Plum Blossoms in Paris (22 page)

If we’re not careful, the two of us could formulate a new and semipermanent Franco-American alliance that has my determined chin set within Mathieu’s stubborn jawline. And which flexes both when it doesn’t get its way.

Mathieu strums my hair, running his fingers down the length and back up again. It feels good, and I lean into him. The night is not so cold with his arm around me. I banish thoughts of a little Jean-Paul from my splintering head and remember where I am: my parents’ bookstore, the one they both believe in. The site of my first Paris pilgrimage on that fleeting, rose-colored day. I left Shakespeare & Co. disenchanted, after coming across a copy of
The Razor’s Edge
braced on the shelf like a silent accusation. Seeing it led me not to my father, whose disappointment I was accustomed to, but to Mathieu, that sphinxlike stranger on my first Paris train. He had thought I could answer his riddle. But I didn’t even know the question.

I realized, emerging from the doorway beside me, that I didn’t know why I had come to this city that could only hold borrowed meaning, but that I knew, I
knew
, in a moment of perfect clarity, with the dust of old books and the fur of indolent cats-in-residence making my eyes tear, that it wasn’t some quixotic quest for truth and understanding, but more like a break I could never have managed without the excuse Andy gifted to me. I had been walking my own razor’s edge—juggling the roles of precocious student, perfectionist daughter, and determined girlfriend—all of my life, on a journey that swung me in circles. I wanted to fall off the blade and rest. Paris provided a good leaping-off point.

And Mathieu has soft arms.

Yet this doesn’t feel like rest. Instead, I’m walking along a cleaner edge, a prescient path through Sandburg’s “impalpable” mist, where I breathe the purer, if more mysterious, air of blind men. This edge might take me somewhere. Mathieu is with me, but his weight throws me, and he keeps trying to circle around me to pull ahead. I don’t know how to manage the both of us. I don’t know how to make the journey my own and ours. I don’t know how to have a relationship yet, and particularly this relationship. For this isn’t some ordered, algebraic world I’ve programmed myself into, where the equation is always solvable for
x
and
y
. Our world is a god-awful differential equation, stacked with so many layers of independent variables that we can barely find one another in the baffling mix. Even then, when you solve the damned thing, what do you get but some kind of laborious graph whose meaning no one (not even my Chinese TA) understands, that looks like it was scratched by tying a gigantic pen to the tail of a meandering cow who doesn’t know his ass from a hole in the ground.

And yet I am in love with him (Mathieu, not the cow, thoughboth would be astonished, in their steady, wide-eyed fashion, to find me thinking of my love life in terms of mathematical paradigms), and bound to him for the duration of this crooked journey. There’s the rub.

Mathieu pokes me in the ribs, and I jump half a foot into the air. He shakes his head, amused by my perpetual distractions, and directs my attention toward the bookstore. “Go buy me a Christmas present.”

Surprised, I look at him. “Are you serious?”

“Yes, as you say, we might not have a Christmas together. So let us enjoy one now.”

I love this man. He is not unbendable. I clasp his boyish, pliable form, and he looks pleased, if embarrassed, which moves me more than any grand romance he might invent. I stand and play with his hair, grazing his ear with my fingers, while he fixes me with those eyes, willing me toward something again. I turn to go but stop and spin around. “Wait, don’t I rate a present too?”

“I thought I gave you your present earlier this afternoon.” He shoots off a shit-eating,
American
grin at me and hangs his foot on his knee.

I swat him on the arm, as girls do when they like a boy, and he pulls me on his lap, as boys who fancy a girl must do. He kisses my neck and assures me that he will find me something later. Like I really care. He’s right, of course. Making love to Mathieu under the Matisse sure beat my mom’s homemade, beeswax candles that I got for Christmas last year. I kiss him on his cowlick and leave him behind to complete my mission.

Shakespeare & Co. is a shrine for people who try their worldly best to scorn shrines. It might be the secular humanist’s style of worship to kneel at this rather shabby storefront and be filled with the grace of the written word, as penned by mere mortals. The bookstore is the ultimate beacon of egalitarianism, though the light it emits is low wattage, with scores of books presented in thesame, haphazard manner—leaning against one another for support, some careworn. Each book’s ultimate, intangible worth is to be determined by the reader, of course, and not by the unassuming people who mill about the place, and whom one supposes, by their vestments of unwashed T-shirts and jeans, must be the employees/tenants since they drowsily eye the collection plate.

If the whole of Paris enjoys a utopian reputation for struggling artists, its
café crème
and red wine the locally grown panaceas for what ails your inspiration, then this modest building, with its mossy appeal, must be the writer’s inner sanctum, its primeval Shangri-La.

It is no wonder my father and Mathieu love it so. My dad, the bibliophile, wants to consume it all, while Mathieu, the writer-philosopher, wants to create the masterpiece worthy of its shelves.

There is a lot of pressure on little ol’ Daisy, who has not felt confident in bookshops since
Professor
Lockhart took her to a
Walden’s
and directed her toward
The Canterbury Tales
, forcing her to pronounce words like
sovereyn pestilence
, while she eyed the complete set of
Frog and Toad
stories, envisaging herself as the upbeat, eternally patient Frog and her father as the more grousy Toad explaining the Christ symbolism in the Prioress’s tale. Mathieu, too, expects a bona fide home run, something dazzling and brilliantly discerning. For gifts say a lot about the giver. How I wish I could get by with a three hundred euro pair of red high heels! How easy that would be. Finding the perfect book to give Mathieu is like trying to find my mother that obscure jazz record she doesn’t have, has somehow never heard of, and will love anyway. The last one I tried was a Duke Ellington collection of b-sides. She patted my head and said it was something my father might have given her. This seemed a bit harsh. And not entirely accurate since at least I got her the compact disc and not the 78 LP my dad would have triumphantly wrangled for a quarter at a garage sale.

There are the biggies up front.
Ulysses
. Purported to be the best novel ever written, though I couldn’t stick to the first ten pages while simultaneously clinging to the notion that I was not half retarded.
A Moveable Feast
. Obviously Paris-centric, by Papa Hemingway’s unsentimental, if still tender, hand. It wouldn’t make much sense to buy it for Mathieu, who I am sure has read it, though nowhere near the Café de la Mairie bordering St. Sulpice, of course. Moving on … Henry James, you inscrutable prick. How could you have written both
Washington Square
and
The Golden Bowl
? How is a mind capable of such murky digressions and convolutions (she asks, digressing)? Wade into late James, and you might drown in the swirling vortices of his saltwater sentences. My finger traces the thin binding to my namesake’s story. Nah. Too obvious. And I still can’t forgive Ms. Miller for dying at the end. Though I begin to see why she had to.

There are the lesser titles in the main stacks, the great majority of which I have never heard of. A few stick out in sharp relief, like welcome friends in a room full of strangers:
A Room with a View, The English Patient, The God of Small Things
. Old friends. A few authors are more intimately known: Jane Austen’s a beloved, spinsterish aunt who brings gossip and excellent advice; e.e. cummings is that shy, might-have-been boyfriend from college with the awful acne and scary talent; Patricia Cornwell is the embarrassing, experimental “friend” I took up with during a confusing phase and will never speak of again; and Jonathan Franzen is the hermetic, alcoholic uncle who shows up out of the blue to symbolically shit on your neat suburban lawn one day in order to demonstrate the constipated state of your soul, which might be annoyingly obvious were it not for the fact that he does it
so goddamn well
.

Some of them might find the company of the others suffocating (I can well imagine Franzen shriveling before Austen’s glorious, surface directness). But they all mean something to me—oddly, maybe—for it is a distinctly lopsided relationship we keep. I can never return the favor of their friendship, yet I have held onto something dear and unintelligible from each, fingerprinting the cadence of their words, and the burden of their characters, onto some untouchable place in my heart, like a charcoal grave rubbing that smudges with time, but never entirely fades.

This is why it’s nearly impossible to find the perfect book for someone. Movies, art, and music are universally shared experiences. Books are a sweetly solitary affair. The author can invent the characters and nudge them along an arc, but the reader is the most important character of all, the one who sees and judges everything: the architect of that supple third dimension. And the question is: what kind of world does Mathieu want to preside over? What will I be saying about myself and how I view him when—

Oops. I am not alone.

There’s a puckish kitten with a pink nose and green eyes stretched out, at eye level, between Samuel Beckett’s
First Love and Other Shorts
and (Sister) Wendy Beckett’s
Joy Lasts: On the Spiritual in Art
. She yawns at me and demonstrates her pink, fuzzy belly.

“Bonjour
, little friend,” I coo. She mews in return and responds eagerly to my petting, running her whiskers through my fingers, the long nails gouging the book she sprawls across with a limpid entitlement that cats just naturally possess. No wonder the ancient Egyptians worshipped them as goddesses. They are nervy without showing us anything so humble as effort. “You’re a funny little girl,” I laugh, as she sits up and contemplates me with her head cocked to the side.

“She doesn’t really belong here,” an American voice says.

“Excuse me?” I don’t feel so drunk anymore and can’t understand why I would be hearing voices. Or seeing cats.

A girl’s face peeks out from behind the kitten, and she chirps, “Hi. Sorry.” She has a snub nose spotted with freckles and a do-rag covering a mess of hair.

I give an awkward wave. The kitten licks her nose with a sandpaper tongue.

“Yeah, this cat doesn’t belong here. We already have a shop cat. This one just wandered in here this morning, and nobody had the heart to kick her out yet.” She sighs and pets the kitten, which arches her back and lifts her tail. She’s missing half of it, though the cat seems unconcerned of this fact, waving it about like a mast without its flag.

“She
seems
friendly,” I say. I have always been a dog person. Cats I don’t entirely trust.

“Yeah. They all are,” she replies, like it’s a common thing for homeless animals to seek refuge here, along with their human counterparts.

“What do you think will happen to her?” I ask, with a sense of foreboding. Little tiger kitty yawns again, revealing her saber-tooth incisors, before resuming her washing.

The girl shrugs. “We can’t take another one on. There’s enough cat fur around here as it is, and George would never allow it. So I guess we’ll have to throw her out before closing tonight, or someone will take her to a shelter.”

The kitten stops licking herself. She mews and settles down on her books, resting her pert chin on Samuel Beckett’s
Waiting for Godot
. She blinks, content to wait forever.

“What will happen to her at the shelter?”

Maybe the Parisians (being so enamored of their bureaucracy) have a system in place, some established protocol, with reams of absolutely necessary paperwork involved, whereby adorable, abandoned waif-animals are corralled into shelters and dispersed by government clerics into the rustic French countryside. There, they take up residence in charming barns,
chateaus
, and wineries, where they can live out their days with the cows, gentle people, and luscious grapes of the Bordeaux region, picking off a mouse here and there for sport, staring down sheep dogs with a superiordetachment when queenliness is called for. This is why people love socialism, right? It takes care of everyone, from mighty cats to lowly humans.

“The same thing that happens back home. If she’s not picked up after a couple days, she’ll be killed.”

Ugh. My faith, such as it was, in France’s bleeding heart is officially dead. Someone wipe away the cobwebs, and stamp the death certificate.

A little American initiative is in order.

When Mathieu, lounging on his bench, sees me emerge from Shakespeare & Co. with a reconstructed box in my arms, he smiles his confusion.
Ah, she could not decide on just one. How sweet
. As he hears me baby-talk to the box, he drops his smile and looks wary.
Can she still be drunk?
As he sees the plucky feline head pop over the edge of the box, his eyes widen in alarm.
Has she gone completely insane
?