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

more except for this strange, beautiful painting and its bastard offspring, cloned onto coffee cups, tote bags, and umbrellas.
    Her face is my springboard. I will throw myself at mortality, and take a leap of faith.
    Primed, I dash into the adjacent gallery, stuffed with Monet’s paintings of the Rouen cathedral. I look for my stranger’s brown blazer among the shock of color, but this isn’t his room. I cross into the next theater, where the swirling genius of Van Gogh rocks me violently. I am reminded of my hair cells back in Choi’s lab, the way they startle upon stimulation. This is how I feel. Distorted. Dizzy. Charged with potential. Van Gogh’s self-portrait pulses with a radiant turmoil. He was descending into insanity at the time. I am ascending into euphoric madness. Different thing, altogether. Him, estranged from his world; me, running to engage it. But the intensity of feeling is something we share. Falling and Rising. Passions of movement.
    There they are—the American couple, the Fannies. They have seized one of the benches for their cage match, the woman gesticulating wildly. I look frantically for my brown blazer, but his is not among the palette of colors. Bullying my way through the crowd, I arrive at the couple’s side, desperate enough to interrupt the woman’s tirade. Their pettiness almost destroys my momentum. Almost. She looks at me crossly, and a bubble of my laughter escapes into the air.
    “I’m sorry, but where is the tour guide who was with you just now?”
    “Excuse me?” she asks, so archly I’m surprised her eyebrows don’t leap off her face. She means to make this difficult.
    I take a deep breath. “I’m sorry to be a nuisance. But I need to talk to him about something.”
    Her husband pipes up. “Lilla dismissed the poor fellow. Wasn’t as impressed with her insights as she needed him to be.” He ignores Lilla’s glare. “He headed that-a-way,” the man says, pointing toward an exit.
    “Thanks,” I shout back, forgetting them and their old, tired ways. I am so young. My youth pounds like horses’ hooves in my ears, urging me on. A frowning guard shushes me, but I turn and smile at him, jerking my shoulders up in that goofy confessional way people inflict on others when they don’t feel responsible for their actions. Poor fellow thinks I’m taunting him. He’s got lovely English ears that will turn red in a few seconds.
    The exit dumps me into a no-man’s-land, a cross section of confusion, and I hesitate. Stymied, the horses halt. There is a spacious café to be considered on my left, more rooms across the way for the post-impressionists to display their increasingly abstract works, and an escalator rolling to my right. I’m not sure. With sweaty palms, I grip the railing of a landing that grants a sweeping view of the museum’s lower floor. It is a grand space, washed by light. Reminiscent of a Roman cathedral, the soaring, coffered ribs of the old train station alternate with arches of tinted glass, slants of sunlight spilling across a share of the marble sculptures below, which burst into reverent detail. This one humbles herself before God, while that one stretches toward ecstasy, the distance between them heightening the drama of their appeals, and inventing new relationships. The clean, art-deco lines, and terraced space, recall a gutted archaeological dig, where priceless treasures have been unearthed by raw, determined hands. But it is still dead air they breathe. My breaths are shallow but warm.
    Quickly, I scout the long promenade below. There are masses of humanity down there, and too many wear brown. Yet instantly I spot him, brown hair and blazer, pulling away from me. Perhaps it is the fact that he moves purposefully, while the others linger. My heart is squeezed by the idea that I will lose him. He is already near the exit, his steady stride stretching the distance between uslike a rubber band about to snap. Damn his speed. Must he be that anxious