“I’m not so sure I have a home anymore,” I whispered.
“What? What are you talking about?” my mom chirped too eagerly for the information just given. This could not have been news.
“I’m leaving George, mom,” I admitted, closing my eyes so as not to watch myself in the mirror when I finally got feedback on my quasi-admission.
She sighed. Twice.
“Darling, you know that in principle I am more than simply not against this. But, given the time you’ve invested, leaving is not so easy to do at this point. And you are not getting any younger, so you’ll need to think long and hard before making any final decisions.” She paused, dramatically, as if saying what was to come next would require her to ingest extra oxygen. “He’s not so bad, if you think about it. I mean, he doesn’t drink, he doesn’t hit…. There are men worse than George, believe it or not.”
Feeling a tickle in my throat, I knew I had to hang up. I removed the phone from my ear to check the time.
10:35…or 22:35, local time.
Jamie would be back in half an hour.
I squeezed my eyes shut as I pinched the bridge of my nose, trying to contain tears that seemed bottomless that evening.
Who was I kidding with this spontaneity?
“Mom, I have to get up early tomorrow, so I should go,” I managed to choke out into the phone, suppressing a sniffle. “I’ll be fine,” I said with an honest attempt at conviction before ending the call.
Chapter Eleven: Ceremonial
The sunlit spring of the previous day was gone. Instead, a deep, frigid fall greeted us when we all woke up the next morning. It was difficult to keep my back straight against the drizzle and the wind as, sleepy-eyed and quiet, our group piled out of our hotel on rue du Commandant Mauchotte (our morning croissants wrapped in hotel restaurant napkins) and inside the bus parked at the curb. Groggy, we watched the city streets get mercilessly pelted by the rain.
“Okay everyone, listen up! It’s up to you if you want to get out and take photos in this rain, but we will be making a few stops: Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame de Paris, a few others. At twelve, we have lunch and then, for those of you interested, we have a trip to the Palace of Versailles planned. I have to remind you that this is not obligatory—if you’d rather spend the day shopping, you may do so guilt-free. Dinner is at seven. Nicole will give you the details—she’ll give you each a business card of the restaurant to help you explain yourself should you decide to take a taxi there on your own. Which reminds me—always keep a few hotel business cards on you in case you’re ever lost. That way you can just hand one to a police officer or a cab driver without irritating the locals with your English, or even your disappointing, American high school French, for that matter. After dinner, for those of you who’d like to join us, I’m thinking of going up to Montmartre. This would be by metro.”
I looked at Abbott from behind my paper cup of steaming hot tea. He looked well-rested and self-assured standing there, balancing in the aisle. This command of the audience looked natural on him and sounded as if it came easy. He pronounced each French term with irritating precision, his Scottish accent almost helping.
“Now, I’m happy to report that everyone was in their own room when I called in at eleven last night. Thank you very much, Mr. Sola, for keeping an eye on the lot. I’ll go ahead and say that I guess you all do deserve our trust and respect, at least for now. It’s yours to lose. I just ask that you keep one of us informed as to your whereabouts….”
Abbott went on, but I closed my eyes and rested my head on the cool window. I’d purchased some French cold medicine in the hotel lobby gift shop, with Abbott’s assistance, and while it seemed to be working as far as drying up my sinuses, it also teleported me into an area thick with fog. Perhaps it was the nighttime kind and Abbott simply neglected to translate that crucial piece of information, I thought. Or maybe it was just the rain.
“How are you feeling, sweet Levit?” he asked, startling me out of my near-slumber. Before I was able to unstick my face from the glass, I heard him settle in next to me.
“Oh, well, I guess I’m better for now,” I muttered, stretching my sticky, glossy lips into an artificial smile, my eyes searching the seats ahead. My voice sounded hoarse. It hurt my throat.
Jamie, I could see, was alone, sitting three rows up, sipping his hotel coffee with an air of apparent ease and comfort about him. For all the precision of his layered haircut, his body language sure managed to read effortless.
When I woke up that morning, he was all the way on the edge of his side of the bed. His body on top of the covers, I could see that he was still wearing his clothes from the night before (but for his shoes and socks—his feet were bare). Turned away from me, his spine protruded through the thin material of his black t-shirt. I’d slid out of bed as quietly as I could and snuck into the bathroom to take a shower, determined to postpone the unavoidable—having to wake up to awkward small talk with a stranger. This would be weirder than waking up next to Javier that first bright morning in Spain, I suspected; Javier and I had a reason for being in the same bed, and that reason wasn’t front desk mix-up.
By the time I was out, however, Jamie was awake. We’d nodded cordially at each other as steam followed me out of the bathroom, my robe tied tightly and modestly around my waist. His hair was a mess, stuck to his left cheek. Still, those dark-rimmed eyes of his managed to tickle me as if from inside.
“So when do you think you’ll be sharing the news? You know, about your engagement?” Abbott whispered conspiratorially in my ear, breaking my stare. The man really did have no concept of personal space—I could practically feel his lips on my hair.
“I’m not so sure if it’s necessary that I say anything at all. I don’t need to give the kids a memo on my personal life,” I spat out, probably too loudly, gesturing toward the slowly but surely waking bunch sitting before me. They were scattered throughout the bus—Paz, in the front row, sat flirting with Ofir from across the aisle (with Veronika at her side). Liam and Jordan sat behind them, directly across the aisle from Stephanie. Sage and Wisdom napped in an awkward embrace, while Sophie tried to prostrate her small body across two empty seats, using her backpack for a pillow.
“No, of course not, but…,” Abbott tried, losing either interest or will midsentence. “Look, you’re a smart girl, I’m sure you’ll figure it all out.”
I couldn’t help but smack my tongue in response. With age, I’d become weary of this assertion.
Growing up, hearing adults say that I was a “smart girl” sounded like a promise, a prophetic insight of some sort. Surely these couldn’t be empty words. Surely adults wouldn’t throw such loaded terms around so carelessly and cruelly. Surely they all couldn’t be liars. But now, to my adult ears, “smart girl” sounded nothing short of patronizing. He was likely in on the joke, just like George’s mother.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get my crap out of your storage as soon as we get back to the States.”
“Oh, sweet Levit, no worries. You saw—all I have in there is a bike that I haven’t ridden in years. The damn basement closet is all yours for as long as you need it. Bring more stuff over, for all I care. Or take the bike. Or move in, even,” Abbott whispered, patting my arm, too kindly. “So? How’s it rooming with Jamie over there?” he asked, changing subjects. He raised his eyebrow, presumably for levity. “Is there one bed or two in that room?”
“It’s okay, it’s fine,” I answered too quickly, through a fit of cough, blushing involuntarily. “Oh, look, we’re here!” I exclaimed. “Arc de Triomphe!”
Now that he reminded me of his bike, I missed mine.
~ ~ ~
With its French gothic ceilings and its stained glass, the Notre Dame was indeed as breathtaking as our itinerary promised. Its magnificent grandeur oozed wealth, romantic in an intimidating sort of way. It was enough to make me want to become Catholic, if only to justify wanting to get married in a place this glorious. But even had I stayed with
George (and even had he not always insisted on wanting an “authentic” marriage ceremony of the indigenous people of one remote region or another), I still wouldn’t be able to marry inside a place like this, I knew—not with his paying parents being Eastern Orthodox. I suppose Javier wouldn’t mind.
“The Notre Dame is about one hundred and thirty meters in length,” Nicole chirped quietly but rapidly in her proper English accent as my American teenagers dragged their feet behind her. “From groundbreaking to completion—roughly one hundred and eighty years!”
The stats told me nothing, and soon Nicole was tuned out. A B.A. in history and I can’t say I knew much more about this place (or even country) than my students. I still don’t. I lectured, annually, on the French Revolution, sure, and France’s fate in World War II, of course, but that’s about it (not counting whatever tidbits we covered in medieval history). They were better off with the shy and jittery Nicole. See, I’m not so smart.
I wandered off until Nicole’s voice was but a whisper in the hushed, sacred space. Without meaning to, I found myself walking up the aisle, toward the pail filled with Holy Water. I dipped my fingers in.
“Are you Catholic?”
I jumped up and away as my heart felt itself get flushed violently down to my heels. In the shadows of the church, not having shaved, Jamie looked more tired than I remembered that morning (or maybe simply older than I had somehow imagined him to be, period). He looked almost Goth, which seemed strangely appropriate. He startled me.
“You scared the crap out of me!” I laughed, embarrassed. “No, no, I’m not. I’m Jewish. Not religious or anything. No skirt, hooray on bacon, et cetera. My parents came to America from the Soviet Union, so I’m of that secular variety. But what can it hurt, right? God is God,” I answered with a nervous shrug, my delivery hurried.
There I was—qualifying. This was a compulsion, really. I had done the same with George, and Javier before him. In response, Javier had attempted to placate me with a rumor that smelled of mythology invented solely for my comfort: the story went that his ancestors’ may have been Jewish prior to the Spanish Inquisition, as evidenced by the fact that, to this day, his grandmother allegedly lit candles on Friday evenings (in the secrecy of her closet). I still don’t know if that story is true, but it was nicer than George’s reaction upon learning of my heritage (and my immediate qualification thereof); he took it as a warranty of sorts, balking at my attempts at keeping the fast on Yom Kippur.
“I guess,” Jamie shrugged in response, sliding his palms inside his jeans’ pockets, his ring sticking at the stitching, again, not letting his left hand go all the way in.
“What, you don’t think so?” I asked, contemplating steering the conversation back so as to “un-qualify” myself, gain back a portion of that lost self-respect.
“No, I think if you believe in God, that’s definitely the approach to take—one God and all that. There are enough artificial divides between people to claim that God belongs to only one group and not another,” he reasoned with a smile that looked only a fraction condescending. “My mom is Muslim, my dad is Catholic. They are more ceremonial, so to speak, than anything else. They are not that observant of all the little rules that God purportedly wants them to adhere to, but they are general believers. I guess, like you?”
“Well, you have to believe in something, right?” I tried to help him conclude.
“Definitely, definitely. I just choose to believe in people. In good nature, kindness, you know? Things we can see and feel. And control. Real things. That’s enough for me,” he declared by way of summation.
I nodded, taking this in. This was a good, solid answer.
“Of course, yes, that too,” I stammered, my cheeks hot. “Yeah, I mean, I guess it’s something we can see, control…I hear you….”
To scramble for words like that, to let go of ideals at the drop of a hat…. I was supposed to stop feeling compelled to do any of this when I became an adult. To concur, to appease, it always seemed easier at the time, but only left me feeling empty after. Grown women were supposed to know better. Not only could I not control the butterflies in my stomach at the sight of Jamie’s dark eyes, I was apparently still a teenager when it came to my loose tongue in the presence of a good looking man.
“It’s just easier, for me, at least, to believe that there is a higher purpose of some sort,” I tried to recover with some respectable grace. “To know that there is a reason for all this shit around us, you know?” I insisted, immediately taking my hand to my mouth, remembering that I was in the house of God.
“It’s all right, you’re forgiven,” Jamie laughed, dipping his long fingers into the pail of Holy Water and flicking some in my face.
Immediately bowing my head, I blushed further, feeling my chest burn.
“So anyway, what’s your pedigree, exactly? Your name, your look—I cannot figure it out for the life of me,” I asked when I finally dared to look up again, droplets of Holy Water still on my forehead.
“Oh, yeah, I get that a lot. My mother is Turkish and my father is Portuguese. Both born in the States, though,” he conceded. “My name is not terribly ethnic, I know—my mom just happened to like it. Not James, just Jamie. I’ll be sure to tell her that, in France, they think I’m a girl, thank you very much,” he scoffed. “But ‘Sola’ is actually a Portuguese last name. Or at least so I’ve been told all my life.”
“Ah, so it all makes sense,” I nodded, half-listening, wondering if I’d just sabotaged whatever budding relationship we could’ve had by first admitting my potential gullibility and then by shamelessly attempting to backpedal. With George, it had only helped, of course, but I hardly wanted to do what history always tended to do on its own; I hardly wanted to repeat anything. It was both comforting and heartbreaking to have to remind myself that, this time, it didn’t matter anyway. Jamie was married, and I had a potentially suicidal, very recently “former,” fiancé at home. His home, not mine, that is.
~ ~ ~
I, for one, was relieved when our bus refused to start at our designated corner near the Eiffel Tower, where, having risked our cameras in the downpour for the sake of a few blurry photos to show for our time there, we’d previously disembarked. This mechanical malfunction saved me from having to give my students general and evasive answers about the history of one Louis or another.
As a kid, I had always naively presumed that adults and children were entirely different species: some were born children, while others were born adults—two wholly different groups forever to remain who they were. As in countless other respects, I am sure that I was not unique in compartmentalizing the world in such a neat little way. Children, went my reasoning, knew nothing and wanted for everything, while the adults knew everything and wanted for nothing. It was a convenient way to make sense of my surroundings growing up, but it also caused for quite a shock to the system when it was time for me to turn fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…. It was challenging, sobering to turn the age of majority and realize that I still looked and sounded nothing like what I’d always believed adults should look and sound like. Somehow, along the way, I hadn’t actually acquired the necessary wealth of knowledge and wisdom that I’d always thought this powerful bunch possessed. Additionally, I continued to want for absolutely everything, never satisfied, forever a gluttonous ingrate, like George insisted.
No, it was better not to be able to go to Versailles at all. How beautiful would the gardens look in the rain anyway? No, it was better to let these kids graduate high school thinking that their young history teacher knew it all. That knowledge would hopefully help them believe that the letters of recommendation she’d written for them were actually worth something. Ignorance is not only easier to wallow in—it is indeed the promised bliss. Sometimes.
Rain pelted our metal roof as Abbott discussed our situation with the tiny-shouldered Nicole. The rest of us waited.
“All right, gang, so the bus is out of commission. We can’t get another one until
tomorrow morning. To pay us back for the inconvenience, we’ll be getting two additional dinners paid for by the travel company, thanks to Nicole. As far as today is concerned, however, we can either make our way to Versailles on our own, or we can each do our own thing and reconvene this evening for dinner and a trip to Montmartre—again, for those of you interested, of course,” Abbott eventually announced.
A quick show of hands simultaneously demonstrated the lack of teenage interest in the Palace of Versailles and their thirst for shopping; for the majority of our kiddos, as well as Stephanie and Abbott, Galeries Lafayette it was.
“I thought maybe some of you would be interested in visiting Jim Morrison’s grave while here. If so, I’ll come with,” Jamie offered nonchalantly, rubbing his face awake in the grayness of the early afternoon.
“Oooh, I want to go,” Veronika shot up from her seat to volunteer.
Paz raised her perfectly threaded eyebrow at her friend.
“Well, I’m going shopping, Veronika,” she stated plainly, her arms neatly folded across her breasts, which were packed snugly in a t-shirt underneath an equally snug denim blazer.
“It’s okay, Paz. Mr. Abbott, as well as half this bus, is going to Galeries Lafayette. You can go with them. Veronika can go with Mr. Sola.” I presented my unsolicited take on the matter as I stood leaning against the front row seat of our out-of-order vehicle, next to Abbott, who solemnly nodded along. Paz’s mouth opened and closed without making so much as a peep, as if she were a fish violently thrown upon the shore by a wave much mightier than she. Not that I could ever be that wave.
“Ms. Levit, you should come with us, then,” Veronika sang. As opposed to Paz, this girl definitely over-plucked her eyebrows to the point of it reading as self-mutilation. If Paz were a good friend, she’d long ago come to the child’s rescue, I remember thinking.
I felt Jamie’s eyes shoot to me.
“No, I’m still not feeling well, Ver,” I said hoarsely, sniffling demonstratively. “We have over a week left of this trip and I would like to be able to breathe freely for some of it, you know?” I reasoned, paraphrasing myself for the umpteenth time in a matter of two days. “I think I’ll just go back to the hotel for the afternoon and then join you guys for dinner,” I added, brighter, with a rubber band smile, looking at Jamie only out of the corner of my eye.
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