Plum Blossoms in Paris (28 page)

“I was not thinking about my clumsy feet, of where we were headed. I was not thinking of her promise of ice cream later, if I was good. I thought only about how soft her hand was in mine and how lucky I felt to have possession of it for the day.”

His eyes blink open and beat into mine. “So, naturally, I stumbled over a rough place in the sidewalk and planted my face in the concrete. I had not been holding tightly enough, you see.” Heguides my hand from his face, the illusion of time travel shattering. “There were pieces of glass from a broken bottle some drunk had discarded. One of them cut me. I should have been sewn up, but my mom wanted to show me a new installation at the Pompidou, so we made do with disinfectant and a bandage from a nearby pharmacy.”

He smiles. “She was never much of a mother. Yet I cannot say that I ever regretted her choice, or the day. And I am lucky enough to have this mark on my face to remember it by.”

The tears roll down his cheeks, mixing with the rain, imperceptible but for the accompanying ratchet of his shoulders. I bring him close and usher him through the window. Inside, I remove the daisy and his wet clothes, drying him with a towel, like I would a child. I place him in between the bed’s cool, crisp sheets, replenished just today, as I hid from the chambermaid, sitting on the toilet and doubting the shallow Isabel’s devotion to the magnificent Larry. Mathieu becomes quiet and observant on my bed, watching me while I undress and set the damp clothes atop my suitcase. I still haven’t unpacked.

Mathieu hitches himself up on an elbow and, with a dear, innocent look, asks, “Where are your scars, Daisy?”

I deflect him, shaking out my hair and bringing a towel to my head. “They are not so obvious maybe. But they’re there.”

“Will you tell me about them?”

“What do you want to know?” Flinging back my wet hair, I reveal my nakedness before his wandering eyes, made more luminous with emotion.

He gives a little shake of his head and leans back into his pillow. “Nothing, now. Just come to me.”

I do as he asks. We make love sweetly, if not as hungrily as before, beneath a hotel painting of a country chateau. We are careful with one another, considerate. If yesterday felt like somethingbeing demolished, today is about constructing something lasting, something meaningful, between us. It is a more promising, if less ecstatic, opening, and I clasp my arms around the commitment, around the homecoming. Mathieu’s homecoming, to me.

Afterward, he asks what I’m thinking about.

“Nothing, really.”

“Come on, what is it?” he prods, trying to see my face as he spoons me.

I laugh. “My mind was wandering back to before. The rain and the song. The real Daisy Bell refused her suitor, you know.”

He flips me on my back. “Is that true? I did not see another verse to the song.”

I pat him lightly on the cheek. “Don’t worry. She must have been a real gold digger. Totally immune to the charm of a bicycle built for two.”

“And you?”

I think for a moment, as he eyes me cautiously. For a man dismissive of religion, he is superstitious, and doesn’t like what I’ve told him. I caress his cheek. “Me? Isn’t it obvious? I must call my parents.”

“Why now?”

I surprise Mathieu by rolling over on him, pinning him to the bed. “Because they’ve got to know sometime that I’m not coming back.”

His eyes widen with joy, and he canvases my body with kisses, lingering on the web of skin above the iliac crest, working his hand into the groove. Not worshipfully, but to discover.

I can live with that.

“The French flag is red, white, and blue too,” I muse as he goes about his business. “I will simply have to invent new threads here. Become more French than … Victor Hugo … Edith Piaf … Gertrude Stein.” Something tickles, and I suck in a breath.

“What are you blathering about?” Mathieu mumbles, from my belly.

I mean, why not?
I sigh, working my fingers through his hair, committed to the insanity. No, not insanity. Evolution.

But when did I decide, and was it a decision freely made? My mind is now the treasonous one, not content to let things lie, even as my body tells the brain to shush, keen on enjoying its status as Mathieu’s playground. Surely it wasn’t the song. Or the scar. I am not that easily gotten. No, I made my decision before the first note left his mouth.

I remember back, to standing at the window. I remember wanting a sign. And it was then that it happened. My mind produced Mathieu at precisely the moment I needed him to appear. He made the decision easy for me. But it was still mine.

“This is the right thing to do.”

“Mmm?” He is preoccupied with the far, shady corner of my neck.

“I said this is the right thing to do.” I am calm, magnificent. My voice resonates with authority. I am prepared to loaf with Mathieu into the next century. Cleveland is a dark smudge, a malignancy caught and pulverized on the X-ray of my former life. I am in remission. Nay, I am cured. I feel powerful. This is an act of romantic rebellion. I cannot have my home and Mathieu. So I will adopt Paris, and make it my home with Mathieu. Already, I feel nearly a part of this magnanimous city. I cannot speak its squirrelly language, am uneasy about its customs, and have no friends or family here. But what do friends and family mean without Mathieu? He will be everything to me: teacher, lover, friend, and guide. The rest? Bonbons.

Mathieu pulls away. “Of course it is the right thing to do.”

I nod, placated. Of course it is. Of course.

After all, I love him tremendously. When I am in his arms, nothing else matters.

Why is that not a comfort to me?

D
ad?”

“Daisy,” he exhales.

“Sorry it’s been a while.” I have wound the phone cord around my fingers, and the tips are quite blue.

“What on earth were you thinking? Not calling or writing … your mother contacted the American embassy, I’ll have you know. We’ve been frantic with worry.”

I plop on my bed. “I never said I’d call.”

“Some things, young lady, are assumed. We assumed you would have the courtesy to inform your parents if you were alive and well.”

“I’m alive, and well,” I quip, hoping he’ll find this funny.

Or not. “When are you coming back?”

I stand and start to pace. “That’s the thing, Dad—I’m not.”

Silence. Then, “Explain.”

“It’s like this: I have fallen in love, Dad, and—”

“Oh, sweet Jesus.”

Not a good sign that my father is appealing to Jesus.

Swallowing, I press on, “The man, Mathieu, has invited me to stay with him here in Paris. And I have agreed.”

Silence.

“Uh, is Mom there?”

“No. She’s with your grandfather. He’s ill.”

“What’s wrong?”

“He had a stroke. Your mother has been heartsick. And your absence has made it that much more insufferable. So I want you to get on an airplane, young lady, and return to us. Today. I don’t know what to do for her, you see …” My dad’s voice wobbles but regains its gruffness as he says, “Quite frankly, this is the least you can do, Daisy, after putting us through so much.”

I feel Mathieu behind me, though I try not to look. Shaking my head, I croak, “Don’t bully me like this, Dad. My not being there was not responsible for his stroke, or Mom’s sadness.”

“This is unconscionable of you, Daisy! Have you no sense of responsibility to us anymore, or to yourself? Can you throw your life away on a no-account Frenchman whom you’ve just met and who likely has one thing on his mind? When he gets it, you
will
be discarded, Daisy. Have no doubt of that. Please tell me that you’re not that naïve.”

“He’s already gotten that, Dad. And he still wants me to stay!”

“Well. Then you’re a bigger fool than I ever imagined.”

“I guess I am.”

The silence is unbearable. I would prefer he call me a fool again.

“Andy called,” he says, out of nowhere. “He sounded contrite about … everything. And very worried. We agreed that all of this is so unlike you. You were always a rock. It was Henry who could never be serious about anything.” Voice cracking, he resumes, “So please, honey, when are you coming home? Your life is waiting for you here. And your mother needs you.”

Pinching my eyes shut, I summon my voice. “Good-bye, Dad. Tell Grandpa—and Mom—that I love them.”

“Now list—”

I hang up, staring at the silent phone.

“It was bad, yes?”

Nodding, I turn toward Mathieu, who sits in a chair under the muted television. A car bomb killed twenty-three people in Baghdad today. There is a twisted carcass of a van smoking on the screen. I grimace.
Bad
is such a deficient word. I flip the TV off with the remote. “Yes, it was bad.”

He gives me space. I could not bear any arms, not even those, around me right now. A father’s anger and disappointment eviscerate any platitudes or comforting. I may melt into a puddle of self-reproach. No one else can slay me like this.

We have always gotten on well together, though we are not close (where is that girl out there who is close to her father, the lucky one who talks to him and feels listened to? I want to know so that I might admire and envy her). Although I find his absentminded professor shtick tiresome at times, I have always understood that it arises out of a desperate desire for security. He needs to establish himself as a certain type of person so he can cubbyhole his reactions to life’s slings and arrows.
It is Sunday, and so I read the Arts & Leisure section of The
Times
in my leather chair while sipping my gourmet coffee ordered off the Internet
. This kind of self-awareness helps when:
I was not named the Winston Hollings Distinguished Professor of Literature, again, but I will grow the distinguished beard anyway, as an Oedipal statement on self-fulfilling prophecy
.

The man lives in a fortress, carefully shingled with his impenetrable theories and staked to the ground with the frail timber of dead men’s dialogues. As long as he can talk
at
the regular people, avoiding too much
tête-á-tête
, and publish papers on the arcane subject matter that soothes with its crisp abstractions, he is content in his work. Though his students do not adore him, they respecthis eccentricity and know not to bother him during office hours, lest he start to sputter and blink uncontrollably. I am the only one who doesn’t mortify or restrain him. It is a great burden, and a gift.

Sensing in him a discomfort for social occasions, I tried to smooth the terrain by dominating events, feigning an extroversion I did not feel so he could watch and feel safe from the sidelines. In a lot of ways, it was I, as the oldest child, who was his protector. My mom, resentful of his demonstrable ability to live without her, stopped trying years ago, while my brother was a little embarrassed to claim such a milquetoast father. Henry tried out for football one year, rattling my father to the point of distraction. He told his son that if Henry—or Hank, as he now liked to be called—required an extracurricular activity for his transcript, the chess club would be far more fruitful and less likely to lead to “bodily grievance.” Henry told him, with the bluntness that teenagers find intoxicating, that the possibility of “bodily grievance” (or “getting your ass kicked”) was why guys did football and why the cheerleaders put out for them.

My mom, decked out in her “Hank’s Mom!” jersey in 30 degree weather, whooped from the stands when Henry became the team’s star wide receiver. My father, fussy in an overcoat and leather gloves, winced at every snap and looked as green as his tweed cap, a copy of his latest manuscript languishing on his lap as the other dads, macho men all, hurled insults at the refs, the other team’s players, and even their own sons. My dad was unfailingly loyal, if bewildered. He could not convincingly ape the other men, yet wanted to show support for his son, which led him to mumble lines from a William Carlos Williams poem—about baseball, actually—under his breath at heart-stopping intervals of the game, when the only poetry called for was the sliding of the ball into my brother’s quicksilver hands. The recitation of familiar words is known as prayer, of course, and just because my father’s Bible was the great canon of American literature and poetry did not makehim any less a believer in their ability to conjure miracles. The man could not recognize an I-formation if his life, or his son’s life, depended on it, yet he came for every game. And I, more than my easily horrified brother, who lamented the absence of the mythical, “regular Dad,” loved him for it.

Despite Mathieu’s flippant comment about his sexuality, the truth about Stephen Lockhart is not that easy. It rarely is. The forging of human connections is simply too much effort anymore. If anything, he is asexual now, as cloistered as a monk, and equally impervious to the charms of male and female. Except for my charm. I can still seduce him when I want to. I could, anyway. The pain of his rebuff, and of our segue into some maudlin, father-daughter melodrama, has shriveled my hope and painted the night black. As foolish as it sounds, I feel like mourning my father: that baroque, if sensitive, man who never wanted kids, but somehow managed two more than his immortal hero.

But I am also mourning his loss of me. And that is a bitterer pill to swallow.

Suddenly, Paris feels like purgatory. And I am stuck in its Hotel California.

I could go back, just briefly, to sit by the bedside of my grandfather, a man I hardly know, in spite of his genetic proximity. Yet I understand that if I were to leave, it would be for good. The clock would sound midnight. The spell would be broken. Mathieu would be as real to me in America as Prince Charming. I am not fooling myself. Our tie is tenuous at best. There are too many voices humming in the wings.

And Andy? I do not allow myself to acknowledge his voice.

Mathieu skulks at the periphery of the room like an aimless soul. Or a man unsure of what his girlfriend thinks.

“Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I just don’t know.”

“This is difficult for you.”

“It sucks.”

He nods.