you’re alone. So I’m asking, no bullshit, is it same old, same old?”
I loved her for asking. She was making the gesture of a true friend, and in life you don’t get many. But I laughed with an insouciance I hadn’t known I could fake, and I said, “You are one crazy lady. I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
The whole summer trip to Europe—almost three weeks of it—was really organized around Paris. Around being in Paris when they were going to be there. Obviously I wasn’t planning to spend three weeks in Paris—it was only five days. But they were headed off to Italy in the first instance, to Sirena’s family, and then, after a brief stop back at home, on to Beirut for a spell. Reza got out of school at the end of June and they were leaving at once; so I made sure to time my visit to the City of Light to coincide with them.
I hadn’t been there since my management consultant days, an extravagant, dreamlike distant time when I’d stayed at the Royal Monceau and ordered room service, a breakfast I still remembered for its glinting heavy pewter pots and its stiff white cloth, the table rolled silently across the carpet and set up facing the window, as if it were my own private restaurant. This would be a more modest experience: I’d booked a single room in a three-star near St. Michel, named (one hoped eponymously) the Plaisant Hotel, the twenty-first-century revamp of a Jean Rhys hotel, I could tell from the website, with narrow corridors and creaking floors and faulty plumbing, and the gleam of sage-colored paint on walls that had once been wrapped in smoke-infused crimson damask wallpaper.
Was my trip memorable and extraordinary? Need you ask? I can rave about the vastness of the spaces on the road to Oban, or the sun-filled mist hovering above the earth in the early morning at Grasmere. I can describe my sweet hotel in Bloomsbury with, in my room, the smallest bathroom—and surely the most minute sink—known to man. I can bore you with photographs of Big Ben or the Bay of Naples, and feed you on tidbits about Nelson and Emma in love, or about Anne Boleyn in the Tower. I purchased souvenirs unthinkingly to show my third-grade class, only to remember I would not have, this year, a third-grade class. I chatted with a family from Milwaukee at the next table while I ate Welsh rarebit at Fortnum & Mason, and I bought four hopelessly impractical gilt-rimmed champagne glasses in Portobello Market, that I then had to lug around Europe in a specially wrapped box with a handle, as though they were eggshells, or a bomb.
Early on, in the B&B in Grasmere, lying in bed looking with one eye closed at the sprigged wallpaper and the pale blue sink in the corner of the room, I thought to myself that I could lie there all day and no one would mind. I could fib and say I’d seen Wordsworth’s house, without seeing a single thing, without doing more than buying a postcard from the gift shop—but probably I wouldn’t need to lie, because who would ask me? What finally got me moving was not my own desires—I had none, except to get to Paris—but rather the thought that I might miss my cooked English breakfast, prepared by Mrs. Crocker with her lacy apron and her appraising eye; and that should I not get out of the house relatively promptly, that same Mrs. Crocker would appear at my door in a different apron, the housekeeping apron, with a dustpan and brush and a bucket full of solvents, and would chase me, sourly, from the room. My motivation, even in anticipated shame, lay always in others. You can take the woman out of upstairs, but you can’t take the upstairs out of her.
Naples was marginally better, because I could muster some genuine will for the sites, and because the crumbling, garbage-filled city itself frightened me, and fear is a strong emotion and one I’ve had much truck with in my life. When I came out of an empty museum on the hill and had to walk alone across the empty park surrounding it, I had to ask myself whether my palpitations and breathlessness were caused by genuine risk to my life, or whether I was merely indulging a habit in the hope that my fear would keep me safe. Safe! When you’re