Plum Blossoms in Paris (24 page)

“Where is it?”

He jerks his chin toward his bag.

“You’re not going to give it to him, are you?”

He motions me closer and brushes my neck with his lips. “Not unless you think I should.”

My spine bows, and I lean into him. We fall into a new kind of story.

Click. Click, click, clickclickclick …

But the dream is too impossible.

“How could you afford to buy me those shoes today?”

Flushed, he groans into my ear, “You made me.”

“I did not.”

“You made me love you.”

“Sweet. But not good enough.” I smile and draw back, placing my hands on his chest to restrain him. “You’re destitute, Mathieu. And you like it. So why do you have a platinum credit card?”

“It is one my father gave me years ago. I never use it.”

“Except when you want to impress girls.”

“Except when I want to impress this girl.”

“Good excuse,” I say, curling my fingers around his neck. He flinches and backs away.

Click
.

“I do not like that word.”

“Neither do I.”

Our eyes sweep, search.

“Who is Andy?”

I laugh. “Tit for tat, right?”

He cups my breast.
“Oui.”

“He’s my ex-boyfriend.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s all.”

“I see.” The hand slips to his side.

Locking my arms under my breasts, I worry my lower lip.

“Why have you finally told me all of this, Mathieu?”

“Because I want you.”

“How
do you want me?”

“Just this. I want you like this. You have become a part of me. If I kept things from you, it was only because we owed each other nothing.” He swallows and tries to smile. “Now I owe you.”

My elbows slacken.

He holds up a finger. “But. I also owe you this: I am a writer, Daisy. I am a tour guide when I have to be, and a writer because I have no other choice. If I must do without to write, this is fine. It is better than fine. But nothing means more to me. Nothing.”

Yes. Well.

He cuffs my wrists with his hands. “I tell you this so that you will trust me, Daisy. No more secrets, and no expectations. We will live freely.” He squeezes, hard.

Feeling his heat, I glance up at the lonely thumbtack.

Nothing means more
.

Untangling myself, I rise.

I walk to the open window. Leaning into the dark, frosty air above a deserted courtyard, I breathe deeply, the cool air impaling my bare breast. It will be winter soon. Somewhere, Andy breathes. Rakesh too. We cannot discard our histories in the course of a day. We cannot build new cities, either. The pages behind me flutter in the draft. I shudder and fancy myself falling forward, pitching this body with its barnacled heart into the swell below. I close my eyes. If only I could forget myself for the length of this breath, if only I could forget . …

If only I could be a girl again.

I close the window. It grinds with the effort, and Beckett bolts for safer corners.

I turn toward Mathieu, who looks at me gravely, that sickle-shaped scar on his cheek a shock of white. He looks like a stranger again. I do not know his name, the name he shares with his father. But it’s not Quixote. And I’m no Dulcinea.

I grab my shirt from his floor and pull it on. Turning back toward the window, I catch my reflection in the dirty glass. I smooth the hair from my face, pulling a ponytail holder from my jeans pocket and pinioning it back. Mathieu was right. I rotate slightly and extract a wavy curl of my hair, so that it rests on my neck.

“You want to know something, Mathieu? You called it.”

He blinks in quick succession.

“What do you think of your orphan girl?”

He says nothing.

Uncertain that I can trust his word on anything, I go over and look in that bag.

Jesus. Was not expecting
that
.

“Daisy.”

I look at him, but he is like that marble of Rodin’s, melting into its base.

His words on the wall warn me:
words are loaded pistols
.

“You don’t fucking say.”

I leave everything, including the orphaned cat, and my spent heart. I close the door, and it rattles against the doorjamb, like a dropped kiss.

I will flee to the Hotel California. Where people go when dreams die.

I
nstead, I ascend. To Montmartre, that is.

Unable to face a hotel room after envisioning a night of lying in Mathieu’s arms, I do not truncate my perfect Parisian day yet. It may end sour, but it will be by my lemons, not the ones Mathieu has hurled at me. I storm the hill up to Montmartre, tears raining from my eyes, reaching for higher air. There is a hand squeezed around that heart I thought to leave behind. The Sacré Coeur awaits me at the top. She is gaudy and obvious next to Notre Dame, like someone advertising her virtue by taking a chastity oath and then flaunting her assets at the next kegger. Slippery metaphor, perhaps. But apt when viewing the three milky breasts topping the great roof of the church, through which Jesus’ love pours to nourish the wicked and suffering.

I stand at the top of the stairs, chest heaving, mission completed. I haven’t the foggiest idea of what to do with myself.

This is not the spot for me. The place is infested with lovers—the parasitic people—snuggled together on the steps leading up to the Sacré Coeur, bodies pressed against one another, for heat, at the curved balcony. I shiver uncontrollably, only wearing the sweater I thoughtlessly grabbed this morning, when Mathieu was but a Monet in my head, and I a girl pushing freedom. I wrap the sweater around me, but it does not feel as tight as Mathieu’s arms and provides only a modicum of warmth, and no heat.

I turn my eyes outward, across the plain of city lights, a sparkling wonderland that ought to—on any other night and to any other person—bring pleasure. The view of Paris at night is stunning, of course: the Eiffel Tower glittering in the distance like a shattered diamond. But with no one here to share it, and the quiet laughs of others insulating me in my loneliness, the sight of all this untouchable beauty is like viewing a dearly departed in his open casket. The familiar, beloved form is there, but the magic has flown, and you wish you hadn’t looked after all, because why would you want to remember that?

I briefly wonder which light is Mathieu’s light, his small spark among the thousands of embers crackling into the night sky. I have no instinct for where his home sits, no feeling for it. He is lost to me. Shutting my eyes, I turn my back on the Sacred Heart and all her laborers of love and set about exploring the rest of Montmartre.

It is something to do, you see.

If Paris has multiple personalities, Montmartre might be the vivacious tart who can’t hold her drink. Named for a martyred saint who lost his head, the former medieval village is where Picasso and his macho
compadres
roped modernity, and where his good friend Casegemas, snubbed by love, took his own life after firing upon, and missing, his lover. The man’s legacy of misery bled the hypoxic hue into Picasso’s Blue Period. Cheap rent, easy girls, and a surprising countryside transformed this bucolic hilltop into a refuge for artists, writers, and drunks of no discernible talent but for drinking themselves to death. Merry men, all. Who knows about their women. Not much is ever written about the women. Maybea nod, if they’re lucky, for shaking their asses, or being a mother. Casegemas’s lover, Germaine, owes her fame to Casegemas, who owes it to Picasso. She’s third-rate famous, at best.

Montmartre still evokes bohemian Paris, but, elbowing my way past the swarms in the narrow village streets, while protecting my wallet from the pickpockets that Rick has intimated are everywhere, I have the same feeling I often have in Paris: that crawling sensation of the “just-miss.” If only it were a hundred, or fifty, or thirty, years ago, what I would have seen … then. If Paris isn’t dead, she hibernates. Everything belongs to the past in this city—and God, what a past—but there is the musty smell of a desperately preserved reputation hanging in the air, like aged books being ravaged, one moth at a time. People peck at the ground to find the seeds of inspiration F. Scott Fitzgerald or Toulouse-Lautrec planted in the soil of their fecund talent, growing tangled roots that ran to the other side of the world. They could still persist, like the vineyard that has endured for centuries on this hilltop sanctuary, but there are too many garish weeds sprung up for me to even see what I am stepping on. One thing is for sure: Josephine Baker and her sly, sweet rose are nowhere to be seen.

Instead, the Frat Brigade from Duke tries to be heard back in Durham, hailing a bottle of “absinthe” that looks like green pee outside a packed café. Vendors ply me with limp paintings that would make Thomas Kinkade wretch and the infamous moustache of Salvador Dali—another renowned Montmartre dweller—droop. Leaflets for music and sex shows down in “Pig Alley” rain from the skies. There is an atmosphere of gluttonous consumerism here, if not for
things
, then for a bygone feeling. Carnival music, from a modern-day, patrolling minstrel group, no less, is the tongue-in-cheek soundtrack to my night. I am complicit in the rundown, riding my merry-go-round called Distraction. It’s a circular ride, and you never really arrive anywhere. But it simulates the sensation that you’ve traveled far and seen lots of stuff.

I wonder what Mathieu might think of Montmartre today. We didn’t make it here, though I can imagine his insistence that we stop at Rue Lepic, knowing that I would want to pay homage to Van Gogh’s rundown apartment. He lived there with his brother, Theo, before the infamous ear chop and his best work, which, since his is a tragic tale, barely sold while he was alive. Supposedly, there is a spray of sunflowers nodding from the window on 54 Rue Lepic. Yes, Mathieu would have brought me to Van Gogh’s street, so I could see the flowers whose blind faces track the spindling sun. Their mute devotion, mirroring Van Gogh’s faith in Christ, charged him with an artistic and religious outpouring so fervent that he worked eighteen paintings of that simple, now iconic, vase of sunflowers. He wanted to get it right. I can understand the feeling, if not the motivation. Such obsession forces—with a fist—genius from talent and brings madness along with it, like a jealous, bruised lover who demands all the attention.

But admirers will trek toward this crappy apartment tonight, tomorrow, and for as long as there are sunflowers in this world—partly for the art, partly for the tormented soul that produced it—where the great man spent a year of his abridged, nineteenth-century life. They will stand vigil outside, just to catch a whiff of his perfume. Mathieu, meanwhile, would have brought me there—not for the flowers, which he’d find a touch overdone—but because this was the street we lived on in our alternate reality. The one with Fonzie, our aborted doggie.

Resigned to the frantic energy of this Montmartre, I sip warm beer in a loud bar populated by tourists and, I think, prostitutes, at the bottom of Rue Lepic, which I have stumbled down without allowing myself to look for sunflowers or the ghosts of Jack Russell terriers. But even here, a question dogs me: where does Mathieu go, if anywhere, to find his inspiration, or is it always with him, like an inflammation of the fingers?

Answer: who the fuck cares, Daisy. Right?

“Can I buy you another?” Right.

It’s one of the Dukies. How do I know? Because he looks like a cocky son of a bitch, and he sports a shirt that reads
Duke … it even sounds cool
. His mandatory baseball cap (Yanks) is backward, and his shorts boast a blue devil insignia. He reeks of cologne and opportunism.

I take a generous sip and set the glass down heavily on the bar. His smile is sure, and he’s not bad-looking. He’s got that sanitized, premed look about him. It’s one I know well. “Sure,” I allow. Why not?

“Oh, good, you speak English,” he says, hopping up on the bar seat next to me. “I thought you were American.”

“Oh, you too?”

He smiles uncertainly. “Well, yeah … can’t you tell?”

I finish off the glass. “I was just kidding,” I enunciate, staring at the emptied pint. I don’t like beer either.

He titters and motions to the bartender. “Set up another for the lady here,” he yells, pointing to my head.

So now I’m a lady. A lady whose pants he’d like to crawl into. He must be attracted to mopey, dejected types whose aura of rejection screams, “Challenge!” Or it went something like this:
Hey, man, see the sad sack of shit in the corner? Ten points, and a pint of Guinness, if you nail her
.

“What’s your name?” he shouts, his bared teeth an advertisement for Crest Whitestrips.

“Dana,” I yell back, jerking my head up and down like a yo-yo.

“Cool … like Dana Scully, right?”

“Yeah, but much less trouble.”

He slaps his hand on the bar. “Man, I loved
The X-Files
backin high school. They had some crazy stuff go down on that show.” He sticks out a tanned paw and says chummily, like he respects me and shit, “I’m Matthew, by the way. But you can call me Matt.”

Really. The name, pronounced in his faux humble way (covering for a New England, prep school background, I suspect), still affects me. My heart skitters back to an unsteady rhythm, like this seismic coincidence has been foretold by the great oracle of Delphi. “Nice to meet you, Matthew,” I say, more softly, allowing my hand to remain in his.

His blue eyes widen, or maybe it’s his pupils zeroing in on their target. He pumps my hand, belying his innocent intentions by allowing his finger to graze my wrist. Letting go, he hitches himself up and bellows, “Hey, mate! A Guinness for me, please.”

Our drinks come. Matthew turns to me and asks, “So what is it you do back home, Dana?”

“I’m in the FBI.”

“No way,” he gasps, and I almost smile. Almost.

“No. I’m in a master’s program in neuroscience at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland.” I take a swig of my beer, stifling a yawn. “We do outstanding work on inner ear hair cells. Really cutting-edge kind of stuff that would blow … your … mind.” I try to whistle. My lips must be numb, because I can’t feel a thing.
You know how to whistle, don’t you, Steve? You just put your lips together and … blow
.