Paris by the Book

by Liam Callanan

  “So—did you—do you—” Declan started.

  “No,” I interrupted. Because I didn’t date—what would the girls think!—but as soon as I said the word, I realized I was saying it to myself: no, not until you know what’s happened to Robert.

  Seconds passed.

  “Are you—talking to yourself?” Declan asked.

  “DHL,” I tried.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I was imagining calling and switching from UPS.”

  “You’re funny,” he said.

  “Just keeping my options open,” I said, which made me think, uncomfortably, of a book I had ordered for Ellie—ostensibly for sale in the shop but very much for her—the Girls’ Guide to Dating with Dignity. It was for high school students. The cover looked punky and fun, and I liked the publicity materials. Madonna had endorsed it!

  She’s grandmother-old, Mom, Ellie said, and that was the last she interacted with the book. But I read it with great fascination. If only I had had such a guide in high school, college, and beyond. I’d dated with very little dignity. I hadn’t made it easy for myself, true. I was smart and proud of it, into subtitled cinema, and, for three weeks, the marching band (I played the euphonium, something else I will never tell Declan, or Ellie). The book’s first rule—its overall thesis, really—was be straight with your guy. I’d blown past that one, of course. But one of the subrules to this was—and this astounded me—tell him that you like him. Just like that. And the book cautioned that he might say that he didn’t like you, or not as much, or not in the same way, and that was fine—a whole chapter followed about how to have a good cry and the value of good friends during such a time, but the book made helpfully clear that all this was normal, and most of all, healthy, and that none of this could happen unless you started with the truth.

  The book, significantly, had nothing to say on the subject of husbands who may or may not be dead. “I really like you, Declan,” I said, and waited. For someone to walk up to us with a clapper and yell, cut! For Daphne to materialize and ask me to say what I’d said in French. For Ellie to disgustedly shake her head. For Robert to come out from the kitchen and say, but I said I was sorry.

  “I—I like you?” Declan said.

  * * *

  —

  Maybe only I heard the question mark. But I later heard him quite clearly when he asked if he could come over sometime while the girls were at school. I said why and yes and he arrived with flowers and wine, and I turned the fermé sign on the front door—because it was lunchtime, because Madame Brouillard was out that day and couldn’t cover—and we went upstairs.

  “To Lamorisse’s birthday!” Declan said.

  I didn’t pretend it wasn’t a date. I didn’t pretend it was. I didn’t pretend Robert was dead, and I didn’t pretend he was downstairs, either. I did pretend that Declan had gotten Lamorisse’s birthday right, though he was off by four months.

  The wine was amazing. So, too, the lingerie Molly had brought by earlier that week. Lingerie was her husband’s go-to gift every birthday, Christmas—every other Tuesday, apparently—and she had more than she could ever want. Need. I, meanwhile, was someone who clearly did need, I think she said. And: “have fun.” Inside the still-wrapped box had been a half camisole the weight and width of a tissue.

  I’d taken the box out that morning, before Declan came over, before I’d gotten dressed. I went to the mirror and stared: I had lost weight since Robert had vanished, and lost more in France. I had thought I looked drawn, but Declan had reliably, if cautiously, complimented my appearance each time we met, and I looked carefully at myself now. Still the same constellations of moles, still the same tummy that had seen two pregnancies, two daughters, the same body that had done all the work asked of it, and which I increasingly thought stared back at me with a weary now what?

  Now this, apparently: wine finished, we paged through The Red Balloon’s companion book of photographs in my kitchen.

  What was I doing in my kitchen with this man and this book?

  Laughing. Listening. Dying. We reached the last page. We looked up at each other. He couldn’t have seen the camisole arranged just so on the bed in the other room, but he was looking like he had. I looked back down. I paged back to the start.

  You love this book, Declan said.

  Film, I said.

  Balloon, he said.

  I exhaled.

  I like the balloon fine, I said softly, speaking now to the book’s opening spread, a photo of Pascal on Ménilmontant’s steep stairs, gazing up at his balloon, the cat looking, too, a shot that’s not in the film. I love this Paris, I said.

  Declan stared at the page, leaned in closer—to me, to the book. Look, he said, we’re in the picture! Smoothing the book flat, Declan pointed to two faint shadows in a doorway. There was nothing there; he was just having fun. I suddenly wasn’t. I can’t believe we didn’t see him! Declan said, referring to Pascal, to Ménilmontant, but all I could see, in a part of the photograph I swear I’d never seen before and which Declan showed no sign of seeing now, was a murky figure looking out a window.

  As I said, this image, this angle, is not in the film, only the book. In the film, the scene on the stairs occurs under overcast skies. The title photo in the book is so sunny you can almost see the ghostly orange balloon Lamorisse inflated inside the lacquered red one to make the color pop brighter. The trick works; you don’t focus on anything else.

  Which may be why I’d never seen this figure up at the margin, in the window—a nose, a hand, a face, my husband.

  Incroyable, Declan said, still joking, not seeing what I was seeing, because no one could; the photograph had been taken years before my husband had been born. Lamorisse could not possibly have taken a photo of my husband. Which was strange, because he had. Incredible?

  Incredible, and I said so, in English.

  Just the one word of Declan’s in French and just the one of mine in English, but English then did what English does in Paris, start a tiny tear in whatever waking dream you’ve been enjoying, the cute café now just a tourist trap, the sketch artist just another American, the friend you met mid-Ménilmontant-mugging now just a friend. I said I had to do some things. Declan waited until I looked up. I did and apologized. He looked sad and then smiled, and when I saw him out—professionally, no embrace beyond a quick, firm squeeze of his tricep—I kept the fermé sign up and locked the door. I looked at the empty spot in the store window Robert’s book had once occupied, and then I went through my secret bookcase door to the back room, sat down, and did what the Girls’ Guide recommended, which was cry until you’re out of tears. At which point, the guide said, stop.

  CHAPTER 9

  Stay together, said the guide as we set out in the “feetsteps” of Madeline. So far, so good. Given the flyer’s amateurishness, I hadn’t expected much, but here we were: a tour guide, tourists, two British twins, an Iowan, and a mother and two daughters from Milwaukee who wanted far more out of this tour than it could ever provide. Hold on! the guide shouted, and I almost shouted back, no kidding.

  Hold the hands, he amended, now looking specifically at Daphne. Daphne was standing next to Declan and looked at him. Declan looked at me. That meant none of us were looking at Ellie, who let go of Peter and Annabelle in order to swoop in and pull Daphne away. Ellie, who’d never held Daphne’s hand ever. Ellie, who may or may not be telepathic but still managed to silently shout don’t you dare to Declan.

  But it was too late. I’d already dared. I’d invited Declan along. Because Daphne had said I could, because I felt bad about the awkwardness in my kitchen on Lamorisse’s not-birthday, and because—this will sound ridiculous, but it was entirely true—I wanted that awkwardness to continue.

  Whatever trick of the mind had placed Robert in that photograph had unnerved me. Declan, despite, or because of, my attraction, had steadied me. (And was he attracted t
o me? The Girls’ Guide had a whole section on Signals! that I was too shy to consult.) Patting Declan’s arm on the way out hadn’t been so much a way to be in physical contact with him—well, it was somewhat—as it was to prove to myself, to whomever was watching, that Declan was real, here in the flesh. Robert was not.

  The tour guide, a young man, spoke a sturdy, mirthless English. He clearly had no great love for Bemelmans’s creation; this was just a way to make money. Peter asked him what his name was. The guide pretended not to understand Peter’s French. Annabelle whispered to Peter the name of a French children’s book character they hated—somehow the guide understood that, and told them to be quiet. Annabelle then asked me, in English, for a stick. Not an unusual request—she was our budding naturalist and would poke anything, alive or dead—but this did not bode well.

  As we walked east along the Seine, away from Notre-Dame, my girls could not stop noting all the erreurs.

  “He keeps calling her Madeleine, Mom,” Daphne complained. Peter and Annabelle volleyed the name back and forth. Daphne had a point. The book’s rhymes don’t work if you don’t pronounce the name as it is (mis)spelled, Madeline, like get-in-line, and instead pronounce it as it “should” be pronounced, comme en français, like Mad-lenn. Daphne had brought her own book and kept checking it. “And there are twelve little girls in two straight lines.”

  “Twenty-four!” said Peter.

  “No,” started Daphne, “it’s—” and gave up.

  Straight lines of any kind were the least interesting aspect of Madeline, or Bemelmans, for my girls. They loved the squiggles, the animated looseness of Bemelmans’s art, the pages that looked like he’d scratched them out in thirty seconds (though they were often the result of thirty drafts, Robert said), but most of all the fact that, pretty as Paris was, danger lurked around every corner: in the first book of the Madeline series, in hardly 350 words, there’s a robbery, a wounded soldier, blood-speckled mist roaring from a tiger’s mouth, a snowstorm, a rainstorm, an ambulance ride through the legs of the Eiffel Tower, and, of course, a dead-of-night appendectomy. Both Daphne and Ellie had trick-or-treated as Madeline various times in Milwaukee, but they had had little time for the hats and bows I assembled: they preferred to show off the tiny appendix scars Robert drew on their abdomens (with a Sharpie, which even I had to admit nicely echoed Bemelmans’s pen-and-ink drawings).

  The girls never articulated their love of Bemelmans to me—Robert sometimes tried to—but they didn’t have to; I saw them live it. And now on this tour, I was seeing it anew, as our guide spoke one falsehood after another.

  “Seriously? Bemelmans was ‘American’?” Ellie looked at me. I had once made the grave error of shelving Bemelmans’s adult nonfiction with his fellow Manhattanites in U.S.A./New York. Ellie preferred his entire oeuvre to be shelved with the Parisians.

  “He did live in America?” I said, adding the question mark only when Ellie’s stare demanded one.

  “Was he Belgian?” Declan tried. He wasn’t trying to ingratiate himself, or he was. He seemed truly curious. “The name—”

  “Belgian!” Ellie snorted. “He was Austrian—not Australian, Daphne”—Daphne snuck Bemelmans onto our Down Under shelves once to tweak Ellie, and it still rankled—“born and raised. For a time, anyway. Then Germany.” We all turned to look at her. “Then. . . . America,” Ellie said.

  We’d reached the Pont Neuf, the bridge where, in the series’s second book, Madeline falls into the Seine, only to be rescued by a dog Madeline’s classmates adopt and name Geneviève. Geneviève, the patron saint of Paris. Geneviève, whose name was Fleabag, Ellie now explained, until Bemelmans’s editor made him change it. Annabelle perked up. “Fleabag!”

  “I don’t remember that from the book,” said Peter.

  “Not that book,” said Daphne. “Ellie reads the grown-up books.”

  Our guide took no notice, made no mention of the dog, the saint, fleas, anything of value whatsoever.

  Ellie couldn’t take it anymore. “Excusez-moi!” she shouted. The guide stopped. The group looked at Ellie. She took a deep breath and asked about the plunge, the dog, the debate—it was a debate for her and Daphne—as to precisely which bridge Madeline fell from, because when Bemelmans drew the very first drawings for Madeline, he was on the Quai Voltaire by the Pont du Carrousel—mais . . .

  The guide shook his head, furious that we might presume to know Paris better than he did. But we did, we knew this Paris, Bemelmans’s Paris—Robert’s—very well.

  The remaining tourists—we’d lost a few each block, it appeared, as the tour grew increasingly desultory—turned to Ellie.

  “This bridge—” Ellie began.

  “This bridge!” the tour guide shouted and began yelling at Ellie, in French, that this bridge was a very important bridge, yes, but not for anything having to do with her stupid book—this bridge was where, in 1968, brave anarchists came close to killing the American ambassador, and wouldn’t it have been wonderful if they had, because one thing would have led to another and the world would not now be ruled by ignorant, shit-eating Americans. Bemelmans was German, he said, and what horrors Americans haven’t inflicted on the world, Germans had and would again.

  His scarlet candor (and lying, at least about the supposed assassination attempt) suggested that he did not think Ellie—nor Daphne—nor any of us—could speak French fluently. And indeed, no one else on the tour seemed to understand a word he said. But Daphne understood enough to begin crying, and Ellie to begin shouting. This made Peter huff and Annabelle shriek. The guide answered all this with crude slang that was new to me.

  It wasn’t new to Declan, though, who took to French to tell him to shut up, and furthermore, to be ashamed for taking these people’s money and then providing them with a sham of a tour, and for making kids cry . . .

  The guide shook his head, and then backed up a step, then another, and then melted away into the crowd.

  Peter and Annabelle went to Declan’s side—either to console him or because they knew he’d been sticking up for them.

  Je suis désolé, Declan said. “I am sorry” is all it means, though it always makes me think, “I am desolate,” and so I was, or close to. Daphne shook her head. Peter looked stricken, Annabelle like she really wanted that stick now.

  But our tour? I turned to our little group and thought about what to say. Come by the store—we are less than a kilometer away—buy the actual book, or just browse. My apologies on behalf of Paris. I don’t know that guide, but I do live here, and—

  “More than one building or school in Paris claims to be the model for Madeline’s school, the famous ‘old house in Paris that was covered with vines.’ The truth is that Bemelmans modeled it on his own school in Austria—a school for boys.”

  This was Ellie. Everyone was staring at her.

  And why wouldn’t they? She was speaking with authority. Head held high. Feet planted. Atop the bridge railing, two hands lightly anchoring her to a lamppost as she swung.

  “He spoke German. And many other languages.”

  I looked at Declan. He nodded to two policemen moving toward us from across the bridge, just beginning to break into a slow jog.

  The fathers in the crowd, meanwhile, beamed at this wise and spirited child. So did Annabelle. The mothers looked toward me—I was going to stop this, right? Soon?

  Yes. But how to do so without being the cause of her fall? I stared at her. Ellie stared back. That meant that she didn’t quite see Declan moving toward her from another angle.

  “Now, Miss Clavel, we all know her?” Ellie called out. “The woman in the book who’s like the teacher or leader or something. Also not German. But anyway, she was based on his daughter’s teacher. Bemelmans’s daughter was not named Madeline. Barbara. His wife, though, he met her after she’d quit living as a nun in a convent kind of like the girls’ school to work as an artist’
s model in Manhattan. But this is the important part: Bemelmans’s wife was named Mimi, which was a nickname for Mad—”

  My old boss, the university president, never, ever understood the importance of a dramatic pause. What, precisely, is the point? she would say. And I would say, it’s the entire point; a pause tells the audience, “get ready.”

  But my boss’s point: she didn’t want anyone to be ready. A pause would only give someone in the crowd an opportunity to shout, to heckle, and thereby throw her off balance.

  Which is precisely what Daphne did.

  Three letters, a single syllable: Dad!

  Ellie spun.

  Dad? The word delayed me a crucial half second. But not Declan, who moved like he’d heard nothing, like he really thought he’d catch Ellie before she fell.

  He did not. She dropped too fast.

  I sprang to the spot she’d just left.

  More magic: she’d only fallen three feet. A broad outer lip extends beneath the railing, and that’s where Ellie now stood, relieved. Peter and Annabelle clapped. Everyone did. Ellie looked down at the stony surface that had saved her, and so did I. It was about two feet wide, sloped slightly toward the river’s surface, and was tinged with a green that must have been mold or algae or moss—something slippery, anyway, because the moment she extended a hand to me (though Declan’s was closer), she disappeared from sight.

  * * *

  —

  What next? Someone screaming (not Ellie); Declan restraining Daphne, Peter, and Annabelle; me running. And shouts and horns and whistles and, somewhere in the distance, growing louder, a two-tone siren, and then another, sharp-flat, sharp-flat, the sound that always reminds me I’m not in Milwaukee anymore, and haven’t been for some time.

  Ellie chose a good spot to fall into the river, just one hundred meters shy of a fireboat station where frogmen were testing new gear. Wiser still would have been to evade the frogmen and let her mother rescue her, but I’d run down the closest stairs, which led to the wrong bank, and so was unable to intercede when, after plucking her from the water, the firemen turned her over to the police.