Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  He smiles and bounces on his heels. “It is a surprise.”

  “What?” I moan, twisting away. “Just tell me so I can reject it and go to sleep.”

  He grabs my coat and key. “No. It will be better this way. Come on, lazy Daisy. It is Friday night, and you are in Paris.” Flinging the door open, Mathieu hesitates before turning toward me. “But there is one question I need to ask you first.”

  “What? How does this French-American man have such surgical scorn for half of his heritage?”

  “Not at all. My question is this: do you know how to roller skate, Daisy Margaret?”

  “Skate?”

  “Skate. Do you know how?”

  I narrow my eyes. “Are you serious?”

  “With equal parts French and American.”

  Shifting my weight, I recount my slim, fractious history on the subject. “My mom got me Rollerblades when I turned thirteen. Half of the scars on my body are because of those things.” I shrug. “My mom’s kind of a flake that way. She remembered that I liked purple, but forgot the pads.”

  “So you know how to skate?”

  “Skate? Yes. Stop? Not so much.”

  Apparently, this is enough, for Mathieu hustles me through the door. “Trust me. You will not need to stop.” He smiles and hikes his eyebrows up and down like a comic book villain. “Are you up for it, Yank, or do you still want to sleep the night away?”

  And because I am also my mother’s daughter, a woman so naturally competitive that she once started a half marathon and ran the whole thing because she felt it would be a “cop out” to stop, and because I am also the determinedly Plucky Heroine, I march out the door, fairly certain that this skating misadventure will not solve anything, and absolutely certain that I will fall.

  But there is always the matter of maybe. And the curious question of how.

  Spectacularly, as it turns out.

  Chapter

  22

  The people are the surprise.

  There are fathoms of skaters in a celebratory mood amassed near the Montparnasse Tower, that Rodney Dangerfield building in Paris only good for its lookout tower. There is a buzz in the air, an anticipatory glow, as electric as the nightsticks held by some of the revelers. Thousands of helmeted and padded skaters perform practice spins and rib good-naturedly with old friends and new. In a matter of minutes, I overhear five languages, from four continents, spoken. My tongue is a mite overcome, muted by the size of the crowd, and the nuttiness of my agreeing to be a part of it, when clearly I share nothing in common with these people. I don’t even have a pair of skates on, so I am a dwarf among the giant people. It’s funny what the new normal can be.

  We have to buy skates from a man hocking them at a hugely inflated price. What are you going to do? This is street capitalism, and he knows his market. Mathieu fumbles with his wallet, but I check him.

  “This is mine.”

  He opens his mouth to argue but is stopped by my expression. He nods and withdraws.

  Skate Man grins repugnantly and makes a cutting remark to Mathieu in French, spittle spraying. I can only imagine what is said. I thought American guys were macho, but they have nothing on the French. After paying, I whisper to the guy, “Vous devez avoir un pénis très petit,” which, I think, means, “You must have a very small penis.” (I have been very lonely at nights with my little dictionary and littler imagination.) But my pronunciation must be awful because he merely stares at me, my money hanging limply from his hand as I, not so cuttingly, saunter away.

  Mathieu, understanding my peculiar dialect, laughs until his shoulders shake. He pulls me to an open gap on the curb where we remove our shoes and don the skates, which are as stiff as shackles. I use Mathieu’s shoulder for leverage and perform a wobbly pirouette, rolling my eyes as he pretends to coach. Mathieu looks funny in skates. Andy could be an Adonis without even trying. I’ve never entertained Mathieu as the athletic type. In fact, France seems to shun exercise to a large extent. I have yet to see a gym, and unless they’ve installed a running track atop the Arc de Triomphe, joggers are few and far between. It must be all the sweating and awful workout clothes.

  “Did you play any sports in high school?” I ask, circling him.

  “Not in an organized way. But there were neighborhood football games.”

  “Football?” I blurt out. Then, “Oh—you mean soccer, of course.”

  “No, I mean football. You were thinking, I imagine, of that barbaric ritual known as American football.”

  My legs scissor like a drunk puppet’s. “So what’s the appeal there? With soccer?”

  “It is a sport of strategy. Of patience, and slow failure.” He wheels around quickly. Maypole removed, I sprawl to the pavement. Mathieu smiles indulgently. “And sometimes, great surprise. It is not the American way of constant gratification. Football feels more like real life. It is long, arduous, and sometimes there are no winners or losers.” He offers me his hand.

  Ignoring it, I find my feet again. “Great. Sounds like fun.” I practice my stopping, which is pretty straightforward when moving at one mile per hour.

  “Who said anything about fun?”

  There is a ripple of movement in the air. I hear a whistle sound, and a great, rousing cheer sweeps like an athletic wave through the crowd, which starts its tectonic shifting.

  “But wait! I’m not ready!”

  “Of course you are,” Mathieu says, ignoring the charge of people. He skates backward and holds out his hands to me, as skaters swarm us like cicadas.

  “But what about my shoes? Your shoes?” I yell, sucked into the great vacuum that a mob’s momentum insists upon. There appears to be a hill ahead of us. A very frightening kind of downhill.

  “Forget it. We do not need them.”

  Looking back at my Keds, their toes pointed neatly over the curb, laces tied, I am not so sure. I am abandoning an important part of myself back there. Those shoes have marked my steps for so long. God knows where these skates will lead me. Maybe I can return to pick them up laaaaatttteer—

  “Aauugghh!” I scream, grabbing Mathieu’s shirttail as we descend the first hill, which skis more like a mountain. “I can’t stop!”

  “You are not supposed to stop. Just let yourself go,” he instructs, his voice the eye in my storm. “Or hold on to me.”

  He is right. Somehow, though chaotic, it works, and there are no major collisions or falls. The crowd is a single organism with many pulsing parts, all similarly programmed to achieve their end. Eventually, I gain the confidence to let go of Mathieu’s shirt and, on flat ground again, even catch up to him, swish-swishing my legs to his constant rhythm. I look over at him and smile.

  “I’m doing it,” I yell, pleased.

  “You are doing it,” he agrees.

  There are many tonalities to be plucked from the glittering lights of Paris, but the colors have dissolved tonight, the lights dragged long, like time-lapsed film. At intervals, I take note of something that won’t be ignored, like the ornate Opera House or the tireless Louvre, streaming at the blurred corners of my vision. But on the whole, I fall into a state of Zen-like meditation. Mathieu and I coast wordlessly through the vacated city streets (What did they do with the cars? my baffled brain shouts above the Zen), which yawn so wide that they seem ordained for just this activity by some prescient nineteenth-century city planner. I pocket each foot forward, before discarding it as the next vibration ricochets up the vertical thrust of my legs, into my buttocks, and is killed by the package of vertebrae in my spine. The amplified friction of hundreds of nearby wheels kissing the pavement discourages talk and thought. I buzz like a small bee through the night air with my angry cluster, pulled by instinct alone. Does a bee think about destination? No, it reacts. And so I react. Continually. Reflexively. It is not until we hear a distant whistle and hit a wall of slowing skaters that we realize there is a break.

  It feels strange to stop, once you get going.

  We find another curb, and
I hobble over in a post-runner’s-high daze. My thighs are intractable and I sink to the ground in relief. I look at my wrist to check the time but my watch is curled on my nightstand, fast asleep. I have no idea of the time, or of how long we’ve been skating.

  “Probably one and a half hours,” Mathieu guesses.

  “It feels like less.”

  “It always does.”

  “You’ve done this a lot?”

  “A few times.”

  Just react.

  “Ever with another girl?”

  He looks at me, a line of sweat swathing the skin above his lips. “Not with one who meant anything to—”

  “—because I do this all the time at home. Except in Cleveland we call it How Long Does the Stupid White Girl Have Before She Gets Killed by A Crowd of Angry Motorists Wielding Tire Irons?” I avoid his eyes, spinning my wheels. “Of course, the SUV drivers are usually the first to attack, followed by the mean grannies made late for Wheel of Fortune. And there’s always a Hummer guy who tries to light some poor skater up with gasoline. Because, you know, he has so much of it to spare …”

  Mathieu shakes his head and sighs.

  “What?” I demand.

  “Will you ever be able to forget about my past relationships?”

  I give him a long, hard look. “Mathieu, I ran into two women yesterday, one of whom was a lesbian. Sorry, but I’ve never been part of such a diverse harem before.”

  He snorts.

  “And God only knows who else is hiding in the shadows. But I don’t doubt that I would be the ugly one.” I cut him off with my hand. “Two women, one day, in a city the size of Paris. Please forgive me if I don’t really like my odds.”

  “Daisy.”

  “So no, I won’t forget. But I won’t ask you about them. For self-preservation, if anything. I’m a bit of an ostrich yet.”

  Mathieu chews on this. “All right.”

  “That’s all?”

  He leans back on his palms. “I do not know, Daisy. You accuse me of holding back, of keeping secrets, when it is you who has not been frank.”

  He holds up a hand. “Let me finish. It took me a day—that is all, remember—to confess to you about my father, my mother, and my ex-girlfriend. But what do I know of you, for all my efforts? That you like Matisse more than Picasso. That your father has a strange hold over you. That you despise your dependency on—” He smiles sadly. “That you are always looking to wander, even while I hold your body close.”

  I blush and look down at my hands. “What else do you want to know?”

  “Why you came to Paris? Who Andy is? Why you felt the need to run away from home?” Mathieu looks at me searchingly. “You are slippery, Daisy. You try to appear so straightforward, yet you push people away with your humor, your insecurities … your cowardly self-righteousness.”

  My neck snaps up. “Self-righteous? Are you serious?”

  “You like to run. You will take any excuse,” he says. “Tell me, did you leave my apartment last night because you were enraged by my lies—lies that meant nothing to our relationship, as far as I could see—or were you secretly relieved to have found a smooth escape from all the turbulence? Did I hurt you, or did I merely cut your pride, as you struggled to imagine yourself in a different fairy tale, without a worthless, poor writer who would never give up his worthless writing, not even for you?”

  The whistle sounds again. The rest of the skaters rise and shove off. Mathieu and I remain seated. When the last of the lonesome skaters, loosely swerving backward, passes, I look at the retreating mass, feeling very much like a runt wolf abandoned by her pack and left to die.

  We are near the Pére Lachaise Cemetery. The iron gates stretch forever. Jim Morrison, having broken on through to the other side, rests there in perfect silence.

  “You and Sartre are right: hell is other people.” I sigh, brushing my hands off.

  Mathieu smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

  “If you must know, I haven’t talked about Andy because I don’t want to be judged. I feel a little bit protective of him. If you knew too much, you’d probably find a lot to scorn. Including me for loving him, once.”

  Mathieu pounces. “Do not shroud your motives. Andy was an excuse.”

  “Was he?” I demure, anger washing over me. Why must we fight about such nonsense? It makes me want to, well—damn him!—run. The skates are handy. I know I could beat Mathieu. The guy was built for grace, not speed.

  “Yes, you wanted to get away. You hate these ridiculous classes of yours and the career you thought you wanted. You realized that life has more to offer than the crushing routine of your laboratory, that there is more mystery to be uncovered in the universe than you could ever hope to find under your microscope, and that you had rebelled from your free-thinking parents by becoming their opposite: a slave to science, when you have the soul of a poet.”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in souls,” I mutter, shrugging the skates off.

  “I believe in your soul.”

  Maybe you wouldn’t if …

  I bite my lip and say, “You are wrong, Mathieu. I know you would like to be right. You have this picture of me in your head somehow. But you’re wrong.”

  He nods, leaning back again. “Anything is possible.”

  “I didn’t hate my life,” I say, shaking my head. “You have this funny idea of scientists, Mathieu—like we’re all programmed toward lives of logic and humorlessness. Like we’re unfeeling robots or something. It’s a cheap stereotype. The guy I work for? Dr. Choi? He is an incredible musician with this sweet soft spot for old musicals. I’m sure if he could spare some of the time he spendsworking to cure a debilitating disease, he’d compose an aria called ‘Some Enchanted Utricle.’ Oh, go ahead and laugh.” I scoff at his bemusement. “But people find their inspiration in different places, and thank God for it. You should thank your lucky stars that these people care so deeply about this stuff. Otherwise, I would have died at birth because I was born with a hole in my heart, and you could have been sitting here with someone else, wondering, after pulling your eyes away from her assets, why you felt so dissatisfied with the level of her conversation.”

  “In spite of the pleasure I feel at your ‘level,’ Daisy, you still digress. You are not ‘these people,’ no matter how prettily you pretend. I have no problem with your professor’s devotion. I am not against progress. But I am an advocate for authentic living. And I suspect that if you were to write an aria right now, it would be titled something like—oh, let me think—‘Some Enchanted Evening’? It may be too obvious for you, but it rather captures the spirit of the thing, yes?” Mathieu grabs my fingers and kisses my palm.

  He’s wrong, again. Not “Some Enchanted Evening.” “This Enchanted Evening.”

  I unscrew my shoulders and allow my head to loll backward. There is a smattering of stars blown across the sky, bright enough to pierce through the City of Light’s guarded aura. Paris is not the entire universe after all. I wonder what The Big Dipper is called in French? Le Gran Soup Spoon? I look toward Mathieu, ready to say something, but he is also engaged with the night sky, his Adam’s apple a tricky knot appealing to the heavens. I let it go.

  There are nights, rare ones, in which you need the sky to put you in your place. I am so small. And yet, I am my everything. I cannot reconcile these two truths so easily.

  I like to think that I could open my mouth on these nights and yawn it back inside, my belly ballooning to accommodate the undigested cosmos, holding it expectant inside of me, until it couldbe reborn. The Big Bang spewed it out there. But who lit the fuse? Science knows so much, yet understands so little. This is why people pull toward religion. The answers are so unsatisfying. Are we nanoquarks of God-matter, clashing with other quarks, equally infinitesimal and elusive, or are we chewed-up stardust trying to locate that lost radiance? Does it matter?

  I am here. Mathieu is here. Dark matter dances all around us. We fight and are repelled. We make up, and
there is attraction. And if I feel like a shape-shifter, a time traveler, sitting next to him (an unsettling thing—except to Einstein, maybe—when contemplating stars, because if you can’t believe in your own robust shape and form, then how are you to interpret the universe and your place in it?), well then, so be it. I don’t know where I stand with the universe, and I don’t know where I stand when I’m with Mathieu. But still I embrace the company. And I like looking at the stars. They are not much bigger than I from here. And if they no longer burn, a legacy of light survives.

  “You’re right,” I say, as the sequestered traffic spills noisily into our street. We pull our legs back and stand up, facing one another on the sidewalk, headlights bleaching our faces at intervals. “To some extent, anyway.”

  “About what?” His skates are still on, and with mine off, he towers over me. I tilt my head up, hating myself a little for appreciating his greater height. It’s a movie heroine thing: it’s been conditioned within me to demand the head tilt.

  “I don’t really like my schooling,” I admit, looking past the sharp corner of his shoulder, toward the iron gates beyond. “But more to the point, I didn’t really like Andy toward the end.”

  Mathieu guides my chin toward him. His eyes won’t let me go this time.

  “I cheated on him months ago. Never told him, of course. But when he broke up with me, I had the chance to play the victimand do something crazy.” I shrug, but my chin trembles. “We’re very alike, Mathieu. I, too, get bored, restless. Andy did me the great favor of giving me a reason to run. But then I tripped and fell into you. And I can’t seem to get up again.”

  I look down and take his hands in mine. “Yet I know that the day will come when you or I will get bored, and run again.”

  He squeezes my hands and smiles. “It would be difficult to be bored by you, Daisy. You are too, too—”

  Alarmed, I try to stop him. “Don’t say any—”

  “—too damn something,” he finishes, his eyes flashing their surrender under the headlights.

  “—more,” I sigh.