Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  “It always appears so from a distance.”

  “Are you saying it was not foolish at the time?”

  “I’m saying that nobody intended it to have the effect it did.”

  Mathieu’s face grows red. “That is no excuse, Daisy.”

  I grab hold of his hand with both of mine. “No, it’s not.”

  There are tears of anger in his eyes. But I am not so foolish as to think they are directed at me, or even my country. Or that he will let them fall.

  One day is all it takes for some people to forget geography. But there are those they leave behind.

  “Mathieu, you don’t live in darkness anymore. You made your own light.”

  He shakes off my hand, and bends down to retrieve the euro, smoothly pocketing it.

  When he looks up at me, his eyes are like lead. “I do not know what you mean, Daisy.”

  He turns and walks away.

  I recall what it feels like to be alone, in this church called Paris.

  “We are here.”

  Yes, I followed.

  Mathieu opens a heavy wooden door with rusted hinges and ushers me toward a winding walkway that bisects the courtyard. He does not look at me. And I do not look at him, though I am so conscious of not looking at him not looking at me that he is like a phantom limb I cannot see but still cruelly feel. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end. I am equal parts terrified and relieved. I do not like that I followed; I do not like that he took my following for granted.

  The courtyard is tranquil and idyllic, like every secret garden in Paris. Ivy loops around and through the crumbling stone walls, waning blooms bob from imperfect pots, while the shadowy possibility of Parisian cats beckons at every turn. Once again, the sound of water, leaping from the lion’s mouth, attempts to soothe our pique as we venture deeper into this temporary asylum. An orange tabby, balanced on a windowsill, tracks us as we silently cross the cobblestone path. I feel nauseated and gray, the charm of the scene lost on me. With each step, I grow more aware that the physical magnetism Mathieu and I share, along with a wealth of good intention, may not save us from flaming out by the end of this golden, if fading, day. I am no longer merely adorable to Mathieu, and if part of me is proud, I also feel the loss of our childish delight in one another—the beautiful belief that we could shelter that spark of passion through all storms.

  Mathieu suddenly sinks down on a lichen-covered stump and pulls me down beside him. Something catches in my throatat his touch, and I feel the warm weight of the stolen coin in my hand. I hesitate before allowing myself to look at him, but when I do, his eyes are drawn and sad, his face a collection of my doubts and miseries. What relief to find this reflection in the looking glass … and not one expressing scorn or anger. I let myself breathe. His hand finds my face, and I am solid again. I lean my cheek into his palm. We watch the flickering expressions, tender and doubting, erupt and pass over one another’s faces, like the rapid shedding of masks, until we are all that remains. There is a hypnotic vigor to his eyes that wipes the slate clean. To look into this face and not take refuge in ego through playacting, or retreat into self-consciousness, is the most freeing sacrifice to be made. We simply give ourselves to one another. It is the most difficult experiment of my life to be this frank with another soul. To not blink. There is no final answer to arrive at, no conclusion to reach, or punch line to deliver—just the generous gift of more questions to be raised. Something stirs in my gut, and there is an unraveling of fear into perfect peace.

  There is one thing to say at a moment like this.

  “I didn’t really like my grandmother so much.”

  “I sometimes wish I believed in God.”

  I rise and throw the coin into the bubbly water of the fountain. It makes a small splash and sinks to the bottom.

  An odd kind of promise to make. But I sit back down, and we nod, like these pearly words were a vow and the coin toss the kiss that followed. It is the only pledge we can offer to one another. A promise to end all thought of promises. For our eyes are opened from this point on. We have traveled beyond words. The tree we rest on is as good as dead. The water behind us flows on and on and on and . …

  Over and over, we’re turning off the light

  Even the warriors are always great at night

  Wait ‘til we’re somewhere closer to the moon

  Then you can kiss me and say that it’s too soon

  Right now and right here

  My love, oh my dear . …

  —Keren Ann

  Chapter

  14

  I am unprepared for his father’s place. Nothing about the innocuous building suggests the kind of luxury to be tiptoed over inside. The staircase up to the fourth floor (third European, though I refuse to concede the logic) is in need of refinishing, the wood starting to show gaps. I know because I clung to the banister as we inched up the stairs. Mathieu had some apologizing to do. At every stair, and landing.

  When Mathieu opens the door with his key, I gasp. The apartment is sumptuous. I wish I could do it justice, but I have no vocabulary for these opulent objects. French furniture is particularly tied to its history, and I have no method for discriminating between a Louis the Something-or-Other chaise and a Third Republic one. They all look like something you shouldn’t sit on. If forced to make a stab, I would say that this place sings of the Belle Époque, with mismatched, eccentric bric-a-brac punctuating more elegant showpieces. There are elaborate moldings, Oriental carpets, crystal chandeliers, and gold-gilt mirrors stretching the length of walls. The ceilings are high and delicately bordered bygold-leaf vines, the fireplace mantel is a buxom slab of red marble, and the only sound to intrude upon the immaculate stillness is the uncollected murmurs of several clocks. Attractive ancestral portraits of ladies with taffy hair and gentlemen wearing riding outfits comingle with pretty landscapes in an aristocratic joie de vivre. An ivory tusk and African mask reside on a lowboy next to a maudlin Rococo figurine and a brandy snifter that sports some reddish residue. It is the only sign that someone could possibly live in this palace. There is no theme to tie a knot around everything except for a kind of dazzling, if dated, affluence.

  Mathieu’s father’s apartment is an opera singer. She thinks a lot of herself, but the problem is, nobody much goes to see opera anymore.

  “Geez,” I blow out.

  Mathieu is busy looking through a drawer. “Yeah.”

  “Does your dad actually live here?”

  He does a quick sizing up of the place. “Of course.”

  “And did you live here when you were younger?”

  “Yes. From fourteen to eighteen.”

  I nod and walk around, trailing my finger along the edges of furniture. There is no dust. He must have someone in to clean. Either she forgot the brandy snifter or she was having some fun. Good for her. This place could use it. I lower myself into a three-corner wooden chair, whose sided cushions depict birds imprisoned by flight. Sitting opposite a mirror, I rest my elbows gingerly on the chair’s coiled, decorative arms. I cross my legs, then switch them, and meditate uneasily on my reflection, which is distorted in the waxy glass. If I had lived here during my adolescence, I would have lost my mind and become a recluse, or lost my mind and run away. Live in a museum long enough and you risk growing an unhealthy attachment to things, or alternatively, you may feel suffocated by the sensation that you are just another object and flee to preserve your humanity.

  I think it likely, from the way he grimaces and sweats over the files in the lowboy, that Mathieu felt compelled to run. It makes me ache for him—for the boy in him.

  “I have to use the bathroom.”

  “Down the hall and first on your right,” he replies, barely looking up. He will not tell me the reason for his errand. And I will not press him for it.

  The bathroom was an excuse. I slip down the hallway on a mild prowl, pausing to peer in at the beamed kitchen overlooking the courtyard. A curmudgeonly oven range capped by an enormous e
xhaust system throws out some attitude, while the granite countertop looks like you could bash someone’s head in along its edge. An awesome collection of knives stands at razor-sharp attention next to an array of pill and vitamin bottles. Overall, the kitchen seems a threatening place. And that’s without any French cooking bubbling menacingly on the stove. The one note of interest is the scheme of decorative wine racks floating above the cabinets, in which every pod is occupied, like slumbering space travelers fixed in suspended animation. I would love to check the dates on the bottles, some of which look musty, but don’t want to overtly snoop. I give the kitchen up and come to a door on my right. The knob doesn’t turn, so I continue down the hallway. The adjacent door opens, and I stop short.

  My pupils dilate. The heavy, stiff curtains are drawn over the window opposite me. I open the door further, allowing the natural light from the hallway to diffuse into the dimmed space. This is not the bathroom, but a bedroom of sorts. Except there is no bed. Or any furnishings. The entire room, probably fifteen by fifteen, is packed with paintings leaning stiffly against the four walls. They are protected with yards of bubble wrap, so I cannot detect the quality of what’s underneath. But I can make out what’s hanging on the white walls. And it sucks my breath away.

  There is certainly a Monet over there; some of his haystacks, I think. Very probably a Toulouse-Lautrec to the left. A Degas opposite that, with those scrawny dancers of his. That small one near the corner might be a Morisot, though I could be inferring because it shows a seated woman with a parasol, like the one in the Cleveland Museum that I adore. And something that looks remarkably like a blue-period Picasso hangs to my right.

  And then there is the Matisse, near the window, its faceless woman with flowers waiting patiently for light.

  Holyholyholyholy. My eyes are crazed, greedy. I feel like I’ve just happened across the tomb of King Tut. That I’ve cracked physics’ Theory of Everything. That pure, eternal beauty has found a home inside Mathieu’s father’s apartment in this overly trendy section of Paris. That all the ostentatious stuff down the hall was a false perfume to throw me off a sublime scent. That this room, and not the cathedrals choking this city, is where God must live, or at least summer. I have strayed off the beaten path—no, I have soared, with borrowed wings, from any path. I cannot believe my height, yet my hawkish eye catalogues every detail, from the electric green brushstrokes of a fanning collar around Toulouse-Lautrec’s cancan girl to the stark, heavy outlines of Picasso’s robed woman, bent from age. I strain my neck across the paintings on the floor to look for things I would not bother with in the Orsay. Like the quality of the frames, which seem original to my museum-conditioned eye. Like signatures, some of which look as familiar as my own: Picasso’s muscular dash, Monet’s more delicate expression. Because I have the luxury to do so, on my own, making me feel, briefly, ecstatically, like I am the first to behold them. Because foundational to our definition of beauty is that we never expected to find it. I was going to take a pee. Instead, I glided into an art historian’s wet dream.

  I do not think, at the time, of how they got here. I do not stop to wonder at their incarceration in this improbable room. I forget about Mathieu down the hall, and whether I should be here. When immersed in a dream, you don’t stop to think whether you’ve been served an invitation. You don’t examine causes or consequences. You just are.

  I save the Matisse for last, the climax.

  Such insatiable color!!! He earns this giddy enthusiasm, by God, so that I have some hope of conveying the intensity of caramelized color rupturing the cones inside these irises. The darkness cannot mute Matisse’s bold hand; instead, it is the fluorescent light bulb that illuminates. The canvas is roughly three by four and invents a space unbothered by perspective, where a faceless woman backed by an ocher wall sits at a table so saturated by red, pulsating strokes that it looks alive, like blood spilling from oxygen-rich lungs. Balanced on the table are blue vases stuffed with flowers and bluer plates overflowing with tipsy lemons and a chance, plum apple: the banal stuff of still lives everywhere. Only, like Cezanne, a still life is never still with Matisse, and never banal. Everything rolls toward a beautiful transition, with lemons waddling like ducklings, an orgy of common flowers splaying, odd details disappearing and reemerging like lovers’ legs. The lesser vases are filled with a suggestion of stems and petals, but the large vase to our left, where our eyes, liking big things, naturally curve, is ornamented with more exotic faire: something purpley and Eastern, maybe peonies or plum blossoms. The sort of crisp flower you’d expect to see on a gorgeous Japanese or Chinese calligraphy scroll to mark the start of spring and life’s renewal. They stand stiffly, priggishly, marking their superiority to the spraying mess of ejaculate below.

  And so it is here, at Matisse’s feet, that I realize why I chose Dr. Choi for my mentor over a year ago. Why I didn’t gravitate toward the sexier Parkinson’s research in Rosenberg’s lab and have my name attached to some important articles, nudging me further up the Alpine career path. It was so simple: I was beguiled by apretty picture and wanted to linger awhile. There was a painter’s precision, and unruliness, to the hair cells in those fluorescent microscopy photographs in Choi’s darkened lab. The brilliantly dyed projections were so tightly arranged, like a Fibonacci sequence of petals in a flower, yet shaggy and playful at their ends. Recklessness and restraint. It was all there, inside my ears, making its own kind of music.

  Matisse, of course, is jazz. All gorgeous, playful improv flirting above the elemental rhythms of a master technician. He makes me move.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?”

  I jump, and when I fall back down, it is really like that: a return to earth. Mathieu’s earth, but still earth. He stands with his hands on the doorway.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, stepping back. “I really was trying to find the bathroom. The doorknob wouldn’t turn.”

  “You must turn it to the left,” he replies, lightly enough.

  “Ah. The left.”

  Mathieu enters, and I squint to read him. He nears but passes me to jerk the curtain open. I blink rapidly in the light, my pupils constricting. Out there is the street, the people, the commerce: the workaday world of Paris bustling on. Mathieu clenches his jaw dangerously. I think I preferred the darkness.

  “I am sorry, Mathieu. I suppose I should have closed the door. To be honest, it never occurred to me.”

  “I am not upset, Daisy.” His eyes flit around the room like a wary animal’s. “Yet I did not expect this. The fool.”

  “You seem upset.”

  “To the contrary, I thought I seemed in control.”

  “You do seem in control. Like the kind of vicious control a parent tries to muster when she’s mad at her kid. I can tell you that, as the kid here, it’s much scarier than yelling.”

  Mathieu chuckles, if not convincingly, and bends over the windowsill, peering into the dying sun. He maintains his position for a full minute: I know because I count the seconds. My eyes are still dancing, though, and it finally occurs to me to think of the money in these paintings. I suppose I always felt it. Maybe it was partly, if not consciously, responsible for my spasms of wonder upon entering the room. We are accustomed to assigning arbitrary values to objects that should defy such categorization. Paintings aren’t home runs, purebred dogs, or real estate. Art ought to transcend the dogma of numbers, unperturbed by Adam Smith’s invisible hand of supply and demand. How can something appreciate in value when its content has not changed? It was always this degree of beautiful, from the moment the last stroke of paint was applied to the canvas to the moment my eyes brushed its surface, a century later. It shouldn’t matter to us if a Matisse fetches a hundred dollars or a hundred million dollars.

  But it does. We can’t help ourselves. And the market gets it roughly right. After all, Picasso is the all-time best-seller, the perennial record-smasher, that glittering name in lights on the auction house’s marquee that makes fashionable people
wet themselves, and would anyone argue that he was the genius of the twentieth century?

  Well, me. I’ll put my money, such as it is, on Matisse.

  Mathieu turns and rests his backside against the window, crossing his arms over his chest. He has arrived at a decision on how to handle me.

  “I would have liked to have saw the expression on your face.”

  Hmm. Have saw. A slip-up in Mathieu’s perfect parade of past participles. Though it had to happen, I still imbue the moment with special significance. But I reply cheerily enough, “It was probably stupid. Stupidly stupefied.”

  “And what if I had told you they were all reproductions?”

  I respond carefully. “I would not have believed you.”

  He nods. “Mmm.” Mathieu motions me over, and I hoist myself onto the ledge next to him. “And why not?”

  I shrug. “I don’t know. You just feel it in your gut, I guess. Like you know a good melon.” I giggle too stridently, the tension of the moment whistling out of me. He looks lost, and I nudge him in the ribs. “Come on, When Harry Met Sally? Billy Crystal? Meg Ryan?”

  He shakes his head, and I groan, pained by his ignorance. Some things, like lifesaving pharmaceuticals and clean water, and Sally’s diner orgasm, ought to transcend the confines of the nation state. Mathieu explains, “The only Billy Crystal film I have seen was something called Mr. Saturday Night.”

  “That’s probably the only Billy Crystal movie I haven’t seen.”

  “Yes. Well.”

  We lapse into silence. I want him to explain, but he resists. The paintings look at us, and we look back. My eyes will not abandon the Matisse; I’m afraid it might disappear. The sunlight has enriched and deepened the colors, cooling the blues, inflaming the reds. Parts of it look wet to the touch. I would like to touch it.