Plum Blossoms in Paris (18 page)

And then there is the Matisse, near the window, its faceless woman with flowers waiting patiently for light.

Holyholyholyholy
. My eyes are crazed, greedy. I feel like I’ve just happened across the tomb of King Tut. That I’ve cracked physics’ Theory of Everything. That pure, eternal beauty has found a home inside Mathieu’s father’s apartment in this overly trendy section of Paris. That all the ostentatious stuff down the hall was a false perfume to throw me off a sublime scent. That this room, and not the cathedrals choking this city, is where God must live, or at least summer. I have strayed off the beaten path—no, I have soared, with borrowed wings, from any path. I cannot believe my height, yet my hawkish eye catalogues every detail, from the electric green brushstrokes of a fanning collar around Toulouse-Lautrec’s cancan girl to the stark, heavy outlines of Picasso’s robed woman, bent from age. I strain my neck across the paintings on the floor to look for things I would not bother with in the Orsay. Like the quality of the frames, which seem original to my museum-conditioned eye. Like signatures, some of which look as familiar as my own: Picasso’s muscular dash, Monet’s more delicate expression. Because I have the luxury to do so,
on my own
, making me feel, briefly, ecstatically, like I am the first to behold them. Because foundational to our definition of beauty is that we never expected to find it. I was going to take a pee. Instead, I glided into an art historian’s wet dream.

I do not think, at the time, of how they got here. I do not stop to wonder at their incarceration in this improbable room. I forget about Mathieu down the hall, and whether I should be here. When immersed in a dream, you don’t stop to think whether you’ve been served an invitation. You don’t examine causes or consequences. You just are.

I save the Matisse for last, the climax.

Such insatiable color!!! He earns this giddy enthusiasm, by God, so that I have some hope of conveying the intensity of caramelized color rupturing the cones inside these irises. The darkness cannot mute Matisse’s bold hand; instead,
it
is the fluorescent light bulb that illuminates. The canvas is roughly three by four and invents a space unbothered by perspective, where a faceless woman backed by an ocher wall sits at a table so saturated by red, pulsating strokes that it looks alive, like blood spilling from oxygen-rich lungs. Balanced on the table are blue vases stuffed with flowers and bluer plates overflowing with tipsy lemons and a chance, plum apple: the banal stuff of still lives everywhere. Only, like Cezanne, a still life is never still with Matisse, and never banal. Everything rolls toward a beautiful transition, with lemons waddling like ducklings, an orgy of common flowers splaying, odd details disappearing and reemerging like lovers’ legs. The lesser vases are filled with a suggestion of stems and petals, but the large vase to our left, where our eyes, liking big things, naturally curve, is ornamented with more exotic faire: something purpley and Eastern, maybe peonies or plum blossoms. The sort of crisp flower you’d expect to see on a gorgeous Japanese or Chinese calligraphy scroll to mark the start of spring and life’s renewal. They stand stiffly, priggishly, marking their superiority to the spraying mess of ejaculate below.

And so it is here, at Matisse’s feet, that I realize why I chose Dr. Choi for my mentor over a year ago. Why I didn’t gravitate toward the sexier Parkinson’s research in Rosenberg’s lab and have my name attached to some important articles, nudging me further up the Alpine career path. It was so simple: I was beguiled by apretty picture and wanted to linger awhile. There was a painter’s precision, and unruliness, to the hair cells in those fluorescent microscopy photographs in Choi’s darkened lab. The brilliantly dyed projections were so tightly arranged, like a Fibonacci sequence of petals in a flower, yet shaggy and playful at their ends. Recklessness and restraint. It was all there, inside my ears, making its own kind of music.

Matisse, of course, is jazz. All gorgeous, playful improv flirting above the elemental rhythms of a master technician. He makes me move.

“Did you find what you were looking for?”

I jump, and when I fall back down, it is really like that: a return to earth. Mathieu’s earth, but still earth. He stands with his hands on the doorway.

“I’m sorry,” I say, stepping back. “I really was trying to find the bathroom. The doorknob wouldn’t turn.”

“You must turn it to the left,” he replies, lightly enough.

“Ah. The left.”

Mathieu enters, and I squint to read him. He nears but passes me to jerk the curtain open. I blink rapidly in the light, my pupils constricting. Out there is the street, the people, the commerce: the workaday world of Paris bustling on. Mathieu clenches his jaw dangerously. I think I preferred the darkness.

“I am sorry, Mathieu. I suppose I should have closed the door. To be honest, it never occurred to me.”

“I am not upset, Daisy.” His eyes flit around the room like a wary animal’s. “Yet I did not expect this. The fool.”

“You
seem
upset.”

“To the contrary, I thought I seemed in control.”

“You do seem in control. Like the kind of vicious control a parent tries to muster when she’s mad at her kid. I can tell you that, as the kid here, it’s much scarier than yelling.”

Mathieu chuckles, if not convincingly, and bends over the windowsill, peering into the dying sun. He maintains his position for a full minute: I know because I count the seconds. My eyes are still dancing, though, and it finally occurs to me to think of the money in these paintings. I suppose I always felt it. Maybe it was partly, if not consciously, responsible for my spasms of wonder upon entering the room. We are accustomed to assigning arbitrary values to objects that should defy such categorization. Paintings aren’t home runs, purebred dogs, or real estate. Art ought to transcend the dogma of numbers, unperturbed by Adam Smith’s invisible hand of supply and demand. How can something appreciate in value when its content has not changed? It was always this degree of beautiful, from the moment the last stroke of paint was applied to the canvas to the moment my eyes brushed its surface, a century later. It shouldn’t matter to us if a Matisse fetches a hundred dollars or a hundred million dollars.

But it does. We can’t help ourselves. And the market gets it roughly right. After all, Picasso is the all-time best-seller, the perennial record-smasher, that glittering name in lights on the auction house’s marquee that makes fashionable people wet themselves, and would anyone argue that he was
the
genius of the twentieth century?

Well, me. I’ll put my money, such as it is, on Matisse.

Mathieu turns and rests his backside against the window, crossing his arms over his chest. He has arrived at a decision on how to handle me.

“I would have liked to have saw the expression on your face.”

Hmm.
Have saw
. A slip-up in Mathieu’s perfect parade of past participles. Though it had to happen, I still imbue the moment with special significance. But I reply cheerily enough, “It was probably stupid. Stupidly stupefied.”

“And what if I had told you they were all reproductions?”

I respond carefully. “I would not have believed you.”

He nods. “Mmm.” Mathieu motions me over, and I hoist myself onto the ledge next to him. “And why not?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. You just feel it in your gut, I guess. Like you know a good melon.” I giggle too stridently, the tension of the moment whistling out of me. He looks lost, and I nudge him in the ribs. “Come on,
When Harry Met Sally?
Billy Crystal? Meg Ryan?”

He shakes his head, and I groan, pained by his ignorance. Some things, like lifesaving pharmaceuticals and clean water, and Sally’s diner orgasm, ought to transcend the confines of the nation state. Mathieu explains, “The only Billy Crystal film I have seen was something called
Mr. Saturday Night.”

“That’s probably the only Billy Crystal movie I haven’t seen.”

“Yes. Well.”

We lapse into silence. I want him to explain, but he resists. The paintings look at us, and we look back. My eyes will not abandon the Matisse; I’m afraid it might disappear. The sunlight has enriched and deepened the colors, cooling the blues, inflaming the reds. Parts of it look wet to the touch. I would like to touch it.

“So which is your favorite?” Mathieu asks.

That’s easy. “The Matisse.”

Mathieu nods, but I can tell he disagrees. “Why?”

“I don’t know. I just felt it instantly, unlike the others. The colors ran right through me.” I clear my throat. “Which is yours?”

“But of course the Picasso.”

“And why?”

He reflects, staring at the austere, indigo canvas with an intensity I understand, if I don’t share. “I like that mean look in the old lady’s eye,” he says. “It is an unsentimental portrait, yet manages compassion. She will not go quietly, he is saying.”

“It makes me think of El Greco. That long, austere line … the unflinching sufferer.” I shiver a little. “It is remarkable. But Icannot say that I would want it hanging over me at night. It would be a constant
memento mori
.”

“You prefer Matisse’s armchair prettiness to Picasso’s piercing humanity?” he jests, probably thinking back on Mrs. Fanny from the Orsay.

“You say tomato and I say to-mah-toe
,” I sing. He rewards me with a smile. “Yes, and you won’t shame me from my position, Mathieu. I’m twenty-three years old. There will be plenty of time for your existential angst and despair. But for now, please, humor me a little and allow me vases of flowers, and tides of color to wash away my cynicism.” I squeeze his hand, and he responds in kind. “I will not believe that my desire for lightness over darkness speaks of any slightness of character, or that your liking such morbidity makes you deep. It simply makes you French.”

He tousles my hair, relaxing into laughs. “I was not trying to be ‘deep,’
mon petit chou
. Art is visceral, from the gut, as you say. Picasso will always speak to me—probably because he screams the loudest.”

I bargain on the moment. “And your father? Which is his favorite?”

Mathieu licks his lips and turns back toward the window, driving his knuckles into the marble. “To have a favorite painting, you must have a heart”—he touches his hand to his chest—“that is hungry for art.” He shakes his head and looks at me, his expression darkening. “My father is a glutton for many things, but fine art is not among them.”

“Then what
is
all of this, Mathieu?”

“A longtime investment,” he says, driving each syllable with his tongue as hammer. He turns toward me. “And that is all I can say, Daisy. Please forgive me. I would like to explain further.” Mathieu takes my hands and places them around his neck. “But he is my father.”

“Of course,” I answer reflexively, grazing his mouth with mylips. I would like to probe deeper, but I have already traversed too far. It occurs to me that I am standing inside a room that is worth millions of dollars, if I am correct about the paintings’ authenticity. It is a heady notion, but also slightly sinister. Suddenly, the idea surfaces that, for Mathieu, this is an
ugly
room; not ugly in the literal sense, of course, but a corrupting ugliness that spreads from some rotten place of contaminated feeling. His father may have poisoned it for him with … what? People who collect art don’t usually do it for the money. They feed on the thrill of having something worth that much and vaguely hope it appreciates, but what they really are after is the prestige of the ownership, of symbolically belonging to a rare relic of beauty and sharing in its miraculous conception. The owner wants to trace the artist’s immortality.

And so the collector becomes an art fanatic, and gets to “know” his artist, intimately. It’s no longer about the money, but the fame. After all, there are much better ways to make one’s fortune than purchasing risky paintings. So how did Mathieu’s father accumulate, or hoard, a treasure trove that is being squandered in a vulnerable, neglected apartment that requires a curious cleaning lady to maintain it? Why would someone do such a thing without the passion driving him on? Who is this—

Hold on. Mathieu’s tongue is in my mouth.

“What are you
doing?”
I ask, tearing away.

His mouth is a little desperate, and he clutches at the ribbon of material around my waist, kneading me closer to him. He is intent on releasing something, but I retreat. Does he want
me
, or am I just the useful vessel for acting out this Freudian nightmare? At my question, he stops kissing me and pulls back.

“I do not know,” he says, voice breaking.

I look at him tenderly, sorry for it—the graceless questioning of this man’s desire for me when it’s all I have wanted—and there, across his shoulder, is Matisse’s fresh, faceless figure, and past thatis Picasso’s decrepit woman, and beyond that is all hallway and emptiness and nonexistence. I abandon the paintings for Mathieu, for he is easily the most beautiful, and precious, and ephemeral, thing in a room webbed with still-life dreams. He, not quite a genius but devastating in his desire to be, pulls me, with the gravity of those downcast eyes, toward him like a planet powerless around its sun. I do not care about motivation, for it comes down to this: I could not celebrate any stroke of color more than the red covenant of those lips, and I could never form so perfect a poem as the one smudging itself in the verse of his eyes. He is boyish and lean and powerful and so goddamn stunning while he stands there second-guessing himself that I answer his doubt and that strange shame by locking onto his lips with the ferocity of a muse breathing inspiration into an artist desperate for resuscitation.

I love those lips. I love his kiss. I love him.

I love him.

We are clumsy and nervous getting started, and at times I have the overwhelming desire to laugh like a small child doing unchildish things. When he pulls me to the floor, I feel the thick Oriental carpet rub up against my naked back, and I smooth the surface of it with my free hand, thoughtlessly stroking the same pattern of paisley swirls, this time red, that taunted me in Cleveland. I laugh at this happy coincidence, loving paisley, and those mad little whirls of perpetual motion. Above me, Mathieu stops the wonderful things he was doing to move me with those increasingly assured hands to stare anxiously into my face.