Jack took my hand. I was not sure why I felt so moved. It was a mixed-up day, with Amy calling and quarreling with her parents, with my own sense that soon, very soon, I would have to be on a plane back to New York for a career that felt—next to the beautiful simplicity of Vermeer’s work—loud and difficult. Nothing felt settled; nothing seemed to combine in the way I had expected. The painting—in fact the entire afternoon in the Rijksmuseum, with Jack’s hand finding mine, then releasing it, then finding it again—almost wounded with its beauty. It was not Hemingway’s Paris, but it was the same thing, the same pursuit of the simple and sublime, and it hurt my heart a little to let it inside me.
“I know what we need to do,” Jack said. “It’s the perfect antidote for a day in a museum.”
“I’m not sure I’m in a very adventurous mood.”
“You will be. I promise. Come on. We need to get away from the past and move toward the future.”
“If it were only that easy.”
“What is it, Heather?”
“Weltschmerz,” I said, feeling the heaviness of the word as it passed my lips. “German for world weariness and pain. It’s the idea that physical reality can never meet the demands of the mind. I researched it for a paper my sophomore year. I remembered it because it kind of describes these moods I sometimes get.”
“Welt…?” he asked.
“Weltschmerz. Unnamed dread and fatigue of the world. That’s the definition.”
“Ugh,” he said. “Do art museums always have this effect on you? If so, we’ll have to avoid them.”
“Sorry. I don’t like to be this way.”
“Don’t be sorry. Come on. It’s close by here. I found it the last time I came through Amsterdam.”
I was in no shape to resist. Jack kept my hand in his and led me out. Five minutes later, we stood in a fencing studio at the edge of the Rijksmuseum Gardens. The idea of a fencing studio, the concept that you could simply trade everyday life in for a fencing foil, or an épée, or whatever the hell it was called, seemed so preposterous that I felt my heart lift a little. Jack spoke to the attendant and nodded at whatever he was being told. The attendant was a young man with a triangular goatee. He looked like Zorro only not as outrageously cute as Zorro was supposed to look.
“We’re going to fence,” Jack said, pushing his credit card toward Zorro and looking at me. “We’re going to fight to the death. When you’re feeling existential dread, you need to push the limits. You need to confront death.”
“Jack,” I began, then I realized I had no idea what I wanted to say. I didn’t have a stance against fencing. No one in the world had a stance against fencing. I still felt jumbled up and jittery.
“You’ll feel better, I promise. It’s the best way to get out of … what did you call it?”
“Weltschmerz.”
“Okay, Weltschmerz, then,” Jack said, pulling his credit card back from Zorro. “Trust me on this. It’s impossible to feel world weary if you are fencing in defense of your life.”
“I don’t know the first thing about fencing, Jack. I’ve never even thought about it.”
“Perfect,” he said, accepting a roll of equipment from Zorro. Two white uniforms came ingeniously wrapped around a pair of fencing foils. Jack pushed one at me. Zorro shoved a beekeeper’s hat toward me. It was a helmet with the front covered in mesh. Apparently, we could also plug ourselves into a sensing device to record hits. Zorro spent quite a few minutes explaining the hookup to Jack.
“You can figure this out, right?” Jack asked me when Zorro finished. “It’s just a set of overalls, really.”
“We’re going to fence? Right now? That’s what you’re saying?”
“You won’t think about a thing except combat. Trust me. It will get your blood cruising in the best way.”
“This is crazy.”
“Of course it’s crazy. Everything is crazy. The whole world is crazy. Didn’t you know that, Heather? Didn’t you know everyone is an imposter and there are no real adults in the next room?”
“I’m very competitive, Jack. You need to know that about me. You need to know that if you want to sword fight with me, I will take no prisoners.”
“Fence,” he corrected me. “Now go into the ladies’ locker room and suit up. There’s a key, so you lock up your clothes in a cubby. Prepare to meet your untimely death at the end of my sword.”
I looked him straight in the eye.
“Very Freudian, this whole fencing thing,” I said. “Very penis-centered.”
“Exactly.”
“This could be your last moment on earth, Jack. Enjoy it.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Zorro laughed. He had been watching our exchange.
“Americans,” he said and shook his head.
“Fuck, yeah,” I said, turning to him, then lifting the uniform off the counter.
* * *
You learn several things when you stand in front of a man you are drawn to while wearing a fencing costume and carrying an épée in your hand. You learn, pretty quickly, that it is impossible to look anything less than chubby in a fencing costume. You also learn, if you are lucky, that the man you are drawn to looks kind of amazing standing directly in your path, his body turned to provide the most difficult angle for potential punctures, his grin solid and amused. Annoyingly, you also notice that your discomfort somehow fuels his pleasure, so that when he tilts up his visor and smiles at you, suggests a small rearrangement of your elbow while lunging, you want to kiss him and kill him and, above all, land a solid stab to his chest so that you might exalt for an instant in the way he has exalted for the better part of an hour while turning you into a pincushion.
“You are really, really, a mad dog,” Jack said after our twentieth, fiftieth, hundredth exchange. “Who knew? I had no idea. The real Heather is part sociopath.”
“En garde,” I said, mostly because I just liked saying it.
“Let me put my visor down.”
I felt my arm shaking. I felt my body shaking. Whatever Weltschmerz I had felt before was gone. Jack was right about that. Now I felt my blood stirring, my competitive juices bubbling, while Jack slowly, slowly lowered his visor. He smiled, and the visor covered the smile.
Then I attacked.
Walking through the door of the fencing studio, if someone had told me that I would turn into a bloodthirsty savage with a foil in my hand, I would have called that person crazy. But I was a savage. Crazy savage. And I loved the feeling of a sword in my hand, the danger I embodied. This was one-on-one sport, the best kind. My body felt exhausted, but I couldn’t resist attacking.
As soon as I lunged, Jack swatted my foil to one side, slid his blade down the length of my épée, and softly pecked my chest with the tip of his weapon.
“Touch,” he said.
“Touch,” I agreed.
But I kept coming at him. We stood in the en garde position. Whatever instruction Jack had given me was difficult to keep in mind. I wanted blood. I wanted to get him. I wanted to feel the pleasure of sneaking my blade inside his and landing a hit, a very palpable hit, as Hamlet’s fencing supervisor once said in the final death scene. I even imagined being willing to be stabbed if only I could stab him in return. Insane.
But it didn’t matter. I didn’t make much progress. Jack slapped away my feeble thrusts and pivoted to one side. He quartered me for an instant, and before I could do a thing, he had tapped me again with the tip of his foil.
“Damn!” I shouted.
“It takes time.”
“Knitting takes time. I want blood.”
“Talk about a Freudian she-devil.”
“You asked for it, Jack. You opened up this can of worms. I warned you.”
“Okay, let’s finish up, though. I only reserved the room for an hour.”
“I can’t believe how this feels.”
“Feels good, huh?”
I nodded. Then I assumed a position to indicate I was ready. Jack nodded and said, “En g
arde.” I charged forward.
But this time, before he could turn my charge aside, I pulled back voluntarily. I flicked my wrist over quickly and slapped his épée down. He was too strong for my parry to give me much of an opening, but I slid my blade quickly forward and caught the inside of his forearm. It was not a true hit, but it was as close as I had come in an hour of trying. Jack stepped back and pushed his visor up.
“I think that was a hit,” he said.
I pushed my own visor up. We stood looking, breathing, panting, and I had never felt more alive and sexed up in my life. I shoved the helmet off my head altogether and ran at him and jumped into his arms and kissed him as hard as I had ever kissed anyone. He dropped his épée to one side, and his body swelled to take my weight, and then, in two steps, he had me against the padded wall of our tiny studio, his lips on my mine, the feeling of sweat and blood and anger and heat mixed together in a glorious, painful way.
We didn’t speak. We had no need. He kept kissing me deeper and deeper, and I suddenly felt our bodies click, move to a second gear, a millionth gear, the ancient gear, and then the violence became gentleness, and he stopped and held me and looked in my eyes.
“This is a different Heather,” he whispered.
“Same Heather,” I said, finding it hard to catch my breath.
“You’re spectacular.”
“Shut up.”
He kissed me again. This time he kissed me so hard that I felt my back and ribs flex against the wall. He was strong. Incredibly strong. I kept my legs wrapped around his waist and, yes, it was sex play, it was surely sex play, but it was something else, too, something beyond Weltschmerz, something that annihilated any false thoughts or cheap emotions. I wanted his body, all of it, but I also wanted something deeper, something that had to do with the light in the Vermeer painting, in the soft haze of a morning and the color of a bowl as if filled from the maid’s hand, and I wanted his sweat and swagger and his sword thrusts. Of course it was insanely Freudian, that was obvious, but who cared? If he had pushed me through the wall, if we had created an ebony silhouette like a cartoon character blasting through the side of a mountain, I would have kept kissing him. It was only when someone began knocking, someone far away, and Jack turned slowly, peeling his lips from mine, that we saw Zorro standing in the doorway, looking sheepish, his right hand carrying a clipboard.
“Your time is up,” he said, blushing. “Sorry.”
Jack nodded, and I swung down from his body. Whatever blood remained in my body had turned to copper, and I had to put a hand out on the wall to keep from staggering. For a long time, we remained standing next to each other, both of us aware a touch from either of us could start everything again in a flash.
18
“Raef asked me to go with him to Spain. It’s near the end of our trip,” Constance said. “There’s a jazz festival in Málaga, and he wants me to go with him.”
She didn’t say anything else. We stood in the bathroom, both of us brushing our teeth, both of us looking at the other’s reflection in the large mirror over the sink.
I smiled. But I had too much toothpaste in my mouth to do it properly, so I spit some out, then put my eyes back on Constance’s eyes.
She stopped brushing and looked at me, her eyes getting teary.
“Could this be real?” she asked. “Can this be happening? Are we just making things up in our heads?”
She said it so softly that it broke my heart. It contained so much tenderness, so much longing, that it seemed to surprise her as she spoke the words.
“You and Raef? Yes,” I said, “I think it is. I think you found your true.”
True was an old word whose meaning we three had cobbled together to indicate things that felt indivisible. Amy and Constance and I were true. Cold beer at a ball game, an open fireplace in a small cozy bar, the scent of grass on a spring morning, lilacs, the sound of a bee as it hit the screen door over and over—those were true.
“It feels like it is, but that’s crazy, isn’t it? I don’t know what to think about it. I really don’t. I’ve known him for a day, maybe a little more. And I promised my parents to stay with you.”
“Don’t think. Just go along. Follow it and see what happens. We didn’t come to Europe to be big chickens, did we?”
She looked for a while into my eyes. Then she spit out her toothpaste and came back to reality.
“Well, I’m not going without you,” she said, her face bent to the faucet. “I would never do that, but I didn’t know where things stood with you and Jack—if we could all travel together, maybe. I swear, I feel like I’ve been drugged. I’ve never felt this way.”
“When is the jazz festival?”
“Probably the last week we’re here.”
“You should go with him. I don’t know what Jack’s plans are. But even if I had to travel on my own for a while—”
Constance shook her head.
“No. Absolutely not. I won’t even consider it. I’m not leaving you alone in Europe.”
“I think I want to go back to Paris, anyway,” I said, feeling the rightness of it even as I spoke. “Maybe I can talk Jack into that. We’re flying out of Charles de Gaulle, so I could just go a couple of days early. We’ll see. He has a friend who has an apartment in Vienna, too. He has plans to go there. It will all work out. There are plenty of people our age traveling around.”
“He’s your true,” she said, straightening and meeting my eyes again. She dabbed a towel at her mouth. “I know that without question. You’re like a picture that suddenly comes into focus when he’s around. It’s adorable. He’s nuts about you, too. Raef said so.”
“I don’t know what to make of him. I’m like a guy who goes fishing and suddenly hooks an enormous fish. You never expected to be in contact with such a thing,” I said. “It’s all ridiculous, isn’t it? First trip to Europe and we’re gaga over a couple of boys.”
“They don’t feel like boys, though, do they?”
Constance wouldn’t let my eyes go. She wouldn’t let me dismiss Jack and Raef so easily. She wouldn’t let me relegate them to college romances, silly flings that came and went quickly. She put her towel down at her side.
“No, they don’t feel like boys,” I said, my eyes still on hers. “But I think Jack has a secret. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something behind his travel in Europe. I can’t tell if he’s traveling to something, or away from something. But something’s there. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
“Have you asked him?”
I shook my head.
“No, not straight out. It’s a feeling I have. A sense that there’s another piece to the puzzle and it’s missing right now. He challenged me a little about going to work at Bank of America, kind of inferring that it would be soul killing. I told you about that.”
“You could google him. I googled Raef and found out he’s all over the jazz message boards. It reassured me to see that somehow.”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t even know his last name. He’s just Jack Vermont. How absurd is that? Remind me to ask his freaking last name, will you?”
She nodded as she rinsed out her brush and then reached over and squeezed my hand.
19
We had our first fight, or squabble, or tiff, or who-exactly-is-this-person-and-why-out-of-all-the-people-in-the-world-am-I-spending-time-with-him-question-mark-question-mark-question-mark, at a table—one of those obnoxiously cute café tables I spotted everywhere in Europe but never in the States—beside a canal on the outskirts of the city. Constance and I had a train to catch to Berlin later in the evening, so Jack and I had decided to rent two black bicycles—the ubiquitous black bicycles that glide everywhere in Amsterdam (Jack had even made a lovely metaphor talking about the bicycle paths as ant trails, the Dutch so many black leaf-cutter ants bringing vegetation back to the nest)—and to spend the morning riding around the city. Naturally—because it was Jack—the weather cooperated. A perfect slice of sunshine, not too hot
, not too cold, descended on the city, and the canals glistened and Jack laughed and held my hand whenever we stopped and we flirted nonstop, and we kissed twice in absurdly beautiful locations, the water glistening, the city clean and fresh, and the flowers, glorious flowers, everywhere.
Then Wolf-Jack appeared.
He did not come to huff and puff and blow my house down.
He came with a smile, and he came with lunch and a tall pilsner that sweated in the sun. He came looking handsomer than any man had a right to look, and he came with his bike leaned against mine, at a tiny restaurant on a tiny street near a tiny cobblestone life-fucking snapshot.
* * *
“Are you sure you really want to hear this?” he asked innocently. “It’s not that big a deal. It’s just a theory, but you probably won’t like it.”
“Sure, I do. I’m always open to theories. Bring it on!”
“It’s something I read, that’s all. When you started talking about New York City, it came to mind. I read someplace that New York is a prison that the inmates have built for themselves. That’s all. It was a concept that someone was kicking around.”
“Go on.”
“You sure you want to hear this? It’s just a notion.”
“Notions are good.”
He took a deep breath and raised his eyebrows as if he had to outline the position even though it wasn’t his. He repeated the proposition, he seemed to say, but he didn’t want to own it.
“Well, if you follow the line of reasoning, it goes like this: The inhabitants of Manhattan live in this tiny area, jammed one next to the other, and to make it all worthwhile, they share the illusion that they are doing something important. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere … all that horse crap. So they have art and first-run movies, and that’s actually part of the prison pay. You have to provide that kind of thing; otherwise, people would revolt. But if you walk around the streets and really look, drop the scales from your eyes, so to speak, you see the dirt and the garbage and the homelessness. Part of that is true of any city, I grant you, but in New York there is a self-congratulatory element that says we are the best in the world. Meanwhile, most of the effort goes into keeping the everyday regimen in place. New York is all about status quo. It feels new sometimes, like when the circus comes to town, or some new movie premier arrives, but nothing really changes. The museums change exhibits and everyone talks about that, and then there are charity balls and everyone talks about the gowns and the new outfits and the fashions … I don’t know, Heather. I’m probably not making any sense. As I said, it was just a thing I read.”
The Map That Leads to You Page 8
