotten less attention from me after Robert left the twins, the store. It wasn’t necessarily a conscious thing. Or maybe it was. Or maybe, tonight, it was the glass of wine I’d brought down from the dinner table.