Harmony in Blue and Gold

If you get to our Champ de Mars, you’ll find two things: wide ribbons of grass better suited to the Parisian climate and long gravel allées catching the sun, almost calling for marrons that hold candles of blossoms vertically in late spring and shade the suddenly intimate pathways. A few streets divide the plain at intervals. I’m told there used to be elms.
+++++Choices are embarrassing. I asked her what she wanted to see. She looked up and down: a giant obelisk at one end, a white marble rotunda at the other. Museums surrounded us, holding us in. She rejected the reinvented Parthenon and disdained the red castle, even though I told her there were ecstatic secrets beneath it. She told me she wished to wander.
+++++I only had a few hours, each stolen at great cost, but agreed. I regretted the five lobed chestnuts, chandeliers of the afternoon sun, as we walked along the gravel. She headed towards the gardens of a low building, attracted by vines twirling themselves around light standards. Chinese wisteria, past blossom. I had some in my garden at home.
+++++Of course there were gardeners, binding up drooping apricots, clearing the pond of spent leaves. They worked with a precision I admired. I am far more careless: I tend to move from one shrub to the next, chasing disorder. Along a fencerow covered with sugar peas, I’m constantly pausing to feast. But these moved to an unseen plan. I had a feeling we were being observed.
+++++The sign announced Asian landscapes. I expressed unmeasured joy. How could she know I loved the blue mountains, the lofty slopes and watercourses, those strange hills of the tropical south. I began to suspect she wasn’t wandering. The doors opened with her lightest touch. After what seemed a lifetime of burning allées, the air was suddenly cool.
+++++The jeweled hills of the Yangtze were covered in quiet fog. Peonies and swallows against the last snow. Scrolls held characters I could not read and most bore a red stamp. In the opened wings of cranes, in the single branch of a cherry, black against the gray rock, I saw a life that was nearly mine, but half a world away, a thousand years removed. The birdsong was only imagined.
+++++In the next room, medallions and jade sculpture. The permanent collection. She loved the flowing green lines: a courtesan holding her fan. In her eyes, I saw the same longing I’d felt for those mountain scenes. “Incense,” she said, “and small breezes near the pavilion. An exotic lute in my hand.” I looked closer. She was nearly that woman. She could have been the artist’s model. But where had he found a piece of jade worthy of her? In the distant south, where rains plagued the miners, and tigers, real ones, made off with the careless? The voyage itself was his reward, the stone a carved memory.
+++++But not mine: she was breathing beside me. I felt a small wind and turned, but nothing was there, only her shadow moving into the next room, then down a long hallway, graceful as one of those cranes, arriving finally at a doorway where she stopped and waited.
+++++So it was all true: she wasn’t wandering at all. She’d led me to exactly this place. She went in first and sat on a bench in the center. I promise you, this is all true, an exact account. And yet, when I search the pictures, I can never find that bench. Hundreds of photographs, and it’s not in a single one. Sometimes I stay up long nights, searching, but I never find it.
+++++She arranged herself on the bench, leaned back a little, languid, completely in her element, her setting. She looked around and I followed her eye. There was porcelain, of course, blue and white, displayed on goldleaf shelves. Even the verticals were leafed in gold. But the walls weren’t blue, they seemed a kind of greenish turquoise painted leather. A honeycomb of lattice divided the ceiling.
+++++But if you walked in there, the first thing you’d notice would be two golden peacocks on the wall. They look like they are contending against each other. One dances on a pile of coins, the other should be holding brushes. Each has its own beauty. I felt like the second. I expected a tail full of suns, but the long feathers are made of a single color. I walked closer, still hoping. I turned around.
+++++There she was on the bench, still gazing. And behind her, La Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine stood just as languidly, like her shadow or echo, kimonoed or robed, her waist gathered with a red sash, before a screen. The same dark hair, only her hands betraying her. When Miranda rose, I expected the Princesse to move with her. But only one was real, the other a painted vision, an artist’s rendering, a Whistler, decades removed.
+++++There was nothing else to see. I barely noticed the terracotta guards lining the hallway. As we went up a flight of stairs, I was just slightly behind her, breathless. Her dress wasn’t silk. I’d merely imagined the red sash. But I didn’t imagine the dark hair moving, her slender legs, the way the pleats fell against her skin. Suddenly I wished to create a place worthy of her. We parted beneath the absent trees.
+++++I’m not much of a painter. Oh, I can make picture frames and dadoed shelving, but freehand lines escape me. I need right angles I can measure. But I did what I knew. I primed my own dining room. Next came the blue paint, a Chinese sky near Sligo Creek. A sponge roller left an irregular pattern of gold. Gold, the baseboards and window trim. I found Cappiello’s Cognac Jacquet peacock poster and framed that in gold as well.
+++++It wasn’t the harmony I desired, but perhaps it would be enough, if she ever walked through my door, wearing a red sash.
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W.F. Lantry, a native of San Diego, holds a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. In 2010, he won the Lindberg Foundation International Poetry for Peace Prize (in Israel), the Crucible Editors’ Poetry Prize and the CutBank Patricia Goedicke Prize. His work has appeared in Aesthetica, Prairie Fire, Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, Istanbul Literary Review, carte blanche and Gulf Coast and is forthcoming in Blip. He currently works in Washington, DC and is a contributing editor of Umbrella: A Journal of Poetry and Kindred Prose. For more information about W.F. Lantry’s work, visit www.wflantry.com.