Aubergine

When Mimi's mother finally died, Mimi immediately decided to squander her entire inheritance on a trip to Paris with her daughter, Rosemary. In their moldy-wallpapered apartment in Bedstuy, Mimi pulled out the only suitcase she owned and told her daughter to start packing. Rosemary packed her blue dress with the white flowers, her green dress with the white pockets, her pink dress with the black stitching, a single black ribbon to tie back her long blond hair, and her sketch notebook; Mimi packed her stiletto-heel leather boots and a few packs of Marlboro menthols.

Mimi found the most extravagant item in the world on her first day in Paris: a fuchsia-colored plastic purse with the two golden Coco Chanel C's glued to its side. She wore it high on her left shoulder and used it to start conversations with the Frenchmen in bars. Mimi would then say to them things like Je veux ramone avec vous and Voulez-vous un turlute? Rosemary was jealous of her mother's skill with the French language, of the way her mother could make all the men in a bar turn and stare just by uttering a single phrase. During the conversations, Mimi would give her daughter some francs and tell her to go to the café down the street and wait for her mother to come get her. Instead of using the money for a croissant, Rosemary used the money to buy a new colored pencil every day. After buying a colored pencil, she would then go to the café and order un thé au lait avec sucre, s'il vous plaît, and sketch until her mother came back. Her mother often returned with her head hanging low, her makeup smeared, wobbling on too-high heels, purse strap dangling in her elbow, with no man's arm to hold on to, but with a few extra francs in her pocket.

It was an unusually overcast day in Paris the day Rosemary bought the colored pencil that was the color aubergine. She had sketched a purple tree, with blossoms like white pansies, their terrier-dog faces weeping red tears that flowed into the mouths of the blue-skinned babies crying beneath them (she had not yet gotten around to buying the pale peach pencil that was skin-toned). She was concentrating on getting the pansies to actually look like terriers' faces when le garçon came to her table. He handed her the check and told her that the café was closing. Startled, Rosemary realized that her mother had not come for her. It was three in the morning. As she gathered her sketches and pencils, she pouted for the sake of her absent mother and remembered all the other times Mimi had forgotten her somewhere. Walking quickly down the darkened streets, she kept her eyes forward and tried not to look at the homeless sleeping under piles of clothes in alleys and on street corners. She reached the hotel, a dark building with cracks in the stucco that stood above her menacingly, and went inside. There was no doorman or bellhop in the lobby, just the old woman with a twisted nose who nodded quickly at Rosemary as she walked past. Rosemary climbed the stairs to their hotel room at a run, skipping every other step. The red carpet that ran down all the hallways and stairwells was stained with a thousand mysterious stains, and Rosemary was proud to claim one stain as her own, a cup of tea she had spilled a few days before. She came upon their door quickly, turned the key in the lock, and opened it, expecting to see her mother crying on the bed, worrying over her daughter.

Instead, she saw something she could not place. It looked like a person's skin was poked in upon itself, the edges puckered, dark and endless, like seeing the pictures of her grandfather's hand where the bullet pierced it: a fleshy absence, a painful wound. She realized then that it was a man's hairy ass hole.

The man was kneeling on the bed, jerking his body forward backward forward backward violently, and though Rosemary could only see his hairy asshole and his dangling hairy balls and not his face, she knew that he was ugly. Her mother lay on the bed below this man, their “privates,” as her mother said, entwined like lover's hands clasped together in a theater. Rosemary heard her mother make sounds like a dying cat, watched her clutch at the man as if he, her tormenter, was the only thing she had left in the world. The man made deeper grunting sounds, like her father had on the toilet when Rosemary was younger and he had still lived with them. As she watched what she did not want to see, her mother slowly began to transform into a beast, a monster, a creature of extraordinary grace and of hideous beauty. Rosemary adored and feared and hated her mother, this beast. She backed out of the room, closed the door, and squatted beside it, her arms wrapped close against her chest, her stomach cold. It felt like hours before the door finally opened and the man walked out. He glanced at her once, but said nothing and left quickly. Rosemary smirked a little because she had been right: he was ugly. She stood up and walked back into the room.

Mimi watched herself in the mirror across the room with empty eyes, fixing her hair with one hand and holding a cigarette in the other. “I'm sorry I didn't come to the café, Rosie,” she said, her voice as empty of feeling as her eyes.

Though Rosemary hated herself for it, she forgave her mother then and there for everything. “It's okay, Mimi,” she said, remembering that her mother hated to be called a mother by any name. “But when are we going home?”

“A few more nights in Paris,” her mother said with a smile. “Some would give up everything for what we have right now.”

Thirty years later, Rosemary returned to Paris with her husband. The Paris trip was supposed to resurrect Rosemary and Paul's marriage, so they got a room with a view of the Tour Eiffel, and attempted to make love every night. The problem was that Paul had begun to remind her of the man with the hairy asshole, and she reminded herself of her mother. But Rosemary refused to put all the blame for the failed consummation on herself. As he aged, Paul was becoming ugly. At forty-eight, he had lost half his head of hair, most of it receding in the front, and a good portion of it thinning at the back. The rest of his body seemed to be growing even more hair: little black curls scattered between his nipples, fuzz sprouting from the finger segments above his knuckles, fur clustered around his navel, leading down to his hairy cock and balls, back around to his hairy asshole. His nose drooped, his ears stretched, and his cheeks sagged. Sex had become mere movement, with Rosemary closing her eyes and waiting for him to be finished. When he noticed, he would ask in his timid voice, “Are you okay?” He did not really want to know the answer. She would nod and smile in a soft way that gave him enough room to back away and pretend nothing had happened. They would lie side by side, not touching, breathing lightly. He would fall away into loud snores while she lay awake, hating his features that she had once treasured as uniquely “Paul.” She felt terrible about this. She wanted a normal marriage.

That night, while they were having sex, she imagined an ancient scene between lovers, male and female bodies entwined in perfect connectedness, like in the garden of eden. She imagined that what her mother did with men to make a living was sacred, not merely a carnal desire fulfilled, but the prophetic ideal union.

She felt something, then. Longing. She was not herself anymore, but was instead caught up in a recreation of something bigger than her. With her thighs, she urged Paul's hips to speed up in time with hers. She moaned. She could feel her belly button tingling, felt her body pulling him in. She clutched at his hairy back with her fingernails, painted the color of red wine. He finished before she was ready to be done, but she was so caught up some strange new feeling that she didn't care. They unstuck their skins and he collapsed beside her. They breathed as if they had just been running. He lay with his head on the pillow and his eyes closed.

Rosemary knew that she was no longer herself. She felt like she didn't have the right to be in her own body. She was exhilarated with the strangeness of it, the feeling of power it gave her. She never wanted to leave. But as she caught her breath, the feeling began to fade. She reverted back to hating the man lying beside her. Maybe she hated him even more than before. She no longer wanted the intense feeling of being taken out of herself. She waited for Paul to fall asleep, then slipped on a dress and wandered out the door.

She went to the small courtyard attached to the hotel and sat on one of the rusted benches. The large sycamore looked calm in the darkness. The shadowy gates around the edges of the garden looked menacing. The stray cats came over. They crashed into her legs with full force, stroking themselves in this way. She didn't pet them, even though they continued to demand it of her. Instead, she watched the leaves on the tree. She watched the leaves and imagined that they were each a little dog face staring back at her from the depths of the earth.