Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  She talks to Mathieu in French and with that more intelligible body, ignoring me. Laughing throatily from time to time, her face erupts in dimples that seem charmingly at odds with her sophisticated appearance. Mathieu has risen and is all elbows as he runs a hand through his hair. The goddess licks her lips. Mathieu licks his. The goddess trails her fingers down the lily of her neck, arriving at the kissable hollow of her throat. Mathieu’s eyes follow. The goddess smiles, revealing a gap between two front teeth, arequisite imperfection that makes her all the more beguiling. Mathieu shifts painfully from one foot to another. The goddess is breaking my heart.

  Finally, my appearance is noted. Something should be done for the mouse worrying her whiskers at Mathieu’s elbow. He motions toward me, and the goddess glances down, with mild curiosity. I scurry to my feet.

  “Daisy, this is Camille Velay. We are old friends.”

  “Enchantée,” she says, extending a hand while looking at my caterpillar eyebrows. Hers are like delicate parentheses. I limply shake her hand. Enchanted.

  “You are American, no?”

  “Yes,” I answer, smiling humorlessly. If I hadn’t told that stupid joke, I bet she never would have looked over. Thanks, Irene. I’ll bring you home a souvenir of this humiliation.

  “I love your country. Everyone is so pleasant to me. I am afraid to frown,” she says, her giggles mixing musically with the gurgles of the water.

  Crap, she’s nice. I wanted an excuse to hate her. Something beside her looks, which might make me mean and small. I suppose I should say something equally nice now. Her inviting green eyes demand it. “Yes, most people are very nice in America.” I should let it go, but, “Niceness is like a nervous condition there. It has a way of masking our other syndromes.” Stop it, Daisy. “In fact, some of us can’t help but smile, even through our tears.”

  Said grinning like a fool, of course.

  Camille’s expression stumbles as she looks to Mathieu for instruction. He laughs uncertainly and translates something for her. I don’t know what I said. This is a situation for which I have no training. How might a mortal do battle with a goddess? Again, I’m sure the Greeks, and Mathieu, and Woody Allen would know.

  Camille laughs politely and says, “I am sorry. My Englishis not very good. I have a summer in Boston for cello internship many years ago, but I forget much.”

  She plays the cello. My favorite instrument. Probably studied at Juilliard. Surrendering Mathieu, I sigh, “Your English is very good. It is my French that is so very bad.”

  She laughs again, and demurs.

  I think I’m beginning to fall in love with her. Clearly she, and not I, is the modern incarnation of the woman on the fountain, worthy of Mathieu’s—I mean, our hero’s—encircling arms. Which means that I’m the one-eyed monster hanging over them.

  “I have to go. Julie waits.” She slips into a few words of French and leans forward to kiss Mathieu on the cheeks. I squirm, despising this custom when it does not involve Mathieu’s lips and my cheeks. She lingers on the last cheek, his right (my favorite too, as it holds a tiny scar on its outer rim whose origin I mean to plumb), and looks meaningfully into his eyes as they part. She tells me that it was “a pleasure” and brushes my cheeks with her lips. She smells like you’d expect a goddess to smell, the perfume succulent and mysterious, like a spicy ambrosia. She turns and departs, her ass really working in that slim ivory skirt. We watch her leave. She turns, smiles, and waves once.

  And then she’s gone.

  I turn to Mathieu, who seems shaken. His hands are jawed into his pants pockets, affecting a casual interpretation of the event. He looks past me and says, “That was Camille.” I am reminded of the guy on the plane. Master of the obvious.

  “So I gathered.”

  “She is an old friend,” he repeats, flatly. A boyish cowlick has been aroused on the crown of his head, which might be cute were it not for its resemblance to another manifestation of boyish excitement.

  “I don’t have friends who look like that,” I mumble, slumping in my chair.

  He takes his seat. “Few do.”

  I worry at my nails. The birds ply my ears with their final trills of the season, but their verdant slingshots bounce off my pea-green heart. Everything feels borrowed from someone else’s dreams. Was it an hour ago that Mathieu kissed me, and I swooned? A half hour ago that we watched, like an old married couple, those sweet men play their game? Ten minutes ago that he laughed himself from the shadows? Now he is removed, traveling beyond the ghosts of the past, swinging in some plane of possibility, where the vision in white dances seductively, leaving me to this solitary shuffle by his side.

  Of course Andy found someone else. Of course.

  I feel myself slipping away.

  “She is gay, you know.”

  Pause.

  “What?”

  Maybe he means gay like “happy.”

  “Camille is a lesbian,” Mathieu says. He is serene, but very real.

  “I don’t believe you,” I answer, equally calm. We are such adults.

  “She is. It made us crazy back in school, but she knew then too.”

  “So she is a friend from school?” He hadn’t mentioned this while she was here.

  “Mmm. More of an acquaintance. She did not socialize much with the boys. We could not hold her interest,” he says, flashing me an impish smile.

  “Mathieu, that woman is not a lesbian. They don’t make lesbians who look like that,” I argue, throwing out my hands in disgust. Dumb logic, I know—egregious, backward thinking—but I saw how she looked at him. Why would he lie if he didn’t have something to hide?

  “Maybe not in America. They are—what is the expression?— a dime a dozen in France.” His hand shields his eyes, for thatsliver of sun has swung round to us, trolling for the departed angel, settling for Mathieu. “Many are bisexuals. But not Camille. She has the courage of her convictions.”

  I cross my legs impatiently. My reaction to her was almost sexual, though I am not gay, in either derivation of the word. Perhaps I did pick up on something from her. More likely, she is one of those rare individuals who transcends sexual boundaries, each gesture so sensual that she stirs and invents new, imaginative pots.

  Camille is Venus on the waves. Without the bloody cherubs.

  “But why were you so taken aback by her appearance? You looked stupefied.”

  Mathieu raises a hand from his eyes to squint over at me. “Is it not obvious?”

  I shake my head.

  He blindfolds himself again. “I was afraid she would hit on you.”

  I lean back my head and laugh liberally. “You are full of it, you know,” I finally say, tears trickling down my cheeks.

  He smiles. “Full of what?”

  “It.”

  Mathieu grabs my hand and pulls me on his lap. We are friends again. I don’t know if I believe him, but the leap of faith is already taken. And faith is not reasonable.

  It is only later, after recovering from kisses rained on earlobes and eyelids, while we flee our Garden in search of food, that I wonder how Mathieu adopts the American vernacular so well. Dime a dozen. Courage of her convictions. His English is almost better than mine. While Camille, who spent months in Boston, could not pin down a past tense verb if the smattering of adorable freckles under her eyes depended on it.

  I’d like to think it’s because Camille is dumb, and Mathieu brilliant. I’d like for things to be that simple, and to my benefit. But acquiring a new language is not rocket science. It just takestime and practice. Lots and lots of practice, around native speakers. Yet he has never mentioned spending time in America. Indeed, the image of Mathieu in America seems jammed, like trying to imagine George Bush reading Sartre.

  When I look at Mathieu from the corner of my eye as we head down Rue de Écoles, I see someone I could walk with for all time. Nothing in his demeanor suggests otherwise from him. It is a heightened state we enjoy.

  And yet, when I steal an une
asy glance back at our fair Eden, it already seems a bit spoiled, even—dare I say—fallen.

  A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.

  Chapter

  10

  The roads and alleyways of Paris are designed for getting lost.

  Which is a fine thing if you don’t have anywhere to be.

  We retrace our steps to St. Sulpice, and, uncertain, linger in the cathedral’s square. A gaggle of pigeons argue for food and wash their wings in the water of the square fountain, where four holy men are enthroned like grand inquisitors, before relieving themselves on the disciples’ holy vestments. It is an unimpeachable fact of life that it is hard to maintain one’s dignity, religious or otherwise, with bird shit on your head, and what I gather to be a petrified Sulpice looks understandably sullen. But this fountain of his is a great spot for people-and pigeon-watching, as tourists flock toward the church and natives grab a bite to eat on a park bench. Their unleashed kids chase the wary birds in games of chicken and hurl coins into the fountain with all the grace of miniature shot-putters.

  Somehow I want people, and quarreling birds, around us right now. Mathieu scowls toward a corner café, murmuring darkly in French. It is nearly one o’clock, and the tables outside are stuffed with customers feasting on the mild weather.

  “Do you want to try it?” I ask. I was too nervous to eat this morning and am hungrier than I’d care to admit (even the airy exercise of falling in love requires stamina and calories).

  “It is not a place I care for,” he hedges. “The tourists come to this place where Hemingway wrote, not knowing that five cafés in this quartier boast the same claim.”

  “Hemingway wrote there?” I ask, straining my neck toward the café. A Farewell to Arms is one of my favorite books.

  Mathieu smiles. “See? It works every time.”

  “Well, so? I’d actually like to check out the Café Flore, or Les Deux Magots,” I say, pronouncing Magots (rhymes with Margot) as Maggots (the larvae that gorge on dead flesh), while eyeing him for outward signs of disapproval. Not a wince in sight. Satisfied, I continue, “To sit and eat at the same spot where all those renowned writers worked—what’s not to like about it?”

  He scuffs his shoes on the cobblestone. “Yes, but Daisy, they are no longer there. Just little plaques that might say, ‘Hemingway, probably drunk, spilled his café crème at this table,’ or, ‘This is the bathroom where Simone de Beauvoir took a really good crap.’” This is not the way to memorialize giants. It degrades them into tourist attractions, and only cheapens their legacies.”

  I plunk myself on the fountain’s edge, cross my legs, and lean back on my palms, playfully pointing my foot at him. “I think you have a problem with famous places. It offends your idea of authenticity. You would have loved to be seen at the Café Flore at one time, but now that everyone else wants to go there, it’s très gauche. You can’t stand to be part of the herd, even if your instincts point you in that direction. Face it, Mathieu: you are a snob among snobs.”

  He furrows his brow in protest.

  “Not a snob,” he replies. Standing, he searches the stippled water behind me. “Perhaps suspicious of people’s motivations. I have too much respect for the writers and thinkers who debatedand wrote in those places, and for what was written, to let any fool come in and treat it like a photo opportunity. Those places were cathedrals devoted to the avant-garde, and there are many of us who still worship the ideas that flowed like honey through them.”

  I allow my foot to fall and sit at a more respectful attention. When he gets worked up, I experience a flurry in my chest, like something is singing.

  “So many of the French surrealists and existentialists, as well as your American expatriates, invented modernity inside those modest cafés, where a struggling writer could drink beer and suck on inspiration, then write until his pen or endurance failed him. I think of your Hemingway scratching out The Sun Also Rises, that first lean novel, in six weeks at La Closeries des Lilas, poor as a mouse and happier than he will be again. I think of Sartre and Beauvoir living at the Flore, warming their toes near the mean heater, and jousting with the friends who called on them there, but, when the time was ripe, working like dogs in heat as they penned their manifestos, before stumbling home to fuck and write some more.

  “Do you know,” he exclaims, his face suffused with such admiration for people I know nothing about that I suffer pangs of exclusion and awe, “that Sartre called his Flore the ‘Road to Freedom’ during the Occupation, for it shone brightly as a beacon of enlightened thought during fascism’s darkest hour, when this City of Light was as black as a starless sky?” He shakes his head, a little embarrassed by the openness of his ardor, and relaxes his hands out of fists, before sitting down.

  I rest my leg against his.

  “And so, for me, these places meant more than every grand building and monument in Paris, including this one,” he says, waving a dismissive hand toward St. Sulpice. “But now those cafés are as contrived as neon churches, where the only ambition left is forthe money to be milked from their reputations, so that you can pay three euros to take coffee and breathe the air of ghosts. The people who go there are looking for celebrities, Daisy. Me”—he breaks off to look over, with glittering eyes—“I would rather pay homage to those places by reading the books that were written there, and remember their authors that way.”

  He shrugs and rubs at the back of his neck in an effort to moderate himself. “So I guess I am a snob, yes. But a snob with good intentions.”

  We sit silently, though my ears roar with Mathieu’s words. There is no greater aphrodisiac than loving someone in love with ideas. When Mathieu talks, I am transported into a world where thoughts matter as much as, if not more than, deeds. I have been starving on the easy, empty calories of perpetual action, which have left me, along with my countrymen, fat and sluggish in mind and spirit. When I’m with Mathieu, I don’t eat; I savor.

  But there is one matter at odds with his character, at least with my beginner’s understanding of it, and the inconsistency sticks like a thorn in my mouth. I turn and ask him, “Is this why you’re a tour guide? You cannot stand for anyone not to know what you know about these places?”

  Mathieu sighs and looks away, deflated by my characterization. “I do not know why I am a tour guide. It was never something I planned. I fell into it while trying to make enough money to write. My mother sent an American friend to Paris with instructions that I show him around, and when he went home, he gave others my name. So voilà,” he smacks his hands together, startling me, “I become a tour guide with a real distaste for the upper level of the Eiffel Tower and the tourists I must take there.”

  “Especially young American women who have never read Sartre?”

  He rolls his eyes in mock dismay at my admission before throwing an arm about my shoulders to dip me toward the fountain. Licking the beads of water off my laughing lips, my hair a wet fringe, I shriek at the upside-down saint, who juts his chin out in defense of his importance. “I will never take you to the Eiffel Tower,” he promises, as my skin hangs past my cheeks.

  I try to flex forward, but he has all the advantage, holding me prone like a rag doll. “But for not laughing at my Sartre joke, I condemn you to my recitation of his play, No Exit, in French, mais oui, some night soon, as you lie naked on my bed”—he raises an eyebrow to seductive heights and licks the spray from his lips, while a giggle gets caught in the tunnel of my throat—“looking precisely like Manet’s little Olympia, as you contemplate Sartre’s hypothesis of hell as other people.”

  Mathieu has me pinned. His eyes laugh into mine, and I squirm agreeably, content to be contained. Encouraged, he moves to kiss me. But as he relaxes his grip on the wrists behind my back, I spring nimbly from him, delighting in his clumsy fall toward the fountain. He barely catches hold of the edge before being pitched into the cold water. If I cannot surprise him in matters of the mind, where his experience is oceanic, I can still keep him of
f balance.

  He curses in French (he falls back on his native dialect for effusions of love and vulgarity; perhaps when he’s most authentic?) and glares at me, but I laugh at him and dance away. I run toward the cathedral, nailed into place by two bell towers, of which one is taller and showier than the other. I briefly wonder which one I am, and which one is Mathieu. But any whimsy is lashed away by Mathieu’s footsteps and voice, imbuing my name with the French intonation, so that it sounds inquisitive and promising. Day-Zee? Arrêt, Day-Zee! I smile, trying to suppress a gurgle of laughter, and go faster, relishing the movement of my legs and the slapping of my feet on the old stone, affronting, in equal measure, spotty gatherings of pigeons and Japanese tourists, both of whom squawk at me in strange, otherworldly tongues. Gatheringmomentum, I fly toward the steps of the great cathedral, which I must reach before Mathieu, just beyond my shoulder, reaches out and snags me. Charging the steps, preserving myself as a blur in a couple’s honeymoon photo, I take them three at a time before darting between the columns and launching myself through the heavy wooden doors that are, auspiciously, parted.

  Breathlessly, I enter the cathedral and, slowing, turn right. I clamp a hand over my mouth in reaction to the looks lobbed my way but am unable to contain my giddiness, which, like anything under enormous pressure, explodes in inappropriate laughter as I slide swiftly along the back wall. Here is a small chapel swirling with Delacroix’s murals, depicting a conclave of souls in a fury of tumult and torment. Losing my giggles, I linger over an effete angel wrestling, or doing a mean tango, with a muscle-bound man wearing leg warmers, when I feel a hand clamp down on my shoulder and wheel me around. Caught, I can only squeal out, “Sanctuary!” as I confront Mathieu’s mouth, pressed fiercely against my laughing lips. I gasp into his kiss, slowly sinking into stone. But as his body relaxes, I hastily plant my lips over the scar on his cheek, ducking and dodging from those angel arms like a fleet flyweight, before dashing toward the side aisle.