by Sarah Hina
“So what do you want to do?” Mathieu asks, tucking me closer, his voice low and resonant. If he were to say my name across an ocean, the pull of his voice would reach someplace deeper than sound to drag me toward him.
“Fuck it!” I laugh to the sky. “I want to do nothing. Absolutely nothing. With you.”
We kiss. And the cars in the busy street honk their communion, and the stars sigh their pleasure. Mathieu and I don’t make a sound. We have spun off the axis.
And so I do fall. Farther and farther. To some nameless place where imagination does not penetrate: beyond the stilted architecture of poetry, past the probing eyes of Hubble. These are still outward realms, after all. When what we desire is not to travel, but to find. To lock onto something, like a leech fastened to blood-rich prey. To feel the illusion of permanence in a kiss, a person, a moment, a God … even if we cannibalize ourselves in the process.
The gates of Pére Lachaise do not exist. They have retreated into the darkness. And Jim Morrison?
The Lizard King lives. And he can do anything.
The sun rises in Paris, and the grass is wet with dew. The sun rises in Paris, and the smell of baking bread hits you from nowhere and anywhere. The sun rises in Paris, and a statue in a park smiles over you like a guardian angel. The sun rises in Paris, and your lover’s arm rises and falls on your blanketed chest. The sun rises in Paris, and your heart—that weak, shameless organ—aches with the tender beauty of it. The sun rises in Paris, and somewhere your grandfather may be dying. The sun rises in Paris, and you can taste the regret for the many mornings when you will not see the sun rising in Paris.
It is a new day.
Look at me I’m only seventeen
The many years between us
Have been broken
Look at me under the evergreen
Life is a mellow dream
Almost unspoken
By the way
You said you’re here to stay
Let me love you ‘til tomorrow
Then it will last a year and a day
Maybe we’re here to forget
—Keren Ann
Chapter
23
I am, all modesty aside, a rather brilliant loafer. I wasn’t sure if I could crack it, but it turns out to be a simple matter of cutting the noose called Time. My watch is a blind eye hibernating in my suitcase, along with Rick, my camera, and everything else. Once acquitted of the notion that I must do A by Time B, my body stirs only when our neighbor upstairs starts her ballet steps, my feet flexing in time with her indelicate pliés and pirouettes as Mathieu snores beside me, the late morning sun burning through the sheet over the window. Beckett, not immune to time’s passing when food is indicated for, stares at me from her squat on my chest, while my belly, conditioned toward an idea of hunger before the feeling even made itself manifest, bears no complaint, now, to eating dinner when I would normally have thought about bed. The hours in between? They spend themselves in a new kind of education: reading without deadlines or exams, French lessons from Mathieu, learning that the best time to explore the Parc des Buttes-Chaumont on Paris’s outskirts is during lightly raining days, when it is nearly deserted, and the mist hanging over the small canaltransforms it into a Brigadoon emerging from its hundred-year slumber, just for you.
My favorite subject of study is Mathieu. How I measure our days together by the lengthening bother of curl on the back of his neck, which he vainly attempts to plaster down with the oil from his palm. How he types gustily—the noise ricocheting like weapon fire off the walls—with just his index fingers, and rebels when I suggest anything else might be more efficient. How he can’t even shut up when asleep but carries on in conversational French, pieces of which I can now crack from time to time. Once he spoke of his mother. Once he talked about a fine roasted lamb. Another time he groaned my name, upon which I promptly had my way with him.
But it is in his rare quiet moments where I find the most to love. That sleepy-eyed smile when I thrust a disapproving Beckett into his face in the mornings. The wetting of his lips a half second before pouncing on a rhetorical point. How he closes his eyes when he listens to music, or to me, on those occasions when I’m particularly brilliant or maddening. And, most eloquently, the way those same eyes light up when I sneak up on him at a meeting place earlier agreed upon. He cannot disguise his glee. And so I find that I have not grown up after all, for I am still sixteen and loving a man loving me. I invent reasons to be away from him, and do not acknowledge the fear that cramps my heart on that beat before he sees me, when I despair of some hardening of that soft, pliable passion quickening in his eyes. Happily, it is always there.
The leaves have turned, so the Earth must be harnessed to motion. Autumn in Paris is a lot like autumn elsewhere, except there are fewer leaves on the ground. Paris is, of course, a conscientious guardian of her trees. Yet I miss the crunching leaves beneath my feet. I have to go out and buy many more sweaters (and another pair of shoes) than the two I brought, because it isgetting cold and Mathieu’s arms can only work so hard. Mathieu does not recoil at my buying them from a second-hand store. I think a part of him still believes that as goes my money, so go I. He doesn’t yet trust that I am capable of sacrifice. He warns me that I will grow bored and hostile toward him for dragging me away from my “weekly trips to TGIF” and my “American fever for shopping malls and bad pornography.” I ask him who the hell he thinks I am. His paranoia is silenced as he retreats from the solace of comfort stereotyping. I ask him, more tentatively, what the difference is between good porn and bad porn. He takes me to go see Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris, playing that night at one of the many art-house cinemas nearby. I tell him afterward, with a charley horse seizing my gut, that this is not porn; it’s sex as human suffering. But maybe it worked, because we still had sex when we got home. Then again, we have sex every night. It just doesn’t involve measurable amounts of butter or self-loathing.
We like to sit on the roof in the evenings, wrapped up in a blanket, a bottle of wine a silent third. It pains Mathieu to have to drink bad wine, but it would pain him more to go without. The medieval rooftops of Paris are a jagged topography, their scarred, rusted chimneys gasping for cleaner air. Close your eyes just so, at sunset, and behold an urban Cezanne: mercurial beauty disguised as permanence. We shamelessly peek into people’s windows and invent lives to wrap around them, wanting them to be warm too. Mathieu’s are character studies that can never clear loneliness; mine are bad nighttime stories parents might tell their kids, with fantastical deus ex machinas that surface when I’ve snarled the flimsy plots. We enjoy shaking our heads at one another. And we enjoy our lovely, aimless talks and lovelier aimless silences. You get a different feel for a city watching her (almost) sleep at night. I feel tender toward Paris now. She is not home, but she is something like it.
“Do you believe in God less now that your mother is dead?”
The question swoops through the thin, late October air and lands with a thud on Mathieu’s head. We were having a lively discussion about book vending machines. Mathieu is adamant they could work. Just put in your three euros at the metro station, and out plops Goethe’s Faust. And that’s where we diverge. Maybe Goethe is wildly popular here. God, I hope so. But in Cleveland, it is more likely to plop a drippy mess like The Purpose Driven Life. Or, if it were a truly good dump: Ann Coulter (excuse the second reference to Ms. Coulter; I do hate her so, but she doesn’t deserve the attention).
I love that Mathieu doesn’t know who Ann Coulter is. That he thought Bill O’Reilly was an Irish soccer coach. He lives in a purer realm than I. We can’t talk about a lot of the stuff that, viewed from a godly distance, has recently filled me with rage. And I, in turn, don’t care a whit about the newspaper scandals that captivate the French, who have an inexplicable fondness for the government characters in their serialized dramas, like they’re black sheep to be welcomed back into the fold after a public slogging. But they’re not my family, and I didn’
t grow up with the clannish gossip of favored sons from the Grandes Écoles tickling my dinner conversation. I hail from a different place, where the cult of Big Celebrity was invented and refined. Bureaucrats don’t qualify. Though, strangely, the pundits decrying them sometimes do.
Without those common points of reference, Mathieu and I are forced (what divine coercion!) to talk about books, art, and music. He has never read Jane Eyre. I am properly horrified. Yet I almost forgive him when I find his The Carpenters LP hiding out between his John Cage and Bob Dylan.
Somehow, though, it always comes back to God. Maybe because this is a more lucid, streamlined existence: a life unpoisoned by paperwork. Anesthetizing myself to the tug of intentions, Iam saturated with thoughts and sensations. More obsessed with the origin of things than with their conclusions. I return to God because I envy Mathieu’s clarity and desire some of that—if not its acrid flavor—for myself.
I kind of like getting him worked up, too.
Mathieu frowns. “How do you mean?”
“I just wonder. I know she left you long ago, but there’s still got to be a sense of abandonment when the woman who gave you life—the only godlike figure available to us—is suddenly proved to be mortal. I can’t imagine the sense of loss,” I continue, my voice pinched at the thought of losing my own mother, who is very far away. “I just thought it might have swung you along the spectrum, if not from believer to nonbeliever, then from agnostic to atheist.”
Mathieu scowls. “I think agnostics are the worst of the lot. Believe in something, for God’s sake!”
I play with a ring on my finger and delicately clear my throat. “So what was the moment? Were you ten years old and God didn’t answer a prayer? Fifteen and rebellious? Twenty and disaffected?”
Mathieu sets his wineglass down. “I was seven.”
“Seven?”
Mathieu nods. “I had a teacher, Mme. Bellamont. Sweetest lady in the world. My mother told me she was going to be a nun, but she was too in love to go through with it. I liked her more when I heard that. And I was a little jealous of her husband. She had these amazing legs. They were not designed for a nun’s habit. I was always looking up the long line of them, wondering what was concealed underneath those skirts.” He smiles at me, but I wince at the idea of a sexualized seven-year-old.
He continues, more soberly. “She was the only good teacher I ever had. Most of my teachers terrified or bored me. But not her. I think she felt a little sorry for me … anyway, I was her pet.”
He shakes his head and scoops up his wine. “Yet she died in a car accident the summer after—” He looks down. “She was to have her baby the following week.”
“That’s awful,” I concede, after a small pause. “But people die all the time. It doesn’t explain a seven-year-old abandoning God.”
But your mother leaving the year before might.
“Of course it does, especially since church bored me to tears. My mother was homesick and took me most Sundays, trying to pretend that French Catholic bore some resemblance to American Southern Baptist. She never believed in it, but she, like so many of your country, sought that fool’s gold of tradition and ritual. I was terribly impatient with it all. Even then, it seemed like prayer was a bargaining chip, a way of offering up some humility to cash in later for the ultimate prize.”
His features are twisted with contempt. Mathieu is not indifferent toward religion, but actively hostile. The recognition unsettles me.
“I could accept Mme. Bellamont’s death. But what was the point of the baby’s life being started, if only to end so soon? I tried to imagine that fetus walking between my mother’s pearly gates of heaven, but she kept falling over on little toothpick legs before I could get her there.” He laughs harshly. “Then I imagined her being dragged around by the umbilical cord like a—”
“—okay, I get the picture.”
Mathieu smiles wanly. “Sorry.”
I nod but avert my eyes.
He adds, more evenly, “My point was this: what kind of afterlife could a fetus enjoy in heaven? None. So then heaven must be a fraud. What kind of personal God could be so perverse as to bring new life into the world, only to squash it before it could absorb its existence?”
What kind, indeed.
“Then why not believe in a more impersonal God? Like the Deists. Or Buddhists.”
“I like much in Buddhism,” Mathieu acknowledges. “I like the idea of interconnectivity, of each of us being a jewel of many facets strung together in an endless array, infinity reflecting infinity. I appreciate the idea of karma, of being responsible for one’s actions in life. And I admire the Buddhist’s commitment to his cause.”
“Then what?” I ask. “What stops you from considering it?”
“Truly? I would feel ridiculous.”
“How so?”
Mathieu raises his palms to the air. “It is no accident that the vast majority of people in this world are born to their religion. It is the language of worship that feels most comfortable, and comforting, to us. Buddhism feels foreign, exotic. That which is foreign and exotic to us can never be completely comforting.”
You don’t say, I muse, watching a plane blink its steady path in the distant sky. “So you’re ruling out the possibility of eternal enlightenment through the simple fact that you might feel ridiculous meditating on a yogi mat in the middle of Paris?”
“No, not entirely.”
I laugh. “Then what?”
“I do not believe in their means.”
“What? Transcendence? Enlightenment?”
“That is the goal. But to do that, one must forget desire. To lose your ego is to lose your identity. Which is the only thing that makes this life bearable. As a writer, I am my own God.” Turning toward me, Mathieu says, “I would never sacrifice that, even for enlightenment.”
“You are a terrible egomaniac.”
“Yes, I am. But you should be happy of this. You may yet be immortalized.”
I would not love Mathieu any other way. I love the spirit and the flesh of him. I would not sacrifice this world for the next, unless he could null the sacrifice by joining me. This world feels heavenly to me 60 percent of the time: the time I’m with Mathieu.
What do muses do with the other 40 percent of their time? Did Manet’s Olympia let out a breath of relief, kick off her heels, and grow out of that flat canvas at nights? I will never know.
I point my toes toward the Eiffel Tower that night, and every night, on our rooftop magic carpet. It steadies me to witness its steely tip blinking atop that jumble of geometry, to sense its implacability even while I sleep. I have so little to orient myself here. When I am away from Mathieu, I might as well not exist. He is my entire salvation in a world devoid of familiar living.
This is, of course, what I was afraid of.
But screw it, I think, glowering at the replica of the Statue of Liberty on the Pont de Grenelle on a gray Monday afternoon. Autonomy is overvalued, anyway. So I had the freedom to be creatively unhappy before. Now one thing makes me unhappy: this empty, afternoon solitude in the most beautiful city in the world. I invent reasons to be away while he is writing because I don’t want to be too needy, and yet while away, I need, need, need like a blind kitten rooting for the teat. Love carries us high only to knock us down. Or perhaps love gives us permission to make ourselves low. It is during this time of the day when I check for clocks: 3:23 … is he missing me enough? 4:14 … should I take the long way back, in case he is finishing? All of this should disgust me, but I’m too ripe with anticipation to care about self-respect.
Besides, he has it just as bad. This is our conversation, in bed, from two nights ago:
Mathieu: I cannot breathe sometimes when you are away. I will be working and things appear to be going well, and then I look up and notice that I am alone, and my breath will be sucked away.
Daisy: Good.
Mathieu (surprised): You want me to suffer?
Daisy: Of course.
/> Mathieu (frowning): I don’t want you to suffer.
Daisy: Sure you do.
Pause.
Mathieu (finally): So?
Daisy: So what?
Mathieu: Do you suffer?
Daisy (kissing him on the forehead): More than you, silly. I never have to look up to notice that I’m alone.
Mathieu (puzzled): So why do you leave me?
Daisy: Because I love you. And I want you to keep on loving me.
Mathieu: I would not if you were here?
Daisy: Not as much. I would sense your distraction and feel that I was crowding you, until eventually you would feel like I was crowding you, and that would be a far worse world of suffering to me.
Mathieu: But I can’t work anyway. You have ruined me as a writer. My mind is always elsewhere.
Daisy (a little triumphantly): I’m sorry.
Mathieu (perceptively): Liar.
He’s starting to talk more like an American. He’s even taken up contractions and tolerates my colloquialisms, though I have only been able to incorporate “that would puke a hound bitch from a gut wagon” (thank you, Grandma Lockhart, Miss Parkersburg, West Virginia 1926) once, on a novice trip to a meat market on Rue Cler. Mathieu stood in a state of incomprehension as I, weak-kneed, first encountered boudin noir, or blood sausage, a delicacy whose plasmatic origin is exactly as it sounds. While we still encounter cultural hiccups like that, the line is being redrawn in my direction little by little. I once surprised him with a bucket o’ chicken from KFC, complete with mashed potatoes and somethingmilky that aspired toward coleslaw. He feigned to choke it down, but then again, I didn’t exactly force that third breast on him (he is a breast man, regrettably). Of course, afterward, I had to listen to him disparage the kindly Colonel Sanders for ten meandering minutes, accusing me of condoning the “Southern plantation mentality” through my complicit desire for delicious fried foods. But his heart wasn’t in it, and before I could enlighten him that Sanders was born in Indiana, he broke off to lick his greasy fingers and grab a juicy leg (he is also, more happily, a leg man) from the bucket marked by the Colonel’s folksy mug.