Carried Away

by Whitney Williams

  As he stood and staggered toward me, murder in his eyes, I probably should have said something. I didn’t have anything nice to say. Instead, I whipped my head around, building up some momentum in the ribbon-wrapped cord of hair down my back. Hair will burn like you wouldn’t believe. As soon as the long, loose ends passed through the gas flames, I lit. I danced toward him, full of fire and fury, whipping my hair into his chest and lighting his beard.

  ‘Law’ doesn’t help you a whole lot when your face is on fire. He should have picked a different word.

  I continued fast, leaping up furniture and catching my hair in my hands behind my back. The hotel’s sprinkler system had glass bulb heads. With my feet on top of the armoire and my head wedged against the ceiling, I slid backwards, reaching for the sprinkler with the smoldering nub of my dwindled hair-torch. When the armoire started tilting away from me, I wondered how much fire it took to set one of those sprinklers off.

  They’re pretty sensitive.

  No sooner had he extinguished his face than the rain came. He yelled something that I presumed to be a different obscenity and jumped back. I kind of wish I could remember what he said as he ducked out the door in case I ever need to pick a fight in Arabic. I expect it was unkind.

  Another thing about those sprinkler heads is that you can’t turn them off. At least I can’t. I surveyed the increasing devastation my wrath had wrought and sighed.

  I went into the bathroom to clean myself up, which was only a minor hassle with my hands behind my back. I should have learned how to pick handcuffs. It felt like an important omission from my self-taught education. If I ever open a finishing school based on my experiences, the girls will definitely learn to pick handcuffs.

  It was still pouring rain in the suite’s front room when I finished, but weather in the bedroom remained calm. I knocked a phone off its switch hook and dialed the front desk with my nose. Then I started screaming.

  “AAAHHH!!! It won’t stop! There is water everywhere! It just started…AAAHHH!!!”

  I walked out into the hall to wait for maintenance.

  My dress was still wet when Henry arrived. I had passed the time standing in the hallway, spinning back and forth to dry my skirts. When he came around the corner, I flashed a too wide and toothy grin. He smiled too but only for an instant, then he walked up to me with a furrowed brow. Before he could say anything, I interrupted him. “They’ve had to move us to a new room.” I pushed open the door, which I had wedged to keep from latching, inviting him in.

  “You’re all wet,” he asked.

  “There was a problem with the plumbing.”

  “And you got a haircut?” Only about a foot or so.

  I smiled and nodded innocently. “Mmmhmm. Do you like it?”

  “It’s lovely,” he lied. I must have jaunted my hip too far for my innocent nod because he looked around behind me and continued, “And you’re wearing handcuffs?”

  I rolled a playful growl off my tongue and winked. He didn’t buy it.

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing I couldn’t handle.”

  “Tell me what happened.” That was not a question.

  I hesitated, looking for the right euphemism. “They came onto the reservation.”

  I’m not sure why I didn’t want to tell him the whole story. Maybe it was my little revenge for the night before. I wouldn’t be able to keep it from him if he demanded to know, and I wouldn’t have shivered nervously if I hadn’t been cold and wet.

  He walked down the hall to the suite we had been in before and opened the door, then closed it immediately. Frowning and arching his eyebrows, he nodded his impressed approval. At the time I wasn’t sure which delighted me more, the nod or the fact that he never mentioned it again. In retrospect, it was the latter. That was the first time I had asked him to trust me, and he did.

  I shivered again from the evaporative cooling of my skirts when he sat me down to work on the handcuffs. I asked him to show me how he did it. They were more complicated than I expected. I practiced until I could do it easily while looking, then I latched one around my wrist and tried behind my back. I got it a couple of times, but I wanted to be faster so I kept practicing.

  Controlling the bobby pin with my fingers was difficult with everything backwards, not able to see how it was oriented. I worked for quite a while without getting it open again. I might have forgotten how to do it, so I brought my hands back in front of me and started over.

  Release single lock in travel direction. Engage double lock against travel. No. Reset double lock. Release single lock with travel. Disengage single lock. Release double opposite. No.

  I wasn’t sure I remembered the sequence right, but there were only so many possibilities. I could have asked, but I would need to be able to figure it out again if I ever forgot. Release single lock, wait, the lock latch wasn’t where it should have been. It was on the other side. That must have been the single. I was halfway done. Release double lock, but the double lock latch moved the wrong way. On the other side then. Why couldn’t I reach the lock latch?

  The pin popped out of my rigid fingers and landed on the carpet a few feet away. I saw where it went and hovered out of my chair to get it. My knees shouldn’t have hit the ground, and my arm should have stopped me from rolling onto my side. I curled up and decided to go get the pin later. Someone said something.

  “I was wondering when you’d notice.”

  Notice what? My nail beds looked kind of blueish, but I had stopped shivering so it couldn’t have been that cold. Whatever. I would feel better if I took a nap. I’d had a rough day. Right there on the floor would be fine. The carpet was soft.

  “Are you OK?”

  Yes, I’m fine. Are you OK? Your hands around my neck feel feverish. Why did you poke me like that?

  “Can you hear me?”

  Yes, I can hear you.

  He pulled my dress off and carried me to the bathtub. Even through his suit jacket, he was so nice and warm. The water was too hot, but he was adjusting it. It was still too hot, too hot, too hot, WAY TOO HOT! He had such strong, warm hands. STOP SPLASHING ME! The water was so hot I should have been scalded, but somehow it didn’t hurt.

  It should have scalded him too. He didn’t seem to care. He had his shirt off and his hands down in the water caressing me, which felt good, so good. His hands are really nice and warm! It felt so good I started shivering.

  I should have dried off and changed before practicing with the handcuffs. I also should have turned on the heater after getting all of our things into the new suite. I’d like to say in my defense that I was not the one who built a huge hotel in the middle of the desert and then air-conditioned it like a meat locker. It hadn’t felt very cold partly because Henry got home before my adrenaline wore off and partly because it wasn’t very cold, maybe 10 or 15 Celsius, equalized to the snowy atrium.

  Be that as it may, wet clothes, vasodilatation, and a rapid pulse will suck down your core temperature mighty fast, especially if your core isn’t very big.

  I finally understood what was happening when I felt that deep down cold under warm skin, like the way I’d been feeling naked under my clothes. He drained the tub and made only a brief effort to dry me off before raising my arm around his shoulder and walking me to bed. I found no warmth under the thick blankets until he brought the warmth of his body to me, burying me under himself and rubbing me all over with his hands.

  I wasn’t hurt, thank goodness. Hypothermia probably wouldn’t have killed me, but if he hadn’t been there, my dogged determination to pick the cuffs might have gotten me brain damage. He hadn’t actually saved my life in the strictest sense. I thought about Gretchen when she almost drowned. He was right to stay with her, the way he stayed with me. I never lost the feeling of his touch, not for an instant, from the moment he checked my pulse, and I didn’t want to imagine how I would have felt if he’d left me alone under those unhelpful covers. I needed him.

  People say they need each ot
her all the time, but they mean something very different from what I felt. My body’s basic metabolic functions had failed. The imperishable flame within me had gone out, and he held my ember in his hands, wrapping me in a nest of tender and gently blowing me into it. I felt like I needed him as surely and immediately as if he were manually pumping my iron lung. I felt like I needed him, and I chose not to realize I could have taken care of myself from that point. I didn’t want to.

  He rolled me onto my side and came up behind me, laying my head on his upper arm and pushing my wet hair out in front of me. One of his legs curled inward, the other staying straight, forcing me into the same position, half underneath him. He slowly tightened his clamps, trapping me in a perfect nestle between his chest and his enclosing arm, between his other arm under my head and his thigh behind my buttock, between his heavy limbs and the soft bed. I reached out along his extended arm and cuffed my wrist to his, then bent his elbow back toward me, laying his warm hand on my neck. I clutched his other hand to my breast. Please don’t let go, not now, not ever.

  The next day, I wore nothing but his suitcase, funny since I finally had clothes. Also funny, at least to him, was that he didn’t tell me the Swiss don’t search carry-ons from Dubai and the French don’t search chauffeured cars with French plates.

  It was a long ride, not as long as the last one, and it was Gretchen who gently unfolded me onto the bed of a little hotel in Lyon. Henry had work to do in Geneva and didn’t join us until the next morning.

  --Gretchen--

  Dear Diary,

  Peggy is retiring in August. I’m so glad she told me. This may be the nicest thing she has ever done for me. Henry told her he didn’t need to interview candidates for her successor, that she should pick someone. She knows how much I’ve always loved him. She knows I’ll take great care of him. Maybe she picked me only for his sake. She called me last night, and I started today. I felt bad about leaving the show, but my understudy is really very talented. I told them I could still fill in for her when needed.

  I have a small desk right next to Peggy’s for the next few months. Then I guess I’ll move into hers when she leaves. When Henry got to the office this morning and saw us both, he was not pleased. He stopped in his tracks, looked back and forth between us, then said, “You’re in cahoots, I see.” He flashed an empty smile to try to make it a joke, then went into his office, asking Peggy to come with him. I followed her in even though I knew he didn’t want me to.

  Before he could say anything, Peggy introduced me. “This is your new assistant, Gretchen.” He was not amused. He didn’t know what to say, what variation of “no” would be effective. I could see him working through arguments in his head, thinking through all the things he would say to her for which she already had answers he could not refute. I spoke first so he wouldn’t have to figure something out. That’s my job now.

  I asked him if he was uncomfortable hiring me as his assistant because of our personal relationship. Relieved that I invited him to admit it, he said he was. Then I said, “If you intend for our relationship to remain solely personal, may I ask you for a personal favor?” He said yes. I had laid a perfect little rhetorical trap for him, and he walked right into it. That was my chance to say all the things I wish I had said the night he left me alone in his bed. For so many years, I have played that memory over and over in my head, wishing I had known what to do. Now I know him too well. He didn’t stand a chance.

  I knelt, right there on the floor of his office, and begged him to have me one way or the other. He capitulated almost immediately. I wish he had taken me up on the romantic alternative in my proposition, but I knew he would not. I got the job. Maybe it was unkind of me to corner him like that and leave him no choice. Maybe I’m willing to fight dirty if the stakes are high enough.

  - gg

  Chapter Seven – I Hate Paris

  --Sally--Eurydice--

  Gretchen loved Paris. There are a billion girls all over the world thinking how sweet and romantic it would be to go to Paris to fall in love. Gretchen was one of them, possibly the worst.

  Whenever she talked about Paris, she accidentally started speaking French. She loved the wine. She loved the architecture. She loved the vibrant history on public display. She loved the shopkeepers haggling with commuters over prices of fresh ingredients they would use to make their evening meals. She loved watching young couples strolling through parks and along broad, tree-lined boulevards. She loved the puke-green color of copper statues and the Seine’s matching, smelly waters and every sewer rat under every quay up and down its length.

  Gretchen moved the Metro’s shoddy turnstiles as carefully as you move aside the arm that holds you when you wake in the night. She walked the streets of Paris like she was walking gently up and down her lover’s back, and it betrayed her. They betrayed her. I’ll never forgive them for it.

  I hate Paris. When I hear people talking about Paris, it sounds to me like they’re talking about an incurable disease. “We’ll always have Herpes.” I hate the city. I hate the people. I hate the language. I hate the museums and the cathedrals and the useless arches. I hate all the little shops up and down the Champs-Élysées hocking their stupid merchandise to stupid tourists and the snooty waiters in their rat-hole cafes. I hate the little faux-happy people picnicking on the steps of the Sacré-Cœur with their crepes and their baguettes, and I hate the stupid spellings for everything with made-up letters and all the little accent marks because even if you can read, you’re going to read it wrong, so say it like this, except no, that’s wrong too, you ignorant foreigner. I hate the gardens and the trees and all the too-ugly statues of my friend Gretchen at La Place De La Concorde, and why is there an Egyptian obelisk in the middle of the street? And everywhere you go, any way you turn, that giant, steel middle finger is pointed up into the sky right at you. Fuck Paris. There. I said it.

  We came in on the train from Lyon. As soon as we stepped out onto the platform, Gretchen was beaming, dancing around, calling everyone “mon chéri.” Of course, she spoke perfect French. She waved over our driver, who had come to the platform to meet us, and directed him to our bags. There was only the one, actually. Their suitcases had all fit into my enormous trunk, but the trunk wouldn’t fit into the car. After some discussion, we left the driver to work that out, proceeding on foot.

  We had flown in on the Concorde. Henry had meetings in Geneva that Monday, and Gretchen would never miss an excuse to visit Paris. I suppose I was terribly excited too, still possessing only the perfect memories of my first visit almost a year before. We travelled light, everything in a single bag. I tried to get it, but Henry wouldn’t let me, always the gentleman. We arrived in the morning and had time to check into our hotel before going to a late lunch.

  We took the Metro to Passy and walked to a restaurant where Gretchen had made dinner reservations for us. We could see the Eiffel Tower through a window from our table. I thought that was for my benefit; actually it was Gretchen. She loved the tower and visited every time she was in town. Henry and I kept quiet while she spoke fast, fluent French with the maitre d’ then the waiter. Then the sommelier too. She didn’t even bother looking at the menu. The sommelier returned with the chef and they talked excitedly with her. I lost count of the courses, all with their own special utensils and their own wines in differently shaped glasses. The restaurant flowed like a smooth gear train; everything was perfect. After dinner, we crossed the Seine at Pont d’Iéna. There was a long line at the tower, but Gretchen must have had tickets somehow because we didn’t have to wait.

  Gretchen took us to a little cafe in Val-de-Grâce. She chatted up the waiter, didn’t even bother opening the menu. There are never any menus with Gretchen. The waiter left, then the chef came out of the kitchen, and Gretchen talked with him. She was fast friends with everyone. Lunch was unassuming but splendid. We took a cab over to Champ de Mars. Gretchen always goes to the Eiffel Tower whenever she is in Paris. She always has a plan, too. You’re welcome
to take the stairs up any time you want, but there is a long wait for the elevator. Someone she knew met us there with tickets. “Bon jour, mon chéri!” Gretchen’s hand wagged from the top of her outstretched arm as she skipped over to her friend. They talked and laughed for a while before kissing their goodbyes.

  The night was beautiful. You can’t see the stars from Paris any more than you can from other major cities, but the city itself is lit. Looking down from the observation deck, I saw the city sprawled out beneath us in constellations of shimmering light. The Palais de Chaillot was right below us, reaching out its arms like it could catch us if we fell.

  The day was hot and weary. Like any city, Paris lives by a cacophony of traffic and bustle. You can’t hear it from so high up, but you can see it. Gretchen danced over to the railing and pressed herself against the screen like she could embrace the entire, honking, filthy metropolis. Then she fell.

  Henry walked up next to me, pointing out landmarks along the Seine. I held his arm and gazed out in wonder. We walked around the deck, looking out over the twinkling city. I pulled him close and followed, hearing only the calm sound of his voice and the excited twittering of Gretchen’s. I could not have memorized it all if I had made a recording. They were trying to give me the city. They were trying to give me the world. I drew what felt like my first breath and marveled at the wondrous universe opening to me.

  Henry dove after her, sliding along the deck and reaching down into the hole where the odd corner piece of steel deck plate had given way. I followed him to hold him steady, but he wasn’t even close. He started to scramble into the void, so I dove for him. I fell hard on the deck, flat on my chest, but I managed to catch his leg in both hands. If my own life were at stake, I could not have clutched so hard. Even so, he was flailing, trying to climb down into the steel web of girders below but grasping only air. He was slipping away. I released what felt like my last breath in an exasperated wail.