Plum Blossoms in Paris (7 page)

Primed, I dash into the adjacent gallery, stuffed with Monet’s paintings of the Rouen cathedral. I look for my stranger’s brown blazer among the shock of color, but this isn’t his room. I cross into the next theater, where the swirling genius of Van Gogh rocks me violently. I am reminded of my hair cells back in Choi’s lab, the way they startle upon stimulation. This is how I feel. Distorted. Dizzy. Charged with potential. Van Gogh’s self-portrait pulses with a radiant turmoil. He was descending into insanity at the time. I am ascending into euphoric madness. Different thing, altogether. Him, estranged from his world; me, running to engage it. But the intensity of feeling is something we share. Falling and Rising. Passions of movement.

There they are—the American couple, the Fannies. They have seized one of the benches for their cage match, the woman gesticulating wildly. I look frantically for my brown blazer, but his is not among the palette of colors. Bullying my way through the crowd, I arrive at the couple’s side, desperate enough to interrupt the woman’s tirade. Their pettiness almost destroys my momentum. Almost. She looks at me crossly, and a bubble of my laughter escapes into the air.

“I’m sorry, but where is the tour guide who was with you just now?”

“Excuse me?” she asks, so archly I’m surprised her eyebrows don’t leap off her face. She means to make this difficult.

I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry to be a nuisance. But I need to talk to him about something.”

Her husband pipes up. “Lilla dismissed the poor fellow. Wasn’t as impressed with her insights as she needed him to be.” He ignores Lilla’s glare. “He headed that-a-way,” the man says, pointing toward an exit.

“Thanks,” I shout back, forgetting them and their old, tired ways. I am so young. My youth pounds like horses’ hooves in my ears, urging me on. A frowning guard shushes me, but I turn and smile at him, jerking my shoulders up in that goofy confessional way people inflict on others when they don’t feel responsible for their actions. Poor fellow thinks I’m taunting him. He’s got lovely English ears that will turn red in a few seconds.

The exit dumps me into a no-man’s-land, a cross section of confusion, and I hesitate. Stymied, the horses halt. There is a spacious café to be considered on my left, more rooms across the way for the post-impressionists to display their increasingly abstract works, and an escalator rolling to my right. I’m not sure. With sweaty palms, I grip the railing of a landing that grants a sweeping view of the museum’s lower floor. It is a grand space, washed by light. Reminiscent of a Roman cathedral, the soaring, coffered ribs of the old train station alternate with arches of tinted glass, slants of sunlight spilling across a share of the marble sculptures below, which burst into reverent detail. This one humbles herself before God, while that one stretches toward ecstasy, the distance between them heightening the drama of their appeals, and inventing new relationships. The clean, art-deco lines, and terraced space, recall a gutted archaeological dig, where priceless treasures have been unearthed by raw, determined hands. But it is still dead air they breathe. My breaths are shallow but warm.

Quickly, I scout the long promenade below. There are masses of humanity down there, and too many wear brown. Yet instantly I spot him, brown hair and blazer, pulling away from me. Perhaps it is the fact that he moves purposefully, while the others linger. My heart is squeezed by the idea that I will lose him. He is already near the exit, his steady stride stretching the distance between uslike a rubber band about to snap. Damn his speed. Must he be that anxious to leave, knowing he’s left me behind? My foolish expectations winter with the chill at his back, and I start to wilt. There, he’s gone. My grip on the rail slackens, and I go limp.

“Promise me you will not jump.”

The shock of him, standing at my elbow and wearing a crooked smile. I immediately start to hiccup.

“Your jacket”—
hic
—“is gray!”

“Your eyes are blue.”

The French, of course, are famous for their seductive powers. One should really keep her guard up around them. He didn’t, after all, admit that my eyes are a
pretty
shade of blue, or some variation on the theme. It doesn’t matter. He could have said my eyes were the color of dried cement, and the same giddy glee would have throbbed through my bones. It is the look, not so much the words. And that look is international.

“I am Mathieu,” he says, extending his hand. He moves toward me but stops. I can tell he’s not sure about the cheek kissing—that I, as an American, might think it too forward. This consideration touches me, even as I lament the absence of those lips upon my ready cheek.

“Daisy,” I say, looking down.

I take his hand, waiting for a muffled guffaw, an ironical smile. But his hand is warm, and he presses mine lightly, letting it linger.

“Daisy, would you like to share a cup of coffee with me?”

Surprised, I look up. Our hands are still clasped, each reluctant to let go. He gestures toward the café behind us.

And that is when I start loving Paris.

W
e went for coffee. We stayed for lunch.

I fell in love with him in fits and starts, like a woman laboring with birth. Big moves forward, small steps back. Doubt crept in, until he gave me reason to push it away. By the end, I had delivered myself to him.

The café at the Musée d’Orsay is extraordinary. An enormous, bifurcated room, it’s welded together by the steel beams from the former rail station, its impregnability somewhat softened by the stucco walls, wicker chairs, and radiant, globed flowers. The most remarkable detail is the original rail clock, twenty feet in diameter and cobbled of steel and glass, which dominates the far wall, allowing the rooftops of Paris to filter through. From my seat, I see the white domes of the Sacré Coeur—The Sacred Heart—perched atop Montmarte.

We fumble for conversation, our bold heat blistering into a more temperate self-consciousness. But once committed to a roller coaster, it’s impossible to get off. And so things progress. I fall in love with him three times over the next two hours, out of love twice. This math is child’s play.

Cupid’s first arrow, gold-tipped, finds its target:
happens around fifteen minutes into our conversation. He tells me his mother recently died. Startled, I offer my condolences in that clumsy, lacking way people do when they don’t know the deceased, and barely know the living. He shakes me off, smiling tightly. Says he never cared much for his mother. Calls her a phony. I’m uncertain how to respond to this. Intuiting my doubt, he explains: his mother never had time for him and his three older sisters, abandoned them all when Mathieu was six and sick with the (the English terminology stumps him, until he mimes frantic itching, and I, giggling, intervene)
chicken pox
, leaving for New York City, and later, to Los Angeles, to try her hand at acting. Someone once told her that she looked like a dark Catherine Deneuve, but could speak English as artfully as Sarah Bernhardt. Evidently, this was exaggerated. He saw her a handful of times after that, the visits separated by years, not months, until the sharp pain dulled into an ache and then exhausted into indifference, like she was just some woman whose face appeared a little altered each time he met her again.
Céline
.

At last she succumbed to lung cancer; he could not remember an occasion when she wasn’t “sucking on a cigarette.” She even smoked at the very end, while her lungs growled for oxygen. She was buried on a Thursday, and he did not cry. His sisters, his father, all cried. He wondered why they should. For Mathieu, she was an empty abstraction of maternity by this point, like those pastel moms of Mary Cassatt’s down the hall—pretty, but illusory, for what could the childless Cassatt know about motherhood, really?

I do not fall in love with him as he talks about his mother’s death, or the little boy he once was. These facts say something about a person’s history, but they do not reveal the man.

Rather, I fall in love with him some minutes later, when he takes off his jacket and a pack of cigarettes spills from his breastpocket like an accidental confession. Women’s cigarettes. The pink label, slims. He tries to convince me I didn’t see them, with a sleight-of-hand trick that could fool no one. He continues to drink his coffee, his hand shaking slightly.

He kept her cigarettes.

The arrow pricks the skin:
he has (gut-wrenching present tense) a girlfriend. He tells me this in the manner of someone relaying he owns a dog: incidental, as an aside, without consideration for the way my (startled blue) eyes are shining out at him, and ignoring the umbrage his right foot, shod in brown leather, is taking with my inner ankle, caressing it so gently that I am afraid to move, like it is a skittish cat I might frighten away. Suddenly he is a cad, and I am a foolish girl, too easily turned on by an accent and the mawkish hope of a foreign love. Cupid’s just another cherub, after all. I yank my foot away and sit up smartly, attempting to reclaim the self-respect I, naked in relief, relinquished the second I hiccupped my delight at seeing him again.

“Your girlfriend.”

He is surprised. “Pardon?” He has been recounting a rather charming story about a
boulangerie
near him, articulating, with great ardor, what constitutes a good baguette, emphasizing the caramelized exterior and the yeasty honeycomb within. I thrilled to myself,
How marvelous! The man is even passionate about bread!
But then he recounted how his
lady friend
worked there, concocting pastries, which she slipped to him for free.

I clap my hand over my mouth.

“Daisy? Are you well?”

I wave him off, nodding. “I didn’t know.”

“Did not know what?” he asks, confused.

“That you had a girlfriend.” The tears do not fall but are poised for betrayal.

He starts to laugh. He rests his chin on his hand and laughs at me. My nerves, so splayed and painful of late, cannot withstand such open malice. I immediately hate him.

“I’m glad this is so amusing to you.”

Mathieu sobers and takes my hand. “I said
lady
friend. Not girlfriend. I have a friend, and she is a lady who works at the
boulangerie
. She is also sixty-four and weighs one hundred kilos.” He puffs out his cheeks. “She really loves her work.”

I laugh with relief. I’m embarrassed because now he knows. I didn’t fall out of love with him: I was just preparing myself for being in love with a cad.

Deeper it (and I) plunge:
he wants to order my lunch for me. He looks serious, but uncertain, like all American females are uber-feminists who become offended at the slightest hint of male forwardness. In truth, back home, I might have hesitated, wondering if it was a power play. Here, I willingly give Mathieu lead. He pores intently over the menu before commiserating with the distracted waiter, ordering something I do not understand. It could be beef brains. I don’t care. When he’s nervous, he looks like a schoolboy, playing at grown-up things.

All bent askew:
he wants to know everything about me, sitting back in his chair with the languorous expectation of a student at the start of class. His directness flusters me, since my first impressions of the French people have led me to conclude that personal forwardness is a little vulgar here. Yesterday, for example, I happily told the front desk guy, who was reviewing a pictography of the American West, about my trip to Yellowstone when I was twelve. I thought my personal recollection of Old Faithful might be illuminating for him. He regarded me skeptically for a moment before interrupting to ask if I “required more towels.”

But then, Mathieu isn’t France.

When I tell him that I’m studying to be a scientist, his face falls, just barely, but perceptibly. That little line between his eyes is worried. When he presses me for details, I give them, and thelittle line deepens, like a crevice in his understanding. How could the thoughtful woman reading
The Razor’s Edge
on the train share an identity with the laboratory troll? We look so much alike, I understand his confusion. But he cannot know that I faked the book—that the nerd is nearer to reality.

“So you look at tiny projections in dead people’s ears?” he asks, leaning back in his chair.

“Dead turtles.”

“So you look at tiny projections in dead
turtles’
ears?”

“Well, that’s a layman’s explanation,” I retort. “I would argue that we conduct experiments to further our knowledge and understanding of crucial biological processes.”

He rubs his jaw. “And these experiments will better people’s lives someday?”

“That’s the idea.”

Mathieu leans in. “In what way?”

Something shrinks inside me. It’s not a question I’ve encountered before. The pursuit of something tangible, like a degree, and the comfortable future it promises, is enough for those nice, tactful souls who have bothered to ask about my studies. Most, in fact, are impressed, or bored, enough by the coupling of the words
neuroscience
and
graduate studies
to let it lie. Not Mathieu. He wants to know the
meaning
of my work. And I don’t know what to tell him.

I smile. “It’s complicated.”

He returns the smile. “I have time.”

Lunch comes. It’s some kind of bisque, followed by
Tuna au Poivre
, but I barely taste it, too mired in explaining my work to Mathieu. I tell him about the luckless multitudes afflicted with Meniere’s disease, that singular condition of the inner ear that causes vertigo, and make outrageous statements about the serendipity of scientific research. I point, with unearned self-importance, to Marie Curie as an example. She’s French—through marriage, anyway. He should understand.

Mathieu swallows and lays down his fork. “This is all good to know. But tell me one more thing, and then I will leave it alone.”

“What?”

His eyes are dark, almost threatening. “When you are secreted away in your lab, looking through your microscope, does your face illuminate the way it did when I saw you before the Manet, or are you doing someone else’s work for him and pretending to yourself and others that it is enough?”