Jessica Lost

by Crumpacker/Picariello

  The Caserne was a world within a world in concentric circles. Outside its gates, everything was different. Inside the gates, there was meant to be an echo of home, but it was Army, and still unfamiliar. Away from the Caserne, everything seemed free, unregimented. Inside became neither here nor there, just a place to be. Home was very far away.

  Jake’s friend Quint quickly became my friend, too. He said we were his ménage à trois, just what he’d always wanted; the three of us had read the same books. But what I’d always wanted when I got to Europe was not a ménage à trois, but to drink calvados and look at the Arc de Triomphe in a trench coat with the collar turned up.

  I liked Quint’s face. Where Jake’s face was hard and angular, Quint’s was rounder and softer, containing sweetness. He had a way of looking that was both piercing and gentle. The world he watched amused him; it made him sad; but it didn’t amaze him. Jake was the discoverer; Quint kept the journal.

  We were together much of the time, laughing, singing, joking, admiring each other and the new world we were in. Quint was funny and smart and horny, very horny. He talked about German girls who lifted up their skirts and sat with bare bottoms on wooden chairs; he talked about German prostitutes, all named Ilse—behind-the-couch Ilse, quickie Ilse, the captain’s Ilse. He wrote Jake and me funny letters, and left them for us at the hotel, pretending to be an anonymous correspondent who thought I should know my husband was sexually depraved. He had been found screaming on the Autobahn: “Wo ist der gonads???”

  “I love my wife,” he quoted Jake as saying, but “Oh! you Fraulein!”

  College humor? We were recently out of college, and we loved it.

  At Christmas, we went to Paris together on a three-day pass, taking the fabled Orient Express, now like everything else in Germany, old, gray, dirty, and shabby. At every station middle-aged men carrying pails of hot water filled with sausages peddled their wares; when you bought a sausage, it was given to you on a small paper plate with a dab of mustard and a hard roll. The sausage was always delicious; the men were always angry as they cringed, bowed, and served, but not happily. Before the war, they had probably been lawyers. During the war, they had certainly been soldiers.

  Just after Heidelberg, a young woman opened the door to our compartment and asked if there was room. She was pretty, tall, obviously American. Maybe a Christmas present for Quint, I thought.

  “Willkommen,” Jake said. “What’s your name?”

  She mumbled something. Later, Quint and I discovered we both thought she had said, “Oh, really.” We called her Rilly.

  She told us she’d been waiting at the Bahnhof for the train, and had stood too close to the stove. “Look,” she said, turning around to show us a round hole with charred edges in the back of her skirt. She was tall, silent, strange, distant, and not quite there; yet she was clearly taking our measure. She stayed with us until Paris, where Jake insisted we all have a drink together first thing, though it was morning, early morning. Quint and I had calvados, Jake and Rilly cognac. We toasted Paris, ourselves, each other.

  Rilly didn’t have a place to stay in Paris, so we found rooms together, a double and two singles, at the Hotel Odéon. The hotel was large and dark, with a single bulb in the ceiling of each floor lighting the hallways; you pressed a button and the light went on. It stayed on for a minute or so, and then went off until the button—or the one on the next floor—was pressed again. There was one bathroom, a water closet, on each floor; stuck on a nail next to the toilet were squares of newspaper. Alternate floors had a bath in a large closet at one end of the hallway. We paid $2 a night for our double room in the hotel, just off the Avenue Saint Michel, down the street from the Comédie-Francaise.

  We set off to explore, walking along the Seine. I remember Sacre Coeur, and all the steps, and Montparnasse, and the bridges over the Seine. Paris was not the City of Lights then; the big streetlights had not been turned on since the war. The streets were gray and dirty, and every so often you’d see bullet holes in the side of a building. But it was as beautiful as it had been described in every book we’d ever read.

  I remember an acrobat with a chain across his chest, just as in La Strada, which hadn’t been filmed yet; and a man selling a magic peeler-shredder-slicer kitchen implement, as well as one making crêpes. We stopped to watch. I sifted through my purse to find some money, and then when Quint and I turned around Jake and Rilly had disappeared.

  “They’ve probably gone ahead,” I said. We walked on for a block or two; but they weren’t there.

  “Maybe they’re waiting for us back at that corner,” Quint said. They weren’t.

  We stood at the corner for several minutes, thinking that if we’d missed them, they’d look for us there. After a while, we went into a café near the corner and sat at a table near the window, drinking chocolat and watching the street. Finally, a long time later, we took the Métro back to the hotel.

  Jake and Rilly were stretched out on our bed with a bottle of wine, two glasses, and a deck of cards, with a few cards scattered between them on the rumpled bedspread. They didn’t look surprised, or worried. Rilly looked smug; Jake looked guilty.

  “Where were you?” Jake sounded faintly accusatory, as if he were exploring the possibility of accusing me of having done something wrong. “We couldn’t find you anywhere! We figured if we came back here, you’d turn up eventually. What happened to you?”

  Rilly smiled.

  When she left the room, she left the hotel. We never saw her again—at least I didn’t.

  We only had one day left: I have no memory of what we did. I know the three of us went back to Stuttgart together on the Orient Express. Wives then had a certain advantage in this kind of situation—the only advantage I was to discover. They were expected to go along with their husbands. I don’t think Jake and I talked about what had happened; I don’t think I expressed anger or hurt or dismay. I went along with the pretense: Nothing had happened.

  For our first wedding anniversary, Jake bought me a beautiful pair of earrings. I bought him a German cigarette lighter.

  We liked our presents, but we weren’t terribly enthusiastic about the occasion. On we went, messing up our impeccably neat German hotel room, eating doughnuts for lunch at the Caserne, which was in Vaihingen, a suburb of Stuttgart, connected by an old wooden trolley, with seats reserved in the front for the Schwerferwundet, wounded veterans of the war. After dinner we made friends with ex-Nazis in the hotel restaurant, where we had great, simplistic conversations: “Krieg ist schlecht,” I said: War is bad. None of them had ever fought against Americans; they had all been on the Russian front. Hitler wasn’t a bad man; he just made some mistakes.

  One of the men went to great pains to explain that he would drink with me, but not with Jake, because Jake was a soldier. It still amazes me that I was willing to accept what he said and drink with him. Didn’t I have the faintest idea of who I was, of who I had a right to be? With Jake, I was still looking for happy endings. But I wasn’t willing to create them, or to make them happen, because I simply didn’t know how. I thought he was a happy ending; but he turned out to be another unhappy beginning.

  For Americans after the war, everything was cheap and easy. For Germans, it was the opposite. American cigarettes, American coffee, and American dollars were prized. Those who held them were coveted and cosseted—and despised.

  When we first arrived in Stuttgart, the unit was preparing a Christmas play to be presented to local children, German as well as children of the soldiers stationed there. It was based on James Thurber’s Many Moons, in an adaptation Quint had written.

  Many Moons is about a princess who is pining away, terribly unhappy because although she can have anything she wants, the only thing she wants is the moon. The king can’t figure out how to give it to her. The court mathematician is consulted, and the king’s philosopher is asked. Even the wise man doesn’t know what to do. The king offers her hand in marriage to anyone who can resolve this apparently in
soluble problem. Finally, on a dark, moonless night, the court jester presents her with a paper cutout of the moon, big, round, and golden, on a stick. She’s thrilled—the moon, at last!

  When the king, unable to believe that anything so simple could be the solution, asks her what will happen now that the moon is hers, no longer in the sky, she explains, sweetly and simply, that there are several moons: Each one comes and shines for a few days, and then slowly leaves, and after several dark days, another one comes to take its place. Her moon is just one of many—happy ending.

  Quint wrote and directed the play, and Jake took photographs. I was the princess. After the first performance, the cast joined the children for punch and cookies. Some of the awestruck children looked at me as if there were stars over my head as well as a paper moon in my hand. It was a beautiful princess costume.

  After Christmas, when we came back from Paris, our ménage à trois changed. Quint was finding other friends. He joined a German-American club, in hopes of making out with a non-Ilse Fräulein, and, indeed, he did meet a sweet young thing. The four of us went one night for Kuchen and Kaffee mit Schlag; she told me, in response to something one of us had said, that you could always tell who was Jewish because Jews wear long coats, and carry bags full of money. All the men have dirty tangled beards. We won the war, I thought, but that was all.

  Quint was working on the next Special Services play; but for the rest of us, there wasn’t much to do. The days were short and cold, with quick, damp bursts of snow and ice. Sometime in late January the owner of the restaurant asked us, very nicely, to leave. I think we’d tried the patience of the chambermaid: We left clothes tossed on the chair, and piles of papers and books on the floor. We didn’t make the beds. Every day, she straightened everything: The clothes were hung up or folded and put away, the books and papers neatly arranged on the desk, and the bed linen straight and taut. It was a conflict of cultures, and more: We were careless and young, barely postadolescent.

  It wasn’t difficult to find another a room, a Zimmer, in a house down the road. I think our room had been the master bedroom. The furniture was big, heavy, and dark, but the room was comfortable. We gave the landlady a pound of coffee after we’d been there a while. She was thrilled. Since she didn’t make the room up every day, that source of conflict was eliminated.

  Sometime in February, Jake was sent to the hospital. Though this is where I should remember the most, it is the beginning of remembering the least. I don’t want to say I’ve forgotten, because that would imply there was something to be found, retrieved, and eventually restored. What I have instead is blankness: In places, there is simply nothing there. It’s as if there never had been anything there.

  10. JIL

  MADISON

  The drive to Madison was one long, straight, flat road through cornfields, or at least it seemed that way from the backseat, where my brother and I dozed and argued and stared out the window for endless hours.

  I was going to Wisconsin because the alternative, living in the city with Wendy, was even more unacceptable to my mother. And maybe there was a part of her that was relieved to get me out of the house, away from the constant struggle our relationship had become.

  Driving down Johnson Street to Witte Hall, my cinder-block freshman dorm, we passed sidewalks chockablock with gorgeous, ragged, long-haired boys unpacking guitars, milk crates of record albums, and the complete works of Herman Hesse. Girls stood smoking in groups, wearing overalls and dirty sneakers, T-shirts tie-dyed pink and purple, straight long hair sliding down their backs. To me, it looked like heaven in torn denim and fringe.

  We pulled up in front of Witte and I jumped out, hoping to be shed of my family before anyone saw me. I wanted to slip into a new version of myself: a Joni Mitchell sound-tracked, pot-stoked, patchouli-oiled hippie chick, shoeless, ruleless, family-free.

  I pulled out my box of record albums, which I had refused to entrust to the trunk shipped two weeks earlier. Behind us three scruffy, bushy-haired guys were unpacking a blue VW van.

  “We gotta score today,” one of them said. “Shouldn’t be hard.”

  My father appeared at my side, upset. “Watch out for those boys,” he said. “They’re looking to take advantage of you girls.”

  I didn’t know if telling him they wanted to score drugs would make him feel better or worse, so I just nodded. At least half my conversations with my father revolved around maintaining my virginity until marriage.

  “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?” was his favorite saying. “There’s only one thing men want” ran a close second. I had the feeling that, to my father, I was a carefully guarded hymen wrapped in a thin coating of flesh and denim.

  Preserving my purity was his number-one objective. Losing it was mine.

  Second only to having sex was making friends. Third was having fun, however that worked out. Somewhere down the list were things like going to class, getting decent grades, figuring out what I wanted to be when I grew up.

  To my amazement and joy, making friends was easy. I loved my roommate, a frizzy-haired, highly focused girl from Cleveland. Janey was a lot straighter than I was: She listened to the Jackson Five (so juvenile!) and slept with her hair tightly wrapped around empty frozen juice containers in an effort to straighten her curls; but she was friendly and warm, and willing to be my immediate best friend. She didn’t know I was the high school weirdo, the dork who sat alone on the bleachers and wrote sad poetry. She knew the exuberant, new and improved me.

  Down the hall were Annie, Tory, and Debra. With them, Janey and I formed a fierce fivesome who went everywhere together in a wild clump of energetic youth, intense and dramatic. There were at least a half-dozen film societies on campus; many films were free, none cost more than $2. Our first semester, Janey and I saw forty-two movies from Labor Day weekend to Christmas break. We went dancing and to concerts: Bette Midler! Joni Mitchell! Roberta Flack! We ate matzo ball soup at Ella’s Deli, and demonstrated against the war in Vietnam. We petitioned for George McGovern and sat at the Memorial Union in a great loud laughing herd, and talked and talked and talked all night.

  I was a colorful college butterfly instead of a lumpy high school worm.

  I was having a great time.

  What I was not having was sex. I went to student health the first week of the semester and got my little plastic circles of birth control pills; but it seemed that I was taking them for no reason.

  Notwithstanding my father’s constant “Why buy the cow” clang, there turned out to be plenty of guys who were allergic to free milk in Madison, Wisconsin, despite its reputation as the dairy state.

  Guy #1: Lyle, a Wisconsin native as sweet as the name of his hometown: Appleton. A blond-haired, blue-eyed junior, Lyle was madly in love with my RA, another Appletonian. He’d gotten Melinda pregnant in high school. She’d had an abortion, which so traumatized her that she broke up with him, and so traumatized him that he couldn’t—or wouldn’t—have sex with anyone, including me, no matter how many times I expounded on the infallibility of birth control pills. Our sexual activity was like a movie that went forward and backward in fast motion. Lyle would open my shirt, then close it again, take off his shirt, put it back on, always terrified of causing another disaster.

  When Lyle talked about Melinda, he wept. In October, she gave him another chance, and I moved on.

  Guy #2: Daniel, a nice Jewish boy from New York—someone I should have dated in high school. But until I became a butterfly I would never have had the nerve to speak to him. Daniel was smart and driven, knew old movie musicals, and was already planning where he would attend law school and how long he’d practice law before entering politics. He knew all the words to every song from Guys and Dolls and could recite both Gene Kelly’s and Debbie Reynolds’s lines from Singin’ in the Rain. Daniel was funny and handsome. But he’d recently had a large mole removed from his penis and was not allowed to enjoy any sexual activity for a month. In college years, a month is the
equivalent of half a decade. I dropped him.

  Guy #3: Steve, a dark-haired, leather-jacketed rebel from Chicago who rarely talked and always seemed to be alone, even when I was with him. Steve was gorgeous, Steve was willing, and Steve had no known skin disorders or former girlfriends haunting the halls. What Steve did have, strangely, were scruples. Steve would not deflower a virgin. Steve would not even kiss me, since kissing might lead to a loss of control. I metaphorically kissed him good-bye.

  Guy #4: Talal was a tall, slender, caramel-colored sophomore from Kuwait. He was gorgeous, a catlike, raven-haired god with high cheekbones, charm, money, and a car. Talal also had a penis the diameter of a large soup can. It took several hours, several joints, and several shots of bourbon but, finally, the weekend I turned eighteen, the messy deed was done . . . with an Arab. My mother would have died.

  I started spending much of my free time at Talal’s apartment off campus, where he lived with several other students from the Middle East, another Kuwaiti, a Saudi, and a Lebanese. All of them had generous government scholarships that included cars and the cash for nice apartments, even a woman who came in to clean once a week. The only requirement was that they maintain a B average and major in engineering. None of them particularly liked engineering, but it was a good deal, and they loved Madison. They loved eager, easygoing American girls; they loved their cars and their apartments. Soon, most of my friends were hanging around their apartment, too. These guys had a nicer place, better drugs, and more food than any of us could afford. And they were exotic, interesting, and fun.

  “What are you going to do for the break?” Janey asked the group one night in early December. We were draped around the living room, listening to music, reading, doing homework, getting high.