He sipped the wine and appraised it. “Not bad,” he said, smiling. He looked incredibly handsome and happy, alive to everything around him. He knocked me out the way he looked in that moment.
“A tree is an arrow into the future,” he said in mock seriousness. “We’re going to plant a tree tonight. We’re going to cut locks of our hair and bury them with the tree. We’re going into the Jardin du Luxembourg and plant a tree to shade any future Hemingways. You can visit it whenever you come to Paris. Everything else in the world will go along, sometimes failing, sometimes prospering, but your tree—our tree—it will keep growing. Our grandchildren will be able to visit it.”
“Are we having children soon? That would be good to know.”
He looked at me and made a funny face. His eyes looked lively and happy above the rim of his glass. He wiggled his eyebrows a little.
“The world is unpredictable,” he said. “You can’t plan everything. Not even with a Smythson superdeluxe calendar thingy.”
“Do you think the authorities are going to let us plant a tree in the park without any objection?”
“Oh, Heather, my careful, dot-the-i’s Heather. We are going to plant it without them knowing. Ninja gardeners. Who can hate a planted tree? Who would pull it up? Once it’s in the ground, it will be safe. Do you see how clever this is? Maybe we won’t even go into the park, although that would be the best habitat for a tree. We could plant it in one of those little plots of earth on one of the boulevards. The tree would live a riskier life, but that might suit it. Maybe the tree is a rebel tree. Maybe the bucolic life is not for our tree. It might be an alternative, punk kind of tree.”
“Why an ash?”
“European ash,” he said, drinking off half his wine. He topped us both off again. “It’s long-lived, for one thing. And it’s common. No one will think it out of place. The man gave me a little card—the gardening shop guy. Ash has its own runic sign—an AE merged. They think it comes from the Old English or German meaning Esche.”
“You’ve done your homework. I’m impressed.”
“You should be,” he said, and he leaned over to kiss me. “If it goes our way, the tree will live a century or more. Think of that! Look upon my mighty works, or Look upon my works, you mighty, or something like that. Was it Keats? Or ‘Ozymandias,’ by Shelley? Anyway, one of the Romantics, right?”
“I remember reading it in high school.”
“So while the world falls and collapses, our tree, the great ash, will be rising into the sky, triumphant! What do you think about that?”
“I think yes. I think yes to everything, Jack.”
“Good, now finish this glass of wine, and then we can be on our way. Do you have nail polish?”
“A little, I think. Hold on.”
Where did this man come from? How had he tumbled into my life? And why did his pleasure in life infect me so readily?
I went into the bathroom and returned with a small bottle of red nail polish. It was nearly empty. I handed it to Jack. He had a flat rock that he had found somewhere, and he carefully brushed it off.
“Our immortality,” he said.
He shook the nail polish, then carefully, precisely, wrote our names out on the rock. He enclosed them with a silly heart. He took out his Swiss Army knife and handed it to me.
“Here, cut a lock of my hair, please. Then I’ll cut yours.”
I cut off a curl above his right ear. He took a small shank from the line of hair near my left shoulder. He tied both locks of hair together with piece of twine he cut free from the burlap holding the tree.
“Ideally,” he said, his hands busy, his eyes still fresh and happy, “we would plant it like this, without anything to guard it, but then the hair would decay and the nail polish would become indecipherable. Here.” He snatched a plastic container that we had from an earlier purchase of watermelon. “Not as romantic, maybe, but maybe it will make it last longer. What do you say? Anything else you want to add?”
I nodded. I took the stone from him and wrote under our names my favorite line: Hate what’s false; demand what’s true.
Jack read it, nodded, then kissed my lips.
*
“Didn’t Raef and Constance want to come?” I whispered.
“I didn’t invite them. This is about us, not them.”
I squeezed his hand.
It was dark. The Boulevard Saint-Michel sent enough light for us to use, but we kept to the shadows. Our gardening tools were pathetic. We had a single dinner knife, a plastic bottle of water, our plastic container, and nothing else. But it made me tingle to be doing something illicit. The park was closed, but Jack promised that other people got in during the night. It only stood to reason, he theorized. Even if we were apprehended, he said, we would not be arrested. The French, he promised, could not resist a love story.
It felt like being ten years old in the middle of a hide-and-seek game.
This, I realized, was something I would remember all my life. More than a photo. More than a museum visit. For a century, a tree would grow in a park in Paris, and my name, and Jack’s name, would be at its root. That was Jack’s way in the world.
“We’re looking for an innocent sort of plot, a place that is inconspicuous. Nothing grand or showy, okay? We want the tree to be a nonentity for the first twenty years of its life. Then, oh, baby, it’s going to begin to dominate its surroundings. Then it will become the most badass tree around. Are you with me?”
“Yes. Hell yes.”
“Okay, here we go. What do you think of that spot? It’s not fancy, but it’s safe, I think. It’s near the café tables. We can come back and visit it tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be something?”
We snuck carefully across a wide lawn, attentive to our position relative to the lights on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. When we reached the dirt plot, Jack canvassed things quickly and then suggested a spot on the right-hand corner.
“No big trees here,” he said, falling to his knees and beginning to dig in the dirt. “No competition. It will look like a volunteer plant, or a tree that some department planted and then forgot about. There won’t be any reason for someone to dig it up. Not back here away from things. Is this good? Are you liking this spot?”
“It’s perfect. It works.”
“Okay, the soil is soft. This is easy. Are you ready? We’ll both slip it in together. Here we go.”
My hands shook. I couldn’t control them. They shook until Jack put his hands around mine and steadied us both.
“It’s our tree,” he whispered. “No one else’s. It will always be ours.”
“In Paris.”
“Our tree in Paris,” he said. “The mighty Esche.”
I put the plastic box containing our hair and the rock down in the hole beside the tiny roots. Then we backfilled the hole and smoothed dirt around the tree stem. We did our best to make it appear that the tree had always been there. Jack handed me the bottled water.
“Water gets the air out of the soil,” he said. “Gives it its first drink in its new home.”
I poured the water carefully around the base of the tree. Pan, not far away, watched us in the still light at the entrance to the park. It seemed likely he would approve.
36