Plum Blossoms in Paris (35 page)

The escalating voices prevent us from pursuing our conversation. Mathieu is arguing. I can tell by the bridge of his nose: it’s puckered, like he smells something bitter. Usually his outrage is directed at me, so I’m curious to observe how it plays upon others. With his palm turned upward, he might be extending the opportunity for some education, or begging for a real argument. Ivan, taking a broader approach, waves his arms around, grasping for metaphorical straws from the thin air. Luc jumps in on Mathieu’s side, yet it seems a halfhearted effort, that sad cigarette butt he’s jabbing around a limp echo of his rhetorical prowess. Even Mathieu ignores him as he starts to his feet and begins to pace.

Fights are funny to watch when you can’t understand what’s going on. Like vaudeville, or opera.

Nicole says nothing. With her pale complexion setting off lips chiseled in with black liner, she looks like a geisha. Not so much docile, as empty. The
tabula rosa
of some males’ fantasies.

“They are enjoying this, no?” I ask Henri.

He purses his lips and settles into the couch. “Men enjoy fighting, feeling anger. It is a method of cutting themselves loose from this”—his hand encompasses the stylish room—“and activating their primitive sides. Engaging with the real world.”

“But what are they talking about?” I whisper. Ivan is now standing, though he has turned his back on Mathieu.

Ahem. Our setting: the legendary French
salon
. The players: all those brave enough to enter. The choice weapon: a rapier wit. The style: cutting, clever, and often cruel. Employed: only upon assurance of mortally wounding an adversary. Your manner: ironic, detached, and always effortless. Means of death: mortification. Attention: novices will not be granted a handicap. To note: laughing at your own jokes is not permitted. Smiling, too, is frowned upon, unless furnished in a malicious, deprecating manner. Men and women may do battle with one another. But when locking horns, it is recommended that the female jousters take their cleavage into consideration. After all, a timely lean-in can be as deadly as a wicked tongue-lashing.

Okay, that’s the way it worked in
Ridicule
. Mathieu is sweating all of this too much. And nobody’s looking at my cleavage. Not even the lascivious Lothario Luc.

“Mmm … let us see,” Henri says, leaning in. “Mathieu believes that Zidane is the best football player ever to have graced the field, while Ivan argues for Shevchenko. Mathieu points to the team successes for Zidane, while Ivan counters by stressing Shevchenko’s legendary standing as a striker. Mathieu suggests that Ivan is allowing his Ukrainian fealty to color his empirical critique of the situation. Ivan finds this laughable, since Zidane is French. Yes, Mathieu notes, but of
Algerian
origin. So it is not as much of a—how do you say, my dear?—of a jerking-the-knee response?”

I nod, a little sad. Sports. That’s all. And nationhood. How common. Versailles is still a museum. And what does it say about Mathieu that he points to this Zidane guy’s background (Algerian Muslim) as making him less French? What does it say for us?

No wonder Nicole is silent. What is there to say?

Mathieu throws up his hands and, glancing at me, pronounces, “I am bored with this argument. Let us move on.”

Cued, Gabrielle emerges from the kitchen, looking impossibly composed for a woman about to serve a four-course meal, and informs us that dinner is ready. The men immediately break off their argument, forgetting their trumped-up outrage in favor of a surer kill. I rise. Mathieu finds me with his eyes and smiles. My smile must look more tentative because Henri takes my elbow and remarks, “You look pale, Daisy dear. Let us get you some food.”

We make our way over to the elegant dining room table andpart ways. I can see the riverboats sparkling through the window as I take my place, and something sharp and melancholy stabs at me. Perhaps it is just hunger. I couldn’t eat before, due to nerves. The little zucchini, olive, and tomato salad that Gabrielle has set down on the delicate, ivory tablecloth before me feels like a taunt, but I dutifully shovel it all into my mouth, even the olives, which I normally shun. Only when taking the last bite do I feel embarrassed. I am the first to be finished. Probably because I am the only one not talking. Mathieu sits to my right and Ivan to my left, at the head of the table. Nicole is across from me, with Luc sandwiched between her and Henri. Gabrielle reigns at the other end. Somehow, I feel all alone.

Novices get no handicaps.

I feel regret about being parted from Henri. He is the only one, including Mathieu, that traitor, to take note of me. I thought Ivan might try harder, being an immigrant himself, but he either doesn’t know much English or is afraid that someone might think to link the two of us as outsiders. I find some solace in the thought that Henri would rescue me if he weren’t already buried in conversation with Gabrielle, that fat, round head of his bobbing up and down from time to time with touching gravity. I continue to grip my fork, hitting the tines against my plate now and again to give the impression that I am manipulating some imaginary rabbit food. Never have I been so irritated by the French language, streaming without pause, or by the contrary French slowness, as my stomach curls around the paltry vegetables. I take a long sip of my wine, grimacing at the dryness. I want milk. My mom’s lasagna. The plastic fruit centerpiece I got for her in middle school, which she holds onto, in spite of the stemless orbs and boomerang bananas. There are teeth marks in the red apple: a Lockhart family mystery, still unsolved. These butterfly orchids of Gabrielle’s could be crushed by a firm sneeze.

I am the child who’s been put at the grown-up table: bored, fidgety. My legs swing restlessly, and I jab Mathieu’s leg with my shoe. Since they’re pointy enough to kick a gnat in the ass, he finally pays me some notice.

“Sorry.” I grin.

“Is everything all right?”

“Spectacular,” I spit.
But nobody’s talking about the weather.

Mathieu blunts the sharpness of my look with a nod. “Good.” And resumes his conversation with Luc and Nicole, who has reanimated herself and is leaning forward in a cleverly attentive manner that allows her V-neck bodice to ripple like a lulling wave. She wears a gray lace chemise against her skin.

Two points, Nicole. Three, if it had been black.

It is humiliating to be a child at this table. To know that I could be scoring points with these people if they would only speak my language. It’s unfair of me, the lowest common denominator in the room, to expect everyone to sacrifice their natural eloquence for my native tongue, yet I do. I think noble thoughts about how I would do the same for them if the situation were reversed. After all, guests are treated like royalty back home, their security and comfort so attended to that they can feel manhandled at times. The expression “kill them with kindness” must have originated in America, where women like my grandmother wielded the title of hostess like a bludgeon. But in France, guests are outsiders to be tolerated until, through some implausible transformation, they prove themselves worthy of bother. This is perhaps a more genuine attitude to strike, if equally lethal. If it were left up to me, I would rather be suffocated by consideration than naked with neglect.

More than all of it, I hate being Mathieu’s appendage, his arm candy. I dolled myself up merely to make him look good. Throbbing with potential, I am consumed by a hubristic overture to demonstrate my intelligence. Yet all I am capable of is this chiseled smile and a poke at my boyfriend for scraps of his attention.

Why is it that Colette should so often be (faintly) praised, by Mathieu and others, as France’s greatest
woman
writer? God, I hate that.

I scoot back my chair, placing my napkin on the table.
“Pardonnez moi.”

To my surprise, everyone stops talking and looks at me attentively. Jesus, am I supposed to give a toast or something?
“Jai besoin d’aller …”
I bite my lip, hard. In the white silence, only Frank Sinatra whirrs in the background, “
You’ll never know
. …”

Shrugging, I smile brightly. “I need a potty break.”

Moving into the hallway, I try to decide if I just said “potty.” I must have substituted my preschool English for preschool French. Nonetheless, I have to laugh at the
faux pas
. I don’t belong here. I am still the American on that train, bumbling for my footing. Mathieu and I were wrong: I haven’t become more French. Yet I have changed. It has nothing to do with nationality. It’s the yolk of experience that nourishes adaptation. I don’t, in actuality, really
want
to belong here. The idea slows me as I tread through the long hallway. I have always wanted to belong.

I have always wanted to attach myself to something.

I find the bathroom easily enough. It’s next to the macabre, and strangely comical, George Grosz reproduction in the hall. Ivan and Gabrielle have a thing for pre-Third Reich, Weimar Republic art. Grossly caricatured pieces advertising the worst in human nature, exposing the gristle, like cartoon figures to be unzipped and turned inside out. The kind of thing that should have teeth and human hair embedded within so that you can touch the Hobbesian depravity, and try not to recoil. It manages to feel dated (the Weimar look) and contemporary (everybody is for sale). It is admirable, evocative art that should have been hailed as a warning by the German people. Yet I must admit to heaving a sighof relief when I turn on the bathroom light, revealing a pleasant seashell motif, complete with scented soaps. I don’t think I could pee in front of that stuff. It seizes up my insides.

Noticing the streak of blood on my wad of toilet paper, I almost sob. My good Aunt Flow. How bizarre that the shedding of this blood—that monthly surrender of my body’s evolutionary purpose—should fill me with such gratitude. Logically, it goes without saying that I, a woman with no talent for unselfish love, would come to love a child once it was a thing of flesh, and not merely this skeleton of an idea rattling after me over the last couple of weeks. Particularly Mathieu’s child. And yet, as an idea, the phantom child has haunted me, infiltrating darker hours when I threw up daytime blockades. And why should that be? Isn’t it true that if I
were
to have been pregnant, it would have bound me more to Mathieu, and Paris? Hadn’t I already committed myself, anyway?

Well, hadn’t I?

    I turn on the sink, and the water falls over my hands. I allow the current to get as hot as I can stand, before turning it off.

This room is deathly quiet and has no windows; it’s like being embalmed, with rosewater slowly filling my veins.

“Lay your head down, sweetie.”

It was a November night in 1995. I had hopes of the first snow that night. Algebra test in the morning.

“Ten more pages? I’m not even tired, Mom.”

I was, though. I shot up like a weed that year—three inches by my dad’s count—and slumbered like a baby. My freshman yearpassed in the fog of a midsummer night’s dream.

My mom smoothed my hair. Her hands were always warm. “I want to tell you about something. Something I think you should know.”

I rolled my eyes, squirming under my flannel nightgown. “Thanks, but I got the pink pamphlet already, Mom.”

“Not that.”

Her eyes sobered me. They were scared. It is a terrible thing to see your parents show fear. I was old enough to know better, but I still wanted them to be invincible.

“It’s about your birth, hon.”

I became very still. “Okay.”

I felt small and lacking under the faded blue sheet with the tiny white daisies. My room was stunted in its middle school incarnation, when I thought to own my name by displaying it everywhere. Only the books matched my new height, the Brontë sisters dislodging Sweet Valley High’s chirpy duo with the sharper elbows of Heathcliff and Rochester, bulls shrouded beneath the sisters’ creamy prose.

Looking up at the wedge of my mom’s face, as she struggled to bring the words, I noticed lines on her skin that I had never seen before. I was horrified by a black, brittle hair infiltrating a mole on the jib of her chin. Her looks were starting to go. She was aging.
She will die someday. My mother will die
. I got a little mad at her about it. Childish, yes, but I was a child, and the anger steeled me against the hard rain of her words.

My mother touched my cheek. But her hand had turned clammy, and I turned on my side. She sighed. “I think you already know that we hadn’t planned on having you. I was still in school, and your father and I hadn’t made things permanent yet.” She slipped off her engagement ring and rolled it like a Rosary bead between her fingers. A nervous habit, it always seemed like a game of chicken to me.

I nodded, pulling my legs up to my chest. They were furry. I hadn’t met Andy yet. I never wore skirts or shorts. My breasts were still empty promises.

“So when I found out that I was pregnant, it was a big surprise. Shocking, actually. I mean, we had taken precautions, of course.”

Embarrassed, I looked beyond her, to the
Beauty and the Beast
poster on my wall. How I wanted to be Belle at that moment. To be swirling the dance floor in a dress dreamed up by Wordsworth’s daffodil maidens.