by Sarah Hina
“So which is your favorite?” Mathieu asks.
That’s easy. “The Matisse.”
Mathieu nods, but I can tell he disagrees. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I just felt it instantly, unlike the others. The colors ran right through me.” I clear my throat. “Which is yours?”
“But of course the Picasso.”
“And why?”
He reflects, staring at the austere, indigo canvas with an intensity I understand, if I don’t share. “I like that mean look in the old lady’s eye,” he says. “It is an unsentimental portrait, yet manages compassion. She will not go quietly, he is saying.”
“It makes me think of El Greco. That long, austere line … the unflinching sufferer.” I shiver a little. “It is remarkable. But Icannot say that I would want it hanging over me at night. It would be a constant memento mori.”
“You prefer Matisse’s armchair prettiness to Picasso’s piercing humanity?” he jests, probably thinking back on Mrs. Fanny from the Orsay.
“You say tomato and I say to-mah-toe,” I sing. He rewards me with a smile. “Yes, and you won’t shame me from my position, Mathieu. I’m twenty-three years old. There will be plenty of time for your existential angst and despair. But for now, please, humor me a little and allow me vases of flowers, and tides of color to wash away my cynicism.” I squeeze his hand, and he responds in kind. “I will not believe that my desire for lightness over darkness speaks of any slightness of character, or that your liking such morbidity makes you deep. It simply makes you French.”
He tousles my hair, relaxing into laughs. “I was not trying to be ‘deep,’ mon petit chou. Art is visceral, from the gut, as you say. Picasso will always speak to me—probably because he screams the loudest.”
I bargain on the moment. “And your father? Which is his favorite?”
Mathieu licks his lips and turns back toward the window, driving his knuckles into the marble. “To have a favorite painting, you must have a heart”—he touches his hand to his chest—“that is hungry for art.” He shakes his head and looks at me, his expression darkening. “My father is a glutton for many things, but fine art is not among them.”
“Then what is all of this, Mathieu?”
“A longtime investment,” he says, driving each syllable with his tongue as hammer. He turns toward me. “And that is all I can say, Daisy. Please forgive me. I would like to explain further.” Mathieu takes my hands and places them around his neck. “But he is my father.”
“Of course,” I answer reflexively, grazing his mouth with mylips. I would like to probe deeper, but I have already traversed too far. It occurs to me that I am standing inside a room that is worth millions of dollars, if I am correct about the paintings’ authenticity. It is a heady notion, but also slightly sinister. Suddenly, the idea surfaces that, for Mathieu, this is an ugly room; not ugly in the literal sense, of course, but a corrupting ugliness that spreads from some rotten place of contaminated feeling. His father may have poisoned it for him with … what? People who collect art don’t usually do it for the money. They feed on the thrill of having something worth that much and vaguely hope it appreciates, but what they really are after is the prestige of the ownership, of symbolically belonging to a rare relic of beauty and sharing in its miraculous conception. The owner wants to trace the artist’s immortality.
And so the collector becomes an art fanatic, and gets to “know” his artist, intimately. It’s no longer about the money, but the fame. After all, there are much better ways to make one’s fortune than purchasing risky paintings. So how did Mathieu’s father accumulate, or hoard, a treasure trove that is being squandered in a vulnerable, neglected apartment that requires a curious cleaning lady to maintain it? Why would someone do such a thing without the passion driving him on? Who is this—
Hold on. Mathieu’s tongue is in my mouth.
“What are you doing?” I ask, tearing away.
His mouth is a little desperate, and he clutches at the ribbon of material around my waist, kneading me closer to him. He is intent on releasing something, but I retreat. Does he want me, or am I just the useful vessel for acting out this Freudian nightmare? At my question, he stops kissing me and pulls back.
“I do not know,” he says, voice breaking.
I look at him tenderly, sorry for it—the graceless questioning of this man’s desire for me when it’s all I have wanted—and there, across his shoulder, is Matisse’s fresh, faceless figure, and past thatis Picasso’s decrepit woman, and beyond that is all hallway and emptiness and nonexistence. I abandon the paintings for Mathieu, for he is easily the most beautiful, and precious, and ephemeral, thing in a room webbed with still-life dreams. He, not quite a genius but devastating in his desire to be, pulls me, with the gravity of those downcast eyes, toward him like a planet powerless around its sun. I do not care about motivation, for it comes down to this: I could not celebrate any stroke of color more than the red covenant of those lips, and I could never form so perfect a poem as the one smudging itself in the verse of his eyes. He is boyish and lean and powerful and so goddamn stunning while he stands there second-guessing himself that I answer his doubt and that strange shame by locking onto his lips with the ferocity of a muse breathing inspiration into an artist desperate for resuscitation.
I love those lips. I love his kiss. I love him.
I love him.
We are clumsy and nervous getting started, and at times I have the overwhelming desire to laugh like a small child doing unchildish things. When he pulls me to the floor, I feel the thick Oriental carpet rub up against my naked back, and I smooth the surface of it with my free hand, thoughtlessly stroking the same pattern of paisley swirls, this time red, that taunted me in Cleveland. I laugh at this happy coincidence, loving paisley, and those mad little whirls of perpetual motion. Above me, Mathieu stops the wonderful things he was doing to move me with those increasingly assured hands to stare anxiously into my face.
“Is this all right?” he asks, shy and uncertain.
(Do not laugh during sex. Ever.)
I kiss him as my answer, fielding him closer. “You … are … always … talking.”
He doubts me. “I was going to wait. I had it planned. We would continue our tour, building the sweet anticipation. Then, on the last day, with only touch left, we would finally do … this.” Mathieu furrows his brow, made timid by this other, more strategically romantic self, who is adorable but rather tedious to me right now, since it isn’t his hand running wild across my trembling, supplicant body. “I would have given everything to you, Daisy. Not just me, but Paris. It might have been perfect.”
“It is perfect.” I close my hands around his face. “I don’t need Paris. And no stagey productions or plans for us—I’m so tired of thinking ahead of myself. I only want you. Now.”
He abandons thought for me.
The soul drops back into this body and begins to sing. Muscles stretch fingers, nerves strike keys. Mathieu’s mouth drags a bright weight down, down. From the broken capillaries of an earlobe into the dark bruise of tenderest pain. Lower still.
Lips form words, but sound is beyond.
I am fire, not air. Fire …
The room slackens and recedes. Mathieu’s eyes are wetter than rain. My back curves, arms extend. I reach for him, wanting this destruction. Wanting our walls to shatter, all these colors to slather and run. He answers with a reckless drive. I lock my arms around him and bury my lips into his neck. Breathing his skin. Taking him in.
Mathieu.
That name the only language I could ever understand.
His body breaks like waves across my flame. Pressure tacks its tempest spot, and I surrender to the swell. Fingers ripping tension. Legs pressing need. If I cannot get inside of him, I commit to drown.
Please … please.
The final curtain tears. Darkness pours between us. My eyes roll with light. I fracture far and wide.
And walls that feared, die.
Chapter
15
Lovers, and readers, will become torpid and dull after sex. After the sharply drawn tension now lies like a sloppy noodle on the spoiled floor, and page. I know that I can’t top first sex for gratifying voyeurism. Few can. It doesn’t matter if it’s not great: it’s still new, and a thing of poignant mystery. After the first ten times, no matter the improvement in technique or the deeper connection forged, we’re still trying to recapture that first-time revelatory experience. His hands on my naked thigh, his tongue on my … plum blossoms. There is no high like the first high. That first kiss, or climax, is often the climax and the resolution of a certain kind of movie, and we, the audience, drift out of the theater manipulated and sated, aglow with tender notions, not entertaining any end but the lovers’ projected bliss. Too many affairs begin out of little more than a kind of fatal boredom. And so I linger by the Matisse, by Mathieu, worried, and thinking about the married couples I’ve tangled with in Paris. They might yet be our bookends.
But I want to believe that even they would read our story.
We rouse ourselves after a while, yawning like big cats after a satisfying kill. Time might have stood still, but now it clicks on, like a projector sluggishly firing, and I sink back into this animal body. There is my stomach growling, and Mathieu’s too, and we laugh about this, our warring bellies, listening for the loudest battle cry. Mine wins, and I tell him that it must be an American thing, or at least a Midwestern thing, since we eat around six o’clock, when Dad gets home from work, and Mom takes a bubbling casserole out of the oven to place before his wearily smiling frame. Some artifact of 1950s living that endures because it’s comforting to have routine. Even with a mom who works, I have rarely eaten past seven o’clock. Only Europeans are this laid-back, I tell Mathieu, a little disapprovingly, not falling under the spell of Monet’s pillowy haystacks.
“Maybe Americans are just hungrier than we are.”
“Fat, you mean.”
“Morbidly obese,” he teases, poking me in the squishy part of my belly, making me squeal and scramble away like any self-conscious girl, American or French.
He scrambles after me, and …
Some minutes, or an hour, later we dress. Now we’re all buttons and business. It is time to eat. I want a steak, a Coke, and a bloomin’ onion. Or at the very least some French fries.
And make that steak rare.
Mathieu insists that we walk along the quay first, that the restaurants are empty at this time of the evening, that nobody in his right mind—he’s excepting Americans—eats at ten before seven. He wants me to see something.
The beauty of the evening and the hum in my heart are in such harmony that I readily agree.
It is the magic time of the evening, dusk, when the burnt sun at our backs slips past its horizon, and the Paris sky inflames to a purplish fever. The sky is larger in Paris, panoramic. There are no skyscrapers to choke its view, and like everything in Paris, I have no doubt that it was by design. You have to admire a city and its people for having such perfect consideration for one another. Ahead, rooted to its isle, is Notre Dame, her chameleon sandstone absorbing the last light of the evening and alchemizing it into this fiery façade that glows from within. Like an opal, she is Paris’s fairest jewel.
Mathieu and I walk in silence, our hands joined, the Seine flowing languidly beside us. I marvel at the day’s thread. I have experienced years that unspooled faster, and with less to show for them at the end. I haven’t grown so much as enjoyed many lifetimes. Was it just last night that I called Andy, that schoolboy, with whom sex was as satisfying as a wet sneeze? This morning that I fantasized about a vigilant autonomy, a sacred aloneness? Now I belong to Mathieu, and he to me. I do not feel any kind of sacrifice at the giving. He has not stripped me of my independence but sharpened every particle of my being until I am downright aerodynamic—a woman made to fly—making more of this thing I call my self than I could have been leaning over my balcony, a Juliet without her Romeo.
With no great fanfare, the lights of Paris blink on.
“Ahh,” I sigh, my heart thumping its admiration. Mathieu smiles. This is what he wanted: to flood my darkness with light. The bridge ahead, one of nineteen straddling the Seine in Paris, illuminates as a bateaux mouche tucks under, and the happy couples on board, drunk on life, clap their joy. A lone artist, desperate to finish his painting, fights against the darkness on thequay, squinting into the light above his easel, dabbing color onto the canvas while a thicker paintbrush remains slung behind his ear. He curses under his breath, disgusted with the night’s claim. His painting of slaps and dashes is unremarkable, but his fierce commitment fills me with pleasure. I breathe in his turpentine as we pass. It is the pungent scent of someone following his bliss.
Musicians are out, filling the lovers and flâneurs with song, trading on their talent for the sporadic drop of a coin. It seems a hard existence, until you breathe in the languorous Paris night, the charm of the open-air concert hall in which they perform, and a deliberate choice to shun convention and embrace a life of unimpoverished poverty. Ahead, the ubiquitous accordion player stands, too stiff-lipped and dignified for parody, and squeezes the sound out of his instrument with the care of a surgeon massaging blood into his patient’s heart. The notes are tremulous and sad, a quivering sob pulled from his fingers. Tears fill my eyes, for when the heart is full, it does not take much pressure to make it burst, splattering the contents in an emotional carnage. I wipe my eyes and scavenge for a euro from my sweater pocket to drop in his case, to repay our earlier debt. If only there were some way of letting him know it’s not charity. I look at him, wanting the connection, but his eyes, including the paralyzed, droopy one, are closed in meditation. He hears the plink of my little tribute and nods gravely, maintaining his inward focus. I come to a realization: these people are not here for our money. This is prayer.
If I relaxed my eyes, blurring the electric lights into gas, it might be a hundred years earlier. This is why Americans come to Paris. It may wax and wane in our collective imagination, but its gravity is as reliable as the moon’s upon the oceans’ tides, its effect on us undimmed through the ages. It, like the Matisse, remains the same. It’s we who change.
I look up at Mathieu to find him lost in thought. His remotenesspleases me. It feels good to ignore one another, to reclaim the quiet of solitude, if not its heavy sentence. I want to walk all night by his strong, silent side. I want to sail under dark bridges and whisper sweet nothings to the reflectionless water, as we push toward long horizons. I want to seize an instrument, any instrument, and pound out the fugue inside my heart. I want to swallow time and hold it pregnant within me. I want to dance on the graves of saints and sinners. I want to suck out all the marrow out of the marrow of life … and belch when I am full.
I want to live so deep that I cannot find sunlight.
Chapter
16
We eat with our hands. Like cavemen, or toddlers. The restaurant is Ethiopian, and the setting this stuffed basement room in the Latin Quarter. We rub shoulders with strangers whose plummy faces, unaccustomed to feral, African spices, glisten with exertion. Heaping platters of colorful dishes are placed in front of our new friends, who initially look taken aback (so which one is the ox?), then tentative, then transported. I begin to understand the effect imaginatively prepared food and that elusive variable called atmosphere (which cannot be scooped from the troughs we call “buffets”—ironic French word origin notwithstanding—back home), can have on people. There is a fragile unity here that is temporal, but felt. We are sharing in something neither trivial nor profound. We are simply eating communally, and in so doing we perform a ritual that transcends time.
Intricate basketry and African masks adorn the restaurant, along with more modernist paintings that brook the divide between the continents. Some look like reinterpretations of Chagall, with floating people, and grinning skeletons, serenely rendered inprimary colors, while others remind me
of Hindu mandalas, or Aztec calendars, in their circular iconography. It is at moments like these when I marvel at the sameness of people across the globe, how the points of departure are really that: small diversions that exploit, and elaborate on, our commonality. The world is a sphere, without beginning or end, the divisions arbitrary, ghostly things. For the first time in Paris, in the belly of this humid restaurant, I have no sense of being a foreigner. The place has a comforting sense of inclusion, and movement.
It is American jazz, those throaty steppes of Stan Getz’s sax, which buoys our conversations, and not the muscular, driving beat of Ethiopian drums. Paris has a raging hard-on for American music—particularly old-school jazz. My mom would approve. I will have to tell her when I get back. If I get back.
When it is our turn, I am so hungry that I do not hesitate. I grab a piece of injera, a crepe-type bread, and plow it through the red-peppered chicken stew, stuffing it into my mouth, where it sizzles on my tongue. I like how the food is served—all entrées to a single ceramic plate. No pretensions; what’s mine is yours, mon ami. I take a big gulp of water, ignoring my sweating wine, and dab at my temples with a cloth napkin.
Mathieu grins. “Too much for you?”
“Are you kidding?” I scoff, throwing back another mouthful. “I grew up with a mother who challenged us to jalapeño pepper contests and made Indian curries that set our hair on fire.” I cough. “This is nothing.”
“I grew up in cafés and restaurants, the waiters my extended family, until I learned to take care of myself.” Mathieu’s hand pauses halfway to his mouth, and his eyes catch a sparkle from someone’s glass. “Someday I will cook for you—real Provençal cooking, Daisy—and you will finally appreciate this cuisine that frightens you so.”
“Frighten is too strong a word. I’m just skeptical of any nation that puts egg on pizza,” I retort, smearing my bread through the meat and veggie mixture. “It makes me question everything.”