Plum Blossoms in Paris (30 page)

The whistle sounds again. The rest of the skaters rise and shove off. Mathieu and I remain seated. When the last of the lonesome skaters, loosely swerving backward, passes, I look at the retreating mass, feeling very much like a runt wolf abandoned by her pack and left to die.

We are near the Pére Lachaise Cemetery. The iron gates stretch forever. Jim Morrison, having broken on through to the other side, rests there in perfect silence.

“You and Sartre are right: hell is other people.” I sigh, brushing my hands off.

Mathieu smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“If you must know, I haven’t talked about Andy because I don’t want to be judged. I feel a little bit protective of him. If you knew too much, you’d probably find a lot to scorn. Including me for loving him, once.”

Mathieu pounces. “Do not shroud your motives. Andy was an excuse.”

“Was he?” I demure, anger washing over me. Why must we fight about such nonsense? It makes me want to, well—damn him!—run. The skates are handy. I know I could beat Mathieu. The guy was built for grace, not speed.

“Yes, you wanted to get away. You hate these ridiculous classes of yours and the career you thought you wanted. You realized that life has more to offer than the crushing routine of your laboratory, that there is more mystery to be uncovered in the universe than you could ever hope to find under your microscope, and that you had rebelled from your free-thinking parents by becoming their opposite: a slave to science, when you have the soul of a poet.”

“I thought you didn’t believe in souls,” I mutter, shrugging the skates off.

“I believe in your soul.”

Maybe you wouldn’t if …

I bite my lip and say, “You are wrong, Mathieu. I know you would like to be right. You have this picture of me in your head somehow. But you’re wrong.”

He nods, leaning back again. “Anything is possible.”

“I didn’t hate my life,” I say, shaking my head. “You have this funny idea of scientists, Mathieu—like we’re all programmed toward lives of logic and humorlessness. Like we’re unfeeling robots or something. It’s a cheap stereotype. The guy I work for? Dr. Choi? He is an incredible musician with this sweet soft spot for old musicals. I’m sure if he could spare some of the time he spendsworking to cure a debilitating disease, he’d compose an aria called ‘Some Enchanted Utricle.’ Oh, go ahead and laugh.” I scoff at his bemusement. “But people find their inspiration in different places, and thank God for it. You should thank your lucky stars that these people care so deeply about this stuff. Otherwise, I would have died at birth because I was born with a hole in my heart, and you could have been sitting here with someone else, wondering, after pulling your eyes away from her assets, why you felt so dissatisfied with the level of her conversation.”

“In spite of the pleasure I feel at your ‘level,’ Daisy, you still digress. You are not ‘these people,’ no matter how prettily you pretend. I have no problem with your professor’s devotion. I am not against progress. But I am an advocate for authentic living. And I suspect that if you were to write an aria right now, it would be titled something like—oh, let me think—‘Some Enchanted Evening’? It may be too obvious for you, but it rather captures the spirit of the thing, yes?” Mathieu grabs my fingers and kisses my palm.

He’s wrong, again. Not
“Some
Enchanted Evening.”
“This
Enchanted Evening.”

I unscrew my shoulders and allow my head to loll backward. There is a smattering of stars blown across the sky, bright enough to pierce through the City of Light’s guarded aura. Paris is not the entire universe after all. I wonder what The Big Dipper is called in French?
Le Gran Soup Spoon?
I look toward Mathieu, ready to say something, but he is also engaged with the night sky, his Adam’s apple a tricky knot appealing to the heavens. I let it go.

There are nights, rare ones, in which you need the sky to put you in your place. I am so small. And yet, I am my everything. I cannot reconcile these two truths so easily.

I like to think that I could open my mouth on these nights and yawn it back inside, my belly ballooning to accommodate the undigested cosmos, holding it expectant inside of me, until it couldbe reborn. The Big Bang spewed it out there. But who lit the fuse? Science knows so much, yet understands so little. This is why people pull toward religion. The answers are so unsatisfying. Are we nanoquarks of God-matter, clashing with other quarks, equally infinitesimal and elusive, or are we chewed-up stardust trying to locate that lost radiance? Does it matter?

I am here. Mathieu is here. Dark matter dances all around us. We fight and are repelled. We make up, and there is attraction. And if I feel like a shape-shifter, a time traveler, sitting next to him (an unsettling thing—except to Einstein, maybe—when contemplating stars, because if you can’t believe in your own robust shape and form, then how are you to interpret the universe and your place in it?), well then, so be it. I don’t know where I stand with the universe, and I don’t know where I stand when I’m with Mathieu. But still I embrace the company. And I like looking at the stars. They are not much bigger than I from here. And if they no longer burn, a legacy of light survives.

“You’re right,” I say, as the sequestered traffic spills noisily into our street. We pull our legs back and stand up, facing one another on the sidewalk, headlights bleaching our faces at intervals. “To some extent, anyway.”

“About what?” His skates are still on, and with mine off, he towers over me. I tilt my head up, hating myself a little for appreciating his greater height. It’s a movie heroine thing: it’s been conditioned within me to demand the head tilt.

“I don’t really like my schooling,” I admit, looking past the sharp corner of his shoulder, toward the iron gates beyond. “But more to the point, I didn’t really like Andy toward the end.”

Mathieu guides my chin toward him. His eyes won’t let me go this time.

“I cheated on him months ago. Never told him, of course. But when he broke up with me, I had the chance to play the victimand do something crazy.” I shrug, but my chin trembles. “We’re very alike, Mathieu. I, too, get bored, restless. Andy did me the great favor of giving me a reason to run. But then I tripped and fell into you. And I can’t seem to get up again.”

I look down and take his hands in mine. “Yet I know that the day will come when you or I will get bored, and run again.”

He squeezes my hands and smiles. “It would be difficult to be bored by you, Daisy. You are too, too—”

Alarmed, I try to stop him. “Don’t say any—”

“—too damn something,” he finishes, his eyes flashing their surrender under the headlights.

“—more,” I sigh.

“So what do you want to do?” Mathieu asks, tucking me closer, his voice low and resonant. If he were to say my name across an ocean, the pull of his voice would reach someplace deeper than sound to drag me toward him.

“Fuck it!” I laugh to the sky. “I want to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. With you.”

We kiss. And the cars in the busy street honk their communion, and the stars sigh their pleasure. Mathieu and I don’t make a sound. We have spun off the axis.

And so I do fall. Farther and farther. To some nameless place where imagination does not penetrate: beyond the stilted architecture of poetry, past the probing eyes of Hubble. These are still outward realms, after all. When what we desire is not to travel, but to find. To lock onto something, like a leech fastened to blood-rich prey. To feel the illusion of permanence in a kiss, a person, a moment, a God … even if we cannibalize ourselves in the process.

The gates of Pére Lachaise do not exist. They have retreated into the darkness. And Jim Morrison?

The Lizard King lives. And he can do anything.

The sun rises in Paris, and the grass is wet with dew. The sun rises in Paris, and the smell of baking bread hits you from nowhere and anywhere. The sun rises in Paris, and a statue in a park smiles over you like a guardian angel. The sun rises in Paris, and your lover’s arm rises and falls on your blanketed chest. The sun rises in Paris, and your heart—that weak, shameless organ—aches with the tender beauty of it. The sun rises in Paris, and somewhere your grandfather may be dying. The sun rises in Paris, and you can taste the regret for the many mornings when you will not see the sun rising in Paris.

It is a new day.

I
am, all modesty aside, a rather brilliant loafer. I wasn’t sure if I could crack it, but it turns out to be a simple matter of cutting the noose called Time. My watch is a blind eye hibernating in my suitcase, along with Rick, my camera, and everything else. Once acquitted of the notion that I must do A by Time B, my body stirs only when our neighbor upstairs starts her ballet steps, my feet flexing in time with her indelicate
pliés
and
pirouettes
as Mathieu snores beside me, the late morning sun burning through the sheet over the window. Beckett, not immune to time’s passing when food is indicated for, stares at me from her squat on my chest, while my belly, conditioned toward an idea of hunger before the feeling even made itself manifest, bears no complaint, now, to eating dinner when I would normally have thought about bed. The hours in between? They spend themselves in a new kind of education: reading without deadlines or exams, French lessons from Mathieu, learning that the best time to explore the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont on Paris’s outskirts is during lightly raining days, when it is nearly deserted, and the mist hanging over the small canaltransforms it into a Brigadoon emerging from its hundred-year slumber, just for you.

My favorite subject of study is Mathieu. How I measure our days together by the lengthening bother of curl on the back of his neck, which he vainly attempts to plaster down with the oil from his palm. How he types gustily—the noise ricocheting like weapon fire off the walls—with just his index fingers, and rebels when I suggest anything else might be more efficient. How he can’t even shut up when asleep but carries on in conversational French, pieces of which I can now crack from time to time. Once he spoke of his mother. Once he talked about a fine roasted lamb. Another time he groaned my name, upon which I promptly had my way with him.

But it is in his rare quiet moments where I find the most to love. That sleepy-eyed smile when I thrust a disapproving Beckett into his face in the mornings. The wetting of his lips a half second before pouncing on a rhetorical point. How he closes his eyes when he listens to music, or to me, on those occasions when I’m particularly brilliant or maddening. And, most eloquently, the way those same eyes light up when I sneak up on him at a meeting place earlier agreed upon. He cannot disguise his glee. And so I find that I have not grown up after all, for I am still sixteen and loving a man loving me. I invent reasons to be away from him, and do not acknowledge the fear that cramps my heart on that beat before he sees me, when I despair of some hardening of that soft, pliable passion quickening in his eyes. Happily, it is always there.

The leaves have turned, so the Earth must be harnessed to motion. Autumn in Paris is a lot like autumn elsewhere, except there are fewer leaves on the ground. Paris is, of course, a conscientious guardian of her trees. Yet I miss the crunching leaves beneath my feet. I have to go out and buy many more sweaters (and another pair of shoes) than the two I brought, because it isgetting cold and Mathieu’s arms can only work so hard. Mathieu does not recoil at my buying them from a second-hand store. I think a part of him still believes that as goes my money, so go I. He doesn’t yet trust that I am capable of sacrifice. He warns me that I will grow bored and hostile toward him for dragging me away from my “weekly trips to TGIF” and my “American fever for shopping malls and bad pornography.” I ask him who the hell he thinks I am. His paranoia is silenced as he retreats from the solace of comfort stereotyping. I ask him, more tentatively, what the difference is between good porn and bad porn. He takes me to go see Bernardo Bertolucci’s
Last Tango in Paris
, playing that night at one of the many art-house cinemas nearby. I tell him afterward, with a charley horse seizing my gut, that this is not porn; it’s sex as human suffering. But maybe it worked, because we still had sex when we got home. Then again, we have sex every night. It just doesn’t involve measurable amounts of butter or self-loathing.

We like to sit on the roof in the evenings, wrapped up in a blanket, a bottle of wine a silent third. It pains Mathieu to have to drink bad wine, but it would pain him more to go without. The medieval rooftops of Paris are a jagged topography, their scarred, rusted chimneys gasping for cleaner air. Close your eyes just so, at sunset, and behold an urban Cezanne: mercurial beauty disguised as permanence. We shamelessly peek into people’s windows and invent lives to wrap around them, wanting them to be warm too. Mathieu’s are character studies that can never clear loneliness; mine are bad nighttime stories parents might tell their kids, with fantastical
deus ex machinas
that surface when I’ve snarled the flimsy plots. We enjoy shaking our heads at one another. And we enjoy our lovely, aimless talks and lovelier aimless silences. You get a different feel for a city watching her (almost) sleep at night. I feel tender toward Paris now. She is not home, but she is something like it.