Plum Blossoms in Paris (37 page)

Everyone is silent. Kerry is shown on a tarmac saying something about “hunting down” the terrorists with a creepy mixture of Bush-like bravado and limp desperation. I jab at the television to shut it off. Nobody protests.

“Even if what you say is true,” Mathieu continues, that quick tongue working over his lips, “what does it have to do with you anymore?”

I consider him very carefully before replying, “Mathieu, I am an American. It matters desperately to me who wins that election.” I pause. “It should matter to you too.”

Mathieu starts to his feet to regain control. He crosses the room and, with his fingers, unfurls my fists into hands again. “But there is nothing that
you
can do, Daisy.”

I look into his bright, pleading eyes. “You know that’s not true, Mathieu.” I smile to soften my words. “But thank you, all the same.”

“You are not serious.”

“I am.”

Neither of us blinks.

Henri clears his throat. “What is it that you are going to do, my dear?”

I turn to face them. “I have to go back. It’s ridiculous. And as meaningful as spitting in the wind, I know. But it matters.” Looking back at Mathieu, I add, “If I don’t vote in this election, I should kill myself.”

Everyone starts speaking English. Like a switch has been turned.

Gabrielle (with fiery conviction, something like Delacroix’s
Liberty Leading the People):
“But of course you should go back! It is your civic obligation!”

Ivan (with an abundance of melancholy): “It is as you say, Daisy. Lost, I fear. The American people have sealed their fate.”

Luc: “Did you hear that bin Laden is possessed of Kylie Minogue?”

Nicole: “Obsessed.”

Henri (The Statesman): “You must do what you feel is right, of course.”

Only Mathieu is silent. Standing there, shell-shocked, he is the lost, abandoned boy once more. He frowns at the floor.

I shiver, thinking that I would hate to be the floor. But there is this: I know—I know—he loves me now.

When his eyes rise to meet mine, they are furious with love.

“You are a coward then.”

“No, Mathieu.”

“All it took was an excuse for you to come here. And now another for you to leave.”

“No.”

“You want to leave. You made your choice. Run, Daisy, run.”

“I—”

“You choose your security over your passion, your pretty, deluded contentment over authentic living, your—”

“—now wait a minute, Mathieu—”

He pushes me away and starts to walk toward the door. “You choose that sickly wasteland of Bush’s where—”

I trail after him. “But that’s the thing, Mathieu—”

He trains his hand on the wall for support. His breaths are shallow as his forehead kisses the door. “Where the feebleminded followers are convinced that God is guiding their bombs and that the Almighty Dollar is leading them toward an Earthly Paradise . … Where your beloved theory of evolution is under attack by a medieval lynch mob. burning books and building museums to false science. The same Neanderthals who are probably still certain … oh, yes, they are terrifying in their certainty that Copernicus was right—that the sun circles still around the Earth, and more specifically, America—and where my dying mother spent the last year of her shitty life suffering at the hands of an insurance system that does not so much as usher the dying to their deaths as fling them against the wall to hurry death along.”

“Mathieu.” His knuckles caress the wall.

“I cannot condone—”

“Mathieu.”

He reaches for the doorknob. Escape. Shoving off the door, he spins around to face me, his distraught face inches away, and shouts,
“What?”

“I voted for him.”

“What?”

“I voted for him. Bush.”

His eyes circle. “When?”

“In 2000.”

Mathieu shifts his weight to his other knee, arms hanging at his sides. “You voted for George Bush in 2000.”

I clasp my hands, remaining as stiff and straight as a soldier before the firing squad. “Yes.”

“George W. Bush.”

“The one and the same.”

He searches the floor now for answers. Not finding any, he tries my face. “But
why?
”

I need support. Feeling for the adjacent wall, I back into it, positioning myself beside the contemptuous eyes of Otto Dix. I will try to explain.
The devil made me do it
. … But, “I have no good reason.”

“Some bad ones, then?”

The others are watching, horrified. Even Henri looks like he’s ingested something distasteful. I have managed to secure my audience, just in time for them to launch the tomatoes. I almost find it funny. You’d have thought I just confessed to murder.

But I don’t really feel like laughing.

“I don’t know, Mathieu. Maybe I bought into his fairy tale about compassionate conservatism. Maybe I thought Gore was a bit of a stiff who couldn’t settle on an identity if his life depended on it. Maybe I wanted to shake up my holier-than-thou parents a little bit. Maybe I thought that wedge issues like school vouchers didn’t sound that important at the time. Maybe I was nineteen years old and didn’t know squat about any of it.”

I look at him searchingly. “Or maybe I was in the voting booth and the urge just came over me.” I pause to take a breath. “It’s dumber than dumb, but I guess I did it because I could.”

“Mersault,”
Mathieu mumbles.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“But anyway,” I say, shrugging off the wall, “this is why I have togo back. Because I have a sticky sense of culpability about it. Because the world will grind on, even as I pretend it’s of no consequence to me. Because”—I pause and beseech him with my eyes—“because as histrionic as this sounds in an age of cynicism, I cannot abandon my country during its moment of crisis the way your father abandoned his.”

His eyes flicker to my face, then down again. I have no pulse on him.

Finally, he says, “I was wrong about that painting.”

“What?”

“You look nothing like the Orphan Girl. You look like my mother.” He smiles brokenly. “But only from the back.”

Tears fill my eyes. “Mathieu—”

“You will not come back then?”

“Do you want me to?”

His gaze settles on my face in a calculating manner. “I don’t know.”

I nod, my throat constricting. “Okay.”

I turn toward Gabrielle and the others. “Thank you for inviting me tonight.”

She nods while the others desist. Henri’s hand remains on his breast, in lamentation. He never would have written this for me.

“Look after him, please,” I say. Then, turning back, I walk past Mathieu. Our shoulders—mine naked, his concealed—brushing like two strangers in a train station choked with weary travelers. I have purchased my freedom through confession. Only it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Other people matter. They all may feel differently about me now.

Definitely Mathieu.

So does the priest toward the confessor, I imagine. That’s human. Maybe I
would
like Picasso’s art more if he had been a better person.

And me? How do I feel?

Like the mother
and
the child. Reborn.

H
ail Mary, full of grace.

It’s not just confession. There’s atonement, too.

Notre Dame is spectral tonight, floating like a candle on her Seine. There is a vapor in the air—a Gothic, Brontë mist—drugging my sight, softening the stone of the cathedral until it’s a luminous, lacey latticework woven around a flank and ribs of whalebone. While her rose window glows like a milky spiderweb spun by the moonlight. One hand on her façade, however, reminds me of her solidity. For Paris, the quintessential feminine city, has at her heart this molten stone to brace her against the furies. In a City of Light, she is the eternal flame. It was here, where I stand, in the square before the cathedral, that the last snaggle of Nazi snipers shot at de Gaulle’s parade of liberation. There, within its famed sandstone, where Napoleon was crowned emperor. Here, at her lovely ankles, is point zero, the origin of all measured distance in France.

She is unflappable, timeless, this heart of Paris.

She is also closed.

I cannot believe the door’s resistance. I absolutely trusted that church doors never closed. Isn’t the church there to succor the suffering when the state turns its back, to offer a benediction and hope to the sinner during her crisis of faith, to provide sanctuary from such worldly, corrupting depravities that are most bountiful at this witching hour of night, when Freud’s id wants to reign with such primitive and tyrannical authority? After all, what good are Quasimodo’s fierce, protective arms—or God’s, for that matter—if I cannot tunnel into their loving center?

I can’t help but take it personally as I sink to the earth, my costume skirt flaring around my knees.

But then, out of the dying fall …

The sound of Paris. If music be the food of love, fill me again, for here is that guitar vibrato of Django’s Gypsy offspring rubbing against my cheek to entice and seduce me again. And there is the young, black Esmeralda, with folds of peasant skirt in her hands, cutting elegiac circles around the square, waltzing the wind. Admirers stop to stare and throw coins in the guitarist’s case. Oh, she is good, this lithe girl with the downcast eyes, playing upon our inscribed idea of this place, cleverly insinuating herself into our nostalgia with each flick of heel and toe traded upon the ancient cobblestone.

And yet, there is no ironical detachment to be impugned here—no sense of going through the exacting motions of expectation’s hard choreography. Paris, she proclaims with an eloquent turn of her slim wrist, is proud of her history, even of her derivativeness. Hugo wrote his novel, in part, to shine a light back on medieval Paris, to stab at this dusty fossil that was a crumbling, forgotten edifice until it bled freely, to demonstrate that the old Paris, though brutal and capricious, had a purity and authenticity about it that his contemporary Parisians had sterilized to the point of infertility. Hugo believed that Paris was the ceiling of civilization, but that it had yet to reach its roof.

He grew its glory higher.

And so does our Gypsy girl with her Egyptian bangles and Mona Lisa smile. She, too, plays Paris as Rhapsody. She, too, understands that all paths lead here. The travelers around me nod to the music. They have heard the call.

And so it is, while straining my neck, as a skyscraper enthusiast might back home, toward the ghoulish gargoyles above, that I am struck again by the dichotomy of old and new, and how Europe is on one side and America on the other. How like infants we are, slogged by growing pains, next to the old Continent. How, at times, it seems we have no history of our own, or that our history is so fresh it remains a raw wound, like a canker in our mouths whose flesh we can’t help but chew on from time to time, out of thoughtlessness or thorny temptation. Those Gettysburg reenactors who meet with such solemn reverence every year, the Confederate faction pining for a beloved “lost cause”—if not that one in particular, then a simulacrum—before retreating to their middle-class homes that chummily border their black, middle-class brethren. The Dadaist museumification of absurdist reliquaries: Roswell, the largest ball of twine, Graceland; like if you make people pay for it, there might be something worth seeing. Our obsession with anniversaries, as if the elapsing of time were something to be charged at and taken down by a nation of linebackers. How we embrace caricatures of ourselves—with unlikely names like
American Gothic
—without being sure where the truth ends and irony begins. That notorious tendency to view things in black and white—the shortsighted filter of the fundamentalist—which makes things simple and convenient, except when the refracted light contains the muddier truth. How we have the kind of unthinking arrogance of the hulking teenager on the block—the cocky jock flexing his guns—who knows that one fatal step on the basketball court could cripple his future. Yet he leaps for thedunk anyway, confident in his immortality because enough people have told him how great he is that he has no reason to doubt himself, no backup system in place.

No contingency plan.

Youth is a marvelous thing. But goddamn if the blinders don’t have to come off.

Not that Europe is a piece of humble pie. But that’s someone else’s story to tell. I don’t have the proper perspective after three weeks to indict a whole continent, or even France, for her panoply of failings. I am an American missing my country, unsure if when I go home I will find it again.

But knowing I must go.

A storm of roller skaters thunders across the bridge in front of me. Friday night in Paris. I look at them longingly over the several minutes it takes for them to pass, photographing their flight in my mind, the way people do when they’re ready to say good-bye. I rise in their wake, abandoning the performers who have given me pause and comfort, happy that they were here for me, yet thankful that good-byes are not required. As I depart, the jangly riffs of a new song play off my back. I smile. That’s the comforting thing about Paris: she can endure just fine without me.

I find myself at the bridge and fold my torso over its beveled edge.

“Promise me you won’t jump.”

Mathieu.

“H-how did you know I was here?” Seeing him, my convictions dive into the water below.

“I am God.”

I roll my eyes and pick my feet off the ground. One of the heels clatters off.

Mathieu claims it and hops up on the bridge. Smiling thinly, he explains, “I was on my way to Notre Dame. I thought you might have come to beg for mercy.”

I shake my head, scowling.

“You are very predictable, Daisy.” Mathieu’s smile doesn’t convince his eyes, which are blacker than the inky water. “It was either here or that other favored cathedral of yours, the Orsay. And it is closed.”

“So was she,” I say, shooting my thumb over my shoulder.

He eyes the cathedral. “She is more beautiful from afar, anyway.”

I sigh, easing myself down, and stretch my neck to look behind me. “I don’t know. I think I wanted thick walls around me tonight.”