A Small Indiscretion (21 page)

Daisy might be waiting at the train station with nobody to greet her. If Louise and Malcolm were somehow stuck, she would step off the train and find herself alone. Would a ten-year-old girl know how to navigate a foreign city, even one she’d visited many times before? I didn’t know, and there was nobody to ask. Patrick would have known, but Patrick was not there. I was filled with fury at him for having flown off to Dublin and escaped. Why could I not escape, too?

There was sunlight coming through the window, overtaking the room slowly but steadily. I studied it, paralyzed by indecision. Perhaps I was worrying over nothing. Malcolm and Louise might have come back to the penthouse and left again this morning while I was sleeping my drunken sleep. They might be collecting Daisy from the train station right this minute.

I read Patrick’s note again. It was a farewell, but Patrick was full of farewells. I had learned not to take his goodbyes too seriously. He had returned to me, hadn’t he, in the end? He had not stayed with the girl—Mary McShane—at Montmartre. He had come to me, but I had rolled away from him. Was there still time to win him back? Could a case be made that I could still reasonably expect his affection
if I pursued it? And to whom was I beholden—Patrick? Malcolm? Louise? Or only myself?

I checked the phone again, and this time there was a dial tone. The sunlight had reached the grandfather clock; it was almost noon. By one account, they might arrive at any moment—Louise and Malcolm, having successfully collected Daisy from the train. They might be pressing the elevator button, waiting to make their way up to the penthouse. I had to act now, or I might never get away. I hurried into the bedroom and threw my clothes into my pack. I ran a brush through my hair and washed my face. I pulled the shower curtain closed and hung up my towel. I brushed my teeth, then scrubbed the toothpaste out of the sink and made the bed.

I found paper and a pen and tried to compose a note. But I couldn’t think clearly. Where would I say I was going? Where, in fact, was I going?

The phone began to ring. I stood listening to the sound. It seemed impossibly loud in the sunlit room.

I put Patrick’s note in my pocket. I slung my backpack over my shoulder. I pushed the elevator button, counting the rings of the phone. I shoved open the metal doors, stepped in and closed them again, and the sound stopped. When I entered the lobby, the porter was out front. If I went through the main door, I would have to walk right past him. I’d be caught running away. I turned left, down the hallway, and found another door. I shoved it open and stepped into a narrow alley, then onto the streets of the altered city.

T
HE STORM HAD TOUCHED DOWN
on the Brittany and Normandy coasts. It whipped the ocean into ten-foot-high waves, then swept east across France in a narrow band, reaching hurricane force when it blasted Paris. The Black Forest of Alsace had been hit like a hammer. Four thousand trees at Versailles were uprooted. A third of the forest at the Bois de Boulogne was destroyed. Chimneys collapsed and cars were hit by falling trees. Millions of homes lost power. Paris-area suburban rail services were suspended, and only a third of the métro lines within the city were still in operation. The airports at both Roissy and Orly had been closed for the early-morning hours. Thousands of travelers were stranded by the first total shutdown of the French national railroad.

I didn’t know any of that, of course, when I stepped out of the building into the alleyway, then onto the street. I chose a direction at random and began to step through the debris. Patrick’s scarf was flung around my neck and my boots kept coming untied. When I bent to retie them, the edge of my coat got soaked in a puddle.

I descended the stairs of one métro station after another, only to find there were no trains running. I reached the Seine and stood before it, watching its brown rage. It had overflowed its banks and
was threatening to flood Notre Dame. I went on walking in a kind of stupor of wonder at the ravaged city. There was a general feeling of wreckage and tragedy, and I indulged myself in feeling at the center of it. I bought a sandwich at a café. I collected information about the storm here and there. Then I was at Gare Saint-Lazare and there was a train that could take me to Cherbourg, on the coast. I sat in grim relief that I was finally heading somewhere fast. The train hummed beneath me, its white noise obliterating the need to think about what I ought to do next.

At Cherbourg, there were no ferries to Dover, but there was a ferry about to depart for a place called Rosslare, which I understood was on the other side of the Channel. I reasoned that if it was on the other side of the Channel, it could not be very far from London, so I bought a ticket. I would head back the way I had come and return to Victoria and spend Christmas alone. On the ferry, I sat down at the bar and asked the bartender how long the journey would take. She said we would land in Rosslare at noon the following day.

“That long to get back to England?” I said.

“Not England, love,” she said. “Ireland.”

“Ireland?”

“Rosslare. Are you not wanting Rosslare?”

Rosslare seemed as good a place as any, and I said as much.

“I hope you’ve booked yourself a sleeping berth,” she said. But I hadn’t. I’d bought the cheapest ticket available. I would have to sleep on deck somewhere. I would have to make do.

Standing across from me at the bar was a man. He had a cap pulled down low on his forehead and a dirty-blond beard and very full, very chapped lips. He had his foot up on the bar stool and a roll of duct tape in his hand. He appeared to be repairing his shoe. He bit a piece off and wrapped the tape all the way around the toe, then sat back down at the bar in front of his beer. There was an air of fortitude
and certainty and cheerfulness in his broad face and body and a gentleness, too, in his very blue eyes. A man like that, I thought, would take you in hand. A man like that would keep you safe from yourself.

Was it love at first sight? Not exactly. But it was a haven in the storm.

D
O YOU RECOGNIZE US
, finally? Can you locate your parents at last in all this mess?

Parents
. It’s just a word.

It’s a word whose meaning one does not think to interrogate until one must.

N
OW THE STORY
becomes more difficult to set down. Now it becomes necessary to distinguish between the lore and the truth. To disentangle the version of events that’s made its way into dinner conversation over the years—becoming a matter of public record—from the truth. But is truth the same as memory? I offer you a memory. Has the memory been shaped by the waves of time, and by the history that has rushed against it since? Of course it has. What memories haven’t?

Y
OUR FATHER AND
I met on a ferry crossing from Cherbourg to Rosslare in the Irish Sea.

True.

It was Christmas Eve.

True.

We were both traveling alone.

Yes.

Your father was a gentleman. He offered me his sleeping berth.

Yes, he did.

I slept in that berth, alone.

T
HERE WAS ONE
other man at the bar. A boy, really, about my age, an Irish boy with some quintessentially Irish name like Cathal or Manus. He had a sharp face and thin red greasy hair standing straight up from his head. He was trying to grow a beard that was not really taking hold. He was heading home to Wexford for the holidays.

The two men were sitting one stool apart. I listened to them talking. The man in the cap, an American, was saying he’d meant to spend Christmas in Nice, but he’d been unable to travel there from Paris because of the storm. It was fine with him, he said; he was sick of the French and had decided he’d like to spend Christmas where people spoke English. But he’d already spent the month of November working in a clinic in the English countryside, so he was heading somewhere new—Ireland. He had been overseas half a year, he said, and in two months’ time he was expected to start a residency in family medicine at a hospital in San Francisco.

“A doctor, eh?” the Irish boy said. “You like sick people, so?”

“I like dogs, actually.”

“Dogs?”

“I learned to breed dogs growing up,” he said. “But you can’t make much of a living that way.”

“Which state?” the Irish boy asked.

“Wisconsin.”

They finished their beers. The American took off his hat, and I was struck, again, by his beautiful blue eyes.

“I’ve always wanted to go to America,” Cathal-or-Manus said. “Get out of feckin’ Wexford.”

After a while the blue eyes looked straight at me across the bar, and the American smiled.

“Are you ever going to come warm this empty chair?” he said to me.

I looked at him. I moved to the empty seat between the two men. He bought me a beer. He told me his name was Jonathan Gunnlaugsson. I couldn’t pronounce it, so he wrote it on a paper napkin for me. I shoved the napkin in my pocket, where I had also put Patrick’s note.

At some point we all took our beers outside. We sat on a plastic bench out of the wind and ate cheese sandwiches from his pack. The redheaded boy had a fiddle, and he began to play. The American and I struggled to talk over the fiddle and the roar of the sea. I told him I’d been to Paris with my boss and his wife. I told him my boss’s wife was having an affair, and that the man she was having an affair with had come with us to Paris. I left out the bits about my own romantic entanglements. I was conscious that the picture I was painting was not entirely complete, but Jonathan was clearly a person of substance, someone I wanted to know, and already my interest in him was causing me to perceive the episode in Paris through a new lens. I had walked out of an unseemly situation; I wasn’t going to walk back into it by setting the story between us.

There was a woman on the ferry with a small white dog. The dog was jumping up and barking and the woman was feeding it bits of a sandwich.

“That woman is rewarding the wrong behavior,” Jonathan said.
“The first rule of training is you don’t reward with affection or food unless the dog is quiet and submissive. That woman thinks it’s cute, the dog acting that way, but it’s not cute and it doesn’t make the dog happy. It doesn’t make him settled.”

“You’re an expert?”

“Yes.”

“A dog expert?”

“Actually, it’s the same with women.”

“Really? A woman gets affection only if she’s calm and submissive?”

“That’s right,” he said. “If a woman wants to be loved, she has to be good.”

I laughed. And he laughed. I felt I’d been taken in hand. And I felt, too, that the day was brighter and calmer than it had been just a few hours before.

He stood up and led me to the railing. The redheaded boy had stopped playing. Jonathan sent him inside with money to buy us all more beers. He told me he’d grown up on a farm in northeastern Wisconsin. He’d spent his summers on an island, Washington Island, where his grandmother lived and where his ancestors had first landed and settled when they emigrated from Iceland in the 1800s. They kept an old houseboat there. They lived on the boat every summer for the month of August.

“It sounds idyllic,” I said, “but it probably wasn’t, was it? Childhoods never are, are they?” Where had I gotten this idea? From a book, probably.

“Actually, it was idyllic as far as childhoods go. Except there was only my mother. No father. But my mother made it work.”

“What happened to your father?” I asked him.

“They were never married. Then he died.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right. I never really knew him.”

“Why did you leave Wisconsin? If it was idyllic.”

“That’s what people do, isn’t it? They leave so they can return.”

I asked him how he ended up picking San Francisco as the place he wanted to begin his career. He looked at me, clearly deciding how much to reveal.

“Oh, you know, the usual thing,” he said. “A girl.”

“Oh,” I said.

“But that’s over. As far as I know.”

I asked him for details. He told me they’d known each other when they were children. Then her mother had died, and she’d ended up in San Francisco, with relatives. That’s where she was raised. But she came home every August, to Washington Island. She was “pretty and all that.” She’d done well for herself, “under the circumstances.” She’d wanted to get married, but he hadn’t.