Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

I teeter to the left, scraping my elbow against an historic French building and leaving behind a bit of personal history. I feel no pain, even as I watch the cut skin struggling to clot, my body’s cavalry of platelets riding to the rescue without my oversight. Fibrinogen molecules unite! We’ve got a real situation at the intersection of humerus and radius. On the double, proteases! If I am the God of my machine, I must not be omnipotent or omniscient, because I don’t have control over any of it, and I don’t know what the fuck’s going on. But it runs pretty smoothly. The blood soon coagulates, forming a thick putty over the wound. All is saved. Good work, soldiers: at ease.

  Fascinating mechanism, really, but my mind, like a triggered Venus flytrap, closes upon the red stuff itself, that salty porridge swimming through our veins and which drips warmly down my arm. The liters of blood that must have washed down this Paris alley. My DNA comingling with the genetic muck of Paris in an international cocktail. Rivers of blood and human waste have been absorbed by Parisian cobblestones, saturating the rocky surfaces before finding the Paris sewers (what a city: even its sewers rate tours), and flowing toward the open sea to find dilution of itsmemory. The Seine should be a sludgy bloodbath, but it’s forgotten the revolutions, too, or is holding them a watery secret.

  Oh, the city pays tribute to these acts of terror, is even rather boastful of them, like their monuments wink knowingly about a rakish, if lovable, past. Yet it’s been whitewashed, gilded. Funny how removed we feel from the chaos that came before. It’s only been a few generations since a bunch of raging, murderous thugs scurried like rats through the maze of Paris streets, slicing and dicing other rats at random, making heroes of brutes and victims of laypeople. Have we evolved so rapidly? Do we have less capacity for bloodlust now? No. We’ve simply promoted technology to do our dirty work.

  It takes a monster, feral or groomed, to kill a man with his bare hands. The monster has the peculiar talent for looking into a victim’s eyes and not recognizing that shared throb of humanity. He will always see the Other in place of a Brother. Today, it only requires a feeble imagination to commit the same atrocity, on a more spectacular, shock and awe level. The computer acts as an indifferent intermediary, the distance serves as buffer. Rarely do we have to confront “the whites of their eyes” anymore; rarely do we, as a nation, have to witness the consequences of war. Rarely has war been born so lightly. Little W—a man who is neither omnipotent, nor omniscient, but believes himself to be—has made us all small. I hope we grow into our shame.

  For Americans love to point to our national origins as a sign of superior pedigree and character. After all, we threw some tea over a boat; the French revolutionaries cut people’s heads off and staked them on poles. We invented a new form of democracy, largely on the strength of a few men’s prescient ideas and iron will; they cut some more heads off. But now our nobility is slipping away. We’ve become the punch-drunk aggressors—gnashing our teeth in time to the heroic beat that swings flags and corruptible hearts, offeringup our liberties like devotionals to a new god called fear—and the French are the wannabe diplomats whose sincerity would be more believable if there wasn’t all that bloody history to dampen our confidence. Funny how things change. I think it was Jefferson who penned, “All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” The French know something about that. But I, too, have been a mouse, my conscience a muffled squeak in a noisy world too littered with mice, all scratching out small, rodent existences in a bigger rat’s house of ideas. When what we need are some trumpeting elephants.

  Yes, it’s funny the difference a day makes in one’s level of outrage. Practically unreal, some might say. Fair enough. But I was asleep. Now I am awake. My life is no longer a dream, or a nightmare. It is the pale moon of Paris and the silver guillotine.

  And I felt something of its blade upon my neck as another of Mathieu’s pretty ghosts brushed my shoulder, while a foreign (it could not be American) newspaper attached itself to my chance, gummy shoe. I looked down and saw a small Iraqi boy with no arms looking haunted and aged—like, it must be said, without a whiff of hyperbole, a concentration camp survivor—beneath my foot, which has no claim on its good fortune other than landing luckily upon this earth in some geopolitical realm that doesn’t punish the riding of a bicycle around my yard with losing two limbs and, who knows, very probably a family. Because wasn’t it lucky, in someone’s (but not God’s) twisted imagination, that this liberated boy pedaled while his five siblings sat in a house constructed of glass and wood and nails whose carnage quotient was regrettably (so sorry, folks, didn’t mean to!) realized only after the errant bomb hit? After that tissue-paper flesh serving as the barrier between the rigid outside world and the multitudes of wondrous things—from inner ear hair cells to dizzying, first-love dreams, which were whirling like a rainfall of falling helicopter seeds within that softly mortal interior—was eviscerated.

  There is a new moon tonight.

  And so I think to wonder, for the first time, what my country’s military industrial complex is up to in the middle of this moonless night, in a faraway country where the people are brown, the oil is black and bubbling, and the children’s fear tastes metallic, like the blood congealing on my arm.

  It’s enough to make me think back to that restaurant mirage, and further, to that ballot in Florida. What a butterfly effect it predicated. Where have you gone, Al Gore? A nation returns its lonely eyes to you. We’ll accept the stiffness of your spine, as long as it’s connected to a conscience.

  And hey, drunk people can use words like incorrigible (if not actually say it) and get misty-eyed about Jefferson and that pack of holy white men, and Al Gore, too. You can be shit-faced and homesick and have verbal diarrhea at the same time (again, see our friend Henry Miller). The personal becomes political, if you open your eyes. What else should I think about? That the soulful girl with scarlet fingernails looked at Mathieu with more longing than Bergman had for Bogart at the airport? Why would I want to think about that?

  I want to believe in Mathieu, and America. I just wish they’d stop giving me reasons to suspect them of a lousy betrayal.

  “That was not a lesbian,” Mathieu finally says. He does not notice my elbow, which depresses me.

  “Oh, so there are straight women in France?”

  He pauses. “Yes, occasionally they are past lovers.”

  “No.”

  “Mmm.” He takes my elbow reassuringly.

  “As in a lover you’ve had recently?” I ask, not reassured.

  “As in a lover I had before you. Not so recently, however. At least twenty-five years and ten days ago by my count.”

  “As recent as that?”

  He grins. “It feels like an eternity ago, Daisy. A different lifetime.”

  We walk.

  “She looked like Natalie Portman.”

  “Who?”

  “Nothing.”

  My left elbow throbs. Paris has pricked me. Her pacifist persona is just that: studied, false. Beneath this perfect beauty beats the heart of a lioness straining against her chains. She would like to ravage the world again, eat us alive. Just give her the motivation and a vision.

  She could be a real bitch if she wanted to.

  We stand in front of a nondescript storefront. My eyes swim toward the lettering above the doorway. Shakespeare & Co. I feel less than reverential. I was not married on the street in front of a bookstore—Iraqi boys with no arms notwithstanding. My still-vigorous self-interest insists it didn’t happen.

  Mathieu looks at me expectantly.

  “Really? Here?” I ask, pulling the corners of my mouth in.

  “It is the perfect blending of the English-speaking world and the French.” Mathieu smiles. “We invented a new nation here twenty-five years ago, Daisy.” He circles around me, dragging his foot. “You and I. It is the only place in Paris that could mean something equal to the both of us.”

  I look again. The idea is nice. But behind me, over th
e quay, is Notre Dame, luminous and lasting. “I don’t know, Mathieu. I could have sworn we ducked into Notre Dame and got hitched there.”

  “People do not duck into Notre Dame and get hitched. Especially non-Catholic people who do not believe in marriage as a holy sacrament. It is not Vegas, Daisy.”

  “Okay, okay. Settle down. I guess we got married here.” I turn my back on Notre Dame, scuffing my foot on the ground. “Since you thought of it first.”

  He stands rigidly, hands jammed inside his pants pockets. As I watch him mope, it occurs to me that we are children fighting over a petty game of make-believe. And we both want to be the white knight. In reality, I am ferociously tipsy and more than a little upset about the Queen Amidala clone, and he is perturbed because I have casually, even heartlessly, drop-kicked his romantic idealism over onto the Right Bank, that more pragmatic realm of Paris of which we dare not speak.

  We seem to be at an impasse. Someone’s got to say it.

  “We seem to be at an impasse.”

  He sighs noisily. “I thought you would be happy with this. It seemed … inspired, back in the restaurant.”

  I sigh noisily. We find a nearby bench. The sidewalk outside the shop is bustling, even at this hour. Two Muslim girls frown and bury their chins into their chests as a group of teenage boys give chase, nipping at their head scarves and laughing. Apparently, being a meathead is not an American invention. I have an urge to follow them, but they’ve curved the corner and disappeared. I turn to Mathieu. He is looking the other way.

  “It’s a lovely idea. I just think I’ve run out of romantic steam. It occurs to me that I have twenty-one hundred American dollars left, and that when it is gone, I am too.”

  He leans back into the bench, his arm thrown behind me. “I thought we would not entertain the idea of endings yet.”

  “I can’t help it.” I time my orgasms to the precise, soulful crescendos of favored songs. “I mean, I figure out what I’m going to TiVo inmonthly increments. I do my Christmas shopping in the summer. It’s in my nature to look ahead.”

  Mathieu narrows his eyes and looks again to the couple occupying the bench to our right. They nuzzle each other’s necks, the girl shyly laughing. I can feel the wish in his silence. He already wants to change me, make me more like him, oblivious to anything but the moment. I tried it, I liked the novelty of it, but it looks a bit phony on me, like these shoes I awkwardly carry but may never wear. Before and after making love, I thought about my mother’s words, and considered, in a disembodied way, our lack of a condom. I never would have had sex without a condom back home. The idea would have terrified me. I permitted it here because I wanted Mathieu more than I cared about the future. I needed Mathieu. Swimming in the current of those arms, I’d have taken the rough gamble of water over the life preserver and drowned happy. The thought shames me now. Especially since it’s about thirteen days after the start of my period. Time is nauseatingly relevant and as pressing as a fist against my belly.

  If we’re not careful, the two of us could formulate a new and semipermanent Franco-American alliance that has my determined chin set within Mathieu’s stubborn jawline. And which flexes both when it doesn’t get its way.

  Mathieu strums my hair, running his fingers down the length and back up again. It feels good, and I lean into him. The night is not so cold with his arm around me. I banish thoughts of a little Jean-Paul from my splintering head and remember where I am: my parents’ bookstore, the one they both believe in. The site of my first Paris pilgrimage on that fleeting, rose-colored day. I left Shakespeare & Co. disenchanted, after coming across a copy of The Razor’s Edge braced on the shelf like a silent accusation. Seeing it led me not to my father, whose disappointment I was accustomed to, but to Mathieu, that sphinxlike stranger on my first Paris train. He had thought I could answer his riddle. But I didn’t even know the question.

  I realized, emerging from the doorway beside me, that I didn’t know why I had come to this city that could only hold borrowed meaning, but that I knew, I knew, in a moment of perfect clarity, with the dust of old books and the fur of indolent cats-in-residence making my eyes tear, that it wasn’t some quixotic quest for truth and understanding, but more like a break I could never have managed without the excuse Andy gifted to me. I had been walking my own razor’s edge—juggling the roles of precocious student, perfectionist daughter, and determined girlfriend—all of my life, on a journey that swung me in circles. I wanted to fall off the blade and rest. Paris provided a good leaping-off point.

  And Mathieu has soft arms.

  Yet this doesn’t feel like rest. Instead, I’m walking along a cleaner edge, a prescient path through Sandburg’s “impalpable” mist, where I breathe the purer, if more mysterious, air of blind men. This edge might take me somewhere. Mathieu is with me, but his weight throws me, and he keeps trying to circle around me to pull ahead. I don’t know how to manage the both of us. I don’t know how to make the journey my own and ours. I don’t know how to have a relationship yet, and particularly this relationship. For this isn’t some ordered, algebraic world I’ve programmed myself into, where the equation is always solvable for x and y. Our world is a god-awful differential equation, stacked with so many layers of independent variables that we can barely find one another in the baffling mix. Even then, when you solve the damned thing, what do you get but some kind of laborious graph whose meaning no one (not even my Chinese TA) understands, that looks like it was scratched by tying a gigantic pen to the tail of a meandering cow who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

  And yet I am in love with him (Mathieu, not the cow, thoughboth would be astonished, in their steady, wide-eyed fashion, to find me thinking of my love life in terms of mathematical paradigms), and bound to him for the duration of this crooked journey. There’s the rub.

  Mathieu pokes me in the ribs, and I jump half a foot into the air. He shakes his head, amused by my perpetual distractions, and directs my attention toward the bookstore. “Go buy me a Christmas present.”

  Surprised, I look at him. “Are you serious?”

  “Yes, as you say, we might not have a Christmas together. So let us enjoy one now.”

  I love this man. He is not unbendable. I clasp his boyish, pliable form, and he looks pleased, if embarrassed, which moves me more than any grand romance he might invent. I stand and play with his hair, grazing his ear with my fingers, while he fixes me with those eyes, willing me toward something again. I turn to go but stop and spin around. “Wait, don’t I rate a present too?”

  “I thought I gave you your present earlier this afternoon.” He shoots off a shit-eating, American grin at me and hangs his foot on his knee.

  I swat him on the arm, as girls do when they like a boy, and he pulls me on his lap, as boys who fancy a girl must do. He kisses my neck and assures me that he will find me something later. Like I really care. He’s right, of course. Making love to Mathieu under the Matisse sure beat my mom’s homemade, beeswax candles that I got for Christmas last year. I kiss him on his cowlick and leave him behind to complete my mission.

  Shakespeare & Co. is a shrine for people who try their worldly best to scorn shrines. It might be the secular humanist’s style of worship to kneel at this rather shabby storefront and be filled with the grace of the written word, as penned by mere mortals. The bookstore is the ultimate beacon of egalitarianism, though the light it emits is low wattage, with scores of books presented in thesame, haphazard manner—leaning against one another for support, some careworn. Each book’s ultimate, intangible worth is to be determined by the reader, of course, and not by the unassuming people who mill about the place, and whom one supposes, by their vestments of unwashed T-shirts and jeans, must be the employees/tenants since they drowsily eye the collection plate.

  If the whole of Paris enjoys a utopian reputation for struggling artists, its café crème and red wine the locally grown panaceas for what ails your inspiration, then this modest building, with its mossy appeal
, must be the writer’s inner sanctum, its primeval Shangri-La.

  It is no wonder my father and Mathieu love it so. My dad, the bibliophile, wants to consume it all, while Mathieu, the writer-philosopher, wants to create the masterpiece worthy of its shelves.

  There is a lot of pressure on little ol’ Daisy, who has not felt confident in bookshops since Professor Lockhart took her to a Walden’s and directed her toward The Canterbury Tales, forcing her to pronounce words like sovereyn pestilence, while she eyed the complete set of Frog and Toad stories, envisaging herself as the upbeat, eternally patient Frog and her father as the more grousy Toad explaining the Christ symbolism in the Prioress’s tale. Mathieu, too, expects a bona fide home run, something dazzling and brilliantly discerning. For gifts say a lot about the giver. How I wish I could get by with a three hundred euro pair of red high heels! How easy that would be. Finding the perfect book to give Mathieu is like trying to find my mother that obscure jazz record she doesn’t have, has somehow never heard of, and will love anyway. The last one I tried was a Duke Ellington collection of b-sides. She patted my head and said it was something my father might have given her. This seemed a bit harsh. And not entirely accurate since at least I got her the compact disc and not the 78 LP my dad would have triumphantly wrangled for a quarter at a garage sale.

  There are the biggies up front. Ulysses. Purported to be the best novel ever written, though I couldn’t stick to the first ten pages while simultaneously clinging to the notion that I was not half retarded. A Moveable Feast. Obviously Paris-centric, by Papa Hemingway’s unsentimental, if still tender, hand. It wouldn’t make much sense to buy it for Mathieu, who I am sure has read it, though nowhere near the Café de la Mairie bordering St. Sulpice, of course. Moving on … Henry James, you inscrutable prick. How could you have written both Washington Square and The Golden Bowl? How is a mind capable of such murky digressions and convolutions (she asks, digressing)? Wade into late James, and you might drown in the swirling vortices of his saltwater sentences. My finger traces the thin binding to my namesake’s story. Nah. Too obvious. And I still can’t forgive Ms. Miller for dying at the end. Though I begin to see why she had to.