Plum Blossoms in Paris (4 page)

Rejuvenated, and more generous toward a country that isn’t too proud to own its nook of global commerce, I easily find the train. It’s about a thirty-minute trip into the heart of Paris, so once I exchange money and board, I lean back into my nubby seat contentedly. Not wanting to look like a tourist with Rick on my lap, I pretend to read
The Razor’s Edge
(the back says something about Paris and, curiously, India), which I tossed into my carry-on at the last moment. It’s about eight in the morning, three in the a.m. Cleveland time. I slept precious little on the flight, wasn’t even tired until touchdown. Restless to be removed from The Great Accuser, I squeezed closer to the window, wearily trying to follow
The Apartment
, which, surprisingly, was the second selection in the double feature. Damn if Shirley MacLaine didn’t once look kind of cute.

My reflection in the train window informs me that I am not so fortunate. I suppose a physical description is owed, though Isquirm at the task. The vanishing night—that evaporated time, now swirling above the dark Atlantic waters—has wounded my face. It appears sunken, a little shadowy, with the deeply set, unspectacular blue eyes retreating under an awning of bangs and unruly eyebrows. The vertical thrust of my nose—which my father terms
aquiline
, but about which I have my doubts—and chin, admittedly saucy, strikes a jagged line in a more emphatic version of myself. All the softness is stripped away. A long glob of black hair hangs limply from the hallmark scrunchy, though wisps break free to tickle my neck.

It’s not a pretty picture. In fact, I’ve rarely been described as such. Striking, yes. Arresting—gee, thanks. Someone, a colleague of my father’s, once called me
handsome
—the horror. As a child, they told me I had a face full of potential: all it needed was time to blossom. I fervently pinned my girlish hopes on those celebrity anecdotes about how gawky and hideous they were once upon a time … back in the day …
like, really! …
envisioning when I, too, could screech and cringe when my mom slyly dragged out old class photos for my friends to laugh at. I am still waiting.

My face chugged along in much the same manner: with an excess of creativity, and not enough discretion to know when to stop. It is better when I smile. My mouth is my best feature—generous, with a fuller upper lip that arcs downward at the corners. Hence I have a tendency to look sulky, even peevish. But when I smile, the corners bow, and my teeth burst forth with radiant, bleached brilliance, to startle the person across from me. Accustomed to my moroseness, he will often look uncertain, like he’s coaxed a smile from a sphinx.

Sometimes I think my appearance, coupled with the incongruity of my name, has afflicted my personality more than anything else. It’s as if Goldie Hawn was born looking like Susan Sontag. Whichever direction you choose to go in, sparkly orpainfully serious, you end up feeling ridiculous. Never underestimate the power of a name or a mouth that genes conspired to turn the wrong way. As Daisy Lockhart, I could never be considered quite brilliant; as the owner of a face sculpted by an anonymous, cubist hand (think Picasso’s Dora Maar), I will never be the belle of the ball, even if it’s Case Western’s Annual Biology Boogie.

The train lurches forward, and I kick my carry-on bag, which holds a hodgepodge of items in disarray. Slumping forward, I see something cylindrical and urgently green roll down the long aisle. I gasp and make a grab for it, but it’s too late. The thing lazily ricochets across the rubbery aisle, alerting everyone of my presence. Every French eye, snatched from perusing
Le Monde
or
Le Figaro
, watches its progress, as it pitches this way and that, according to the undulations of the train car. It hits an older lady on the back of her chunky heel before banking across the aisle and coming to rest against a leather bag whose owner I cannot fathom.

It’s the portable oxygen mask sealed in a canister—“The Life Force 3000”—I take on every airplane flight, in case of emergency. My father bought my first one twelve years ago, before our family flight to England, and I have purchased this one, the third, from a catalogue that sells such things as radiation suits and water filtration devices and, well, lifesaving oxygen. The third, because they expire. Oxygen doesn’t last forever, apparently.

I bolt from my seat, mortified to be an instigator. Each placid eye finds new focus, zeroing in as I stumble forward, fixing me with such a look of scientific detachment that I feel like a lab rat put through a maze for their study. At least the rat has some cheese to focus on. I compensate for my gaffe by mumbling, “Sorry, sorry,” not even capable of locating
“Perdón”
in my small French repertoire during the low tide of this second, petty humiliation of the day. I am cognizant of how overly abused the word
surreal
is in our language, but I don’t know how else to describe chasing downmy emergency oxygen mask in a train barreling toward Paris on a foggy morning, with the imperious eyes of France judging me. I almost expect that lady, the one three rows up, with the fussy white dog whose eyes bulge and whose tongue pinkly protrudes, to drink her coffee from a cup wrapped in fur. I have never seen a dog like that, much less on a public train. It’s wearing a pompadour and roosts like a hen on its silk, saffron pillow.

“Sorry. Sorry,” I repeat as I inch forward, smiling nervously, hopeful that, at the very least, they find me colorful. But nobody, not even the dog, cracks a smile. A ticket agent approaches, and I perform a soft-shoe number with him, during which he has the nerve to frown disapprovingly.
“Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur!”

Finally, I’m in range of the ridiculous object, which shrieks,
For Emergency Use Only!
I bend down to retrieve it. My outstretched fingers brush against the leather of a black satchel. The bag is soft yet firm, like the skin of a man’s shoulder. I lock onto the canister, relieved to be done with this genuflection, and start to rise.

“You bring your oxygen with you at all times, then?” a voice asks.

Half crouching, I confront a pair of almond-colored eyes, inches away. Startled, I retreat to a fully upright position. The stranger, the owner of the interested eyes, offers an amused half smile and continues, “Or is it only in France?”

Flustered, I laugh a little. I scramble to think how he knows I’m not French. There are three languages of cautionary warnings on the canister. Why couldn’t I be French?

“I could use some right now. I think I just sucked all the air out of the car.”

His face is long and intelligent, and when he looks at me, I feel like I might finally forget my name. “Do not let them fool you. Parisians are like a—how do you say?—a cult. They enjoy making outsiders, particularly Americans, feel like outsiders.” His accent isthick, but his words aren’t clunky, delivered with a natural rhythm that makes me believe he has spent a lot of time abroad, in England or the U.S.

“How did they know I’m American?” I can’t help but ask, forgetting my little performance of thirty seconds ago.

“Well, are you not?”

“Yes, but I don’t understand.” I frown. “Are we that hopelessly out of place?”

“I heard your accent; the others likely did too. And the apologizing?” He nods and offers a wry smile. “For all their occasional bluster, I find Americans to be the most insecure nation of people.”

Stung, I retort, “And I am finding the French to be the most judgmental.”

He laughs. “You are probably right about this.” His eyes flick to his book, about the size of his hand. Small, intense font. He seems finished with me.

His ready detachment curls my toes into their Keds.

The ticket agent returns to find me still making his life miserable. Turning to leave, I realize I have a book in my left hand, a finger marking some phantom place on page who-gives-a-crap. Before I can take a step, the stranger’s eyes, alerted to the book by the flapping of its pages—a soft, airy
phfft
—as I allow the leaves to run over my thumb in dissatisfaction, catch the title. I don’t know if it’s my imagination, but his face illuminates, like a child’s when entrusted with a delicious secret, and he exhales from a pocket of ecstasy I cannot fathom. Looking up at me, eyes burning, he remarks,
“
I apologize. I see the whole of your situation now.”

“And what is that?” I ask, baffled. I’m not used to people talking like this. You know, with sincerity.

His eyes are like my father’s at his best: clear and brilliant, believing the best in me. “You are no tourist.”

He turns back to his little book without another word. I am transported, without legs, back to my seat. I do not think I breathe until the train pulls into a station, and the doors part with a soft
swoosh
. He rises to exit the train, never looking back.

I watch him go.

T
he stranger on the train derails me, and I am aimless. My mind slips around a circle’s smooth edges. Forgetting the view outside my window, my first encounter with Paris is a blur, sliding past me like a silent, scratchy movie. I finally remember myself at Luxembourg station, which is on the Left Bank, adjacent to the famous Luxembourg Gardens. Catching the metro to Saint-Michel, I double back a bit. Muscles stitching from exhaustion, I lug my bags up the stairs, squinting into a patch of frail light. My eyes are not fixed for day yet. When I clear the station, I slow to look around and catch my breath, blinking like a nocturnal rodent faced with noon sun.

So this is Paris.

Adjusting the strap of my carry-on, I perform a shaky pirouette. Immediately, I hear the ruckus of automobiles, whirring like giant insects down a street that hugs the Seine. The cars are small, nothing like America’s road beasts, and mopeds whip across the lanes, squeezing past cars stalled by traffic. Across the street lies a busy sidewalk, where fathoms of people tread at this early hour. I am acutely aware, already, of the chasm in sensibility between the tourists and natives. It is not hard to pick up on. The female tourists wear tennis shoes and dawdle; the Parisians wear heels and glide.

There are bookstalls, shaded by a generous stretch of trees, lining the river embankment. They are green, metal contraptions, modest in size, and sell a hodgepodge of items, including art prints, books, some touristy stuff. It is nine o’clock, and the one to my left is just opening for business. The small, beefy man with the cigarette clenched between his lips is lifting the roof with a practiced jerk. He stares off to the right, at some shapely legs carving a path through the crowd.

My eyes follow her, and there it is: Notre Dame. I inhale sharply, the inscrutable scent of tangerine finding my nose. The hulking grace of the ancient cathedral, fastened to the Île de la Cité, is smoky around its borders, but fresh, that sharp spire, with its plaintive cross, whistling heavenward, toward leavened clouds. It’s almost enough to make you believe in fairy tales. The vision of each architect and laborer (coerced or not) who once laid a hand upon the cathedral’s façade, its survival throughout the turbulent history of the city, and the modern mythology that has sprouted through its buttresses and bell tower make Notre Dame less a house of prayer than a national shrine. Gazing at the massive, but musical, structure, one does not expect Quasimodo, back hunched, to materialize atop its buttresses. More like Victor Hugo, wearing a stern look, flouting an awesome beard, parting the clouds like God Himself, and carrying the soul of a nation in his quill.

Mumbling something, a pinch-nosed woman bumps into my shoulder, breaking the spell. I smell car fumes. I am in the way. People have somewhere to be. I think I believed that humanity would be more retiring in Paris (something about a thirty-five hour workweek), but work is work, across the planet. The same sour expressions tarring my walk to school every day, making me feelguilty I don’t share their dread, are superimposed on the faces here, like the traveling clothes of paper dolls, defying me to give a damn about a centuries-old building inspired by a religious fervor few now have the time or inclination to serve. Yet still I stare. Only I move to a more discrete location, next to an accommodating tree. After all, I grew up in a town where the oldest home was built in the nineteenth century. It’s got an historic plaque next to it and everything.

As I turn to grab the obligatory camera from my bag, a modest, green sign on the building beside me catches my eye:
Shakespeare & Co
.

The Little America of Parisian bookstores. Former home to Sylvia Beach and her den of expatriate writers and wannabes. I smile reflexively, already succumbing to the shop’s timeless draw. It must be genetic. My parents felt it, too.

I slip the camera’s strap around my neck, shifting back and forth between Notre Dame and Shakespeare’s façade, skirted by bins of bargain books. Honoring the tug of duty, I settle on the bookstore, and prepare to snap the picture.

Just like my dad told me to.

I hadn’t phoned my parents to let them know about Paris until I was already packed. It seemed more convenient that way.