And part of it was simply this: I like people. I like learning about their go-to karaoke songs and their favorite bad movies and seeing photos of their sticky toddlers. These things are important.
But after my surgery, I felt like I’d lost that part of myself (the conversational part, I mean. My lifelong quest for cake endured and was arguably now less hampered by human interaction, but I would still argue that something essential to who I was had gone missing). The ease with which I once composed concertos of conversation was gone. I tripped over phrases; I struggled with small talk. Cognitive exercises that had once seemed effortless—like blogging, and tweeting, and fighting with people on the Internet who used “literally” improperly—were now frustrating at best. On bad days, they were impossible.
I’d stare at my computer screen, the cursor flashing at me like a metronome. I’d tap along, trying to will the words out, but they never came.
I wondered if they’d escaped, rushing out of the hole in my head. Or if my tumor itself had been some integral part of who I was. I mean, you can’t take out a piece of someone’s brain and have them be the same.
Or can you?
But every checkup I had was perfect. My brain was utterly undamaged. No one noticed any differences, or if they did, they said nothing. All of this should have been comforting, but it just amplified my frustration with myself. And then one afternoon, after I’d struggled to write a blog post, a feeble attempt to be funny through the fog of self-doubt and sadness, someone left a comment that said I was just recycling the same old jokes, and it was “getting old.”
Now, on the spectrum of horrific things that people say when protected by the anonymity of the Internet, this is pretty far toward the “sugar and ponies” end of things. The amount of vitriol that I’ve had addressed to me over the years in grammatically problematic missives is both alarming and hilarious. If you are a woman on the Internet, this is par for the course—people who have never met you will say shocking things, mostly about your vagina, and occasionally, when they want to get really creepy, about your eyeballs.
If someone tells you that your jokes are getting old, it is basically the online equivalent of a gift basket, albeit one filled with culinarily specious treats like summer sausages and canned cheese (two things that should not be shelf-stable: meat and dairy). The most meaningful response it should elicit is an insincere thank-you and a witty retort. And yet when I read this accurate if insensitive comment, I promptly burst into tears. That comment hit far too close to a nerve.
“YOUR MOM IS GETTING OLD,” I screamed at the computer, before scooting my keyboard out of the way, putting my head down on my desk, and wallowing in self-pity, in a way that Joan of Arc and Susan B. Anthony and Tina Turner and so many other heroic woman before me had not.
I tried to resume life as normal. We went on trips; I wandered around cities; I blogged. I felt like I’d stepped into someone else’s life. I pretended I knew what I was doing. I pretended everything felt normal. After all, weren’t things better now?
In January, Rand had actually taken a break with me in South Africa. We went back to Ireland in March and had a lovely time. We went to Australia in April and swam the Great Barrier Reef, which Rand had wanted to see since writing a report about it when he was nine. Then in the spring, I learned that a friend of mine from high school had died of brain cancer, leaving behind his wife and a son he’d never meet.
I felt guilty for being alive. I felt guilty for spending my days feeling terrible. I wanted to go back to how things were before all this had happened, but in this scenario Rand’s promise to me didn’t hold true: there was no cab that could take me back to how things were.
In the wake of loss and mired in depression, just before the one-year anniversary of my own surgery, Rand and I left for Paris for the second time in our lives. And for the first time, we actually made it there.
I’d heard from various other travelers, movies, and cartoons that Paris itself was a sort of chaotic nightmare, an overpriced tourist trap wrapped in a cliché. And that Parisians are universally horrible to everyone, but they reserve a special bit of loathing for Americans.
I was sufficiently petrified of this, and so I’d spent the last few months studying French, an endeavor at which I exhibited a level of such profound incompetence that even my seasoned tutor seemed taken aback. I’d nevertheless managed to keep a few important phrases in my head, which I will share now at no additional cost to you. A gratis lesson in Français, for which I ask nothing in return. Though I suppose if you did wish to thank me, the additional purchase of several more copies of this book might serve. It makes an excellent gift or a nominee for the National Book Award. But I digress.
French for the Wretched. Lesson 1:
“Je voudrais des macarons, s’il vous plaît.”
I would like some macarons, please.
“J’ai chlamydia.”
I have chlamydia.
In what will be both a defense and criticism of my French instructor, I will note that she only taught me that first phrase. I looked up the second one on my own.
For the record, I do not actually have chlamydia (despite what the captain of a rival high school debate team told everyone in the twelfth grade after we made out one time), but I imagined vivid scenarios in which falsely professing to have an STD might get me out of trouble in France. I would thwart pickpockets and mimes and an overly flirtatious Sarkozy by screaming it loudly, confusing them long enough for me to make my escape.
I also had a bunch of commonly used niceties in my wheelhouse, like s’il vous plaît and merci beaucoup and désolé, which means “I’m sorry.”
As in, “Désolé, monsieur/madame, j’ai chlamydia.”
None of this would prove to be even remotely necessary, but I’ve come to understand that we all do different things to better prepare ourselves for a trip. Rand likes to answer all his email, open up a fresh pair of contact lenses, and do extra exercises so his back will hurt less. I like to pack excess underwear and commit to memory the names of venereal diseases in the local language, a combination of actions that, I now realize, is somewhat alarming.
Paris triggered a special and unprecedented level of anxiety in me; this is noteworthy, as my calm is a normal person’s panicked, and my panicked is a normal person’s “OH, GOD, WHAT IS HAPPENING?”
Here is a short list of the things I expected to encounter in the city of light:
• dog shit (my friend Mindy had warned me that it peppered the city like an unholy seasoning),
• thieves, and
• a bunch of people who acted as though I had murdered them in another life.
But reality, once again, did not align with my expectations. I found none of what I had feared and no occasion to scream about STDs under the Arc de Triomphe. Instead, Paris would make good on every other promise made by the art nouveau movement and films starring Audrey Hepburn. There were broad streets lined with trees, down which elegantly dressed men and women strolled. There were red-painted lips and well-tailored suits, blooming flowers, ornate wrought-iron fences, and Metro signs designed by Hector Guimard. If you listened hard enough, you’d swear you could hear accordion music playing. Walking down the Champs-Élysées one warm afternoon, we actually did.
I pressed my nose against a bakery window and stared at the long cases inside, filled with macarons in a sea of colors, in flavors I couldn’t have even dreamed of (not even during those dessert hallucinations that haunted me the week that I tried a paleo diet).
“Come back for me in three days,” I whispered to Rand as he laughed.
Outwardly I smiled and tried to enjoy it all, while struggling with the sickening belief that it was wasted on me. Not just Paris, but all of it: the doting husband, the noncancerous brain, the endless pastries I shoved into my mouth with the subtlety of a squirrel finding a cache of nuts in midwinter.
Don’t misunderstand me: I never thought I was deserving of the rich fairy tale that was my life. Bu
t it was indisputably mine. I now felt like those memories belonged to someone else. That the surgery had somehow erased that previous iteration of Geraldine and I had taken her place.
I was an imposter in my own life.
I explained to a friend that it reminded me of an actor being replaced by another one halfway through a TV series. I’ve always gotten a huge kick out of the absurdity of it. No one seems to notice that Mom is now a sturdy blonde instead of a slim brunette, or that infants seem to age years over one summer hiatus. They just accept it. I’ve always assumed that inwardly, someone must be screaming.
During the filming of Mad Men, Don Draper’s son was played by no fewer than four different actors, something that Rand and I took to joking about at length. Whenever the character got out of line, we’d scream things like, “Go to your room until we can replace you!” and “You don’t hold a candle to Bobby #2!”
One full year after my surgery, that’s how I felt. The elation of being alive was long gone, and I could only fixate on the fact that twelve months had passed, and I wasn’t back to normal. It was as though Original Geraldine had been replaced with another one, and the rest of the cast failed to notice what was so glaringly obvious. And this new Geraldine was not someone I liked.
She was slower and quieter and had a frizzy patch of hair growing back through the scar tissue in her scalp. I know how self-pitying and vaguely psychotic this all sounds, but there was a strange, sick comfort in all of it as well. Hating myself made it much easier to deal with the guilt of being perfectly fine.
But getting lost gives you perspective. It always does. When you don’t know where you are, the best thing to do is step back and try to make sense of things. For me, the turning point happened somewhere in the short walk between the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre.
Art museums have always been a place of solace and contemplation for me. Other people meditate, or visit temples of worship, or take a hike in the woods. I wander the modern art wing. It requires less repentance and less cardio, and there’s usually a café with cake.
That’s where I find peace, being that particular breed of nerd who can stare at a seemingly nonsensical piece of art and clap her hands excitedly. Who can point out the influences of other masters in a painting or sculpture and be moved by all of it. I say this not to brag. It’s just the sort of skill one acquires when still a virgin in her twenties.
I hadn’t planned on visiting the d’Orsay. I overlooked it, as people so often do, failing to realize that whatever treasures were not in the Louvre were here. The d’Orsay is often overshadowed by its glitzy sibling, but Rand knew what it held. When I asked him which museum he wanted to tackle in Paris on his day off, he skipped over the perennial favorite and went straight for the Musée d’Orsay.
The Louvre, home to the Mona Lisa, would have been the obvious choice. But my husband is always wary of things that are too popular, too universally loved. He goes for dark horses and unconventionally beautiful things. I do not question him in this endeavor. I know precisely how I benefit from it.
The d’Orsay is vast and cavernous, an airplane hangar for humanity’s brief moments of greatness. There is a massive central hall lined in mosaic tiles, with arched windows running down both sides. At one end, a massive clock hangs, just in case you should lose track of how jet lagged you are. Seeing it there, insisting that it was 2 p.m. when my heart and mind and the trail of spittle coming out of my mouth clearly insisted it was bedtime, felt like a microcosm of the last few months. The world was telling me one thing—that I was totally fine. I was insisting another—that I was now the sort of person who got mad at clocks.
The galleries shoot off this main hall, filled with anemic-looking Cézannes, pixelated Seurats, and enough Monets to fill a decade’s worth of dental office calendars. Renoirs in which all the subjects looked soft and fuzzy, like those weird humanoid Muppets. There were Van Goghs, swirly and vibrant, each surrounded by a crowd of onlookers. The oft-told tale is that the doomed painter never sold a canvas in his lifetime and is now heralded as one of the greatest artists the world has ever seen. I suppose there is a lesson to be learned from that, but all I take away is heartache. Van Gogh died at thirty-seven.
In one gallery, I paused in front of a cluster of Toulouse-Lautrec’s paintings of the Moulin Rouge. Even his most vibrant subjects—dancers and clowns—were gray-skinned and gaunt, looking as if they might at any minute die of consumption. I wonder if that was how Toulouse-Lautrec saw the world—fragile and sick. After having been plagued by illness all his life, he eventually succumbed to complications of alcoholism and syphilis at thirty-six.
It should have depressed me. Instead, I found odd comfort in the realization that nothing was eternal. I stared at the brushstrokes of geniuses who had died young and realized that even their works, no matter how much they were cared for, would eventually crumble and fade. But they still painted them because making something beautiful—even if it lasts for a second—is never futile.
Everything changes us. Brain surgeries, heartaches, divorces, bankruptcies, amputated ears, mental illness—it all helps to paint the picture of who we are at a precise moment in time. We are constantly adding layers of ourselves in brushstrokes big and small. The canvas is ever-evolving. Of course I wasn’t the same person I was before my surgery. I wasn’t the same person I was five minutes ago. None of us are.
That, I’d realize, was what I had to reckon with after surgery. Not trying to get back to who I was. That Geraldine was, for better or worse, gone. Instead, I needed to be okay with losing that part of myself. I needed to be comfortable with who I had become.
The next day, I went to the Louvre by myself. I’d anticipated something even grander than the Musée d’Orsay, even more majestic and lovely. Elaborate gilded frames and curving vines, all lit with a sepia-tinged glow, like Mucha paintings brought to life. Hallowed halls, as silent as an empty church.
The reality is less that and more like a college kegger. Lots of people shouting and taking selfies and touching the artwork because apparently it’s not enough to look at it. You really need to feel Delacroix’s brushstrokes to understand him.
The Louvre’s layout does nothing to help mitigate its likeness to a drunken sex carnival. The architect clearly wanted to incorporate the classical into the modern while still remaining true to his roots as a sadist.
There is a wide cement courtyard, lined on three sides by the massive, U-shaped building, and the iconic glass pyramid sits alone in the middle. There is no shade in this courtyard, and if you neglected to get your ticket beforehand (which I did), this is where you will have to stand in line, hopefully briefly, baking in the midsummer Parisian sun (which, also, I did).
It was 10:30 a.m. on a Thursday, and so the line was relatively short. Within ten minutes I was inside the glass pyramid and took an elevator down one floor (only by going underground do you discover the pyramid is connected to the rest of the U-shaped building). This layout is ingenious, as it gives one relatively easy access to any wing of the museum, but also panic-inducing, as swarms of people head in different directions, usually while screaming in a plethora of languages.
It is okay to cry at this point. But know that it gets worse.
One level below the glass pyramid, you will become acutely aware that it acts like a magnifying glass above an anthill—its windows amplify and focus the searing June sun directly onto the crowds.
I breathed deeply. I needed to get out of there as soon as possible. I unfurled the map and decided I’d simply visit the works highlighted in the museum pamphlet. (It’s probably the exact opposite of what Rick Steves would have done, but as I noted, he wears pleated-front pants across Europe, thus nullifying his opinion.)
The first item on my agenda was, of course, the Mona Lisa.
I’d seen her parodied countless times, seen reproductions of her image with its enigmatic smile and absent eyebrows—which may have been intentional or possibly a result of overzealous cleaning—time
and again. I was delighted by the prospect of seeing the real thing.
I followed a series of signs that were posted all around the museum, bearing not only the painting’s name but a small black-and-white reproduction of it as well, a rather considerate touch for those museum patrons unfamiliar with the Roman alphabet.
I wove through the Bacchanalia of the museum. There were people touching some of the statues; the nearby guards made no move to stop them—either they didn’t notice, or perhaps they realized their efforts were Sisyphean and had wisely given up. Flashbulbs fired like heat lightning on ancient canvases, despite the many signs requesting that they be shut off.
After a twenty-minute trek, I turned a corner and found myself in the right gallery. At the end of it was the Mona Lisa, surrounded by a crowd of at least thirty people. I squeezed through, remembering the years I spent navigating concert crowds in my twenties (there was a brief, fleeting moment in my life when I may have been cool), and finally made it to the front.
There she was, smiling at me with her naked brow and odd little grin.
And there I was, utterly confused as to what the big deal was.
Other than a cautionary tale for why you should leave facial depilation in the hands of a professional, I didn’t understand.
This is blasphemous, I know. She is a masterpiece, but I couldn’t understand why. I stood there for a good while, waiting for one of the world’s most famous paintings to resonate with me, and it didn’t. I gave it a fair chance. I held my ground, near the front, while my fellow museum patrons jostled next to me with all the subtlety and grace of a mob of Black Friday shoppers.
I’d heard that the painting was smaller than most people expect it to be, so I was prepared for that, but not for how underwhelmed I’d be. I’ve heard time and again that some things lose their magic when you see them in person, but I’ve found that in my travels, the opposite is more often true. Believe me when I tell you that the Pantheon will render you speechless. And that Jay-Z, whom I once saw in New York before he disappeared in a puff of lavender smoke, is an Adonis in a white suit.
All Over the Place Page 18