“When does winter break start?” he asks me, lowering his hands.
“Today.”
“When do you go back?”
“The fifth.”
He takes out his BlackBerry. “Okay,” he says, after a few seconds. “That works. Actually, that works well. You can come with me.”
“We tried that once, remember? It doesn’t work. Minna hates me.”
“I meant to Paris. I’m flying there on Monday from Boston. For work. As long as the airline doesn’t call a strike, that is. They’ve been threatening to all week. I’m staying with G and Lili. They have a new place. Plenty of room. You’re coming with me.”
I laugh out loud. “No, I’m not.”
“No arguments, Andi. You’re coming to Paris and you’re taking your laptop with you. We’ll be there for three weeks. Plenty of time for you to work up an outline for your thesis.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something? What about Mom? What do we do about her? Just leave her here by herself?”
“I’m checking your mother into a hospital,” he says.
I stare at him, too shocked to speak.
“I called Dr. Becker. Right after I got here. He’ll get her into Archer-Rand. It’s a good place. They have a good program. Can you pack some things for her? I’m going to take her early tomorrow morning and—”
“Why? Why are you doing this?” I shout angrily. “You were never here when you were supposed to be. Now you’re not supposed to be and here you are. Nobody asked you to come. We’re doing fine without you. Totally fine. We’ve always done fine without you.”
“Fine? Is this what you call fine?” he shouts back. “This house is a dump. Your mother’s lost her mind. And you’re about to get kicked out of school. Nothing’s fine, Andi. Nothing.”
“I’m not going. I swear I’m not.”
I pick up my bag and head for the door.
“Where are you going? Andi? Andi, I asked you a—”
There’s a crash from the parlor.
“Marianne? Are you all right?” Dad shouts. He runs into the parlor.
“I’m not going to Paris,” I say, slamming the door behind me. “I’m not going anywhere with you. I swear to God I’m not.”
9
It’s cold on the streets of Brooklyn.
I’m standing on the corner of Cranberry and Henry. A neon Santa is glowing in the window of Kim’s Deli. Under his smiling fat face, three words flash on and off: Ho, Ho, Ho.
Kim’s is closed. Mabruk’s is closed. In the dry cleaner’s next to Mabruk’s, clocks showing times all over the world tell me it’s 5:35 a.m. in London and 6:35 a.m. in Prague.
I need to go inside. I’m freezing to death. I forgot my jacket. I blow on my hands. Hug myself. For a few seconds, I let myself imagine what it would be like to go home, build a fire, have some hot cocoa with my parents, and talk everything through.
Ho, Ho, Ho, says neon Santa.
I look at the clocks again. 5:36 a.m. in Reykjavik. 8:36 a.m. in Riyadh. Riyadh … Is Sunday a workday in Saudi Arabia? If it is, King Abdullah’s sure to be up and about, and Vijay Gupta will be, too—trying to get him on the phone.
I head for Hicks Street. Number 32 is a small brownstone with a statue of Ganesha in the front yard. The house is dark, except for a light burning in a window on the second floor. I see Vijay in that window. He’s got a headset on. I fish some coins out of my pocket and throw them at the glass. One hits. Vijay comes to the window and waves. A few minutes later, the front door opens. He tells me he’s on hold with Kabul.
It’s dark in the hallway but we don’t turn any lights on. I follow him up the stairs and into his room. It’s a full-on fire hazard. I can’t cross the floor without stepping on issues of the Economist and the New Republic. He’s got Aljazeera streaming on his laptop, the BBC on his PC. I’ve never known anyone so interested in the whole wide horrible world.
I flop into his bed and pull his comforter around me. He puts a plate on the pillow. Samosas. The Guptas own ten Indian restaurants.
“What’s up?” he says, sitting down at his desk.
“Can I—” I start to say, through a mouthful of food, but he holds up a finger.
“Yes, ma’am, I tried the press office,” he says into the phone. “They gave me your number. No, I’m not a reporter. I’m trying to get President Karzai to comment on my thesis. I’m a student. An American student. At St. Anselm’s. Um … St. Anselm’s? In Brooklyn? Hello? Hello?”
He takes his headset off. Swears.
“Wow, V, I’m shocked,” I say. “I thought for sure Karzai would tell the Taliban to chill for a sec so he could take the call. Especially when you said you were from St. Anselm’s.”
He gives me a look. I’m about to ask him if I can crash in his room tonight when we both hear it—the sound of footsteps, brisk and purposeful, coming down the hallway. And then a voice, “Vijay? Viiiiijay!”
“Duck and cover,” he says. “Here comes the Atom Mom.”
She’s fearless, Mrs. Gupta. I can think of so many unsavory things a seventeen-year-old boy might be doing in his room after midnight but Mrs. Gupta doesn’t even knock; she just throws open the door and stands there, hands on her hips, eyes blazing—the goddess Kali in a terry cloth robe.
“Vijay! I heard you talking!”
“I was on the phone!”
“I heard two voices! Two! Why aren’t you studying? Do you want to stir curry all your life? Do you think Harvard wants boys who fool around day and night? Why are you wasting your time like this?”
“Gee, thanks, Mrs. Gupta,” I say. Her first name is Rupal. I’ve never heard anyone use it.
“Ah! It’s you, Andi. What are you doing in my son’s bed at this hour?”
“Trying to sleep.”
“What about your own bed? In your own house? How can Vijay study this way? How can you study this way? Life is not party, party, party! You must get good grades. Both of you. Do you know what awaits you if you do not? No? Well, then, I will tell you …”
Vijay leans back in his chair and groans.
“… a life spent making chapatis for every Tanmay, Deepak, and Hari! You’ll be living with ten roommates in some filthy apartment in Jackson Heights because you won’t be affording Brooklyn Heights on the minimum wage. No, no, no! How will you eat? How will you pay your bills? This is not the ATV world you two seem to think it is—”
“MTV world,” Vijay says.
“—where silly people with tattoos play guitars all day and no one ever works!” She pauses for breath, then adds, “You are heartless, you children. The worry you make for your parents!” When she finishes, she gives Vijay the most tragic look imaginable, as if she had a serial killer for a son instead of a Harvard-bound valedictorian.
“Go home, Andi,” she says to me. “Home is where young ladies belong at this hour. Your mother will be anxious.”
To Vijay she says, “Did you try President Zardari?”
“Go back to bed, Mom!” he shouts.
Mrs. Gupta leaves. Vijay says, “Ah, yes, winter break in Mombai. No place I’d rather be. So anyway, why are you in my bed at this hour?”
“Because I want you, baby.”
We both laugh hysterically at that. Vijay dates the valedictorian at Slater, a beautiful girl named Kavita who wants to be a pediatrician. They go running in Prospect Park. I date guys who look like Joey Ramone. They go running, too. Out of stores, mainly. With security guards behind them.
“What happened?” he asks me again.
“Nothing. Why do you think something happened?”
“Something always happens with you. Did you go to Nick’s party?”
“I did.”
“And?”
I wink at him. “It’ll be on the front page of tomorrow’s Post.”
“Seriously, Andi.”
I want to tell him it almost was in the Post. I want to say that I came close tonight. Up on Nick’s roof. The closest I’ve ever been. One step. All I
needed was one step. I want to tell him about my father. And my mother. And Paris. That’s why I came here. I want to tell him that I’m afraid. But I don’t. Because looking at him, with his headset and his books and his notes, I know he shouldn’t be dealing with me tonight. Or ever. He should be on the phone with Downing Street and the Élysée Palace and the White House. Because he’s that smart and that good.
I get up. “I’m going to head,” I say. “I’ll let myself out.”
“Stay. You can crash here.”
I kiss him on the forehead, fierce and quick, because he still tries when everyone else has quit and I have no idea why. “Zardari’s waiting,” I tell him. “Pakistan’s got the bomb now. You better not piss him off.”
And then I’m gone. Outside again, on my way home. I don’t want to go there but I’m cold and tired, and where else am I going to go?
I’ve got my shoulders hunched and my head down, so I don’t see it when I turn onto my street. But when I get to my house, there’s no missing it. DYE SLUT is written on the sidewalk at the bottom of my stoop. In giant spray-paint letters. I know who did it. There’s only one person in all of Brooklyn who could spell die wrong.
That’s bad, but what I see next is worse. Far worse. Keith Richards’s guitar. On the sidewalk. In a million pieces.
Arden hates me. That much is clear. Nick must, too. A quick grope cost him a really nice guitar. And once Arden gets busy IMing, anyone at St. Anselm’s who doesn’t already hate me, will hate me. All of Brooklyn Heights will hate me. New York State. The East Coast. North America.
And suddenly, Paris doesn’t look so bad.
10
Airports should all belong to the same country. The country of Crappacia. Or Bleakovania. Or Suckitan.
They all look exactly the same. No matter where you go in the world, when you land, it’s all asphalt, weeds, and dead coffee cups. We arrived at Orly and waited an hour for our suitcases because the baggage handlers are on strike. Then we got in a cab. Now we’re stuck in the Monday night rush on the A106 near Rungis—rhymes with grungy—outside Paris. But we could be in Queens. Or Newark. Or hell.
“Twenty-twenty-twenty four hours to go
I wanna be sedated.”
“Can you stop, please?”
“Nothin’ to do
Nowhere to go
I wanna be sedated.”
“Andi …”
“Just get me to the airport
Put me on a plane
Hurry hurry hurry before I go insane—”
“Stop!”
Dad pulls out my left earbud so I have to stop pretending I can’t hear him.
“What?”
“I’m trying to make a phone call!”
My singing pisses him off. The Ramones piss him off. My guitar is taking up too much room on the seat between us and that pisses him off. Everything about me pisses him off. My heavy hand with the eyeliner. My hair. The metal. Especially the metal. It cost us fifteen minutes at Logan’s security gates when we were already late. I set off the detectors half a dozen times. I had to take it all off. The studded jacket. The skull belt. Bracelets, rings, and earrings.
“You going into battle, hon?” the security guard asked me as she watched it pile up in a plastic bin.
I walked through again. More beeps. Dad was fuming. The guard patted me down. She felt under my arms. Looked inside my socks. Ran her fingers around the collar of my shirt.
“What’s this?” she asked, tugging on the red ribbon around my neck.
I didn’t want to take it off but I had no choice. I pulled it over my head and handed it to her. Then I stepped through the detector again. No beeps. I glanced at my father, thinking he’d be relieved I’d finally made it through. But it wasn’t relief I saw. His whole face had shifted. Like plate tectonics.
“You have that?” he said as the guard handed the key back to me.
He reached for it, but I quickly put it over my head and dropped it inside my shirt—a dad no-fly zone.
“I didn’t … I didn’t know you had that,” he said. “How—”
“From his clothes. It was in his pocket.”
“I looked for it. I thought it was in my desk.”
“He took it back.”
“When?” His voice was a whisper.
“After the Nobel.”
“Why?”
I didn’t answer.
“Andi … why?”
“Because you’d found your own key to the world.”
Why is it that weeks and months and years go by so quickly, all in a blur, but moments last forever. Truman turning to wave at me for the last time. My mother collapsing in the detective’s arms. And now this one: My father standing by the X-ray machine at airport security, sagging and limp, like a puppet whose strings have been cut.
We made the boarding gate in time. It was an early-morning flight. I listened to music and slept. He worked.
“Can we call Mom?” I ask him now as he finishes his call.
“No. I’m sure you remember what Dr. Becker said.”
I sure do. We were in his office yesterday morning. After we said goodbye to Mom. We left her in her room, sitting on the edge of her bed, sedated. She was wearing a pink hospital-issue sweat suit. She hates pink. Almost as much as she hates sweat suits.
I asked Dr. Becker for the number of her room phone so I could call her from Paris. He said the rooms didn’t have phones.
“So how do I call her?”
He gave me a standard-issue mental-patient smile then said, “Andi, I think it’s unadvisable—”
“Inadvisable.”
The smile slipped. “I think it’s inadvisable for your mother to take calls for a few days. Perhaps in a week, when she’s settled in and has accepted her new surroundings. I think you’ll agree with me that it’s in her best interest.”
But I didn’t agree. With him. With anything. I didn’t agree with the needles and pills. I didn’t agree with the peach walls. The floral curtains. Or the picture on her wall. I especially didn’t agree with the picture.
“You have to take it down,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“The picture. The one that’s bolted to the wall of her room. The cottage with the purple sunset. It’s nauseating. It’s a mind-numbing, middlebrow triumph of mediocrity. Where’d you get it? Paramus?”
“Andi!” Dad barked.
“Do you know what she looks at all day? Do you know what’s taped to the wall where she works? Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples, Van Gogh’s Blue Enamel Coffeepot. His Still Life with Mackerels—”
“Stop it right now,” Dad said to me. Then to Dr. Becker, “I’m sorry, Matt, I—”
“Take it down,” I said, my voice cracking.
Dr. Becker held up his hands. “Okay, Andi. If you would like me to take the picture down, I will.”
“Now.”
“Damn it, Andi! Who do you think you’re talking to?” Dad shouted.
“I can’t do it right now,” Dr. Becker said. “I need maintenance to do it. But I give you my word that it will come down, all right?”
I nodded stiffly. It was something. Some small win. I couldn’t protect my mother from Dr. Feelgood but at least I’d saved her from Thomas Kinkade.
The traffic jam gives a bit. We pick up speed and a few minutes later, we’re on the outskirts of Paris. The road to the city is lined with shabby stone houses, used-car lots, falafel dens, and hair salons, their signs all shining garishly in the dark.
“It might do you good, you know,” my father is saying as we hit the Boulevard Périphérique. “It might take your mind off things.”
“What might?”
“A change of scenery. Paris.”
“Yeah. Sure. My brother’s dead. My mother’s insane. Hey, let’s have a crêpe.”
We don’t talk for the rest of the ride.
11
“Lewis! You cantankerous wretch! You dusty old fart! You drysouled, Bunsen-brained, formaldehy
de-soaked bastard!”
It’s not me saying that. Though I’ve wanted to. On numerous occasions.
It’s my father’s friend G—a round man in yellow jeans, a red sweater, and black glasses. He’s a rock-star historian. Oxymoronic, but true. He wrote this mega-bestseller on the French Revolution. It scooped up all the major prizes. The BBC made a series out of it. Ang Lee’s doing the movie.
G and my dad met at Stanford when they were grad students. His real name is Guillaume Lenôtre, but Dad calls him G because the first time they met, he called him Gwillomay. Then Geeyoom. And then G limited him to his first initial.
G’s speaking to us in French. My father and I speak it here. I learned it as a child. Dad’s still learning.
“My word! And who is this—” G’s eyes travel over the leather jacket, and the metal, to my hair. His cheery voice falters. “—this stunning Visigoth? My little Andi? All grown up and dressed to fight the Romans.”
“And everyone else,” my father says.
G laughs. “Come in! Come in!” he says. “Lili’s waiting for you!”
He leads us through the door, locks it, then ushers us into a long, badly lit courtyard crammed full of architectural salvage—marble columns, cornices, horse troughs, streetlamps, a fountain, a dozen decapitated statues.
“Are you sure this is the right address?” I’d asked my father when our cab pulled up outside. We’d driven deep into the eleventh arrondissement, well east of the city center, and had ended up in the middle of nowhere. I looked out the cab window and all I could see were two giant iron doors flanked by high stone walls. They were covered in graffiti and plastered with tattered posters touting car shows and strip clubs. The place looked abandoned. Across the street there was a body shop, a dingy Greek café, and a place that makes heating ducts. Nothing else.
“Number eighteen Rue St-Jean. I’m sure this is it,” Dad said as he paid the driver. “G told me it was an old furniture factory. He said he only bought it a few months ago.”
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