Chapter XXXIII. Still Life, with Flowers.
XXXIII.
STILL LIFE, WITH FLOWERS.
FLORIDA.
The kids and I spend spring break in Florida with my parents, while Francois stays behind for work. Our time there is slow and gentle. Late starts, lazy afternoons by the pool, puzzles and Boggle at night. After recent events, I find the pace appealing.
As promised, I shoot my mother’s portrait for the installation.
We do it in the garage with a bedsheet as a backdrop and the doors rolled open for optimum light.
I keep her hair and makeup to a minimum.
Enough to hide any blemishes, but not so much that she does not look like herself.
And for all her complaining about how old she’s become, she is surprisingly impressed with how lovely the tests look for such a simple setup.
“You really are very good at what you do, Cecilia,” she says, thirty minutes in. A smile on her regal face. “Maybe I don’t tell you enough.”
“Thank you, Mummy.”
Coming from her, this is everything.
Late one morning, midweek, when the kids are still in bed, I find her in the front garden, tending to her orchids. She’s wearing one of Andrew’s old Georgetown T-shirts, a pair of culottes. Who knew they still made those?
“I think the kids wanted to go to the beach today, but I might just let them sleep. What are you doing out here?”
She is fastening the roots of a phalaenopsis orchid to the trunk of a small palm tree. Wrapping them gently with twine.
“This is what I do with my orchids, now. I buy potted ones, and after the flowers fall off, I bring the plants out here and fasten them to a tree, and they thrive. We don’t have to water them or anything. They just blossom, and then they die, and then they come back.”
I take her in for a moment, the joy and wonder in her eyes, like a child. She almost vibrates as she points out the blooms throughout the cluster of palms. Fuchsia and ivory and golden yellow. A distinct look of pride paints her face. This is her happy place.
It is rare that I see my mother happy. Most often it’s in old photos: black and whites, blue-tinted color snapshots, my father’s slide collection from the ’60s and ’70s.
She was at her most radiant then. Not because of her youth but because she seemed truly happier in her skin.
Glowing in the Caribbean sun. Surrounded by her doting husband, friends, relatives, and a community in which her family had been part of the fabric for generations.
The kind of community they don’t have here. The kind I could never have in Paris.
“Do you ever miss Jamaica, Mum?”
“Hmm?” She’s distracted, inspecting a petal. “No, not really. We go back often enough.”
“Not to visit, but to live. Do you ever miss your lives there?”
She shakes her head, no hesitation. “It’s not the same Jamaica.
With both Mummy and Daddy gone, most of our friends moved away, and the family scattered, it doesn’t feel the same.
Kingston doesn’t always feel safe. And living on the north coast would be too far from our friends there.
Jamaica doesn’t have the same pull for me. Not for a while now.”
“But you and Daddy are still so Jamaican.”
“Yes, well … you carry that with you.” She scratches a mosquito bite on her forearm. “Do you feel fully French?”
“Not at all. But the longer I’m away, the less I feel American. Not that I’ve ever really felt American to begin with. Except when I’m in France or Jamaica, I guess. But coming back here has really made it apparent how much of an outsider I am. Like I’m living in limbo.”
“Well, yes, we are the sum of all our experiences.” She returns to securing the twine before moving on to another tree. “And all these little pieces of you make you stronger. Make you more adaptable and capable of existing in various places.”
“Do you ever feel untethered?”
“No. I know who I am.” She smiles then. “At my age, it would be a problem if I didn’t. Look at this one,” she says, cradling the blossom of an ornate oncidium, with its frilly plum-colored petals. The lips a deep Bordeaux. Delicate and complex and unequivocally female. “So beautiful,” she says.
I can’t help thinking of Anouk.
She calls that night, a little after midnight. When both my parents and the kids are asleep, and I am in bed on my phone, scrolling through news about the presidential primaries.
“Are you awake?” Her voice is deep, syrupy. She sounds as if she’s been drinking. But it’s the middle of the day in Ise-Shima, where she, Frederick, and Sacha are spending part of their spring break. “Everyone is doing Japan, now,” she said, when I asked her about their plans earlier in the month.
“Barely,” I respond.
“Alone?”
“Sadly.”
“Missing me?”
At that I laugh. “Naturally.”
“Well, I don’t know what’s allowed in your parents’ home.”
“Missing you is definitely allowed.”
“But fingering you is not?”
“You should come visit sometime and find out.”
She laughs. “You would like that. I thought you said they were strict Jamaicans.”
“Oh, they are. But I can assure you they would have absolutely no clue, because you’re a girl. And because I am very happily married.”
“Of course you are,” she says, and I can feel her smiling.
The week before, only days following Julien’s incident at the mall, she came over for a quick visit after we lunched at the Ivy in Santa Monica. I wanted to show her some of the edits for the installation, but we ended up in the guest bedroom instead.
After, when she was cinching the waist of her black Ala?a midi dress and stepping into her kitten heels, I couldn’t help but laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“My God, we are ladies who lunch.”
“Lunch, and some polite fingering.”
“Yes, precisely that.”
There was a sudden bang out in the hallway then, and we both froze.
Certain we were caught. I rushed to arrange my hair and my blouse before opening the door to an empty hall.
But there on the wall of glass abutting the courtyard was a distinct smattering of organic matter.
Blood and feathers. And on the ground below, the broken body of a mourning dove.
“I had a long talk with Pascal today,” she says to me now.
“Your ex?”
“We’re trying to coordinate plans for the spring, him coming for Sacha’s graduation.
And my God, he’s infuriating. He wants four tickets to this thing and we only get six.
Can I remind you that he was completely unhelpful with the whole college-application process?
Frederick hired a slew of consultants, but I was the one who did the trips to the East Coast. Why did I marry him again? ”
“Because he was once young and beautiful and in love with you, I imagine.”
“Yes, but clearly not enough to not fuck it all up.”
I’m quiet then. She doesn’t talk about Pascal often. And I haven’t pried. Her ex was not the only one who’d taken something that might have once been beautiful and destroyed it.
Anouk had made her decision about whether their situation was reparable. At some point, I imagined, I would have to do the same.
“In the beginning it was so much fun,” she continues.
“Everything with him was exciting. But then we had Sacha, and I grew up and he didn’t.
He wasn’t ready to be a father. He wasn’t ready to be a husband.
He didn’t know how to be an adult. How to put someone else’s needs before his own.
” She trails off for a moment. And I picture her in her villa at the newly opened Amanemu resort.
Serene, minimalist, surrounded by hills and hot springs, and perched on the side of a bay.
A million miles from moist, flat Florida.
“Anyway,” she says. “I’m glad I didn’t feel like I needed to hold on to him.”
“I think that says a lot about your strength,” I say.
“Maybe. Or maybe I just leave when things are no longer great.”
The following night I endeavor to sort through the few boxes stashed in my bedroom closet.
Before fleeing the States, I had packed up my childhood memorabilia: photos, yearbooks, college essays, baby clothes.
I’d had the need to hold on to so many things.
Over the years, I’d edited painstakingly.
Tossing, donating, lugging back to France.
But there is one box, way in the back, marked BOO, that I’d never dared to open. Until now.
I hesitate only slightly before dragging it out and slicing the packing tape.
And there, inside, are all the ways I’d tried to hold on to Lorry Kenter.
Snapshots and sonnets and love letters. The one he gave me after dinner at Kelley and Ping, just before I left for Cabo.
The journal he crafted for my twenty-fifth birthday.
Inside, the pressed daisy from the first time we made love.
A hand-engraved cuff bracelet. The poem he wrote and messengered to Didier’s studio after meeting me on the train.
A mixtape with all our favorites: Pearl Jam and Dinosaur Jr. The Verve Pipe and Sade.
And Jodeci, of course. Always Jodeci. The biker shorts he once left at my apartment.
The fabric holding on to his scent long, long after he was gone.
I knew I would never wash them. Inhaling the crotch was like a drug, an elixir.
But now, splayed before me, all these varied parts of him—the letters, the photos, the tapes—had begun to smell like dust. Like age.
Like something that had already moved on.
Even the crotch of his shorts. The specific Lorryness given way to the scent of stale paper and ink. Detritus. The last of him, gone.
No, I think. I am still not ready.
And so I return every last item to the box, and replace it in the back of the closet.
Maybe next time.
On the flight back to Los Angeles, wedged between both kids on their respective devices, I mull over my conversations with both my mother and Anouk.
About being able to adapt. About strength and needing to hold on to things.
About the desire to leave when things are no longer great.
And for all my complaining about feeling untethered in LA, maybe acclimating is a choice.
Maybe it’s just something I need to commit to.
And so while I may not have ultimately made up my mind about Francois, I needn’t flee to Paris just yet.