L'America (7 page)

"What's wrong?" Beth snapped, mocking Sylvia's question. Sylvia looked at Beth, holding her with her eyes to make sure. Beth's face revealed everything, though she tried to pretend it did not.

"It doesn't mean anything," Sylvia said.

"What doesn't mean anything?" Beth persisted. She wanted to be cruel, wanted to make Sylvia tell her everything, admit to the kiss as if there were something fatally wrong in it.

"You know what I'm talking about," Sylvia said.

"I do?" They studied each other for a long time and then Beth conceded. "He's a fake," she said.

"Are you going to try to convince me he's awful when just a few hours ago you adored him, too?" Rarely did Beth see Sylvia mad. Then Beth decided she wanted to see Sylvia really mad. Beth wanted to be mighty and evil and say wicked things.

"He'll eat dog in China, get an awful disease in India, come home and brag about it for the rest of his life and think he's somehow more enlightened for it. And meanwhile he'll dump you when something better comes along." She'd heard her father talk about this sort of fake. She knew the mantra.

"This is more than one kiss deserves."

"I'm leaving," Beth said. "I'll go to Italy," she said, wanting to make Sylvia feel the way she felt now—choked, abandoned. She knew she was being irrational, but she couldn't stop herself. She was prone to slamming doors and bursting into flames. A temper, her grandmother called it. "To Beatrice and we'll—"

"And you'll what?" Sylvia said, her green eyes turning angry even though she knew Beth was bluffing, that Beatrice was in Italy studying for her final exams. But the truth didn't matter. The mention of Bea's name now was enough to get them fighting. Beatrice Nuova was Beth's other best friend and Beth had tried to make them a trio in the summers when Bea was in America. But it never quite worked. Beth always remained in the middle with Sylvia and Bea vying for a greater share of her. At Claire, Sylvia would lord her knowledge of the place over Bea, showing Bea where everything belonged, introducing her to the people, making knowing comments to Beth that Bea wouldn't understand. Then Bea would make a suggestion that actually, coming from her, was more like a command: "I would like to go to New York." She would say the words slowly in her accented English. Each word enunciated, each word saying to Sylvia: To Get Away From You. When Beth went to Italy, Sylvia was left behind, envious of her friend's experience, as if it were some sort of tryst that necessarily excluded her.

Sylvia and Beth fought hard now, as if fighting could release the grip. They fought about Sylvia's annoying plans and constant suspicions of everyone, all her gypsies. They fought about all Beth's impractical schemes. They fought about anything and everything, including the shoes of Sylvia's that Beth wore without asking. They fought until they started crying, and then they lay down on the bed and sobbed. They were eighteen years old, overwhelmed by a new and inexplicable longing. Something grand was about to happen to them that they didn't fully understand. For the first time in twelve years they would be separated for more than a few months. They were on the threshold of life and though they would never have been able to articulate it in so many words, it was pushing forth of its own accord—the understanding that they would fall in love and grow up and their friendship as they had known it and their lives as they had known them would be over.

"I'm jealous," Beth confessed.

"For once," Sylvia said teasingly, and then quietly, "I'm the jealous one." They lay on the bed, side by side, Beth in her underwear and Sylvia in a pretty pink sundress with white eyelet at the bodice, especially selected for Chas.

"You look beautiful," Beth said. The ceiling fan stirred the hot air, cooling them slightly, but enough.

"We'll leave," Sylvia said, perking up, rising above Beth on one arm. A late sun leaked through the slatted blinds, pushing in the heat and the smell of paella. She was returning to herself. She liked drama. They both did; they needed drama, fed off drama, created it for their fuel.

"We'll flee in the middle of the night," Sylvia continued. "It'll be fun. Where would you like to go? Africa? Portugal?" Sylvia was a sweet girl. There was no friend she loved more than Beth. She could banish her own dreams if her sacrifice would make Beth happy. Countless times she visited Beth in New York City, forgoing dances and parties at home simply so that she could be with Beth. Indeed, she was in Europe with Beth now instead of on a biking tour of Alaska with her senior class. She had been following Beth's lead since the second grade. A fact that alternately made Beth feel terrible and wonderful. Beth expressed her selflessness in other ways—ways that weren't always so visible and that she couldn't always enumerate but that had to do with her belief in Sylvia, in her ability to be more than a quiet girl from Pennsylvania.

"But you love him," Beth said (trying for that selflessness). And she did believe that Sylvia could be in love. It was possible, then, to fall in love in an instant. That's what love was to them, instantaneous and all encompassing. A shock. A stab. And infinitely important. They were reading
Anna Karenina,
Tolstoy introducing them to the consequences of illicit adult love. All across Europe they had been reading the book—Beth first, tearing out the pages as she finished and passing them to Sylvia, who tread close on her heels. "Don't cry, don't cry," Sylvia would say. "You're giving it away." And Beth would try not to cry.

"I'm not sure that I do love Chas," Sylvia said, with all the earnestness of her age. "I only just met him."

"Don't you want to find out?" But Beth knew what she wanted Sylvia to do. Beth willed it. Sylvia couldn't betray her. They were best friends. Sylvia Summerhaze, she was Beth's first love. Beth loved Sylvia's pale skin, like her name—that pale creamy haze that veils a summer's twilight. Sylvia loved Beth more than she loved her own sister. She had told Beth that emphatically. How important this had all seemed.

"We'll flee," Sylvia said, more urgently now. "I want to flee." She started stuffing her backpack with her clothing, and then so did Beth, infected, too, with the sense of urgency that fleeing commanded, as if their lives depended on it. They were fast and anxious in their flight. "If this is meant to be," Sylvia said, "we'll meet up with him again. Consider it a test of fate." Beth liked that notion, tempting the gods.

Just before dinner, the two girls fled, tiptoeing past Chas's room out into the street, running to the train station, hopping a train for Irún where all the big trains converge to take you north, south, east, west. In Irún they chose a train to Madrid; from there they could go to Portugal and maybe even Africa. They were giddy with fear, a fear that Chas would miraculously appear on the platform as they waited for the great southern express. At midnight they boarded the train. They loved that the town was called Irún.
I run, I run, I run.

"It should be called Werún," Sylvia said.

"Are you sad?" Beth asked.

"Do I seem sad?" Sylvia smiled. The two girls stood there inside the train, the atmosphere thick with that drama pounding heavily in their chests.

They looked out the window, saying good-bye to Irún, as the metal wheels began turning over the metal tracks. Sylvia's name suddenly rang through the night, rising over the bustle of all the many travelers escaping Irún. Her name floated through the darkness and the smoky light of the station's lanterns. "It's Chas," Sylvia said brightly, as if she had hoped also for the drama of this, as if fate had indeed made its message clear. Chas's round, handsome face bobbed above all the other faces.
Unbelievable,
Beth thought.
Pick up speed,
Beth urged the train, feeling astonished and a little manic, her body surging with the power of the train's gathering momentum.

"I'm sorry," Sylvia yelled back, throwing one hand out to him, gripping Beth hard with the other. The grip said,
Look, he did this for me.
The grip relished, enjoyed, devoured, the meaning of a man running for her alongside a train.

"Meet me in Corfu," he said. His eyes caught Beth's, telling her to promise to bring Sylvia to Corfu. Beth wanted to disappear. Had she had a hand in ruining something? she wondered. Could she be Atropos herself, in disguise. "August first," he added. "Promise?" beautiful word that it is.

"We'll be there," Sylvia said. She threw him a kiss.

"This is just the beginning," he said to her. To Beth he said, "Good-bye, Beth," catching her again with his smile, understanding everything but generous just the same. Where is he now, that boy? Chas. The night he serenaded them in Nice they let him come up to their room. He helped them finish off the cheap wine and they talked until dawn about their brief lives and his exotic plans. The four years that separated Chas from the girls and the sea of experience that is college didn't seem like a lot to them then. Traveling you are outside of time.

The girls told him about Beth's father's commune in Snyder County and about growing up there and all the odd folks from all over the world who had passed through at one point or another. "I could just stay there and see the world," Beth had said, and explained that that's what her father did, that he never left because according to him there was no need. Beth knew her father's attachment to Claire was deeper, more paralyzing, but she didn't speak about that.

"You could just go there," Sylvia suggested to Chas.

Indian scientists, Chinese doctors, herbalists from Africa, a scholar from New York, a French chef, an Italian fashion designer, a Spanish engineer—at one point or another every type passed through Claire. Claire was a colorful place with colorful notions of idealism, built on extravagant dreams and fantasies, and Sylvia (as observer) loved to describe it: all the apple trees and berries grown organically; the chaos; the pantry with its sheer abundance of food; Beth's father's penchant for allowing Revolutionary War aficionados to stage reenactments on the front lawn (cannons, muskets, and all); the vast games of football (tackle not touch) that they had been playing on the weekends since the girls were small. Sylvia loved Beth's father, Jackson, too—ambitious dreamer, big round head suspended on his shoulders like a globe, sitting at his desk at Claire, writing to the government to tell them about the potential of hydrogen for fuel, disseminating information to schools and businesses around the world, hoping he would be heard. He always had time for Sylvia, even with all the business of the farm. He'd squat down so that he could look her in the eye to explain what it meant to drive a hydrogen-fueled car (an idea that her own father, who was suspicious of Beth's father and Claire, described as bunkum); he showed her clippings of a van that actually did use this technology (albeit a funny-looking van with hardly any room for passengers). Jackson taught her to throw a football, he taught her to build a fire, he taught her to pay attention to the sky, to lie in the grass and look up at it, so that she could learn to read it and know what kind of day it would be. Mostly, she loved the attention he paid her, as if her curiosity really did interest him. She envied Beth for how important her father must have made her feel.

But she didn't say all this to Chas. To Chas she simply described the funny romance of Claire, exaggerating details enough to make him laugh even if at Claire's expense as she always did when describing it for strangers. Beth didn't take offense; she adored listening to her friend describe her world, appreciated the intimacy with which Sylvia knew Claire, her humor about it as if it were her world, too, as if they shared it like sisters. In contrast, Sylvia had one sister and a mother who stayed at home and a father who was a lawyer for the local university. Theirs was a life as foreign to Beth as another country but one that she loved to visit for the sheer reliability of it. Sylvia's home was like Switzerland—everything functioning, well oiled, on time.

"And your mother?" Sylvia asked Chas, and perhaps that's when he fell in love—because her mind missed nothing. Her auburn hair fell across her left eye and she tilted her head, giving him all of her attention.

"She's dead," he said. He lit the two candles on the small balcony table. Sulfur sparked the air, then vanished. The flames reflected in their eyes.

"So is mine," Beth said matter-of-factly. There was no hole or pang of pain, just an instant of recognition, though Beth realized she had never known another person whose mother was dead.

"I'm sorry," Sylvia said. She was addressing Chas, but her sympathy extended to Beth. It had always been that way for Sylvia; she felt sorry for Beth because she knew what Beth didn't have. She saw it every time her mother hugged Beth, felt it viscerally. In some ways, it's what made Sylvia's love for Beth ferocious—as if she could give her just a little of what she was missing.

"No need," Chas said, and Beth knew his mother had been gone a long time, too. He played old country tunes, singing the girls to sleep. He blew out the candles and tucked them in and disappeared to his room just before dawn.

"Good-bye, Chas," Beth said to him as he ran alongside the train. She felt ugly and greedy, like a selfish two-year-old unwilling to share, but she was also content to have Sylvia again for her own. The train picked up speed.

 

Choice: one of the great mysteries of love. The Surrealist thinker, André Breton, was kept up at night contemplating the meaning of choice and love. Exclusive love is the result of choice, but isn't that choice the result of a series of coincidences? Might those coincidences have a meaning, obey a hidden logic? Breton well understood the moment when chance transforms the world into something rich and strange. Objective chance, he called it—that moment of recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary, the moment when coincidence—Fate?—offers up the answer to a question that hasn't yet been asked; the moment when love finds its object and two lives are bound together forever.

The train south on that Spanish night is entwined with Fate—the great hand of Lachesis, sister of Clotho and Atropos, daughter of Themis—spinning human destiny. Her hand comes down and we are simply playthings, instruments in her delightful little game. Her hand came down and gently set Beth on a different course—for this is Beth's story. You can see it clearly in retrospect, there like an old roadmap to your life. Do you remember that moment, that time, when the world felt perfect and the future impossibly easy and there was only one inevitable direction?