Plum Blossoms in Paris (26 page)

“You could choose Case.” I circled the empty pizza box in the middle of his room. “I promise I won’t tell anyone that you settled,” I added, cupping my hand around my mouth in an exaggerated whisper.

“It’s
Harvard
, Daze.”

“And I’m your
girl
friend, And-ee.”

He mumbled something unintelligible and flipped through the Harvard class catalogue. His desk boasted an iMac, sporting the Harvard Medical School homepage. Harvard as the new porn.

“You’ll still be my girlfriend. Now you can just be my girlfriend who comes to some kick-ass Red Sox games with me.”

“Sure. With all of my copious free time. After all, I’m not in
med
school. Just a lowly neuroscience program at a second-tier university. I wonder if they’ll even make me go to class, or if they’ll just tweak my nose and tell me that I’m cute.”

He whistled and flung the catalogue on his desk. “Sounds like somebody has an inferiority complex.” Grabbing my hand, he pulled me onto his lap and tweaked my nose. I tried to bite his finger, but he had the reflexes of a jackrabbit. “You could have gone to med school too, you know.”

“You’re forgetting that I have no desire to be a doctor. Too many sick people.”

“Too many people.”

“You say toma—”

“—yeah, yeah.”

I looked him directly in the eye. “Do
you
want to be a doctor?”

Andy lost his smirk and furrowed his brow. “That’s a dumb question.” He started fiddling with the computer mouse.

“Is it?”

He pushed me off his lap to put the catalogue on his shelf. “Yeah, it really is.”

“I think you want people to think you want it. I think you’re in love with the idea of being a doctor, the pulpy prestige of the thing.” I added, more softly, “I think you want your parents to stop calling you ‘the athletic one.’”

“I think you took too many psych courses in college. It’s a pseudoscience, you know,” he replied, looking for his iPod.

I could never stick Andy with anything sharp enough to make him really twitch. He was too goddamn happy. He ran on the fumes of a ridiculous energy. Especially then, with the shimmering bricks of Harvard beckoning like The Promised Land.

“I just wonder.”

“What do you wonder?”

“Whether we’ll make it.”

He screwed up his face. “You’re worrying over nothing. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

“Absence makes the heart forget.”

He tackled me onto his bed, smelling of sweat and the wet leather from his basketball. “I could never forget you. Even if I wanted to. You’re too damn …”

“Too damn what?”

“Something,” he mumbled.

We shrugged out of our clothes. The sex was more passionatethan usual. Nothing like the prospect of parting to make you want him to remember.

But he never glanced at that web of skin above my iliac crest. He’d stopped years before. It was just anatomy by then, something he’d be seeing a lot of in the weeks to come. Yet in the middle of our lovemaking, I saw his eyes lock onto the acceptance letter from Harvard, pinned to his cork bulletin board, next to the Red Sox pennant and a signed letter from Senator Voinovich.

I even thought I heard him give a small sigh.

I hear the Red Sox have a real shot at the World Series this year. Nice that old dogs should learn some new tricks—especially when bellied up to curveballs that come dangerously close to ripping off your balls.

The truth is that I will never be as attached to my work, or my microscope, as Mathieu is to his imagination. I wish it weren’t so. I have been conditioned to view work as the end game. The American feminist call to arms was to seize the office and make it the new, liberated home, swapping that vacuum cleaner for some goddamn self-respect. So my mind responds, like Pavlov’s dog, to the bellwether ideas of American success: Harvard, post-grad, assistant professor, associate professor, tenured professor. The Ladder Doctrine of American living. But my heart lies somewhere else. Or rather, many places, for it is a fickle, promiscuous organ—one moment responding to a Manet, the next to a Matisse, one minute to an Andy, the next to a Mathieu, loving them equally, if differently. Yesterday it attached itself to so many things that it split at the seams, drawn and quartered by its conflicting desires.

And I liked it.

I liked the rush of that sensory bombardment, the headiness that shoots your feet off the ground. Back in Cleveland, I existed. I was even content. Yesterday, in Paris, I thrived. It’s the spiritual difference between prose and poetry. I’d like to be able to write something as majestic and clean as Emerson’s
Self-Reliance
, but I want to live as successfully, and recklessly, as Whitman in
Song of Myself
. I, too, want to possess the origin of all poems.

Across the golden hours of yesterday’s dreamscape, Mathieu and I were hedonists worshipping at the altar of Dionysus, and each other. If we stumbled at the end and let our chins graze the earth, it is only because nerves stretched to such great heights must also endure long falls. We touched the sun with waxen wings. How many can boast the same? Even Louis XIV, that fabled Sun King, ended badly, with a failed war, no living children, and a nasty attack of gangrene that finished him off in excruciating fashion. Yet we remember the outrageous high heels, the iron rule, and the palatial Versailles. I want to live, if not decadently, then splendidly, turning my back to the long shadow cast by the hands of clocks, certain that time will come to love, or at least ignore, me.

Today I will do the things I would not allow myself to do yesterday with Mathieu. I will don my jeans and Keds and order a
café crème
at the Café Flore, wondering, with a shadowy thrill, who sat in the chair I now occupy. I will poke my head in Sainte-Chapelle and admire the jubilant stained-glass windows, without anyone whispering over my shoulder that my reaction to them is fraudulent, or that they’re a pretty fiction filtering a darker truth. I will go to the Musée Picasso and acknowledge that I only like about half of his stuff, and that some is downright mediocre. I will embrace my squeamishness and hold my nose when passing a
fromagerie
, trying my damnedest to quell my gag reflex while eyeing the hunks of moldy goat’s milk that are supposed to make my knees quake with gratitude at their pungently ripe bouquets. I will shed my inferiority complex and wear my Americanism as casually as I do back home: that is, without being conscious of it.

I will finally conquer this city by not pretending that I must love the whole of her.

I am reaching for my sensible raincoat in the tiny closet when I notice a note wedged under my door. Fingers expressed, my hand remains caught as I stare, somewhat fearfully, at the small, white rectangle atop the tangled red roses on my carpet. My body hangs on a silver thread, the fleeting tenseness of the moment begging for Andrew Wyeth’s sharp eyes and earnest hands. There is a pull to the raincoat, to my day’s plans lining it, which my arm cannot abandon. And yet the envelope, with its clean white mystery, waits impatiently, its scrawled
Daisy
a promise of complications. It must be from Mathieu. I let it slip I was staying here over dinner, even telling him the room, twenty-three, because I believed the number to be portentous. Perhaps it is.

I open the note, of course—even if curveballs are most dangerous when you least expect them. This is how it reads:

    
I do not sleep. How do you sleep so fitfully? My ear presses against your door, but there is nothing. A nice trick, Daisy. I admire your composure. It is enough to make me question my existence. For how can I exist without finding myself reflected in your eyes? The night is long (Chagall’s moon flown), the hallway silent, except for the occasional growl from the pipes.

You have shattered me, by the way. I guess one should say that first. You may gloat, for I write to you with broken hands. I tried to pet Beckett before, back home, with broken hands, and she hissed your name—your awful, cartoon name—and leapt away, scolding me as harshly as your eyes all those hours ago, when you swiped the room’s walls of my color.

You act like I disappoint you, and I would like to rip you apart, you child. What do you know of disappointment? You have been spooned your own sense of importance all your life by two loving parents, and by an insulated nation that fetes its children almost as much as its flag, and you have become bloated and gassy from all this attention. What do you know of me? You have the American instinct for making rash judgments, which will prove fatal to any true growth of your character.

And yet … I feel your disappointment keenly, like you have dug around the open, raw sore at the bottom of my heart, hunting for some place still untouched by your radioactive hands. I cannot bear that superior look of yours, though I am desperate to rip this cheap door from its hinges, to see what you look like asleep (that was my right tonight), your changeling mouth finally at peace.

What do you dream of, fairy?

I despise Delacroix, and my mother. You have inserted yourself between them and me, blocking them in the shadow your scorn casts. A man’s pride is all he has, Daisy. It stops me from knocking upon this door, though I appeal to your extrasensory knowledge of me like a dead man asking to be killed quickly. To think that a day ago, you were but a dream in my head. I invented you on that train, but now you have somehow become the puppeteer, pulling my strings until I am tied in—there! I heard your toilet flush. I have roused your bladder, at the least. It is all I can hope for tonight.

You do know me. Perhaps this is why I hate you a little.

Are you asleep yet, my love? Are you fading to black once more? Have I insinuated myself into the next dream, the delirious preface to our next story? Will you rise in the morning and think first of me? Or will I have become lost in an airy pocket of soft time, a distant memory? “I, too, had a Paris romance …”Let it not be that, Daisy. Anything but that.

I will not come for you tomorrow. The choice is yours. I will lookfor you all afternoon at our fountain in the Gardens. Just know this: I have been to America. But I will not go back. There is no writer’s life for me there. It was bleached of poetry for me the moment—

You deserve to know this. So if you come, know that I am part of Paris, as permanent a residence as the Seine, if similarly in a state of flux.

And remember this too: Daisy Miller was ahead of her time, a real revolutionary.

A lifetime spent in Europe need not be a death sentence.

Mathieu

p.s. This is not said with vindictiveness, but might it occur to you that your father (the man said, by your lips, to have caressed the fuselages, spoken in strained tongues, worshipped Henry James, and languished in an unhappy marriage) might be secretly gay? It is something to consider.

    
Ka-pow
.

I hurl the note to the floor and step on it, like it’s a bug I could squash. I have always hated the epistolary postscript. They’re flakey, self-indulgent. This one is particularly mean and spiteful. An act of revenge so transparent (with the phony qualifier at the beginning) that I can see his small, black heart languishing behind its pointed jab.

And yet, he called me his “love.” He wants me with him. He will wait for me today. It is my choice, he whispers.

I pick up his note, smoothing the creases. His handwriting is more accomplished than my own; the hand that wrote this did not shake or hesitate. His fluidity, as always, impresses me. And it is comforting to have received a handwritten letter this time. Andy’s e-mail was a poison dart, cowardly shot from afar, mademore poisonous by its indifferent medium. Mathieu’s letter, while vitriolic in parts, is softened by the psychology of its writer (look how he addends his name with that wispy flourish), his words radiating a luster that a computer, for all of its invention, cannot replicate. A part of me wants to tuck the letter in my bosom
(á la
Jane Austen) and start madly diagramming my own.
Mrs. Cogsworth, my quill and inkwell, please!