“Just shut up and wash your hair,” I said. “First things first”
Luckily, I had plenty of shampoo, and even though the sink was small and the water cold, washing my hair gave me a sense of being in command.
An hour later, I was packed, dressed, made up, and had tied a scarf over my wet hair. I put on my sunglasses to further protect me from the evil eye. I had improvised another sanitary napkin with toilet paper and pinned it to my underpants. It wasn’t the most comfortable arrangement, but still, I was ready to pay my bill, lug my suitcase, and face the world.
Thank God for sunlight, I thought, as I came out on the street. Former Druid that I was, I knew to thank the gods for small favors. I had survived the night! I had even slept! For one moment I allowed myself the luxury of thinking everything would be all right.
No thinking, I said to myself. No thinking, no analyzing, and no worrying… Just concentrate on getting to London and pulling yourself together. Just get through the goddamned day.
I lugged my suitcase to a drugstore, bought Tampax, and then schlepped back to last night’s café on the Place St. Michel. I left the suitcase just standing by a table while I went downstairs to the bathroom to put in a Tampax. I had a momentary pang of worry about leaving the suitcase, but then I decided to say the hell with it. It would be an omen. If the suitcase was still there when I got back (appropriately plugged up with Tampax), then everything would be all right.
It was.
I sat down next to the suitcase and ordered a cup of cappuccino and a brioche. It was almost one o’clock and I felt calm, almost euphoric. How little our happiness depends on: an open drugstore, an unstolen suitcase, a cup of cappuccino! Suddenly I was acutely aware of all the small pleasures of being alive. The superb taste of the coffee, the sunlight streaming down, the people posing on street corners for you to admire them. It looked as if the whole Latin Quarter had been taken over by Americans. To the right of me and to the left of me, I heard conversations about course requirements at the University of Michigan and the perils of sleeping on the beaches of Spain. There was a tour group of middle-aged black women in flowered hats heading across the Place St. Michel toward the Seine and Notre Dame. There were young American couples with babies and backpacks. “Picasso certainly had a breast fetish…” one lean, body-shirted Oscar Wilde type said to his companion (who was all decked out in the latest everything by Cardin). Little C’s on his bikini-jock too, I imagined. What a scene! Like Chaucer’s Canterbury pilgrims. The Wife of Bath as a black American lady making a pilgrimage to Notre Dame; the Squire as a gentle-faced blond-bearded college kid carrying The Prophet; the Prioress as a lovely student of art history fresh from Miss Hewitt’s, a cotillion or two, and Sarah Lawrence (and dressing in dirty jeans to live down her aristocratic past and profile); the lascivious monk as a street-corner preacher for macrobiotics and natural life-styles; the Friar as a top-knotted convert to Krishna-consciousness; and the Miller as a former political activist from the University of Chicago who now distributes literature for French women’s lib… (“Why are you a feminist?” I recently asked a guy I know who is very hot for the movement. “Because it’s the best damned way of getting laid nowadays,” he said.) Chaucer would be right at home here. Nothing he couldn’t cope with.
I felt so cool and level-headed for the moment that I was determined to enjoy myself before my panic returned. So I wasn’t pregnant after all. In a sense that was sad-menstruation was always a little sad-but it was also a new beginning. I was being given another chance.
I ordered more coffee and watched the passing parade. All those innocents abroad! A couple was kissing on the street corner and I watched them, thinking of Adrian. They were gazing into each other’s eyes as if the secret of life were to be found there. What do lovers see in each other’s eyes anyway? Each other? I thought of my crazy notion that Adrian was my mental double and how wrong it had turned out to be. That was what I had originally wanted. A man to complete me. Papageno to my Papagena. But perhaps that was the most delusional of all my delusions. People don’t complete us. We complete ourselves. If we haven’t the power to complete ourselves, the search for love becomes a search for self-annihilation; and then we try to convince ourselves that self-annihilation is love.
I knew I wouldn’t run after Adrian to Hampstead. I knew I wouldn’t screw up my life for the sake of a great self-destructive passion. There was a part of me that wanted to and another part of me that despised Isadora for not being the kind of woman who gives her all for love. But there was no use pretending. I was not that sort of woman. I hadn’t the taste for total self-annihilation. I would never be a romantic heroine maybe, but I would stay alive. And that was all that mattered at the moment. I would go home and write about Adrian instead. I would keep him by giving him up.
It was true I missed him desperately at times. I watched that couple kiss and I could almost feel Adrian’s tongue in my mouth. And I had all the other corny symptoms too: I kept thinking I saw his car across the street and maybe later I would even run over to inspect the license plates. I thought for an instant that I saw the back of his head in the café and then I found myself peering suddenly into some stranger’s face. I kept remembering, at odd moments, his smell, his laugh, his jokes…
But it would pass in time. It always did, unfortunately. The bruise on the heart which at first feels incredibly tender to the slightest touch eventually turns all the shades of the rainbow and stops aching. We forget about it. We even forget we have hearts until the next time. And then when it happens again we wonder how we ever could have forgotten. We think: “this one is stronger, this one is better…” because, in fact, we cannot fully remember the time before.
“Why don’t you forget about love and just try to lead your own life?” Adrian had asked. And I had argued with him. But maybe he was right after all. What had love ever done for me but disappoint me? Or maybe I looked for the wrong things in love. I wanted to lose myself in a man, to cease to be me, to be transported to heaven on borrowed wings. Isadora Icarus, I ought to call myself. And the borrowed wings never stayed on when I needed them. Maybe I really needed to grow my own.
“You have your work,” he’d said. And he was right about that too. Oh he was right for all the wrong reasons. At least I had a life-long commitment, a calling, a guiding passion. It was certainly more than most people had.
I took a cab to the Gare du Nord, checked my suitcase, changed money, and inquired about trains. It was already almost four o’clock and there was a boat train that night at ten. It wasn’t one of the fast trains with a fancy name, but it was the only train to London I could get. I bought my ticket, still not really knowing why I was going to London. All I knew was that I had to get out of Paris. And there were things to do in London. That agent to see and various people to look up. Other people lived in London besides Adrian.
How I lost the rest of the afternoon I’m not entirely sure. I read the paper and walked and had a meal. When it got dark, I returned to the station and sat writing in my notebook while I waited for the train. I had spent so much time writing in train stations when I lived in Heidelberg that I was almost beginning to feel at home in the world again.
By the time the train pulled in, little clots of people coagulated on the platform. They had that forlorn look which travelers have when they are departing from somewhere at their usual bedtime. An old woman was crying and kissing her son. Two bedraggled American girls pulled their suitcases on ball bearings. A German woman was feeding her baby out of a jar and calling him Schweinchen. They all looked like refugees. Me too.