Plum Blossoms in Paris (13 page)

“Especially young American women who have never read Sartre?”

He rolls his eyes in mock dismay at my admission before throwing an arm about my shoulders to dip me toward the fountain. Licking the beads of water off my laughing lips, my hair a wet fringe, I shriek at the upside-down saint, who juts his chin out in defense of his importance. “I will never take you to the Eiffel Tower,” he promises, as my skin hangs past my cheeks.

I try to flex forward, but he has all the advantage, holding me prone like a rag doll. “But for not laughing at my Sartre joke, I condemn you to my recitation of his play,
No Exit
, in French,
mais oui
, some night soon, as you lie naked on my bed”—he raises an eyebrow to seductive heights and licks the spray from his lips, while a giggle gets caught in the tunnel of my throat—“looking precisely like Manet’s little Olympia, as you contemplate Sartre’s hypothesis of hell as other people.”

Mathieu has me pinned. His eyes laugh into mine, and I squirm agreeably, content to be contained. Encouraged, he moves to kiss me. But as he relaxes his grip on the wrists behind my back, I spring nimbly from him, delighting in his clumsy fall toward the fountain. He barely catches hold of the edge before being pitched into the cold water. If I cannot surprise him in matters of the mind, where his experience is oceanic, I can still keep him off balance.

He curses in French (he falls back on his native dialect for effusions of love and vulgarity; perhaps when he’s most authentic?) and glares at me, but I laugh at him and dance away. I run toward the cathedral, nailed into place by two bell towers, of which one is taller and showier than the other. I briefly wonder which one I am, and which one is Mathieu. But any whimsy is lashed away by Mathieu’s footsteps and voice, imbuing my name with the French intonation, so that it sounds inquisitive and promising.
Day-Zee? Arrêt, Day-Zee!
I smile, trying to suppress a gurgle of laughter, and go faster, relishing the movement of my legs and the slapping of my feet on the old stone, affronting, in equal measure, spotty gatherings of pigeons and Japanese tourists, both of whom squawk at me in strange, otherworldly tongues. Gatheringmomentum, I fly toward the steps of the great cathedral, which I must reach before Mathieu, just beyond my shoulder, reaches out and snags me. Charging the steps, preserving myself as a blur in a couple’s honeymoon photo, I take them three at a time before darting between the columns and launching myself through the heavy wooden doors that are, auspiciously, parted.

Breathlessly, I enter the cathedral and, slowing, turn right. I clamp a hand over my mouth in reaction to the looks lobbed my way but am unable to contain my giddiness, which, like anything under enormous pressure, explodes in inappropriate laughter as I slide swiftly along the back wall. Here is a small chapel swirling with Delacroix’s murals, depicting a conclave of souls in a fury of tumult and torment. Losing my giggles, I linger over an effete angel wrestling, or doing a mean tango, with a muscle-bound man wearing leg warmers, when I feel a hand clamp down on my shoulder and wheel me around. Caught, I can only squeal out, “Sanctuary!” as I confront Mathieu’s mouth, pressed fiercely against my laughing lips. I gasp into his kiss, slowly sinking into stone. But as his body relaxes, I hastily plant my lips over the scar on his cheek, ducking and dodging from those angel arms like a fleet flyweight, before dashing toward the side aisle.

I step urgently, him hissing my name in pursuit. I like the skeletal restraint imposed on us by the sacred stones. The chase is the thing, yet there should be consequences. The line is blurred. I want to see how far we can take it.

The heat of Mathieu’s eyes on my neck enflames my madness. He reaches out and flips my wet hair. I flick it back. I can sense him recoil, and falter, before picking up the pursuit anew. He steps on the backs of my shoes, but little does he know (wearing those expensive-looking leather things) how one relies on Keds to slip on as readily as slippers. He tries feebly for my hand, but I shake him loose. I am young in flesh and blood, and I have a child’s profaneirreverence for the law of this house. Even Jesus up there, suffering for me on his eternal cross, cannot dam the wicked flow of mirth in my heart. I want Mathieu to hunt me until the end of time, so that we can, like the Hindus, create new cycles.

I run out of church. Confronting a barrier that points me to the pulpit, I move into that painful heart of a church and stop. Mathieu bumps into me in surprise. I look back at him and smile weakly. We stand in the middle of the transept, caught in the crucifix. Silently, we turn and regard the massive wooden organ at the rear of the church, with its tight fractals of pipes protected by dark angels. The organ is monumental, the biggest I’ve seen, so imposing that my ears instinctively cringe for the cacophony that must engulf this house of God during Sunday mass. How those unworldly notes ricocheting off the floating domes must storm the transept, before reverberating down, down into the smallest artery of the smallest worshipper’s malleable tongue, commanding—like a father’s grip—the rebellious blood flowing within to deliver the right words, with reverence. What a grand, and terrifying, magnification of a man’s touch on a pedal, his pushing the right keys. I strain for the swell, knowing it won’t come, but my ear, with its alerted machinery, cannot help but listen. It is deathly quiet. There is an uneasy dissonance: the expectation of sound slamming a hard silence. The flickering flame of my exuberance cannot survive this vacuum. A cold hole opens, and a memory surfaces.

There are wooden chairs, not pews, set up in rows throughout the nave, and I sit down, the chair rubbing harshly against the stone. Mathieu follows suit. There are half a dozen people scattered about, hands clasped in prayer, heads bowed, shaming my earlier exuberance. The remaining chairs are empty, some slightly askew, as if abandoned, en masse, by the secular citizens of this modern France. I finally turn toward Mathieu, who looks at me with some curiosity.

“You caught me,” I whisper, trying to recapture our playfulness.

“Did I?” he asks, not fooled.

“Didn’t you?”

“Something did.”

“Yes, something.” I place my chin in my hands’ cradle. “Funny, huh?”

“What?”

“How churches make you feel like you’re already dead.”

He glances at the dogma of stonework and statuary. “I feel nothing.”

“Really?” I ask, only a little surprised.

“No. But you do.”

I nod. Who was that girl who wore laughter for wings? She has been clipped by the absent voices of a terrible superstition. “I just remembered something that I haven’t thought of in years.”

“Tell me.”

I wave him off, embarrassed. “It’s irrelevant … silly.”

“I like silly irrelevance.”

I smile, hesitating.

“Will it help if I promise to tell you something equally silly and irrelevant when you are finished?”

I laugh. “Okay.” Taking a deep breath, I organize my thoughts. My eyes take solace in the half arches of natural light spilling from the generous windows that try mightily to brighten this darkened space. “When I was really little, I hated visiting airplane hangars.” This is not an auspicious start. Compared to Mathieu’s eloquence, the line is a letdown, my voice pinched and strange.

Daisy, just say what you want to say. Your essays always read like you’re lifting a page from your father. Think for yourself, honey.

I clear my throat and try harder. “We lived near Dayton, a city famous for its Air Force base and not much else. But it had a great air and space museum, one of the best in the country. Well, my dad loved to go, so we went often. My mom favored the astronaut displays, as most people did, because they were the more romantic—you know, man’s heroic nature, the undiscovered country, all that
Star Trek
stuff. But not my dad. He went in for the old-timey displays: those rickety planes used in World War I with their funny nicknames and strange, savage caricatures. He’d stroke their frames, examine the slightest details, moving his hands over the rivets, like he had invented the damn things in some past life. I think he imagined himself as the Red Baron at times.” Tears spring to my eyes. I shake my head, but Mathieu nods, and I gather myself.

“But me—I couldn’t stand going. It undid me to be standing there, all of three feet tall, flanked by those enormous airplanes, hanging from ropes above me, spanning the length of football fields beside me. It was too overwhelming for a four-year-old pursued by this wild imagination. Put me in a real cemetery during daytime, and I would do fine. I knew what that was about. But I could not bear the emptiness of that huge space filled with dead machines.” I shake my head at the absurdity of where I’m going, but soldier on, Mathieu’s silence being of the encouraging sort. “I always had nightmares about walking through that place by myself at night, though I never told my parents. I suppose I was a little ashamed of myself. It seemed so silly, even then. Most kids dreamed about monsters. I was undone by an airplane graveyard.” I breathe out. “But I couldn’t escape the fact that the place provoked a kind of cold terror inside me.”

“And this place? It gives you the same creeps.”

I flash him a self-conscious look. “Crazy, I know.”

“Not so crazy.”

“The weird part is that I was never anything but a casual Christian. My mom is basically an agnostic, now, and my dad a lapsed Episcopalian. I went to church a few dozen times growingup, never really understanding what it was about, but still feeling the enormous power of these rituals and words. I mean—
the body and blood of Christ
—tell that to a kid once, and she will never look at her parents the same way again.”

“Her parents?” he asks, frowning.

“For making her go up and be a party to that. Parents don’t explain things—they just assume kids aren’t paying attention. But I was. I thought I was literally eating the flesh of Jesus Christ, and drinking his blood … that the reverend up there had worked a magic trick with the little wafers that dissolved like cotton candy in my mouth. I mean, he even whispered it to me before putting the pretty silver cup to my lips. I was mortified by his words, but I always went through with it. Afterward, I couldn’t get the taste out of my mouth. It tasted metallic to me, exactly like blood. I’d go home and brush my teeth to get rid of the taste. Even to this day, when I drink wine, I have this strange sacrilegious sensation of getting drunk on Jesus’ blood. Andy bought me a nice bottle of red for my twenty-first birthday, and I couldn’t drink the stuff.”

Mathieu hides a smile with his finger, before saying, “It is a good thing you were not brought up Catholic. You would be a complete mess.”

I lean my shoulder into him. “Easy for you to say. Does anyone in France believe in God anymore?”

“Nobody I know admits to it.” He pauses. “Perhaps it is why we are so unhappy.”

“Are you so unhappy?”

He tents his fingers and leans back. “We can be a little morose from time to time. It is the logical extension of not believing in an afterlife. You Americans can, as you say, ‘smile through your tears’ because you think your suffering is temporary: a kind of grand test from the Almighty. We French know it is cruel and random, that we are ‘being-unto-death,’ as Heidegger would say, before falling into oblivion.”

I groan. “That sounds awful.”

“Yes, it does. Why do you think Conrad called it
the horror?”
Mathieu shrugs and wipes at his thigh. “We are born clinging to life, and for most, that means ignoring death, or packaging death in such a way that we are lulled into complacency by myths and legends, like naïve children. But there is a third way, which sounds, to me, more like the truth you honor than any of this.” He waves his hand contemptuously, before centering it on his breast and looking at me. “And that is to acknowledge that this life is all we have.
This
is my religion, and I am passionate about it.”

I consider, chewing on the inside of my lip. “I know that what you say is entirely rational. It does sound like a fairy tale, and a rather vicious one at that.” Eyeing the crucifix on the wall to my right, I sit a little straighter. Jesus’ mournful, martyred expression is drilled across his strung flesh as a permanent reproach. “But it’s a part of my DNA. Even if I don’t believe it, I cannot entirely unbelieve it. Which doesn’t make me a good Christian”—I sigh—“just a bad atheist.”

Mathieu is not the sort to let someone off the hook easily. He licks his lips and charges. “But your little anecdote of two minutes ago demonstrates your true, authentic instinct for atheism.”

I frown. “How so?”

“What were you scared of in that airplane graveyard? That the airplanes would come to life and run you down?”

“No, not exactly,” I reply, worrying at my fingernails. I find myself hard to explain, the flood of today’s emotions sweeping aside analysis. “I don’t know what I was scared of,” I admit. “That’s why it was so scary.”

“Exactly so. It was you confronting death for the first time, in a real, if limited, way. It was the awful stillness of those ‘dead machines,’ the great emptiness you felt by yourself in the darkness. You had the existentialist’s perception of the void in frontof you. As a four-year-old.” Turning his chair sideways, he more aggressively confronts me. “So what happened in between now and then? What was lost along the way? Why did you wear a saint’s medal, like a charm, around your neck the first time I saw you, on the train? And why is it that you cannot recognize that the shiver you felt in your spine five minutes ago was not the fear of divine judgment, but the fear of the absence of one?”

I flinch and retreat. He is too strident, too perceptive, too demanding of me. He’s calling me out as a hypocrite, of keeping bad faith with myself, when I have tried to be honest. Again, tears reach my eyes, but they are symptoms of anger and pride, and do not fall. I do not look at him, and he makes no move to soften his indictment of me.

After a minute has passed, I observe, “Maybe it was the fear you describe. Very likely, in fact. For it’s true: I have more doubt than faith.”