Gorgeous East (17 page)

Maybe in Paris it would be possible to get a temporary job, save a little money for the trip home.

8.

T
he tea peddler and the letter writer waited with Smith for two hours for the Thessaloníki local, which was an hour and a half late. Sirkeci Station, empty in the early part of the day, filled with commuters on their way back to the outer suburbs, to Cankurtaran and Yenikapi, to Yesilkoy, its un-kept rose gardens and tiny, cigarette-strewn beach of black sand now overshadowed with storm clouds blowing down from the Black Sea. The Thessaloníki train pulled in at last, disgorging women in headscarves and seedy-looking Balkan types wearing dingy pin-striped suits and carrying heavy briefcases full of who knows what.

“I better get a seat,” Smith said, standing up. He embraced both of them manfully. Then the tea peddler spoke.

“He would like to have something,” the letter writer translated.

“Of course,” Smith said, slightly disappointed in this last-minute mercenary turn. “I don’t have much money left, but he can have it all.” He reached for his wallet.

“
Hayir, hayir
.” The tea peddler patted the air between them, offended.

“He means a small personal item,” the letter writer explained. “A souvenir to remember you. A scarf, perhaps?”

“Oh. Yeah, sure . . .” Smith searched through his duffel and pulled out a faded blue sweatshirt, nicely worn, with the motto I TOOK A SWIG AT NIGS!—WISCONSIN DELLS 1997 printed across the front in circus-style lettering.

It was from Smith’s favorite bar in the world, a little hole-in-the-wall place in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin. As he handed over this precious garment, he saw in the eye of his memory the falls glittering beyond the dusty fan-shaped window over the bar, the fat tourists from Milwaukee and Cedar Rapids filling up the stools, the putt-putt golf courses and go-kart ovals out on Route 12. He’d gone down to the Dells, to Story Book Land and the roller coasters and the water parks, every summer when he was a kid with his parents and sister before her unexpected demise and all the complications that followed. And later, during college, he went back to smoke pot along the hiking trails and drink at Nigs and the other dives along Main Street and ride the amphibious Ducks drunk and high through the limestone gorges. He’d lost his virginity there on the morning of his nineteenth birthday in room three of the Hotel Hiawatha with a pale, pink-nippled, redheaded sorority girl from Madison. Afterwards, they’d gone skinny-dipping in the river at a secret place she knew about, the cold water as red as her hair from iron ore deposits in the soil. All this he folded into the faded blue sweatshirt as he folded it neatly and handed it over to the Turk.

“Take this, my friend,” he said.

The tea peddler nodded his thanks, eyes downcast.

Smith then took out a scrap of envelope and scrawled out the address of a friend in New York who might hold mail for him and gave it over to the letter writer. “I don’t really have an address right now. But you can try this. Send me a postcard, tell me how you’re doing.”

Then he shook their hands one last time, took up his duffel, and mounted the steep metal steps into the second-class car and lost himself in the onion-smelling interior. The best good-byes are the swiftest. He hunkered down in an empty seat and watched through the scratched window as the tea peddler and the letter writer walked across the marble platform and disappeared into the forward rush of commuters. They didn’t look back. Smith didn’t bother to knock on the window or wave. He knew he would never see them again, would never return to Istanbul, and was filled with an unaccountable sadness at the thought, even though such terrible things had happened and he hadn’t been happy there, not for a single moment.

A few minutes later, with no preliminaries, no whistles or bells, the train lurched forward and began to move slowly along the tracks through Eminonu, beneath the aqueduct built by Valens nearly two thousand years ago, past the Hippodrome and the Great Bazaar, which once brimmed with the spoils of the gorgeous East. It began to rain. Light at first, then heavy; a downpour darkening the elegant fluted columns of the Blue Mosque, the wide green domes of the Hagia Sophia, washing cigarette butts and discarded lottery tickets and orange rinds and other urban rubbish into the deep, stagnant cisterns beneath the city.

5

THE END OF SMITH

1.

I
n Paris, Smith looked for work and stayed two nights in the cheapest hostel he could find—a dingy flea trap in an anonymous quartier near Cité Universitaire, just beyond the Périphérique—but soon realized he was both too old and too American for such low-class digs. On the second night, the six belligerent Australian backpackers with whom he shared his dormitory-style room stumbled in piss-drunk at 1:00 A.M. They had acquired an illegal passkey from the desk clerk, a fellow Australian, thus circumventing the hostel’s 10:30 curfew. And though the rules also forbade the consumption of
l’alcool
on the premises, the Australians carried a case and a half of Pelican Brun between them and continued to drink heavily for the next couple of hours, talking at full volume, lurching drunkenly between the painted metal bunks, vomiting in the sink.

Smith, outraged, protested twice. The first time the Australians ignored him. The second time they threatened to beat him senseless if he didn’t shut his mouth. Still rattled from the ordeal in Istanbul, Smith was in no shape for a fight, especially not with six drunken Australians; so he shut his mouth, crawled deeper into his bunk, and jammed a musty-smelling pillow over his head. He managed to catch a half hour’s tortured sleep sometime after the Australians passed out around 5:00 A.M.

First light showed pink and pale blue and exhausted in the sky above the black monolith of the Tour de Montparnasse. The Australians snored, an alcoholic cacophony every bit as loud and odiferous as a diesel-powered generator going full blast. Smith, despairing of further sleep, rose and dressed. Then he gathered up several half-empty bottles of Pelican lying around the room and quietly dumped the remaining contents into open Australian backpacks. This stealthy act of revenge accomplished, he slipped out of the hostel by a side door.

Traffic was just picking up along the boulevard Jourdan. Smith felt the rumble of the métro at Cité Universitaire as a small earthquake beneath the pavement beneath his feet. He bought a bottle of mineral water and a fresh-baked baguette, still warm, at a boulangerie near the busy intersection of avenue Reille and avenue René Coty, and found a bench in the Parc de Montsouris. Swans slept on the muddy banks of the small island in the middle of the lake, slate-colored in this early light, heads tucked beneath their wings. Munching grimly on the baguette, Smith counted out his remaining funds. The total amount came to less than he had expected—115 U.S. dollars in traveler’s checks, 63 euros in cash, and a handful of useless Turkish lirasi, maybe 8 dollars’ worth. Not enough for a plane ticket to New York at current rates, even on an underbooked Air India charter flight with babies screaming and nonstop Bollywood movies playing on the drop-downs.

He saved the second half of the baguette for lunch and, to economize on métro fare, walked an hour across the city, from the Fourteenth to the Fourth Arrondissement—which is to say from Observatoire to the Quai des Célestins—to the American Cultural Center in the basement of the American Methodist Church overlooking the green-brown waters of the Seine. Here the Methodists maintain what they call the Official Paris English-Language Job and Housing Bank. This grandiose moniker conceals a somewhat paltry reality: five or six tattered binders with the good listings already ripped out; two computer terminals upon which, for a euro a minute, the applicant might consult craigslist France; and one overladen bulletin board covered with rarely culled three-by-five cards and myriad scraps of paper listing both employment opportunities and apartments to share. From the Job Bank’s quirky porthole windows it was just possible to glimpse the tall white facades of the Isle St. Louis, anchored like the fantasy of a luxury liner in the middle of the river.

Smith spent the morning down there, sorting through the outdated listings (English Language Tutor Wanted—French required; Companion for Elderly Man—French required; English-Speaking Tour Leader—French required; Child Care Provider—French required), wasting precious resources on watery cups of coffee from an American-style vending machine, on fleeting chunks of Internet time and phone calls to numbers that had been disconnected, to jobs that had been filled six months ago.

At about two in the afternoon, as he stood dumbly studying the bulletin board for the last time, a young woman came down the short flight of steps from the Quai des Célestins and through the foyer and the glass doors into the Job Bank and stepped up and pinned a yellow scrap of paper to the board with all the other scraps. She was in her early twenties, short and a little overweight, with brown hair and a shiny-greasy complexion unadulterated by makeup. Her brown eyes held a slightly crazed, glittery look. She wore a pair of Ole Miss sweatpants and a bulky beige cable-knit sweater; the knockoff Hermès scarf knotted around her neck seemed a pointless concession to French fashion sense.

“Y’all looking for a job, or a place to stay?” the young woman said brightly to Smith, her voice drawly and Southern.

Smith turned to look at her. “Both, I guess,” he said. Something about her eyes made him want to look away.

“Well, my goddamned co-loc bagged on me last week, ran off with some dude to, like, the Czech Republic. Here Czech it out”—she waved to the pinned-up yellow scrap—“get it, Czech it out? Hey, that was a joke, y’all.”

“Funny,” Smith said, not meaning it. But he leaned forward and squinted at the spidery, nearly illegible handwriting on the scrap: Quartier Ménilmontant-Père-Lachaise, he deciphered, on a street he’d never heard of. One bedroom; sleeping couch in living area. The rent at 250 euros per month was crazy-cheap for Paris, even for a closet or a bit of floor space in a corner.

“It’s just the right place if you like dead people,” the young woman said. “Père-Lachaise Cemetery is right across the street. That’s where Jim Morrison is buried—”

“And Balzac,” Smith interrupted. “And Oscar Wilde and Joyce. Not to mention Proust and Molière and Bizet and the great actresses Rachel and Sarah Bernhardt . . .”

But she didn’t seem to be listening.

“Sounds like a deal,” he admitted finally. “But really, I don’t have enough cash right now. I need a job first.”

“Yeah, but where’re you staying meanwhile?” the young woman persisted.

Smith shrugged.

“Well, you got to stay somewhere.”

“Yes . . .”

“Hey!” she exclaimed, suddenly. “Are you hungry?”

Smith admitted he was.

“Come on”—she tugged at his arm—“let’s get something to eat. We’ll talk it over.”

“Like I said, I’m pretty broke . . .”

“On me!” she said, pulling him toward the glass doors. “Don’t worry about a thing.”

2.

H
er name was Blaire—“You know, like the prime minister”—Smith never got a last name, though he learned nearly everything else about her in the first five minutes: She was from Atlanta; had graduated from Emory last fall with a major in communications and a minor in French. She didn’t have a boyfriend right now. Sure, she’d made out with a few girls in college, but was definitely not a lesbian. She was an only child, parents divorced—father living in San Diego with a Mexican woman who used to clean his house, and that was weird; mother still in Georgia married and divorced twice more since, second time to a creepy born-again computer programmer who once tried to put his hands down Blaire’s pants. Now, she was living in Paris for a while, sitting in on classes at the Sorbonne and trying to decide whether or not to pursue a master’s in French literature.

“Though I got to admit,” she chattered on, “I’m not really into the whole deal. Baudelaire—that guy’s depressing as shit. Writes poems about chicks strangled after, like, sex . . .”