13 Little Blue Envelopes (15 page)

#7&8

#7

Dear Ginny,

Head for the train station. You’re getting on a night train to Paris.

At least, I’d like you to get on a night train to Paris. They’re really nice. But if it’s day, get on a day train. Just GET ON A TRAIN.

Why Paris? Paris needs no reason. Paris is its own reason.

Stay on the Left Bank, in Montparnasse. This area is maybe the most famous artists’ quarter in the world. Everyone lived, worked, and played here. There were visual artists, like Pablo Picasso, Dégas, Marc Chagall, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Salvador Dalí. Writers, too, like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Gertrude Stein. There were actors, musicians, dancers . . . too many to name. Suffice it to say that if you stood here in the early twentieth century and you started throwing rocks, you would hit a famous and incredibly

influential person who helped shape the course of artistic history.

Not that you would have wanted to throw rocks at them.

Anyway, go now.

I have to insist that you go to the Louvre immediately. You can get your next assignment there, in the proper atmosphere.

Love,

Your Runaway Aunt

The Surfboard Sleepers

There were a few seats available on the next train to Paris, much to the surprise of the man who sold Ginny her ticket. He seemed genuinely concerned by her rush and kept asking her why she wanted to leave Rome so soon.

Her little room on the train (the
couchette
) sat six people.

The boss seemed to be a middle-aged German woman who had a steel-colored crew cut and a huge supply of oranges. She ate these one after the other, sending visible gasps of orange oil into the air of the cabin as she peeled them, flooding the air with a citrusy smell. At the conclusion of each orange, she’d wipe her hands on the gray fabric of the armrests of her seat.

Something about this move gave her a kind of authority.

Under her command were three sleeping backpackers and a man in a lightweight tan suit who had an accent that could have been from absolutely anywhere. To Ginny, he became Mr.

Generic Europe. Mr. Generic Europe spent the ride doing a 159

crossword puzzle. He coughed dryly each time the German woman sitting next to him peeled a new orange and then moved his arm so that he didn’t get orange pulp on his sleeve when she wiped her hands.

Ginny took out her notebook

July 5

9:56 p.m., train

Dear Miriam,

Last night I had to run from an Italian boy who kept
trying to take off my pants. And now I am on a train to
Paris. I cannot confirm my identity anymore, Mir. I
thought I was Ginny Blackstone, but apparently I have
gotten into someone else’s life. Someone cool.

About the Italian guy thing, it wasn’t particularly sexy
or scary. More skanky. He lied to me to get me to go to his
sister’s apartment, and I went because I am dumb. Then I
escaped and had to wander through Rome.

This reminds me of something. I still have a whopping
bad case of what you call my scag magnetism. I thought I
had gotten rid of it there, but it looks like scary guys still
materialize from thin air in my presence. They are drawn
to me. I am the North Pole, and they are the explorers of
love.

Like the guy with the Radio Shack bag who always
hung out outside the second-floor women’s bathroom of the
Livingston mall who told me on multiple occasions that I
look exactly like Angelina Jolie. (Which I do. If you just
change my face and body.)

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And we can’t forget Gabe Watkins, the freshman who
dedicated many, many pages of his blog to me and took a
picture of me with his phone and Photoshopped his face and
mine into a picture of Arwen and Aragorn from
Lord of the Rings.

Anyway, you’re in New Jersey, and I’m here, speeding
through Europe on a train. I realize that maybe this all
sounds incredibly exciting, but sometimes it’s just really dull.

Like now. I have nothing to do on this train (not that
writing to you is nothing). I’ve been by myself for a few
days, and it doesn’t always feel good.

Okay. I’m going to stop complaining now. You know I
miss you, and I promise I’ll mail this soon.

Love,

Gin

A few hours into the trip, the woman said something about bed in two languages, and then everyone else in the cabin stood up.

There was a lot of pushing around of stuff, and in the process, Ginny got squeezed out of the cabin. When she re-entered, there were six big shelves there. Judging from the fact that Mr.

Generic Europe was stretched out on one, Ginny guessed these were supposed to be beds.

There was a lot of awkward shuffling around as people figured out which ones they should take. Ginny got an upper one.

Then the German woman snapped out the overhead lights.

Some of the others turned on little personal lights that were built into the wall. But Ginny had nothing to read or do, so she remained in the dark, looking at the ceiling.

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There was no way she was going to be able to sleep on some jiggling surfboard sticking out of a wall. Especially since the German woman kept sliding open the window, and Mr.

Generic Europe kept closing it halfway. Then one of the backpackers said something in Spanish and then said, “Do you mind?” in English and pointed at the window. When she closed it all the way, no one put up a fuss. The German woman opened it again anyway, and the cycle went on throughout the night.

Morning came suddenly, and people started going in and out of the
couchette
with toothbrushes. Ginny rolled over and swung her legs off her surfboard, carefully toeing the ground. When she returned from washing up in the cramped and kind of dark bathroom, the beds were magically folded back into chairs. An hour later, the train stopped and she was shuffling through a huge train station and out onto a wide, sunny boulevard in Paris.

The street signs were little blue plaques on the sides of huge white buildings, frequently obscured by a tree branch, lost in a bunch of other signs, or just impossible to spot. The streets veered off almost constantly. Still, it wasn’t that difficult to find a hostel in the neighborhood that Aunt Peg had recommended. It was in a massive building, some kind of old hospital or junior palace. A woman with stiff black curls behind the front desk, after admonishing Ginny for five minutes about not calling ahead in peak season, told her that though there were no singles left, there was plenty of room in the dorms.

“Do you have sheetz?” the woman asked.

“No . . .”

“Three euros.”

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Ginny handed her three euros, and the woman handed her a big white bag made of a rough cotton.

“Eet will be lockout soon,” the woman said. “But you may take your sheetz upstairs. You can come back at seex. The door ees locked each night at ten. Eef you are not here at ten, we lock you out. I suggest you take your bag weeth you.”

Ginny took her sheet sack up the stairs and went to the room at the end of the hall, as she’d been directed. The door was open just a crack, and she pushed it wide to reveal a very large room with skinny, military-style-looking bunks. The floor was covered in small putty-colored tiles that were still wet from a mopping with a strong-smelling cleanser.

Her roommates were still there, gathering their things for the day. They nodded hello to Ginny and exchanged a few words of greeting, then they went back to their conversation.

She quickly concluded that they were from the same high school, which was in Minnesota. She knew this because they all knew one another’s names and were talking about what classes they were going to take together. They also kept saying things like, “Oh my God, can you imagine this in Minnesota?” and, “I want to take one of these home to Minnesota.”

Ginny put her bag o’ sheets on one of the empty cots on the other side of the room. She lingered for a minute, adjusting the sack over the little plastic pad that served as a mattress. She wasn’t great with strangers, but today she felt like she could be.

If the girls had seemed interested, she could have gotten into a conversation with them. Maybe she could join them, and they could all go somewhere together.

That was it. That was what she wanted. She and the girls 163

from Minnesota could go through Paris together. They’d go to stores and stop at a café. They’d probably want to go to a club or something. Ginny had never been to a club but knew from her French textbook that that’s what you did in Europe. So if the Minnesota girls wanted to go, she would go too. They’d all become good friends really quickly.

But the Minnesota girls had different plans and slipped out the door without her. A screeching voice came over the loudspeaker and told everyone in French and English that they had better get out or there would be some kind of hell to pay. Ginny picked up her bag and left, alone.

Once she was out on the street, she soon passed a metro station with one of the famous, curling green metal entrances and, lacking a better plan, descended. The Paris metro map was a bigger, more troubled cousin of the London map. However, the Louvre was easy to find. The stop was called Louvre. That was a good hint.

Her French textbook had assured her that the Louvre was big, but nothing prepared her for just how big. She waited in line for two hours to get in through the massive glass pyramid entrance. Inside the Louvre, there was a certain safety. It was okay to be a tourist. Everywhere she looked, people were poring over the floor plan, reading guidebooks, digging into backpacks.

For once, she fit in completely.

There were three named wings to choose from—Denon, Sully, and Richelieu. She checked her pack into the baggage claim, chose Sully at random, and headed into its depths, immediately finding herself in a re-creation of a stone vault, which led around to the section on ancient Egypt. She 164

wandered through room after room of mummies, tomb decorations, hieroglyphics.

She had always liked Egyptian things, especially as a kid, mostly because she’d seen them at the Metropolitan Museum with Aunt Peg and they played “If you could pick what things you wanted to take with you when you died, what would you take?”

Ginny’s list always started off with an inflatable raft. She didn’t even own an inflatable raft, but she could imagine it perfectly—it was blue with a yellow stripe and handles. She was convinced that she’d need it in whatever heaven she was imagining.

The Egyptians had also taken some seriously weird crap with them to Deadland. Tables shaped like dogs. Little blue thumb-sized dolls that were supposed to be servants. Big masks of their own heads.

She turned the corner and walked down the hall toward the Roman sculpture.

And she was right back where she started, in the stone vault. It seemed impossible, but it had happened. She tried again, following the signs and the maps. This time, she ended up in the sarcophagus room. On a third try, it looked like she had made it into Roman statues, and then bam, she was right back in with the canopic jars and tomb decorations.

It was like she was walking through some kind of fun house.

She finally had to follow a tour to get out of the land of the dead. She followed them through the Roman statues. Little French children sat below the nudes, gazing up. Not one of them was pointing and laughing. She kept walking through the endless succession of connected chambers until she caught sight 165

of a sign that featured a little picture of the
Mona Lisa
and an arrow. She followed this through at least a dozen more galleries.

One thing Aunt Peg had instilled in her was a comfort around paintings. Ginny never claimed to know much (if anything) about painting. She didn’t know a lot about art history, or techniques, or why everyone suddenly fainted in ecstasy if some artist suddenly decided to use only blue. . . . Aunt Peg had explained that while these things were important to some people, the main thing to remember was—they’re just pictures.