by Stacy Travis
It was cute for a while. But the night of the reunion was the polar opposite. When I told him I was leaving, he eyed me like an annoying mosquito and told me how much fun he was having with his friends. “We have a lot of catching up to do,” he said again.
“Okay, well, I’m still gonna go.”
Instead of remarking that I was stunning and adorable—his two favorite words for me—he said something different in a tone I’d never heard before. “Why are you being such a bitch?”
“Excuse me?” I was in the middle of convincing myself I hadn’t heard him correctly when he continued.
“You’re always trying to do this to me. It’s not cool.” He popped the cap on another beer. He missed his mouth when he tried to take a drink, and it dripped down his chin. He wiped the suds off with the back of his hand, blinking heavily at me.
“Doing what?”
“Trying to crush my buzz,” he said, a little belligerent. The brunette was still hanging all over him, and she looked at me like I was an intruder she wanted to assassinate with her pointy fingernails.
“Oh my God. I’m not trying to do that. You should stay and have fun. I’m just ready to go,” I said.
“So go. What do I care?” It was the first time he’d ever talked to me like that. I couldn’t tell whether it was brinkmanship or the alcohol, but I didn’t want to be there. Not at this party, not with him.
I walked toward the house, fully intending to leave.
Then I felt a pang of guilt. He just wanted to have fun and maybe I was a buzzkill. I decided to find a quiet spot in the house and wait a little longer to see if he’d leave with me.
It’s what a person in a relationship did. Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure I was the only one who believed it was a relationship.
An hour later, I looked around the yard and didn’t see him in the spot where he’d been hanging out for most of the night. The only way out of the party was through the house, and I’d have seen him if he’d passed by me there.
Then I noticed a pool house in the corner of the yard—bright lights streamed through a window—and figured people must be hanging out in there. But when I walked through the door, I didn’t see people. I saw Johnny. Getting a blowjob from the brunette he’d been with earlier. Her tank top and bra were on the floor.
I stood, frozen, first wanting to un-see what I couldn’t get my brain to process. It had to be an easily explained misunderstanding.
How, exactly?
I was having trouble forming words.
As if he felt my eyes on him, Johnny turned and blinked a couple times at me like he too was confused by what was happening. The now-topless woman had extracted his dick from her mouth but she did her best to look away from me. “I thought you left,” was all he said.
Because that would have made it cool.
I didn’t cry over him, and I didn’t wonder if I should forgive him and try to salvage some part of our pointless non-relationship.
At thirty, I knew I wanted more. So I did what any self-respecting woman would do—I packed for my trip to France.
After shredding his nonrefundable ticket and telling him never to call me again.
Chapter Three
A Plane on the Tarmac
The flight attendants, who each wore their hair wound up in a bun under a navy blue cap, walked down the aisles, handing tiny headphones in plastic wrap to anyone who needed them. The ones I’d brought didn’t fit in the two holes in the armrest, so I took the small bundle and unwrapped the earbuds.
“Excuse me,” a female voice said.
I looked up and saw a petite brown-haired woman with E-cup breasts that formed a shelf above her midsection. I don’t normally size up other women’s breasts but they were eye-level. I coveted her dark velour sweatsuit and realized she’d perfected the comfortable travel outfit. In my jeans, I was in for a long night of wedgies.
She was looking at her boarding pass and eyeing the row number over my head. Hers was the middle seat, so I moved so she could stow her purse and buckle in.
“Debra,” she said, extending a hand. She held a stack of magazines with the other hand, People sitting on top.
“Hi. I’m Nikki,” I said, wondering whether she’d be chatty or if she just figured anyone about to share a four-by-six-foot space for ten hours ought to get acquainted. She looked over at the bearded guy on her other side—he now had the eyemask over half his face—and turned back to me with a shrug. Now that we’d met, I just might ask to borrow her People magazine when she was done. Since I worked at a public relations firm, I heard—and generally ignored—celebrity gossip and it couldn’t have interested me less. But on vacay, bring it on.
It turned out Debra was the last to board. The flight attendants closed the plane doors and began their safety demonstration. Debra rolled her eyes at me when they asked us to give them our undivided attention. I smiled like we were on the same team of scofflaws, but I watched the demonstration because… rule follower.
The man by the window had already fallen asleep with his mouth open. I’d seen him shake a tiny pill from a bottle and down it with some water. I’d never flown for ten hours before, so it hadn’t occurred to me that medically-induced sleeping might be a good idea.
I’d only left the country a couple of times—once in college, when I crossed the border south of San Diego and spent a night in Tijuana, and a second time when I spent a semester learning Spanish in a small town near Quito, Ecuador. I realized that my high school Spanish would be of no use in France, so I’d been using a language app on my headphones while jogging.
“Le train est grand,” the language program would prompt me to repeat. It was great vocabulary to have in case someone asked me about the size of a train. I wouldn’t know how to get to the train, but that was beside the point.
I was happy to be taking this trip. I didn’t need a boyfriend or a travel companion to have a great time and I was looking forward to waking up each morning and coming up with my own plan for the day. I was independent. I could do this. Traveling alone would be good for me and it would push my boundaries. It would force me to be light and spontaneous on my own. In a foreign language. With jet lag. On unfamiliar territory. In a country where I knew no one.
No, I’m not at all freaked out.
And because I was completely freaked out, my thoughts drifted again to Johnny, as if my brain was caught in a loop, rehashing our relationship and wondering if it made me a weak feminist to think that the wrong guy was better than no guy.
Don’t answer that. I know, it’s no guy. No guy!
My friend Annie had known the answer to that question long before Johnny and I ever had a fight. We always fought about the same thing; how I wasn’t spontaneous enough and how he wouldn’t take anything seriously. And even though Annie was my closest friend and I trusted that she always had my back, I chose to ignore her concerns. At least initially.
“I get that he’s fun. But is that all there is?” Annie said, after meeting Johnny for the first time at a wedding last year. She lived in San Francisco, so we didn’t see each other much anymore, but we’d been roommates for all four years of college and I loved her like a sister. She was my polar opposite—impulsive and insistent with her opinions where I tended to think and consider. She had a sleeve of flower tattoos and the wiry, lean body of a triathlete, where the thought of doing three different sports in a week exhausted me, let alone in a single race. But our hearts understood each other and she was my go-to for everything.
Thus, I put stock in her unvarnished view of him. She’d seen me at all hours of the day and night in various stages of relationships, excited about a new guy or depressed about a shiny new fraternity pledge who wouldn’t give me the time of day. “You’re an ambitious early riser, and he brags about drinking late and sleeping late. You plan for every eventuality, and he was just talking about skydiving later today just, you know, because.”
“Don’t you think it’s good for me to get out of my comfort zon
e?” I said, still trying to hang on to the idea that he made me better. “Wait, he said he’s going skydiving?”
“You’re going too. Apparently, it will be ‘off the chain,’” Annie said. I could hear Johnny saying exactly that. “He’s also planning to have you pay for it. Listen, I just want you to be happy. I don’t think you have to prove you’re adventurous. I love your neurotic need to plan, and I still find you fun without the skydiving.”
“That’s because you’re like that too,” I said.
“True, and I want you to be the person you are. Not the one who proves she’s fun by jumping to her death from a plane. I don’t like that he makes you doubt yourself and your instincts just because he doesn’t think about tomorrow.”
The idea of jumping from a plane invoked abject panic in me, but I continued to cling to the benighted conviction that two people with different outlooks could complement each other. “I’m serious enough for the two of us,” I said. “Don’t you think he brings out something better in me? A lighter, spontaneous side?” Annie would never lie to me. She was the smartest woman I knew and the youngest person to make partner at her lawfirm, while fostering six rescue dogs on the side.
“If anything, he brings out your more anal, responsible side because you always have to clean up after him,” Annie said.
Whelp… there you have it. Truer words were never spoken.
It turned out Debra liked to chat. That was okay with me since I knew there was very little chance of me sleeping on the plane. I could really only sleep fully-reclined, which meant that unless I wanted to lie on the floor at Debra’s feet, I’d be awake.
“You traveling to see family?” she asked.
“No, just doing my own thing.”
“Ah, sounds like heaven. I’m in a wedding, and my entire time in France is planned, right down to the ride from the airport. Though I guess I can’t complain about the ride.”
“Who’s getting married? Friend?”
“My sister. She lives in Provence. Ever since she spent her junior year abroad, she’s been dying to marry a French guy, and wouldn’t you know, she met Allain in New York. He swore he would never go back to France, not after he’d just finished getting his green card to stay in the US. But he was no match for my sister. When she gets her heart set on something, watch out.” Debra laughed.
“Have you been before? To France?” I asked.
“Nope, never. You?”
I shook my head. “First time.”
She looked awed and impressed. “First time and you’re off on your own. You’re so brave.”
I didn’t feel brave. I felt like I was putting on an empowered facade when inside, I was clinging to my mom’s pantleg and begging her not to leave me at preschool. I wanted to be brave. But I just felt tired.
“I’m not sure it’s bravery. But I’m going, regardless.”
“That is bravery. You just defined bravery.” I liked Debra. I considered asking if I could tag along with her to the wedding. I’d make myself unobtrusive and I wouldn’t eat. But at least I’d have a plan.
Debra kept going on about my bravery, however, so I chickened out.
“It’s gonna be amazing. You’re gonna find yourself. Maybe you’ll have some kind of Eat, Pray, Love adventure and not come back for two years,” she said.
The thought evoked abject panic and I assured her there would be no two-year adventure. “I have a return ticket, and I intend to use it.”
“I’m just sayin’.”
“I guess. I don’t feel especially brave. I just feel nervous.”
“Of course you do. You’re going alone. You’ll be eating dinner alone. I’ve never done that,” she said.
Nor had I. As if I needed reminding.
I would be eating dinner alone. Every night.
Debra must’ve seen something in my face, possibly the sudden pallor of a dead woman, because she started stammering. “I mean… it’s gonna be great. You’ll figure it out as you go. That’s what people do in Europe. They backpack around and figure it out.”
Despite myself—and the lack of a backpack or a parachute—I felt her enthusiasm start to embolden me. “You’re right. I’ll figure it out,” I said.
“We each have to follow the path in front of us,” she said,
And she was right. This was mine.
When the captain asked the flight attendants to secure the doors, something shifted in me. I felt suddenly at peace. My momentary panic was supplanted by excitement because the only direction was forward. I also felt freed, finally, from blaming myself for not making an adult relationship work with a guy who didn’t want one. I needed to get back to being myself. I didn’t need a relationship. I needed to remember who I was before Johnny. Independent and self-sufficient—that was how I would be for the next two weeks and for all the weeks to come.
As Los Angeles faded into the distance beneath the plane, so did any lingering doubt that I would be fine. I already felt better.
Onward.
I was going on my own, and whatever lay in front of me would be mine to choose and determine. I needed to get away—maybe ten thousand miles away—in order to put my relationship behind me and get into the right frame of mind for whatever came next.
I could tell the flight attendants wanted us to be sleeping because they turned up the heat, turned down the lights, and asked us to draw the window shades. Debra had to reach over and do that because the man in our row still hadn’t surfaced from his Ambien haze. The fact that the rest of the passengers managed to fall asleep didn’t stop my active brain from churning through topics like it was on steroids.
Debra put her eye mask on and took off her shoes to settle in for a nap. I felt self-conscious about turning on my reading lamp in the dark plane, but with most of the people around me blocking the light with eye masks, I decided no one would mind if I burned a little midnight oil.
My eyes felt bleary, but I tried to read one of my books, a mystery that should have hooked me by the end of the first twenty pages, but I lost interest. I leafed through the airline magazine and saw that someone had completed the crossword puzzle and ripped out one of the articles. I read Debra’s People cover to cover. I played solitaire on my phone, which bored me so much I decided staring at the headrest in front of me was more fun. Boredom and staring, however, did not translate into sleep.
I shifted positions, closed my eyes, tried again to read, and then gave up. I repeated that sequence innumerable times, stuck in my own personal wakeful hell.
But ten hours later, we were landing.
Chapter Four
Paris, France
I walked like a zombie through customs and picked up my luggage, then I followed the masses to a bus stop where something called the Roissybus would arrive and take me somewhere near the center of Paris. It was relatively cheap and easy to find at the airport terminal. No cabs on my meager vacay budget.
A throaty female voice came over a loudspeaker and thanked us for riding the “Wassy Bus.” That was how she pronounced it. Even with my limited French-language skills, I knew enough to recognize a clunky Americanized pronunciation. But it was oddly comforting to hear someone butchering the language as badly as I was sure to do. I’d heard rumors of French people having little tolerance for American tourists, but the recorded voice on the bus made me feel like I was in good company.
Before I knew it, we’d passed along the outer highways and crossed into the eighteenth arrondissement, down a busy avenue, and into the center of Paris. Paris! I had to take a moment and pinch myself to believe I’d actually made it there. As the bus drove, I looked out the window and saw the majestic Arc de Triomphe in the distance then the Eiffel Tower soaring above the rooftops of the city.
When the bus pulled over in front of the Opéra Garnier, I hopped off, grabbed my overstuffed blue duffel bag and a roller suitcase I’d borrowed from my parents. As the bus pulled away, I surveyed my surroundings. The streets teamed with tiny cars and mopeds. Well-dressed peop
le hustled past on the sidewalks. I was thrilled to be in a foreign city and also scared shitless because I had no idea where to go.
Channeling Hemmingway and Georgia O’Keefe, I Googled left-bank hotels, picturing myself drinking absinthe with a present day Ernest. There were a few I could afford in the fourteenth arrondissement, near the one skyscraper in central Paris—the Montparnasse Tower—but I couldn’t see a skyscraper from where I stood and had no idea where that was in relation to where the bus had stopped.
So I did the only logical thing.
No, I didn’t cry.
The next logical thing.
No, I didn’t get drunk.
I quickly retreated to the closest cafe I could find and plopped myself down at an outside table to order a cup of coffee. Coffee could fix anything.
It wasn’t busy. About half the tables were filled, and I noticed other people sitting alone, which made me feel a little bit better. At a table in front of mine, two women who looked my age sat with bottles of Perrier and tall glasses in front of them. One of them held the leash of a small white dog, who licked water from a saucer under the table. The other had a motorcycle helmet on the seat next to her.
Johnny rode motorcycles… Stop it, stop it, stop it.
Two men to my right seemed like they were talking business, based on the yellow legal pad between them, the drawings they couldn’t seem to agree on, and their continued head shaking and discussing. Everyone had a purpose, even the man who sat alone, writing in a small blue notebook, and the older woman eating a plate of smoked salmon and drinking wine with the dignity that a formal lunch warranted. I remembered the term café society, and for the first time, I understood what it meant. There was something magical about people sitting in conversation with each other. Almost no one was snapping selfies of their food or texting while sitting in front of a perfectly good person to talk to. They were doing what humans were meant to be doing—talking, connecting, and interacting. I felt myself longing to participate somehow, someway, and speak in some combination of English and Duolingo French with someone I’d yet to meet. I couldn’t see my way clear to how that would happen, but I committed to staying optimistic.