Plum Blossoms in Paris (8 page)

His presumption is intoxicating, galling. Like a stolen kiss deserving of a slap. You hate him for it, but then, what a kiss to land.

“You don’t know me.”

He raises his glass of wine and takes a leisurely sip. “Not yet,” he murmurs.

What an ego. I should stand up, thank him for lunch, and leave. I really should.

But, pierced …
I stay seated. I could argue that a strange force pins me to my chair, like Venus on the waves, smoking my blood, stealing my breath whenever he looks at me with that heady potion of playfulness and sincerity. That I remain, out of a sense of duty, to finish a shared lunch and the first conversation I’ve had in a week. That I want to watch, from my eyelet view, the sun pulling the gloss from the matte of pewter rooftops stacking the Paris skyline. The passing shadows through the old clock are the only indication that we have not managed an end to time, as the other diners in the café, our scenery, come and go, faceless, colorless next to our spectral display. They traverse the dead hallways of Degas’ soulless ballerinas when they have this dynamic
pas de deux
before them! Silly people. Look at Mathieu’s eyes crinkle like crescent moons when he laughs at my father’s reaction to my coming here; how his jaw flexes with feeling when I recall my mother’s words, urging me on; and finally, how he grips his fork at their shared insistenceof a sojourn to Shakespeare & Co. What fool could stomach dead geniuses when this brilliant, living man sits before her!

I stay because I am starting to feel real again.

Mathieu informs me that he is a freelance tour guide. He wants to be my guide for the next—and here he breaks off, a cloud passing over the clock. The bubble of our delusion wavers. But we are not ready to invite endings.

He wants to be my tour guide. Mine.

“This is what I will do. You have, by now, transformed Paris into a long list of places and things to check off, have you not?” He eyes my bag under the table, suspicious of Rick’s presence.

I nod sheepishly.

“You have been hiding out in McDonald’s, tourist blights, avoiding places that might require a passing understanding of French.” He says it like it’s true, and I don’t refute it. “This deadens the city. It puts you on the defensive, Daisy, like Paris is something to be overcome, not enjoyed.” Even though he’s lecturing, there is still profound joy at his saying my name—that horrid, hated name—like it’s familiar living. “Paris is, above all, a sensual city. So this is what we will do.” He sits up and looks deeper into my eyes. “We will drown ourselves in each sense and suck on its many pleasures until we are overcome and wasted on them. One day we will allow for the sound of Paris, another for the taste, still another for the vision of Paris … you understand.” He smiles, a slow wonder. “By the end of each day, we will be so intoxicated that we will stumble to find our feet again. And then we will awaken and fill ourselves once more.”

What do I do? What does any drunken person do when given a hand? Take it, and hold on for dear life.

We finally end our lunch because he has an engagement. An English couple. In town for two days, they have two things on their list: where Princess Di died and the Eiffel Tower. We laugh, a couple of contemptible bastards.

I have seen the Eiffel Tower. Yet at no time, while perched on its lofty lip, did I feel as elevated as I do now, darting down the littered stairs of the nearest metro station, birthing a hard seed of hope in my heart.

That moonless night, I lie atop a bed that is not my own, listening to the traffic whip down a street whose name I do not feel confident to pronounce, thinking not of Mathieu, born of a country that still feels strange, but of Andy. For when one, sober and alone, reflects on the drunkenness that comes before, there is doubt that any of it could have happened. Mathieu is still a dream. A lovely one, but hazy, and too wondrously fleeting. His eyes, so clear to me before, have faded to black. I cannot recall if he is right-or left-handed. I do not know his last name.

Andy Templeton I will not forget. Our sturdy seed laid roots and flowered perennially. If the blooms have withered and died with time—victims of too many fallow seasons—I can still press the dried petals to my heart and catch a last whiff of their fading scent. They smell like home.

After tossing and turning until even the traffic slumbers, I call his apartment. It is nine his time. He will be doing something predictable and Andy-like: studying, fixing a late dinner of jarred sauce and rotini after coming home from the library. I do not know what I will say to him, only that I must hear his voice across the ocean that divides us.

He does not answer.

I curl around my hurt and try not to think of what there is to do in Cambridge, on a starry night, for a newly single premed student sniffing for fresh memories.

I
am daunted the next morning. My eyes are wide, like a rabbit’s, in the mirror. My hair empathizes by inventing a new part. Exasperated, I pull the shag back into my trained ponytail, impatient with the time and devotion it takes to look pretty. Oh, I want to look pretty for Mathieu. Not presentable or well kept, but undeniably pretty, wildly feminine—dazzling. I just don’t know how to go about it. I flirt with the idea of makeup but abandon the notion when I check the time. It’s 8:30, and I have no time to run out and purchase makeup. Contenting myself with lip gloss—
Strawberry Smack!
—I feel much like the Pentecostal teenager who begs her mother for this sad consolation. I shrug at my reflected image, and she shows a ready enough surrender. There is nothing we can do about the veiny saddlebags beneath my eyes or the suspicious white mass erupting on my chin.
C’est la vie
. It is the same strange face Mathieu stared into for two hours yesterday, without finding it entirely repulsive. I cannot help but think, through some oversight on his part, that he liked what he saw, whiteheads and all.

He is on his way, even now. Somewhere, in this sprawling city whose surface I have but scratched, a man makes his way toward this hotel, with plans for me, for a tentative hypothesis called “Mathieu and Daisy.” The thought both tantalizes and distresses. My heart thuds like a warning in my chest, reminding me of its fresh injury. I cross the room to my window, throwing it open to lean across the wrought-iron bars, and scan the street below. I can barely make out the café on the corner to my left, where I dined alone last night, braving the French menu, and scarier still, the omnipotent French waiter, for the first time. I cautiously attempted a few words of French (which I have been studying diligently at night, because MTV Europe can only be tolerated, for its kitsch factor, on mute) and was rewarded with a look that, if not entirely equitable, could not be labeled contemptuous. I probably would have softened the stiff dignity of the fellow more if I had not asked for a Coke and pizza margherita. But baby steps were all I could contemplate. Today is the plunge.

The day is breezy and cool, the sun a cipher behind its shield of clouds. The bustle of the people, the start-and-stop crush of cars on the Rue des Écoles are oblivious to the sun’s absence, or my plaintive form, clad in little-girl pajamas, spying on them. They simply scurry on. I am struck by how superfluous I am to the scene—at best, an extra in a long-running play—tucked away in this tiny hotel room, my money the umbilical of a slight attachment.

I have aborted all the others.

Before today, the condition of being alone bred loneliness. But now, there is a reckless freedom fluttering through me, around me, tickling the curtains, coaxing the hair on my flesh to stretch and stiffen like new grass. It’s only just licking the surface, yes, but, given time, will spread with a wildfire’s imprecision to consume that stagnant isolation, the great void I’ve carried (in the pit of my stomach, like an absent meal) since receiving Andy’s e-mail a lifetime ago. Something happened in my sleep last night, and isnow upon me, with the warmth and breath of another body. No longer witness to the outside view, I watch the film of my fear, like a cataract, being lifted from my eyes, the burdens of regret and sorrow lanced by a wayward breeze blowing through my window on a Paris morning.

Rebuffed by my backward appeal to Andy, and alert to the spectrum of possibilities shimmering ahead with Mathieu, some dormant antennae has curled around to take proper notice and recoiled at the state of dependency it found. To rely upon another person, no matter how dear, for my happiness will not work for me. I cannot live like half of a person. Yesterday served as an alarm, as I so eagerly strung myself between the two men. I have come too low. Like a snake chafing itself along a rock before shedding, I have rubbed up against my neediness, until it nicked and scorned me into action. This new skin—raw, but my own—feels like an old welcoming, a reassertion of some primal color. A thousand windows have opened, and a thousand winds may come. I have time to welcome them all.

Yet Mathieu comes now, like a tornado.

His eyes, clear to me in the unambiguous light of day, promised it at our departure, as he punctuated his intention with two kisses on my cheeks that, foolishly, made me not wash my face last night. And so I detach myself from the strange pull of the window and busy myself with the task of getting dressed, pulling a pair of dark jeans from the top of my suitcase, still unpacked, and sliding my newly shaved legs into them. I wrap my torso in a sweater the color of Cezanne’s limes, and new grass, and consider myself absently in the oblong mirror. I have a long, lean look, my hips flaring slightly in the cinched jeans, my chest nearly unconscious. My eyes are not wounded, but defiant. I pull my black hair from its circular prison and shake it out. It is a little unruly, but I leave it.

Outside the window, the sun yawns itself awake and starts to burn.

I have to smile when I see him. He looks like an American caricature of a Frenchman, wearing dark slacks, a snug, horizontally striped shirt, the iconic black beret a jaunty saucer atop his head. Put some mime makeup on his face, and I’d throw some change at his feet, just to keep him away.

I had planted myself outside the Hotel California St. Germain to wait for him, hands clenched like clams inside my pockets. It occurred to me for the hundredth time that I know nothing about this person who’s coming. Except that he is late. I was trying to decide if I felt disappointed, or relieved, when his figure caught my eye, striding across the Rue Montagne Ste-Geneviève. I am amused and mortified by his costume. If people should think he’s serious—

“Bonjour,
Mademoiselle
Daisy,” he greets me, seizing my shoulders and kissing me lightly on both cheeks. I am like a doll on delay, only coming to life in time to pucker at the air. He smells sharp and masculine, and for a moment, I have to fight the animal inclination to lean forward and breathe him in.

Laughing to cover for my embarrassment, I ask, “What’s with the getup, Pierre?”

He steps back, looking down in confusion. “What do you mean?”

Oh. Jesus.

“Do I not fit your ideal of the romantic French bohemian?”

I offer a small prayer of thanks. “I think you forgot the little moustache,” I retort, “and the insufferable look of self-importance.”

It is only the second time I make him laugh. I am determined to hold my own today. Yesterday I was a schoolgirl, his little Madeline, whom he led by the hand. I like his boldness. As long as it doesn’t defeat my own.

He removes the beret, spinning it on his finger like an American teenager with a basketball, before stuffing it into his back pocket. He says, “You would be amazed at the additional gratuities I receive in this outfit.” He grabs a sleek black sweater from a knapsack slung across his body and smiles wickedly. “Particularly from American professors on my famous ‘Lost Generation’ tour. I think I am fulfilling a sort of fantasy for them.”

Mathieu sets his bag down and pulls the sweater over his torso. I am sorry for the lost definition of his arms, which have the pleasing utility of a musician or painter.

“Probably a little bit of a homoerotic one,” I assent, admiringly. The fact is, though he had looked like a cartoon of a Frenchman, it was an appealing portrait. I can imagine men like my father getting a kick out of it, almost against their will. There is something in Americans that wants to stereotype the French, for good or ill. We are willing to acknowledge their superiority in cooking, matters of style and art (once upon a time, anyway), the staging of mass street protests, and staying thin, if we can publicly brutalize them for their snootiness, declining world influence, massive bureaucracy, the late Vichy government, and, well, their snootiness. It’s similar to the strain of anti-elitism that has swept like a pandemic of polemical hand-wringing across America during the last decade, whenever anyone sprinkles talking-point words like
Ivy League
and
East Coast intellectualism
throughout a tiresome tirade. The French have a reputation for spawning philosophers with the startling frequency that we manufacture business moguls. Words,
French
words, and not the pan-Union euros, are the real currency of this country, maintaining her solvency, while in America, money serves that purpose more than satisfactorily, thank you very much and come again, sir.