Chapter 40 Present Day
PRESENT DAY
OSCAR
The morning rain had given way to the sun that melted the clouds, leaving a crisp freshness to the air and lifting Oscar’s spirit. Oscar and Elle parked their bicycles outside of Claude Monet’s home in Giverny and secured them with the locks the rental shop in Vernon had provided.
Even though Oscar rejected Elle’s suggestion they spend the night together, it had not dampened her enthusiasm to spend the next day with him.
While a large part of Oscar desired the intimacy, he knew if they had, it would embroil him in yet another complicated love-triangle between Elle and her boyfriend. “No more of those,” he thought.
Besides, he had an excuse. He shared the hotel room with other teammates, and didn’t want Sensei to hear about any “hanky-panky,” as he called it.
Oscar, in fact, had talked with Doctor and Missus Jō when he’d returned to the hotel to check in.
Missus Jō said that she hoped he hadn’t minded her match-making meddling, and Doctor Jō reminded him that they would leave in three days.
“Not enough time to properly fall in love,” he’d gleefully added.
When Oscar asked if he could go visit Monet’s home in Giverny with the girl, Doctor Jō gave him permission as long as he promised that he would not wind up in a French jail and that he would not get the girl pregnant.
Sensei had not hesitated to reiterate his advice on birth control.
“The best form of birth control is an aspirin…one that is held between the woman’s knees,” he roared with laughter.
Oscar had reassured him he would represent the U.S.
team well. Although watching Elle dismount her bike in her tight yoga pants made him reconsider this promise.
Oscar had spent the rest of the night between restless sleep and searching on his phone, hidden under the covers so as not to disturb his roommates.
One thing he’d learned for sure was how wrong his winery-owner relative was about his looks.
It isn’t the Hoschedé genes that are so prominent.
It is the Monet genetics that course through the generations.
Perhaps this is why I share the same love of color and art, natural beauty, a love of Japan, and a strong attraction to romance.
He pondered all this while entertaining Elle on the train.
The ride from Paris had taken only forty-five minutes to Vernon where they’d rented bikes from the drugstore near the station to make the thirty-minute ride past the Blanch Hoschedé-Monet Museum, over the bridge, along the Seine River, past the Museum of Impressionism, and on to Monet’s home.
Their train had left from Gare Saint-Lazare Station, the same station that his great-great-great-great-grandfather would have used to travel to Giverny, or beyond to his childhood home in Le Havre where his parents had apparently called him Oscar.
The train station still looked very much the same as Monet had painted it almost one hundred and fifty years ago in 1877.
In some odd way, Oscar felt like he was coming home.
The train fare had been worth ten euros just to see the view of the tranquil countryside of France flash by.
It was just as he’d imagined: a patchwork of delightful green fields of farmland.
As he’d absorbed the scene, Oscar thought about what he’d learned from his research last night: World War I raged only fifty kilometers north of Giverny and at the age of seventy-seven, Monet brought vegetables from his garden to feed the soldiers at the small hospital in Giverny and refused to evacuate with his family saying, “If those savages must kill me, it will be in the middle of my canvases, in front of all my life’s work. ”
Even with worsening cataracts and vision loss, the old master saw his patriotic duty to paint…
and paint, he did. Oscar had read on and learned that as the war ended, Monet felt his late paintings were an attempt to heal the nation.
He’d thought his series of weeping willow paintings expressed the grief of devastation, with close to one and a half million French dead and four times that wounded.
Almost one third of the young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-seven had perished.
Then la grippe, influenza, took millions more as the war ended.
The war and the flu had devastated France.
World War I had also devastated the French wine industry. No wonder his great-great-grandfather had left France for a new life in America.
As Oscar and Elle approached the woman at the entry gate, Elle tightened her embrace of his arm, and Oscar smiled at her as he sprang for the twelve euros entry fee.
It was easy to see why Monet had chosen this spot for his home and gardens.
Surrounded by countryside and quaint houses, his heaven on earth was protected by rolling hills to the north and the Seine River to the south.
It was a perfect location for a lush arboretum.
The early morning rain brought the plants and trees to life and turned everything emerald green.
The sweet fragrance of budding flowers swirled through the air.
It must have been exactly how his great-great-great-great-grandfather had wanted it to feel.
“So, you learned much about Monsieur Monet last night as I cried myself to sleep?” Elle teased, taking the ticket. “I guess if I had to be rejected, it is better that it is because of someone so near and dear to our French heart.”
Oscar gave her a side hug. “Thanks for coming with me today,” he said, ignoring her pout. She smelled delicious. “You want to see the house first or the gardens?”
Elle wrapped her hands around his arm. “Whatever. I’m just not letting you go back to California and those dumb American girls.” She thumped her finger against her forehead and shook her head. “Who would ever think of breaking young Oscar’s heart?”
“Not a French mademoiselle, for sure,” Oscar said, imitating her accent.
“Oh, so now you speak French. How romantic.” She kissed his shoulder, and they both laughed.
Oscar followed the sign: LE JARDIN D’EAU, The Water Garden, into the gardens, below the pink and ivory brick home accented with bright green shutters and stairways.
They entered the world of Monet—a sea of tulips, daffodils, iris, and every other kind of flower one could imagine, all awash in primary colors of every hue and shade—brilliant pinks, subdued burgundies, royal purples, and canary yellows.
Elle let his arm go and twirled a pirouette under an arch of blooming honeysuckle. “Oh, how I wish I had worn a dress to dance under such beauty.” She spun gracefully back to Oscar’s side. “Isn’t this something?”
They continued along the garden path until they came to the most famous place of all—the place that Oscar’s great-great-great-great-grandfather loved and where he painted hundreds upon hundreds of canvases.
Standing at the edge of the pond, it was as if standing in a painting still wet from Monet’s brushes.
The teal-green Japanese bridge arched over pink and purple water lilies.
Majestic weeping willows and Japanese maples framed the perfect view.
A trellis of wisteria hung in glorious purple clusters with sunbeams glistening through the foliage.
Oscar had read that the old man smoked like a chimney, and his imagination let the aroma of the burning pipe tobacco fill his mind while the master recreated the colors and light, stroke by stroke, trying over and over to capture the fleeting beauty.
“Water lilies are an extension of my life, without the water, the lilies cannot live, as I am without art.” Oscar had remembered reading.
Oscar and Elle stood in silence, mesmerized by the power and glory, until Elle said, “Mon Dieu. It is like heaven on earth.”
She took his hand and pulled him down the path and onto the Japanese bridge. “You must kiss me now or I will surely die.” She pressed him against the railing and, standing on tiptoes, her body into his. She kissed his lower lip tenderly and searched his eyes, inviting him into her.
An older, portly woman wearing a bright blue bandana on her head and pushing a wheelbarrow full of cut branches interrupted their embrace. “Excusez-moi,” she said politely.
Oscar stepped back, blushed and laughed nervously, “Wheelbarrow interruptus.” Then he saw the wheelbarrow’s front tire sink into the joint between the path and the bridge. The woman struggled to move it forward.
Oscar walked to her, grabbed the front of the wheelbarrow, and lifted it, allowing the woman to go her way.
“Merci, merci,” she smiled at him.
Oscar smiled back and said in the only French he knew for sure, “Bonjour, madame,” and saluted her with two fingers.
She stopped in shock, dropping her end of the wheelbarrow, and stared back and forth from Oscar to Elle. The color drained from the woman’s face, and she covered her mouth, at the same time cried, “Sacré bleu!”
She whimpered something Oscar didn’t understand and brushed past them, taking extra-long strides down the pathway, abandoning her wheelbarrow on the bridge.
Oscar watched her go and turned to Elle in dismay. “Did I just make a terrible French blunder?”
Elle looked as surprised. “I don’t know what just happened.”