The Bird Market of Paris (24 page)

“My friend is supposed to be on this plane,” the socialite said. “But I didn't see her in line.”

I wiped my forehead.

“I don't know what I'm going to do if she's not on the plane because I'm staying with her family in Paris and I don't have the phone number.” She had a nasally, high-pitched voice, like a cat being squeezed. I opened the childproof cap and dry-swallowed one of the little blue pills.

A cute young guy in his late teens sat next to me in the aisle seat.
These are the people I'm going to die with
.
Maybe the young guy will hold my hand as we plunge into oblivion.

Panic billowed in my stomach toward my throat, which began to close as we trundled down the runway. My head scorched and my skin turned from clammy to sweaty.
Stop it
, I told myself.
Don't you dare cry. You're going to make a fool of yourself
. My eyes betrayed me, tears rolling from behind my dark glasses.

It was bargaining time.

God
, I prayed,
if You get me there safely, I'll never drink again. I mean it this time. Never, ever, ever.

I held my face in my hands as the engines wailed. We caught air. Choking and sobbing, I realized I should have taken the Valium much sooner. I should have had a few martinis.

The socialite asked me what was wrong. After two minutes of sputtering, I told her about my fear of flying. The plane jockeyed in the air, my butt lifted from my seat one moment and pushed into it the next. The screen on the seat back in front of me flickered and a map appeared showing the plane's trajectory to France. There was too much ocean from runway to runway. I ate another Valium.

I sobbed into my hands, snot running into my palms. I didn't want my last six minutes to be spent like this. I wanted to go down with some dignity. The socialite dug through her purse, produced a disc player, and plugged one earphone into my right ear. “This will calm you,” she said.

The music sounded like whales crying, blended with a modulated, analog synthesizer. I found myself able to search for a tissue and eat another Valium. A steward told the socialite to turn off her music.

She dug in her purse again and offered a deck of Tarot cards. She shuffled them and told me to cut the deck, and she pulled out a card.

“We're going to land safely,” she said. “Don't worry.” I looked at the card. It was the
death
card, a gangly skeleton in the card's center, a scythe in its bony hand. A flush of panic accelerated into my chest and face.

“That's a good card, it's not what you think. It means
change
, not death. I'm telling you, we're fine.” She shuffled again and asked the deck out loud if her friend was on the plane. The deck said no. She did this several more times. “I don't know what I'm going to do when I get there,” she said.

I asked her, through choking sobs, if she would do a reading for me. It could distract me, and give me some indication about landing safely in Paris.

“OK,” she said, shuffling the cards, “but I'll have to charge you five dollars.”

I fixed my eyes on the seat back in front of me and continued to sob, the kind of crying where hiccups and hyperventilation complicate the deep breathing and sighing that real crying requires. I grabbed the vomit bag from the webbed hammock where they keep the evacuation directions and hyperventilated into it. The bag made a sound like someone dancing on a piece of corrugated fiberglass.

The guy next to me asked what was wrong. Wrong? How could he tell something was wrong?

I removed the bag from my mouth long enough to tell him I was afraid of flying.

“I shouldn't tell you this,” he said, and paused, “but my mom died in a plane crash.”

I removed the bag from my mouth again. “Commercial jet?” I hoped he would say she'd died in a two-seater and had been flying the plane herself, while intoxicated and having an epileptic seizure.

“Yeah,” he said. “It was a big crash. A lot of people died.”

I managed to tell him I was sorry. “How old were you?”

“Four. You learn to live with it, you know?”

No, I didn't know. What was wrong with him that he'd travel by plane knowing firsthand how unsafe they were?

“Did she say she'd charge you five dollars for a Tarot reading?” he whispered. I nodded. He rolled his eyes.

The socialite, convinced by the Tarot deck that her friend wasn't on the plane, turned her attentions back to me.

“Do you mind if I do some healing on you?” she asked. I shook my head and breathed into the vomit bag. She closed her eyes and waved her hands over me like a child would over a top hat during a magic trick.

“I can feel your pain,” she said. “It's coming from up here.” She placed her palm on my head and told me she was taking the pain away. Five hours and fifty minutes to go. I swallowed a fourth Valium.

The steward asked if we needed anything. The socialite requested a glass of wine from his cart and handed it to me. The wine plunged hard into my gut. I asked him for another. As I held the plastic cup, watching the surface of the blood-colored liquid ripple in time with the engines' whirr, I felt a fuzzy sheen of apprehension starting in my toes and rising through my scalp, spreading like mint in an untended field.

I had done it again. I'd taken a drink. Hadn't I
just
prayed that if we arrived without incident I'd
never
drink again? I felt something else crawl up my spine, into my neck—a rubbery, numbing layer of peace so thick a kid could bounce on it at a birthday party.

I guessed we landed, because the socialite was wheeling me in a luggage cart through Charles de Gaulle Airport, toward the luggage carousel. Everything was fuzzy, covered in white auras from the skylights overhead.

“We're here?” I croaked.

“Give me your luggage tags,” she said. I couldn't move. She grabbed my purse and sifted through it.

After collecting my two heavy bags, she wheeled me to the taxi stand. The socialite gave a slip of paper she had found in my wallet to the driver and told him to take me there. She helped me out of the luggage cart and dumped me headfirst into the backseat.

“Have a good trip,” she said, slamming the door as the taxi pulled out of the airport.

 

Chapter 21

Then there was the great milky sky over Paris. The heavens looked new, extraordinary, and I imagined I understood it as a bird might. I had arrived at the airport unbroken, a shattered foxhole prayer still welded to my tongue.

Slumped in the taxi's backseat, I tried to appreciate something of the French highway, which reminded me of the hideous strip of State Road 441 near my parents' home in Fort Lauderdale. But we were driving
away
from Paris, not into it. The giant arch at La Défense, on the outskirts of Paris, faded in the distance. My home for the month of July—an English-style town house in Saint-Germain-en-Laye, was outside Paris. It had never occurred to me to look up Saint-Germain-en-Laye on a map. I had assumed it was a part of Paris, the way the East Village is part of New York City, but it was more like Queens—an upscale, French version of Queens.

I dumped my bags in the steamy, infinitesimal, slanted attic room and sat on the narrow, springy bed. The room was decorated with fashion magazine ads and American movie posters, Corona and Budweiser bottles, a few stuffed animals, and the various knickknacks a seventeen-year-old girl would possess: three porcelain Dalmatians, an array of miniature perfume bottles, shot glasses, and a yellow candle in the shape of a duck sitting in a basket.

The neighborhood was pretty, blossoming with pink and orange roses and rhododendron. The family was welcoming: the businessman father, Piers, solid, well put together, and handsome in his own way; the mother, Gilbertine, a pleasant-looking, tidy woman with a nurse's smile and short blonde hair, a stay-at-home mom with three kids; Marie, twenty-three, living in my apartment in New York while I was in Paris; Corinne, seventeen, a lovely girl in her last year of high school; and Arnaud, fourteen, a gawky but well-mannered junior high school kid.

Their eldest daughter had misrepresented our apartment exchange situation. She said her parents ran a bed-and-breakfast and I would have the entire top floor to myself, with a separate entrance to my part of the house, and I could come and go as I pleased. But after instructing me on how to use the front door key, Gilbertine told me I couldn't leave or return after they had activated their burglar alarm for the evening.

Not only was the house not a bed-and-breakfast, there wasn't even a lock on my door. I had a bathroom, also without a lock, and the door wouldn't stay closed. No shower curtain, but there was a large mirror in which anyone walking into the bedroom would see me in the shower in all my naked glory, trying to keep water from puddling all over the floor.

The house was so
quiet
, a black-hole kind of quiet, the world suspended like a pond carp under a crust of ice. I felt betrayed, and my paranoia jangled to life. Maybe this was a trap. Maybe these people were part of the sex trafficking trade and would sell me to a sleazy girl-biz entrepreneur and I'd end up locked in a cage in a faraway country, forced to perform acts beyond my imagination. Maybe they were serial killers. Maybe this was just going to be a boring, restrictive month with strangers, not the freeing, redemptive journey I had imagined. Or, the serial killer thing.

I listed my options: Leave this place and return to New York City, where ambulances, shattering glass, and the sound of prostitutes negotiating rates outside my window lulled me to sleep every night; take the train to Paris, find a hotel, and charge it to my credit card; or kill myself—a decidedly better fate than being sold to sex trade traffickers.

I walked down the thin, winding stairway of the home and, at the bottom step, through choking tears, told the family I must leave.

“You are tired,” Gilbertine said. I nodded. “Come, eat something with us.”

The four of them made space for me at the table. Piers poured me half a glass of red wine and placed salmon on my plate, then offered me part of a baguette. The wine tasted like guilt, but I told them it was delicious, staring at the wine in my glass as if I'd never seen this type of liquid before. I couldn't look at their faces as I ate, and then slithered back upstairs, telling them I needed to rest.

I called my mom and whispered into the phone, explaining about the lies, and how I was trapped with dangerous strangers. I felt wilted and irrational and wide awake, like a balloon hanging in a small, swirling draft.

“Go to sleep,” she said. “You're not thinking clearly.”

I cupped my hand around my mouth and rasped into the phone. “I believe I'm in danger here.”

“Put someone else on the phone.”

I called for Gilbertine to pick up the extension, and listened for snatches of their conversation.

“Is this typical of her behavior?” Gilbertine said.

After a few minutes, she hung up and climbed the creaky stairs to my attic room.

“It would be a good idea if you could get some sleep,” she said. “You'll feel better after.”

All I could do was nod. She shut the door behind her, the door that would not lock.

I didn't want to spend my NEA money on hotels—that's not what it was for. I slipped under the green gingham comforter, still wearing jeans. The bed groaned like a badly constructed ship, and when my knee hit the thin wall it rattled the photo of the three suntanned siblings standing in front of a plateau in Monument National Park, according to the caption on the frame.

After half an hour of sweaty sleeplessness, I minced downstairs for a drink of water. The family stared at me like a strange animal they pitied because it seemed disoriented. I began to weep.

“I need to leave,” I said. “This isn't what I thought it would be.” I had come to Paris to find the bird market and free my soul of its burdens, perhaps having adventures to write about along the way, which seemed improbable in the suburb of Saint-Germain-en-Laye.

“Your daughter told me this was a bed-and-breakfast.” They looked confused.

“You knew you were coming here and then you would have our other apartment in Paris by yourself in August in one month,” Gilbertine said.

“You can't go back to New York,” Piers said. “You made a deal. Our daughter is working there.”

I wanted to tell them that their daughter scammed me; but Gilbertine had a kind face and sympathetic eyes, and looked so maternal and comforting. I decided to trust fate. Maybe living with a family would soften my splintered New York City nerves.

Around midnight, I crawled into bed under the lowest slant in the attic, pulled the covers to my chin, and closed my eyes. It was so quiet the family could probably hear me clear my throat. There was rustling in the small, walled garden behind the house, the sound that marauders make before they shoot rappelling ropes through the window, climb up, and rape and murder everyone in the house. I tiptoed to the window and searched for the source of the sound, but saw only blackness.

I had two choices: either let the marauders enter the house and kill us, or wake the family and hope they could drive the marauders away. I tapped on the parents' bedroom door. Nothing. I knocked louder. Gilbertine opened the door wearing a white cotton robe, looking exhausted.

“There's someone in the garden,” I whispered. “Behind the house.” I pointed in that direction. She said something in French to her husband and he walked past me as we followed him downstairs. He found a flashlight in the kitchen and beamed a current of light through the sliding glass door into the darkness.

“There's nothing here,” he said.

“I swear I heard something,” I urged.

He opened the door and stepped out into the night. Gilbertine and I waited behind him. After a minute he called for us to come outside. He stood under my window, pointing the flashlight into a bouquet of crispy fallen leaves and onto a huge prickly hedgehog rummaging in the underbrush.