Plum Blossoms in Paris by Sarah Hina Read Free Book Online

immediacy
and
permanence, like an entire lifetime can be held within a moment. The easy sentimentality of Cabanel, and of many of the Romantics, has been sloughed off, as Manetstakes his claim—on the tip of Olympia’s kittenish heel—as the father of modern art. Olympia finishes this floor off (she has no use for its fawning slightness), for it is she, more than any goddess or virgin, who is ascending toward impressionism, and the future we still seek.
    Dodging students on a school field trip, I ride on the escalator to the third floor, where Manet’s second masterpiece,
Le Déjeuner sur L’Herbe (Lunch on the Grass)
takes center stage. Another naked woman (not a nude, which is classical) confronts us, sitting next to two clothed beatniks, deep in discussion. If Olympia’s nakedness shocked, this woman, inserted without context next to disinterested men, scandalized.
    A voice crawls over my shoulder, and I prickle with some misplaced sense of intrusion at my private devotion. The voice explains that the painting required two armed guards due to the outraged reception it received at The Salon. The idea of someone attacking the priceless piece of art rouses my interest, and I turn.
    There is a middle-aged couple, complete with leather fanny packs, facing me. The man has a comb-over and looks as bored as some of the schoolchildren. His eyes rove like a blind man’s, sweeping for a landing strip that doesn’t require too much from him. He settles on a pretty blonde looking at a Pissarro. The wife fans herself with the museum pamphlet, while staring at the tour guide, who has his back to me. She asks him an insensible question about water lilies, and the tour guide explains that Éduoard
Manet
is not the same person as Claude
Monet
. “Common misconception,
madame
, for people unacquainted with the French language.” His tone is cordial, if pointed.
    I hide a smile.
    The woman looks disappointed. “Because I’ve always loved them so. My daughter, Penelope, got me an umbrella with those lilies on them. She picked it up somewhere in Chicago, I think, on a business trip. She works for Ernst & Young, you know.” Flip to the hair. “Anyway, it was darling. Phil had one of his lapses and forgot it in our rental car once, on a trip to Ocracoke, and
poof—”
here she unleashes a hand gesture meant to express contempt and remorse—“it was gone. Such a shame. I loved that little umbrella.
Adored
it.”
    Phil is nonplussed. The blonde has a friend.
    “Anyway, do you think they might sell it in the gift store here?” she asks the guide, putting a hand on her fanny pack and stroking the money inside.
All in good time, my pretties
. …
    “I’m sorry,
madame,”
the guide replies. “One what?”
    Something about that voice … low and clear, like a cello shadowing Bach.
    The woman starts her obsessive fanning again, in spite of the cool temperature. “Why, the umbrella of course. With the lilies. Or maybe those sunflowers of Van Gogh’s. You know”—she looks at him expectantly—“something pretty.”
    At this, the tour guide, just a man with brown hair and a smooth voice until now, turns toward me, mumbling, “I can inquire for you,
madame
. I am sure they have all sorts of pretty trivial things for you to choose from.”
    It should come as no surprise that it is my stranger from the train.
    I draw back while he takes me in, almost knocking into the priceless treasure on the wall and inflicting more injury on it than my fellow Americans’ indifference toward anything not made famous by its perversion. He smiles uncertainly, probably trying to place me, while I study him. He is older than I, likely dreaming of nailing Charlotte, or some French equivalent of the hot cheerleader, when I was still worried about losing my retainer on field trips. He is tallish, but not overbearing, and thinner than good health allows for, the hollow pockets under the high cheekbones designating him as the distractible type who