Plum Blossoms in Paris (25 page)

Matthew frantically chews his gum. “That’s awesome. Man, it sounds like you’re really on the fast track. Here I thought you were still a lowly undergrad like me.” He blinks too fast. It’s unsettling. “You going for your PhD after that?”

My head tips back. There are mirrors on the ceiling. It is impossible to find myself in the swirling crowd. “Sure.”

“Cool. You’ll be tenured in no time, I bet.” He gulps his beer, and a little bit falls outside his mouth and rains down on the bar. He quickly wipes it up with his napkin, which he had folded to the size of a postage stamp.

I make him nervous. I’d laugh, but I might throw up.

“I’m over here on a foreign exchange program from Duke,” he explains, pointing helpfully to his shirt. “I’m history, pre-law.”

Ah. I knew it was pre-Something. It’s apparent he’s not Something, in spite of the low lighting and fortuitous name. “What are your plans after conquering law school, Matthew?” I shout, playing the game.

“My dad has a firm in D.C. I might clerk there, and then, who knows?” He shrugs. “Run for Congress maybe, in ten years’ time.” He takes another drink, this one smoothly disappearing.

“Really?”

Maybe I haven’t given him enough credit. The guy is still young and wears that obnoxious, entitled air of the filthy rich, but perhaps he feels the rub of good fortune on his conscience. Maybe he wants to give something back. Maybe Matthew will be Something Great someday.

“Yeah. I’m already head of the College Republicans at Duke. We’ve experienced a 23 percent boost in our enrollment since I became president,” he boasts, smiling broadly. “Of course, that could be due to the war.”

Maybe Matthew is pre-Neanderthal. He does have a large, sloped forehead, come to think of it, and a lantern jaw.

“Oh, man, you’re not a Democrat, are you?” he asks, the back of his hand concealing a smile.

“God, no. That would be a fate worse than death.”

“What?” he yells over some god-awful French pop song. Ah, Edith Piaf. The Sparrow has flown, apparently.

“THAT WOULD BE A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH.”

“I’ll say.” He smirks. “Say, I gotta joke for you: how many Frenchmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

“Oh, I know this—”

“None! They just surrender to the darkness.” He snorts.

I laugh. “Ain’t it the truth. Pussies.”

He looks at me hungrily. The man is aroused by smugness. He probably has mood lighting and a jar of Vaseline set out for Ann Coulter’s weekly appearance on
Hannity & Colmes
. So she has a neck like a Modigliani, without the humanity. Ad hominem attacks are the most potent aphrodisiac for people who live outside the reality-based universe.

“So would you describe yourself as an idealistic neoconservative out to spread freedom throughout the uncivilized world, or are you more of an old-school, let’s-drain-the-bathtub, Grover Norquist type, or a what-would-Jesus-do, let’s-protect-the-stem-cells, waitin’-for-the-Rapture kind of guy? Personally, Ronald Reagan is my hero, so I guess I’d be the middle one, with a token touch of the latter.” Burping a little, I add, “Because God knows Reagan would be a mite suspicious about this whole Iraq thing!”

“Uh, I’m a little of all three, I guess. But mainly I want to lower taxes.”

I smile brilliantly at him. “That’s so refreshing to hear. It’s not many people who can be that optimistic about their own self-interest.”

It rolls off him like water. His eyes are fastened, like some fantastical missile detection system, to my cleavage, since I’m leaning in cozily. He must be desperate to gawk at the nubs. “Yeah, well, I try.”

“So what’s a freedom-loving American patriot doing in France?” I ask, relaxing my head on my hand to look more deeply into this young man’s untroubled soul. There are no scars on these cheeks. They look laminated.

He shrugs and takes his cap off to run a hand through the gelled hair. “These things look good on your transcripts, and I want Georgetown.” He lifts his drink. “And while Parisians might be a bunch of pacifist wusses, they can still party.”

“I’ll drink to that.” We dutifully clink mugs.

“And why are you here?” he asks, wetting his lips.

“Ohhh … to get laid by a dirty, yellow Frenchman, I guess.”

I think his jaw might unhinge. He starts to choke, before checking himself. “Wait, are you serious?”

I stare at him. He looks away and holds his beer for support.

At last, Matthew sweeps in, gaining courage at this unprecedented chance for the easy score, and whispers/shouts in my ear, “Would you settle for a filthy American who wants nothing more than to be with you tonight?” His hand, complete with class ring, grazes my thigh.

Nothing more
.

I feel myself closing in on his earlobe. “That depends.”

“On what?”

“On how long you can make me feel like I’m someone else.”

His eyes flap their confusion. I help him out by laughing.

“And on if you have protection.”

Now I’m speaking his language. Matthew grins and nuzzles my ear.

“You bet.” He kisses my neck and pats his pocket. “Never leave home without it.”

I barely fight the inclination to shove him away and bring my hand to my head. “Please,” I beg. “Could we not talk quite so much?”

He smiles. This is all so easy. “I promise to be as quiet as a mouse, Dana.”

We leave a minute later, his buddies giving him the old winkwink nudge-nudge routine. There’s an erotic museum down on the Boulevard de Clichy (I wince at that hard ch-sound charging from that clumsy, American mouth) he tells me is awesome
and
tastefully done. Wow, because I was worried it might not be tasteful. Nice attempt to walk the line between perv and gentleman, little man. Anyway, it works because I go with him.

I guess he considers this to be our foreplay.

Why
do I go?

It’s something to do, you see.

Ma vie en rose
.

T
here is nothing less erotic than looking down a green plaster vagina with a man who giggles like a little girl.

No, I don’t have sex with the blue devil.

Although much in the museum is, dare I say, devilish and fun. The drawings and Indian sculpture are deliciously perverse. Two bodies twirling into one. Legs that laugh at beginnings. Boudoir coquettes, fannies round and raised like baboons’ invitations. In the end, the unflappability of human lust is gently comical and poignant. I am an animal. Mathieu is an animal. The rest is just obstacles we invent to keep it interesting.

Matthew, or Mr. McGrabby, is a big obstacle. But he’s not interesting, and I’m not a drunken sorority girl. So I tell him I have to use the restroom. He waits for me by a sculpture of a woman’s leg slung outside a window. I make my escape by the more conventional front door.

I wouldn’t feel too badly for him. He still has a war he has no intention of fighting in to turn him on and enough simulated vaginas engorging him to keep him randy and snickering throughthe night. Mine will not be overly missed.

I have learned a few things since Rakesh. And, somewhat infuriatingly, though I was with Andy for years, I could not cheat on Mathieu after this day. I may hate it, and chafe at the bit, but he owns me. Distance or distractions cannot dilute the claim. I can still feel the shock of his hand on my breast, fingerprinting me. I was the one to leave, yet I know he feels my pulling toward him, like a boomerang about to turn. Which is why I keep walking the other way.

I catch the metro back “home” to my pink hotel room, where I confront the fact that this is the life I have scratched out for myself in Paris. Here is the chick-lit confession: after watching a dubbed rerun of
Friends
, I looked up
mon petit chou
in my French-English dictionary, and in my bewilderment at what I found, cut my toe-nails, did
not
try on my shoes, ran to the market in the falling rain to buy the nearest thing to
Ben & Jerry’s Fudge Brownie
, ate the whole pint, before packing myself in between the bedsheets and mulling masturbating. But I fell asleep before I could work up the necessary energy, or move beyond the green vagina in my thoughts.

As for Mathieu? He refused to show himself at all.

The day dawns gray and chilly, as it should. I awake, underslept and bewildered at my surroundings. I had dreamed that Mathieu and Andy were fighting over me … in a manner of speaking. Andy tried to goad Mathieu into a fight so he could pound on him, but all Mathieu would do was turn toward the viewless window (with Van Gogh’s sunflowers sitting on the sill), and repeat,
“Words are loaded pistols”
in his soft, portentous way, Andy bobbing andweaving behind him in an impersonation of The Champ. Finally, tiring of their shared ineffectuality, I snatched the flowers from the vase and threw them out the window, before smashing the two of them over the head with the heavy urn, dropping them into a people puddle,
à la
The Three Stooges.

All that was left out was the canned laughter/cheering and a fat, black, sassy woman yelling, “You go, girrrl!”

Groaning as I get out of bed, I notice a dribble of brown ice cream on the sheets that has spilled from my demolished carton. It gives the embarrassing impression that I soiled myself overnight. Filled with high hopes for the day, I trudge to the shower.

Shivering in the anemic stream of water, I begin to experience a change of heart about the whole situation. Maybe you overreacted, the damp, hypothetical angel (looking like a jolly Grandpa Matisse) on my right shoulder purrs. What is it, really, that Mathieu has done? So his father colluded with Nazis. Or, at the very least, sat by while Jews were sent to their deaths. Stole priceless pieces of art that the world should own. Surely you can’t blame the son for the father’s complicity in the biggest horror show of the last century, a genocide that felt as ancient and removed as the old black-and-white footage that chronicled it, until now.

Of course you should
, the equally hypothetical, if plainly indignant, devil (disguised as a head of Picasso/body of a bull thing) on my other shoulder hisses.
What’s he doing about it now? Nothing. Take it from me: lying is all men are good for, Daisy, and he got you—good. He lied about Camille, he lied about his distaste for smoking, which, while not a big deal, somehow is, because it’s in the minor details where true character lies low, like an outlaw. And, while not lying about Justine, he didn’t come clean there either.

And then there’s that bag. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

Zut alors!
But you didn’t come clean about Andy
, sputters Matisse, more forcefully than I’d like for a Grandpa sort.
Not tomention with Andy. And you lied to Mathieu about your grief for your grandmother, and that ridiculous story about Aunt Flo. People lie, Daisy. Love? You two barely know each other. You’re going to be on guard for a period of time. You want to project an illusion of lovability … a garden of flowers. He clasps his hand to his chest and bows
.

But she owned up to most of that stuff
, Picasso interjects, waving a dismissive hoof.
He was a phony all along. While having the cojones to convict you of lying to yourself about your religion. Hell, he’s not even a real writer. More like one of the sycophants who trailed me my entire career
. He sniffs and puffs up his bull-chest.
They still yap at my heels
.

Jesus Christ
, Matisse swears, rolling his eyes.
The ego on you: talk about bull crap. Camille was a charming girl, Daisy. Would you have been able to resist her while your heart was bathed in sorrow?

Of course she would have, the Picasso/bull thing spats. He is in control of the choices he makes in life. All that junk is just a convenient excuse to make him feel better about himself. Mathieu is a lout. And once a lout, always a lout. Trust me, I know.

God, I hypothetically hate both of you. How about an offended silence all around?

Stepping out of the shower, I come clean with myself: his father’s crimes, while revolting and deplorable, do not taint Mathieu. We all want to protect the people we love, and his crime, if any, is that he cannot give his father up while he’s receding into obliviousness. And I can understand, if not condone, his sleeping with Camille. Hell, it’s not like last night with Matthew couldn’t have happened. One more pint, and I’d have lapped up my self-loathing with as much gusto as a coed in Cancun. And the smoking thing is negligible, although I despise it and don’t understand how he could continue to kill himself in the aftermath of his mother’s death.

The bag. The bag is not unforgivable. Just … perverse.

No, what I can’t forgive is the moment when he, with flagranthonesty, told me that
nothing
meant more to him than his writing. I cannot compete with characters inside his mind for his attentions. That probably makes me as big an egoist as he is, but I already languished in a relationship in which I played second fiddle to a man’s relentless pursuit of his ambition.

It’s not going to happen again.