Now, Dad answered his own question, his voice low and scratchy in the receiver.
“We are under an invincible blindness as to the true and real nature of things,” he said.
A Room with a View
The late great Horace Lloyd Swithin (1844–1917), British essayist, lecturer, satirist and social observer, wrote in his autobiographical Appointments,1890–1901 (1902), “When one travels abroad, one doesn’t so much discover the hidden Wonders of the World, but the hidden wonders of the individuals with whom one is traveling. They may turn out to afford a stirring view, a rather dull landscape or a terrain so treacherous one finds it’s best to forget the entire affaire and return home.”
I didn’t see Hannah during Finals Week and only encountered Jade and the others once or twice before an exam. “See ya next year, Olives,” Milton said when we passed each other outside the Scratch. (I thought I detected wrinkles in his forehead hinting at his advanced age when he winked at me, but I didn’t want to stare.) Charles, I knew, was off to Florida for ten days, Jade was going to Atlanta, Lu to Colorado, Nigel to his grandparents — Missouri, I think — and I was thus resigned to an uneventful Christmas vacation with Dad and Rikeland Gestault’s latest critique of the American justice system, Ride the Lightning (2004). After my last exam, however, AP Art History, Dad announced that he had a surprise.
“An early graduation present. A final Abenteuer—I should say, aventure—before you’re rid of me. It’s only a matter of time before you refer to me as — what do they say in that mawkish film with the cranky elderly? An old poop.”
As it turned out, an old friend of Dad’s from Harvard, Dr. Michael Servo Kouropoulos (Dad affectionately called him “Baba au Rhum,” and thus I assumed he bore a resemblance to rum-soaked sponge cake), had, for some time, been entreating Dad to visit him in Paris, where he’d been teaching archaic Greek literature at La Sorbonne for the past eight years.
“He invited us to stay with him. Which we will, certainly; I understand he has a palatial apartment somewhere along the Seine. Comes from a family drowning in money. Imports and exports. First, however, I thought it’d be swell to stay a few nights in a hotel, get a taste of la vie parisienne. I booked something at the Ritz.”
“The Ritz?”
“A suite au sixième étage. Sounds quite electrifying.”
“Dad—”
“I wanted the Coco Suite, but it was taken. I’m sure everyone wants the Coco Suite.”
“But—”
“Not a word about the cost. I told you I’ve been saving for a few extravagances.”
I was surprised by the trip, the proposed lavishness, sure, but even more by the childlike zeal that’d overtaken Dad, a Gene Kelly Effect I had not witnessed in him since June Bug Tamara Sotto of Pritchard, Georgia, invited Dad to Monster Mash, the statewide tractor pull in which it was impossible for someone without trucker connections to get tickets. (“Do you think if I slip one of those toothless marvels a fifty, he’d allow me to get behind the wheel?” Dad asked.) I’d also recently discovered (crumpled paper sadly staring out of the kitchen trash) Federal Forum had declined to print Dad’s latest essay, “The Fourth Reich,” an offense which, under normal circumstances, would have caused him to grumble under his breath for days, perhaps launch into spontaneous lectures on the dearth of critical voices in American media forums, both popular and obscure.
But, no, Dad was all “Singin’ in the Rain,” all “Gotta Dance,” all “Good Mornin’.” Two days before our scheduled departure, he came home laden with guidebooks (of note, Paris, Pour Le Voyageur Distingué [Bertraux, 2000]), city shopping maps, Swiss Army suitcases, toiletry kits, miniature reading lights, inflatable neck pillows, Bug Snuggle plane socks, two strange brands of hearing plug (EarPlane and Air-Silence), silk scarves (“All Parisian women wear scarves because they wish to create the illusion of being in a Doisneau photo,” said Dad), pocket phrase books and the formidable, hundred-hour La Salle Conversation Classroom (“Become bilingual in five days,” ordered the side of the box. “Be the toast of dinner parties.”).
With the nervous expectation “one can only feel when one parts with one’s personal baggage and holds fast to the shabby hope of reuniting with it after journeying two thousand miles,” Dad and I, on the eve of December 20, boarded an Air France flight out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield airport and safely landed in Paris at Charles de Gaulle, the cold, drizzling afternoon of December 21 (see Bearings,1890–1897, Swithin, 1898, p. 11).
We weren’t scheduled to meet up with Baba au Rhum until the 26 (Baba was supposedly visiting family in the south of France), so we spent those first five days in Paris alone as we’d been in the old Volvo days, speaking to no one but each other and not even noticing.
We ate crêpes and coq au vin. At night, we dined in expensive restaurants crawling with city views and men with bright eyes that fluttered after women like caged birds hoping to find a tiny hole through which they might escape. After dinner, Dad and I entombed ourselves at jazz clubs like au Caveau de la Huchette, a smoky crypt in which one was required to remain mute, motionless and alert as a coonhound while the jazz trio (faces so sweaty, they had to have been lined with Crisco) ripped, riffed and warped with their eyes closed, their fingers tarantuling up and down keys and strings for over three and a half hours. According to our waitress, the place had been a favorite of Jim Morrison, and he’d shot up heroin in the same dark corner in which Dad and I were sitting.
“We’d like to move to that table there, s’il vous plaît,” said Dad.
Despite these rousing environs, I thought about home all the time, about that night with Hannah, the strange stories she told me. As Swithin wrote in State of Affairs:1901–1903 (1902), “Whilst man is in one location, he thinks of another. Dancing with one woman, he can’t help but long to see the quiet curve of another’s nude shoulder; to never be satisfied, to never have the mind and body cheerfully stranded in a single location — this is the curse of the human race!” (p. 513).
It was true. Contented as I was (especially those moments Dad was unaware of the bit of éclair at the corner of his mouth, or when he rattled off a sentence in “perfect” French and was met with confused stares), I found myself staying awake at night, worried about them. And, this is awful to admit, because the correct thing was to be wholly unfazed by what Hannah had told me — I really couldn’t help but see them all in a slightly different light now, a very severe overhead light in which they bore a startling resemblance to smudged street urchins who sang and marched in the chorus of “Consider Yourself” in Oliver!, which Dad and I watched over salty popcorn one dull evening in Wyoming.
After nights such as these, the next morning I found myself squeezing Dad’s arm a little tighter as we dashed in front of traffic crossing the Champs Élysées, giggling a little louder over his comments regarding fat Americans in khaki when a fat American in khaki asked the madame at the pâtisserie counter where the bathrooms were. I began to behave like someone with a grave prognosis, searching Dad’s face all the time, feeling on the verge of tears when I noticed the delicate wrinkles blooming around his eyes, or the prick of black in his left iris, or the frayed cuffs of his corduroy jacket — a direct result of my childhood, of my tugging on his sleeve. I found myself thanking God for these dusty details, these things no one else noticed, because they, fragile as spiderwebs and thread, were the only things separating me from them.