Still Points North

by Leigh Newman

  Lawrence pulls into the lot. He goes to the stand and comes back with a cardboard tray in his hand. The hot dogs are covered with every needless condiment known to man: cheese and relish and onions and barbecue sauce and chili, all of which I love and he does not, believing that such lavish toppings pollute the purity of the dogness. Worse, there are two small root beers. And he hates when I get two small root beers instead of one large root beer, which we could split, getting the same amount of drink for substantially less money.

  I’m not sure how to react to this. Because Lawrence has a lot of wonderful qualities, but one thing he isn’t great at is taking care of people. He’s skipped my birthday so many times I’ve stopped expecting a present or even a card. He made me dinner once (tuna casserole, five years ago) and that was the end of that. We used to fight about this all the time, but maybe I liked that kind of oversight somehow. Maybe I would have been smothered by somebody shoving roses and homemade pasta into my life at the end of the day. Or maybe that’s what I need and have always needed. The point is: I still don’t know.

  And yet here he is with a hot dog that bespeaks me and everything I am, holding it out as if to show me how it could have been if I had just hung in there with him. I start to cry all over the food and the cardboard box it comes in. He is crying, too, I think, but I can’t see really, I just hear some deep racking sounds from the driver’s side. When I look up, he’s hunched over the wheel, his face wrecked by tears. The heater clicks on. He wipes his face with the back of his hands. “It was the wedding,” he says. “I didn’t help with the wedding.”

  “No,” I say. “You didn’t.” Not that I helped with the wedding, either. Charging into battle with a veil isn’t getting married.

  He turns on the car. He lets it sit for a while, idling. “You’re not coming back, are you?” he says.

  I shake my head. Then frantically begin to eat everything in front of me, which is a little like bolting out of the car in that my mouth is full; there will be no more talking. Lawrence does the same thing. Then Leonard moans for fries. I crawl in the backseat of the car with him and curl up in a fetal position. I feel a little ill. The hot dogs were my first real meal in weeks.

  Lawrence drives us back to the bus stop. He gets out. I get in the driver’s seat. “See you next weekend,” he says.

  I’m going to Baja for Bride-to-Be next weekend. I don’t have the heart to remind him.

  Three days later, with no warning, Lawrence shows up at my garage. It’s unexpected, considering our last conversation. Plus, he’s wearing some very disorienting, unflattering clothing: plaid pants, striped shirt, a jacket with shoulder pads that dates back to glory days of David Hasselhoff. “I’m going with you,” he says. “To Baja.”

  “But we’re separated. And you could have called.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “But we’re separated.”

  He has a grim, determined look on his face—a look I have not seen since I left him, but that I recognize. This is the same look he uses when he tries to make a fire, which is a long, baroque process for him, but which he sticks to silently, furiously—him versus wet, green wood—for hours, until it catches. “You owe me,” he says.

  I look down at my slippers. There’s a tear in the cork sole that I examine extensively, because, considering my behavior, of course, Lawrence deserves an all-expenses-paid nature cruise. “We are not sharing a bed,” I say. “And do not tell people we’re newlyweds. Or separated. Or … anything at all.”

  Off we go, on different flights. I prepare myself on the airplane: The kind of honeymooners who will be on this particular cruise are not the kind who go to a remote village in Mexico. They will not wish to sleep in a hut on the beach and clamber over jungle-covered ruins, swatting malarial mosquitoes off each other. These honeymooners will be sunburned, gelled, and slightly smashed at all times. Late at night, after many Jell-O shots, they will tell kind, patient, understanding Lawrence their stories—how Tim showed up at the sorority house with a ring floating in a box of Lucky Charms (the bride loves cereal), how Jenny bawled her face off when Richard’s blimp saying MARRY ME floated over the college football stadium—while I sit in the corner, rolling my eyes, trying to disguise my longing for their dumb young bliss with a safe, prickly coating of disdain.

  This was a terrible idea. I shouldn’t be going on this trip. And neither should Lawrence. And it’s my fault because I didn’t have the courage to say no, good-bye, let’s just end it, the way you’re supposed to during a breakup, if you actually care about the other person.

  And yet, there Lawrence and I stand on the vast, broiling, cement quay, both of us toting our separate duffel bags all the way to the ship. Where we stop. A long, long line of passengers is waiting to go very, very slowly up the gangplank. Because they’re having trouble managing their walkers and wheelchairs and giant plastic sacks of low-priced Mexican pharmaceuticals.

  There’s evidently been some kind of mix-up. We’re on a cruise for people aged seventy-five and up.

  In the olden days of endlessly dating, we might have laughed at this. Now we stare glumly up at the boat. We sit glumly through the group dinner, where the buffet is Mexican, minus the spices, salt, and peppers that might give anyone heartburn. It’s like eating pureed death. On a tortilla.

  I can’t get it down. Neither can Lawrence. We go glumly up to the top deck, doing anything not to face our stateroom, which is not a stateroom so much as a vacation jail cell with two narrow iron bunks bolted to opposite sides of the room, no TV, no room service, no turn-down mints.

  We flop down on deck chairs. We say nothing, both perhaps aware that this is neither the romantic trip where Lawrence is going to win me back, nor the ship of fools, brides-gone-wild adventure where I will prove to him that marriage is ridiculous. This is something else: a tub of despair.

  “Don’t they even have an ice sculpture of a dolphin?” says Lawrence. “All I want is an ice sculpture of a dolphin.”

  “All I want is a towel folded into a swan.”

  “All I want is Isaac.” Then he does Isaac’s cheesy smile and double finger point, straight from the open bar on The Love Boat, circa 1978.

  From over by the lifeboats comes a waft of laughter. A sharp-faced, cackling woman is pulling a bottle of tequila out of her bag. And bottles of mango juice. And a lime. So are the rest of the ladies at her table. Now come the snacks: tortilla chips, mixed nuts, canned Frito-Lay bean dip of the kind, tragically, you will find in any Mexican 7-Eleven.

  “Little ones,” a woman calls over. “Come have cocktails.”

  “I’m not paying sixteen dollars for a drink,” another says. “I pack my own bar.” She is not kidding. She has a plastic thermos of pre-mixed margaritas, which, as it turns out, are refreshing and light and just what we needed. We sit and play gin rummy (everyone also has brought decks of cards). During margarita one, the conversation revolves around what a wise, tough leader George Bush is. During margarita two, the conversation revolves around why the staterooms have separate beds. All the elderly ladies are very bummed out about this. Even though their husbands are sitting at a different table, playing poker.

  “Who cares?” says Lawrence, quietly.

  “Yeah,” I say. “It’s just a place to sleep.”

  Looks ricochet around the table. From then on, we’re officially adopted. We’re not left alone for one minute. We’re invited to nature talks, water-safety demonstrations, coffee hours. We’re given sleeping pills and hard candies dug out of the bottoms of purses. These are people who have been married for fifty years—or were married for fifty years before one of them passed away. They pretend not to notice Lawrence and I slumping through the mariachi band or sitting on separate sides of the dining room. And for this, we’re grateful. We don’t have to talk very much. We fill our days with helping people read the paper and listening to stories about the Korean War.

  Until the day trip off the ship. We’re all supposed to hop in little rubber rafts to
putter over to a beach. This is hard for a lot of our new friends. Ray, a ninety-two-year-old with arthritis, needs me to sit with her, in case she slips off the seat. Lawrence is helping Amos, who has Parkinson’s.

  We all watch as Marion climbs into a raft. She’s on oxygen and has to take the tank with her. Ten stewards hover over her every breath. Her husband, Jerry, tries to climb in. The steward stops him. “It’s against company policy.”

  “I’m going with my wife.”

  “Sir, I cannot allow you to do that.”

  “She’s not feeling well and she’s afraid and I’m going with her.”

  “Sir, I can’t allow you to do that. You’ll have to get back on the boat.”

  Jerry flexes with rage. He is tall and stooped and elegant and spectacularly polite in a low-key way that doesn’t exist anymore. He used to be a postman. He has seven grandkids. He is not going to punch anybody but it’s heartbreaking, watching him control this impulse and give in and finally climb in another raft. That is, until he whispers to the driver. His raft suddenly slows down, motoring alongside his wife’s at the same reduced speed, so that the two rafts are, in effect, holding hands.

  All that open tenderness: It’s too deep, beautiful, and acute. Lawrence and I look at each other then look immediately away.

  The next day, we hug good-bye and fly home on our separate flights. I tell myself that that cruise was the perfect last trip of our marriage. It was depressing and miserable, and it showed us that all the real, wonderful couples of the world know how to be together. But us? We’re not in the same raft. We’re not in the same plane. And this is okay. I get the window seat for once without bickering. I love the window seat.

  Except for the black seizing pain in my chest.

  Is this what missing is, finally? Wishing for somebody to bicker with? Wishing for somebody to shake you awake from your nap and remind you that windows are not for resting your head against but for looking out of? Lawrence loves a vista. It can be the patchwork of hills outside Sienna or the crags of Atlas Mountains in Tunisia or the smogscape of a row of New Jersey factories. He’ll notice it and force me to stop daydreaming and notice it with him until I see what he is seeing, which in this instance would be the rolling grandeur in an expanse of clouds—that opera of altitude and sky, fat, puffy ladies strutting across the blue. It’s so easy to forget when you’re all by yourself—how being with someone isn’t always about the effort it takes not to leave them and not let them leave you, either. There are those moments you sit astonished—the secret, almost-impossible ones where your two imaginations meet.

  Back in Massachusetts, I get a call. It’s Lawrence. He’s going to stop bothering me. All he wants is for me to come to New York for the summer. We will have three last months together, months like we used to have, just hanging out, no pressure. And then we can call it quits—in a kind, caring way, as friends.

  CHAPTER 14

  Cinq de Plus

  June looms ahead of me. I drop Leonard off in New York and take one last job. Soon to be legally single, I’ll need a lawyer and any income I can get. The job is in Spain, for a new client who wants me to write stories of my old ilk, a thoughtful essay on vibrant new Spanish architecture as it relates to the vibrant new Spanish politics. I visit Bilbao and Barcelona and Santiago de Compostela all by creaking bus, since the old Spanish politics were fascist and required that all trains go through Franco’s capital of Madrid, meaning there are no rail lines between small hip provincial cities.

  Valencia is my last stop. Some kind of conference is taking place, and every hotel in town is booked. My taxi driver finally finds me a pension outside the city limits at the shut-down seaside. It is midnight. Still, I resist. No matter the country, the city, the state, the time zone, there is nothing lonelier than the shut-down seaside. We make laps around the suburbs and downtown and port. I finally surrender.

  The pension is empty save for the junkies who have spent the winter there, apparently unable to understand that last summer ended eight months prior. They linger on the steps, gray and dazed. The ocean roars by in the darkness. I lie in bed with all my clothes on and my wallet clutched to my chest, shivering under a thin cotton shaving of a blanket. All I have to do is make it to the morning and wrap up my article.

  Studio laughter, honking horns, wild applause ricochets up the tile steps from the front-desk TV. I sit up. I’m not going to make it. I can’t survive a night like this—the kind of night when you realize you are so alone you might do something unthinkable just to stop the feeling and there is nobody you love even to find you the next morning. Which means you can go ahead and do the unthinkable without the guilt of directly traumatizing anyone. This is not a good thought to have, considering my family history. And yet it’s not the first time I’ve had it. It’s just the first time I’ve had it so insistently—a whisper like the air leaking out of a tire.

  The truth is, I don’t deserve to be around other people—and life is full of other people.

  I put my shoes on. I go straight into town and buy a ticket for Madrid. In Madrid, I buy a ticket to Paris. The Basque country clicks by, the Pyrenees, flat yellow fields and red-tile villages, then Lyon. Then Paris, which roars up like a wave of stucco, marble, and soot.

  For a long time, I’ve suspected I am not that original of a person. Sunshine makes me happy. It makes me really happy. So do all the other usuals: bicycles with shiny bells, double scoops, black Labs, killing a mosquito in the middle of the night with one slap, and, of course, Paris in the spring.

  There are ducks in the parks and little wooden sailboats. There are Rodins and restaurants that serve only melted cheese. There are handfuls of cheap Arab street candy. There’s a free swimming pool on a riverboat and a secret Swiss mountain garden hidden behind the zoo. There’s also an unofficial system in the subway: If you look poor or even just a little sad, people will offer to let you pass through the turnstiles with them, in effect giving you a free ride on the train.

  Some people seem to think Parisians are rude. These people have never lived in New York or shopped at a mega home improvement store in the rest of America. Here even the taxi driver asks how you are before clicking on the meter.

  My trip is unplanned and not exactly feasible. I find a dumpy sausage-smelling hotel by the Gare du Nord train station. I make some rules: (1) no spending any time in the hotel other than sleeping during the night (for a maximum of eight hours); (2) no calling Parisian friends and pretending to be blasé and carefree about your upcoming divorce over chilled glasses of Lillet; (3) no planning any farther than three hours ahead. In other words, when I’m having a coffee for breakfast I can think about going to the Arab art museum at 11 A.M., but not about spending the summer in New York.

  I’m doing something I haven’t done in years. I’m not working or writing or traveling between families or schools or jobs. I’m on vacation. I can do whatever I want.

  I head to the twisty, romantic Saint-Germain-des-Prés. I walk into the fanciest flower shop I can find. It’s a dazzle of glass inside, as though the counter ought to be covered with emeralds tossed casually, by the handful, on swaths of black velvet.

  Like so many people in the world, I love flowers. I love walking down the street with them, the bouquet in my arm transforming my posture and entire being into somebody who dresses in haute couture and fights off admirers, laughing photogenically. I love that they come and go, down to their cheap glass vases, which you can always recycle or give to a neighbor. Actually one of the things I always loved about Lawrence was that he was macho enough to like flowers, too. He bought himself white tulips every April.

  A saleswoman approaches. She is wearing a yellow block cotton print from India, specifically the city of Jaipur. I have bought the same fabric at the same market. But she’s had hers made into a tunic with intricate, body-hugging tucks and folds. It is very sexy for a tunic, a cross between an apron and a corset. Meanwhile, she’s not young and has done nothing about her many wrinkles, save to
apply a pair of green cat-glasses that make her look artsy and smart. You can practically smell the sculptors and poets who have fallen in love with her over the years, and thrown themselves off moonlit bridges.

  “Good evening.”

  “Good evening.” The saleswoman smiles at me. I’m unnervingly close to asking if I can smell her—or work for her for no money, just for a few months. I can sleep on the floor. But she wants to know if I’m looking for something for a dinner party, perhaps? Or a friend?

  “No.” I blush. “Just for me.” I point to some tall, elegant cut lilies. Swans, essentially with petals.

  She shakes her head. “Pas pour vous, mademoiselle.”

  I like lilies. I would like to be one, in fact, cool and mysterious. Then again, I also like being corrected. Especially by her. Her face seems to say, in the kindest way, Why don’t you try again? I know that you know the answer.

  I’ve forgotten this about France. The shopkeepers want you to stay and discuss and consider and admire in order to reach the absolutely perfect selection for you, specifically. For all the obvious reasons, this process makes me anxious. I study the buckets, each so artfully arranged. The roses are the little tea ones, romantic but too young. There are some lovely mixed bunches, but I have never been a mixed-bunch person. I’m a one-flower lady, hold the baby’s breath. The Gerber daisies are too dyed-looking and spiky. The orchids are too expensive and manly. Then along come the irises.

  They are a little wan and lonely, cool and bluish purple. But also a happy yellow at the center. I point, very tentatively, at them.

  She beams. “Excellent choix!” Out come the ribbons and plastic and tissue and gilt stickers. Her hands flurry around with clippers—this stem is too long, that leaf too chunky. She wraps on the paper, then the plastic, then the ribbons. It’s a graceful minuet of endless, microscopic folds and tucks and snips. I’m so grateful. This is the nicest thing to happen to me in months. In fact, I can’t bear for it to end. So I do something horrible. I ask for another flower.