by Sarah Hina
There is some guilt in being the catalyst for the mild suburban melancholy affecting them. After all, it was my cellular reality that settled the matter of their marriage, that unhappy accident replacing my mother’s jazz ambitions with serial maternal monotony. I know it was an unsatisfying improvisation for Patricia Lyons to go from jazz pianist to sometime piano teacher/child entertainer. She can make balloon animals while playing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Kids love it. They ask for The Balloon Lady at all their parties. She handles it with aplomb. Yet there is something violent about the way she twists and grinds the latex to form cute little giraffes, elephants, whatnot.
I groaned, tired of my mother’s delaying tactic. “Mom, just say it already.”
“Go.”
The word landed soft, like a benediction.
“What?” my father, undoubtedly pacing, and I both said.
“I think you should go.”
I smiled, feeling the first hint of happiness since Andy’s e-mail, because deciding on Paris hadn’t made me any less miserable than anyone who goes to the doctor, set on medicine, therapy, something palliative. You’re still sick, naked, and chafing under a piece of plastic. Only now there is a process in place for restoration. This surprise reaction from my mom, though, was different, like a tiny salve on the bigness of my hurt. I heard my dad bellow, “Are you out of your mind, Patty?” and smiled further. It was an extra gift to hear my father so confounded. He of the iron will, the steady disposition, the unbearable self-righteousness. I love him, but he’s a bit of a prick.
Her voice scooped up momentum. “Go, Daisy. You’ve been too tightly wrapped all your life. Find some freedom in Paris.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes a little. “Okay, Mom. Thanks,” I interjected, hoping to ward off a recitation of “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.”
A second phone picked up. “Daisy, your father here.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake, Stephen, let the girl be. She’s twenty-three years old.”
“Now, Patty, you’ve had your say. And I couldn’t disagree more ardently, by the way—”
“Big surprise there,” my mom squeezed in.
I sighed, deflating.
“Daisy, I would like to remind you that it is unwise to believe that one’s environment can cure unhappiness. The distance between the physical and emotional states won’t be bridged by a mere change of scenery.” He floundered a bit, coughing, and fell back on, “The grass is no greener in Paris, my dear.”
“No, Dad, it isn’t,” I said quietly, but with urgency. “But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Maybe I just want to escape, and Paris sounds nice, like a destination I can believe in right now. Why does it have to be more complicated than that?”
He pulled out the last stop. “But why Paris? Why not someplace American at least, like, I don’t know … Boston. You know, Daisy, James warned a century ago that Americans are too apt to think of Paris as the celestial city. It will only disappoint.”
I was ready for this. I must always consider this dead man’s likely opinion when debating my father about my twenty-first century life. He is like the evil stepparent who will never earn a place in my heart, but whose wisdom must be consulted, if only for show. “Dad, I’m surprised you’d say that. What about The Ambassadors?”
“W-well …” he sputtered.
Triumph. “I have it right in front of me.”
Actually, I’d googled “Paris Henry James” earlier. I got, on the thirty-second hit, a Miss Barrace saying, in The Ambassadors, “We’re all looking at each other—and in the light of Paris one sees what things resemble. That’s what the light of Paris seems always to show. It’s the fault of the light of Paris—dear old light!” Someone named little Bilham echoed, “Dear Old Paris!” I didn’t know these people, but anyone with “little” or “tiny” in front of his name must have the author’s true feelings at heart. My dad knows little Bilham well; The Ambassadors is his, and James’, favorite novel.
My mom snorted while my dad grumbled, “You will not find the Paris from The Ambassadors in the Paris of today, I assure you. Instead, you’ll find a segment of people so self-satisfied and insulated from the world around them that they’ll scorn your existence and your country.”
“Oh, honey, your dad’s just mad at Jacques Chirac for trying to spoil George W’s warmongering efforts. Pay no attention.”
My parents are Democrats, by the way. I am too, though my voting record, like many of my generation, is spotty at best. Usually, my mom and dad agree on politics, the few times it jags through the surface of their self-absorption. But my dad has a militaristic streak in him that defies easy categorization. I think it has something to do with a nostalgia for grand, just causes, like World War II. He bought those Tom Brokaw books before I could cough, “sucker.” Dad’s blustery idealism is stranger stillsince he grew up in the age of Vietnam. Yet, whenever anyone brings up 9/11 his eyes grow watery, and he has to turn away, chin weakening. When he thought Dean would win the nomination, he became so incensed by the “snot-nosed, yuppie pacifist” that he threatened to vote for Bush after all, despite their divergence on 90 percent of the issues. Now that Kerry is the man, my dad seems nervous about the fellow, like he can’t quite trust someone so like himself. Anyway, the war is still a source of tension for my parents. I try to remain informed, if detached.
“Dad, I promise not to cavort with Chirac or any elder Frenchman who wants to lecture me on American imperialism. Frankly, the subject isn’t uppermost in my mind.”
Eventually, my dad gave in. What else could he do? I suppose he could revoke his financial support and refuse to see me, but for all of my father’s drama, he’s not operatic.
This is all he could muster. “Daisy, do me a favor. Go to Shakespeare & Co. It’s a bookstore near the Seine, on the Left Bank.”
My mom inhaled deeply in consent. The waves over the telephone aligned and vibrated.
“Take your time. Look around, and buy some books by authors you’ve never heard of. Take a picture while you’re at it, and show it to me when you get back, so I can imagine I was there,” he added ruefully.
My eyes welled. My parents, on the whole, are lovable creatures. “Sure, Dad. No problem,” I said.
He sighed one last time and hung up the phone, dewy in defeat.
I was about ready to hang up too, when I heard my mom venture, “Daisy?”
“Yeah?”
“Make sure you take some condoms. French men are not always so conscientious about these things.”
“Mom!”
Really, parents are insufferable.
“And honey?”
“What?”
“Your father isn’t always wrong.”
Click.
There is a bleating of horns, and the moment discharges with the camera.
Shakespeare & Co. will have to wait. I require a hotel. Retrieving my map, I unfold the awkward sections, scanning its iconography until my arms ache. I am somewhere on the Left Bank. The city expands outward, its own universe, with me as an infant planet, choking on its stardust.
This camera suddenly feels like an albatross about the neck.
Rick likes the Latin Quarter. I like it because it’s near. I start the journey.
The sky is clearing, and though chilly, Paris feels warmer than Cleveland. The sunlight, bounced from the husks of pearly buildings, has found the darker people, including me, bundled in a black cardigan. I shuttle into the heart of the Latin Quarter through a network of arteries that seem familiar, culled from snapshot memories of the handful of films I’ve seen shot in this famous quartier. Every corner comes with a café. Most customers huddle inside, but a few hardy souls stake out positions on the sidewalk, eyeing passersby while they raise café au lait to thinly pressed lips. Croissants sit at their elbows, half neglected. A few have dogs with them, but most are alone. Contrary to the solitary diners in America, they do not strike me as lonely.
There are also bookshops, scores of them
, boutiques, and small markets hustled like afterthoughts in between, the latter advertising their bins of fruit as appealingly as Cezanne’s still lives, luring me to stop and squeeze a few. Some of it I don’t recognize, but all of it looks fresh and honest; there is none of that waxen appearance some produce has back home. Red, enticing strawberries bleached out on the inside, little teases. Apples that turn to mush in the mouth. I take a paper bag and fill it with small apples that have a red, angry skin. The shopkeeper, an older lady wearing a fringed shawl, smiles and nods as I bumble with the euros. I am so touched by the smile, by the fringe, that tears spring to my eyes. She clucks and calls me chérie. I could kiss her. I hum as I walk down the road, crossing the notorious Boulevard St. Germain refreshed and ready to embrace humanity. I bet these apples really crunch.
I turn left, down the wide, commercial Rue des Écoles, and start looking for a hotel in earnest. I want to feel settled in, take a nap. When I pass some potted evergreen plants, I pause and peer in the large glass window, where bland, unlived-in lobby furniture awaits. I step back to catch sight of what’s written on the red awning. When I spy the elegant, unlikely name in gold cursive, my jaw slackens.
Hotel California.
I laugh, feeling like Holly Golightly, and bounce slightly on my heels. Closing my eyes, I hope for a sign. None comes. Yanking the double doors open, I push my way through. We’ll see. It could be heaven or it could be hell.
“May I help you, mademoiselle?” the concierge inquires from behind the C-shaped desk. He has obviously been waiting all morning for me to enter his life.
I smile brilliantly at him. “I hope so. A room for one, please.”
“Oui, mademoiselle.” He starts punching keys on the computer. “How many nights will you be staying?”
Until I run dry. Patting the four thousand dollars’ worth of traveler’s checks in my bag, I sigh. Thank you, dear, dead Grandmother Lyons.
“Indefinitely.”
Chapter
5
I “did” the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre in the following days.
And arrived at the bleak realization that I would trade both of Venus de Milo’s missing arms for a single squeeze of my hand in smog-choked Cleveland.
But it is not my intention to push postcards.
So, lifting a lens from cinéma vérité: imagine a movie montage, running over the accordion’s wistful vibrato, tracking our heroine while she takes in the sights (do not fail to notice how achingly lonely, when lingering on charming bridges, one looks in Paris, all alone), and then imagine a slow fade to a more weary figure—let’s call her “Seasoned Daisy,” looking more languid than that fresh girl who gawked at Notre Dame, if also disappointed. For what is Paris but old, grave buildings, heavy with a history she cannot own, peopled by strangers she cannot talk sensibly with, and bittersweet with apples no more succulent than the fruit back home. And notice that this Daisy has bowing pouches under her eyes from crying herself to sleep, missing her boyfriend more than she might have in America because when you are in a new place, you wantold, dear people to make it feel like home, especially in new places where romance is like a disease you cannot catch. And finally, envision the caption under this more melancholy manifestation hailing Four days later in rain-streaked letters. Good enough.
Besides, there is the stranger on the train. And I’m not a tease.
Wednesday then. The thirteenth of October. Lucky thirteen.
I linger over my croissant and café au lait in the hotel restaurant. There are other travelers there, married couples efficiently downing the typical French breakfast, bread and coffee, the warm-up (un petit déjeuner) for the serious business of lunch, ginning up their enthusiasm so they can attack their itineraries with gusto. One fellow, an American (I just know), has it spelled out for him on his Palm Pilot. His wife, a wan forty-something with pink lipstick slashed across her lips, flakes the crust off her croissant with a fingernail and looks coolly into her steaming coffee rather than at her husband, who is likely determined to get his money’s worth for this second honeymoon that has cleaved him from his TiVo and favored Adirondack chair.
It looks like I’m not the only one struggling to match the ideal of Paris with the reality. If I had to guess (and I will), they’re both thinking that it was easier to ignore one another in a 3,000-square-foot house than locked side by side on their way to the Pompidou Centre. But the BlackBerry won’t be denied. And so they march on.
While the wife buries her nose in a copy of Elle, I rise to leave. The husband looks at my ass and wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.
My outlook is on the grimmer side of gray today. Maybe I just sat in something gross.
I take the metro to the Musée d’Orsay. I visited last Saturday and fell in love with the third floor of the museum, which was transformed from an abandoned railroad station in the late seventies. Most of the pieces on the first floor pay homage to the academicpainters, and while I dutifully scoot through the rooms, thick with Ingres and Delacroix, the idealized paintings and sculptures leave me a little flat, like a string of catwalk models too perfect to invest yourself in. Take The Birth of Venus, by Cabanel. What you have here is the soft-core porn of the age, made palatable for the masses by tapping a mythological figure, instead of a modern, breathing woman whose skin failed to achieve the same creamy luster, but in whose blemishes we might recognize ourselves.
Venus, exposed, is sprawled on the waves, affixed there by some force that has also rendered her unconscious, but oh-so fetchingly, that sinewy form and cascade of hair showing off every advantage of the female form. Lovely. I can appreciate the passive beauty there, but the appeal is corrupted by the most overused, nauseating figures in the history of painting: cherubs. A sexy woman is lying there, and it’s disturbing to see little babies with wings flying rapaciously over her, like they’re either going to pee on her or suckle her to death. It’s cowardice to paint sex like that, and then couch it in cutesy, Rococo crap. This is a painting destined for wall calendars. Put it somewhere between Anne Geddes and Maxim. And yet this was the painting in the 1863 Salon. It’s obvious men were the judges. Sexually repressed men, boasting boners beneath their breeches.
I advance further, past the academics and realists. Here’s a real painting: Olympia, by the revolutionary artist Édouard Manet. She is also unclothed. But this woman is a prostitute. Her tight, compact form, propped up on pillows, is angular where Venus is curved, and she looks out evenly, not a little bored, scorning us a trifle for our churlish voyeurism. The brushwork, anticipating impressionism, is crude in places, but expertly employed to secure a sense of immediacy and permanence, like an entire lifetime can be held within a moment. The easy sentimentality of Cabanel, and of many of the Romantics, has been sloughed off, as Manetstakes his claim—on the tip of Olympia’s kittenish heel—as the father of modern art. Olympia finishes this floor off (she has no use for its fawning slightness), for it is she, more than any goddess or virgin, who is ascending toward impressionism, and the future we still seek.
Dodging students on a school field trip, I ride on the escalator to the third floor, where Manet’s second masterpiece, Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (Lunch on the Grass) takes center stage. Another naked woman (not a nude, which is classical) confronts us, sitting next to two clothed beatniks, deep in discussion. If Olympia’s nakedness shocked, this woman, inserted without context next to disinterested men, scandalized.
A voice crawls over my shoulder, and I prickle with some misplaced sense of intrusion at my private devotion. The voice explains that the painting required two armed guards due to the outraged reception it received at The Salon. The idea of someone attacking the priceless piece of art rouses my interest, and I turn.
There is a middle-aged couple, complete with leather fanny packs, facing me. The man has a comb-over and looks as bored as some of the schoolchildren. His eyes rove like a blind man’s, sweeping for a landing strip that doesn’t require too much from him. He settles on a pret
ty blonde looking at a Pissarro. The wife fans herself with the museum pamphlet, while staring at the tour guide, who has his back to me. She asks him an insensible question about water lilies, and the tour guide explains that Éduoard Manet is not the same person as Claude Monet. “Common misconception, madame, for people unacquainted with the French language.” His tone is cordial, if pointed.
I hide a smile.
The woman looks disappointed. “Because I’ve always loved them so. My daughter, Penelope, got me an umbrella with those lilies on them. She picked it up somewhere in Chicago, I think, on a business trip. She works for Ernst & Young, you know.” Flip to the hair. “Anyway, it was darling. Phil had one of his lapses and forgot it in our rental car once, on a trip to Ocracoke, and poof—” here she unleashes a hand gesture meant to express contempt and remorse—“it was gone. Such a shame. I loved that little umbrella. Adored it.”
Phil is nonplussed. The blonde has a friend.
“Anyway, do you think they might sell it in the gift store here?” she asks the guide, putting a hand on her fanny pack and stroking the money inside. All in good time, my pretties . …
“I’m sorry, madame,” the guide replies. “One what?”
Something about that voice … low and clear, like a cello shadowing Bach.
The woman starts her obsessive fanning again, in spite of the cool temperature. “Why, the umbrella of course. With the lilies. Or maybe those sunflowers of Van Gogh’s. You know”—she looks at him expectantly—“something pretty.”
At this, the tour guide, just a man with brown hair and a smooth voice until now, turns toward me, mumbling, “I can inquire for you, madame. I am sure they have all sorts of pretty trivial things for you to choose from.”
It should come as no surprise that it is my stranger from the train.