Paris by the Book: One of the most enchanting and uplifting books of 2018

“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?

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.

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.