You Deserve Nothing - Alexander Maksik [12]
It goes like this:
My father, Michael Fisher, straight out of Yale with a Master’s in Economics, in Paris for a vacation before he flies to Africa for his first assignment at the US Embassy in Pretoria, looks away from Prud’hon’s The Empress Josephine and sees my mother walking slowly across the gallery.
She is the first person to have passed in ten minutes and my father hears her footsteps before she appears. He glances at her and then returns to the painting. “It is as if,” he says, “Josephine herself has wandered into the room.”
Dad watches her. The way she’s dressed, the ease with which she moves through the gallery, the way she swings her arms, all make him believe she’s French. My father, a master of languages, has not then mastered French and wonders what to do.
“She is,” he says to himself, “the most beautiful woman I have ever seen.”
She terrifies him. And so rather than speaking to her, he takes from his wallet one of his fresh-cut business cards. On the back he writes: Do you speak English? He keeps the card in his hand and goes on pretending to admire Josephine. Then he gives himself an out: if she doesn’t stop at this painting, he will let her leave undisturbed.
His heart beats. His palms sweat. She stops just behind him. He can feel her there. He can hear her pencil scratching across paper. He takes a breath. He counts to ten. He turns to her. He hands her the card, she looks at him surprised, thinks at first, she later says, that he’s a missionary, a Jehovah’s Witness, but accepts the card, reads his message, smiles, writes an answer on her half-finished sketch of Josephine, tears it from her notebook and gives it to him: Are you dumb?
He laughs aloud. His heart races. Seeing those words, that simple question, “Are you dumb?” written in her wild hand floating there where Prud’hon’s dark woods should be, the story goes, “the world became a perfectly solvable equation.”
And so he spoke.
“She’s nearly as beautiful as you are,” he says.
Suave Michael Fisher. The world a perfect proof.
“Do you think so?” my mother responds, gazing up at the painting, as if, my dad tells his guests, she were truly trying to decide who was more beautiful.
Finally she says, “You know, this Josephine, she had a pug named Fortune. She used him to send Napoleon secret messages. Did you know that?”
My father did not.
“On their wedding night Napoleon wouldn’t let Fortune sleep with them and Josephine said, ‘If the pug doesn’t sleep in our bed neither do I.’ You know what happened then?”
“They slept with the pug?”
“They slept with the pug.”
“Smart man.”
All this time Annabelle has been studying Josephine. Eventually, she turns to Michael, who’s been studying Annabelle, and says, “I’ve got better teeth than she did. Did you know that she had famously awful teeth?”
What did she see when she finally looked at young Michael Fisher? A well-dressed man, wearing good shoes and a neat haircut. A man with gray eyes and a long, straight nose. Strong round shoulders. A wide, open, American face. Thick blond hair. An attractive, unremarkable looking man, whose flat eyes threw her—she couldn’t tell if they were warm or cold.
Why she agreed to have a coffee with him in a café (neither of them can remember its name) on the Place Dauphine she wasn’t sure. Certainly it wasn’t the world falling into perfect order. She’d never describe love in those terms anyway, but whatever was propelling her away from a museum she’d waited nearly a year to visit, I promise it wasn’t love.
And that’s how they met—the museum, the café, and so on. Then they became inseparable. Lumen became Fisher. There’s no detail after the café. We’re to imagine the rest—the long walks through the city, the laughing, the glittering lights, an accordion, a rumbling métro, passion. People nod, they close their eyes. Ah Paris. Love. Romance. A chance meeting. But what is it they imagine, these guests of my parents who nod