27
“Wow, look, Mommy, the whole world,” a child in the seat ahead of me exclaimed, as he stared at the earth from above for the first time. The barren Andes stretched up, otherworldly and jagged in the evening sun. Nothing else stirred or seemed alive in the firmament around us, as the plane taxied through the gloaming.
I disembarked, and hurried to catch my connection. As I rounded the corner from security a stoop-shouldered old woman stopped me with her eyes.
“You are not traveling alone,” she said enigmatically.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“There is an energy traveling with you, protecting you.”
“Thank you,” I said, lost. “You see such things?”
She looked at me mysteriously again before smiling and moving away, as I made my way to the next gate. I was still perplexed, but pleased for her blessing as I embarked again, the mountains quickly invisible and the lights of the city rapidly fading.
I awoke in the gray early morning, banking through snow clouds over New York. Ours was the first flight to land that day, so the customs line was empty when I made my way through, only to be stopped by the Homeland agent who examined my papers.
“This passport is full.” He scowled his disapproval. “I shouldn’t stamp it.” His display was meant to provoke uncertainty. I knew he would let me pass.
“I’ll get a new one first thing tomorrow,” I said, performing my part in the drama, as I waited for his foul morning mood to pass. At length he went through a great kabuki of mercy, before relenting, and stamping on top of another stamp. “Next time I won’t.”
My suitcase was the only one on the carousel when I reached baggage claim, and I moved efficiently through the automatic doors, past the people holding flowers and signs for whomever they had gotten up so early to greet.
It was soon rush hour so I took AirTrain. The train was at the platform when I arrived, and whisked me to Jamaica Station, where I caught the LIRR to Atlantic Avenue. There I found a cab, but was thwarted by traffic near the Brooklyn Bridge. I asked the driver to leave me at Fulton Ferry, where I picked up the first water taxi of the season, and made it across the gray river in the fluttering snow.
The empty apartment needed dusting, but was otherwise as I left it. I poured myself a glass of water, which was the only thing in the refrigerator, set a kettle to boil, and went to shower.
When I returned to the kitchen I ground coffee beans, which I measured into a filter and bloomed with a bit of the water before pouring the rest slowly over them for three minutes. I finished my coffee, unpacked my luggage, and stored it away.
That evening I ordered a movie in English over the computer, and American dinner over the phone, and ate my meal as I watched the movie, and drank a nightcap of Kentucky bourbon.
When I went to sleep I was happy to be in my own house and not some strange shore for the first time in months, and snug with my own comforter around my shoulders, in my own bed, and to fall asleep dreaming American.
By midweek, though, I was aware only of the emptiness of the rooms, an incompleteness that stayed with me until Sylvie arrived a few weeks later.
I was curious to meet her friends, and pleased to find I got on with them without undue effort. But by week’s end she was spent from the city, and happy to get away when we headed west, under the great sky again.
Other than Davidson and Elsa, we were joined by Ingo, one of the film’s backers, Ingo’s fiancée, Ola, who worked at a bank in London, and Gabriel, a cinematographer, and his wife, Renata, a famous Hungarian dancer and beauty.
Everyone besides me was an accomplished skier. I had planned the trip mainly because I thought Sylvie would enjoy it, and was glad to see she did. The snow was fresh and powdery; the mountain not too crowded; and when I fell, as I took my first lesson, I learned to take it in stride.
“Your ski edges are set at ninety degrees from the factory,” Sylvie consoled me when I grew frustrated. “Mine are bent to eighty-eight degrees. It makes it easier to carve the powder.”
“Yes, that is why.”
“Don’t worry, you will get better.”
“How long do you think it will take before I can go off trail?” I joked, after falling down again.
“You’re so sweet in the country. But I’m afraid you’ll never be a good skier.”
“Because I started too late?”
“No, because you don’t love it. You’ll plateau, and lose interest.”
“We will have to find another hobby, then.”
“Diving. Bookbinding. Cooking. Gardening. Tango. Would you take up tango with me?”
“We will do it all.”
“But what happens when we lose interest?”
“We will find new things.”
“What if we run out?”
“We will be happy and old by then. Don’t you think?”
“Yes.”
The third evening we were at the bar in the lodge, playing pool with a group of locals, who lived all season on the mountain and were telling the others about the best trails. We had dinner in town that night, and afterward were in such high spirits we decided to drive to the casino on a nearby reservation.
We left in two cars under the Easter moon, over the empty roads, through the darkness in the country with nothing but the white headlights reflecting back off the white snow, blue evening stillness, and the wine-dark forest against the twilight.
When we neared the casino red and orange neon lights burst through the darkness to meet us on the highway, breaking the spell of a lunar landscape, but transfixing us with how tawdry they had made that part of the wilderness.
“It all seemed so innocent before,” Ingo remarked, unhappily. “Like the America one imagines.”
“It was a way of bringing hard currency to a poor country,” Gabriel told him. “They did not know what came with it.”
“What is the difference between innocent and ignorant, anyway?”
“Ignorant means not knowing. Innocent is intending no harm.”
“Ah, so they overlap, and pull apart, as in our language.”
We were on the casino floor. Renata and Gabriel had never been in a casino before, and looked around with superior awe, the way Europeans always try to condescend to Americans in the heart of the country. As we fanned out toward the tables, the others tried to egg them into gambling, which they refused.
Davidson and Elsa were dressed to the nines, elegant as always, even amid the whirling slot machines, with everyone else in ski vests and blue jeans, as the speakers piped in Johnny Cash and Joni Mitchell.
We settled down to the roulette wheel in pairs, playing alternately the red or the black, so none of us was up or down very much, and as a group we were not leaving too much behind. Davidson and Elsa grew bored with the small stakes, though, and put a pile on seven, which they lost. They bet another stack on four, and lost that, too. Ingo and Ola were calculating the odds, which they did not like, and did not deviate from their calculations, win or lose, so did not move too far up or down. Neither did we, leaving the only excitement in watching Davidson and Elsa blow their chips in spectacular fashion.
After an hour, Sylvie and I were up a hundred, but the game had grown tedious, and she wanted to raise the stakes. “May I?” She took a chip from our stack.
She bet a street on her birthday, and then a corner on our two birthdays, and we lost both. Next, she went with her number, which was not the dealer’s, and so we lost fifty bucks in short order. We were still up fifty, and it was fun, so she took half what was left and played the centerline. We lost again.