Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  “THAT WOULD BE A FATE WORSE THAN DEATH.”

  “I’ll say.” He smirks. “Say, I gotta joke for you: how many Frenchmen does it take to screw in a lightbulb?”

  “Oh, I know this—”

  “None! They just surrender to the darkness.” He snorts.

  I laugh. “Ain’t it the truth. Pussies.”

  He looks at me hungrily. The man is aroused by smugness. He probably has mood lighting and a jar of Vaseline set out for Ann Coulter’s weekly appearance on Hannity & Colmes. So she has a neck like a Modigliani, without the humanity. Ad hominem attacks are the most potent aphrodisiac for people who live outside the reality-based universe.

  “So would you describe yourself as an idealistic neoconservative out to spread freedom throughout the uncivilized world, or are you more of an old-school, let’s-drain-the-bathtub, Grover Norquist type, or a what-would-Jesus-do, let’s-protect-the-stem-cells, waitin’-for-the-Rapture kind of guy? Personally, Ronald Reagan is my hero, so I guess I’d be the middle one, with a token touch of the latter.” Burping a little, I add, “Because God knows Reagan would be a mite suspicious about this whole Iraq thing!”

  “Uh, I’m a little of all three, I guess. But mainly I want to lower taxes.”

  I smile brilliantly at him. “That’s so refreshing to hear. It’s not many people who can be that optimistic about their own self-interest.”

  It rolls off him like water. His eyes are fastened, like some fantastical missile detection system, to my cleavage, since I’m leaning in cozily. He must be desperate to gawk at the nubs. “Yeah, well, I try.”

  “So what’s a freedom-loving American patriot doing in France?” I ask, relaxing my head on my hand to look more deeply into this young man’s untroubled soul. There are no scars on these cheeks. They look laminated.

  He shrugs and takes his cap off to run a hand through the gelled hair. “These things look good on your transcripts, and I want Georgetown.” He lifts his drink. “And while Parisians might be a bunch of pacifist wusses, they can still party.”

  “I’ll drink to that.” We dutifully clink mugs.

  “And why are you here?” he asks, wetting his lips.

  “Ohhh … to get laid by a dirty, yellow Frenchman, I guess.”

  I think his jaw might unhinge. He starts to choke, before checking himself. “Wait, are you serious?”

  I stare at him. He looks away and holds his beer for support.

  At last, Matthew sweeps in, gaining courage at this unprecedented chance for the easy score, and whispers/shouts in my ear, “Would you settle for a filthy American who wants nothing more than to be with you tonight?” His hand, complete with class ring, grazes my thigh.

  Nothing more.

  I feel myself closing in on his earlobe. “That depends.”

  “On what?”

  “On how long you can make me feel like I’m someone else.”

  His eyes flap their confusion. I help him out by laughing.

  “And on if you have protection.”

  Now I’m speaking his language. Matthew grins and nuzzles my ear.

  “You bet.” He kisses my neck and pats his pocket. “Never leave home without it.”

  I barely fight the inclination to shove him away and bring my hand to my head. “Please,” I beg. “Could we not talk quite so much?”

  He smiles. This is all so easy. “I promise to be as quiet as a mouse, Dana.”

  We leave a minute later, his buddies giving him the old winkwink nudge-nudge routine. There’s an erotic museum down on the Boulevard de Clichy (I wince at that hard ch-sound charging from that clumsy, American mouth) he tells me is awesome and tastefully done. Wow, because I was worried it might not be tasteful. Nice attempt to walk the line between perv and gentleman, little man. Anyway, it works because I go with him.

  I guess he considers this to be our foreplay.

  Why do I go?

  It’s something to do, you see.

  Ma vie en rose.

  Chapter

  20

  There is nothing less erotic than looking down a green plaster vagina with a man who giggles like a little girl.

  No, I don’t have sex with the blue devil.

  Although much in the museum is, dare I say, devilish and fun. The drawings and Indian sculpture are deliciously perverse. Two bodies twirling into one. Legs that laugh at beginnings. Boudoir coquettes, fannies round and raised like baboons’ invitations. In the end, the unflappability of human lust is gently comical and poignant. I am an animal. Mathieu is an animal. The rest is just obstacles we invent to keep it interesting.

  Matthew, or Mr. McGrabby, is a big obstacle. But he’s not interesting, and I’m not a drunken sorority girl. So I tell him I have to use the restroom. He waits for me by a sculpture of a woman’s leg slung outside a window. I make my escape by the more conventional front door.

  I wouldn’t feel too badly for him. He still has a war he has no intention of fighting in to turn him on and enough simulated vaginas engorging him to keep him randy and snickering throughthe night. Mine will not be overly missed.

  I have learned a few things since Rakesh. And, somewhat infuriatingly, though I was with Andy for years, I could not cheat on Mathieu after this day. I may hate it, and chafe at the bit, but he owns me. Distance or distractions cannot dilute the claim. I can still feel the shock of his hand on my breast, fingerprinting me. I was the one to leave, yet I know he feels my pulling toward him, like a boomerang about to turn. Which is why I keep walking the other way.

  I catch the metro back “home” to my pink hotel room, where I confront the fact that this is the life I have scratched out for myself in Paris. Here is the chick-lit confession: after watching a dubbed rerun of Friends, I looked up mon petit chou in my French-English dictionary, and in my bewilderment at what I found, cut my toe-nails, did not try on my shoes, ran to the market in the falling rain to buy the nearest thing to Ben & Jerry’s Fudge Brownie, ate the whole pint, before packing myself in between the bedsheets and mulling masturbating. But I fell asleep before I could work up the necessary energy, or move beyond the green vagina in my thoughts.

  As for Mathieu? He refused to show himself at all.

  The day dawns gray and chilly, as it should. I awake, underslept and bewildered at my surroundings. I had dreamed that Mathieu and Andy were fighting over me … in a manner of speaking. Andy tried to goad Mathieu into a fight so he could pound on him, but all Mathieu would do was turn toward the viewless window (with Van Gogh’s sunflowers sitting on the sill), and repeat, “Words are loaded pistols” in his soft, portentous way, Andy bobbing andweaving behind him in an impersonation of The Champ. Finally, tiring of their shared ineffectuality, I snatched the flowers from the vase and threw them out the window, before smashing the two of them over the head with the heavy urn, dropping them into a people puddle, à la The Three Stooges.

  All that was left out was the canned laughter/cheering and a fat, black, sassy woman yelling, “You go, girrrl!”

  Groaning as I get out of bed, I notice a dribble of brown ice cream on the sheets that has spilled from my demolished carton. It gives the embarrassing impression that I soiled myself overnight. Filled with high hopes for the day, I trudge to the shower.

  Shivering in the anemic stream of water, I begin to experience a change of heart about the whole situation. Maybe you overreacted, the damp, hypothetical angel (looking like a jolly Grandpa Matisse) on my right shoulder purrs. What is it, really, that Mathieu has done? So his father colluded with Nazis. Or, at the very least, sat by while Jews were sent to their deaths. Stole priceless pieces of art that the world should own. Surely you can’t blame the son for the father’s complicity in the biggest horror show of the last century, a genocide that felt as ancient and removed as the old black-and-white footage that chronicled it, until now.

  Of course you should, the equally hypothetical, if plainly indignant, devil (disguised as a head of Picasso/body of a bull thing) on my other shoulder hisses. What�
��s he doing about it now? Nothing. Take it from me: lying is all men are good for, Daisy, and he got you—good. He lied about Camille, he lied about his distaste for smoking, which, while not a big deal, somehow is, because it’s in the minor details where true character lies low, like an outlaw. And, while not lying about Justine, he didn’t come clean there either.

  And then there’s that bag. Didn’t see that coming, did you?

  Zut alors! But you didn’t come clean about Andy, sputters Matisse, more forcefully than I’d like for a Grandpa sort. Not tomention with Andy. And you lied to Mathieu about your grief for your grandmother, and that ridiculous story about Aunt Flo. People lie, Daisy. Love? You two barely know each other. You’re going to be on guard for a period of time. You want to project an illusion of lovability … a garden of flowers. He clasps his hand to his chest and bows.

  But she owned up to most of that stuff, Picasso interjects, waving a dismissive hoof. He was a phony all along. While having the cojones to convict you of lying to yourself about your religion. Hell, he’s not even a real writer. More like one of the sycophants who trailed me my entire career. He sniffs and puffs up his bull-chest. They still yap at my heels.

  Jesus Christ, Matisse swears, rolling his eyes. The ego on you: talk about bull crap. Camille was a charming girl, Daisy. Would you have been able to resist her while your heart was bathed in sorrow?

  Of course she would have, the Picasso/bull thing spats. He is in control of the choices he makes in life. All that junk is just a convenient excuse to make him feel better about himself. Mathieu is a lout. And once a lout, always a lout. Trust me, I know.

  God, I hypothetically hate both of you. How about an offended silence all around?

  Stepping out of the shower, I come clean with myself: his father’s crimes, while revolting and deplorable, do not taint Mathieu. We all want to protect the people we love, and his crime, if any, is that he cannot give his father up while he’s receding into obliviousness. And I can understand, if not condone, his sleeping with Camille. Hell, it’s not like last night with Matthew couldn’t have happened. One more pint, and I’d have lapped up my self-loathing with as much gusto as a coed in Cancun. And the smoking thing is negligible, although I despise it and don’t understand how he could continue to kill himself in the aftermath of his mother’s death.

  The bag. The bag is not unforgivable. Just … perverse.

  No, what I can’t forgive is the moment when he, with flagranthonesty, told me that nothing meant more to him than his writing. I cannot compete with characters inside his mind for his attentions. That probably makes me as big an egoist as he is, but I already languished in a relationship in which I played second fiddle to a man’s relentless pursuit of his ambition.

  It’s not going to happen again.

  “You could choose Case.” I circled the empty pizza box in the middle of his room. “I promise I won’t tell anyone that you settled,” I added, cupping my hand around my mouth in an exaggerated whisper.

  “It’s Harvard, Daze.”

  “And I’m your girlfriend, And-ee.”

  He mumbled something unintelligible and flipped through the Harvard class catalogue. His desk boasted an iMac, sporting the Harvard Medical School homepage. Harvard as the new porn.

  “You’ll still be my girlfriend. Now you can just be my girlfriend who comes to some kick-ass Red Sox games with me.”

  “Sure. With all of my copious free time. After all, I’m not in med school. Just a lowly neuroscience program at a second-tier university. I wonder if they’ll even make me go to class, or if they’ll just tweak my nose and tell me that I’m cute.”

  He whistled and flung the catalogue on his desk. “Sounds like somebody has an inferiority complex.” Grabbing my hand, he pulled me onto his lap and tweaked my nose. I tried to bite his finger, but he had the reflexes of a jackrabbit. “You could have gone to med school too, you know.”

  “You’re forgetting that I have no desire to be a doctor. Too many sick people.”

  “Too many people.”

  “You say toma—”

  “—yeah, yeah.”

  I looked him directly in the eye. “Do you want to be a doctor?”

  Andy lost his smirk and furrowed his brow. “That’s a dumb question.” He started fiddling with the computer mouse.

  “Is it?”

  He pushed me off his lap to put the catalogue on his shelf. “Yeah, it really is.”

  “I think you want people to think you want it. I think you’re in love with the idea of being a doctor, the pulpy prestige of the thing.” I added, more softly, “I think you want your parents to stop calling you ‘the athletic one.’”

  “I think you took too many psych courses in college. It’s a pseudoscience, you know,” he replied, looking for his iPod.

  I could never stick Andy with anything sharp enough to make him really twitch. He was too goddamn happy. He ran on the fumes of a ridiculous energy. Especially then, with the shimmering bricks of Harvard beckoning like The Promised Land.

  “I just wonder.”

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Whether we’ll make it.”

  He screwed up his face. “You’re worrying over nothing. Absence makes the heart grow fonder.”

  “Absence makes the heart forget.”

  He tackled me onto his bed, smelling of sweat and the wet leather from his basketball. “I could never forget you. Even if I wanted to. You’re too damn …”

  “Too damn what?”

  “Something,” he mumbled.

  We shrugged out of our clothes. The sex was more passionatethan usual. Nothing like the prospect of parting to make you want him to remember.

  But he never glanced at that web of skin above my iliac crest. He’d stopped years before. It was just anatomy by then, something he’d be seeing a lot of in the weeks to come. Yet in the middle of our lovemaking, I saw his eyes lock onto the acceptance letter from Harvard, pinned to his cork bulletin board, next to the Red Sox pennant and a signed letter from Senator Voinovich.

  I even thought I heard him give a small sigh.

  I hear the Red Sox have a real shot at the World Series this year. Nice that old dogs should learn some new tricks—especially when bellied up to curveballs that come dangerously close to ripping off your balls.

  The truth is that I will never be as attached to my work, or my microscope, as Mathieu is to his imagination. I wish it weren’t so. I have been conditioned to view work as the end game. The American feminist call to arms was to seize the office and make it the new, liberated home, swapping that vacuum cleaner for some goddamn self-respect. So my mind responds, like Pavlov’s dog, to the bellwether ideas of American success: Harvard, post-grad, assistant professor, associate professor, tenured professor. The Ladder Doctrine of American living. But my heart lies somewhere else. Or rather, many places, for it is a fickle, promiscuous organ—one moment responding to a Manet, the next to a Matisse, one minute to an Andy, the next to a Mathieu, loving them equally, if differently. Yesterday it attached itself to so many things that it split at the seams, drawn and quartered by its conflicting desires.

  And I liked it.

  I liked the rush of that sensory bombardment, the headiness that shoots your feet off the ground. Back in Cleveland, I existed. I was even content. Yesterday, in Paris, I thrived. It’s the spiritual difference between prose and poetry. I’d like to be able to write something as majestic and clean as Emerson’s Self-Reliance, but I want to live as successfully, and recklessly, as Whitman in Song of Myself. I, too, want to possess the origin of all poems.

  Across the golden hours of yesterday’s dreamscape, Mathieu and I were hedonists worshipping at the altar of Dionysus, and each other. If we stumbled at the end and let our chins graze the earth, it is only because nerves stretched to such great heights must also endure long falls. We touched the sun with waxen wings. How many can boast the same? Even Louis XIV, that fabled Sun King, ended badly, with a failed war, no living ch
ildren, and a nasty attack of gangrene that finished him off in excruciating fashion. Yet we remember the outrageous high heels, the iron rule, and the palatial Versailles. I want to live, if not decadently, then splendidly, turning my back to the long shadow cast by the hands of clocks, certain that time will come to love, or at least ignore, me.

  Today I will do the things I would not allow myself to do yesterday with Mathieu. I will don my jeans and Keds and order a café crème at the Café Flore, wondering, with a shadowy thrill, who sat in the chair I now occupy. I will poke my head in Sainte-Chapelle and admire the jubilant stained-glass windows, without anyone whispering over my shoulder that my reaction to them is fraudulent, or that they’re a pretty fiction filtering a darker truth. I will go to the Musée Picasso and acknowledge that I only like about half of his stuff, and that some is downright mediocre. I will embrace my squeamishness and hold my nose when passing a fromagerie, trying my damnedest to quell my gag reflex while eyeing the hunks of moldy goat’s milk that are supposed to make my knees quake with gratitude at their pungently ripe bouquets. I will shed my inferiority complex and wear my Americanism as casually as I do back home: that is, without being conscious of it.

  I will finally conquer this city by not pretending that I must love the whole of her.

  I am reaching for my sensible raincoat in the tiny closet when I notice a note wedged under my door. Fingers expressed, my hand remains caught as I stare, somewhat fearfully, at the small, white rectangle atop the tangled red roses on my carpet. My body hangs on a silver thread, the fleeting tenseness of the moment begging for Andrew Wyeth’s sharp eyes and earnest hands. There is a pull to the raincoat, to my day’s plans lining it, which my arm cannot abandon. And yet the envelope, with its clean white mystery, waits impatiently, its scrawled Daisy a promise of complications. It must be from Mathieu. I let it slip I was staying here over dinner, even telling him the room, twenty-three, because I believed the number to be portentous. Perhaps it is.