Carry the One (17 page)

None of Carmen’s old locker-room routines of disrobing would work here. There was no dark corner, no locker door to slip behind. Worse, they were on a platform that created the effect of a stage. She felt bereft of her clothing as she stepped out of her skirt, unbuttoned her blouse, unhooked her bra, transferring all this protective coloration onto a pair of side-by-side pegs in the wall. She was profoundly chilled, even though, only moments earlier, the room seemed too warm, too close with the sighing breath of all these women. Who—Carmen suddenly realized—had now become quiet, as if holding their breath collectively. She found herself awake in the middle of her worst nightmare. They were turned, looking her way. She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her breasts, and felt a flush spreading through her.

Only when she was able to look up again did she see it was not her they were fascinated by, but rather Heather, who had emerged from her leather and denim and gender-generic underwear looking like the poster girl for famine relief. The head of an adolescent on the body of a child. Her ribs bowed out below her tiny flattened breasts, her arms looked snappable as dry twigs, her collarbones jutted like stones at the base of her neck. The flesh stretched over this frame was the watery blue-white of nonfat milk.

Heather, snapping her underpants off a toe, looked up and caught the stares of the assembled. She didn’t seem offended, or put off.
Carmen saw she might find their interest flattering. She had, after all, gone to a great deal of trouble to come to this, and might well want to show off her accomplishment.

Suddenly Heather wasn’t just a jerk or a spoiled little rich girl. In a rush of pure impulse, Carmen wanted to fold her up in her arms, stand Heather’s toes on her own and dance her around this ancient room like she used to do with Gabe when he was little and having a bad day. But, of course, she couldn’t.

Carmen feared for girls. After Casey Redman, they all seemed fragile, vulnerable, miraculous in making it through girlhood. And Heather, Carmen now understood, might well not.

“Ready?” she said now, challenging Carmen with her nakedness, daring her to show pity or revulsion or fear.

Carmen looked away, at nothing. “Okay.” She saw that some women were emerging from the steam bath in their underpants, and so she left hers on. She kept her arms crossed over her breasts and followed her Virgil, into the depths.

Which began with a bank of showers surrounding two tables with padded, cloth-covered tops, on which lay women undergoing what must certainly be the

NETTOYAGE DE PEAU-55 FR

advertised on a paper sign taped to the wall.

“What does it say?” Heather asked.

“It’s some kind of skin cleansing,” Carmen said, and they stood for a moment watching the women on the tables being ministered to by huge, hulking masseuses with massive arms and red hands, who looked to be sanding down their victims with rough, wet cloths. Carmen couldn’t tell whether this process would feel heavenly, or torturous.

Beyond this they found another large cavern with raised, tiled cubicles lining the walls. Within these, women in pairs and threes were taking amateur turns at rubbing each other down, and pouring water
over each other from the sawed-off plastic liter soda bottles that littered the floors. There was water everywhere, from the fountains and the hoses snaking around on the tiles, also standing water in all the many depressions worn through the ages both in the floor and in the sitting platforms.

With Heather leading the way, Carmen followed so closely that, to counter a slippery step, she put up a hand and touched the sharp blade of Heather’s shoulder. She seemed so insubstantial and vaporous, and with the steam rolling up and around her, it almost seemed an outstretched hand would pass through her.

They moved slowly over the slick floors, through a third chamber and into a fourth, the heat growing progressively more oppressive, the steam clouding ever thicker until finally Carmen could barely see anyone else, and only a misty specter of Heather. Which relaxed her a bit in her modesty, and made it easier to look straight at Heather without flinching.

“Want me to dye your hair?” Heather asked over her shoulder, the first joke she has ever made with Carmen.

“How could anyone stay in here long enough to do anything?”

“Challenging, though, in a weird way,” Heather said, holding onto Carmen’s arm briefly, for support.

They tottered over and sat down in a shallow lake on the edge of an empty, tiled alcove. “Let’s see how long we can stand it,” Heather suggested, and disappeared behind the drape of vapor that closed around her as she reclined.

Carmen moved to the back of the niche and collected water from the small fountain carved into the wall, pressing her face into it, then spilling the water down the front of her body, over one then another shoulder. For the next small stretch of time, she lost Heather’s terrible troubles along with her own small ones. For a few moments in the depths of this place, so far inside it was almost impossible to think of an outside; she became someone she felt only vaguely acquainted with.

When she tried, she had great difficulty standing up. She waited an extra beat for some confidence of balance to return, then reached through the mist to find Heather, and finally made contact with a hip that was an immodesty of bone, thinly veiled with flesh.

“You okay?” she asked.

“It
is
kind of intense,” Heather admitted.

“Let’s go back,” Carmen said, taking Heather’s hand, the two of them moving forward with the smallest, most tentative of steps. Carmen was still a little woozy when she entered the previous room, but at least she was freed from the weighted air of the deepest chambers. They progressed—or rather regressed—slowly, until they reentered the first, mildest steam cavern, where they stopped and sat for a while and watched two women large as sumo wrestlers, in black thong underwear, one scrubbing the other in a slow, trancey way, cooling the cloth under a running tap, wringing it out, then scrubbing some more.

“This place is a trip,” Heather said, and Carmen could see she was trying to cut the experience down to size, trim it into a tidy story to tell some night, to someone else in black, in the Dunkin’ Donuts lot.

“Let’s cool off,” Carmen suggested and they stood again, much steadier now, and retreated into the showers, which only ran cold, and were stunning.

“Ahhhh,” Carmen said.

Heather moved in next to her, under the same flow of what felt like brilliant liquid ice. Carmen sensed her presence through the water and opened her eyes to meet Heather’s vacant, wash-blue stare. She saw that Heather was putting herself through a decompression process, pulling herself out of this unalterably shared experience into the pale Paris afternoon they were about to reenter, once again separate. But she wouldn’t be able to get there. They could no longer retreat into their previous positions exactly because they had been here together. Carmen saw that everything up until this afternoon had been prelude between them, overture, that now was the exact starting point, the place where she and Heather might begin.

At the hotel, she called Matt and Paula’s number and mercifully Gabe picked up.

“How’s it going?” she said.

“Big doings here.” He was talking not in a whisper exactly, more like a TV golf announcer during an important putt. “The twins started a fire in a new house going up on the next block over. Then they stuck around to watch their handiwork. The cops picked them out of the crowd right away. The toes of their sneakers were melted and charred. Dad’s furious. And freaked. Those girls are so sweet looking, but they are total criminals.” He stopped and for just a beat, they were both listening to the same soft ocean of fiber optics. Then he said, “Hey, how are you? Heather try to push you off the Eiffel Tower?” And Carmen unfolded with gratitude for him. In contrast, she envisioned the road ahead of Heather, the next few years. The creepy boyfriends. The unsavory interests, the phases and episodes and therapy and medications. All requiring enormous amounts of parental attention and intervention. Getting Heather through to adulthood looked like a staggering proposition.

The three of them went for dinner to a restaurant Rob knew, in the Marais. Filled with diners at the far end of their youth, riding a surf of conviviality, ordering cigarettes, which were then brought to the table on silver trays, the pack opened, the matchbook folded back, everything in a state of readiness, as if smoking were an urgently necessary element, an integral part of the hilarity, along with the many bottles of champagne brought up the circular steps from the basement, their popping corks punctuating the laughter and conversations—French in the upper registers, underlaid with a few more pedestrian languages.

Rob ordered them a Bordeaux, something excellent he knew about, something he’d written in a thin leather notebook he kept in an inside breast pocket. Rob hadn’t gone to college. He’d attended a
cosmetology academy and in the years since had risen to a social level he’s had to cram for.

For dinner, he ordered the steak frites. Heather, who, like Gabe, was vegetarian, ordered a spinach terrine and the vichyssoise. Carmen—an ocean away from Gabe’s censorious gaze—ordered quail. She had never eaten them, but here they were in the capital of haute cuisine, so why not be adventurous? She imagined small, delicate chicken-like pieces in some complex sauce. What arrived were two very dead birds with their heads bowed.

“Oh gross, how could you possibly?” Heather said, throwing the back of her hand across her eyes, an actress in a silent movie. “Really,” she said, “I’m going to be sick if I have to watch her—” here she stopped and turned away from her father, toward Carmen, granting her the concession of direct address—“watch you eat them.”

“Maybe we should send them back,” Rob said, grazing Heather’s cheek with his knuckles. He asked her, “Would that be better?” He was careful with his daughter. The same way he approached Carmen, to whom he said, “Would that be okay? We could get you something else, something less tragic?”

He acted as if the problem at the table was a small one, merely another matter to be smoothed out. He persisted in relentless cheer until the shoals of the evening had been cleared, and the rest of the meal took on a light, peppy rhythm. Carmen sent back the quail and ordered the sole. Rob, in a gesture just shy of a toast, lifted his glass and rolled the red wine so it coated the inside, leaving a film of itself behind as it washed up the other side.

“I know I should feel exhausted by now, but I don’t. I feel hyper-alive. It’s Paris. That’s what this town does to you.”

Carmen and Heather sat by, not looking at each other, but strongly in each other’s presence, and pretended to listen while Rob overpainted their frictions with a fantasy in which they were three sophisticated people enjoying one another’s splendid company in the City of Light, in a Brassaï photograph.

Carmen’s sole arrived and Heather only then began to address her terrine, taking a few bites, then just picking at it, pushing broken-off pieces under a shell of radicchio. As soon as the waiter had cleared their plates away, and was setting out small cups for espresso, she excused herself from the table to find the toilette.

“Let’s be corny tonight,” Rob said to Carmen as Heather passed behind him, occupying a sliver of space. “Let’s go up to Montmartre and have our portraits done by terrible artists. Go to a cancan show.” He took Carmen’s hand. He was still enjoying the beginning of their romance while Carmen had moved much farther down the road of their cluttered, now intersected lives. Or rather she saw that the road was rushing crazily toward all of them, the way it did in Pole Position, an old video arcade game that used to make Gabe scream in fake terror as he steered out of the way of falling boulders and sudden oil slicks.

This was not what Carmen had in mind. She’d been looking for something fun and manageable and sexy, but now it was clear that a lot about this, if it went on, would be large and messy. She imagined merging herself and Gabe into Rob and Heather, making one of those awkward, reconstructed families that create a new geometry out of everyone’s already existent problems. She didn’t know if she loved Rob, or even liked him enough to shoulder into the yoke next to him so they could share their burdens. Until now she hadn’t had to ask herself these questions.

black earth

Nick was taking I-90 north through Illinois. The traffic, for no apparent reason, was crazy. He had to swerve twice to avoid spaced-out lane drifters.

He hadn’t mentioned this pilgrimage to Olivia. He just told her he was meeting Bernie Cato up at the observatory. She was easy to lie to these days, distracted by her new job. Carmen’s boyfriend, Rob, had brought her into his company. MarcAntony. A new Roman empire. They had a huge salon just off Michigan Avenue. Olivia was now on the receiving end of the sort of tips wealthy women considered appropriate. She had quite a bit of extra income. She’d bought another cat.

He was fairly certain she would eventually leave him. She wouldn’t be enough to protect him from himself. Himself was such a formidable enemy. And if he started using again, she’d be out. Those were her terms and she was a hard-ass woman. If she disappeared he wouldn’t be able to manage on his own, and his sisters wouldn’t be able to save him. They couldn’t see how puny they were in the face of his need to be high. They were ants saying, “Hey can we help you hold up this huge building that’s toppling onto you?”

He was trying out good behavior, shifting his focus from what he
needed to what he might provide for someone else. He got the idea for driving up here from Alice. According to her—and she got it from Jean—Tom Ferris was hoping to revive his career with a song about the accident. And Nick thought, just in general, but particularly in this instance: What would be the exact opposite of what Tom Ferris was doing? What he came up with was this private pilgrimage. He imagined the girl’s family had been hollowed out by their loss. He would offer himself up to them in whatever way they might need. Someone to talk to, grieve with.