Plum Blossoms in Paris (38 page)

“To support or hide you?”

I don’t bother answering.

He sets my red heel down, toe pointed neatly over the water, and wipes at the corners of his mouth. Our eyes see every part of the world but each other. Strange that we should be uncertain again. But now the anxiety surfaces not from knowing too little, but realizing too much.

Unbalanced, I turn to face him. “I don’t really feel the need to ask for forgiveness, you know.” Gulping back yet another sob, it hits me that I have been like a desert enjoying, and suffering, through a rainy season. A monsoon of tears. “At least, not from you.”

“You think that’s why I came?” he asks, frowning.

“You looked like my father when I did something to disappoint him. You made me ashamed of myself. I didn’t like it.”

“I
made you ashamed of yourself?”

I snatch my shoe from his stone throne. Slipping it on, I start to walk again. Toward where, I don’t know. Mathieu tails me, always a pace behind. I can feel his eyes watching me. We chase the distance of çle de la Cité in the silence and cold, my crushed toes and hyperextended insoles screaming their consternation at my bedrock belief that I can outrun my problems.

Finally, we arrive at Le Pont Neuf, that “new bridge” which is so famously old. Lovers and drunks drape themselves likemollusks across its bow. None of them looks at us, and I, too late, remember Mathieu’s scar. Hoping that he will not think the destination deliberate, I trip down the adjacent stairs, still intent on protecting him in a flimsy way from what he is daily confronted with. There is a stingy card of quay below the bridge, and I halt next to a banged-up dinghy thudding hollowly against the riverbank. The two of us—a hot atom hurling through this particle accelerator called Paris—shiver in the shadows and fog. Mathieu turns so that his chin is held level to the water, which ripples in anticipation.

The moment is pregnant with mystery and possibility. I take a deep breath … and blow out. I’m not equal to it right now. My grandmother—or was it Socrates?—once said that when your feet hurt, you hurt all over. Mine throb.

“So do they all hate me, then?” I ask, wrapping myself in a hug.

“Who?”

“You know, your mortified friends.”

“I think they were puzzled at first.” Staring at the ground, Mathieu rubs his jaw.

“And then?”

“Henri told me that if I didn’t go after you, he would.” He looks up at me and smiles.

I return the smile. “I think I’m a little in love with Henri.”

He nods. “It is a good thing I came, then.”

“Listen, Mathieu,” I say, taking a tentative step closer to him, “the whole Bush thing was four years ago. I feel bad about it, yes. But I didn’t order the bombs to drop. So let’s not go down that slippery path of endless abstraction. In fact, I started regretting my vote not five minutes later. It became a different world about that fast, and there’s not a chance in hell I would have voted for the guy once the rules changed.”

“You think this is why I am upset?”

I stop my advance. “Isn’t it?”

Mathieu bends down to pick up a stone. He judges the heft of it in his hand, like the old man playing
pétanque
on that sundrenched afternoon, all our days ago. He rises and hurls it across the dark film of water.
Onetwothree
, it’s quickly swallowed. He sighs and finds me again. “Daisy, I am not thrilled that you helped elect a buffoon to the highest office in your land. But that was four years ago. I have no claim on your past. It is your future, our future, that distresses me.”

I grow still. The water laps behind me. “I might come back.”

He shakes his head and looks away. “I might not be waiting for you.”

Stung, I ask, “Will Nicole become the new face on the wall?”

“No.” He hesitates before meeting my eyes. “But there will likely be another.”

I turn toward the river, and step into the dingy, which whimpers under my weight. A small French flag that’s seen too many revolutions rises from the stern. I sit down. The air under the bridge is loamy with mildew, dead leaves. It is the sort of stink that rises to the roof of your mouth and stews. I drift in place, the boat struggling to float away, while the dock line maintains a toothy grip.

“I see. I’m replaceable.”

“We are all replaceable, Daisy. In death, and in life.”

I look up sharply. “Your mother was replaceable?”

Mathieu grimaces. “Sure.”

“Is that why you went to see her as she was dying? To tell her that she was replaceable?”

His hands find his hair as he retreats into the shadows.

“You did go see her, didn’t you?”

“I have said as much.”

“You have actually said very little about it.”

“I have said enough, Daisy!” The explosion of his voicereverberates under the bridge. A stranger with an overcoat approaches, meets my eyes, and hurries away.

I look down, pressing my lips together. The boat groans. Running my hand along the starboard side, I feel the crevices of a small plaque. Of course. Everything in Paris comes with a plaque. I squint to make out the lettering:
Caneton 505: 1954
.

Nineteen fifty-four. Old for a boat.

But young for a mother.

I tighten my grip on the boat’s side. “Wait. Your mother was born in 1954, right?”
Flora Goodwin: 1954-2004
.

“So?” his voice, much quieter now, answers.

“So she would have been only twenty-two when she had you then.”

Numbers never lie.

“What is your point, Daisy?”

He must be the black shape flattened against the armpit of the bridge, and so I speak toward that. “You told me she had your sister at twenty-two.”

The shape becomes as still as the stone supporting it.

It all becomes clear, even in the darkness. “Your sisters are half sisters, and younger than you. You have met them maybe a few times in your life. You probably even hated them a little.” A small motorboat cruises by, bright, then loud, like lightning begging the thunder. Mathieu is briefly illuminated in the fury, and his eyes drill a child’s fear. The boat passes, and he fades to black, while the waves rock my cradle and strain the line. “But not as much as you hated your mother for choosing them over you. For wanting more kids when she already had one she left behind.”

“Please, Daisy. You sound so melodramatic.”

I recall my knee dive in Cleveland, that strange prayer which spun a stranger story:
I don’t know how to be alone
. I wasn’t
meant
to be alone. I was meant to be twice as powerful, twice as loved. I have searched most of my life for that missing half, that fated Gemini, the ghost in my ear. When, really, I was lucky to even be alive.

Mathieu has been searching, too. But what he found never made him feel lucky. “The truth is often ridiculous, Mathieu,” I say. “But never melodramatic.”

His face emerges from the darkness. His cheeks look wet, but it could be the gloaming kiss of moonlight reflecting off the water. The story spills from him as he approaches. “My mother became pregnant with me when she was still performing. She never knew who the father was. When the man who came to be my father fell in love with her, she told him it was his. He believed her, until he saw me. Then he knew. I suppose a father always knows. But he loved her too much to let on. And so he accepted me, let her think he believed her. When she told him she was returning to America, that she had come to hate France, and him, he fought for custody to exact his revenge and make her stay. He never thought she would just fold and leave in the middle of the night.”

Mathieu closes his eyes, swaying slightly. “I dreamed that night she left me in the Louvre. And every painting, down each endless hallway I chased, was Delacroix’s
Orphan Girl”

Mathieu opens his eyes and silently climbs into the boat with me. Shedding his coat, he wraps it around my shoulders and takes the bow. The boat is so small and neat, our knees almost touch. I can smell his scent on the coat and tuck it tightly around me.

“My father was stuck with me. Though he was successful in ignoring me for most of my life, I knew he hated me. It was only when I became old enough to be useful to him that he started to bother with me again.”

I touch his knee. “What do you mean, useful?”

His head falls into his palms. “He enlisted me to help him with the paintings. Always minor things, like assisting him with his correspondence, keeping abreast of the market, setting up quiet auctions. I was desperate for the fool to like me, to pay attentionto me. When it began to dawn on me what he was doing, what he had done, he told me that he would take a paternity test and disown me, if ever I told anyone.” He rubs his brow across his arm, and I lay my hand upon his crown.

“He was the only family I knew. And yet he hated me, for reminding him of her.”

“What did you do?”

He sits back and looks at me wearily. “Any family is better than none. So I shut up and did as I was told. Even when I left, at eighteen, and severed all ties with him, I never gave him up to the authorities. He was my only connection to her.”

I bury deeper into his coat, my brow wrinkling. “What do you mean? I thought you saw her every couple of years.”

“The only occasion when I saw my mother after she left was her funeral. She looked” —he grimaces—“quite different.”

My mouth falls open, but I cannot speak. He stares past my shoulder as laughter rains down like shimmering coins from up above.

“She only wanted to see me once she knew she was dying. During the last year, she plied me with letters, including my sisters’ photographs, sent American tourists to support me, and repeatedly phoned. I stopped answering after a while.”

I press my cheek to my palm. “But Mathieu, why?”

“It was too late to take responsibility for what she did.” Mathieu finds my eyes. “Given enough time, love flips to hate. I, too, wanted revenge, you see.”

My eyes do not spare him, even as my heart splits in two. “And you were proud to take responsibility for that?”

He smiles, briefly. “Not proud, no. Yet I wouldn’t change anything, Daisy. It was on my way home from the airport that I met you.”

I shake my head a little, checking my tears. “That is a sorry kind of fate.”

He laughs harshly and covers his face with his hands. “You and fate. Why, Daisy, do you insist on believing in fairy tales?”

Because there must be a reason why I was born, why I snuck through. That hole in my heart was put there to be filled.

After a long silence, I clear my throat. “What are we to do?”

He peels his hands away. “This is not for me to decide.”

“I still love you.”

He smiles sadly. “Yes.”

“We could just push ourselves off, sail away.” I imagine us shaking Paris off like a stiff corset, chasing the flat and free horizon.

“Just say the word,” he replies. Removing a sign from under his legs, he adds, “This boat is ours.”

I cannot read the French but understand this part: €200, and the phone number scrawled underneath. What do you know? It’s cheaper than the bloody shoes.

A wind sweeps under the bridge, stirring the dead leaves, our hair, and the shaggy flag behind me. It flares, reaches out, and brushes my neck with its loose threads. Turning around, I pluck its mast from the stern, rolling it between my palms as I consider his offer. The French tricolor:
Liberté, Égalité, et Fraternité
. Red, white, and blue.

And yet, I cannot help but miss our stars.

The shoes I will give to Irene. Everything else I will keep.

I place the flag across my lap and clasp my hands over its faded colors. Looking tenderly at him, I shake my head slightly. “I’m no good here, Mathieu.”

He takes my knee with his hand, in reassurance. “It only takes time, my love.”

I touch his hand as gently as I know how. “I’m no good with
you
, Mathieu.”

He blinks once, and falls silent, before taking possession of his hand again.

We sit like that for several minutes, rocking in our boat. I want to say more, to explain, but I resist. If I talk, he will talk. I am as weak as an infant and too capable of being swayed.

I don’t remember who is the first to fall, but we find each other on our knees. I bury my face in his neck. His mouth finds my hair. We remain like so for minutes, or lifetimes. We don’t want to let go. We understand what letting go means.

A modestly sized
bateaux mouche
slices under the bridge like a scalpel cutting through a womb, so terribly close that, if I squint into its klieg lights, I can make out the couples eating on the other side of the glass. A large man with a crew cut catches sight of our embrace and gives Mathieu a bawdy thumbs-up. I laugh, or sob, and pull away, cupping Mathieu’s cheek in my hand.

“I just remembered something.”

“What did you remember?” he asks, softly.

“My first day here, in my own
bateaux mouche
. They told us that legend of the kiss.”

“Which legend?”

“The one about kissing under Le Pont Neuf. How you make a wish at the same time as you kiss your lover, without telling each other what the wish is? Then, within that same year, your wish will come true.”

“You’re thinking about Pont-Marie, and I don’t believe—”

“—so anyway, I think it’s a great idea.” Looking into those bright, skeptical eyes, I do my best to smile, and ask, “Don’t you, Mathieu?”

He
must
believe. There will be hope.

Mathieu sighs. Then nods in something like defeat.

I’ll never forget this: his head, dipping from the shadows into a finger of moonlight, tilts to the side, while his lips (those lips, the very ones which have convinced me, without intent, to chase the god in Art) separate with a slight
puh
. Then his breath and mine, hot mixing with cold.

The Paris fever.

We kiss.

He is gone from the boat before my lips can taste his absence.

I look up at him, from my knees, alone again.

“You’re in the stern,
mon petit chou.”

His eyes flash his meaning, while his hand holds the umbilical of the dock line.