The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  “Excuse me?” I said, and I turned the iPad against my chest.

  “My legs went numb sleeping up there. Not right away but after a while. At least I got a little sleep. Do you want to try it? I’d boost you up.”

  “I could climb up if I wanted to.”

  “It was an offer, not an insult.”

  “You’ll have to move if my friend comes back. The seat is taken.”

  He smiled. I wondered why I was being bitchy. It was likely a defense mechanism. He was so good looking—and so knew it—that I couldn’t help wanting to puncture his confidence. My neck flushed. It’s my one tell. My neck always flushes when I’m nervous, excited, or under pressure. When I took exams at Amherst, I looked like a ring-necked pheasant. I used to wear turtlenecks to cover it, though the heat of the collars only made it worse.

  “You were reading, right?” he asked. “I saw the way your hand flipped the pages. Do you like these e-books? I’m not a big fan myself.”

  “I can carry a lot of books in one small device.”

  “Hooray,” he said, his tone mocking but flirty.

  “Traveling, they make sense.”

  “A book is a companion, though. You can read it in a special place, like on a train to Amsterdam, then you carry it home and you chuck it on a shelf, and then years later you remember that feeling you had on the train when you were young. It’s like a little island in time. If you love the book, you can give it to someone else. And you can discover it over and over, and it’s like seeing an old friend. Can’t do that with a digital file.”

  “I guess you’re purer than I am. You can also throw a book on a shelf, then pack it the next time you move, then unpack it, then pack it again. And so on. An iPad holds more than any bookshelf in any apartment I’m likely to get.”

  “I mistrust devices. Seems like a gimmick to me.”

  But saying that, he grabbed the iPad and turned it over. It happened so quickly that I didn’t have time to prevent it. I was conscious of the train-ness of the whole experience: cute guy, train moving, lights, scents of food from back in the bar cars, foreign languages, adventure. Also, he smiled. He had a killer smile, a conspiratorial smile, a smile that said mischief wasn’t far off, come along, we’re going to have a better time than you’re having alone.

  “Hemingway?” he asked, reading a page. “The Sun Also Rises. Wow, you’ve got it bad.”

  “Got what bad?”

  “Oh, you know, the whole Hemmy thing. Paris, kissing the old women in the slaughterhouses, wine, impressionists, all that. The usual romance of the ex-patriate experience in Europe. Maybe even the I-want-to-be-a-writer-and-live-in-a-garret thing. You might even have it that bad. I thought women didn’t like Hemingway anymore.”

  “I like the sadness.”

  He looked at me. He hadn’t expected that, I could tell. He even bent back a little to see me more fully. It was a look of appraisal.

  “East Coast,” he said tentatively, like a man caught between choices of ice cream flavors. “Jersey, maybe Connecticut. Dad works in New York. It could be Cleveland, maybe the Heights, I could be off that much, but I don’t think so. How close am I?”

  “Where are you from?”

  “Vermont. But you didn’t tell me if I was right or wrong.”

  “Keep going. I want you to tell me my whole profile.”

  He looked at me again. He put his hand softly on my chin. It struck me as a pretty good pickup tactic regardless of how accurate he might be. He turned my face gently from side to side, looking seriously at me. He had wonderful eyes. My neck glowed like red flannel. I glanced quickly to see if maybe Constance had stirred at our voices, but she still slept. She could sleep through a hurricane, I knew.

  “You graduated recently. You’re in Europe with your buddies now … sorority sisters? No, probably not sorority sisters. You’re too clever for that. Maybe you worked on the college newspaper together. Good college, too, am I right? East Coast, so, maybe Sarah Lawrence, Smith, something like that.”

  “Amherst,” I said.

  “Oooooo, so smart, too. Tough to get into Amherst these days. Or well connected, which is it? How smart? Hmm? That remains to be seen. But you’re reading Hemingway in Europe, so that’s either very impressive or terribly clichéd.”

  “You’re being a jerk, you know? A condescending jerk. That’s the worst kind.”

  “I’m doing a male display in order to meet you. The thing is, I like you. I liked you right off. If I had tail feathers, I would spread them out and dance around you to demonstrate my interest. But how am I doing so far? Is it working at all? Feel any pitter-pat in your heart?”

  “You were better before you opened your mouth. Much better, actually.”

  “Okay, touché. Let’s see. Mom involved in charities, volunteer work. Dad has made it big. Corporate big, not entrepreneurial big. But that’s just a guess. Lots of dough either way. You’re reading Hemingway, so you have artistic feelings, but you don’t trust them because, well, because they aren’t practical. Hemingway is part of the well-read résumé, right?”

  I took a deep breath, nodded to accept what he said, then slowly began to speak.

  “And you are a pretend back-to-earther green Vermonter jackass who talks a lot, probably reads—I’ll give you that—who has one of those quiet little trust funds that allows you to wander around the world, picking up girls and dazzling them with your wit and wisdom and erudition. The thing is, you’re not about the sex that might come along with that package, although you don’t mind it. You’re about getting the girls to fall for you, to marvel at your wonderfulness, because that’s your particular pathology. And so you can riff on the whole Hemmy thing as if you two are old drinking buddies, but Hemingway did this all for real—he was after something you’ll never understand—and you, you’re just playing at it, and you should leave now because Amy should be back soon.”

  He smiled. If I hurt him, his eyes didn’t give him away. Then he winced playfully.

  “Just take the knife out of me before I go.”

  “I’m sorry, Jack,” I said, and I couldn’t help laying on the name a bit and mocking him with it. “Did anyone ever mention that you look like a bad version of Hugh Jackman?”

  “The Wolverine?”

  I nodded.

  “I give. You win. Mercy.”

  He started to stand, then he grabbed for my calendar that I had beneath the iPad.

  “Tell me that’s not a Smythson. Smythson of Bond Street? Oh, good gracious, the most expensive, tony Day Runner anyone ever saw? Tell me you don’t actually own one of those.”

  “It was a graduation present. And it wasn’t full price, believe me. It was a deal thing, and it was pretty much for free.”

  “I’m trying to imagine what kind of person needs a pretentious calendar to remind her that she’s doing okay.”

  “Punctual people. People who want to remember appointments. People who are trying to accomplish something in this world.”

  “Oh, and you’re one of those?”

  “Trying to be.”

  “How much do those things cost, anyway?”

  “Not your business. Go bother somebody else, would you?”

  “Oh, good Lord,” he said, dropping the Smythson back in my lap. “Do you really think if you get every gold star the teacher hands out there is a huge refrigerator in the sky where you get to hang your special papers? That some supermommy somewhere will put refrigerator magnets on your accomplishments and everyone will stand back and applaud?”

  I wanted to punch him. I nearly did.

  “Do you really think, Jack, that roaming around Europe and trying to be a lost, romantic soul will turn you into anything other than a cynical drunk sitting in a bar somewhere and boring everyone around you?”

  “Wow,” he said. “Are you just traveling for your résumé? So you can say at a cocktail party someday that you’ve been to Paris? Why did you bother coming over here if you see travel that way?”

 
“I don’t see it any one way, Jack. But little hipster dudes who are, like, a hundred years late to the party, to Paris, and all that between wartime romance, well, they’re pitiful. Some of us believe in doing things. In making things. So, yes, sometimes we get calendars from Bond Street that help us organize our day. That’s called human progress. We have cars and planes and, yes, iPads and iPhones. Deal with it, Vermont boy.”

  He grinned. I almost grinned back. I had to admit he was fun to spar with. I didn’t think he took much of what we said seriously. The only thing he seemed to take seriously was the way our eyes kept catching and holding.

  “Well played. I admit it, well played. I like your passion. It doesn’t take much to get your tongue sharpened, does it?”

  “Is that the best you can do? Are you calling me a sharp-tongued shrew, Jack? I’ll know most of the references you throw at me. I’m well educated and wicked smart. Drift away, Jack Vermont. Go back to contemplating the great significance of your life, or maybe plot out the next novel you will never write. Go find a café where you can sit and have pretend conversations of pretend importance with other pretend expats who like to believe they see a little more deeply into the human experience than we poor, benighted businesspeople. That will make you feel terrifically superior. You can look down from your lofty heights and throw your thunderbolts.”

  “Pretend expats?” he said, grinning again. He grinned to get me to grin, and I had to fight not to give in to him.

  “Should I go on? Or do you get the idea?”

  “I do,” he said, and he slowly stood. “I think this went very well. How about you?”

  “It was great.”

  He made a show out of creeping past me out to the aisle—and he did have a great body—and then he swung up into the sleeping rack again. When he settled back, he waited until I looked at him. He stuck his tongue out. I stuck mine back at him.

  4

  That’s where it stood for a while. My neck burned red, and I had trouble controlling my breathing. For a ten count, I sat with my face in my hands, trying to get control of myself. I didn’t like thinking I was so easily pegged, because I was from New Jersey, and my dad was a corporate suit, and my mom was a Junior Leaguer. I hated thinking I was a convenient type, a person someone like Jack could identify in the first minutes of meeting me. I also didn’t like the venom that came out when I turned it on him. Then again, he had crossed a line. I watched him while the lights continued to flicker and flash from outside. I had been in the no-man zone for months, ever since I’d broken up with Brian, my major college crush. I still couldn’t bring myself to think about the fact that I had brought Brian home, even decorated the family Christmas tree with him, only to discover he had screwed a girl on a dare the week before. He had been drunk, and the girl had been a local bartender with a wide bra strap and a head full of blond-tinted hair, and he’d been put up to it by his friends. Bar dare, bar dare, bar dare, ha ha ha, funny, funny, funny, another round, they chanted. So he had gone off into her car, or his car, or to an alleyway, for all I knew, to have his rendezvous. And it didn’t mean anything, that was for sure, the world agreed on that, but all I could remember was looking up at Brian’s cordovan corduroys as he stood on the stepladder and took ornaments from my hand, while my dad made drinks in the dry bar off the living room and my mom, the T. rex, lumbered around the house with a wispy sweater over her shoulders like a cape and $300 trousers from Eileen Fisher hiked up to the bottom knobs of her ribs. Bing Fucking Crosby played on Pandora. I confess: I felt the dreamy romance of the entire thing—Christmas in the country, snow falling, Holiday Inn and all that rot—until his friend Ronnie Evers Facebooked a picture of Brian with his hand down the back of Brenda the bartender’s skinny jeans, his tongue stuck out like an acid-band lead guitarist, while she ground her buffalo legs against his thigh and leaned back cowgirl-style.

  What followed, when I twigged it all out from Twitter and Facebook and a few tagged photos, was a quiet little scene between Brian and me down in the old rumpus room, our tight, controlled voices hissing like old radiators.

  How could you? Her? You did her?

  It was a joke. A bet! I was drunk!

  Oh, jeez, Brian. For fuck’s sake.

  Everything’s okay. Jeez, lighten up, Heather. We’re not engaged, you know?

  Fuck you, Brian.

  But we had tumbled out of our particular little Eden. We split up the next day, his bag thumping into the trunk of his old Volvo sedan before he pulled out, Christmas lights leading him away. When I turned back to the house, I spotted Mr. Periwinkle, our ancient cat, watching from the upstairs window.

  * * *

  So Jack. Constance was still asleep. Amy was still gone. The train car had settled into that kind of restless calm that comes to things in motion when people are trying to sleep, but keep waking up. I smelled coffee from the bar car behind us. Now and then, right out of a noir movie, we got the train sound that comes when you go through a stop or past a siding: duhhhhh-de-de-de-de dealllllllhhhhhhhh. A Doppler effect, I knew from first-year physics.

  I decided on coffee. And decided halfway thumbs-up on Jack the Wolverine, so that when I passed him I took a little snapshot of him with my iPhone. He didn’t wake. But then I felt guilty about what I had said to him, how harsh I had been, so when I ordered my own latte, I ordered one for him, too, figuring someone would drink it if he didn’t want it. While the porter made the coffee, I looked at the picture. Jack was drop-dead gorgeous but slept deeply—zombie sleep, really—and I wondered what that was about. Brian had always slept halfheartedly, an insomniac itching for the world to start again. Jack sank way, way down when he slept.

  I carried the order back, one in each hand, which proved harder to do than you might think. I stopped next to his head and stared at him for a second, figuring eyes always woke people up. It did. Maybe he detected the presence of someone, I don’t know, but he looked over at me and smiled, and it was a sweet, innocent smile, one he might have given his mom on his tenth birthday.

  “I got you a coffee,” I said. “It was the least I could do given your pitiful life.”

  “Let me get up.”

  I stood and waited. He slowly slid down. It was my first time standing next to him, and I liked the way he seemed to curl around me. Big shoulders, big muscles, a riot shield of a man.

  “We could drink these out between the cars,” he said, arranging his bag so he could leave it. “I could use some air, miserable, trust-fund, lame-ass Vermont boy that I am.”

  I nodded.

  “You are,” I agreed. “Sad but true.”

  He finished with his bag and grabbed his coffee. I wondered, as I followed him out to the space between the two cars, if what I had done could be called a pickup.

  5

  “Sorry if I was being a jerk earlier,” he said. “I sometimes oversell.”

  “To women?”

  “I guess.”

  “Are you a show-off in general?”

  “Only around women as beautiful as you.”

  “How old is that line?”

  “Not so old. Maybe I mean it. Maybe I think you’re beautiful. How tall are you, anyway?”

  “Five six.”

  “That’s the perfect height, you know? Trapeze artists are all five feet six inches or under. So are human cannonballs. The people who get shot out of cannons … they’re five six.”

  “You’re making that up.”

  “It’s a known fact. An accepted fact everywhere. It’s the first question if you go for a job at a carnival. Even lion tamers are five six or under.”

  “Have you worked in a circus?”

  “Of course.”

  “But you’re taller than five six.”

  “The women have to be five six. The men can be any height at all if they work behind the scenes. That’s what I did. Mostly I talked people into throwing softballs at a stack of bottles. I was a barker.”

  “I don’t believe a thing you say.”

/>   “And a lion bit me once. You probably won’t believe that, either. Right on the thigh. Right in the meaty part of the thigh. I was asleep and suddenly there she was, a female named Sugar. She was known to have a bad character, but I never had a problem with Sugar. She looked at me as she bit down as if to say she was sorry, but it was her nature, after all. I was just a midnight snack.”

  “You are so full of it, but I could almost listen to you for a while.”

  He shrugged and sipped his latte. We stood between the two cars, facing each other, our backs against the walls on each side. The track seemed to fly underneath us. You could smell things obscurely—hayfields, and cinders, rain maybe, an electric scent that came from a motor—but mostly it dissolved into simple movement.

  “I’ve often wondered why Sugar let go. It haunts me, really.”

  “Maybe you taste bad. Was this in Vermont?”

  “It was in Istanbul. It’s a long story. I’m sorry. I get nervous, and then I talk too much. Or try too hard. That’s what I did with you earlier. A fatal flaw, I guess.”

  “I wouldn’t call it a fatal flaw. Just a flaw.”

  “I was hoping you would find me Byronic.”

  “I think if you need to hope someone finds you Byronic, then you aren’t Byronic. Ipso facto.”

  He looked at me and sipped his coffee. The coffee wasn’t very good.

  “Ipso facto?” he asked. “Latin for ‘pretentious’?”

  “By that very fact. The enemy of my enemy is ipso facto my friend.”

  “You are such an A student, aren’t you?”

  “And the problem with that is…?”

  “Just that you’re an apple polisher. That’s why you have a Smythson calendar. What’s the worst grade you ever got? Outside of gym class, I mean.”

  “You think I wouldn’t get an A in gym?”

  “I think you were probably picked right away in dodgeball, then everyone on the other team tried to peg you in the head because you are such an A student. Ipso facto.”