Plum Blossoms in Paris (31 page)

“Do you believe in God less now that your mother is dead?”

The question swoops through the thin, late October air and lands with a thud on Mathieu’s head. We were having a lively discussion about book vending machines. Mathieu is adamant they could work. Just put in your three euros at the metro station, and out plops Goethe’s
Faust
. And that’s where we diverge. Maybe Goethe is wildly popular here. God, I hope so. But in Cleveland, it is more likely to plop a drippy mess like
The Purpose Driven Life
. Or, if it were a truly good dump: Ann Coulter (excuse the second reference to Ms. Coulter; I do hate her so, but she doesn’t deserve the attention).

I love that Mathieu doesn’t know who Ann Coulter is. That he thought Bill O’Reilly was an Irish soccer coach. He lives in a purer realm than I. We can’t talk about a lot of the stuff that, viewed from a godly distance, has recently filled me with rage. And I, in turn, don’t care a whit about the newspaper scandals that captivate the French, who have an inexplicable fondness for the government characters in their serialized dramas, like they’re black sheep to be welcomed back into the fold after a public slogging. But they’re not my family, and I didn’t grow up with the clannish gossip of favored sons from the
Grandes Écoles
tickling my dinner conversation. I hail from a different place, where the cult of Big Celebrity was invented and refined. Bureaucrats don’t qualify. Though, strangely, the pundits decrying them sometimes do.

Without those common points of reference, Mathieu and I are forced (what divine coercion!) to talk about books, art, and music. He has never read
Jane Eyre
. I am properly horrified. Yet I almost forgive him when I find his
The Carpenters
LP hiding out between his John Cage and Bob Dylan.

Somehow, though, it always comes back to God. Maybe because this is a more lucid, streamlined existence: a life unpoisoned by paperwork. Anesthetizing myself to the tug of intentions, Iam saturated with thoughts and sensations. More obsessed with the origin of things than with their conclusions. I return to God because I envy Mathieu’s clarity and desire some of that—if not its acrid flavor—for myself.

I kind of like getting him worked up, too.

Mathieu frowns. “How do you mean?”

“I just wonder. I know she left you long ago, but there’s still got to be a sense of abandonment when the woman who gave you life—the only godlike figure available to us—is suddenly proved to be mortal. I can’t imagine the sense of loss,” I continue, my voice pinched at the thought of losing my own mother, who is very far away. “I just thought it might have swung you along the spectrum, if not from believer to nonbeliever, then from agnostic to atheist.”

Mathieu scowls. “I think agnostics are the worst of the lot. Believe in
something
, for God’s sake!”

I play with a ring on my finger and delicately clear my throat. “So what was the moment? Were you ten years old and God didn’t answer a prayer? Fifteen and rebellious? Twenty and disaffected?”

Mathieu sets his wineglass down. “I was seven.”

“Seven?”

Mathieu nods. “I had a teacher,
Mme
. Bellamont. Sweetest lady in the world. My mother told me she was going to be a nun, but she was too in love to go through with it. I liked her more when I heard that. And I was a little jealous of her husband. She had these amazing legs. They were not designed for a nun’s habit. I was always looking up the long line of them, wondering what was concealed underneath those skirts.” He smiles at me, but I wince at the idea of a sexualized seven-year-old.

He continues, more soberly. “She was the only good teacher I ever had. Most of my teachers terrified or bored me. But not her. I think she felt a little sorry for me … anyway, I was her pet.”

He shakes his head and scoops up his wine. “Yet she died in a car accident the summer after—” He looks down. “She was to have her baby the following week.”

“That’s awful,” I concede, after a small pause. “But people die all the time. It doesn’t explain a seven-year-old abandoning God.”

But your mother leaving the year before might.

“Of course it does, especially since church bored me to tears. My mother was homesick and took me most Sundays, trying to pretend that French Catholic bore some resemblance to American Southern Baptist. She never believed in it, but she, like so many of your country, sought that fool’s gold of tradition and ritual. I was terribly impatient with it all. Even then, it seemed like prayer was a bargaining chip, a way of offering up some humility to cash in later for the ultimate prize.”

His features are twisted with contempt. Mathieu is not indifferent toward religion, but actively hostile. The recognition unsettles me.

“I could accept
Mme
. Bellamont’s death. But what was the point of the baby’s life being started, if only to end so soon? I tried to imagine that fetus walking between my mother’s pearly gates of heaven, but she kept falling over on little toothpick legs before I could get her there.” He laughs harshly. “Then I imagined her being dragged around by the umbilical cord like a—”

“—okay, I get the picture.”

Mathieu smiles wanly. “Sorry.”

I nod but avert my eyes.

He adds, more evenly, “My point was this: what kind of afterlife could a fetus enjoy in heaven? None. So then heaven must be a fraud. What kind of personal God could be so perverse as to bring new life into the world, only to squash it before it could absorb its existence?”

What kind, indeed.

“Then why not believe in a more impersonal God? Like the Deists. Or Buddhists.”

“I like much in Buddhism,” Mathieu acknowledges. “I like the idea of interconnectivity, of each of us being a jewel of many facets strung together in an endless array, infinity reflecting infinity. I appreciate the idea of karma, of being responsible for one’s actions in life. And I admire the Buddhist’s commitment to his cause.”

“Then what?” I ask. “What stops you from considering it?”

“Truly? I would feel ridiculous.”

“How so?”

Mathieu raises his palms to the air. “It is no accident that the vast majority of people in this world are born to their religion. It is the language of worship that feels most comfortable, and comforting, to us. Buddhism feels foreign, exotic. That which is foreign and exotic to us can never be completely comforting.”

You don’t say
, I muse, watching a plane blink its steady path in the distant sky. “So you’re ruling out the possibility of eternal enlightenment through the simple fact that you might feel ridiculous meditating on a yogi mat in the middle of Paris?”

“No, not entirely.”

I laugh. “Then what?”

“I do not believe in their means.”

“What? Transcendence? Enlightenment?”

“That is the goal. But to do that, one must forget desire. To lose your ego is to lose your identity. Which is the only thing that makes this life bearable. As a writer, I am my own God.” Turning toward me, Mathieu says, “I would never sacrifice that, even for enlightenment.”

“You are a terrible egomaniac.”

“Yes, I am. But you should be happy of this. You may yet be immortalized.”

I would not love Mathieu any other way. I love the spirit and the flesh of him. I would not sacrifice this world for the next, unless he could null the sacrifice by joining me. This world feels heavenly to me 60 percent of the time: the time I’m with Mathieu.

What do muses do with the other 40 percent of their time? Did Manet’s Olympia let out a breath of relief, kick off her heels, and grow out of that flat canvas at nights? I will never know.

I point my toes toward the Eiffel Tower that night, and every night, on our rooftop magic carpet. It steadies me to witness its steely tip blinking atop that jumble of geometry, to sense its implacability even while I sleep. I have so little to orient myself here. When I am away from Mathieu, I might as well not exist. He is my entire salvation in a world devoid of familiar living.

This is, of course, what I was afraid of.

But
screw it
, I think, glowering at the replica of the Statue of Liberty on the Pont de Grenelle on a gray Monday afternoon. Autonomy is overvalued, anyway. So I had the freedom to be creatively unhappy before. Now one thing makes me unhappy: this empty, afternoon solitude in the most beautiful city in the world. I invent reasons to be away while he is writing because I don’t want to be too needy, and yet while away, I need, need, need like a blind kitten rooting for the teat. Love carries us high only to knock us down. Or perhaps love gives us permission to make ourselves low. It is during this time of the day when I check for clocks: 3:23 …
is he missing me enough?
4:14 …
should I take the long way back, in case he is finishing?
All of this should disgust me, but I’m too ripe with anticipation to care about self-respect.

Besides, he has it just as bad. This is our conversation, in bed, from two nights ago:

    
Mathieu:
I cannot breathe sometimes when you are away. I will be working and things appear to be going well, and then I look up and notice that I am alone, and my breath will be sucked away.

Daisy:
Good.

Mathieu (surprised):
You want me to suffer?

Daisy:
Of course.

Mathieu (frowning):
I don’t want you to suffer.

Daisy:
Sure you do.

Pause
.

Mathieu (finally)
: So?

Daisy:
So what?

Mathieu:
Do you suffer?

Daisy (kissing him on the forehead):
More than you, silly. I never have to look up to notice that I’m alone.

Mathieu (puzzled):
So why do you leave me?

Daisy:
Because I love you. And I want you to keep on loving me.

Mathieu:
I would not if you were here?

Daisy:
Not as much. I would sense your distraction and feel that I was crowding you, until eventually you would feel like I was crowding you, and that would be a far worse world of suffering to me.

Mathieu:
But I can’t work anyway. You have ruined me as a writer. My mind is always elsewhere.

Daisy (a little triumphantly):
I’m sorry.

Mathieu (perceptively):
Liar.

    He’s starting to talk more like an American. He’s even taken up contractions and tolerates my colloquialisms, though I have only been able to incorporate “that would puke a hound bitch from a gut wagon” (thank you, Grandma Lockhart,
Miss Parkersburg, West Virginia 1926)
once, on a novice trip to a meat market on Rue Cler. Mathieu stood in a state of incomprehension as I, weak-kneed, first encountered
boudin noir
, or blood sausage, a delicacy whose plasmatic origin is exactly as it sounds. While we still encounter cultural hiccups like that, the line is being redrawn in my direction little by little. I once surprised him with a bucket o’ chicken from KFC, complete with mashed potatoes and somethingmilky that aspired toward coleslaw. He feigned to choke it down, but then again, I didn’t exactly force that third breast on him (he is a breast man, regrettably). Of course, afterward, I had to listen to him disparage the kindly Colonel Sanders for ten meandering minutes, accusing me of condoning the “Southern plantation mentality” through my complicit desire for delicious fried foods. But his heart wasn’t in it, and before I could enlighten him that Sanders was born in Indiana, he broke off to lick his greasy fingers and grab a juicy leg (he is also, more happily, a leg man) from the bucket marked by the Colonel’s folksy mug.

All in all, I’m loosening him up a little.

But he’s still got that fierce disdain for America as an Idea, for America as the Great Homogenizer, I lament, arriving at my destination on the Champs Elysées, that shamelessly global boulevard in Paris where the Gap, Häagen Dazs, and Louis Vuitton comingle in a classless orgy of consumerism. I consider Mathieu’s championing of the French way of life laudatory, as I am beginning to appreciate their insistence on fresh food and taking things slow, but would love to prove that he is capable of succumbing to those frothy experiences he righteously rants and rails against.

And so it is that, enjoying a scoop of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream outside of a movie theater featuring a poster of Tom Cruise, sans smile, with gun, I hatch a wonderful plan. Not only will Mathieu learn to embrace America’s fun side; he will have the pleasure of living in America—or in a stylized, Pop Art America—for an entire day. After all, if I am to go without gorditas and
The Daily Show
for the remainder of my days, he can put up with a smidge of retribution.

Not that I really see it like that, of course. I’m simply inviting him to the Happiest Place on Earth.

“Darling.”

“Yes.”

“My turn today.”

“Hmm?”

“My turn, my turn.”

“I’m listening,” he says, eyebrow cocked.

I roll over, playfully pinning him. “My turn to play tour guide.”

He smiles drowsily. “And where will you take me?”