The Map That Leads to You

by J. P. Monninger

  Constance hadn’t heard from her except for a few random texts; I hadn’t, either, even after I sent the pictures of Constance riding a mechanical bull in Kraków. Somehow being united again persuaded us to believe that she had to pick up and answer our request. Constance texted her first to tell her we were calling. Amy didn’t answer the text. But a few second later, when we clicked on Facetime, Amy immediately picked up and answered with a signature line.

  “What’s up, bitches!” She laughed.

  It was Amy, our Amy, and she looked happy but strange confined to the small computer screen. She looked thinner, too, bonier. Her eyes sparkled. She looked like someone who had run many miles but wasn’t quite put back together.

  “Oh, it’s so good to see you!” I said. “I missed you so much. We both have!”

  “No, you haven’t! You’ve been slicing off some sweet boy flesh for yourselves! I watch your Facebook posts! All those Instagram shots.”

  Maybe, maybe she was overcompensating a little with her enthusiasm. Constance leaned close to the screen, her glasses glinting a little.

  “What did you do to your hair?” she asked Amy. “I can’t quite see on the camera.”

  “Cut it. This gay guy grabbed me in my mom’s salon and insisted on a new hairstyle. I’m officially middle-age bobbed! I look like I just had a baby or something!”

  “It’s just wonderful to see you, Amy,” I said. “You look fantastic.”

  “I feel great. I’ve been going to the VFW hall in town and flirting my ass off with a bunch of old soldiers. They’re like training wheels for me. Getting back in the game little by little.”

  “Good,” Constance said. “I’m glad you picked up our call. It’s been too long. We miss you so much.”

  “And you two! Is love in the air over there? What the hell? I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and you go over the moon on me.”

  Constance blushed. So did I. Neither one of us answered.

  “Oh, jeez, you both have it bad!” Amy said, her voice slightly lagged in time. “Really bad. So now where are you? Are you back in Paris?”

  “We just got here,” I said. “We’re staying for four days, then we’re flying home.”

  “Are you coming alone?”

  I glanced at Constance. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.

  “Jack is coming with me,” I said.

  “I might be going to Australia,” Constance said. “It’s not for sure yet.”

  “You love these guys, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said softly. “I guess we do.”

  “Well, then, don’t be a pair of prudes. Ask for what you want. I’ll tell you this, the dating outlook around here is pretty grim. All boys or old men. I’ve got this one married jerk who won’t leave me alone. He has a belt buckle with an entire buckboard wagon on it. You wouldn’t believe someone like him exists, but he does. Every Saturday night, he shows up at the VFW hall, only he doesn’t say Saturday night, he says Date-ur-day night. He’s a weird little man.”

  “Are you dating him?” I asked.

  “Nooooooo,” she squealed. “No way. Oh, good God, no.”

  “But everything is okay?” Constance asked. The question was deliberately vague. Despite discussing it a thousand times, Constance and I were unsure what Amy thought about leaving, about the whole wrap up of her time in Europe.

  “I’m okay,” she said. “I know I haven’t been a good friend lately. I’m sorry I wasn’t in touch more. I couldn’t do it right away. It was hard coming back. Embarrassing. My parents were pissed. They couldn’t leave it alone. My mom likes to drop my fiasco—that’s what she calls it, Amy’s fiasco—into conversation every now and then just to keep me humbly under her thumb.”

  “Mothers and daughters,” I said.

  Constance nodded.

  “It was just a big bust,” Amy said. “Just Amy’s fucked-up summer trip.”

  “Things happen,” I said. “Crazy things. It wasn’t all that bad.”

  “Yes, but not to you two.”

  “You never know what’s going to happen,” Constance said. “The saints teach us that much, at least.”

  “Trouble is, I’m far from a saint,” Amy said.

  “You’re pretty saintly,” I said.

  “Honestly, though, I’m pulling back a little. I’m being a little less wild, a little less robust, you might say. I’ve been cutting down on my drinking, and I’ve been running again. It’s been a long time since I had steady exercise. I need it. I ran a 10K last weekend. I’m in surprisingly decent shape.”

  “You look good,” Constance said. “Healthy.”

  “Well, I’m trying.”

  We talked a little more, mostly focused on gossip about recent Amherst graduates. Amy had a good supply of tall tales about our old group. Finally, Raef and Jack returned. They sat and had a coffee and smiled at Amy and said hello, and then Amy was the fifth wheel and felt it.

  “Okay, I’m going to scoot,” she said. “Later, bitches.”

  “Take care of yourself,” I said.

  “Always,” she answered.

  She hung up or whatever it is you do when you sign off from Facetime. The screen shrank down and swallowed her, and she was gone in an electric burp that sounded odd in the café, sounded as if she had returned to the mother ship and wouldn’t beam down again anytime soon.

  34

  We checked into the Hotel Trenton, a modest pension on the Left Bank, not far from the Jardin du Luxembourg, a block or two from the Sorbonne. It was an extravagance on our limited budgets, but Jack argued it was worth it. We would only be in Paris together for the first time once—and only once—and to huddle together in a hostel wouldn’t do to commemorate such a moment.

  As always, Raef knew somebody, worked a deal somehow. There was no end to Raef’s handiness.

  The rooms were not much; they had not been updated in ages, but each room possessed a tiny balcony, large enough for a chair if you sat sideways. Raef and Constance had a room on the second floor, slightly below and to the right of our room. From our balcony we could see the rooftops, the red-tiled gutters and aluminum vents, and Jack promised me that Quasimodo, the Hunchback of Notre Dame, might swing into our bedchamber at any time, day or night.

  He sat on the bed and watched me unpack. I put some things in the small bathroom, trying to be orderly. The double bed made the room difficult to navigate. I banged my shins twice on the bedframe, the second time so hard that I had to stand for a second and close my eyes. Jack seemed to have the better idea. He looked ready for the nap we had promised each other—Raef and Constance had the same idea—before meeting to go exploring.

  “You okay?” Jack asked when he saw me standing and grimacing against the pain.

  “This damn bed.”

  “Why don’t you get on the bed with me? Then it wouldn’t trip you up.”

  I nodded and crawled over to him, my shin still stinging like a crazy torch. With our heads on the pillow, we could look out on midday Paris. I smiled, thinking how good it felt to be in Paris. The sun did not appear to be strong; a few lazy clouds worked against the gray sky and seemed to gather the day’s color into their billowy centers.

  “I have a bit of a headache,” Jack said.

  “You okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  He shrugged.

  “Can I get you anything? Do anything?”

  “Sex,” he said. “Kinky sex.”

  I pushed up and looked at him. He smiled. It was a weak smile. He didn’t feel great, I could see, and his color was lousy.

  “I mean it, Jack. Are you okay?”

  He shrugged again. He tried to put a brave face on it, but he clearly didn’t feel well.

  “Let me close my eyes,” he said. “I’ll be okay in an hour.”

  “Okay. If I’m not here when you wake up, it means the Hunchback has taken me.”

  “Good to know.”

  I kissed him gently on the cheek. I felt his lips curl in
a smile, but he didn’t move.

  We slept a long time. I woke in midafternoon, and Jack still slept soundly beside me. He had turned away so I couldn’t see his face. I didn’t want to shake the bed or risk waking him, so I slipped carefully into the bathroom, rinsed my face, brushed my teeth, brushed my hair quickly, then wrote a note and stuck it to the mirror.

  “Sleepyhead, call me as soon as you wake up,” I wrote. “I hope you feel better.”

  I slipped out the door and went to explore Paris on my own.

  * * *

  I bought a crêpe du fromage and a café au lait from a food truck outside the Jardin du Luxembourg and carried it to a table beside a statue of Pan not far beyond the entranceway. I was hungry, but I also wanted the sensation of having a small meal by myself in the park that Hemingway made famous. I sat beneath a large chestnut tree, already in its final fruiting, the heavy nuts scattered around its base, some of them exploded from footfalls. I ate slowly, picking at the crêpe, which was delicious. It tasted of grass and meadows, and the cheese was warm and sweet. The coffee had a dark, heavy viscosity that I had never tasted in coffee before. The two flavors and textures—the soft, yielding flesh of the crêpe balanced against the oily richness of the coffee—made me happy in a peculiar, pleased way. Here I was again on the Left Bank of Paris, late summer, and I sat in the Jardin du Luxembourg, the massive trees and green lawns surrounding me, the exact spot where Hemingway and Hadley and Bumpy sat decades before between the wars.

  It was slightly silly and overly romantic, but I didn’t care. I pulled out my iPad and read Hemingway. I read from A Moveable Feast, which I had read during my first trip to Paris. I scanned through the pages, stopping to reread sections I had noted or underlined. Hemingway still got to me. He wrote: We ate well and cheaply and drank well and cheaply and slept well and warm together and loved each other.

  I read that several times. I thought of Jack and of what I wanted.

  I took the last, tiny sip of my coffee and turned the plate over so that the crumbs from the crêpe could be taken by the multitudes of pigeons that roamed near the table, never far away, always burbling, like water or birds made of glass.

  I was still sitting, empty but pleased, when the phone beeped.

  Where is Quasimodo holding you? the text read.

  The Jardin du Luxembourg, I wrote back. Come sit with me.

  * * *

  “We need to go on a secret mission,” Jack said as he kissed me quickly and slid in beside me. “We’re not meeting Raef and Constance until late. We have the evening to ourselves.”

  “First tell me how you’re feeling.”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Are you really? Or are you just being brave?”

  “No, I feel fine, honestly. I swear.”

  “You slept really hard. You didn’t wake at all when I left.”

  He smiled and reached over and tucked my hair behind my ear.

  “Did you eat?” he asked.

  “A crêpe and a cup of coffee.”

  He nodded. He looked serious for a second and turned to me.

  “This is Hemingway’s park, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  “When he was young, he walked his baby here, didn’t he?”

  I nodded.

  “He used to kill pigeons and stuff them under the baby blanket,” I said. “They were so broke they needed the pigeons for food.”

  Jack smiled softly.

  He reached across the table for my hand.

  I loved the weight of his hand. I loved its size wrapping around my own.

  My phone buzzed before we had a chance to move. The Mom-a-saurus was on the line, but I didn’t pick up the call.

  We sat for a while and watched the park grow darker. It was a beautiful evening. Later, a tall man walking a Jack Russell came by, and we watched them continue down the path. They looked funny together; the dog’s short little legs seemed to go a thousand times faster than the man’s. The dog was well behaved. It moved like a balloon tied to the end of a stick.

  We headed back to the room at twilight. I felt full with happiness. Jack stretched out on the bed again and fell asleep. I guessed he wasn’t feeling 100 percent. I sat on the chair on the balcony and looked out at Paris. I opened my iPad, but I didn’t read. I wanted to breathe Paris into my core. I wanted to trap some part of it so that I could carry it with me. I saw the pigeons alight on the slate roofs for the night and watched a tiny plane pass overhead. One by one, lamps came on down in the street, and soon the building shimmered with yellow light, cocktail light, where people came inside and sat and began their evenings. I watched it all and said not a prayer, not a memo to God or a mysterious creator in the sky, but instead to life, to whatever it was that propelled Hadley and Ernest and all the people who had come to Paris to discover what they didn’t even know they needed. I had come, too, and now I was going to say good-bye, but I vowed never to leave Paris entirely, to carry it with me, to keep it as my own secret to visit whenever life permitted it.

  A little while later, Constance tapped on the door.

  “Is he still asleep?” she whispered when I opened the door and stepped into the hallway.

  “He’s asleep. I’m not sure he feels great.”

  “Raef said the club we’re going to isn’t far. I texted you the address. We’ll see you later?”

  “I hope so.”

  Constance gave me a quick hug. She smelled of the outdoors and of her favorite soap.

  “We’re going to eat something with some of Raef’s friends, then we’ll go from there. But the plan is to go to the club. I’ll text you if anything changes.”

  “What time will you get there?”

  “Late, probably. Everything is late in the jazz world.”

  “Okay, shoot me a text to let me know what you’re doing.”

  She nodded. Then she left.

  * * *

  Sitting on the small balcony after Constance had gone, I read parts of Jack’s grandfather’s journal. I held it on my lap and maneuvered my chair until I had sufficient light to read it.

  It was a remarkable document. The writing was fiercely literate, and the paragraphs and observations were delivered in a sharp, sure hand. He was an excellent draftsman, too. He sketched his impressions of buildings and flowers, boulevards and bridges. He seemed drawn to architecture, especially, although he possessed varied tastes. He had a good eye for images and small details.

  It was easy to see what about the journal attracted Jack. His grandfather had been a kind, compassionate soul. He wrote about children and animals suffering the effects of the war. He wrote about the bombings and the smell of thermite still lingering in the air. He also found beauty in all the devastation, and his pictures—plain, simple figures, for the most part—possessed an elegant primitivism that needed no words.

  I was still reading, fully involved, when Jack whispered to me.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “You awake? How do you feel?”

  I put the journal down and climbed into bed with him.

  “Better.”

  “Really better, or just trying to be brave better?”

  “No, I think I’m on the mend. It might have been some food poisoning. I have a chronically weak belly. You might as well know that.”

  I put my hand on his forehead. He felt warm but not feverish.

  “I was worried about you. I’m still worried about you. Do you think we should find a doctor?”

  “You’re sweet. But I’m all right.”

  “You must be starved.”

  “What do we have around?”

  “Odds and ends, Jack. I’ll run down and get you something else.”

  “No, let me try whatever’s here. It will be okay.”

  I kissed him lightly and climbed out and took a few minutes to put together a haphazard snack. It wasn’t much. I gave him the remainder of the bread we had from my backpack, an apple, and a bottle of iced tea.

  He went to the
bathroom while I got things together, and I heard him washing. When he returned, he looked a little better.

  “I haven’t even asked if you can cook,” he said as he climbed back into bed. “Do you have any kitchen skills?”

  “Not many. You?”

  “I’m not bad. I have about ten dishes I can make. That’s about it, though. Plus the basics.”

  “Well, don’t judge me on my little snack here. I don’t have much to work with.”

  “I appreciate you doing it and staying with me.”

  I gave him the makeshift tray, the food arranged on the cutting board Amy had donated to the cause. I sat next to him. He ate slowly, picking at things and chewing carefully to judge how the item sat with him. He drank the iced tea in two gulps. I gave him the rest of the water bottle.

  “I was reading your grandfather’s journal,” I said. “It’s wonderful, Jack. Have you ever thought about trying to publish it?”

  “I’ve thought about it. I talked to my dad about it once, and he wondered why anyone would be interested in a man’s journey through Europe after the war.”

  “Why wouldn’t they be? I would think anyone would see the value of that.”

  “That was my position. My biggest concern about writing a book of alternating chapters is whether I can match his style. He’s better than I am.”

  “I doubt that. But how did he learn to write so well?”

  “You mean as a farm boy in rural Vermont? I don’t know. I’ve thought about that. His father was a veterinarian. They had books at home, that sort of thing. His mother was a midwife. He read mostly classic literature. Ovid and Sophocles. He hid his learning, but it was always there. The nights can be long in Vermont, and when you’re a farmer you don’t have as much to do in winter. He read by the fire or woodstove. I once saw him speak to a classics professor from the University of Vermont, and I watched the professor’s face change as he realized how much my grandfather knew. He was a remarkable man.”

  “You’re lucky to have the journal. Did your dad or mom ever read it?”

  “Not as I did. Or do, I should say. I don’t think my dad knew quite what to make of it. It made him uneasy somehow. I suspect he thought the journal proved my grandfather was discontent with his farm life—that he had bigger ambitions but settled for life in Vermont. I think my father read it almost as a warning. I’m guessing, but that’s my take on it.”