Plum Blossoms in Paris by Sarah Hina Read Free Book Online Page A

neglects to eatbecause there are other, less ridiculous, matters at hand. I imagine him with coffee for breakfast, wine for dinner. With more potent hungers in between.
    A pre-Raphaelite nose dominates his slim, oval face, but the effect is softened by wide, deeply held eyes whose outer corners drag slightly, their accompanying air of concern reinforced by that furrow between the brows. He has the most beautiful lips I have seen on a man, and it is impossible to look and not desire them to brush my more meager canvas. Not gratuitous, but still sensual, they hold soft indentations where the lips meet to suggest a phantom kiss. Never mind the rather crooked teeth they conceal. He is not ashamed of them, and smiles at will. He has a high, erudite brow and cropped brown hair. A layer of beard fuzz marks him as a casual shaver. His eyes, again? Like amber. And like any foolish creature silly enough to venture closer, I am caught.
    Senses in overload, I scramble for sensibility. “Hey.”
    Hey?
My right knee quivers, seemingly with laughter, or sobs.
    “Hello again,” he replies, and with a slight bow (yeah, that’s right, a bow), escorts the two troglodytes away, toward the pretty, safe rooms of Renoir and Monet.
    Again!
I am reeling.
    Love at first sight is pure foolishness, of course. It’s probably the art. My loneliness. Paris.
    If someone would only inform my knee. It continues to shiver from some internal hysteria I am at a loss to control. Like suffering the giggles in someplace sacred. Like an earthquake has just shuddered through my fault-ridden body, eviscerating everything. Like my nerves are pure, radiant electricity, feeling for a place to ground. It’s not love, I tell myself. Just neurological mutiny.
    Of course, it’s not love at first sight at all. This man, and those eyes, have been with me all week. If I have been mourning my past with Andy, it was to prepare myself for this future. Rarely have I been so conscious of the power of the present. I am here, now, perched on the pivot of time, leg shakily extended.
    There is a choice to be made. Things don’t just happen. Either I follow him, or I don’t. There is risk, of course. My mind leapfrogs like a choose-your-own-adventure, foreseeing every denouement before we have a story. Being rebuffed seems the mildest possibility, and one I can handle. There is a permissive element to being in a foreign land, with only the judgment of strangers to reckon with, and I can bear, after pocketing a handful of disgraces in the past week, the humiliation of his laughing in my face. Swinging to the other, more dizzying side of the spectrum, there is the sad inevitability of our parting, perhaps a month away, after my money has run out, each of us unwilling to abandon our country of origin. I could never be French. I haven’t the stomach for it. And I already see that he has a healthy disdain for Americans. Our affair will end, not like some inscrutable French film, but with a purer, American sense of tragedy. Like
Casablanca
, without the noble sacrifice. I’m already starting to miss him—us—and I don’t even know his name.
    Ridiculous to presume this on the piffling authority of a few careless looks and words? Perhaps. But entirely human.
    So then, the question is one of longevity. What is a month worth? To entertain the old cliché about it being better to have loved and lost than never loved at all? I’m not sure. My tolerance for pain has been squeezed, my ego pinned by Andy’s slippery half nelson. Uncertain, I look up at the naked woman in Manet’s masterpiece, for I am still rooted, dumb, to this spot while a stream of tourists files past. Her gaze strikes me anew, in that sandpapery white noise. Now her stare is faintly conspiratorial, daring me. With a shudder, I remember that the woman is dead, that this museum is a morgue of sorts, and that the artists and their muses bewitch us into believing that they are immortal. That painful, naked flesh is no