Plum Blossoms in Paris (15 page)

“My grandmother died last night.”

His teeth slipped back under their covers. “Oh, man. That really … sucks.”

“Yeah.”

He kept his hand on my arm, rubbing the thumb back and forth, back and forth. “Were you guys close?”

I thought about this.

My grandmother (she wasn’t the Grandma sort) was an elegant, austere woman who probably hated my name as much as I did. A devotee of etiquette books, she had a library stocked with titles like
Thinking of You: The Art of the Hand-Written Note
, and
Setting a Gracious Table
, in addition to all of Emily Post’s ruminations on wedding invitations, place settings, and displaying the flag (hoisted
briskly
, lowered
ceremoniously
—what ghostly italics to impress a young mind). Grandmother was a fundamentalist on these subjects, and like any extremist, did not tolerate dissenters. Propriety pleased her; it structured her life. Take her weekly bridge clubs. These luncheon soirees were an opportunity to shine, to bask in the adulation of her friends’ lavish, insincere praise. When I turned twelve, I was allowed to help her serve the tea and tiny, insipid sandwiches. An Orange County Bat Mitzvah.

If Grandmother was a practiced socialite, I was a twelve-year-old debutante scuffing up against puberty, who did not so much transform from a caterpillar to a butterfly through that scripted rite of passage as curl into a mothy cocoon, refusing to show myself. Everything was on the move, but not enough had caught up. My legs were trestles; the train was a long time comin’.

I was a quarrel of emotions that summer and too dumb to know how to moderate. But I knew I didn’t want to stray onto the thin ice of my grandmother’s hardwood floor in that formal living room with the sallow ancestral portraits. Especially in front of the white-haired, rouged judges who pretended to like me during the compulsory exercises so that they could crucify me when it came to presentation.

I screwed up. I knocked cups over, scalding Mrs. Buckley, who barked like a seal, while dribbling tea on Mrs. Moody’s silk, plumy scarf, which she got from—what do you know—Paris on a long-ago honeymoon with a non-Moody husband. My ancestors’ eyes followed me everywhere, faintly amused, as I played the joker to my grandmother’s queen. Mrs. Moody sniffed and pronounced me “coltish.” Liking horses, I decided it was a compliment. The
coup de grâs
struck just as Mrs. Chambers made an astonishing six no-trump bid. Impressed enough to steal a look at her cards, yet unaccustomed to heels, even one-inch beginners, I tripped over a Venetian lamp cord and crashed into the floor with a platter of paté. It was a sitcom,
Little Miss Daisy
.

Without the laugh track.

I fled in humiliation, sticking my grandmother with the shattered pieces I left behind. All I heard as I bolted up the stairs was my grandmother, panic-stricken, shouting, “Play through, ladies! Play through!” I think Mrs. Buckley had started to blister.

I cleared my throat. Jay Leno told silent jokes on the TV, and the audience dutifully gyrated. Tit for tat. “No, we weren’t close.”

“Oh.” Rakesh’s hand hovered. My arm felt an absence, my body adrift.

“I
wish
we had been.” I pressed all the pain in my life into that wish, looking at him with blurry eyes. My chin started to wobble.

“Yeah, I know.” His hand recovered my arm, his eyes misted. My words, and eyes, prodded him like a laboratory animal that didn’t know the experiment being played upon him. Poor Rakesh.

My chin broke. I started to sob. Rakesh folded me into his arms. He smelled of aftershave and ginger. I imagined him not washing his clothes since spring break, when he went home for his sister’s Indian wedding. She had never met the groom before. How crazy, how possibly brilliant.

“I’m s-sorry,” I sniffled, pulling away.

“It’s okay.”

I wanted to drown in those eyes, that skin. Sometimes a warm body is all that is needed. Especially when the warm body you really want is too busy studying for a gross anatomy final to come home for your grandmother’s funeral.

“You never answered my question.”

“What question?”

“Why are you still here?”

Good question. I had no good answer. Instead, I broke toward Rakesh and closed my eyes, in mute persuasion. I had hit bottom. What did I care if I slopped in the mud?

By pulling toward Rakesh, I pushed Andy away.

The wind from the teakettle started its mad wail.

Rakesh hesitated, then kissed me. It felt different, the things he did. Not better, but different. And because he felt different, I imagined that I was different. Just for one night. Grief is surely the best excuse.

The kettle started to shriek at us, and the couch springs played a broken symphony. We didn’t care.

But Irene did. When I saw those trusting eyes widen behind her glasses as they absorbed our discarded clothes, our nearly naked bodies, I could swear I heard my grandmother yell, “Play through, ladies! Play through!”

Ghosts do talk, Mathieu. At the most perverse times.

“What are you thinking of?”

Mathieu is not one who believes in companionable silences.

“Oh, nothing,” I reply, searching the false sky for inspiration. It is serenely flat, like the two-dimensional skies from pre-Renaissance paintings. Looking at it, one could believe she’s in a storybook. “I was thinking about my grandmother.”

“You mentioned that she recently died, yes?” He is concerned for me.

Mathieu and Rakesh align for a moment, like overlaid photos. “It’s just that—”

“Go on,” he encourages, rubbing my forearm.

I wipe at the corners of my eyes, astonished to find real tears. “She loved her tea parties, playing the hostess. We were very close. She always made a point of including me.” I search my pocket for a tissue.

Mathieu gallantly produces a handkerchief, which makes me feel like a heroine in a nineteenth-century novel. I gingerly blow, but hesitate to hand it back all gunked up with snot. He motions for me to keep it, which I do, twisting the fabric in my hands.

I’m not sure why I do this. I know it’s bad. Worse than playing with Rakesh, because I care for Mathieu and he for me. Perhaps Mathieu is more penetrating than my natural defenses can withstand. Or maybe I need to erase the past, devise a different ending. Who knows? Guilt is a many-layered soufflé I have no interest in dissecting.

I maintain the charade over our lunch, inventing a string of funny, and touching, anecdotes about my “Nana” culled from syndicated episodes of
The Waltons
I watched as a child, all of which affect Mathieu deeply. I can tell by his moistening eyes, which, at intervals, twist the knife in my gut because his grief is at the contagious stage where a sneeze of sadness from me could infect him with a melancholic typhoid. Yet I talk and talk, my mouth on cruise control, inventing other characters in my life—a manic-depressive aunt named Flo living in New York who appeared as Grizabella in an off off-Broadway rendition of
Cats
and still performs
Memory
at every family reunion; a medical ethics professor whom I assisted getting wasted and ruffling feathers at a sports bar after finals and begging me to “discipline” him when I dropped him off (okay, that one’s regrettably true)—stabbing my ravioli from time to time, while Mathieu swallows his scallops with increasing wonder. It is quite the performance and runs flawlessly, as I land every note with the right degree of poetic or vulgar emphasis. When it comesto the curtain call, I have almost convinced myself. Mathieu is transfixed. I cannot say that I enjoy the improv. But I don’t stop.

I guess I do it because I can.

We are there about an hour. When we leave, the tables outside are empty. There is no sign of the previous occupants, no legacy of their words, their glances, the time swallowed from their lives. Their presence here might have been a fiction.

But for some inky stains at the bottom of their teacups.

Oh, to read tea leaves on a day like this!

I
want a nap. My mood has dipped with our return to sightseeing, and I am sluggish and temperamental, like I’ve been squeezed too hard. It’s not Mathieu. If anything, I feel more bound to him. I would like to drop our plans and duck under an obliging chestnut, drifting off to the sound of his heartbeat, awakening at its alarm, so that under the cover of darkness we might eat and drink and flirt some more. No, it’s not my darling guide in this journey we’ve hazarded, and to whom I now press closer, which has me itching to flee this sidewalk lined with the dead façades of fashion playhouses. It’s these extra people dogging about, held hostage by vanity, and numbed by expectation, who trigger this little tantrum. As anybody who feels the advantage of special insight, I look scornfully at the pretenders scurrying through the streets with quotas of sites to see, shopping to do, none of them content to rhapsodize this city with aimless exploration as we do. I have, in half a day’s time, morphed from conformist tourist to wanderlust adventurer, and like any convert, am eager to shout my creed.

I sniff. “Why on earth would anyone want to go into these places?” I ask as we pass another trendy clothing store.

“What do you mean?”

I motion derisively to the slick displays behind the glass. “It’s all so much nonsense. To think how people waste their money just to satisfy their vanity.”

Mathieu halts in front of a women’s shoe boutique. “Not at all, Daisy. You misunderstand.”

“Oh, really?” Squinting, I point with some triumph. “Three hundred euros for a pair of heels that might cripple my feet? That doesn’t seem silly to you?”

He pauses to consider the red heels. “Definitely not practical, no. But to call them silly is rash on your part.” Mathieu turns toward me. “You find art beautiful and engaging. Why should you not have the same attitude toward what you wrap yourself in? Fashion can be less about vanity than about creating an alluring aesthetic for the people around you. Have you ever worn such shoes before?”

“No. Besides bankrupting me, I have no use for them. Where would I wear them—to the lab?”

Mathieu smiles and leans against the glass. “Perhaps that is your problem. You do not resent the shoes so much as the lack of a proper destination?”

I laugh sharply. “No, really—it’s the shoes.”

“But do not think about the money. Just look at the shoes. They are lovely, no?”

I look. They are a conflation of red leather and suede, with a neat bow collecting the asymmetrical straps at the center, and a four-inch heel that could mortally wound a man. Very feminine. Very sexy. Foreign.

“Yeah, so they’re not hideous,” I admit. “But as something that costs the same amount of money that could feed an African family in a year, they don’t look so hot. In fact, thought of like that, they look criminal.”

“And you are inclined now toward such charity?”

Hmm. The bastard.

Mathieu starts to pull my hand.

“No, Mathieu. Really.”

He pulls harder.

“They’re not for me!”

But he is as obstinate as Napoleon at Waterloo.

He pulls open the glass door, and I stop resisting. Now I must saunter in, like three-hundred-euro shoes are something I have a casual sense of ownership about, and Parisian salesladies are not the most intimidating Martians on this alien French planet. This would be easier without my Keds on.

A colorless woman with tamed hair and costume earrings approaches with an unfocused smile. Thankfully, Mathieu takes the lead, as my talent for playacting withers like a meek flower dwarfed by a greater bloom’s shade. The boutique, from walls to carpet, is as red as the reddest bordello, or Victoria’s Secret.

They speak in French, and Mathieu points out the shoes in the window. She archly examines me, before asking, “And you are what size, my dear?”

It might be less humiliating to meet a French person who wasn’t conversant in English. But their maddening competence persists like a bad habit they’d like to break, but can’t.

“Uh, eight,” I mumble. “That’s American, I don’t know how to translate that to European sizes.”

The saleslady gives a perfunctory nod. “We are accustomed to such, as you say, translations.”

She motions us to a red, armless thing that looks like an oversized ottoman before disappearing into the back. There is an oval mirror on the wall that is large enough for me to note my smallness. I look about as lost as you’d expect for someone who gets her shoes from Payless. I try to scorch Mathieu with my eyes, but he is examining a pair of silver sling-backs with a level of absorption American men would find disgraceful. The shoes, along with smart matching purses, are exhibited like museum pieces atop glowing display cases. But no museum, not even Graceland’s, with its fat Elvis toilet of death, has ever made me want to flee like this one. It’s like being suffocated by cherry blossoms.

The mannequin returns with a couple of boxes tucked under her arm. I curse myself for not removing my Keds. More humiliation to suffer. I slip them off, as well as my gray cotton socks, while she asks Mathieu something. Evidently, he is in charge here.