Lone Star (49 page)

“The hell with Mason and Chloe,” Blake said to Hannah, pointing to her eyes and then to his own. “Eyes on me. Tell me what else.”

“There is nothing else! You knew it couldn't last! This isn't news. I was leaving. Like Chloe is leaving. We were over.”

“Tell me what else,” he repeated. Blake wasn't red in the face, or panting. He was eerily quiet.

Mouthing
I hate you
to Chloe, Hannah swallowed. She squared her shoulders and straightened her spine. “Don't be upset, okay?” she said, quivering with a small charming smile. “But I'm having a baby.”

Blake staggered away from Hannah. And they had thought the robbery was the worst thing that could happen to them. Silly them. The money was returned. But there was no return from this brutality.

For a long while Blake, leaning against the table, stood mute.

“Blake, say something,” Hannah whispered. “Please.”

“I give up,” he said, in hoarse outrage. “I give the fuck up on you.”

Everything was squalor. They stood in vomit and retched, the ice fishing and dangling feet forgotten, while all around them balloons were popping and little kids were chasing kites and butterflies and happy parents tossed their melting ice cream cones because it was hot hot hot.

Why was there so much discord in Poland? All the wars started here. What was it about this country? It seemed so placid on the outside. And yet look at the havoc it has caused. It was now Poland's fault what had happened. Poor almost blameless Poland.

Eventually someone said, in a broken voice, what about Barcelona, as if already crying.

“I'll go with you to Barcelona, Chloe,” Mason said. “I promised you I would, and I will.”

Chloe stared at his earnest face as if she didn't know him, saw him through the kaleidoscope of cheering bases and flirting flyers, through the smiling vapid prism of the detested muscular Mackenzie, and suddenly Chloe didn't want to see Mason's face for another second, another
breath
, much less a week in her beachy naked fading ruined Barcelona dream.

“That's not the only thing you promised me, Mason,” Chloe said, trying hard not to cry. “That's right, look away,” she added. “What else can you do, really? So you can't look at me, but you'll go to Barcelona with me?”

He mumbled something she didn't hear.

She thought he said they should talk in private, away from . . . away from what? Away from whom? This was as private as it would ever get, with shattered Blake and bankrupt Hannah by their side in a public square filled with other people's joy. Every frozen season of Chloe's life had the four of them breaking fishing holes in the ice and gliding on their backs and making angels. And now there was nothing.

She backed away from the table, her pitying eyes on Blake, her frigid eyes on Mason, her guilty, angry, conflicted eyes on Hannah, she covered her face as if to shield it from a knife assault, in tremor she raised her hands, praying, surrendering, protecting herself against them, and then turned and ran as fast as she could in her Polish sundress and strappy sandals.

H
ER ENTRAILS ARE IN KNOTS.
I
T HAS BEEN MERE MINUTES IN
burnished sunlight, but her whole body feels chafed, raw from exertion. She wanders, pretending to think, but she is single-mindedly, purposefully, frantically searching for Johnny. She doesn't know what to do. She had run back to the hotel of roses and asked the clerk if anyone had left an envelope for her. They had not. Afraid to encounter her arid bunch, Chloe escapes down a side street, around the university, around, around. How does she fix this? How does she make it right? She thinks that if only she can find him, he can help her figure it out. Everything will be easier to bear if they can figure it out together.

There is an ancient, small, windy feel to Krakow that appeals to Chloe's heart, and if only she were better disposed to being a traveler, she might perhaps fall in love with this seventh-century city of narrow streets and immense fortresses. There is sun and music everywhere on a hot summer night. Oh, to open her eyes and see, instead of running in a state of siege. Stopping, listening for the seduction of his riding-a-Harley voice, hurrying on. Where is the black dog that will make her burn, that will leave its scorch marks on her? She roams the streets in circles.

Seconds, minutes, hours?

If he is here, he won't be far from where the people are. She won't give up. She won't give up.

The beautiful young Krakow women are tall and in heels. They wear lots of red lipstick and silver jewelry. They don't have tear-streaked faces. They carry designer purses, not shoddy backpacks with stray lipstick of the expired Revlon variety and maybe a gummy bear.

There is also Mason's Eurail card, which she is holding for safekeeping, how handy, and a hundred or so dollars Johnny had given her yesterday. Maybe more. For something to do, and to force herself to feel both less frenzied and less weary, Chloe sits down on a retaining wall and counts her money. Three beggars stop and ask her for some of it. None of them is Johnny. She has one hundred and seventy-five dollars. A Eurail card. Her passport. She wishes she had some underwear. A toothbrush. To be proactive, she looks for a drugstore to buy a toothbrush. The underwear remains a problem. But it's after seven in the evening, and the shops are closed. Soon it will get dark. And then what?

She may be guilty, but Mason is wrong. He is the one who broke their tacit agreement for a low-key easy beautiful union. Minimum fuss, minimum pain. That was their motto. Not anymore. She is angry with him for this most of all.

She doesn't want to think about how awful she acted, how upset she got, how she said things she can't take back.

She doesn't want to think about how she hurt Blake. She gets angry at this, defends herself to herself, mouthing inaudible words on a street corner. She didn't hurt him. Hannah hurt him. She was just the messenger. But why did she have to be so vindictive? Hannah would've gotten to the truth soon enough, wouldn't she? Like Chloe would've. Like Mason would've. Why did they mangle each other like this?

How does she go back to them, to the room? How does she speak to them, sleep with them?

No, that's a lie, what she said she felt. The broken contract is
not
what she finds unforgivable. What she finds unforgivable is that Mason would choose to step out on her with someone who wasn't just beneath him, but beneath the amoeba floating in the
lake, beneath algae. Why would Mason drift toward the most insipid of creatures? He must hear Chloe's contempt echoing off all the stones it took to build Krakow. How long had it been going on? She didn't want to ask, because she was afraid to know. What if he had said two years? Two Christmases, two winters in the snow, two summers in the lake, all of his varsity career. Chloe feels all her good intentions toward Mason swirling slowly down the clogged drain of her heart.

So what are her choices?

She can go home. Change her flight, fly home tomorrow. Accept defeat, get ready for the rest of her life.

She can go to Barcelona alone.

That seems insurmountable. She has never been anywhere alone.

She can go to Barcelona with Mason as he had offered.

Impossible.

She can go to Barcelona with Hannah.

The question is, dear Chloe, would Hannah ever again go anywhere with you?

She can go to Barcelona with Blake.

Chloe laughs out loud when she thinks this, perched on her little stone wall. Passersby flinch and speed up. They must think she has escaped and is roaming the streets until she is picked up by the soothing people in white.

Blake is a decent traveling companion. He is super easy. He is open to everything and, until Johnny came along, was in a fine mood from morning to night. He is funny, hungry, game, and ready, and he buys her pastries and carries her shit, her bag and books and water. He doesn't get burned in the sun, and he doesn't cheat on her with the queen airhead of all flying bimbos. He is her friend but, alas, the only halfway-palatable option to
seni, rochas,
and empanadas in Saint Eulalia's city—to go with Blake—is the most impossible of all.

She has to find Johnny. That's all there is to it. She jumps up, scaring off more passersby, and starts walking with a purpose
to nowhere. She either finds him or she goes home. There is no other way. Now it's really up to her.

Krakow is the city of poetry. Literally. Poetry is graffitied on Krakow's millennial stone walls. Chloe walks by the same street twice before she realizes she is duplicating her steps.
Mark the distant city glow / With gloomy splendor red
. A couplet from Sir Walter Scott. She longs to hear a different kind of canto. She will not despair. This city abounds with mystery and life. It has no whiff of disillusionment. She will not despair. She will find him.

Krakow is a city of women in colorful clothes sitting on wood crates selling cabbages. Most are old. They sit mutely in yellow dresses and sell carrots they brought from the villages. They don't have stalls, they perch on stools, low to the pavement, and the street musicians share the city walls with them. The old men stand nearby drinking vodka, toothlessly smiling. In the baskets between the women's feet lie radishes and lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes, and roses by the bunch. On every street there is a blue trolley with an old woman selling what looks like huge pretzels with poppy seeds. They're called
obwarzanek
. They look delicious. Chloe doesn't want to stop.

The drunken scent of overripe roses mixes with dill and fermented cabbage on every corner.
Bigos
and roses. Krakow is a phantasmagoria of glittering gold of the setting sun sparkling in the stained-glass windows. Chloe is light-headed and hungry and thirsty and alone, intoxicated with a nameless fear of all things unknown and the charged possibility of all impossible things.

She doesn't hear him at all, yet she hears him on every corner. She is walking through the desert, and he is her mirage. The canal in the middle of Krakow carries for her his unforgettable voice, echoing it through the parapets and the stained-glass
windows. She swears she can hear his dramatic tenor amplified by the acoustics of the ancient city, his unbreakable voice waxing about rides and trains and daisies and girls he can't leave behind.

She follows a figure she thinks is him down the park slope of the castle with the dragon's lair, because some women are sauntering and yelling into a young man's back from a distance, inviting him to familiarize himself with their melody or perhaps with their white necks. It's not him. It's another man with a ponytail in a black shirt.

The sun sets nice and late. The streetlamps switch on. It is dusk. Then it's night. She looks for him in the lit-up darkness.

He is nowhere.

She simply can't believe it. She doesn't find him.

It is almost midnight when she slowly steps inside the long gray lobby of the rose hotel. It's empty. The young clerk is asleep on duty behind the desk.

Chloe clears her throat to wake the girl up, and asks if the room key is hanging or if her companions are upstairs. The woman tells Chloe that her companions have been upstairs since ten.

With her head hung low, Chloe leans against the counter. She must go up. She is beaten.

“Is there an envelope for me?” she asks.

“You asked me earlier,” the woman says. “There was nothing.”

“I know. Is there still nothing?”

The woman theatrically slides off her chair, takes two steps to the cubbies behind her, looks inside.

“No. Just a newspaper and your bill for tomorrow. Wait—here's something.” She removes something stuck to the back of the newspaper. “Are you Chloe Divine?”

Chloe picks up her heart from the floor and puts it back into her chest before she answers. Yes, she says. I am Chloe Divine. The woman hands her a cream envelope.

On it, in clear, strong all-caps handwriting, is her name.
C
HLOE
D
IVINE
. Underlined twice. H
OTEL OF THE
R
OSES,
K
RAKOW
. Is it her imagination or is the underlining stronger under her last name
Divine
? She'll be sure to spend many hours dissecting the art of underlining. Maybe there's a course she can take in college.

Very carefully she grips the envelope with her fingers. She thanks the woman, and walks steadily out the front door. She goes into Rynek Glowny square, where, even though it's late, the party is just starting. Everything is illuminated and shiny and bright. Musicians, boom boxes, dancing women, drunken men everywhere. And then there is Chloe. She fits into a narrow crevice by the wall of St. Mary's, near a floor bulb that shines up from the cobblestones, and after holding on to the thick envelope for a few seconds, carefully peels it open.

Inside she finds six fifty-euro bills ($400), a Xeroxed page with numbers on it, and a note. The note also has numbers. But also letters that form words. Everything is a symbol—numbers, letters. Everything stands for something else. Chloe tries to find the meaning in it all. Her mother is right once again. Human beings spend their lives infusing finite things with divine significance, with infinite meaning.

The numbers don't make sense, as numbers sometimes do not.

After she reads his letter again, she looks across the square and checks the time. Breathing shallowly, her back against the wall, she watches the clock hands on the tower move from 11:40 to 11:59 before she reads the letter for the third time.

12:02.

Riga, Warsaw, Barcelona. St. Mary's Basilica and Oskar Schindler and the field in Treblinka. Europe is why no one said a word to anyone about anything, remorselessly guilty before everyone and everything, for months, maybe years, hiding the
essence of themselves to spare what they thought were their unbreakable bonds.

If she goes back to the room, there will be a scene. If she goes to the room, she won't be able to leave. They won't let her. In the room there's a suitcase. Shampoo. A toothbrush. Her books. Her Doc Martens. Her belt and jean jacket, and Blake and Mason and Hannah. Her woolly cardigan. Underwear.

On the street there is nothing, not even a sensible T-shirt to throw over her insensible cleavage.

On the street there is nothing but Johnny.