How Did You Get This Number Page 16

  “Are you waiting for your friend?” a man behind me asked in a heavy Italian accent. I was wearing very American shoes.

  He was hoping I’d go sit in one of the pews. It wouldn’t speed up his wait time, but at least it would provide the physical illusion. Which, it dawned on me, is all any of this was about, anyway. Give me your tired, your poor, your Godless masses. It was then that I made a decision that I’m sure had my grandmother rolling into the fetal position in her grave. I peeked through the glass to see Emily gesticulating wildly across from the priest.

  “No, I’m actually waiting.”

  Ten minutes later, Emily opened the door. And the priest followed. Oh, lord, I thought. What does one have to say to warrant being escorted out of confession? I told her not to mention the toe biting. But while Emily met me in line, boasting the gratified look of the blessed, the priest put a new sign into the metal frame behind her. This one read FRENCH/JAPANESE.

  Even God’s servants need to change shifts.

  A new priest appeared. Avoiding eye contact like a bartender on a Saturday night, he shut the glass door behind him and commenced readjusting the swivel chair behind the desk. I felt that internal conflict, that eternal struggle: Do I stay in this line now that I’ve waited this long or cut my losses and leave the building/movie theater/subway platform? I find it’s better to stay and be frustrated than to leave and wonder.

  I brushed past Emily and sat across from Priest 2.0. Deducing that I was not Japanese, he rattled off something priestly in French. I smiled at him. Don’t wink don’t wink don’t wink don’t wink.

  “Je suis une Juden!” I blurted out.

  This is what comes from seeing too many Holocaust films.

  “But,” I explained—my two favorite words in any foreign language are “but” and “because,” the universal time-buyers—“but I think that it is true that we have the same God.”

  The priest put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, studying my face. Was this a prank? Why else would I willingly enter into a situation in which I couldn’t function unless it was to mock God? I wanted to explain to him that I willingly enter into situations in which I can’t function all the time, and it rarely has anything to do with God.

  “English?”

  “American!” I said, far too proudly. This was during a time when it was common to glue a Canadian flag patch on your backpack so that the natives would be thrown off your Yankee scent. Never mind the fact that anyone with a flag patch glued to their bag should probably have the crap beat out of them.

  I had been in utero the last time this priest had uttered a coherent string of English, which he explained to me in words that were not only broken but utterly shattered. Like Helen-Keller-and-Jodie-Foster-in-Nell-had-a-love-child shattered. What a rare combination of languages lived in his godly head. What if it turns out that it’s not an issue of beliefs but linguistics, and Saint Peter speaks only French and Japanese? Bummer.

  The priest cleared his throat. We then proceeded to have the most awkward conversation of my life, potentially of his as well. Through the stilted silences, the rough combination of languages, and the pesky little fact that I did not believe in Jesus or wallpaper in kitchens came the following conclusions.

  a. Paris was so beautiful because it made you look up at the sky/God.

  b. If God had meant the French people to make sushi, he wouldn’t have given them cows.

  c. Little things in life can produce a smile on your face, like the pen he mindlessly clicked in his right hand, which he also let me click.

  I could sense that our time was running out. I could also sense his feeling self-conscious about chucking me out, afraid I’d think it was because I was Jewish. He encouraged me to come back the next week when he was sure there would be an English-speaking priest manning God’s fort.

  “Ah, oui”—I looked at the clock—“but the week that is after this week I will not be here. I will be home.”

  At which point he got up from the desk and came over to my chair. I stood, and he took my hand.

  “God is always home,” he said, grinning.

  I felt good, relieved, which is pretty much the equivalent of feeling good in organized religion. Relief. You’re alive. God doesn’t hate you. Your livestock is healthy. No one gave you boils today. Plus, the priest complimented my French.

  “For how long have you it learned?”

  The truth was, my French was atrocious for how long I it had learned. After a lifetime of flash cards and poetry recitation, I should have graduated from my bicyclette rouge French. I should have been speaking sound-barrier-breaking Concord Rouge French. Out of my mouth came:

  “Deux ans.” Two years.

  The priest looked at me long and hard.

  “Vraiment? Deux ans?”

  I gulped and pried my hand away from his. Yup. Uhhuh. Two years.

  “Merveilleux. ”

  “Oh ... Mercy.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  I flew out of the glass chamber and found Emily, who was standing beneath a large bloody cross. I pulled Emily’s arm as if I were her toddler child and she wanted to go lingerie shopping. I had to get out of there immediately. I was a Jew, and I’d just lied to a priest in confession. In Notre Dame. I was going to get the shit smote out of me.

  I had incurred God’s permanent wrath and purchased myself a one-way ticket to hell. They only sell round-trips to zombies. At the very least, I was going wherever they send Jews who confess to priests and then lie to them. Oklahoma, maybe. But Emily was reluctant to leave. Apparently, her priest was multitalented. Not only was he a fluent English speaker but in her brief meeting with him, he had caused Emily to question her entire religious purpose on this earth, giving her a whole lot more to chew on than a wafer. She wanted to light candles and read pamphlets.

  “Are you kidding me?” I said, eyeing the vaulted ceilings for signs of imminent collapse.

  A security guard came over and tapped me on the shoulder. He asked me to keep it down.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, walking back toward the arches of sunlight coming from the main entrance. But when I turned around, I saw that Emily was still standing at the end of a pew. I whistled, the sound echoing in her direction.

  Roused from her religious reverie, she picked up her giant backpack and made her way toward me. But not before one of her straps brushed against the table of prayer candles, knocking a corner one to the ground. Emily froze. The mess did not look dissimilar from, say, a jar of French mystery spread dropped out a window. I shut my eyes and exhaled. Surely, I thought, this happens all the time. Who puts a candle so close to the edge of a table? Who is so careless with other people’s prayers?

  The security guard glared at me. Between the two of us, I had been the first to get in trouble and was thus responsible for all subsequent offenses, even Emily’s.

  “I do not think you should come to this place again,” he said, ushering us out with his eyes.

  When we got outside, Emily unfolded her map, running her finger along the fold to find the next X. But I couldn’t bring myself to go to another cathedral. We had seen the crown jewel. And I had gotten us escorted away from it. Wasn’t the whole idea of a tapas vacation to partake of a little of everything, anyway? I don’t think God would want me to overdo it. I think he would want me to have a crepe. So Emily and I compromised. No more cathedrals with low-lying fire, but we had to check something off the list. We went to the Luxembourg Gardens, where I stumbled upon my fountain. I stood in front of it while Emily checked out the sculpture garden, growing frustrated not with her map but with the actual sculptures if they weren’t where they were meant to be. And because fountains are inanimate, and thus polylingual, I took the opportunity to use this particular fountain as my church. I apologized to God for everything I had ever done. Except for the stuff that was kind of a given.

  THE RAIN HAD STOPPED, SO LOUISE SNAPPED THE umbrella shut. The fountain water was calm once more. Louise peered into i
t, her reflection blotched by the texture of the water. One woman’s stagnant is another woman’s still.

  The remainder of our trip was spent in a less morbid fashion, imbibing the holy trinity of vacation beverages: coffee, wine, and liquor. For all its faults, tapas vacation had worked, and during round two, I felt no pressure to catalog every single Impressionist painter in one day. Instead, I discovered what I had slept through the first time: French nightlife. We accidentally found ourselves in a French strip club, where a Thai stripper named Cali kept touching Louise’s hair. We went to bars, where I did the same thing in French as I do in English when people are shouting at me at close range but I still can’t understand what they’re saying. I shout back in extremely animated gibberish, which invariably results in much nodding and moving along of the conversation. Except I did this in an exaggerated French accent. It’s better than the alternative—bellowing “What?” at thirty-second intervals, in which case everybody loses.

  The last day of my visit, we went to a giant French flea market. I was determined to take a real piece of Paris back with me. For a long time, if people asked if they could bring me anything from their travels, I used to request a rock or a pebble. You shouldn’t spend your time obligation shopping when you’re on vacation. Plus, picking up a rock from the street was more legitimate than bringing back a snow globe not even manufactured in the corresponding country. I stopped making this request when a friend came back from South America and handed me a cloth sack with a rock—and a stowaway in the form of a dead insect serious enough to have an inch-thick exoskeleton.

  At the flea market, I attempted to purchase a giant ostrich egg. I was bolstered by my ability to say l’ouef but ultimately thwarted by the über mal prospect of packing a forty-euro egg that was sure to break in my suitcase. In sixth grade, we conducted a science experiment in which all the students in the class had to drop an egg from the top of the school’s building, protecting it from breaking using homemade devices. What brand of “science” this fell under, I couldn’t say. Some kids cradled their egg in cotton-ball nests, some suspended it with rubber bands between sticks like a canopy bed. I squeezed an industrial-sized bottle of Palmolive into a large plastic bag, adding the egg halfway. Palmolive, as it turns out, is not as viscous as you’d think. Not only did the egg break but the bag exploded. It looked like someone had aborted a green chicken in the parking lot.

  Louise and I were on our way out of the flea market, me resigned to allowing my bicyclette rouge French to deflate in the decade ahead, when I spotted a large antique wall thermometer. The dials were many and crafted; the glass was unbroken. How much could one, in good conscience, charge for a questionably functional wall thermometer? Five ostrich eggs’ worth, apparently. It was a very nice-looking thermometer.

  “Two hundred euro,” the antiques dealer repeated as if it were a fact, a number measured using the object in question.

  I bristled at the price, again employing “mal, ” but this time it was exactly what I meant. After enough time in Paris my French had actually improved. But I was done talking. The first rule of any negotiation is be prepared to walk away. Or maybe that’s the first rule of eating blowfish. Either way, it was a rule and it was out there and it was time to employ it. And then something happened. For the first time since Paris and I had gotten to know each other, one of its citizens asked me to return.

  “One hundred seventy-five euro,” said the antiques dealer.

  Actually, he didn’t say this, he wrote it down, employing the long French 1. My French had gotten better but not that better. Large numbers were on the same ring of vocabulary as nutritional information. Once he gave in a little, it was all the bolstering I needed to negotiate down, until it was only two ostrich eggs’ worth. There is a bitter-sweet capitalist tingle when one gets too good a bargain. The glee of separating yourself from the idiot who pays full price is quickly replaced by the fact that someone was trying to rip you off in the first place. Everyone’s the idiot eventually.

  On the crowded metro back to the center of town, I attempted to protect the thermometer. It was wrapped in layers of newspaper and bubble wrap, but I was dubious about its prospects for staying in one piece. I didn’t even have any dish soap.

  “S‘il vous plaît,” I’d say when jostled, melodramatically cradling the thermometer. “C’est un violon. ”

  Louise whipped around to look at me.

  “Ceci n’est pas un violon, ” she whisper-shouted.

  “Shut it, Magritte. It is now.”

  Though “thermometer” surely falls under the ten-letter translation rule, I have no idea how to say “valuable antique wall thermomèteuuur” in French. Even if I did, I assume the average person’s ability to conjure an image of such a thing is on par with my ability to produce the words to describe it. Plus, there are benefits to lying about such things. If you are over the age of ten and in possession of a classical musical instrument, people think you are a genius. They think you have an innate gift that you have harnessed into a tangible life skill. They look admiringly at your hands.

  Back in the sublet, the thermometer leaned a good foot beyond my suitcase despite my generous angling of it. This is not a problem! said my laid-back self, recalling the time it had run through the Miami airport with two carry-ons and an oversized lamp made out of a lawn flamingo and still made the flight.

  Shut up and eat your Ding Dongs, I thought, and left the room.

  My flight was the first one out of Paris. Louise and I stayed up all night, eating cheese and drinking the last of the wine. I left for the airport while it was still dark outside, making sure to leave time to call a taxi and then for the taxi not to come. I hailed a cab on the street and loaded my suitcase in the trunk but held the thermometer close to my chest. The streets of Paris were utterly abandoned as the taxi darted through them. I lowered my window to take in my last moments of Parisian air. Then I put it back up as we drove past a garbage dump and a gas station.

  I tore open the bubble wrap on the thermometer. I just wanted to touch it. Finally, something pertaining to Paris had worked out in my favor. Back when his ostrich-egg count was still at four, the antiques dealer said he purchased the thermometer at an estate sale. I imagined the original owners and hoped that they would not be too upset to see it go home with an American. I felt a seam of some sort on the back of it. Curious, I tore a little further to feel a sliding brass hook. I looked up at the cabdriver through the rearview mirror. I put the thermometer on my lap and pushed the hook, opening the back panel like a grandfather clock. I thought I might find a treasure map. The Goonies was a movie, sure, but a very realistic one. Or perhaps I’d discover a copy of the French Declaration of Independence. Certainly not our Declaration of Independence. Copies of that thing turn up only behind maps of West Virginia and velvet Elvis paintings. We are the least classy treasure hunters on the planet.

  TREASURE HUNTER’S ASSISTANT: Do you think the scroll is beneath the seventeenth-century farmhouse? Or maybe in this dusty urn I just found? Looks like it’s from Greece.

  TREASURE HUNTER IN CHARGE: Nahh. Crack open that keepsake ornament with the glitter bonnet. I’m pretty sure it’s in there.

  My thermometer was scroll-free. However, if there was ever any doubt about the thermometer being from the 1800s, I had my answer: in lieu of pendulums and chimes, it was filled with vials of mercury. Not just a bead or two, as in twentieth-century thermometers, but a post-apocalyptic supply dangling from chain after chain. For a moment I entertained the idea that the silver was on the outside of the glass, painted on there for some olden-timey reason I couldn’t fathom but which would make perfect sense if explained to me on a guided tour of Versailles. As you can see here, folks, the toilets were sealed shut with beeswax each night. Can anyone tell me why? That’s right, to ward off pig ghosts ...

  Maybe the vials themselves were empty. But when I turned them upside down, the mercury did what mercury does—holds on for a heartbeat, fighting gravity like ice at t
he end of a glass before it comes crashing down on your teeth.

  “Fuck.”

  “Pardon?” My cabdriver looked at me through the mirror.

  “Rien. ” I sighed, reattaching the tape. Okay, this is a bit of a problem!

  Having just checked the airline’s website for the most current regulations regarding hair conditioner, I knew that mercury was not among the substances welcomed by the TSA. I think it’s generally important—nay, American—to know why you’re being told a rule exists. Which is why I went online to begin with. But if it’s four a.m. and you’re full of French wine, there’s really nothing funnier than the TSA website. There is no personality type untouched, no scenario unexplored, no rare-weapons collector unaddressed. The more obscure the warning, the better. I like to think I would be seated next to the guy who pitched a fit because he didn’t realize he had to check his throwing stars and “realistic replicas of explosives.” He’d probably gnaw his plastic water cup into a shiv out of resentment. It was in the midst of all this that I learned that, in addition to causing lockjawed flipper babies, mercury will eat through aluminum. Which is what planes are made of.

  So it’s not actually the explosiveness of mercury that’s a problem, no more than the handle of the knife or the center of the throwing star is a problem. You have to be a pretty genius terrorist to know how to make a bomb out of mercury. But you have to be only an average idiot to poke a hole in the plane.

  My plan was, for once, to stay very still and do nothing. In stressful situations, people often talk about a fight-or-flight response. Which, in my option, doesn’t give enough credit to the more common reaction of curling up into a little ball. My history of explaining myself in Paris was peppered with failure. For once, I made the decision to play it cool. Or stupid. Whichever came first.

  The good news is that I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to be detained by security. Apparently, grinning like a moron as you slide sketchily wrapped prohibited substances through an X-ray machine will not make it okay that you have them on your person. I attempted to buddy up to the security personnel by getting them on my team, being overly cooperative as they escorted me into a small glass-paneled room noticeably reminiscent of the confession booth in Notre Dame. This was not the first time I had been taken to the special “threat to society” security room at the airport. The first time was when I had booked a sudden and nonsensical jaunt to Portugal and back. But at least in that instance, I possessed the confidence of innocence.