“What’s up?”the instructor asked.
“He’s stuck.”
“Who?”
We all knew who it was. Our Thai prince was too round for the tunnel. Someone should have thought about this sooner. We were all going to die in this cave in the South of France, become legendary like Lascaux.
“He’s moving!” And then we were off again, slinking around, eager to get out into the open air.
The following day there was to be no more outdoor sports, only a sightseeing trip to Vézelay.
We’d left the hostel where we were all staying to go visit the cathedral and surrounding town. After we were dropped at the center of the village, we were allowed to wander for three hours. This free time was standard for such trips. The same had happened when we’d gone to Avignon last year. Everyone took advantage of the hours differently. Jake and Raees usually went to a café to smoke, and sometimes I or Charlotte and Sarah—never both at once—joined them. Natalie would go shopping for souvenirs. I would often walk around alone with my camera.*
I loved going into the old churches—the Gregorian chants eerily pumped into the cavernous halls, the stale air, the candles lit for loved ones. I was obsessed with relics* and reliquaries, the idea that part of an ancient body or blood could be housed in a beautiful, little monument for future pilgrims.
That night, back at the hostel, we were supposed to have a canteen. I thought a canteen was a cafeteria, but I soon learned it was a dance. Everyone was excited about the event, although the boys feigned indifference as they drank behind the rooms. We were all allowed wine at dinner, and they’d made friends with the busboy, who gave them full bottles on the sly.
I couldn’t decide what to wear. A dress might be trying too hard, so I settled on a pair of two-tone shorts and a black T-shirt with my scarab necklace. I had also found a little turquoise bead on one of my nighttime outings and strung it on a black cord to make a choker. I decided my Adidas Samba sneakers were most appropriate with the outfit. Then, I saw Charlotte.
She was wearing jean cutoffs with high-heeled glitter jelly shoes and a concert T from when the Red Hot Chili Peppers had come to Paris. There was a black bandanna rolled up and tied around her neck. She looked sexy and insouciant. Her blond hair was messy and down, falling around her shoulders. All the girls were meant to meet at the bottom of the hostel to walk together to the room where the canteen was to be. I watched from the window and then followed a few paces behind. When we arrived, we were met with the flashes of a dizzying strobe light someone had brought along for the occasion. Without warning, the music stopped and ten of the guys ran into the room, two with guitars. One started strumming the cords to Nirvana’s “Rape Me” as the others started singing the PG version they’d written at the café earlier that day.
“Eat Grapes” was the refrain.
At the end of the parody number everyone applauded, the teachers the loudest. The social studies teacher, Mr. Goose, couldn’t stop laughing. The room was silent, as he was DJ for the evening and was fumbling for the next song. I knew what was coming. Charlotte had started to move in the direction of Raees, and the other girls had followed her lead to look for dance partners. Guns N’ Roses’ “November Rain” began to play, and I watched Raees put his hands around Charlotte’s waist. She balanced her wrists on his shoulders. Everyone had found someone; there was no one left. Even Jake had already coupled with the new girl from New York City.
Nobody noticed as I walked off. There was a path marked with neon orange spray paint that led into the woods. I followed the markers to a clearing filled with moss-covered logs. As I lay flat facedown on the ground, I could feel the moisture seep into my clothes. I closed my eyes and flipped over. This night walk would end differently from the others. I was the odd number, on my back, staring up until my eyes crossed and everything appeared mirrored, like the picture within a kaleidoscope.*
My legs were spread to each side and my hands overhead so that my back arched toward the sky. I started to cry quietly at first. In the stillness of the night, I could make out the song that had started to play back at the dance, one of my favorites: Bush’s “Glycerine.” Then I felt my chest lift and my stomach turn. I hadn’t eaten anything all day, for a few days. Not eating was a nice distraction. There was nothing to vomit, even though my body tried.
Le Vésinet
I was surprised the bathroom mirror didn’t break when I threw the razor. It was one of those disposable models with a hot-pink handle and three tiers of blades from a drugstore in America. I wanted the glass to break, but instead, the square mirror of the medicine cabinet was swiped shiny and clear where the plastic hit the foggy glass. A pump of pamplemousse-scented body wash lay on the floor bleeding shower gel, next to the toilet. I was lying there with my left leg hanging over the edge of the white basin, my right leg bent backward violently shaking, beating the tile wall. My hands were trembling. I couldn’t open my eyes. They were so wet, red, and raw from crying.
It had started with that telling pressure, that feeling when the tears start to pool behind my nose. I had tried to suck in air an even number of times, as if to be cured by my own twisted numerology. The rising sensation came too fast and two became three and then six became seven and then I knew what would happen. It reminded me of Cécile in the movie version of Bonjour Tristesse, except she liked odds until Anne died in the seventh accident on that corner in the South of France. Françoise Dorléac, Grace Kelly, and Albert Camus died in car crashes, too. I knew that fact but not much else about them. What was the point? It had been three days since I’d eaten anything.
The teenage Cécile had been similarly bothered by cloying thoughts that made her try to push them out of her mind with games of odds and evens. I was momentarily proud of my own intelligence with this reference, inflated at a moment when everything else was overblown too. Perhaps the reason Cécile would never do her philosophy homework was because she knew that old Pascal’s theories on distraction would explain away her silly diversions and then they wouldn’t work anymore. She didn’t go for religion but instead for sexual desire and counting until it didn’t work anymore. I would never have the boy. I didn’t have the South of France, either.
Only Le Vésinet.
So far from anything.
I didn’t know how to have fun, how to look forward when there wasn’t much to see. Ever since the school trip, when they had found me in the woods lying in clear vomit, and word had gotten around school, things became worse. You’d think girls would be nicer if they knew you’d had a breakdown, but the opposite happened. They taunted me daily with their laughter and stares, which always made the tears come, even if quietly. I tried to hold my feelings in, but I knew that they saw. They could see me start to hyperventilate as I sucked air in and my chest lifted, the beats between breaths getting shorter and shorter. And it was more evidence that they were right about me.
In the shower, I found that the tears went away. They blended in with the running water, which made everything seem more normal. I didn’t like seeing my naked body in the light. It was all boyish and ugly. The magazines and models were only fantasy, another diversion. I’d never get there, to that place where I would feel beautiful and loved and fine, or even pretty and just okay. I was left to think and remember, think and remember, until it drove me mad and into the shower. Always into the shower, avoiding the mirror, allowing it to fog. I would stay under the water for so long that my hands would prune as they did when I was a child, happy in my bath.
This time, I’d been in the bathroom for hours. At some point, I’d knocked down the convertible showerhead. It had undulated on its articulated cord and hit me in the face before falling down and spraying water everywhere. I didn’t care. I counted seven of its slams, before it lay still.
I was numb, starving, and shivering, naked on the shower floor, my head propped against the wall I had kicked until my heels hurt. Everything was wet. I couldn’t breathe, the air thick with humidity from the steam. The w
indow to the street was too high up and far away for me to open it and let in some fresh air. I tried to get up and fell backward. Then, I managed to stand and turn off the water. I made it to the sink before I fell forward, my head creating a half-moon on the door of the medicine cabinet next to where the razor had hit earlier. I don’t remember much after that.
New York
Fall 2009
I hadn’t seen Jake since years ago, when we had met at the Guggenheim before going away to college. I remember only one scene from the encounter: spinning around the museum’s spiraling staircase with our arms spread like wings. When we reached the ground floor, we ran out as fast as we could before anyone could have a word with us about our behavior. I don’t recall talking about France, because I don’t think we really did. I remember just twirling with abandon. He had been the only one to understand my kind of crazy. I wouldn’t see him again for five years.
*
Our second meeting was in Manhattan at the Odeon restaurant. Jake looked the same as he had in France, though a little taller, a little more handsome, but the same sandy hair and flashing eyes. Except more than ten years of maturity had lent him the calm that had eluded us both back then. He seemed at ease with himself and happy with his work in filmmaking. I couldn’t understand why I hadn’t appreciated his attention as much as I should have when we were young, which meant I’d grown up as well. Instead of fixating romantically on Raees, I should have accepted and cultivated my friendship with Jake—that’s really all it was. Raees was no longer tall and he was an art dealer, having left behind dreams of working in cinema.
“If you’d have asked me then what you’d end up, I thought you’d be a hippie, a free spirit poet,” Jake said as he picked apart a piece of bread. “You were like a flower child obsessed with butterflies*—you had this really funny handwriting and drew insects on everything. You had a very beautiful spirit. You were strange, but it didn’t really bother me. I thought it was endearing. You weren’t like the other girls, and they definitely didn’t like you.” He laughed. “Sorry. You know what I mean. It seems as though you’re doing well now.”
“Thank you.”
“How’s your family?” he asked.
“Fine. I don’t see them very often. My brother loves the outdoors and spends much of his time working in Vermont or Colorado.”
“What does he do?”
“Disaster relief–something, or so he says. I think he actually works with my father,” I said.
“I remember your father did something strange?”
“He says it was ‘international business,’ ‘consulting,’ IBM, maybe. I think Sophie’s dad said the same thing. They both went to work in La Défense at this building you had to enter through Star Wars–like capsules.”
“I bet he was a spy, like Raees’s mom.” Jake had sensed my childhood hunch about my father’s profession without my ever explaining any details to him. “She once told us she worked for the Dutch National Science Foundation, the DNSF. We were like ‘What the fuck’s the DNSF?’ Whenever we hung out at Raees’s place it was always a little freaky. There were these Russian icons with gold-lined eyes. I think they were painted in some sort of wax technique. Raees’s mom always warned us about smoking around them. I swear, one started to melt once when he lit a cigarette too close. Freaky. We thought maybe we could sell a couple on the black market,” Jake said, laughing. “Whenever we went out she’d warn us to ‘Watch out for wild women.’ Everyone’s parents were interesting. Do you remember when I didn’t come to school for a little while?”
“Yeah, I never knew what happened. No one seemed to know. You just reappeared one day. I remember the teachers whispering. Considering you were my boyfriend, I thought you’d share if you wanted me to know.”
Jake laughed.
“My mom woke me up one morning and said we were going away and I couldn’t tell anyone. We were going to take the train to find my dad in Nice. He’d gotten a call from the CRS. They were like a special branch of the French government like the FBI.
“They’d told him, ‘You need to get out of Paris for a while.’ They’d intercepted a threat to an American executive at an American bank. ‘We will let you know when you can return. Go as far away as you can, but stay in France and check into the hotel under a different name. We’ll find you and contact you when it’s safe to come back.’
“So, we stayed in a bed-and-breakfast in Nice.”
“Wasn’t that bizarre?”
“I don’t know; it was normal. We were there with other kids too. They had thought my father was the most at risk, as he worked for United Bank of America. I guess if you were a terrorist you’d choose that over Chase? Anyway, after ten days passed, we received a call.
“ ‘The threat has been neutralized’ was all they said.”
“That’s so crazy. My father was gone most of the time. My only vivid memories from back then are of what happened when he would come home. I forget almost everything that happened after I lost it.”
“Lost it?” Jake asked.
“Yeah, I was severely depressed about a year before we moved back to the States. My mother found this American doctor in Paris that I used to see each week. I didn’t let anyone help me until I decided to get better on my own. My recovery was faked when we returned to New York after my father’s assignment. I tried to be normal, all-American: played lacrosse, dated football players, wore jeans. No one bought it, least of all myself. Every time I try too hard it falls flat. I had to finally accept I was different and figure how to get through the world alone this way. There was no cure. I never actually got better.”
“To be honest, I had no idea.”
“No?” I asked.
“It’s true. Like I said before, you were this beautiful spirit. What may be off is your point of view. Most of us were alone a lot. I got a lot of teenage stuff out of my system over there. We had so much freedom. Raees and I would just go out and get wasted. We drank and smoked, and then when I moved back, there wasn’t any desire for any of that partying anymore. By the time I got to prep school, it was like I had done all that stuff. We’d all grown up alone and so fast.”
South of France
Sometime around 2010
Will was lying with his book on the bed, his back to me and my back to the Mediterranean Sea.
“Where are you going?” he asked, feeling me lift off the bed and toward the door.
“To walk around.”
“Do you want me to come with you?”
“No.”
We had arrived an hour ago from the Nice airport. I knew I would become restless in the hotel room. From the moment we landed, I felt uneasy. There had never been a Will when I had been living in France over ten years ago, and it felt strange to have his comfort in a place I had only known alone. Still, it wasn’t Paris. I wasn’t prepared for that yet.
I had nearly gagged when we arrived at the airport, on the walk down the clinical white border to customs. Neither Will nor I said a word. There was a small queue, because of a dirty-looking man holding up progress. A woman in a pressed blue shirt and ill-fitting black pants had unzipped his suitcase to find a disgusting pile of rotting black pods* that reminded me of the ones I had collected when I was young, as they fell off the trees with the change of seasons. She was lifting them up one by one with a silver caliper. Another agent was ushering people along. I couldn’t help but stare backward, causing my duffel bag to fall off my shoulder. Will picked it up.
“What is that?” I asked, craning my neck. Will was carrying all of our luggage.
“I don’t know, but they don’t want it in France. And I don’t blame them,” he said. I imagined someone must have once said the same of me. Even though Will and I had been together for a few years, I was still afraid to explain to him in particular what had happened when I was thirteen. Everyone knows these sorts of conditions never fully go away. I’d presented my childhood as full of whimsy and mystery rather than sadness, so much so that I’d star
ted to believe this version as well.
We found our way quickly to the car that would take us on to Monaco. I had a special love for the tiny country, and it hadn’t escaped me that once we arrived, we’d no longer technically be in France. Some of my best memories of my grandparents weren’t memories at all, rather imagined scenes pieced together from photographs and stories. A bon vivant, my grandfather was a Sinatra-singing businessman and actor who loved to take my grandmother away from Massachusetts to Monte Carlo. During the evenings, she’d dress up in a long Yves Saint Laurent skirt and blouse, according to pictures, and smoke, always with her gold bangles, one for every child, on her right arm (I wear them now; my mother gave the five to me when I was in college) and a long, brown plait of hair down her back. She was a beauty, and he was a charmer who liked to sing songs from Old Blue Eyes in the kitchen, at parties, or between puffs of a smoke. He once told me about eating dinner next to Grace Kelly on one of their trips to Monaco.
On the wall of my first apartment in New York, I’d hung a picture of my grandfather looking out of a boat with a drink on the rocks in one hand and a cigarette in the other, a windswept American flag behind him. He is wearing a sweater with red-and-blue stripes at the neckline, and his hands are flung upward, against the backdrop of the Mediterranean. On the same wall was another picture, of my mother on the runway of a tiny airport standing next to her younger brother, who was nearly a foot taller than she was. They are about to board a small plane to meet my grandfather and grandmother at their house in Saint Martin. My mother seems a little sad and lonely. This image sometimes reminds me of how ungrateful I’d been growing up. How hard France must have been for my mother too. I think my grandmother’s sense of aesthetics and entertaining style influenced my mother. But they didn’t talk much.
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