Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  The saleslady gives a perfunctory nod. “We are accustomed to such, as you say, translations.”

  She motions us to a red, armless thing that looks like an oversized ottoman before disappearing into the back. There is an oval mirror on the wall that is large enough for me to note my smallness. I look about as lost as you’d expect for someone who gets her shoes from Payless. I try to scorch Mathieu with my eyes, but he is examining a pair of silver sling-backs with a level of absorption American men would find disgraceful. The shoes, along with smart matching purses, are exhibited like museum pieces atop glowing display cases. But no museum, not even Graceland’s, with its fat Elvis toilet of death, has ever made me want to flee like this one. It’s like being suffocated by cherry blossoms.

  The mannequin returns with a couple of boxes tucked under her arm. I curse myself for not removing my Keds. More humiliation to suffer. I slip them off, as well as my gray cotton socks, while she asks Mathieu something. Evidently, he is in charge here.

  “Daisy, would you like a cappuccino?” Mathieu asks, beaming.

  What the hell is he so happy about? The saleswoman’s nonspecific smile is back.

  “Um, no thanks.” Let’s get this over with.

  The saleslady hands me a pair of footsies. I wince at my un-painted, longish nails, and curl my toes into the plush red carpet. The saleslady liberates the high heels from their box and seizes my right ankle with the kind of command mothers have over their children’s uncooperative feet. She wordlessly slips the shoe on and fastens the buckle on the strap before repeating the exercise with my left foot. She doesn’t like being on her knees all day before people’s stinky feet. I don’t blame her, though I wish I could be certain it isn’t my feet that offend her so.

  I rise stiffly, dreading the inevitable teetering during my Miss America promenade.

  Hushed, portentous tones: We are now entering the shoe portion of the evening, ladies and gentlemen. And oh dear, June, this is quite an unfortunate scene—the contestant from Ohio appears to be experiencing some difficulty in walking like a woman. Clucking tongue. Yes, Hugh, a shocking lack of coordination. Very disappointing, I must say, especially for everyone back home in Dullsville who held out such high hopes. Her impassioned defense for research on inner ear hair cells completely won over our celebrity judges, but I’m afraid she may have lost any chance at the title with that fall. Her foot looks like it may be sprained, in fact. Assenting rumble. Indeed, June, it’s starting to swell. What we have is a cankle on our hands here. Avert your eyes, ladies and gentlemen . …

  Yet in spite of the mortifying scenarios playing out in my head, I do not wobble. These shoes have splinters for heels, but I do not fall. Perhaps I’ve gained a measure of balance in Paris.

  I take small steps over to the mirror, wondering if this is what it was like for Chinese women who had their feet bound. Hmm … probably worse. Those caricatured bird steps they were forced to perform, making perverted fetishists out of their men. Yes, perverted, for while it is a little laughable for a man to be granted the permission to suck on an indulgent woman’s toes, it is sadistic for a husband to get off on his wife’s crippling pain and perpetuate the practice for his generation. The little lotus, my ass. Is that really the most apt metaphor they could assign for the process of deformation, infection, gangrene, and permanent disability? I wince a little. My arches are starting to cramp. Maybe we are not so modern. Maybe we are bound by the same tired delusions that gender roles have prescribed for centuries. Maybe Mathieu secretly—

  Shit. I look good in these things.

  The mirror reveals a ray of track lighting licking the small buckle on my right shoe, where—magnifique!—it explodes like a dazzling sunburst. The suede is so rich that it murmurs at me, in French (but of course!), through velvet, rose petal lips. I adore that little bow, winking saucily up at me, and wiggle my toes in delight. Everything about these shoes elevates. I stand differently in them. My back arches, my breasts emerge. My legs, though concealed, are firmer, sexier. My pelvis feels tighter, like I could squeeze a lemon between my thighs. Heck, I could pin Mathieu against thewall and not lift a leg. I place my hands on my hips and preen like a beauty queen. It’s a shameful display of vanity, but I cannot tear my eyes away from the four-inch wonderfucks on my feet. This must be why women get boob jobs. It’s such a convincing illusion of transformation.

  I see Mathieu and the saleswoman eyeing me in the mirror and wipe the blissful, self-satisfied smirk off my face. Tom Petty’s “American Girl” dies on my mind’s tongue. This isn’t my Pretty Woman moment. I’m not really any taller. They are only shoes. And they cost as much as Andy’s first car.

  “How do you feel in them?” Mathieu asks, hand cupping his chin. Not how do they fit, but how do I feel? The metaphysical interpretation of a shoe’s worth, as opposed to the less romantic, but more pressing “what will these things do to my pinky toe blister?” reading.

  I shrug and plop down on the ottoman to yank them off. “It doesn’t matter. They’re out of the question.”

  The saleslady plucks them from my paws, her smug chin turtling into her neck, which is starting to slacken into waddle. I said something awhile back about not stereotyping the French, but what can I say: sometimes the shoe fits.

  “Wait, please,” Mathieu commands, and she stops.

  I pause with one sock hanging off my foot. “What?”

  “I would like to purchase this for you.”

  “It’s out of the question, I said.”

  Mathieu sits down and turns to the saleslady. He says something, and she promptly withdraws. “Daisy, please. Stop what you are doing.”

  “Listen, Mathieu. It’s sweet of you. Really. I appreciate the gesture. But I wouldn’t feel comfortable with it.”

  “And why not?” Mathieu grimaces, but admits, “The money does not mean much to me, Daisy. If I want to do this for you, why should you object?”

  I sit and stare out the window, watching a patchwork of profiles glide by. A little girl, not more than four, with ribbons on her hat walks with her mother and slows to peer in at a display. Her pretty, round face brightens as she points out something to her mom, who nods and pulls her past. The girl looks back wistfully before disappearing. I strain my neck to see what entranced her but cannot locate the prize. I picture Dorothy’s ruby reds tucked between the Prada and Gucci. Cinderella’s glass slippers residing on a silk pillow. They were supposed to be fur, but there was a mistranslation from French to English along the way. And luckily, as fur slippers seem a predictable, even trashy, extravagance. Glass slippers, on the other foot, impress me as being infinitely more exquisite in all their painful fragility. Walking—no, dancing—on glass cut from gossamer that persevered through the alchemy of unlikely love. This is the province of fairy tales. This is the stuff that makes little girls’ hearts patter to the unworldly rhythms of imagination. And it is the stuff that sticks when little girls mature into rational beings. No matter how enlightened, or cynical, they regard themselves.

  I am living a fairy tale. What right have I to refuse my prince?

  I set about tying my laces. “All right, Mathieu, I will let you.”

  He brushes my cheeks with kisses until they are pink and pliant. I paw him away and laugh. “But.”

  “Yes.”

  “Only on the understanding that I do not have to wear them. That I have the right to peek in on them, rouse them from their tissue-paper slumber, and perhaps try them on in complete privacy when I feel daring. But no one else sees me in them. Not even you.”

  “I understand,” he agrees, flushed with his small triumph.

  There. “Oh, and if we end up getting in a fight, promise me that you won’t resent me for the shoes. That you won’t use them as an excuse to stop kissing me.”

  “It will take more than some silly shoes for me to want to do that.”

  The saleslady is forced to watch, and I am helpless to stop him, even as Mathieu bends me back on the ottoman and brush
es the hair from my eyes with his hands. I permit the suffocation. Surely, there are worse ways to die than by Mathieu’s lips. But I can see her over his shoulder, practicing her grateful smile at the counter, impatient for the feel of Mathieu’s plastic in the manicured fingers that have lain to rest youthful diamond dreams.

  For the first time in Paris, my happiness is not enough. I want the world to sing.

  I push Mathieu off and gather myself. He looks wounded but follows me over to the counter, where he mutely produces his credit card. A tidy pile of red business cards rests on the marble countertop, and I palm one while the saleslady packs up the heels. The card reads Michelle Valmont. Mathieu raises an eyebrow at me, but I brush him off with a careless shrug. On a stool behind the counter I notice a paperback, half concealed, bearing a dated jacket photo. It is a formulaic romance title from the eighties. I smile inwardly. If it had been philosophy, or a political thriller, I may have lost hope for Michelle. But she reads for romance. Which means that somewhere behind that superficial, controlled exterior beats the heart of a girl who still desires.

  I smile at Michelle before we leave, thanking her so profusely that she reacts with a flinching retreat. As we depart, I look back at her black form silhouetted against the scarlet backdrop. She gazes at the ottoman where Mathieu and I just sat, and lay, together, perhaps impressing the image of our youthful joy in one another upon her bloodless heart.

  Perhaps reflecting that she needs to stop at the market after work to pick up some meat for dinner.

  Chapter

  13

  mathieu receives a call on his cell phone as we leave the St. Germain area. His jaw clenches as he checks the number, and he holds up a finger to me, begging off for a minute of privacy. I smile and turn away to look in the window of a hat boutique, while he makes for a nearby alleyway. I sense a barely restrained tension plaguing his voice from ten feet away, and, forgive me, desperately wish I knew French so I might eavesdrop. My paranoia returns, and I imagine Camille is on the line. She wants to rendezvous with him, and he’ll finally throw me over for someone he deserves. I clutch my stylish sack in a sweaty palm as the Eliza Doolittle hats perform a carousel dance before me.

  Mathieu returns with an apologetic smile, and I turn toward him lightly. “Even you could not convince me of the necessity of these.”

  He chuckles. “No, these are awful.” Mathieu runs a hand through his hair, and my stomach rolls. “Listen, Daisy. I am sorry, but that was my father. He is traveling and needs me to perform an urgent errand for him at his apartment. Unfortunately, he is starting to become a little, um, funny? In his head?”

  I nod compassionately, secretly relieved it was his senile father and not his ravishing, questionably lesbian friend. “But he is worked up, and I should probably honor his request.”

  “Of course. That’s no problem at all,” I say. I hesitate before suggesting, “Why not take me with you?” I throw my hands up in the air, the bag flying recklessly about. “It’s not like I have anywhere else I need to be right now.”

  This presents him with a dilemma. It’s evident from his expression that he doesn’t want me to see his father’s apartment, yet I also sense he doesn’t want me to know he doesn’t want me to see it. I must say, I suspected as much. And I’m fishing. But Mathieu’s father piques my curiosity. I sense a darkness in Mathieu, introduced by his mother, but metastasized under his father’s care.

  Mathieu looks over my shoulder and mumbles weak protestations like, “Would not want to ask that of you,” and, “It is rather far away,” while eying a hoary, homeless man taking a whiz in the alley.

  I ignore the grunting satisfaction of the pissing passerby. “Come on. It doesn’t take long to get anywhere in Paris. That’s what the metro is for.”

  After much hemming and hawing, he assents. “Okay. But it will be boring.”

  The whiskery man zips up and passes us. He regards me with florid interest, before spilling something under his breath.

  “What did he say?” I ask Mathieu, once he’s gone.

  Discomfited, Mathieu replies, “He said that he can tell American women by the way they smell. Vanilla on their skin and in their … er, vaginas.”

  Dumbfounded, I stare at Mathieu. “He didn’t say vagina, did he?”

  “I think the proper translation would be—”

  “Pussy.”

  “Uh …”

  “Cunt.”

  “Yes.”

  Someone’s been reading his Henry Miller.

  I wait a beat, dying to bury my nose into my skin, but gather myself and laugh. “Come on, Mathieu. Let’s go to your dad’s. I think we’re due for a little boredom.”

  Mathieu smiles stiffly, and we walk toward the nearest metro station, me swinging my bag with all the manufactured enthusiasm of a child sent on a scavenger hunt. I have a family secret to collect.

  Somehow, on this least vanilla of days, I doubt it will be boring.

  We get off the metro at the St. Paul stop, exiting onto the Rue de Rivoli, the central artery through the Marais quartier. Mathieu, blocking me, raised a wall of silence on the train as we barreled through dark tunnels and darker doubts. I would abandon this adventure but for a fatalistic sense that the damage has been done, and I might as well see what I can get from it. I’m quite the little mercenary.

  We start up Rue Malcher and skirt a section of the district that is largely Jewish. There are small, ethnic shops everywhere with signs in two languages: French and Hebrew. I sidestep an Orthodox Jew exiting a falafel joint, and yet, a minute later, am startled to see two young men holding hands outside of a delicatessen. They are the second gay couple I have seen since leaving the metro. It is the first time since arriving in Paris that I’ve had a sense of separateness, of the potential for tribal entanglements. The French pride themselves on keeping a united front, of being cut from a fine, vintage mold, but lassoed living must present challenges, especially in this cramped city that likes to impose an evolved, ifdeterminate, Gallic order. Then again, I’m looking with American eyes, accustomed to the more unaccommodating polarities of my own country, where most Christians believe homosexuality is a “choice,” and where the majority of gays likely believe Evangelicals are Neanderthals. Yet even there, we all sleep under the luckier stars of our flag. Geography is destiny. Nobody understands this better than the Jews and Palestinians in the West Bank. Even the American in Paris feels the strain.

  It takes something monumental to slip the knot.

  I quicken my steps to keep up with Mathieu. “Of course, I keep forgetting that you’re American too.”

  “Why would you say such a ridiculous thing?” he mutters, distracted.

  There is a musical trio performing on the street corner ahead of us. Violin, cello, clarinet. They perform a Hungarian waltz that, like the pied piper, summons the rats, or in this case, tourists. A clutch of onlookers encircles the group, siphoning pedestrian traffic into the street. Sunlight finds the gold of bracelets dangling from a second-story window, as their owner tosses a coin to the street below. The people laugh and applaud. The violinist, wearing a head scarf, raises her bow and dips her head in acknowledgment, never losing the lilting beat.

  I turn toward Mathieu. “I was just thinking of the headline in Le Monde after September 11: ‘We are all Americans.’ For a moment there, we belonged to the same nation.”

  He frowns and tries to speed up, though we’ve hit the snarl of bodies. “That was a sentimental gesture, Daisy. I was not an American. Nobody believed that then, and certainly not now.”

  Stung, I slow. “I was just trying to lighten your mood.”

  “I am light.”

  “So light you might float away?” I shout at his back.

  Diverted, some of the people glance over at us, annoyed that we’ve strummed this minor chord.

  He rubs the back of his neck and says over his shoulder, “I do not think we should go down this road.”

  I slow to a stop. “I’m not going to
censor my conversation because you have issues with your mother.”

  Mathieu halts.

  “My mother?” He backtracks to confront me. “You believe I have issues with your country because my mother went there?” Mathieu laughs and wildly scans the crowd behind me. “How optimistic of you, Daisy.”

  Sarcasm is the cruelest first cut. I could gasp from the pain, if I had the breath in my body.

  “Among other things,” I reply.

  He wipes at his mouth. “These things you speak of.”

  “What about them?”

  “Were they responsible for your leaving America?”

  I look at him in confusion. “No. Why would—no.”

  “Maybe they should have been.”

  “Mathieu, if every American who had a problem with Bush left the country, only the wackos would be left, and that would be a problem for you, too.”

  “All right. So what are you doing to deserve to stay?”

  My mouth opens, but only the music follows.

  He shakes his head, gathering himself, before chucking me under the chin and producing a smile. “I am playing with you, Daisy.”

  I knock his hand away. “No, you’re not.”

  The trio wraps it up, and the onlookers briefly applaud before dropping away like bombs. I can feel the wind of their movement lick my back. We remain stalled. We could wrap it up too, drop away … explode in different places.

  “I am simply tired of Americans using the cover of that day. It cast a long shadow over your country, but that is no excuse to plunge parts of the world into darkness.”

  “I agree with you.”

  He stuffs his hands into his pockets and rocks back on his heels. “And American suffering is no more legitimate than the suffering of Iraqi citizens.”

  “Not at all.”

  “In fact, compared to the trauma inflicted on Iraq, you got off easy.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “It was such a foolish, unthinking calculation.” He places his shoe over the woman’s dropped coin, which bounced out of the cello case and onto the sidewalk. The musicians, packing their instruments away, do not notice.