The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  We didn’t talk for a little. Jack continued to eat at the same pace. Now and then, he stopped to see what reaction his body had to the food.

  “So did you know Constance is thinking of going to Australia with Raef?” I asked when his eating had slowed. “She thinks maybe she’ll go instead of returning home. At least for a while.”

  “I know he’s nuts about her.”

  I looked at him. Our eyes locked.

  “And you’re crazy about me. That’s the next thing to say, Jack.”

  “And I’m crazy about you.”

  “Too late. Doesn’t work when I have to show you the cue card.”

  “I am crazy about you. But I’ve always wondered what that meant. Is that really a compliment? Do we want people to be crazy around us?”

  “It’s an idiomatic expression, I think.”

  “But what if they really were crazy? Would that be good? Isn’t a stalker crazy about the person he loves? I don’t think anyone should say he is crazy about someone unless he is a bona fide stalker. Then, sure. And also, I don’t think it’s politically correct to say crazy. It makes fun of those who really are off their rockers.”

  “You have a strange mind, Jack.”

  “I’m feeling better. I think we should try to go out,” he said. “If you’re up for it.”

  “Do you feel well enough?”

  “Sure.”

  “Are you positive? You still look a little pasty.”

  “I’m really okay,” he said, loading his voice with sex, but it was a fake.

  He grabbed me and pulled me close.

  35

  Jack and Raef disappeared the next day. They said they would be back by dinner, not to worry.

  Constance and I went to Notre Dame.

  We had been there before on our earlier visit, but to Constance, who studied the saints, Notre Dame was a living, breathing building that revealed secrets at every glance. She was systematic in her approach: we sat outside the building for a long time and let our eyes travel where they liked. She knew the history of the cathedral, of course: how it had been built commencing in 1163 and took more than a century to complete; how it had hosted hundreds of important political and religious events; how it perched on the Île de la Cité; how the “Te Deum” was sung there at the end of both World Wars I and II. But that was all background to Constance.

  She came to see Mary.

  It was an obsession with her. Of all the saints, she loved Mary the most, and Notre Dame—Our Lady—contained thirty-seven statues of Mary. But Constance’s obsession within her obsession was the statue of Mary holding the Christ child in the trumeau of the Portal of the Virgin. The statue came originally from the Chapel of Saint Aignan in the ancient Cloister of the Canons, and it replaced the thirteenth-century Virgin knocked down in 1793.

  “Here it is,” Constance told me when we finally entered the building and stood in front of it. She put her arm through mine, and her eyes began to tear as she described it. “This is the Altar of the Virgin. It’s been here since the twelfth century—the altar, but not always with the same statue. Regardez! It doesn’t look particularly momentous until you stop and consider it. See her? She is a young mother, Heather. That’s what I like about it. She is a young woman who has been asked to hold in her womb and arms the divine. What I admire about this statue is the ambivalence. You can see she is charmed by the child. See him? He is playing with a brooch on her cloak and not looking at her exactly, and her hip is out. I love women’s hips, especially when they’re poked out. See? Poked out to hold her child, who is the salvation of the world, and it all rests on a woman’s hip. But inside all that majesty is this small, timid woman and her beloved child. That’s why this statue kills me. I’ve read about it over and over, and now to see it … you know, there have been many transformations here in front of Our Lady. People have been converted in a single instant by one glance at her. I know, I know, I don’t believe much of it myself, but, Heather, I believe in the human need to believe, and this is the embodiment of that.”

  I loved Constance. I loved her as much as anything in the world.

  * * *

  Jack took me to bed in the late afternoon and devoured me.

  The balcony doors stood wide open, and the warm Paris sun heated the first foot or two of the room floor, and he put grapes between my lips and kissed me with them, and it was funny, and silly, and incredibly passionate. Our bodies moved perfectly. He was rough at times, as if he’d fallen through something to be with me, as if his body contained an element that was fish and DNA and seawater, and that had to be released, must be cast forward, and I thought of Mary—absurdly—and of the surprise of pregnancy, and the weight of the Christ child on her hip. It all mixed together, Jack’s splendid body, his mysterious absence earlier, the sun, the warmth of the day, the scent of Paris, dirty and choked as any city with exhaust and human activity, and I gave myself to him, pulled him deeper in me, opened myself to him and lost the line between us.

  Afterward, I rested with my head on his shoulder. He tickled my back slowly, calmly with the stem of a violet he had purchased from a woman selling forget-me-nots for a soldiers’ fund. He drew little pictures on my back, and my breathing matched his.

  I did nothing but stay against him, our bodies cooling together.

  “How’s our sex?” he asked a little later. “Is it kind of spectacular or only okay?”

  “Oh, you first on that one, buddy boy.”

  “It’s a horrible question, isn’t it? If you say it’s great and the other person thinks it’s only so-so, then you’ve created a huge communication gulley. If you say it’s good but not great and the other person thinks it was terrific, then you’ve insulted your partner. It’s one of the great conundrums of modern living.”

  “It’s like going to Phoenix.”

  He pushed up a little and looked at me.

  “It’s an old story in my family,” I explained. “A long time ago, my mother and father had a chance to go to Phoenix. They went and had a horrible time. The entire trip, my father thought my mother wanted to go, and my mother thought my father wanted to go. That’s called a trip to Phoenix in my family.”

  “And the moral of that story is…?”

  “You have to tell the truth to your partner.”

  “I think you’re delicious in bed,” he said. “I love making love with you.”

  “I’m glad you feel that way. For me, it’s only so-so.”

  His hand slowed on my back. I turned my head so he couldn’t see me smiling.

  “You’re a rat,” he said. “A horrible rat.”

  “You turn me inside out, Jack. You ring all sorts of bells.”

  “Good, I’m glad.”

  “In a so-so sort of way.”

  He tried to push me out of bed. I grabbed around his belly and held on. Then he pulled me on top of him—and I loved his strength, I loved how he could move me as he liked—and kissed me with everything. We kissed a long time with the balcony door open and the Paris light beginning to turn away for the night. Each told the other how sweetly we loved. The kisses became a chain, and we followed each link for fear of leaving anything to chance, anything to part us.

  * * *

  At sunset, Jack took me to plant a tree.

  He could not have surprised me more. After leaving me for about an hour, he came to our room at the Hotel Trenton with a small ash tree wrapped in a burlap holder. The tree looked vigorous, but it was a sapling, a slender plant no taller than my knee.

  He carried it out to the balcony and made me do a Lion King salutation. I held it up and introduced it to the plains of Africa—or Paris. It was lighthearted and fun. He sang the Lion King song and made me join in on “The Circle of Life.”

  “So what is this about?” I asked, delighted. Already delighted.

  He had two bottles of red wine, both of them without labels. It was like Jack to find wine from a private vendor. He made me hold the tree—he treated it like a baby—while
he opened the first bottle. He pulled our two seats onto the balcony. It was a tight fit, but we both managed to have our legs out, at least.

  “We drink to its health,” he said. “To the long life of a tree.”

  “To its health,” I said, raising my glass.

  He sipped the wine and appraised it. “Not bad,” he said, smiling. He looked incredibly handsome and happy, alive to everything around him. He knocked me out the way he looked in that moment.

  “A tree is an arrow into the future,” he said in mock seriousness. “We’re going to plant a tree tonight. We’re going to cut locks of our hair and bury them with the tree. We’re going into the Jardin du Luxembourg and plant a tree to shade any future Hemingways. You can visit it whenever you come to Paris. Everything else in the world will go along, sometimes failing, sometimes prospering, but your tree—our tree—it will keep growing. Our grandchildren will be able to visit it.”

  “Are we having children soon? That would be good to know.”

  He looked at me and made a funny face. His eyes looked lively and happy above the rim of his glass. He wiggled his eyebrows a little.

  “The world is unpredictable,” he said. “You can’t plan everything. Not even with a Smythson superdeluxe calendar thingy.”

  “Do you think the authorities are going to let us plant a tree in the park without any objection?”

  “Oh, Heather, my careful, dot-the-i’s Heather. We are going to plant it without them knowing. Ninja gardeners. Who can hate a planted tree? Who would pull it up? Once it’s in the ground, it will be safe. Do you see how clever this is? Maybe we won’t even go into the park, although that would be the best habitat for a tree. We could plant it in one of those little plots of earth on one of the boulevards. The tree would live a riskier life, but that might suit it. Maybe the tree is a rebel tree. Maybe the bucolic life is not for our tree. It might be an alternative, punk kind of tree.”

  “Why an ash?”

  “European ash,” he said, drinking off half his wine. He topped us both off again. “It’s long-lived, for one thing. And it’s common. No one will think it out of place. The man gave me a little card—the gardening shop guy. Ash has its own runic sign—an AE merged. They think it comes from the Old English or German meaning Esche.”

  “You’ve done your homework. I’m impressed.”

  “You should be,” he said, and he leaned over to kiss me. “If it goes our way, the tree will live a century or more. Think of that! Look upon my mighty works, or Look upon my works, you mighty, or something like that. Was it Keats? Or ‘Ozymandias,’ by Shelley? Anyway, one of the Romantics, right?”

  “I remember reading it in high school.”

  “So while the world falls and collapses, our tree, the great ash, will be rising into the sky, triumphant! What do you think about that?”

  “I think yes. I think yes to everything, Jack.”

  “Good, now finish this glass of wine, and then we can be on our way. Do you have nail polish?”

  “A little, I think. Hold on.”

  Where did this man come from? How had he tumbled into my life? And why did his pleasure in life infect me so readily?

  I went into the bathroom and returned with a small bottle of red nail polish. It was nearly empty. I handed it to Jack. He had a flat rock that he had found somewhere, and he carefully brushed it off.

  “Our immortality,” he said.

  He shook the nail polish, then carefully, precisely, wrote our names out on the rock. He enclosed them with a silly heart. He took out his Swiss Army knife and handed it to me.

  “Here, cut a lock of my hair, please. Then I’ll cut yours.”

  I cut off a curl above his right ear. He took a small shank from the line of hair near my left shoulder. He tied both locks of hair together with piece of twine he cut free from the burlap holding the tree.

  “Ideally,” he said, his hands busy, his eyes still fresh and happy, “we would plant it like this, without anything to guard it, but then the hair would decay and the nail polish would become indecipherable. Here.” He snatched a plastic container that we had from an earlier purchase of watermelon. “Not as romantic, maybe, but maybe it will make it last longer. What do you say? Anything else you want to add?”

  I nodded. I took the stone from him and wrote under our names my favorite line:

  Hate what’s false; demand what’s true.

  Jack read it, nodded, then kissed my lips.

  * * *

  “Didn’t Raef and Constance want to come?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t invite them. This is about us, not them.”

  I squeezed his hand.

  It was dark. The Boulevard Saint-Michel sent enough light for us to use, but we kept to the shadows. Our gardening tools were pathetic. We had a single dinner knife, a plastic bottle of water, our plastic container, and nothing else. But it made me tingle to be doing something illicit. The park was closed, but Jack promised that other people got in during the night. It only stood to reason, he theorized. Even if we were apprehended, he said, we would not be arrested. The French, he promised, could not resist a love story.

  It felt like being ten years old in the middle of a hide-and-seek game.

  This, I realized, was something I would remember all my life. More than a photo. More than a museum visit. For a century, a tree would grow in a park in Paris, and my name, and Jack’s name, would be at its root. That was Jack’s way in the world.

  “We’re looking for an innocent sort of plot, a place that is inconspicuous. Nothing grand or showy, okay? We want the tree to be a nonentity for the first twenty years of its life. Then, oh, baby, it’s going to begin to dominate its surroundings. Then it will become the most badass tree around. Are you with me?”

  “Yes. Hell yes.”

  “Okay, here we go. What do you think of that spot? It’s not fancy, but it’s safe, I think. It’s near the café tables. We can come back and visit it tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be something?”

  We snuck carefully across a wide lawn, attentive to our position relative to the lights on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. When we reached the dirt plot, Jack canvassed things quickly and then suggested a spot on the right-hand corner.

  “No big trees here,” he said, falling to his knees and beginning to dig in the dirt. “No competition. It will look like a volunteer plant, or a tree that some department planted and then forgot about. There won’t be any reason for someone to dig it up. Not back here away from things. Is this good? Are you liking this spot?”

  “It’s perfect. It works.”

  “Okay, the soil is soft. This is easy. Are you ready? We’ll both slip it in together. Here we go.”

  My hands shook. I couldn’t control them. They shook until Jack put his hands around mine and steadied us both.

  “It’s our tree,” he whispered. “No one else’s. It will always be ours.”

  “In Paris.”

  “Our tree in Paris,” he said. “The mighty Esche.”

  I put the plastic box containing our hair and the rock down in the hole beside the tiny roots. Then we backfilled the hole and smoothed dirt around the tree stem. We did our best to make it appear that the tree had always been there. Jack handed me the bottled water.

  “Water gets the air out of the soil,” he said. “Gives it its first drink in its new home.”

  I poured the water carefully around the base of the tree. Pan, not far away, watched us in the still light at the entrance to the park. It seemed likely he would approve.

  36

  August 2, 1947

  Spent the night in Paris and went to the races at Longchamps on Saturday. The racing wasn’t much; the horses looked neglected. It was a wonder they hadn’t been eaten or killed outright by a bomb. I liked seeing the riding colors: the bright green and yellow and scarlet. During one race, a dog got loose and chased after the pack of horses. A man behind me said he should have bet on the dog, for at least the dog ran as hard as it could, unlike the horrible n
ags he had wagered on. It drew a general laugh from the people around him. He laughed, too, but his eyes didn’t.

  Constance standing with Raef in the early morning light. A waiter sweeping the sidewalk outside his restaurant. Five pigeons clucking around her feet, a few sometimes dashing forward to see what the waiter had swept into a pile. Constance checking her purse, her backpack, patting her pockets to make sure she had remembered everything. Raef, her man, fiddling with the bags, making a final check, looking to see if this or that buckle had been properly snapped closed. Constance’s hair softly blond and beautiful in the light, her outfit carefully selected from the few clothes that we had, her attention, just for an instant, drawn to the pigeons gathered behind her.

  This was Constance in Paris, I told myself. This is a memory to hold. This is Constance going off to Australia with her true.

  I smiled. My lovely Constance, the girl on the Schwinn, the lover of saints, the gazer at statues of the Virgin Mary.

  She turned and saw me watching. She was on her way. She was going with Raef to the train station, then to the airport, then onto a plane that would take her to Australia. She had days of travel ahead of her, hours on buses and in cars, out to Ayers Rock, out to the red sand and clay of Western Australia. It was an adventure, a what-the-hell flyer, and she stood for a moment on the edge of everything. She smiled at me, and then she took her scarf and threw it into the air. The pigeons, sensing a hawk that was only a scarf, exploded around her feet. They shot up into the air, and their wings clapped and clawed to get higher, and Constance smiled broadly. She knew what she had done: she had sent the pigeons into the air on purpose. She stood in the morning light, leaving me, but putting herself into my memory one last time.

  * * *

  Jack and I went to Longchamps, the horseracing course in the Bois de Boulogne, on the last day. We picked a marvelous day. The temperature had dropped off, and true autumn had snuck in at night. I wore a sweater, and so did Jack. We took a jitney recommended by the hotel, and it was nearly empty. The driver, a fat man with a walrus mustache, listened to a soccer match as he drove us. Jack said he thought the soccer match must be a replay, because it was too early in the day for a live match. The bus traveled out of the city and into the wooden environs of the Bois de Boulogne. Jack said several times it looked like Vermont.