I'm Mostly Here to Enjoy Myself, page 2
It is short-lived. By the end of July, as I’m packing for my flight, new variants have rolled in and the city is resignedly moving to the early stages of another, if not collapse, then shutdown. Like closing up a summer house ahead of a typhoon. New York begins to batten down.
So far the borders are remaining open, at least in the direction I’m traveling, but a familiar sense of foreboding attaches itself to everything I do in preparation for the trip. I feel like I’m moving in a thick fog. I can’t see too far ahead, so anything but contained, carefully considered movement will be injurious in some way. Even though the pitfalls ahead are not yet visible, I assume their presence, from big to small: The flight will be delayed. Customs will be clogged. My vaccination card won’t be accepted. The man I’m renting from will get sick and have to stay in Paris. I will get stuck somewhere I can’t afford, which truth be told, is basically everywhere, and I won’t be able to leave. These are just some of the items on an endless list in my head titled “Things That Can and Probably Will Go Wrong.”
And yet, the perceived risk of jetting away, only slightly ahead of a new virus wave, is, in my mind, only incrementally greater than any other decision I make. My life as a single forty-six-year-old writer—outside of marriage, outside of motherhood, outside of payroll, outside of ritual, outside of, for the past year anyway, real-life human contact—is a life lived largely without a safety net. I am my own fallback. I play all the roles. I’m the person who thinks five steps ahead down all the paths, envisions the various outcomes, and then role-plays all the people I will have to be to solve it. Whether it is risky to get on a plane pales in comparison to what could potentially be more of this…not just isolation, but stagnancy. Total invisibility. Paralysis. Leaving feels less like a risk than a necessity.
TWO
Good Decisions
What no one prepares you for as a woman is for everything to go right. When you are a woman alone, this is never even suggested as a possibility. I will know fellow women who travel solo by their rapt attention when I recount what follows with a level of detail that would exhaust a person accustomed to, for better or worse, traveling with a companion. It’s the solo lady version of parents telling one another they’ve successfully sleep-trained their child or managed to introduce a vegetable into their diet. Similarly, I will watch these women’s faces light up in a combination of recognition, voyeurism, and relief at seeing an ideal version of their life out in the world.
Here’s what happens:
The flight is not canceled. The borders are not closed. I am not sick. Neither is the man I’m renting from, who is already in the air on the way to New York to see his family by the time I depart.
There is no traffic. I make it to JFK, a distance of fourteen miles, in twenty-five minutes, which is forty-five minutes less than the usual time it takes to get there.
There is no line at security.
The plane takes off on time.
Not only that, it’s half empty. There is no one behind me, or beside me; my economy aisle seat in the middle row becomes a bed I can stretch out on.
Shortly after we reach cruising altitude, the pilot comes on to let us know we have a strong tailwind and will be arriving nearly an hour early. “It looks like we’ll even have a gate waiting for us.” He has the sort of gruff male voice that immediately brings me comfort because it makes me feel like we are being flown by a person who has trained in some sort of Top Gun school and, given the opportunity, will refer to turbulence as “chop.” Recent years spent dissecting how we’ve internalized the lethal legacy of the patriarchy does not keep me from being made to feel safe by this.
I feel strangely connected to the other passengers on the plane, as if we are all making this leap together. As though we are a select group who has decided that, after all, life is for the living, or at least the leaping. This feeling of triumph recedes as thoughts of the people not on this plane roll in—the people I am leaving behind, so many of whom remain tethered, by money, by family, by job, by children. I am untethered. Or if not exactly that, then my tethers have the capacity to unfurl at great lengths without ever breaking. I can be simultaneously connected and disconnected. And now here we are, the fortunate adventurers, hurtling into the air. It’s the most motion I have experienced in more than a year. I could never have conceived of a world in which I’d describe flying as enjoyable, and yet, right now I can’t think of a single thing that would bring me more pleasure than this sense of velocity currently racing through my body.
As the earth and the lights of New York City drop away beneath us, my brain clears, my thoughts sharpen. I leave behind the person I have been for the last eighteen months—reliable, solitary—like a snake shedding its skin. I feel as though I could look out the window and see that former shell of myself below, there at her desk on the seventeenth floor, a little hollow, very transparent. A ghost of months past. But I don’t look back. Instead, I lean back in my seat and reappear to myself as a person in motion. I like what I see. Then I fall asleep.
When I wake, there is clean morning sunlight shining through open windows and the flight attendants are serving breakfast. Do I want a chocolat chaud?
I am away.
And still the good fortune continues! At Charles de Gaulle there is indeed a gate waiting for us. There is no line at customs. The French agent scans my vaccination card, stamps my passport, and smiles, wishing me a good day. My suitcase is waiting for me at the luggage carousel. The RER is in the station when I come down. One minute after I board it departs and we make it all the way to Châtelet without stalling.
I am stunned by all of this. I feel as if the world has taken me by the hand. Thrown open a door. Raised a glass and toasted my good decision-making. Really, when was the last time anyone has smoothly departed from New York to anywhere? When was the last time someone smoothly arrived in Paris? Has it ever happened? Was I possibly the first to experience this phenomenon?
And yet, here I am making my way up an unusually quiet Rue de la Roquette barely nine hours after walking out my front door. Nine hours.
A message pops up on my WhatsApp just as the church that marks my street comes into view. It’s the British woman on the second floor from whom I’m picking up the keys.
“Hello again. Just to remind you the street code is 6734. You take a right at the letter boxes and you will see a glass door leading to a staircase…”
This is new. There hadn’t been a second door there last time. Perhaps this was why the key had been left with her instead of just under the doormat. The message continues:
“You press on the arrows to find my name and then you press the bell to ring me and I shall answer and let you in. Second floor right-hand door.”
This degree of explanation makes me think she must be older. No one under sixty feels the need to hand-hold through text like this. I’m briefly reminded of my mother. I have been perversely grateful every day since March 2020 that she died before the pandemic and we didn’t have to spend this time worried about her well-being in a locked-down nursing home. Somewhere in my desk at home sits an old phone on which I am still able to access all her voicemails to me. Each one begins the same way: “Oh hi, sweetie, it’s Mom,” as if I might not recognize her voice. I try to picture my mother navigating texting; by the time cell phones were common, she was too sick to understand how to use them. I imagine that, were she still alive, she would approach it as she did a letter, formally and at length, writing out in detail everything she wanted to say, complete with salutation, perfect grammar, and complimentary close. I think of her beautiful handwriting—everyone remarked on it—and how, until recently, pen to paper was some small extension of how we each operated in the world. All these unique parts of ourselves have been lost to the two dimensions of screens.
The front door code to the building is the same as it ever was; my fingers fly over the numbers as though I had just been here last week. Inside, the spacious entry is cool and dark. There is a second doorway, and I am buzzed up without conversation. Up the shallow curved staircase, the suitcase and I now make our way, one slow step at a time; I’m sweating, real sweat, not just perspiration, and I pause on each landing to catch my breath and switch hands.
I used to be an excellent packer, shrewd and discerning; I could travel on the contents of a carry-on for weeks. But when I was laying out the items to take on this trip, it occurred to me that I no longer understood myself as a person in the world. I couldn’t envision myself out there, in it, doing things. Who would I be when I left this apartment? What does that person wear and where do they go? I had no answer for this, so instead of settling on a few items and leaving space for what I might find out there, I packed all the versions of me. And now I am carting them all up many flights of stairs and they are very heavy.
The British woman with the key is on the second floor, which is the third floor for me; the French count the ground floor as zero. It’s quiet on the stairs; the only noise comes from the courtyard, through the windows that have been cut into the wall halfway between each landing. I can hear recycling and garbage bins being opened and slammed shut as the bistro on the ground floor warms up to the day. The sweat begins to dribble down my face.
Sometimes in moments like this, when managing my own life feels quite literally too heavy and unwieldy, I imagine what it might be like to have help. I imagine there being another person beside me with whom I could think through some of these details. Who could go upstairs and get the key, for instance, and then return and shoulder part of the weight of the bags. Who could say, We’re almost there. Or just laugh with me at the ridiculousness of this. Who could release me, even briefly, from being all the people I need to be. Who could make things just a bit easier.
This shadowy figure, however, is absent today even from the furthest reaches of my own imagination. In the past year, when I did manage to emerge and see friends it was usually for distanced walks around Central Park. They all had the real-life version of that other person I was sometimes tempted to imagine. That theoretical built-in support. And yet here they always were, with me. Round the park we’d go, in some reversed, pandemic, domestic version of The Things They Carried, as they unloaded about how much they resented their spouses, their work, their suffocating apartments. How utterly overwhelmed they were. Are still. How they were staggering under weights and responsibilities, too heavy for anyone to shoulder alone, even while being suffocated by the presence of others who, in theory anyway, were supposed to make things better. Their partners were useless. Below contempt. “I loathe my children,” they’d say to me in a whisper, despite the fact there was no one around, as though they were confessing to an unimaginable crime. “I hate them. Hate,” they’d say again, as if sensing skepticism in my silence. Why had they made the decisions they’d made? Each time, I’d wait until they were done, had caught their breath, and then I’d firmly let them know they were the third person to tell me this, this week. The fifth this month. That it felt like nearly everyone I knew currently wanted a divorce. To be alone. To have made different decisions. That they were not alone in what they were experiencing.
Then I’d return home to my little apartment, actually alone, having let them unburden free of judgment (perhaps the greatest gift one can give), having helped them shoulder the weight of their lives, and I’d have to try to figure out how to do the same for myself. How was I supposed to shoulder myself? That is what this trip is. Me making myself feel better.
I reach the second floor, sweat now fully streaming down my face, arms burning. But inside I am aflame with gratitude that I have only myself to carry around, however heavy all these me’s might currently be.
I wipe my face and catch my breath before I press the buzzer. The door opens six inches. The woman who emerges is a little stooped—the way thin women get when they don’t do yoga as they age—and graying. This is all I can make out. Her face is covered by a mask, her hands gloved. The light in this corner of the hallway is dim. The keys I am here to pick up shoot out through the narrow opening.
The caution she exudes pushes me back a step. It feels like both an admonishment and a jarring reality check. You are being reckless, it says.
“You’re early,” is what she actually says. It’s an observation, not an accusation.
“Yes, well…” I begin to explain about the tailwinds, and customs, and the RER, excited to have someone to share it with, but she is already retreating as though pulled by an invisible cord attached to her spine. “WhatsApp me if you have any questions,” she says.
The tone is friendly, but the door is shut and locked before I can respond and explain that I actually know Paris reasonably well. That I’ve spent every August here for the last five years. Except for last year, of course. I stare at the closed door; her cautiousness creeps around the edges of my lighthearted mind-set, but instead of dimming it, it makes it appear even brighter and stranger. Perhaps it’s just the thrill of being reacted to by a stranger.
I continue my climb. Three more étages and I can kick this suitcase to the corner and attempt to transform into what I prefer to be seen as, at all times and everywhere: a local.
Finally, the door. I slide the thick key in and hear the long iron bar slide down, once, and again. And then…
I’m immediately dropped into a time capsule. Nothing has changed. It’s as though someone sealed the apartment up shortly after I left two years ago, and now I’m the first to return. You hear of those apartments in Paris sometimes. Ones that have been sealed since the war. Everything left, just as is. Like an Egyptian burial tomb, but less intentional. I’m having a similar experience. There is the same white wobbly table leaning against the built-in bookshelves. The same pillows with the mirrored squares sewn on, piled on the denim-covered couch that looks like a futon but doesn’t pull out. There are the same books lined up on the shelves in the same order, and the tangle of power cords and adapters in the far corner. Nearest me on the bookshelf I see the same metal plate of foreign coins, now under a layer of dust.
I’ve sometimes found it difficult to mark the passage of time in my own life. Being untethered, thrilling though it often is, also means being unstuck in time for much of the time. I’m disconnected from nearly every ritual commonly used to mark progress and worthiness: engagement parties, weddings, baby showers, children’s birthdays, children’s school years, marriage anniversaries, Mother’s Day. After a certain age, celebrating your own birthday can feel like an exercise in mustering the resolve to provide a narrative around it that does not involve apology, shame, ruefulness, or defiance. Anything but the word fabulous. I’ve ceased to feel any of these things about my age, but continually being asked to find the language to articulate how I do feel—and the truth is, I feel great, most of the time, but even this declaration inevitably takes on a defensive, middle-finger quality—is not work I’m interested in doing for free. The result is I’m sometimes left with the sensation that time is sliding away. My life a flat line. It’s easy for me to forget how old I am. Not in the sense of maturity. But literally. I sometimes have to do the math.
There is also the matter of my own increasingly unreliable body. From age fourteen to forty it operated with military punctuality; you could have set a watch by the time my uterus kept. No longer. My body has detached itself from its own timeline. On more than a few occasions in the last year I’ve been compelled to ask the question: Virus or perimenopause? (In the winter months this shifts to: Virus, perimenopause, or my century-old radiator?) My doctor, while wonderful, has no answers. “You’re getting to that age” has become the most frequently repeated sentence in my appointments with her. When I press and ask, “Is this normal?” she says, “No one is sure,” because “no one” has ever done the research into the universal experience of half the population. But this might soon change, she assures me after she asks if I’ve scheduled my appointment for the newly released vaccine, which took only a year to create. “Your generation is accustomed to having information,” she tells me. “You’re all furious there is none.” When she says this, I am furious, but it doesn’t last. I can be angry about only so many things at the same time. And even then, I’m not very good at it.
Increasingly, I experience time as one of those old flip-books that you have to thumb through quickly to animate the illustration: time can whip by and I can feel as though I’ve only taken a few steps. The stasis of this apartment underscores the jarring sensation that after I left here, almost exactly two years ago, I somehow ceased to exist. That the intervening months have been swallowed into some sort of black hole during which no progress was made, no development, no transformation. And that any transformation I may have undergone has had very little to do with my own day-to-day experience and very much to do with witnessing so many other people experience isolation and uncertainty for the first time, and violently balk at the realities of it. If anything, the last year and a half has bizarrely felt like a collective, if unintentional, pat on the back. A Wow, it really is hard to be alone. To not live a life that provides a five-year plan. To fend for yourself with little to no security net. The world disappearing from view at times has had the effect of suddenly making me feel extremely seen.
