Blue Plate Special (22 page)

I took the bus to Tel Aviv the next morning and flew back to France.

D
uring the della Negras’ Easter vacation, I got two weeks off again. I stuffed a purloined sleeping bag and a few books and clothes into my backpack and took a train from the middle of France to Venice to meet Jason. Our first two nights, we stayed in a hotel; he treated me, since I couldn’t afford it and he could, but I didn’t feel right about it. It was strange in Venice. Sharing a bed was awkward for us both; somehow, we managed to negotiate the fact that I was not interested in him sexually without ending our friendship. We walked all day long through the city. Our room had French doors that opened onto a balcony, looking out over the water, where we sat together at a little table eating bread and cheese and drinking Chianti and watching the gondolas go by.

Then we left Venice by train and met Christopher in Rome, on the Spanish Steps, on the exact day and time we’d agreed on several months earlier. The three of us bought some food at a market and took a long bus ride to a campground on the Tiber, where we paid for a campsite, set up Jason’s tent, and made camp. We stayed there for a week, living together in one tent, in our by now typical
Jules et Jim
arrangement in which Jason pined for me, I pined for Christopher, Christopher remained merry and aloof, and no one had any sex. Christopher was as broke as I was; we lived on bread, cheese, olives, tomatoes, Chianti, salami, and fruit. Every day, we took the bus into Rome together, explored the city, and took the bus back out
to the campground in the evening. At night, we ate our simple food, read by flashlight, and fell asleep early side by side by side in the tent.

It was Passover; Jason, who always kept kosher, was also not eating any bread. When I accidentally plunged the bread knife into the cheese, possibly contaminating it with hametz, he snarled at me. One night, he went off to a seder at the house of friends of his parents’, and I had a night alone with Christopher. I managed to make awkward, stilted conversation with him over our picnic supper at the campground, then we read our books with flashlights in the tent and turned in early and lay far apart chastely. Jason came back later and took the spot in the middle.

We moved on from Rome to Florence, where we stayed for a couple of nights in a cheap
penzione
near the Duomo, sharing a big, beautiful old room with more than enough beds for the three of us. One day, we all three went our separate ways for the day. I headed straight for a monastery, San Marco, whose cells all had paintings by Fra Angelico. I spent the day staring at them; their startling vibrancy and pitiless objectivity snapped me out of my self-absorption. I returned to my room to find Jason and Christopher already there. I tried to express my excitement about the paintings. I flung myself onto my bed. On that trip, I wore the same thing almost every day: a blue and purple Indian print wraparound skirt, a T-shirt, French sandals I’d found on sale in Moulins. I braided my hair, always, in two French braids. I was tan and strong.

I kicked off my sandals. “You guys, it’s so
amazing
here,” I said.

They were quiet. Wondering whether they were laughing at me, I lifted my head to find them both staring at me. In that moment, I had an inkling that I looked … beautiful, maybe.

“Let me lie with you a minute, Katie,” said Christopher. He came over and got into my bed and lay next to me and put his
arms around me. My euphoria vanished. I went rigid. This was the thing I most wanted in the world. I stiffened until Christopher gave up and went back to his own bed.

The next day, since Christopher’s and my money was running out, the three of us moved to a campground in the hills above the city. Every day, we zipped up our tent and hiked down to the city to see the churches, museums, monasteries, and walk through the crooked, walled streets. I bought as many postcard and poster-sized reproductions of works by Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Rafael as I could afford and fit in my backpack. I wanted to take them back to France, to hang them up in my room, and gaze at them for solace and perspective: I would be an adult someday. I wasn’t stuck in adolescence. There were larger things in the world than my own damn self.

After dinner, we got drunk on red wine on the Ponte Vecchio, hanging out with all the freaks and vagabonds and backpackers. Late one night, we came back to the campground to find that my sleeping bag had been stolen. That meant, we all knew without discussing it, that I would sleep in Jason’s bag with him, since Christopher didn’t offer his. I didn’t want to sleep with Jason, didn’t want to do anything to encourage him romantically. But I also didn’t want to sleep with Christopher, who made me so nervous I got nauseated around him.

And worse, it wasn’t my sleeping bag. I’d borrowed it without permission, taken it in fact, from my friend Maryse, one of the seminary students at La Mhotte. It had belonged to her dead brother; she was sentimentally attached to it. And it was a lovely sleeping bag—pale blue and soft, filled with down—it was like zipping yourself into a duvet. I didn’t know how I would confess to her.

In fact, I never did; I couldn’t bear to. I let her think the sleeping bag had vanished from the storage shed.

During the day, our little threesome subsisted on the usual salami and cheese and tomatoes, but at night, we ate at a Florence
university cafeteria; for less than two bucks, they gave us a full dinner: spaghetti with meat sauce, bread, salad, a small bottle of Chianti, and dessert. It felt good, sitting with the university students. I wished I were one of them. More than anything, I craved the intellectual rigors, social variety, and freedom that I imagined college afforded. Having to take care of four small boys and clean a family’s house and cook for them day after day was tedious and frustrating, and living in the middle of nowhere, even a French nowhere, was lonely and depressing. I couldn’t wait to get to college, to emerge from my stifling cocoon of self-involvement and fly off into ideas and literature, love affairs and friendships. I felt as though my life could not begin until I got there.

Unfortunately, I had let the window of opportunity pass for applying for financial aid again for the following autumn, so I began, in my dreamy, abstracted, scattershot way, to awaken to the fact that I was going to have to defer my admission to Reed yet another year.

When I was finally in full cognizance of this fact, I wrote to the admissions office and asked if I could take another year off. They wrote back telling me I was welcome to come to Reed any time I was ready. Then I arranged with my mother to live at home the following year with her and Emily in upstate New York. I would find a job, work for the full year, and save money for tuition.

One weekend in June, toward the end of my year at La Mhotte, I hitched up to Paris with my friend Monica. She was the only other au pair girl at the school, a placid but intrepid girl from Leeds, also eighteen, who earned several times more than I did from the family she worked for, taking care of one small baby instead of four energetic, demanding boys.

Our occasional trips together that year had been weekend adventures, larks. In the fall, we’d hitchhiked to Switzerland to stay with my punk friend Knut in Dornach, my mother’s birthplace, where we admired the Goetheanum and stayed up all night listening to bands with names like Stiff Little Fingers and Kraftwerk and walked around town with Knut in his tight black leather pants and Doc Martens.

On the way there and back, truckers stopped for us, genial, bored Frenchmen who wanted to bask in the company of two girls for an afternoon in exchange for driving them a few hundred kilometers. We understood the deal. When a truck pulled over and stopped for us just up the road, we ran to it so the driver wouldn’t have to wait long, hopped up into the cab, and introduced ourselves with profuse thanks to the driver. We were a good team—two fresh-faced, pretty, friendly, seemingly innocent teenagers. We were young and fairly naive but instinctively good at gauging people. We obligingly flirted
and chatted with our truck drivers, shared our picnic lunches with them, and always arrived safely exactly where we wanted to go.

Earlier that spring, we’d taken a long weekend and hitchhiked down to Provence. In the lilac and sunflower fields near Aix, we stayed with an older couple on their spread of land that included an orchard, a garden, a vineyard, and a goat pen. Acquaintances of Monica’s parents somehow, they fed us rounds of their excellent homemade goat cheese of three different ages, young, middle-aged, and old, that they took from wire baskets hanging from trees in their orchard. I had never eaten
chèvre
before; at first it tasted strange, and then, all at once, it was unbelievably good, gamy and creamy.

We ate meals at a long wooden table in a shady arbor of grapevines: lunches of chewy, crusty bread and
chèvre
; salads made with the lettuce they grew; and for supper, a soup or stew and once a leg of lamb with
flageolets en pissenlits
, beans with dandelion greens. Our hosts were great cooks and had good wine, not that I knew anything about wine, but their local red
vin de table
tasted fantastic to me. Their stone house was cool and dark and sprawling. I never wanted to leave. I wanted them to adopt me.

I
n June, in Paris, Monica and I stayed in a tiny studio apartment that a guy we hardly knew had generously loaned us while he stayed with his girlfriend. We couldn’t afford to eat any meals in restaurants; we lived on those excellent staples of the young backpacker, baguettes and cheese and tomatoes and cheap red wine. All day, we walked through the city crisscrossing the Seine.

One day, we saw a man jump off the newly built Centre Pompidou. I noticed him standing up on the roof. Before I could wonder about this, he fell and hit the courtyard with a
hard, wet crunch. We watched, dazed, as an ambulance came screaming into the courtyard to pick up his corpse. We barely spoke to each other for hours after.

On our last night in Paris, as we were walking back to our apartment after a glass of wine at an outdoor café, we headed down a deserted side street near the Place Pigalle. Two men appeared at our elbows, as if they had materialized from the darkness. Each of them took one of us by the arm firmly and tried to pull us into an alley. I protested in indignant French; one of them answered in quiet, monosyllabic Arabic, which scared me even more for some reason—we had no common language. Nonetheless, their intentions were very clear. It occurred to me with a fizz of adrenaline that they planned to rape us, here and now.

Monica went passive and quiet, but something exploded in my head, some surge of pure, red-hot rage that enabled me to simultaneously kick and throw my attacker sprawling into the gutter and then to slam Monica’s against a parked car. Before they could recover and come after us again, I grabbed Monica’s hand and pulled her, sprinting, back to our apartment building, where we unlocked the door with shaking hands and then collapsed together in hysterical tears.

The next day, having run out of money for a train home, I had to hitchhike alone back to La Mhotte; Monica was going on by train to stay with friends in Dijon. It was my first solo hitchhiking expedition. I was too scared to sleep that night, imagining various scenarios, the attempted rape naturally fueling my already paranoid imagination. I had no other way to get back, though, and I was expected on Monday morning early, to make breakfast for the boys. Just after dawn, I took the Métro to the end of the line, got out, found the highway south, took a deep breath, and put out my thumb.

After a few minutes, a Renault full of boys about my age pulled over. I got in with some trepidation, but they were a
nice bunch of rambunctious French
mecs
who treated me like a kid sister, lecturing me about hitching alone, teasing me about my bravado when I protested that it was no big deal, and complimenting me on my French. Because I had not one sou, they bought me lunch in a roadside place, a ham-and-cheese baguette I ate ravenously and much too fast. They left me off about an hour from home and drove away honking and waving. I was sad to see them go.

My next ride was a lone middle-aged man in an old Citroën deux chevaux. I was even more worried this time, but there was only one of him, and he was gray-haired and slight. I was cautiously, warily confident that I could fend him off. I’d beaten two strong would-be rapists last night, after all. So I got in.

My new chauffeur turned out to be even more protective and solicitous than the boys. He was a sociology professor at the Sorbonne, a deeply kind and fatherly man who gave me a very frank, touchingly agitated lecture about traveling alone.

“Not everyone is like me!” he said. “There are bad people in this world.”

“I know,” I said. “Believe me. I can’t thank you enough.”

He went more than twenty-five kilometers out of his way to drive me to the front gates of La Mhotte so I wouldn’t have to take my chances with another ride. He waited until I had walked halfway up the long driveway, I suppose in order to make sure no one attacked me before I was safely inside, and then he drove off down the little country road lined with poplars, back toward the highway and wherever he’d been headed.