Plum Blossoms in Paris

by Sarah Hina

  Yet Mathieu is slowly positioning himself toward the beguiling siren of martyrdom that people must hear before embracing the idea of parenthood (it is impossible, I imagine, to embrace anything but the idea until the screaming, tyrannical babe is placed in your unprepared arms). Is it I—honest, at least, in my selfish-ness—who is the egoist here? Or is it Mathieu, naïvely believing he is capable of living two lives: that he will be a philosopher-poet in the mornings and a stay-at-home Daddy from noon until six? Maybe it is easier for men; perhaps, still, not as much is expected.

  Is it lazy to pin the problem on gender, or am I wrong to believe that I would be the one to monitor every morsel of food that passed their impressionable mouths (when I wasn’t feeling guilty for being away, due to my taking a crap job that no Frenchwoman, in spite of 10 percent unemployment, would possibly want) and that it would be me who couldn’t sleep at night because one of them had a funny rash on her belly that might be Lyme’s disease (if deer ticks were suddenly to infiltrate Paris like Hitler’s army), and that it would fall on moi, in my broken French that makes les mamans smirk and avert their eyes, to make play dates and check out preschools, all while Mathieu got to be The Fun One when he wanted to be and Absent (and so more fun by comparison) when something more fascinating than the subject of potty training came along.

  Would we have time for our lovely, aimless talks then? Or would they, like us—and my poor mother before me—be plowed into a belly-up submission? I have no doubt that sacrifice is noble, if also self-serving, and necessary for the survival of the species. The children are our future, trilled Whitney Houston, astutely. And even Shakespeare’s Benedick, abandoning his bright recalcitrance for dingy clichés, insisted, The world must be peopled!

  But not by me.

  I place my hand over my belly. Please, not me.

  “Old and conventional,” Mathieu says, cupping his chin in his hand.

  “Downright bourgeois,” I add, squeezing out a smile. “Watch out—pretty soon you’ll be eating at Hippo’s and shopping at La Samaritaine.”

  He smiles weakly back.

  “And, God forbid, actually wanting to go to Disneyland.”

  The doors start to close on that opportunity. I grab Mathieu by the hand, hoist him up, and fling our conjoined body between the sliding partitions with the force of my determination that we have this day. We just make it, though the doors cough at us in protest, and open again.

  “My coat!” He darts instinctively back inside.

  “Mathieu!”

  The doors are shutting. Mathieu snatches his coat and lunges toward me. But we had our chance, and the same doors that gave us lead before are less forgiving this time. Mathieu’s face is surprised, then sheepish as he quickly abandons his hopeless clawing. He lays a sweaty palm on the glass and mouths something to me. The train starts to pull away toward its next destination, quite on its own authority.

  “What?” I shout, placing my palm against the cool glass. I cannot feel his warmth, though there is the illusion that our hands are touching. A rising sense of panic floods me as the train hurtles down the tracks. I run beside it, not wanting to let go.

  He repeats his message.

  I can’t help but smile.

  He actually told me to have fun.

  And, to my astonishment, I do.

  It feels good to escape our prickly conversation and Paris, which for all her beauty, plays like a series of stereoscopic images just past my reach. It’s gorgeous and dignified, but also a bit paralyzing. My television-suckled brain desires variation, even vulgarity. Disneyland Paris is so artificial that it flaunts its vulgarity on its taffy-colored chiffon sleeves. I let my guard down and allow myself to be lulled by her gauzy, vanilla-scented embrace.

  Once I realize that Mathieu is gone and unlikely to return, especially since this is a good excuse for him to pretend that the idea was untenable (but it wuz impozeeble, Day-zee!), I shed the expectation of seeing him and the burden of convincing him of the park’s charm, which is considerable. Smaller than Disneyland and more manageable by foot, I marvel at the remarkable symmetry it maintains with its sister parks, down to the Cowboy Cookout Barbecue in Frontier Land that serves racks of ribs and grilled corn on the cob. The people are eating it all up. It is a multicultural bonanza, but French is still the dominant language spoken and engagingly raised in sing-along here. A sizable contingent of Mathieu’s countrymen does not share his horror of kitsch or sentimentality, and they reject his prejudices toward Chip and Dale, overpriced fish tacos, and perfectly choreographed parades.

  I chat up an American group of senior citizens carousing around Western Europe on an Elderhostel tour while sitting on a bench and sipping a lemon slushy, and again in line for the Phantom Manor. I am happy to hear that many are nearly neighbors (Cleveland? Why, I’m from Pittsburgh!), conveniently ignoring the fact that this would mean nothing back in The States. Because it does mean something here. They are my countrymen and women, though many of them are fat and maybe a trifle dull (allusions to Sartre more likely to be met with nothingness than being). Probably half of them had the shortsightedness to vote for George W. Bush on an absentee ballot, but they are forthright and friendly and touch my heart with their direct, if still gentle, questioning (You’re not alone, dear? Does your daddy know you’re seeing a Frenchman? Is he feeding you enough?).

  One of them, a lady named Ruth Ann, who has a lovely, if slightly tinted, permanent, volunteers to sit with me on a “Doom Buggy” as we curl our way through the not-so-phantasmagoric array of ghouls, goblins, and other animatronic concoctions. I try to imagine Mathieu seated next to me as the skinny, buffoonish ghost inserts himself into our reflected buggy image near the end of the ride, but the spirit seems a more hospitable and likely passenger. Ruth Ann actually yelps a little at the sight of him. We dissolve into giggles like a couple of schoolgirls, and she invites me to her home in Sarasota, if I’m ever down that way and in need of a place to stay. They do a killer dinner theater, apparently.

  It’s lame, but I cry a little when she hugs me good-bye. Her bosom gives slowly, like a quilted pillow, and she smells of Jean Naté and mint lozenges. I watch her walk carefully toward the restroom with her posse, those arthritic knees making her waddle slightly, but still owning the grace of a lady in control of her identity: American, Jewish, Born in Brooklyn, Retired in Florida, Mother of Four, Grandmama to Eleven, Marvelous Millie-Loving, Purple-Haired, Kind Ruth Ann.

  What could I say in return? One-time American, Now Nationless, Religiously Confused, Unemployed, Ex-Student, Modern Art-Loving, Unmaternal Lover of Mathieu. What does that say about me? Jesus, everyone and his gay brother loves modern art. The other stuff is so nebulously gray. Except for Mathieu, who moves deeper than all color.

  So there’s my identity for you. A bunch of nothingness, and a man who may no longer want me or my squandered ovaries. After all, he sacrificed his leather shoes readily enough the other night to do something he wanted to do. Why should he have gone back so impulsively to fetch his coat when cornered by something I wanted? To get away, I must assume. The subconscious is a brilliant strategist. Who knows? Maybe mine tipped me off that first day in Paris as I walked down the aisle of that other train and noticed a man so devoted to being alone that he could not afford to glance at any of the other passengers, even the striking foreigner biting her lip in feigned confusion, but burrowed deeper into his book with the monochromatic cover and impossibly Danish author. And maybe this same subconscious worked the numbers and devised a scheme—embarrassing, if ultimately successful—that would force him to confront her, and the Meaningful Book she clutched as a talisman to her intelligence. Maybe. Then again, I might just carry too much crap in my carry-on. What would Freud, or for that matter, Sartre, say? I should really start reading the latter. But whenever I pick up Mathieu’s English copy of Critique of Dialectical Reason, I have this irrepressible urge to pluck my eyebrows, or something equally less excruciating.

  To be honest (if that
is possible while passing the Disneyland Paris version of the Becky Thatcher Showboat), I am beginning to wonder whether loafing really suits me. I know what I said before, about being brilliant at it, but I work hard at everything I do. It is the American Way to soak up new challenges, even when that means rejecting all challenges. But should I have to apply myself to something that ought to be effortless? Have I expanded my greedy hour from our little teahouse into a gluttonous bender that I cannot sustain? Did I embrace this unlikely style of living only to secure Mathieu? Are ponderous epiphanies allowed in Disneyland, or do I have to pay extra?

  It is true that I have gained more understanding in the past two weeks than in any year, yet I am consumed by a terrible, animal restlessness I cannot shake. All of my energies seek Mathieu: when I can see him, for how long, and to what end. Every day I encounter sublimity. Yet it comes in flashes, like heat lightning that cannot be photographed, leaving me wanting, always wanting, in the blackness left behind.

  I am jealous of a goddamn typewriter. I hate people who do not exist.

  Even while dreaming, he slips away. The names of his characters—Gerard, Jean, and Violet—find his lips more often than my own lately. I guard his eyes some nights, watching for real and imagined betrayals with every twitch of that shuttered lens. I have become like Milton’s Satan from Paradise Lost: expelled from this heaven of mine through my desperation to be the favorite, and the resentment of serving a higher power than my own. For Mathieu, in spite of his braying to the contrary, is writing, and in droves. His frantic, gunmetal typing is a shield I have no hope of piercing, and so I flee his apartment to escape the temptation to just ram on through, and be bounced.

  For that strange madness—the artistic cycling of feeling into thought, and thought into feeling, which Mathieu describes as “an explosion of tongues”—is a beautiful thing to contemplate in the aftermath, when viewing a Pollock, or reading a Rimbaud poem. But viewed up close, in the act, it is frightening in its capacityfor shutting out the world, and me within it. The channeled voices occupy him far more eloquently, and completely, than I could hope.

  And now there is the politics of children gerrymandering us. How mundane for that to be the cause of our split. Not a clash of cultures, or egos, but a goddamn lifestyle choice. Yet it is a more impenetrable obstacle than his writing, for there is no compromise to be had. What other option is there but for me to eject myself from Mathieu’s influence? Before I, like the fallen Lucifer, start corrupting his urge toward creation, which my better angel assures me is the most sanctified instinct we overgrown monkeys enjoy, but which my devilish side observes, not unjustly, as the last barrier between it and heavenly bliss?

  How did this happen? At which instant did time, which I feigned to ignore, betray me?

  I don’t know, but Mathieu was right about my metamorphosis. What could be more French than thinking about Milton and Satan’s fall while riding solo on a Mad Hatter’s Teacup? I have succumbed to the circular bullshit. And I have petrified my day as a result. Turning the stubborn wheel before me, I start to spin, anxious for the torque to jettison these thoughts and feelings from my conscious mind, determined to become all feeling and action once more. The tiny stereocilia inside my ears, those precise instruments of orientation I abandoned, wildly respond, lighting up the vestibular sensors inside my cortex, which counsel me to stop the foolish spinning and come back to Earth. But I press on. Turning the wheel. Anxious for the next thing.

  But I am not the god of this machine, and the ride stops. Dizzy and nauseated, I exit my teacup, a lone Alice following … what? A white rabbit? A grin without a cat? A dream?

  Maybe it’s time to wake up.

  Disneyland is a day trip.

  Chapter

  25

  mathieu wants me to come to a dinner party with him. I am happy to go because it soothes me, somehow, to think of him with friends, to envision him looking more serene, relaxed, when of late he has been coiled like a rattlesnake threatening to strike. I hadn’t thought of Mathieu with any friends outside his books. He’s never mentioned anyone much, and besides, he has such high standards for things.

  We haven’t talked about Disneyland, the Matterhorn between us. As two hyper-reflective people, this probably doesn’t bode well. To substitute, we have apparently decided to focus on sex. Big sex. Small sex. Loud sex. Soft sex. Sex that hurts, and sex that purrs. Sex as revolution, and sex as devolution. Sex, sex, sex. How much sex can one woman get?

  Yesterday I craved Andy, that simpleton. Mathieu was exceptionally creative, yet I shrank from his artistry, desiring Andy’s workmanlike hands, making their abbreviated rounds (boobs, butt, boobs, repeat). I strained to hear Andy’s muffled climax—the Grunting Grizzly—in my ear. To see Andy’s pleased smile afterward as he dropped off to sleep. I wanted Andy’s innocence.

  Which is not to say that I love Mathieu any less. Only that life is complicated, and I’ve been reading Anaïs Nin.

  So this dinner party thing, while promising, also has me in stitches. And not the laughing kind.

  “What should I wear?”

  “Do we need to bring a gift?”

  “What about food? Oh God, Mathieu, do we have to cook something?”

  “Those fucking indefinite articles!”

  “So they will speak French, right?”

  “Of course they will speak French,” he finally replies on the day of, rolling his eyes.

  “But I won’t understand a thing!” I wail, throwing myself down on his bed. Beckett opens her eyes. Perturbed by my histrionics, she looks balefully at me.

  “You will understand more than you imagine,” he says, sitting beside me. “The body is more expressive than words can possibly be.”

  “Maybe when flirting across a crowded room, but not when discussing the EU’s battle over farm subsidies,” I groan, flopping backward.

  “I promise the subject will not come up.”

  Laughing, Mathieu pulls me toward him, kissing me in the suggestive way that inevitably segues into fun and games. The man is insatiable. Beckett leaps off the bed in anticipation, holding her nose aloft as she makes for the bathroom mat. The little minx cannot stand competition. Once resistant to Mathieu’s charms, she, too, has been seduced.

  Undistracted, I dodge his lips. “But something will, and I’ll look like the fool.”

  Sighing, he pillows his head with his hands. “Your French is getting better.”

  “Yeah, I can talk like a preschooler now. Moi likey Paris. It israining. Do you have an umbrella?”

  He smiles and, playing with my hair, says, “Maybe someone will bring up the weather.”

  “It’s not funny.”

  “What can I say, Daisy?” He shrugs.

  That you’ll look after me. Protect me. Not because you’re the man, but because I am dependent on you for my survival here.

  “They will know that you are American. So they won’t want to talk to you, anyway.”

  I elbow him in the ribs.

  “Besides,” he recovers, “it is a Friday night in Paris. What else do you have to do?”

  This.

  “Oh.”

  And this. “Ah.”

  We swallow this silence like a last supper.

  “I was right,” he brags later, chewing on my shoulder. “Body language.” Hitching himself on a shaky elbow, he counsels, “Do that, and they will not care that you are American.”

  What a gentleman.

  The couple hosting the party knew Mathieu in college. He went for nearly a year. Evidently, a professor told him one day that he was aping Flaubert, and dismally, in his paper, so he quit. Not because of the criticism, which he now admits was just, but because Mathieu realized he didn’t much like Flaubert.

  The couple, Ivan and Gabrielle, had no such aversion to Flaubert or securing their comfortable futures as a government administrator and a professor of French literature. They have a very smart, if modest, apartment in the sixth arrondissement, overlooking the Seine
. Though the party was to start at eight o’clock, we arrive at 8:25 (I have started wearing my watch again), because to arrive any earlier would have been, in Mathieu’s estimation, “shocking.”

  “Enchantés,” I brightly repeat to my hosts, coloring to the exact shade of my new scarlet dress as we shrug out of coats. I still haven’t risen above the self-consciousness that comes with speaking French and limit myself to this one word that, I suspect, betrays not so much sincerity as desperation.

  Fluttering for traction on this slick foyer floor, I think, Oh, Lord, why did I choose to wear red tonight? I thought it was a bold choice when I saw it in the boutique—the light, sexy material and asymmetrical neckline showing off my shoulders to good effect—and snatched it up without glancing at the price. Besides, it went with my heels, those four-inch pedestals that are elevating enough for me to be knocked down from later. I wanted Mathieu to be proud. Only now, next to Gabrielle’s chic black, I feel clownish and obvious. Like Joan Rivers at the Oscars.

  Ivan and Gabrielle smile slightly, murmuring their greetings, and kiss me lightly on the cheeks before clasping Mathieu amid a flurry of rapid-fire French. It seems they haven’t seen him for a while. He smiles ruefully and shrugs.

  It’s her. She won’t let me go anywhere without tagging along.

  Is that so? What a bore. Why don’t you come without her, then?

  (Helplessly) She withholds sex when I “misbehave. ”

  What a little tease. These Americans with their sexual politics. I’m surprised she’ll have sex with you at all.

  It’s not as often as I’d like. And pretty unimaginative when she does.

  Americans are notoriously prudish, yes?

  And gassy. She toots in her sleep.

  How typical. Americans with their hot air and cold pussies.

  (General, smug laughter)

  Okay, to be fair, I think they might be discussing Justine because Mathieu looks defensive and Gabrielle concerned. Ivan places a hand on his wife’s shoulder in a proprietary way that makes me cringe a little and ushers us into the living area. Another couple is ensconced on the leather couch, a partition of silence dividing them. The man looks at the ceiling and draws on a brown cigarette while his blonde partner stands to greet Mathieu and me. Meet Nicole and Luc, shrouded in matching, noncommittal black, cradling glasses of red wine. I grin strenuously, determined to build a bridge of understanding across my pearly whites. My pits are clammy and my mouth tacky and pasty. It seems I am a virgin again. A French dinner party virgin. Not sure what to expect, but still eager to please. Excited … but tense. And pretty damn convinced that it will hurt more than I’d planned. To top it off, I was a little too aggressive shaping my eyebrows this morning, so now I look like a Vulcan. I had an evangelical classmate in the first grade who shaved off her eyebrows, explaining, The devil made me do it, Mommy! Clever girl. All I can offer is, The insecurity made me do it, folks! Not that I, even, would confuse the French for “folks.”