Plum Blossoms in Paris (11 page)

And so we enter Luxembourg Gardens like it’s our private Eden, for surely we are creatures newly born to the world. The rapid-fire creation of a divinity who whispers in our ears, and whom we exalt with our voices, celebrate with our bodies, and, lastly, sing his praises with secret, knowing smiles that nearly resemble that inward, ecstatic state of a Buddha’s nirvana.

W
e promenade. We amble. We stroll down wide paths hugged by two rows of chestnut trees, whose clinging leaves quiver with the breath of fall, delighting in the warm day, our melting hands, and the fanatical discipline of the Paris style, extended in every architectural line, from the dome of the grand palace to the manicured bushes circling the statuary. On other days, this obsessive quest for precision might be exasperating, but today it is merely as perfect as we feel. We barely notice the shadows of lesser mortals accompanying us, except for their momentary blocking of the sun lifted high upon our shoulders. The day is starting to sweat, and glow.

We talk about my family, and they feel far away. Not in a wistful, longing kind of way, but forgotten, like relatives long dead, whose links of attachment have been sawed through by the filing of time’s dull, but steady, instrument. I tell Mathieu this, only slightly troubled about my descent into egoism. He smiles and points to my American guilt. I tell him, very earnestly, that I don’t feel guilty about my estrangement, but that I am starting to feel guilty that I don’t feel guilty about it. He explodes in laughter, and a poodlish woman passing by sniffs in disapproval. But I’m serious.

The Gardens are draped with people sucking the balm from the day. Small, wide-eyed
enfants
watch, with an attentiveness reserved for Barney back home, fantastical puppet theaters, while others leisurely push sailboats off the edge of the fountain, sending forth a tiny French armada. They seem merry, if a little sedate, compared to American beasties. I ask Mathieu about this. He explains that kids are not coddled here, that parents prioritize their own desires above their children’s. This seems a severe assessment. I see plenty of mothers smiling indulgently at their kids’ exploits, waving to them at every pass of the nearby carousel. But the children do seem a trifle self-contained, making me wonder if in America, the home of rugged individualism, we are ironically training our kids to be excessively dependent. I think back to my childhood and how judiciously my life was mapped out, from play dates to piano lessons, from soccer practice to space camp. I never questioned it; children don’t. My life was as predictable as Irene’s, the time measured in increments of “you have to” and “think about the future” rather than in slices of meat loaf or spins of
Wheel of Fortune
. Irene picks up other people’s junk to throw a wrench in the routine. I picked up someone else’s career.

My father wanted me to major in American literature, while my mother never abandoned her hopes for a musical prodigy. Parenthood seems like such a pathetic plea for second chances. But I spun off their axis and flew a different trajectory: into the cool world of clinical science, where detachment and patience are prized virtues and recklessness is a prescription for disaster. I convinced myself of my own rebellion. I wanted to believe that it was my choice. Yet I’ve been poisoning myself with more protocol, too preoccupied to notice that I was sick.

Until now. I finally have the proper perspective to observethe delusion. Perhaps I needed to unhinge myself from the yoke of expectations—my family’s, Andy’s, and my own—to acquire true objectivity. Cleveland Daisy looks small from here, like an ant marching in a line that circles America. Mathieu has freed my passion, and I savor this new sensation of sailing it as breezily and buoyantly as the boys’ and girls’ boats along the rippling water, in a journey where the end always beckons beyond the flat horizon. I have found the freedom to live in this moment of time. I forget my guilt and usher my family back into the shadows, enjoying the sunlight on my freed hair and the haphazard way Mathieu kicks a pebble so that it is always just ahead.

He stops me to watch some older gentlemen play a popular game, with iron balls, called
pétanque
, under the trees. They are grave, and we mime their solemnity, standing at a respectful distance. One has a black sweep of mustache and a white mania of hair like the funny Einstein. A steel coat rack stands behind him, coatless today. Another nod toward order and propriety: I don’t recall seeing coat racks in Central Park. Of course, they would be stolen. Monsieur Einstein rubs the ball with his sweater and predicts the physics of the situation, mumbling to himself. He crouches and wings the weight forward. It crashes into the crunchy pebbles before halting next to a small green ball, whose meaning is mysterious to me. Everyone bursts into exclamations, and Mathieu applauds. Monsieur Einstein used the right formula.

“My father loves this game,” Mathieu says. “He used to play on Saturdays.”

“But they’re all so old,” I whisper, not very tactfully. The youngest appears to be in his mid-sixties; the oldest, a man with a caved-in mouth and disappointed eyes, could be eighty, or a hundred.

Mathieu shrugs. “Yes, well, my father is eighty-six, so he fit in perfectly.”

This startles me. My maternal grandfather is seventy-nine. “So he must have been, what, sixty when you were born?”

Mathieu directs me away from the action and nods. “About.”

Our steps are more measured now. “How old was your mom when she had your oldest sister?” I’m fishing, but this is curious.

“She must have been twenty-two,” he answers, after a slight pause.

“My age,” I muse. I try to imagine having a baby at my puppyish age, followed by three more in quick succession. All with a senior citizen. Bile surges to the back of my throat. I start to sympathize, a little, with Mathieu’s mother. “How did they meet?”

Mathieu smiles wryly. “She was a performer in a revue. And he was her most dedicated admirer.” He glances over at a couple necking on a bench and looks away. “My father never missed a show when she was in the city.”

“What kind of performances?” It sounds like an improbable, dated existence. The real Moulin Rouge.

He releases my hand, the first indication that I have traversed too far. “She was a dancer. A Gypsy: La Esmeralda, for the modern age. But without the romance. Reckless, beautiful, a child in many ways. She performed as the mythic female: Delilah, Scheherazaude, Cleopatra. Any ploy to make her nudity more titillating for jaded men like my father, who were disappointed by earthly love but felt their age, positions, and money entitled them to impose on these young dancers. The girls’ livelihoods depended on making the men feel appreciated, never pathetic, and even loved. Of course, it was all a lie.” He pauses, and I am surprised by his vinegary contempt after all these years. In spite of everything, Mathieu is protective of his mother.

He shoots me a small smile to soften the vitriol, but continues. “She saw through him. He was enraptured, but not able to separate the lost girl from the disguises she assumed. So he pursued her. She resisted, unwilling to sell her youth for the cold comfort of a coin in her hand and an old man in her bed. But she weakened with time, with the bribes and promises.” Mathieu’s lip twitches. “The life of the vagabond is hard. And that bed, bought with my father’s considerable government income, was so fucking soft.”

He tames the lip, and the voice. “She chose the safe route. Most people would have. She bound herself to a husband and, eventually, to kids she never wanted.”

He stops, spent.

“And resumed the life of the vagabond after all,” I say.

He nods. Tentatively, I touch his hand. This is a man still in grief for his mother. A draft will keel him over.

We have arrived at the Medici Fountain, an idyllic spot on the outskirts of the Gardens that, in spite of its popularity, feels like a lovely secret. It is the only place in Paris permitted to run a little wild. The trees are many, their unpruned branches a leafy canopy. It’s Love’s cathedral—the gurgling water our organ music. Fashioned to resemble a grotto, the face of the fountain is punctuated by allegorical figures, the slow trickle of water cascading past the two lovers rendered in white marble—a man, not long past youth, tenderly cradling an exquisite, smiling girl—before flowing into a reflecting pool of black calm. Half-dead geraniums fill the magnificent urns spaced evenly around the rectangular perimeter. The sound of the water is soothing, if sad, like a sudden reminder of the hugeness of time, hurtling toward infinity … of my small place within its gathering body.

When I came here by myself, I only saw the lovers’ rapturous embrace, their gorgeous white relief, and felt my loneliness keenly. Now, with Mathieu, lost in recollection by my side, I am struck by the grotesquely large Cyclops-like figure, in dark weathered bronze, suspended over the lovers. I sense the vulnerability in their fragile lovelock. The whispering water may echo their bliss but also warns of their destruction. For their love is as soft and supple as their glance, and like anything worth having, imminently destructible. One cannot look at them without thinking of their end.

Mathieu looks into the fountain, his hand lifeless in my own. A sobering heaviness descends, and I feel the first dangerous pull of commitment to improving someone else’s happiness. It has been too easy. We simply invented joy, like the stuff was as plentiful and cheap as oxygen, recycling it through a delicate membrane yet to be toughened by experience. My golden hour by the hotel window returns to me, that vivid dream I claimed as a new reality. I cannot say, with Mathieu here, which incarnation of myself—the love-struck romantic or the inviolate, autonomous force of nature—feels more like the truth. His hand, tucked like an obligation within my own, is too near, and already precious. There is no choice but to squeeze it harder … and try to bring a smile back to those lips, pebbled with bitterness.

“I have a joke.”

I didn’t say it would be subtle.

Mathieu glances over and raises an eyebrow, which I translate as mute permission.

“It’s not very funny,” I warn, my heart thudding queerly.

He sinks into an iron chair and spreads out his hands. “I am listening.”

This is a bad idea. But … “How many Frenchmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“I could not say.”

Ah, what is this? Success already! He smiles, a gorgeous lifting. A little thrill of victory courses through me, granting courage.

“One. He just stands there, and all of Europe revolves around him.”

Mathieu chews on this, looking skeptically at an urn, before raising his eyes to my face. “That is awful, Daisy.”

I laugh and fling myself into the chair next to his. “I know. I heard it on a late-night comedy show. This comic did an entirefive minutes just on the French. That was the mildest joke of the bunch. And the funniest.”

“Five minutes, you say? I should be honored, yes?” He clasps his hands together and slides into reflection. “I think that funny man needs new jokes.”

“Okay, so how about this one? Irene told it to me one day at work.” He has no idea who Irene is, or what I do at work, but you don’t need a lot of backstory to do comedy. “Two muffins are in an oven. The first muffin says, ‘Whew! It’s really getting hot in here, don’t you think?’ And the second muffin jumps and screams, ‘Aaauuugghhh! A talking muffin!’”

I throw myself into the part, channeling Stanislavski, and attracting the attention of the dozen people admiring the fountain. Mathieu merely looks startled and doesn’t laugh. I conclude, a little sadly, that there is a cultural barrier in doing comedy. Except for Jerry Lewis and Woody Allen, who managed to break through in France (and what, besides their Jewishness, is the strange connector there?). I had a belly laugh when Irene told that joke to me. Of course, it could have been Irene telling it. I really believed she was a muffin.

“It makes no sense,” Mathieu complains. “The second muffin is also conversing.”

“But that’s the joke!”

“Hmm … it is peculiar in its simplicity.”

“Yes, well, Americans like simplicity.” I throw my hands in the air and slump backward. “Farts and burps, and talking muffins: that’s us.”

Mathieu brightens, scooting his chair to where our knees touch. “Now I have a joke. It is an old one, but quite humorous.”

Oh, goodie.

“Sartre sits in a café, frantically revising
Being and Nothingness
. He tells the waitress he wants coffee with sugar, but no cream.” Mathieu makes a slicing gesture with his hand, and I smile reflexively. “The waitress replies, ‘I’m sorry,
monsieur
, but we are out of cream—how about with no milk?’”

Wait a beat . …

He looks expectant, a smile parading around the corners of his face. Oh, Lord, Sartre was an existentialist, right? And what is it that they
do?

“Mathieu?” a voice chimes.

God is a devil, tempting us with promiscuous fruit. A gorgeous Mediterranean woman with breasts Delacroix would have immortalized stands before us, batting equally obscene eyelashes. I fold my arms over my pubescent nubs and fall back, bowing to the greater authority of her C cups. Mathieu looks flustered and glances over at me, then at the divine creature, whose chestnut tresses (she is the reason clichés exist) are backlit by a spear of sunlight the heavens have indulgently thrown down, then at me again. He must be thinking, as I am, that it is marvelous her skin should glow from within, like Vermeer’s little milkmaids’. How fetchingly distracted she appears when her fingers trespass into the shadow above her cleavage, straining against a blouse that is one hardworking button away from inciting all assembled males to cast aside earthly things and bow down in worship. Yes, Mathieu’s thinking this. The poor fool blushes and stammers like a schoolboy caught with his hand down his pants.

She talks to Mathieu in French and with that more intelligible body, ignoring me. Laughing throatily from time to time, her face erupts in dimples that seem charmingly at odds with her sophisticated appearance. Mathieu has risen and is all elbows as he runs a hand through his hair. The goddess licks her lips. Mathieu licks his. The goddess trails her fingers down the lily of her neck, arriving at the kissable hollow of her throat. Mathieu’s eyes follow. The goddess smiles, revealing a gap between two front teeth, arequisite imperfection that makes her all the more beguiling. Mathieu shifts painfully from one foot to another. The goddess is breaking my heart.