14 It’s Flowers That They Want
It’s Flowers That They Want
Dear beloved Pauline,
I received your letter only a few hours ago, and only with a wide smile can I approximate the joy it gave me to hold it in my hands and read it again and again. I read it maybe twenty times!
I had a premonition today. Did I tell you that I never take the mail out of the box until midday?
This morning, though, I couldn’t wait until lunchtime because of some strange inkling—maybe I caught the telepathy bug from the mentalist we saw on Rivoli.
At ten o’clock, when I raised the shutters of the gallery, I slipped my hand into the slot without even looking, convinced I would find good news inside.
The surprise went far beyond anything I could have dreamed.
A letter from you without a return address.
I didn’t even need to look at the postmark.
My name in your handwriting was enough. I went into my office with a teenager’s excitement, opened the envelope, careful not to tear it, and read it with the same level of urgency we experienced throughout those four days of passion in every minute, conversation, glance, and kiss.
And you know what? I didn’t expect you to tell me what the best moment of your stay in Paris was.
In fact, if I’m going to be honest, I didn’t expect us to take stock of every scene and situation.
Everything had just the right amount of magic, atmosphere, tone, care, tenderness, and mutual trust. We were good together.
Calm. Nothing was taboo or shameful. There were no risks or questions.
We respected each other—in words and silence.
Do you know how important it is to still understand one another when we say nothing?
Do you know how precious it is to stay quiet and love each other?
Did you realize that? Did it ever happen to you before?
“The man who feels deeply speaks little.”
(I could swear someone important said it, but you could hold a gun to my head, and I still wouldn’t be able to tell you in this state of effervescence I’m in as I write to you from the gallery counter.)
Pauline, my beloved, since you’ve left I’ve been living in an ocean of doubts.
There are two of us now, I suppose, based on what you write.
But I’ve become certain of many things, and there’s one thing I am sure about: Both you and I managed to break down our barriers.
We freed ourselves, one before the other, one with the other.
And, we will always have that, dearest, most beloved Pau.
I was going to say for ever and ever. But I prefer to say: As long as we’re here. As long as we want. The drops of honey.
I was telling you—forgive me for jumping from one thing to another, but my ideas move faster than my fingers when I write to you—that I didn’t expect you to tell me that listening to Bulgarian love songs in the kitchen at home and looking into each other’s eyes, a glass of Riesling in hand and letting the foie slowly melt in our mouths “like a delicious caramel,” was The Moment.
Now I can tell you that I did see a tear slip down your cheek, but I thought you were enjoying the goose foie gras, straight from the knife to your mouth, no bread or toast to mask it.
“Savoring,” that’s the word we were probably looking for and didn’t know how to say.
Savoring. Art, foie gras, love, the moment.
“A kiss to build a dream on,” like the song.
Four days to build an entire lifetime on top of them.
While you walked through my life and my neighborhood, there had never been so much morning light on rue de Seine.
Never had the grass at dusk shone like it did on the days we laughed there together.
Every afternoon I’ve remembered the light of when we walked arm in arm, but since you left it has never been the same.
Did you know Salvador Dalí hated sunsets?
He said he felt sick if he saw one. But I would be healed just remembering the one we experienced together by the river.
Did you see? I also use adversatives. It’s not just as you say in your letter.
“I remembered the light, but it has never been the same again.” In every statement, every memory, every thought of the future, we could use a “but.” It’s true.
Maybe you’d like to share in my trick, but I prefer to live without fear, without remorse, proud of what we’ve lived and aware of what we’ve done.
Why should we limit anything? Why should we always rein ourselves in with another “but”?
Why hold ourselves back with a sentence that kills off the previous one, like a card game where the king kills the queen and the ace kills everything?
Doesn’t nostalgia castrate us enough already?
Let’s not let the adversatives help it. For example, I should have written that I remembered the glow of dusk when we walked through the Luxembourg Gardens and was moved by a brilliance I’d never seen before, not even in movies.
And that would be a truth as great as our love.
I think, beloved Pauline—my happiness and life—that I’m expressing more by letter than I dared say in person.
I want to believe that all this, which I held back, you picked up in a gesture, a kiss, or when you let me sing in your ear.
When the hours of this day run out, I’ll invent new ones for you.
I write as it comes, without fuss, without censorship, without leaving out anything that dances through my head.
I write from the heart, because there is nothing freer, nothing more candid, than expressing what you feel in a rush.
In a handwritten love letter, like the one you sent me and I am now returning, nothing restrains feelings, encloses them, or highlights them.
Words emerge out of a bright, vigorous impulse.
Irrepressible, I think. We can hold back words, but heartbeats can’t stop.
They haven’t stopped for a second since our first dance at the Bois de Vincennes.
How’s my day-to-day? You can imagine it.
I am surrounded by paintings, remembering how you looked at each of them one by one the first afternoon you entered the gallery.
Carefully, not daring to come too close, just as you did with me.
Now I arrive, turn on the lights, and I can no longer look at the works with these eyes that are accustomed to auctions and appraisals, but with yours: younger, less contaminated, more authentic.
I try to guess which you liked most and which you didn’t like so much.
I think the original Christo drawings for wrapping the Pont Neuf.
Or maybe the Vilacasas planimetria, which captivated you.
Did you know that he lived here in Paris in the fifties?
I got to know him. His dealer took me to his apartment in Barcelona to see his work.
I think the street was called Conseil du Cent?
Today some American tourists, a married couple, came in, and they fell head over heels for the Vasarely, the one from the Homage to the Hexagon series.
I’d bet you liked the zebra one better, even though the first time you looked at it you got dizzy.
Surely I told you it’s a characteristic of Vasarely’s optical art.
That’s what makes it special, different from all the copycats.
As I was saying, the Americans sat on the chesterfield couch facing the hexagon and spent a good while commenting on the optical illusion, the perpetual motion, the je ne sais pas quoi.
They asked me the price, and I told them many more francs than it’s worth, because all of a sudden I realized I didn’t want to sell it.
And the man insisted they loved it, and wanted to take it or, if possible, have it properly packed and shipped to Vermont.
He even pulled out his checkbook in a swift motion to show me that if it was a matter of price, he was good for it.
In the end I had to tell them it was a sentimental matter for me, and that I wasn’t going to sell the painting, period.
The Americans were offended. They left a little angry and told me something that, if I understood correctly, has some truth to it: “You may as well open a museum, if you own an art gallery and don’t want to sell anything.
” Maybe it really is time to change careers if I’m not able to sell any of the works you looked at and liked, because I won’t make a penny anymore.
It’s like one of those absurd Chekhov stories.
Have you read them? I could have given you one when we were at Shakespeare and Company.
I missed my chance. I’m glad, dearest Pauline, that you liked the bookshop as much as you say you did.
I will probably use the coming months to travel the world and visit bookshops where, from what I’ve researched, I think I might find a book or a catalog I don’t yet have for my collection.
“Why do you collect books about butterflies?” you asked me the evening we dined at Brasserie Lipp.
Because they are flowers that fly. Because they are a surprise of color.
Because, as angelic and fragile as they are, they hide some mystery.
And because, poetry aside, I inherited boxes and boxes of butterflies from my grandfather, which he himself carefully pinned onto cork using the headed pins I handed him one by one.
My fascination, like so many things, comes from the past. Perhaps, beloved Pauline, I’m not looking for butterflies.
Maybe I’m simply trying to return to the glory days of childhood with my grandfather, my hero, at my side.
Doesn’t that happen to all of us in the end?
Don’t we spend our lives searching for traces of past happiness?
Isn’t that exactly what’s happening to you and me, here and now?
Beloved Pauline, you ask me with a certain type of fear whether I intend to answer your letter.
Why wouldn’t I? You will have silence only when I understand that you want silence.
When I have no news from you, I will know that you need me to take a step back and disappear.
Do you know how long a butterfly lives before it vanishes?
They rarely live past two weeks. Depending on the species, they can last at most a year.
I, frankly, hope to live in you far longer than that.
Just as you will live in me. Even if we don’t speak or see each other, we will have each other.
Always. Without “buts.” We will have each other.
That is the absolute truth I have written in this heartfelt, emotional letter, unlike any other I have ever written.
Yours. Always yours. Proud of you and of us.
Jean-Pierre
PS: As you asked, I’m replying by mail through Julie, the most radiant bride ever to walk down the aisle.
Your cousin will decide whether this letter deserves to be forwarded to you and the best way of getting it to you.
I wouldn’t want to betray you. I would never forgive myself for putting your stability at risk.
I wouldn’t want you to have to tell lies to hide a story that is so real.