Many people my age briefly shared my obsession as kids, thanks to rainy-day recess copies of the film that saturated American elementary schools in the 1970s and ’80s. I noticed that, as years passed, those children moved on. I knew I had not, and would not. That book was my first love. Like a crush, a companion, a boyfriend of the type I wouldn’t really have, ever. That book, that film, understood me. Or so I felt. I knew that I understood it. And moreover, I understood its Paris. For other girls (and the odd boy), Paris meant flowers and romance and accordions wheezing. The Red Balloon has none of this. It’s beautiful, but bracing. Some find it sweet, but I didn’t like sweet things as a child and I don’t much now. I’m surprised more people—like the staff of the Milwaukee bookstore I was stealing from—don’t realize the obvious. Red is the color of warning.
I wish I myself had paid more attention to that warning. I was in grad school then for film studies—film criticism—but had started in filmmaking, because I did want to make something, and Lamorisse made it look so easy. It wasn’t, especially when I discovered my filmmaking program disdained narrative. How much better The Red Balloon would have been, they said, had it been solely that: a close-up of a balloon for thirty minutes—or thirty hours! No dialogue. No actors. Just balloon. What do you think, Leah? I thought I’d transfer to film studies, and did. There they told me I needed to be interested in films other than The Red Balloon and cityscapes other than Paris. For a while, I let them think I was. But I couldn’t sustain the fiction; in a very short time, I would burn out, give up. Or as I liked to think of it, give in, and to a private truth: I was mostly still interested in making my own film. I didn’t know how, when, or what it would be. I did know where it would take place: far from Wisconsin.
And far away from this boy accosting me on the street outside a bookstore.
I ran.
Doc Martens do not make for good running shoes, especially when purchased at Goodwill, a size and a half too big. I worried my pursuer might think I’d stolen them, too. I worried that I was worried what he would think.
When he finally caught up to me, the first words out of his mouth were two I myself was about to say.
“I’m sorry?”
He was beautiful. I know there’s a delicacy about the word. There was a delicacy about him.
“It’s okay,” I said, neatly absolving him for something that I had done.
He’d been in line at the cashier when he’d seen me slip the book out of the store. He’d told them to add it to his bill, impulse-bought still another book, and then he’d chased me. “Take it,” he said now, though I already had.
“I’m not sure I want it anymore,” I said, looking at it, lying.
“Can I—can I buy you a coffee?”
“How about a beer,” I said, “unless you’re worried I’d steal that, too.”
He wasn’t, or maybe he was, because he kept a grip on his glass at the bar when we met later that night. He was nervous or thirsty or knew this about himself: his hands, if left unoccupied, would flutter, rise, fall, paint shapes familiar and not. He’d run a hand through his hair and nod, or rub his face and frown, or draw a letter on the table, another in the air. It was how he spoke. It was how he smiled. It was nerves, yes, but of a generalized sort, at least at that point, and my goal soon became to have him be nervous about me. I wanted to see, and feel, what those hands could do.
And he had these eyes. Gray, but the right iris was stained with a tiny burnt-orange splotch I felt compelled to comment on.
He briefly closed his eyes in reply. “It’s meaningless,” he said, “in humans. But in pigeons? Eyes? A big deal, especially if you race them, which I don’t, but it’s how you tell them apart, how you know which one’s yours.”
And at that moment, I did.
“So, Paris?” he said, now tapping The Red Balloon, which lay on the table between us. I winced, I think invisibly. Tap, tap: it felt like little thumps to my chest.
Robert explained that his own favorite children’s stories were by Ludwig Bemelmans. The Madeline series.
In an old house in Paris
That was covered with vines
Lived twelve little girls
In two straight lines. . . .
I shook my head. Once upon a time—first or second grade—those would have been, had been, fighting words. The hats, the bows, the uniforms? The two straight lines?
But on my future husband plowed. He thought I should be, had to be, a Bemelmans fan, given my interest in Lamorisse: “both artists, before—and after—anything else!” In his hands appeared a copy of the first Madeline book. Which he had purchased for me. To go with the book I’d stolen.
He slid Madeline alongside The Red Balloon, both books flat on the tiny table between us. I looked down at the covers and then around at the bar.
“Everyone is definitely jealous of the date I’m on,” I said.
Untrue. But I was definitely anxious. I was protective of my passion, my Paris. So much so, I’d long put off going. Poverty had helped me stall, but so had a cynical certainty that the Paris I’d find would disappoint. It wouldn’t be the 1950s Paris of The Red Balloon. It wouldn’t be as rhapsodically bleak. The balloon, if I found one, if one found me, would pop long before I reached the final page.
(There are many ways to describe cowardice. This is one.)
“The way I see it,” he said, continuing as if I’d not spoken, “and I didn’t see it until just now, actually, looking at the books side by side: it’s weird, isn’t it?”
He was weird, of course, and that only slew me more. In grad school, the default was that the default did not make sense. Our lives were dispiriting, impoverishing, and largely nocturnal, so we thrilled to what illuminations there were, even if they flickered in strange ways. Especially if they did. I looked at him, carefully. He looked at the books.
“It’s two different ways of looking at the world,” he went on. “One city—”
“I don’t buy that,” I said, though I did like a good fight.
“You’re either a Madeline person or a Red Balloon person,” he said. (I didn’t buy this then either, but genetics bears him out: both our daughters would have his eyes and preference for Bemelmans.) “Paintings, or photographs. Paris in color, or black and white.”
“The Red Balloon is in color. It’s all about color.”
“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