I was going home: All the girls were going home, to New York, Chicago, Ohio, and Michigan.
“I don’t know,” Talal said. “Maybe we’ll stay here, or maybe we’ll go on a trip. Maybe we’ll come visit you,” he nudged my head, lying in his lap.
“Yeah, my mother would love that,” I laughed. Nice Jewish girl goes to college and brings home Arab god. That apartment in the city with Wendy might suddenly look good.
“Your mother wouldn’t like me?” he asked innocently.
“I don’t think so,” I said, chuckling as I imagined her reaction. “Why, would your mother like me?”
“My mother is no longer alive,” he said.
We’d been together a good three weeks, and I didn’t know this!
“She died two years ago. But I have a picture of her.” In a minute he was back with a crumpled photo of a lovely-looking woman in a long tunic and head scarf.
“She’s beautiful,” I said, as the rest of the group gathered around to look.
“You look like her,” Janey said, and I agreed. She had the same wide cat’s eyes, the same long, slender face, and the same full lips.
“Do you have a picture of your mother?” Talal asked me.
I laughed. “No, I didn’t bring one.” I couldn’t imagine the kind of relationship with my mother that would lead me to stand her photo on my bedside table.
“Do you look like her?” he asked.
“No, not at all,” I said. “I’m adopted.”
Talal looked at me. “You’re what?”
“Adopted,” I said. “You know, like born to one person, raised by another.”
“So you’re an orphan? Your parents died?”
I’d never had to explain this before. “No, they didn’t die. They gave me up.”
He looked confused. So did his roommates; in fact, so did my girlfriends. They were all looking at me, waiting for an explanation.
Janey stepped in. “Jil’s parents couldn’t take care of her, so they gave her away.”
“Well, they didn’t really give me away,” I said. “They put me up for adoption.”
Ahmad spoke up. “You were like an orphan, only no one died.”
Annie asked, “So you were a foster child?”
“No,” I said. “It’s completely different.”
“Do you know who your real parents are?” Tory asked.
“My real parents are the people who raised me,” I said.
“Your foster parents?” Annie asked.
“They’re not my foster parents. They’re my parents!”
“But how can they be your parents if you’re not related to them?” Talal asked.
Everyone was looking at me wonderingly, waiting for me to explain. But suddenly it all seemed complicated and inexplicable. I knew that I was just like them, with real parents, not two sets of parents with adjectives attached; but I couldn’t find the right words to make them understand.
“They’re my parents—take my word for it.” I got up and went into the kitchen to refill my glass. When I came back everyone had turned their attention to the new Bob Dylan album and I was off the hook.
But my face burned: Why didn’t they understand? Why did they think my story was any different than theirs? Tongue-tied, disturbed, and confused, I decided I would never again tell anyone that I was adopted. That way I could pretend to be just like everyone else.
11. BUNNY
PARIS
A baby begins life as a single cell, smaller than the period at the end
of this sentence, and would be only barely visible to the naked eye.
This cell is created by the union of two parent cells:
the female egg cell or ovum, and the male sperm cell.
GERALDINE LUX FLANAGAN
THE FIRST NINE MONTHS OF LIFE
Jake was in the hospital for a month, at first with a high fever and a swelling on his neck. Twenty-four hours later, the fever was down and the swelling had disappeared. The Army doctors began a series of tests to determine what had caused the fever and swelling. Each day’s tests came back negative; nothing was wrong. More tests were scheduled.
He was in a large, light room; his was the only occupied bed. He seemed to love being there; nothing was expected of him, nothing was asked, nothing was required. He was not in pain. The nurses were attractive and cheerful. He was young, good-looking, mysteriously ill, but relatively healthy, and charming, with that wide and crooked smile, that happy aura of delight.
The Army hospital was in another suburb of Stuttgart, across the city and diagonally opposite Vaihingen, a long, double trolley ride away. When I visited, I brought him books and magazines, cigarettes and fruit. I must have gone every day at first, and then every few days.
While Jack was in the hospital, I occasionally went to the clubs with our friends. It was Fasching, a kind of German equivalent to Mardi Gras, celebrated sometime in February and involving masks and much beer. There were a few clubs in downtown Stuttgart we frequented: We liked the ease with which everybody—the girls, the waiters, and the musicians—presented themselves to us for the taking. Though it was all on the surface—their lives cannot have been easy—that surface was very appealing. It seemed much more real than the earnestness and anger of the sausage men on the train, or the dangerous darkness of the men who hung around the Bahnhof, hawking black-market cigarettes, offering to change money at unofficial rates. This was the other side of sophistication: Have another beer—or a glass of wine—champagne, bitte? Germany was still good at making a cabaret.
Sometimes in the afternoon I’d walk with Quint across empty stretches in downtown Stuttgart. I think he felt responsible for me; in any case, I very much needed him—his friendship, his steady reserve, simply his presence. . . .
Quint was a little removed; he watched, but he didn’t quite participate. His cool reserve was the opposite of Jake’s romanticism. He saw things the way they were, perhaps with a bit of cynicism, certainly with humor, and always with goodwill. He was quiet and funny and very good company.
Was I attracted to him from the beginning? I don’t think so. I think I came to need him, to rely on him, to value him; with him, I felt real. And then I realized I cared about him. It wasn’t a matter of vindictiveness or revenge; my feelings for Quint had nothing to do with Jake.
The turning point came when I went to visit Jake at the hospital sometime in the fourth week he was there.
“I’ve been thinking,” Jake said, after we had been talking for a while. “As long as I’m here, and as long as the Army is paying for it, I think it would be a good idea to ask to be circumcised.”
I was astounded.
“I’ve always thought it would be better to be circumcised. It’s supposed to be much healthier for a man. It’s cleaner. And I’m here, anyway.”
“You’d want the Army to do it?”
“There’s good care here. And it would be free.”
“It would still be painful,” I said.
I could not believe he meant what he was saying.
“Well, at first. But it’d be okay after that.”
“You’d have to stay longer.”
“I wouldn’t mind that. Would you mind that very much?”
“You’ve already been here for a month.”
“Well, I’ll think about it.” Jake was ready to change the subject.
I was stunned. There were two things I couldn’t imagine: The first was staying in the hospital a minute longer than was absolutely necessary. Had this been a four-week vacation? The second was letting Army doctors—any doctors, really— operate on his penis if that operation didn’t need to be done. How could he do that voluntarily? Why not have his appendix out, while he was there, or his tonsils? The answer is obvious: He didn’t have appendicitis or tonsillitis. Foreskins don’t have to be infected to be removed. They just have to be there. Other meanings were more obscure.
I would like to justify myself. I would like to say that you can’t betray a bet
rayer. I’d like to remind you of Jake’s disappearances, of the five months with not a single letter, and the trip to Paris with Rilly. I’d like to say I hadn’t recovered from my father’s death; that the last years of his life had been traumatic, and astonishing, and that he’d died of a brain tumor, which had affected his behavior for a very long time before it was diagnosed. I was thirteen when it started, almost eighteen when it ended—and nineteen when I met Jake.
But of course, you can betray a betrayer. Jake left me many times while we were together, but he always came back. He didn’t give me what I needed, but, at the beginning, he told me he loved me, and he offered me a way to escape from Marlboro and from my mother. I was wounded, certainly, when he met me; but so was he, though I was too young to recognize it.
He was dishonest: He said he’d never had sex with anyone else after we met, not even with Rilly. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t want to fool around, or draw lines in the sand about what constituted honest behavior, and what didn’t.
In the end, though it wasn’t quite the end yet, I betrayed him when I asked Quint to go to bed with me. I didn’t seduce him—I wouldn’t have known how— except through our friendship, through my presence, and through my loneliness. Nor did he seduce me. We were both very innocent, for betrayers. We didn’t need to be seduced; what we needed was each other.
I remember sweetness.
I remember making Picasso faces nose to nose. I remember exploring Quint’s face with my fingers as if what I had always wanted to do was touch him. Across the bridge of his nose, there was a soft brown birthmark. That’s important. I remember teasing him about his name, and stopping the moment he told me to. He cupped his fingers together and tried to show me how to make body noises. I couldn’t, though I tried hard. I remember watching him; it gave me pleasure just to watch him.
I remember walking with him, afterward, in Stuttgart, and wanting to put my arm through his, wanting to be close to him in a public place.
“If we were still just friends,” I said, “I wouldn’t think twice about putting my arm through yours; it would seem so natural. That means that if I don’t put my arm through yours, I’m doing something wrong.”
We walked, arm in arm.
After that, everything is blurred. The next time I visited Jake in the hospital, he knew immediately that something had happened, that I was different. He says that Quint and I came to see him together. I don’t know. In any case, Jake was released from the hospital the following day.
He and I sat in the Zimmer, our room full of dark, heavy, wooden furniture, and agreed that I could not stay in Stuttgart. I would go to Paris to look for work. We would let the days unroll, and give ourselves time to wait to see what happened and how we felt.
I must have said good-bye to Quint, but is it possible that I didn’t? I must have been alone on the Orient Express to Paris. I do remember going back to the Hotel Odéon, to another room like the first, with a large bed, an armoire, a small desk and chair, for $2 a night. Every morning, the chambermaid strapped a pair of wet brushes on over her shoes and shuffled back and forth across the floor. I spent hours in that room, lying on the bed reading, dreaming, sleeping, and waiting.
I also spent hours in a record store on the Champs Elysée, in the listening booth. When it was crowded, the clerks would tap on the door after I’d been there for a while to let me know that it was someone else’s turn. If it wasn’t crowded, they let me stay as long as I wanted. When I asked if they had work, they said they’d let me know. I went to the USO and looked at the bulletin board; I went to the movies, where I discovered that the usher expected a tip, that there were advertisements to sit through before the feature film began, and that you could buy ice cream without leaving your seat. I think I saw Moulin Rouge and Hellzapoppin and The Beggar’s Opera. I went in and out of stores, looking for work. I checked the ads in the International Herald Tribune, and its office. But there was no work.
Jake forwarded my dependent’s check, but it wasn’t very large. I ate hard-boiled eggs I bought at bars from baskets on the zinc counters. At a restaurant near the hotel, there were free baskets of bread and little jars of mustard on every table, and I ate bread with mustard on it and paid for a cup of coffee. Sometimes at night, I’d go early to a restaurant and order something cheap and delicious—an omelette fines herbes, for instance.
I’d sit at outdoor tables in the afternoon and sip my chocolat, or coffee, or wine, and feel as if I had been submerged into a pool of unhappiness. Voices floated by me speaking in sounds and tones I couldn’t understand—slightly muffled, slightly dampened, all fast and jumbled together, high-pitched, no pauses, no periods, no commas. But I was in Paris, and it was beautiful. I remember thinking that I was desperately unhappy in a place I’d never been unhappy in before. This was different from being unhappy in New York City or at Antioch. This was surreal: enormous unhappiness, surrounded by strangeness and by a beauty that itself was a kind of happiness.
I had almost no associations with anything in the city; I’d never been to any of these places before. I didn’t belong anywhere. I was very much alone.
At first, I didn’t realize that my period was late. But gradually, I knew my body felt different. I went to the American Hospital. I think of myself in that Paris suburb walking down a leafy street, as if in a dream, floating an inch or two above the sidewalk, but slowly and inevitably getting closer to the hospital, as if drawn by a magnet. A doctor examined me and told me, yes, I was pregnant.
I had no idea what to do. I simply went through the days as if they would go on forever. I didn’t even try to imagine the future.
The next time I needed to change money, I went, as always, to Pierre’s Coca Cola Bar on the Rue du Roi de Sicile. Pierre changed money on the black market. He wore a long, dark jacket with many pockets on the inside, where he kept different denominations. You’d give him your dollars, and he’d ask you what you wanted back, and how you wanted it.
We always talked for a few minutes; I’d buy a coffee, a requirement, and sit alone at one of the tiny round tables, watching him pirouette and strut his stuff, wrapping his jacket around himself, and then letting it flare ever so slightly.
This time Pierre apparently watched me, because after I had been there for several minutes, he came back to my table. We had already completed our financial arrangements, and there were no other customers.
“Q’est-ce que c’est? You are not happy?”
To me, Pierre was part of Paris—a sweet uncle, perhaps, foreign, but familiar. I had to agree with his estimate.
“C’est l’amour? Eet’s love? You have trouble wiz a man?”
I smiled. “No, everything’s okay.”
“Ah! Of course! I know it! You are enceinte, no? How you say—with baby? Pregnant? Yes, of course, you are.”
Having Pierre confirm the doctor’s diagnosis was devastating. It was much more real. Could everybody tell just by looking at me?
“Wait,” he said. “I come right back.”
He disappeared for a moment, and when he returned, he sat down next to me.
“I can help,” he said, quite kindly. “I know people. Places you can go, cheap. I know good man. Yes? I arrange? Fix for you? We make you happy again.”
In my mind, I saw the dark alley I’d read about, and the doom it held. I could see myself being taken silently through a door and placed on a table in a barely furnished room. I thanked Pierre, my only friend in Paris; but I didn’t accept his offer.
There is more and more I don’t remember. It frightens me even to try. I can feel tears ready to form, and my body braces itself; it knows that remembering will be painful. But nothing happens. I don’t remember; and I don’t cry.
When Quint arrived in Paris, he came with a friend. That’s all I remember of his visit—simply that he was there. And the feeling that he was not there for me, that he had brought a friend as a buffer, in order to defend himself, to be sure that he kept a safe distance.
I
know I received letters from Jake, thick letters, telling me what was happening in Stuttgart. There had been a dance at the Caserne, he told me, and Quint danced with George, which everybody thought was very funny. The paragraph was full of innuendo, but I took it no further than words on the page in Jake’s artfully formed handwriting. There were phone calls—from Jake? Quint? Finally, Jake came to Paris on a weekend pass.
I remember two things about that weekend: One, eating perfectly peeled tangerines that Jake bought at a street market. Two, telling him I was pregnant. We were in bed.
“That’s wonderful!”
Neither of us said anything for a minute.
“Of course, you’ll have an abortion.”
When we went back to Germany together, I felt as if the pieces of my life had been swept up and packed along with my clothes; I’d been drifting through the days by myself, finding no work, no answers; now I was being offered a chance to put my life back together.
Jake had a long pass coming, and we took it, leaving Stuttgart. We went to Switzerland and Italy, Zurich, Bern, and Lucerne, hitchhiking from Milan to Venice. In Bremerhaven, Germany, before we shipped out, I used the last of my marks to buy a beautiful hammered silver ring.
Then the Army ship home, arriving back in New York City, and realizing what a jumble my country was after the extraordinary neatness of Germany and Switzerland, and the luscious beauty of Italy. My life was no less in disarray.
12. JIL
WEDDING
I was nineteen and three-quarters, in my parents’ living room, chilly with central air conditioning on a hot August day. I was waiting for the man I was about to marry.
My mother was so happy she was giddy without benefit of champagne. My father was a little unsure; but given that my mother made all his decisions for him—what to wear, where to live, who and when his children should marry—he was nervously pleased. My soon-to-be-husband’s family was there, too, waiting tensely: We’d been making increasingly desperate conversation for more than half an hour. The groom was late.
Jessica Lost Page 8
