A Small Indiscretion

by Jan Ellison

  I opened the drapes in the main room. The city was calm beneath a mild white sky. The only visible evidence of the storm was the tree we’d heard fall, cracked in two, hanging over itself like a failed sculpture, and the red awning of the hotel flung onto the sidewalk. There were no cars moving in the street. There was a building in front of me blocking the larger view of the city—the hundreds of felled trees, the scaffoldings crashed to the ground, the smashed cars. The Seine, overflowing its banks, drowning the Île de la Cité in muddy water.

  I began to worry. What if Malcolm really had been sick? What if they’d had an accident? But they would have called. I picked up the phone on the kitchen counter. There was no dial tone. The lines had been brought down in the storm.

  Daisy might be waiting at the train station with nobody to greet her. If Louise and Malcolm were somehow stuck, she would step off the train and find herself alone. Would a ten-year-old girl know how to navigate a foreign city, even one she’d visited many times before? I didn’t know, and there was nobody to ask. Patrick would have known, but Patrick was not there. I was filled with fury at him for having flown off to Dublin and escaped. Why could I not escape, too?

  There was sunlight coming through the window, overtaking the room slowly but steadily. I studied it, paralyzed by indecision. Perhaps I was worrying over nothing. Malcolm and Louise might have come back to the penthouse and left again this morning while I was sleeping my drunken sleep. They might be collecting Daisy from the train station right this minute.

  I read Patrick’s note again. It was a farewell, but Patrick was full of farewells. I had learned not to take his goodbyes too seriously. He had returned to me, hadn’t he, in the end? He had not stayed with the girl—Mary McShane—at Montmartre. He had come to me, but I had rolled away from him. Was there still time to win him back? Could a case be made that I could still reasonably expect his affection if I pursued it? And to whom was I beholden—Patrick? Malcolm? Louise? Or only myself?

  I checked the phone again, and this time there was a dial tone. The sunlight had reached the grandfather clock; it was almost noon. By one account, they might arrive at any moment—Louise and Malcolm, having successfully collected Daisy from the train. They might be pressing the elevator button, waiting to make their way up to the penthouse. I had to act now, or I might never get away. I hurried into the bedroom and threw my clothes into my pack. I ran a brush through my hair and washed my face. I pulled the shower curtain closed and hung up my towel. I brushed my teeth, then scrubbed the toothpaste out of the sink and made the bed.

  I found paper and a pen and tried to compose a note. But I couldn’t think clearly. Where would I say I was going? Where, in fact, was I going?

  The phone began to ring. I stood listening to the sound. It seemed impossibly loud in the sunlit room.

  I put Patrick’s note in my pocket. I slung my backpack over my shoulder. I pushed the elevator button, counting the rings of the phone. I shoved open the metal doors, stepped in and closed them again, and the sound stopped. When I entered the lobby, the porter was out front. If I went through the main door, I would have to walk right past him. I’d be caught running away. I turned left, down the hallway, and found another door. I shoved it open and stepped into a narrow alley, then onto the streets of the altered city.

  Twenty-six

  THE STORM HAD TOUCHED DOWN on the Brittany and Normandy coasts. It whipped the ocean into ten-foot-high waves, then swept east across France in a narrow band, reaching hurricane force when it blasted Paris. The Black Forest of Alsace had been hit like a hammer. Four thousand trees at Versailles were uprooted. A third of the forest at the Bois de Boulogne was destroyed. Chimneys collapsed and cars were hit by falling trees. Millions of homes lost power. Paris-area suburban rail services were suspended, and only a third of the métro lines within the city were still in operation. The airports at both Roissy and Orly had been closed for the early-morning hours. Thousands of travelers were stranded by the first total shutdown of the French national railroad.

  I didn’t know any of that, of course, when I stepped out of the building into the alleyway, then onto the street. I chose a direction at random and began to step through the debris. Patrick’s scarf was flung around my neck and my boots kept coming untied. When I bent to retie them, the edge of my coat got soaked in a puddle.

  I descended the stairs of one métro station after another, only to find there were no trains running. I reached the Seine and stood before it, watching its brown rage. It had overflowed its banks and was threatening to flood Notre Dame. I went on walking in a kind of stupor of wonder at the ravaged city. There was a general feeling of wreckage and tragedy, and I indulged myself in feeling at the center of it. I bought a sandwich at a café. I collected information about the storm here and there. Then I was at Gare Saint-Lazare and there was a train that could take me to Cherbourg, on the coast. I sat in grim relief that I was finally heading somewhere fast. The train hummed beneath me, its white noise obliterating the need to think about what I ought to do next.

  At Cherbourg, there were no ferries to Dover, but there was a ferry about to depart for a place called Rosslare, which I understood was on the other side of the Channel. I reasoned that if it was on the other side of the Channel, it could not be very far from London, so I bought a ticket. I would head back the way I had come and return to Victoria and spend Christmas alone. On the ferry, I sat down at the bar and asked the bartender how long the journey would take. She said we would land in Rosslare at noon the following day.

  “That long to get back to England?” I said.

  “Not England, love,” she said. “Ireland.”

  “Ireland?”

  “Rosslare. Are you not wanting Rosslare?”

  Rosslare seemed as good a place as any, and I said as much.

  “I hope you’ve booked yourself a sleeping berth,” she said. But I hadn’t. I’d bought the cheapest ticket available. I would have to sleep on deck somewhere. I would have to make do.

  Standing across from me at the bar was a man. He had a cap pulled down low on his forehead and a dirty-blond beard and very full, very chapped lips. He had his foot up on the bar stool and a roll of duct tape in his hand. He appeared to be repairing his shoe. He bit a piece off and wrapped the tape all the way around the toe, then sat back down at the bar in front of his beer. There was an air of fortitude and certainty and cheerfulness in his broad face and body and a gentleness, too, in his very blue eyes. A man like that, I thought, would take you in hand. A man like that would keep you safe from yourself.

  Was it love at first sight? Not exactly. But it was a haven in the storm.

  Twenty-seven

  DO YOU RECOGNIZE US, finally? Can you locate your parents at last in all this mess?

  Parents. It’s just a word.

  It’s a word whose meaning one does not think to interrogate until one must.

  NOW THE STORY becomes more difficult to set down. Now it becomes necessary to distinguish between the lore and the truth. To disentangle the version of events that’s made its way into dinner conversation over the years—becoming a matter of public record—from the truth. But is truth the same as memory? I offer you a memory. Has the memory been shaped by the waves of time, and by the history that has rushed against it since? Of course it has. What memories haven’t?

  YOUR FATHER AND I met on a ferry crossing from Cherbourg to Rosslare in the Irish Sea.

  True.

  It was Christmas Eve.

  True.

  We were both traveling alone.

  Yes.

  Your father was a gentleman. He offered me his sleeping berth.

  Yes, he did.

  I slept in that berth, alone.

  THERE WAS ONE other man at the bar. A boy, really, about my age, an Irish boy with some quintessentially Irish name like Cathal or Manus. He had a sharp face and thin red greasy hair standing straight up from his head. He was trying to grow a beard that was not really taking hold. He was heading h
ome to Wexford for the holidays.

  The two men were sitting one stool apart. I listened to them talking. The man in the cap, an American, was saying he’d meant to spend Christmas in Nice, but he’d been unable to travel there from Paris because of the storm. It was fine with him, he said; he was sick of the French and had decided he’d like to spend Christmas where people spoke English. But he’d already spent the month of November working in a clinic in the English countryside, so he was heading somewhere new—Ireland. He had been overseas half a year, he said, and in two months’ time he was expected to start a residency in family medicine at a hospital in San Francisco.

  “A doctor, eh?” the Irish boy said. “You like sick people, so?”

  “I like dogs, actually.”

  “Dogs?”

  “I learned to breed dogs growing up,” he said. “But you can’t make much of a living that way.”

  “Which state?” the Irish boy asked.

  “Wisconsin.”

  They finished their beers. The American took off his hat, and I was struck, again, by his beautiful blue eyes.

  “I’ve always wanted to go to America,” Cathal-or-Manus said. “Get out of feckin’ Wexford.”

  After a while the blue eyes looked straight at me across the bar, and the American smiled.

  “Are you ever going to come warm this empty chair?” he said to me.

  I looked at him. I moved to the empty seat between the two men. He bought me a beer. He told me his name was Jonathan Gunnlaugsson. I couldn’t pronounce it, so he wrote it on a paper napkin for me. I shoved the napkin in my pocket, where I had also put Patrick’s note.

  At some point we all took our beers outside. We sat on a plastic bench out of the wind and ate cheese sandwiches from his pack. The redheaded boy had a fiddle, and he began to play. The American and I struggled to talk over the fiddle and the roar of the sea. I told him I’d been to Paris with my boss and his wife. I told him my boss’s wife was having an affair, and that the man she was having an affair with had come with us to Paris. I left out the bits about my own romantic entanglements. I was conscious that the picture I was painting was not entirely complete, but Jonathan was clearly a person of substance, someone I wanted to know, and already my interest in him was causing me to perceive the episode in Paris through a new lens. I had walked out of an unseemly situation; I wasn’t going to walk back into it by setting the story between us.

  There was a woman on the ferry with a small white dog. The dog was jumping up and barking and the woman was feeding it bits of a sandwich.

  “That woman is rewarding the wrong behavior,” Jonathan said. “The first rule of training is you don’t reward with affection or food unless the dog is quiet and submissive. That woman thinks it’s cute, the dog acting that way, but it’s not cute and it doesn’t make the dog happy. It doesn’t make him settled.”

  “You’re an expert?”

  “Yes.”

  “A dog expert?”

  “Actually, it’s the same with women.”

  “Really? A woman gets affection only if she’s calm and submissive?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “If a woman wants to be loved, she has to be good.”

  I laughed. And he laughed. I felt I’d been taken in hand. And I felt, too, that the day was brighter and calmer than it had been just a few hours before.

  He stood up and led me to the railing. The redheaded boy had stopped playing. Jonathan sent him inside with money to buy us all more beers. He told me he’d grown up on a farm in northeastern Wisconsin. He’d spent his summers on an island, Washington Island, where his grandmother lived and where his ancestors had first landed and settled when they emigrated from Iceland in the 1800s. They kept an old houseboat there. They lived on the boat every summer for the month of August.

  “It sounds idyllic,” I said, “but it probably wasn’t, was it? Childhoods never are, are they?” Where had I gotten this idea? From a book, probably.

  “Actually, it was idyllic as far as childhoods go. Except there was only my mother. No father. But my mother made it work.”

  “What happened to your father?” I asked him.

  “They were never married. Then he died.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s all right. I never really knew him.”

  “Why did you leave Wisconsin? If it was idyllic.”

  “That’s what people do, isn’t it? They leave so they can return.”

  I asked him how he ended up picking San Francisco as the place he wanted to begin his career. He looked at me, clearly deciding how much to reveal.

  “Oh, you know, the usual thing,” he said. “A girl.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “But that’s over. As far as I know.”

  I asked him for details. He told me they’d known each other when they were children. Then her mother had died, and she’d ended up in San Francisco, with relatives. That’s where she was raised. But she came home every August, to Washington Island. She was “pretty and all that.” She’d done well for herself, “under the circumstances.” She’d wanted to get married, but he hadn’t.

  I told him how I’d thought I was heading to England, not Ireland. How I’d had no idea I was going to be on the ferry all night and hadn’t booked a sleeping berth.

  “You can have mine,” he said.

  “That’s all right,” I said.

  “No, really. You can have it,” he insisted. He said he would sleep on deck.

  I studied his profile briefly, trying to decide if he was really handsome or not. His eyes were striking, but it was hard to tell about the rest of his face, because of the hat and the beard. He caught me looking at him, and before I could decide if this was a good or a bad thing, he stepped behind me and gathered my long hair in his hands and pulled it back off my face.

  “England’s that way,” he said. “Ireland’s this way. We’re headed straight toward Ireland’s Eye.”

  He was using my hair as a lever, holding it firmly, turning me gently. It was not so different from the way I’d stood with Patrick on another ferry two days before, and yet it felt nothing like that. The sky was dense with cloud, but for a moment there was a parting, and a final gasp of sunlight appeared, edging the clouds in silver and giving the misty rain the appearance of slow-falling snow. His hands were cool and dry on my neck and his body was grazing my back. I wondered why I had been so set on tall men. There were only three inches of height separating this man and me—if I turned around we would be almost eye to eye—and yet that felt exactly right.

  He was talking to me, telling me about where he planned to travel next. Nepal, to trek, he was saying, then to a town in India he wanted to see called Varanasi. I felt the words moving in his chest and exiting near my ear, and I felt him let my hair fall through his hands, then gather it up again, smoothing it firmly off my neck and back from my forehead. His hands seemed to capture the whole of my head, calming and settling it, but exciting it, too. How was all that possible?

  It seemed important to know how long we would be allowed to stand this way. Two minutes? Ten? And how would I know when those minutes had passed? It would not be possible to keep track of something as unimaginative as time while I stood with him this way, understanding, finally, about love. Understanding the impulse toward acts of bravery and abandon, devotion and sacrifice. It was not a matter of concentrated effort. It was not the carefully orchestrated pursuit it had been with Patrick. It was not the selfish oblivion it had been with Malcolm, either. It was not that fleeting suspension of thought, of everyday neuroses, followed by their sudden reinstatement—along with new burdens, new obligations. It was a tender, certain longing, not to press forward but to remain in his embrace. To resist a shift in the wind or in the position of his hands on my skin, his lips beside my ear, the hard pressure of his chest against my spine. To hold tight inside the cradle of meaning that was his body behind me, before the sun was swallowed up by the wet horizon. It was a moment that brought on
a more or less permanent shift in my notion of the future.

  But if he could do this with his hands, if he could form words, about a river in India, the Ganges, where the bodies of the dead were burned, if he was conscious and coherent enough to speak and move, then he must also be capable of letting my hair down and stepping away. That would be the very worst thing—if he were the one to end this before I did. I could not let it happen. I would have to stop it. I would have to be the one to step away.

  But I couldn’t. I didn’t. I stayed there in his arms.

  WHAT ELSE DO I remember? There was more beer. A flask of something stronger was passed around. Night fell and the ship passed through a squall. It rained harder and the ferry began to rock, quite violently, so that we could not stand on deck without holding on. I kept forgetting your father’s last name—so many superfluous consonants!—and asking him to write it down for me. He kept reminding me he already had.

  We moved inside, out of the rain. Cathal-or-Manus played the fiddle beside the bar. I sat next to your father on a bar stool. The curtain dropped, and I wanted the evening to go on and on; I forgot everyone and everything I’d left behind.

  Do I remember descending the stairs to the bottom level of the ship? Do I remember your father, or the redheaded boy, beside me, as I entered the berth of the ferry?

  No. I don’t.

  I do remember the berth itself, since I woke up there. A narrow bed along one wall. Plaid blankets. White pillowcases and white sheets, turned down. A small square window with an orange curtain. A bathroom just large enough for a toilet and a sink and a hose on the wall that served as a shower. I remember, vaguely, the idea your father had proposed, that he would find a place to sleep upstairs so that I could have the berth to myself. It was an oddly chivalrous and old-fashioned idea, and I’m not sure I believed he meant it, or that I wanted him to mean it. What I wanted, by then, after all the hours sitting with him, drinking and talking, after standing in his arms at the railing of the ferry, was to fall into bed with him and to have what seemed inevitable happen right away.