The Isle of Youth: Stories

by Laura van Den Berg

  “I didn’t know acrobats had their own parties,” I said.

  Jean-Paul explained that most acrobats in Paris were the children of acrobats, that it was a time-honored vocation. “We have our own networks,” he said. “Our own social clubs.”

  I tried to imagine a crowd of people with painted faces and masks. “This isn’t some kind of sex thing, is it?”

  “Not at all,” Jean-Paul said. “Or at least not usually.”

  I told them I was in. The acrobats clapped, their bells chiming. All the wine was gone. When the check came, I took out my Visa and slapped it down on the table. My card had a twenty-thousand-dollar limit. I always told my husband that I didn’t need a card with such a high limit, but he said it was good for our credit to have so much power and to use it responsibly and, in any case, there might be an emergency. My husband had been right about that. I was having an emergency. I was the emergency. And I was glad to have power to burn.

  After the bill had been settled, Jean-Paul took out a tube of white face paint and a tiny makeup brush. He moved his chair closer to mine, then leaned toward me and asked me to close my eyes. Without sight, noises were magnified: the soft hiss of a match being lit, dishes clattering, the distant, lilting wail of a siren. He used his fingers to paste the paint onto my face, over my eyelids and down the bridge of my nose. It felt like cold mud. He pressed my cheekbones as he swirled the paint upward. I imagined a white line moving up the center of my forehead and then fanning out like a breaking wave. I could not remember the last time my husband had touched my face. Before finishing, Jean-Paul evened out the job with the makeup brush, its bristles pricking my nostrils and the edges of my mouth.

  Jean-Paul told me to open my eyes. I gazed into the compact mirror he held in front of me. Everything was white except for my eyelashes and eyebrows and pupils. When I grinned, my teeth looked yellow against my painted skin.

  “Voilà!” he said.

  At the table, the acrobats used the makeup brush and the compact mirror to touch up their own faces. Then we went to a costume store on Rue Eblé. Inside, the acrobats picked out a black masquerade mask lined with silver glitter and a black silk robe. I charged the costume on my Visa. Outside, in an alley, Jean-Paul helped slip the mask over my face and then tied the silk sash of the robe around my waist. His fingers were nimble, slender.

  The party was in the Marais. We took the metro. We sat in a row, in our face paint and masks. People didn’t stare as much as I had expected, as I had hoped. The only ones who really gave us a second look were children. The overhead lights flickered and hummed. When our stop came and we stood, I realized gum was stuck to the bottom of my sandal.

  Aboveground, I followed the acrobats down Rue Saint Sébastien. There were restaurants with outdoor patios and nightclubs with neon signs nestled in the windows. The streets were made of beautiful stone. We walked single-file. I was at the end of the line. Once, I got distracted by a couple eating on a restaurant patio, another pale and inelegant pair, but I only had to listen for the bells to find the acrobats in the crowd. We turned onto a cobblestone side street. The stones looked wet even though it hadn’t rained. We stopped outside a gray building with a little blue awning. We rang the buzzer and went inside.

  When the elevator reached the sixth floor, we found the corner apartment open and people spilling into the hallway. They all had on white face paint, but some had blue stars ringing their eyes or a red joker’s smile or yellow comets on their cheeks. Some wore jumpsuits, like my acrobats, others tights and tunics. A woman in a turquoise one-piece bathing suit, a beaded dolphin covering her stomach. A man in a floppy jester hat with bells. Everywhere was the sound of bells.

  “This is the party,” Jean-Paul said. He set the violin case down by the door. I followed him inside.

  The apartment was bright and full. French pop music played on the stereo. The floors were gleaming hardwood. At the other end of the room, a bay window looked out onto the street. People were standing elbow to elbow, shoulder to shoulder, knee to knee. I couldn’t get a good look at the layout and décor. The apartment had been overrun by acrobats and their followers.

  Jean-Paul, Alain, and Dominique spread out, shaking hands and slapping backs and waving to masked figures across the room. Right away, my Teva sandals made me feel like an impostor. I needed high heels or ballet slippers or even bare feet with crimson toenails. I wandered into the kitchen. Glass bowls filled with punch sat on granite counters, alongside champagne glasses and cocktail napkins. Tiny charms in the shape of acrobats dangled from the stems of the glasses. Costumed partygoers leaned against doorjambs, propped elbows on counters, talked in rapid-fire French. I had expected this party to be unique, a once-in-a-lifetime event, but it was the same as any other party, really, except everyone was masked and speaking a language I couldn’t understand. I ladled some punch into a champagne glass and drank it. Then I walked around with the empty glass in my hand.

  The fish tank in the living room attracted me. The tank was black and had fluorescent lights, but there was nothing inside except water and silver pebbles. I studied the spines of the books in a bookcase: titles on deep-space organisms and intergalactic travel and black holes. I wondered if the person who owned this apartment ever dreamed of astronauts. A woman with crystals glued to her cheek in the shape of a heart tried to talk to me, but I couldn’t follow what she was saying. I just nodded until my neck hurt and the apartment felt airless. I pushed past a group of people wearing masks adorned with feathers and back into the kitchen. I filled my champagne glass and went out onto a small balcony with iron railings. It faced the same street as the bay window. Below, I saw the tops of heads and garbage can lids and slick stone streets. No one else was on the balcony and I couldn’t talk to the people indoors. I hadn’t seen Jean-Paul, Alain, or Dominique since we entered the party. I was starting to feel lonely for home. I went inside and slipped into a bedroom.

  I sat on the edge of the bed. I stared at the black phone on the bedside table. It was an old-fashioned rotary, an antique possibly. I dialed my husband’s international cell. I was surprised when he answered after the first ring.

  “Hello,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d pick up.”

  “I’m in Amsterdam,” he said. “My connection was delayed.”

  “Are you going back to Hartford? Back to the house?”

  “Where else did you think I’d go?”

  “I don’t know.” He had a brother who lived in upstate New York, a best friend from college in Des Moines. “Someplace I wouldn’t come back to.” I’d left the door cracked open and noise from the party seeped into the room.

  “Where are you?” my husband asked.

  “A party,” I said. “I met some people after you left.”

  “Oh,” he said.

  “So do you think you should get the house?”

  “Isn’t that a little premature?”

  “Leaving someone in a foreign country seems pretty final to me.”

  “Do you want the house?”

  “I never liked that house,” I said. “It was too dark. And the neighborhood was too quiet. It kept me up at night, it was so quiet. It short-circuited my nerves, it was so quiet.”

  “I like quiet.”

  “I know,” I said. “I always hated that about you.”

  “Let’s figure the house out when you get back.” He paused. “When are you getting back?”

  “I’m not sure.” I pressed the receiver against my forehead and shut my eyes. I heard him ask me to not take so long between answers, because these international minutes were costing him a fortune. Finally I said I had a question for him.

  “Shoot.”

  “When we were sitting on the bench this morning, you were saying something to me. Something important.”

  “I could tell you weren’t paying attention,” he said. “You kept looking over my shoulder.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “I was distracted. There were these acrobats.”


  “And now you’re wondering what I said?”

  “I was hoping you’d repeat it for me.”

  “We all have to live with our deficiencies.”

  “That’s what you said?”

  “No. That’s what I’m saying now.”

  “What does that mean? That you’re not repeating it for me?”

  “There are consequences for the things we do. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Consequences?”

  “Consequences.”

  “I don’t believe in consequences. There’s just what happens and what doesn’t.”

  “I’m glad to hear you still sound just like yourself.”

  “Did you say that you loved me?”

  “No.”

  “That you never really loved me?”

  “No.”

  “That you’d met someone else?”

  “Wrong again.”

  “That you’re planning to kill me and collect my life insurance payout?”

  “It’s crossed my mind,” he said. “But no.”

  I felt like beating my head against the wall until my nose was bloody. I asked why we kept trying for so long, why we even came to Paris, if we both knew we never really stood a chance.

  “Because that’s what you’re supposed to do,” he said. “You’re supposed to keep working on your marriage.”

  It was awful to me, this idea that keeping a marriage together was like laying pipe or digging a ditch. But he was right: it was what people had told us we were supposed to do. We had listened to sentences containing words like “salvage” and “repair” and nodded dumbly, pretending we didn’t know any better. It was an affront to everyone involved.

  I leaned against the pillows and the headboard. I breathed in deeply, but when I exhaled, no air seemed to come out, like something inside me had eaten it. “How was the flight out of Paris?”

  “Turbulent.”

  “Did you miss me?”

  “Not as much as I thought I would, to be honest.”

  “I don’t miss you that much either.”

  I waited for him to say something else. I listened to his breath on the line. For a moment, I thought I was on the brink of profound clarity. I silently counted backward from ten and when I hit zero, I hung up.

  I lay on the bed for a while longer, my fingers gripping the black silk of my robe. I blinked behind the mask. All of a sudden, darkness replaced the knife-blade of light that had been visible under the doorway. I went back to the living room, forgetting my empty champagne glass with its miniature acrobat charm on the comforter. The apartment was dark. The music changed to techno, which I hadn’t heard since college. I hadn’t liked it then, but now it sounded okay. Someone activated a strobe light and white beams cut across the room. People were dancing all over the apartment, in their bells and sequins and feathers.

  “Henri,” Jean-Paul whispered in my ear. He had appeared behind me, his hands on my shoulders. “He went to the clubs in Monaco one summer and he’s been obsessed with those lights ever since.”

  The lights beamed one way, and I saw into the kitchen, where Alain and Dominique were dancing with the woman in the dolphin bathing suit. The glass bowls on the counter looked like they were holding blood. It seemed everyone was smiling. Some of the smiles were painted on, of course, but I wanted to believe that everyone was smiling for real. I saw teeth and gums and tongues, just a glimpse here and a glimpse there, never enough to identify what belonged to who.

  “Henri is from America originally,” Jean-Paul continued. “Our favorite American import.”

  “I thought I was your favorite American import,” I said, bumping against him. This was the first time I’d tried to flirt with anyone in years.

  “But of course!” Jean-Paul said. He draped his arms around my neck. Intersecting white lights shot across the apartment. I put Jean-Paul’s hands on my hips and we danced. We didn’t dance close. We jumped up and down, left and right, knocking into other people. We held hands, and when we let go of each other, it was too dark for me to see if he was dancing with someone else or waiting for me to return, if he too was smiling. I let out a scream and felt a little thrill. I did it again and got the same rush. It was dark and I was masked and no one knew who I was or where I was going next or whether I was losing my mind or finding it.

  When the song ended, Jean-Paul took my hand and led me out of the apartment. It was still pitch dark and no one could see that we were escaping. I marveled at all that could be gotten away with in the dark. Someone’s life could fall apart—or together—without anyone noticing a thing. I thought of all the nights I lay beside my husband in bed and agonized about where my life was going, where it had gone, about being thirty-five and having not done much of anything. All those hours in darkness, a shadow life that was never revealed to him. I might as well have been robbing banks on the sly or having an affair.

  Outside, I touched my cheeks and felt the paint smudge. When I pulled my hand away, there was white on my fingertips. I was sweating beneath my mask and robe. Jean-Paul broke into a light run, still holding my hand, his bells jingling, my sandals slapping the ground like Frankenstein feet.

  “Where do you want to go?” Jean-Paul asked. We were running down a street lit by globular lamps.

  I remembered the first thing I took an interest in when studying a map of Paris on the plane. I read about its history in the guidebook and charted its path on the map with my fingertip.

  “To the river!” I said.

  By the time we reached the Seine, we had given up on running. We knew better than to feign being young and carefree for very long. The paint was making my face itch. I scratched the side of my nose. I had lost my sash and my robe billowed open. When I looked down at my sundress, it seemed unfamiliar, a stranger’s clothes. The Seine stretched out before us, dark and endless. We took a small set of stairs down to the concrete sidewalk that lined one side of the river. The path was lit by goldish hanging lights. We walked along the river, underneath one of the bridges and past an empty bench. Jean-Paul smoked a cigarette and gave me drags. The concrete wall beside us insulated us from city sounds. For a long time, the bells were the only noise I heard.

  “You forgot your case,” I said when I realized he wasn’t carrying it.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “One of the others will take it.”

  “How did you learn acrobatics?”

  “I went to an acrobatics school in Normandy,” he said. “I was taught by the same man who taught my father.”

  “It seems like it would get tiring, all that performing.”

  “I like having a job where I get to wear a mask all day.”

  When he asked what I did, I tried my best to explain my job as a forensic accountant. I worked in the offices of a divorce lawyer in Hartford and spent my days examining bank statements and stock portfolios, trying to figure out what really belonged to whom, where money had been hidden or lost or spent. I hoped the office would be understanding when I called to tell them I was extending my vacation.

  “Once our office had a case where the wife had been grinding up tiny amounts of glass and mixing it into her husband’s food for the last year of their marriage,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s best your husband left when he did.”

  “Maybe so.”

  A riverboat, the bottom exploding with blue phosphorescent light, drifted past us; music and voices rolled across the water. When the quiet returned, I stopped walking. Jean-Paul faced me. I touched his shoulder, right where the silk rose into a little peak, with my paint-smudged fingers.

  “Take off your mask,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. “It’s against the code.”

  I wondered what the mask was hiding, if he was elaborately scarred. “I’ll take off my mask if you take off yours.”

  He smiled. “But I already know what you look like.”

  “You don’t know my name. I never told any of you my name.”

  “I’ve already m
ade one up for you,” he said. “I do that when I meet people.”

  “And?”

  “It’s Sabine. What do you think?”

  “Not even close.”

  I took off my mask and let my bathrobe fall onto the concrete, the black silk pooling at my feet, and undid the straps on my sandals. It looked as though a wizard had evaporated, leaving behind everything but the body. I took one sweeping step toward the edge of the path and jumped into the water cannonball style, knees clutched to my chest like a terrified child.

  I plunged beneath the water. I didn’t open my eyes. I considered what might be resting under me: dead bodies with gnawed fingers and peeling skin, bottles, disposed-of murder weapons, coins, disintegrating love letters. I felt the gentle pressure of the current, the fabric of my dress sticking to my skin.

  After I surfaced, I opened my eyes and slicked back my hair. I wiped my face and looked at the white paint bleeding across my hands. Jean-Paul was standing on the bank in his underwear and mask, his red jumpsuit and ballet slippers heaped on the concrete. He slipped into the river tentatively, as though the water was causing him pain.

  When he reached me, he put his hand on the back of my head. I looked at his lips and nose and ears. His mask had slipped to the side and I saw one of his eyes. Whiteness had collected in the corner of it. I rubbed the remaining paint from his face with my fingertips. His mask and black hair made me think again of Zorro. I traced a Z on his bare stomach. I hoped another riverboat didn’t pass through.

  “Did anyone ever tell you that you look like Zorro?”

  “What is Zorro?”

  “It’s not important.”

  “Do you have a place to stay tonight?”

  “I want to take a train south. To the beaches. I want to see things.” The idea of traveling south had come out of nowhere, but I liked the way the words sounded, the way they felt, as they left my mouth.

  “But you’ll need a place to dry off, change clothes, get some sleep.”

  “I could do that anywhere.”

  Jean-Paul gripped my waist and hoisted me out of the water. I made a V with my arms and he spun me around, his hands moving over my stomach and the small of my back. I saw the gray walls of the Seine and the cars and a person crossing a bridge. All the lit-up windows and the glowing peak of the Eiffel Tower. I tipped my head back and saw the red blink of a plane in the sky. And then he brought me back down.