Foreign Exposure

by Lauren Mechling

  From: “Apotasnik”

  To: “Mimicita86”

  Date: June 30, 2:06 p.m.

  Subject: Attn Cowgirl!

  Mimi, I’m writing from my dad’s BlackBerry. We’re in the cab going to JFK and I just realized how royally I’ve screwed up. Our stopover is not in Berlin, but in Frankfurt!!! I know zilcho of German geography, but any chance you can make it out to the city of hot dogs? Will keep eyes peeled . . .

  Missing you . . . Boris

  P.S. don’t write back to this address unless you have something to tell my pops

  This message was sent by my BlackBerry.

  An hour ago—even five minutes ago -—this message might have sent me over a cliff. But that was before I’d successfully purchased a one-way ticket out of here. Without even replying, I jotted down my confirmation number and logged off, then tiptoed out of the kitchen as if it were a crime scene.

  Part two—getting out of Berlin without parental interception—was a little trickier. I called Dagmar from the phone in the den and wheedled him into picking me up at five-thirty sharp the next morning. “I’ll explain on the ride over,” I said in a panicked tone. “I’d never ask unless it was a total emergency.”

  Dagmar, it seemed, was a remarkably uncurious person. “Sure, sure,” he said in his deep voice. “You are highly lucky, because I have obtained my brother Gerhardt’s car for this evening. I club tonight and tomorrow morning I am coming outside tooting for you.”

  The next morning, he arrived right on schedule. As the sky was blurring from black to gray, I grabbed my bags and padded down the stairs so quietly I could hear the blood pumping to my ears. Please, I prayed, please don’t let Mom wake up. I moved in silence until the second-to-last stair, when an enormous creak sounded. I stood there breathless with panic and terror. I waited, counting down from one hundred, but still no one stirred in the master bedroom at the top of the stairs. In the end, I made the two last steps, placed my goodbye letter on the hallway table, and slipped outside.

  When Dagmar saw me with my luggage, he merely stretched over the seat to open the back door of his sedan. “You missed one extremely excellent party,” he told me.

  Outside the car window, gloomy suburban Berlin was slowly churning to life. Kitchen lights were coming on inside the identical houses, and I wondered if I’d ever come back here again. God, I hoped not. It was with no small tremor that I revealed my destination to Dagmar, who once again assented without a single question. Though he swore to say nothing to Mom—“What have I to say when I am knowing nothing?”—I didn’t totally trust him. Later that morning, they’d be working side by side in the lab. What if Dagmar slipped and revealed my whereabouts? Would she have time to show up at the airport and drag me back to Dahlem?

  Call me paranoid, but I made sure to go through security immediately and wait where Mom couldn’t find me, in the back corner of a grubby café near my gate. I only left it once, to buy a phone card and call Lily with my arrival information. She said she had rehearsal that morning and couldn’t pick me up, but she gave me detailed directions to the house.

  After a tense two-hour wait, I boarded the U-GoJet plane. It was the weirdest of all airplanes, with 1970s disco music, mismatched vinyl seats, and silver glittery overhead compartments. My seat was near the front, and the only flight attendant—who was about my age and wearing a silver lamé minidress—started serving drinks in the rear. “Can I get you anything?” she asked in a high trill right as the pilot announced our descent into London. I never got a chance to order, which was fine since even orange juice cost four euros.

  Stansted was small and uncrowded, and the customs officer waved me through without a single question. Within a quarter-hour of touching down, I’d boarded a black cab. I was hugely relieved. Mom hadn’t apprehended me and now here I was, riding on the wrong side of the road through London. Well, not London exactly—more like a big rural field—but close enough. To keep my mind off the meter, I started daydreaming about the Muckraker, the saucy political journal that Lily had mentioned.

  About an hour later, we finally entered central London. It was a totally different genre of city than New York, and nothing like the grimy construction zone of Berlin. It was more like, I don’t know, a storybook town, with its boxy red phone booths and grand Victorian houses and pigeons and flowers and stately buildings and trees. We followed a red bus several miles before veering off onto a wide street divided, by a little waterway with bright houseboats docked on it. Regent’s Canal: the major landmark Lily had mentioned in our phone conversation.

  We turned onto Blomfield Road, a leafy street of cream-colored Victorian mansions, all overhung with immense willow trees and balconies off the top-story windows. The cab pulled to a stop before the most gorgeous house on the block, number fifty-four. Lily’s house, or, I guess from now on, my house. A little bronze plaque at the entry gate read BRIDGE HOUSE. “Whoa,” I said out loud.

  My trance was broken when a wave of static blared through an overhead speaker from the front of the cab. “Here we are, miss,” the driver was saying. “That’ll be a hundred and ten quid for you there.”

  “Huh?”

  The driver slid the divider open and turned to face me. “That’s a hundred and ten quid,” he repeated, this time slower. “As in, pounds.”

  I stared at the meter, then back at him. One hundred and ten pounds? As in, roughly twenty-two times the cost of my plane ride? How had I failed to notice the fare climbing to such horrific heights, right before my eyes? Of course, I realized, some catastrophe was bound to befall me. My journey until now had been too smooth. “Uh, give me a minute?” I said, and leaving my bags in the cab for collateral, I ran up the walkway to the house and rang the bell. Thank God it was Lily who opened the door. Before we’d even hugged, I breathlessly explained my predicament. “Lily, I’m so sorry to hit you up after all you’ve done, but I don’t have enough—”

  “It’s nothing,” she said, totally unfazed as she pulled wads of twenty-pound notes out of her wallet. “Of course you didn’t know what a financial Hoover this city is.”

  “A who what?” I looked at her in bewilderment.

  “A vacuum cleaner,” she explained on our way back to the cab. “Don’t worry, you’ll pick it up fast.” I collected my luggage while Lily settled the outrageous bill with the driver, who hadn’t budged from behind the steering wheel.

  “This is insane! You just handed him a hundred and twenty pounds!” I raged once we’d shut the front door of 54 Blomfield Road behind us. “You could stay in a five-star hotel for that kind of money!”

  “Not in this town, you couldn’t,” Lily said, and softly patted my cheek. “Oh, Mimi. We have quite an adventure ahead of us.”

  Emotional Ear Wax

  MY ROOM WAS NEXT TO LILY’S on the top floor. I dropped my bags next to my bed, which had not only clean sheets but a Baci chocolate on my pillow. “Is this from you?” I asked, popping the hazelnut treat into my mouth.

  “I remembered how much you love them,” Lily, said, then, “I still can’t believe you’re actually here.”

  After checking out the room, I gave my friend a good looking-over. Lily was uncharacteristically chic that afternoon in a black skirt over jeans and an expensive-looking silky button-down in a swirling kaleidoscope of pastels. I wasn’t sure if I liked the outfit, but it was definitely different.

  “OK, Texas, time for the grand tour,” she said suddenly, made uncomfortable by my scrutiny. “The Foxes are all out, so I’ll do the honors.”

  We began winding our way down through the rambling nineteenth-century mansion’s four stories. Whenever we stepped into a room, I would declare it my absolute, all-time favorite, only to change my mind upon entering the next room. I loved the Foxes’ house down to the minutest detail, from the elaborate plasterwork on the ceilings to the battered rugs arranged haphazardly over the floors. White walls were apparently banned in Bridge House; all surfaces were painted an exuberant burgundy or chartreus
e or magenta or lavender, and all the rooms in the back of the house had broad bay windows overlooking a lush garden.

  The house’s occasional signs of dilapidation made it all the more welcoming. Here and there, I noticed peeling paint, moth-eaten curtains, broken furniture. It smelled weird, too, almost musty in places. At first glance, the second-floor library was the room of my dreams, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves connected by a series of rolling ladders, but near the mammoth globe I started sneezing uncontrollably as dust particles detached from Australia and floated, Tinkerbell-like, into my nostrils.

  In the garden-level kitchen, Lily served me tea in a beautiful, if slightly chipped, gold china cup. I sat studying the somehow familiar painting that hung on the wall, a sprawling oil of an overweight naked woman lying on a couch. Her body was wide open except for her legs, which were pressed tightly together.

  “It’s a Lucian Freud,” Lily said. “Worth about a hundred college educations. He’s an old family friend.”

  “I can’t get over this place,” I said. “It’s so fancy, but it’s also so—”

  “Informal?” Lily filled in.

  “Yes,” I said. “Exactly.”

  “I know: I’ve never understood why my mother likes the Foxes so much. They’re total opposites. Here, they have absolutely zero pretensions about homemaking, whereas my mom would sooner admit to having spent her Christmas in rehab than to not knowing how to load the dishwasher.”

  “I can’t wait to meet them,” I said, taking a long sip of milky tea.

  “If I were you,” Lily said, “I wouldn’t get too swept away yet. I think you’ll find that chaos has certain drawbacks.”

  “Whatever you say,” I said. Bridge House was heaven, and I never wanted to leave. To think that twenty-four hours ago, I’d been munching on a pillow and crying over my no-show boyfriend in depressing Berlin, and now here I was, with my best friend in a fabulous mansion in verdant, dreamy London.

  After tea, Lily took me for a quick stroll around the Foxes’ neighborhood, Little Venice. The main drag of the area—or the High Street, as Lily called it—abounded with cute little organic fruit shops and pubs with ridiculous names, like The Toad and Harp and The Lacy Trotwood. Everyone we passed looked put together and suave, or maybe it was their accents. Lily stopped into a little bodega and bought a tiny plastic container of milk. “It’s the only thing they care about in that house,” she said, “milk for the tea; Scotch and red wine for everything else.”

  When we returned from our tour, a tall, angular woman was sitting cross-legged in the downstairs kitchen, yapping into her cell phone: Philippa, or Pippa, Fox, the matron of the house. In her flowing blue silk dress and with riotous primary-colored makeup smeared over her face, she bore a curious resemblance to a peacock. Upon seeing us, she snapped shut the phone without a word of explanation to the party on the other end. “Well, hello, my little darlings!” she cried out, rushing over to plant a kiss on my cheek. “I’m so pleased you’ve come back, as I was just in the process of commandeering your future. That was Charlie Lappin who just rang. He’s moved your job interview to tomorrow at twelve o’clock. You haven’t any other plans, have you?”

  “Me?” I squeaked out. “For the job interview?” Behind me, Lily laughed quietly. “No, my schedule’s pretty open. Thank you so much for all your help. And I’m Mimi, by the way.”

  “Oh, darling, but of course I know that!” she said without offering her own name. She noisily threw open a kitchen cabinet. “You must think I’m a complete boor—it’s been such madness these past couple of days and I’m absolutely shattered. We had no fewer than three cocktail parties to attend yesterday, and that’s after hosting a Saturday lunch at the house. Then, this morning—typical Imogen—she got caught pinching old-lady night creams from the chemist’s on Notting Hill Gate, and I had to extricate her from this dreadful security guard. Poor darling, he made her sit in this horrid little dungeon in the back of the shop, and even confiscated her mobile!”

  She shuddered as she pulled out two bottles from the cabinet. “Now, Mimi, what’s your pleasure, Cabernet or Merlot?” When, dazed, I randomly pointed to the one on the left, my hostess issued a little gasp of approval, crying, “A Merlot girl, lovely—I see we’ll get along just splendidly!”

  We spent the remainder of the afternoon sipping wine and nibbling enormous almond-filled olives. I couldn’t get over Pippa. If Lily hadn’t told me she was a big shot at the British Broadcasting Corporation, I never would’ve taken Pippa for a power player. She seemed too scattered, hyper, and fun. She dominated the conversation with a variety of topics, from her passion for gardening to her son Adrian’s rodent fetish. No matter how minor the point she was making, Pippa spoke with emphasis and abandon. “They’re awful!” she said of her son’s mouse collection. “Just beastly, with their glowing red eyes and those appalling little tails. When I found one in the larder, I made him get rid of the whole lot.”

  “The larder?” I whispered to Lily. I wished that I had a notebook to record all the unfamiliar vocabulary Pippa was slinging about.

  “The pantry,” Lily translated. “Or cupboard. You’ll meet Adrian soon. He’s usually locked inside his room playing on his computer.”

  “Thank Christ he left the house and went to the cinema today,” Pippa said. “He’s by himself, I reckon. He’s off to Australia for a marine biology summer program next week, and not a moment too soon. Though I do hope he doesn’t limit his interactions to urchins and other slimy creatures.” Pippa ran her long fingers through her hair, showcasing her impressive collection of distressed gold rings with colorful inlaid gems. Her phone started ringing. “For the love of Christ, will it ever stop? I wish mobiles had never been invented!”

  Though Pippa’s phone rang every few minutes, she greeted every caller with the same off-scale enthusiasm—“Hall-ooo!”—leaping up to pace the kitchen for the duration of the conversation. Then, after hanging up and sitting back down, she’d summarize the entire call for us, often reenacting whole passages of dialogue. She relayed, among other things, her neighbor Claire’s “row” with her “positively gormless” nanny; her sister Tilda’s deliberations about an antique credenza on the King’s Road; even her daughter Imogen’s request to dine at a friend’s house. “Oh, and talking of which, who here is a bit peckish?” Pippa asked suddenly. “I’m absolutely ravenous myself.”

  “Don’t worry about Mimi,” said Lily. “She’s always ravenous. Like a wild animal, you’ll see.”

  “Lily!”

  “Oh, don’t worry, darling,” Pippa told me. “We adore all animals—except, I suppose, rodents scurrying about my kitchen!” She tapped her fingers on the top of the table. “I could do with a takeaway curry from round the corner—is that all right?” We nodded, and Pippa speed-dialed a number on her cell phone and said, “Me again, darling. We’ll have the usual—and please do hurry up about it!”

  When she got off the phone, Pippa looked at me and it seemed to suddenly dawn on her that a houseguest had just flown in from another country. “Now, has Lily shown you around?” I nodded. “Good, good. Well, that’s about it, then. Just make yourself comfortable. Towels, food, telly, and the like, it’s all yours. Just make certain never to leave the doors open—our cat Lulu is under house arrest. You can leave laundry in the basket in the upstairs loo, and, oh! Please don’t hesitate to use the phone. I’m sure your parents are eager to hear from you.”

  “I’m sure they are, thank you so much.” I smiled angelically.

  About twenty minutes later the food arrived, and while Pippa was transferring it all to serving dishes, the Messieurs Foxes ambled into the kitchen. The dad, Robin Fox, was tall and rangy, with a long, handsome face, a full head of salt-and-pepper hair, and an upper-crust air of distraction. He was confident and extroverted and utterly unlike his son, Adrian, who trudged into the kitchen with his shoulders slumped and his oily black hair hanging over his eyes. He had on ripped-up sneakers and a dirty T-shirt.

>   “Welcome to our home,” Mr. Fox said, walking over to the cabinet to remove a stack of plates. “I do hope you’re not too terribly disappointed by it.”

  Disappointed? Was he crazy? I never wanted to leave this house, ever, not even to go to a restaurant. “Are you kidding?” I gushed. “I love it. I had no idea what to expect, and it’s totally perfect, all of it.”

  Lily pulled me aside and whispered, “Don’t worry—he’s always kidding, or ‘ironic’ or whatever. Just laugh politely at everything he says,” she advised, “and you’ll be fine.”

  “Please,” he said, “do call me Robin, if that’s all right by you.”

  “Sure,” I said, “thanks.”

  Pippa lurched forward to refill my wineglass. “Here, let me get that.”

  Once we’d served ourselves and gathered around the kitchen island, Robin took a bite of samosa and, with the same abstract expression, began to recount an incident at his club that afternoon. Apparently, following a game of squash, he’d emerged from the locker room and landed in the midst of a chase scene. A woman had sneaked from the lounge to the “geography library,” which is only open to men, he said. “Total bloody anarchy. They bolted all the doors and wouldn’t let anyone out until they’d apprehended the madwoman.”

  “A bit sozzled, was she?” Adrian wanted to know.

  “No, just completely off her trolley,” Robin said placidly. “That, or tremendously keen on geography.”

  As dinner went on, I reveled in the Foxes’ sophisticated verbal jousting, which sounded scripted but was clearly improvised as they went along. Having spent a year in the society of Dad, Quinn, and sometimes Sam and Fenella, I thought I’d grown accustomed to an offbeat domestic scene, but Barrow Street now seemed completely conventional in comparison to Bridge House.