by Sarah Hina
He searches the floor now for answers. Not finding any, he tries my face. “But why?”
I need support. Feeling for the adjacent wall, I back into it, positioning myself beside the contemptuous eyes of Otto Dix. I will try to explain. The devil made me do it . … But, “I have no good reason.”
“Some bad ones, then?”
The others are watching, horrified. Even Henri looks like he’s ingested something distasteful. I have managed to secure my audience, just in time for them to launch the tomatoes. I almost find it funny. You’d have thought I just confessed to murder.
But I don’t really feel like laughing.
“I don’t know, Mathieu. Maybe I bought into his fairy tale about compassionate conservatism. Maybe I thought Gore was a bit of a stiff who couldn’t settle on an identity if his life depended on it. Maybe I wanted to shake up my holier-than-thou parents a little bit. Maybe I thought that wedge issues like school vouchers didn’t sound that important at the time. Maybe I was nineteen years old and didn’t know squat about any of it.”
I look at him searchingly. “Or maybe I was in the voting booth and the urge just came over me.” I pause to take a breath. “It’s dumber than dumb, but I guess I did it because I could.”
“Mersault,” Mathieu mumbles.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“But anyway,” I say, shrugging off the wall, “this is why I have togo back. Because I have a sticky sense of culpability about it. Because the world will grind on, even as I pretend it’s of no consequence to me. Because”—I pause and beseech him with my eyes—“because as histrionic as this sounds in an age of cynicism, I cannot abandon my country during its moment of crisis the way your father abandoned his.”
His eyes flicker to my face, then down again. I have no pulse on him.
Finally, he says, “I was wrong about that painting.”
“What?”
“You look nothing like the Orphan Girl. You look like my mother.” He smiles brokenly. “But only from the back.”
Tears fill my eyes. “Mathieu—”
“You will not come back then?”
“Do you want me to?”
His gaze settles on my face in a calculating manner. “I don’t know.”
I nod, my throat constricting. “Okay.”
I turn toward Gabrielle and the others. “Thank you for inviting me tonight.”
She nods while the others desist. Henri’s hand remains on his breast, in lamentation. He never would have written this for me.
“Look after him, please,” I say. Then, turning back, I walk past Mathieu. Our shoulders—mine naked, his concealed—brushing like two strangers in a train station choked with weary travelers. I have purchased my freedom through confession. Only it doesn’t really work that way, does it? Other people matter. They all may feel differently about me now.
Definitely Mathieu.
So does the priest toward the confessor, I imagine. That’s human. Maybe I would like Picasso’s art more if he had been a better person.
And me? How do I feel?
Like the mother and the child. Reborn.
Chapter
27
Hail Mary, full of grace.
It’s not just confession. There’s atonement, too.
Notre Dame is spectral tonight, floating like a candle on her Seine. There is a vapor in the air—a Gothic, Brontë mist—drugging my sight, softening the stone of the cathedral until it’s a luminous, lacey latticework woven around a flank and ribs of whalebone. While her rose window glows like a milky spiderweb spun by the moonlight. One hand on her façade, however, reminds me of her solidity. For Paris, the quintessential feminine city, has at her heart this molten stone to brace her against the furies. In a City of Light, she is the eternal flame. It was here, where I stand, in the square before the cathedral, that the last snaggle of Nazi snipers shot at de Gaulle’s parade of liberation. There, within its famed sandstone, where Napoleon was crowned emperor. Here, at her lovely ankles, is point zero, the origin of all measured distance in France.
She is unflappable, timeless, this heart of Paris.
She is also closed.
I cannot believe the door’s resistance. I absolutely trusted that church doors never closed. Isn’t the church there to succor the suffering when the state turns its back, to offer a benediction and hope to the sinner during her crisis of faith, to provide sanctuary from such worldly, corrupting depravities that are most bountiful at this witching hour of night, when Freud’s id wants to reign with such primitive and tyrannical authority? After all, what good are Quasimodo’s fierce, protective arms—or God’s, for that matter—if I cannot tunnel into their loving center?
I can’t help but take it personally as I sink to the earth, my costume skirt flaring around my knees.
But then, out of the dying fall …
The sound of Paris. If music be the food of love, fill me again, for here is that guitar vibrato of Django’s Gypsy offspring rubbing against my cheek to entice and seduce me again. And there is the young, black Esmeralda, with folds of peasant skirt in her hands, cutting elegiac circles around the square, waltzing the wind. Admirers stop to stare and throw coins in the guitarist’s case. Oh, she is good, this lithe girl with the downcast eyes, playing upon our inscribed idea of this place, cleverly insinuating herself into our nostalgia with each flick of heel and toe traded upon the ancient cobblestone.
And yet, there is no ironical detachment to be impugned here—no sense of going through the exacting motions of expectation’s hard choreography. Paris, she proclaims with an eloquent turn of her slim wrist, is proud of her history, even of her derivativeness. Hugo wrote his novel, in part, to shine a light back on medieval Paris, to stab at this dusty fossil that was a crumbling, forgotten edifice until it bled freely, to demonstrate that the old Paris, though brutal and capricious, had a purity and authenticity about it that his contemporary Parisians had sterilized to the point of infertility. Hugo believed that Paris was the ceiling of civilization, but that it had yet to reach its roof.
He grew its glory higher.
And so does our Gypsy girl with her Egyptian bangles and Mona Lisa smile. She, too, plays Paris as Rhapsody. She, too, understands that all paths lead here. The travelers around me nod to the music. They have heard the call.
And so it is, while straining my neck, as a skyscraper enthusiast might back home, toward the ghoulish gargoyles above, that I am struck again by the dichotomy of old and new, and how Europe is on one side and America on the other. How like infants we are, slogged by growing pains, next to the old Continent. How, at times, it seems we have no history of our own, or that our history is so fresh it remains a raw wound, like a canker in our mouths whose flesh we can’t help but chew on from time to time, out of thoughtlessness or thorny temptation. Those Gettysburg reenactors who meet with such solemn reverence every year, the Confederate faction pining for a beloved “lost cause”—if not that one in particular, then a simulacrum—before retreating to their middle-class homes that chummily border their black, middle-class brethren. The Dadaist museumification of absurdist reliquaries: Roswell, the largest ball of twine, Graceland; like if you make people pay for it, there might be something worth seeing. Our obsession with anniversaries, as if the elapsing of time were something to be charged at and taken down by a nation of linebackers. How we embrace caricatures of ourselves—with unlikely names like American Gothic—without being sure where the truth ends and irony begins. That notorious tendency to view things in black and white—the shortsighted filter of the fundamentalist—which makes things simple and convenient, except when the refracted light contains the muddier truth. How we have the kind of unthinking arrogance of the hulking teenager on the block—the cocky jock flexing his guns—who knows that one fatal step on the basketball court could cripple his future. Yet he leaps for thedunk anyway, confident in his immortality because enough people have told him how great he is that he has no reason to doubt h
imself, no backup system in place.
No contingency plan.
Youth is a marvelous thing. But goddamn if the blinders don’t have to come off.
Not that Europe is a piece of humble pie. But that’s someone else’s story to tell. I don’t have the proper perspective after three weeks to indict a whole continent, or even France, for her panoply of failings. I am an American missing my country, unsure if when I go home I will find it again.
But knowing I must go.
A storm of roller skaters thunders across the bridge in front of me. Friday night in Paris. I look at them longingly over the several minutes it takes for them to pass, photographing their flight in my mind, the way people do when they’re ready to say good-bye. I rise in their wake, abandoning the performers who have given me pause and comfort, happy that they were here for me, yet thankful that good-byes are not required. As I depart, the jangly riffs of a new song play off my back. I smile. That’s the comforting thing about Paris: she can endure just fine without me.
I find myself at the bridge and fold my torso over its beveled edge.
“Promise me you won’t jump.”
Mathieu.
“H-how did you know I was here?” Seeing him, my convictions dive into the water below.
“I am God.”
I roll my eyes and pick my feet off the ground. One of the heels clatters off.
Mathieu claims it and hops up on the bridge. Smiling thinly, he explains, “I was on my way to Notre Dame. I thought you might have come to beg for mercy.”
I shake my head, scowling.
“You are very predictable, Daisy.” Mathieu’s smile doesn’t convince his eyes, which are blacker than the inky water. “It was either here or that other favored cathedral of yours, the Orsay. And it is closed.”
“So was she,” I say, shooting my thumb over my shoulder.
He eyes the cathedral. “She is more beautiful from afar, anyway.”
I sigh, easing myself down, and stretch my neck to look behind me. “I don’t know. I think I wanted thick walls around me tonight.”
“To support or hide you?”
I don’t bother answering.
He sets my red heel down, toe pointed neatly over the water, and wipes at the corners of his mouth. Our eyes see every part of the world but each other. Strange that we should be uncertain again. But now the anxiety surfaces not from knowing too little, but realizing too much.
Unbalanced, I turn to face him. “I don’t really feel the need to ask for forgiveness, you know.” Gulping back yet another sob, it hits me that I have been like a desert enjoying, and suffering, through a rainy season. A monsoon of tears. “At least, not from you.”
“You think that’s why I came?” he asks, frowning.
“You looked like my father when I did something to disappoint him. You made me ashamed of myself. I didn’t like it.”
“I made you ashamed of yourself?”
I snatch my shoe from his stone throne. Slipping it on, I start to walk again. Toward where, I don’t know. Mathieu tails me, always a pace behind. I can feel his eyes watching me. We chase the distance of çle de la Cité in the silence and cold, my crushed toes and hyperextended insoles screaming their consternation at my bedrock belief that I can outrun my problems.
Finally, we arrive at Le Pont Neuf, that “new bridge” which is so famously old. Lovers and drunks drape themselves likemollusks across its bow. None of them looks at us, and I, too late, remember Mathieu’s scar. Hoping that he will not think the destination deliberate, I trip down the adjacent stairs, still intent on protecting him in a flimsy way from what he is daily confronted with. There is a stingy card of quay below the bridge, and I halt next to a banged-up dinghy thudding hollowly against the riverbank. The two of us—a hot atom hurling through this particle accelerator called Paris—shiver in the shadows and fog. Mathieu turns so that his chin is held level to the water, which ripples in anticipation.
The moment is pregnant with mystery and possibility. I take a deep breath … and blow out. I’m not equal to it right now. My grandmother—or was it Socrates?—once said that when your feet hurt, you hurt all over. Mine throb.
“So do they all hate me, then?” I ask, wrapping myself in a hug.
“Who?”
“You know, your mortified friends.”
“I think they were puzzled at first.” Staring at the ground, Mathieu rubs his jaw.
“And then?”
“Henri told me that if I didn’t go after you, he would.” He looks up at me and smiles.
I return the smile. “I think I’m a little in love with Henri.”
He nods. “It is a good thing I came, then.”
“Listen, Mathieu,” I say, taking a tentative step closer to him, “the whole Bush thing was four years ago. I feel bad about it, yes. But I didn’t order the bombs to drop. So let’s not go down that slippery path of endless abstraction. In fact, I started regretting my vote not five minutes later. It became a different world about that fast, and there’s not a chance in hell I would have voted for the guy once the rules changed.”
“You think this is why I am upset?”
I stop my advance. “Isn’t it?”
Mathieu bends down to pick up a stone. He judges the heft of it in his hand, like the old man playing pétanque on that sundrenched afternoon, all our days ago. He rises and hurls it across the dark film of water. Onetwothree, it’s quickly swallowed. He sighs and finds me again. “Daisy, I am not thrilled that you helped elect a buffoon to the highest office in your land. But that was four years ago. I have no claim on your past. It is your future, our future, that distresses me.”
I grow still. The water laps behind me. “I might come back.”
He shakes his head and looks away. “I might not be waiting for you.”
Stung, I ask, “Will Nicole become the new face on the wall?”
“No.” He hesitates before meeting my eyes. “But there will likely be another.”
I turn toward the river, and step into the dingy, which whimpers under my weight. A small French flag that’s seen too many revolutions rises from the stern. I sit down. The air under the bridge is loamy with mildew, dead leaves. It is the sort of stink that rises to the roof of your mouth and stews. I drift in place, the boat struggling to float away, while the dock line maintains a toothy grip.
“I see. I’m replaceable.”
“We are all replaceable, Daisy. In death, and in life.”
I look up sharply. “Your mother was replaceable?”
Mathieu grimaces. “Sure.”
“Is that why you went to see her as she was dying? To tell her that she was replaceable?”
His hands find his hair as he retreats into the shadows.
“You did go see her, didn’t you?”
“I have said as much.”
“You have actually said very little about it.”
“I have said enough, Daisy!” The explosion of his voicereverberates under the bridge. A stranger with an overcoat approaches, meets my eyes, and hurries away.
I look down, pressing my lips together. The boat groans. Running my hand along the starboard side, I feel the crevices of a small plaque. Of course. Everything in Paris comes with a plaque. I squint to make out the lettering: Caneton 505: 1954.
Nineteen fifty-four. Old for a boat.
But young for a mother.
I tighten my grip on the boat’s side. “Wait. Your mother was born in 1954, right?” Flora Goodwin: 1954-2004.
“So?” his voice, much quieter now, answers.
“So she would have been only twenty-two when she had you then.”
Numbers never lie.
“What is your point, Daisy?”
He must be the black shape flattened against the armpit of the bridge, and so I speak toward that. “You told me she had your sister at twenty-two.”
The shape becomes as still as the stone supporting it.
It all becomes clear, even in the darkness. “Yo
ur sisters are half sisters, and younger than you. You have met them maybe a few times in your life. You probably even hated them a little.” A small motorboat cruises by, bright, then loud, like lightning begging the thunder. Mathieu is briefly illuminated in the fury, and his eyes drill a child’s fear. The boat passes, and he fades to black, while the waves rock my cradle and strain the line. “But not as much as you hated your mother for choosing them over you. For wanting more kids when she already had one she left behind.”
“Please, Daisy. You sound so melodramatic.”
I recall my knee dive in Cleveland, that strange prayer which spun a stranger story: I don’t know how to be alone. I wasn’t meant to be alone. I was meant to be twice as powerful, twice as loved. I have searched most of my life for that missing half, that fated Gemini, the ghost in my ear. When, really, I was lucky to even be alive.
Mathieu has been searching, too. But what he found never made him feel lucky. “The truth is often ridiculous, Mathieu,” I say. “But never melodramatic.”
His face emerges from the darkness. His cheeks look wet, but it could be the gloaming kiss of moonlight reflecting off the water. The story spills from him as he approaches. “My mother became pregnant with me when she was still performing. She never knew who the father was. When the man who came to be my father fell in love with her, she told him it was his. He believed her, until he saw me. Then he knew. I suppose a father always knows. But he loved her too much to let on. And so he accepted me, let her think he believed her. When she told him she was returning to America, that she had come to hate France, and him, he fought for custody to exact his revenge and make her stay. He never thought she would just fold and leave in the middle of the night.”
Mathieu closes his eyes, swaying slightly. “I dreamed that night she left me in the Louvre. And every painting, down each endless hallway I chased, was Delacroix’s Orphan Girl”
Mathieu opens his eyes and silently climbs into the boat with me. Shedding his coat, he wraps it around my shoulders and takes the bow. The boat is so small and neat, our knees almost touch. I can smell his scent on the coat and tuck it tightly around me.