How Did You Get This Number (2 page)

The idea of going to Lisbon began as a bastard idea, the daughter of impulse and video montages with a drop of
Casablanca
in there somewhere. On occasion, it occurs to adults that they are allowed to do all the things that being a child prevented them from doing. But those desires change while you’re not looking. There was a time when your favorite color transferred from purple to blue to whatever shade it is when you realize having a favorite color is a trite personality crutch, an unsubtle cultivation of quirk and a possible cry for help. You just don’t notice the time line of your own metamorphosis. Until you do. Every once in a while, time dissolves and you remember what you liked as a kid. You jump on your hotel bed, order dessert first, decide to put every piece of jewelry you own on your body and leave the house. Why? Because you can. Because you’re the boss. Because ...
Ooooh. Shiny.

One day in November, I came home and saw the desk globe on my bookshelf. Instead of seeing it as my globe in my apartment, where I come home every day, I remembered the globe I had when I was twelve years old. And saw it as a challenge. Confined by perfectly manicured lawns and freshly tarred driveways, preteen me had promised myself that one day I would spin and point and travel wherever my finger landed. I loved the movie
Better Off Dead,
that self-hating love letter from suburban America to foreign exchange students everywhere. More than just a snow-snorting lesson in obsession, here was a cautionary tale against armchair traveling. A rallying call to leaving one’s immediate area code immediately. If I didn’t get a passport soon, I might grow up and find myself serving French fries and French dressing to visiting Parisians.

With each passing year, the promise would become harder to keep. I was about to turn thirty. The obligations, they were coming. What they would entail, I couldn’t say, but I sensed they would be obligatory. So I made some rules:

When I spun again, I touched down on Lisbon. Either my globe is especially small or my fingertip especially fat, but you could argue I was also pointing to Morocco. I made a face. Should a woman really be traveling to Morocco by herself right now? Exactly how dedicated was I to this pact business? Reality was pounding with both fists. A few more sensible thought cycles and I wouldn’t be going anywhere.

So I booked a flight to Lisbon, set to depart in one week.

Here’s a travel tip: If you’re booking an international flight for no particular reason to a relatively obscure city and do not plan on buying or selling drugs when you get there, try to make your reservations at least two weeks beforehand. Otherwise, your boarding pass will be marked with a secret code suggesting you are, in fact, a potential drug or arms vendor, and you will be taken to a special room and treated as such by airport security. Take it or leave it.

The twelve-year-old in me was thrilled by adventuring, picturing an animation of my plane hovering over a map of the Atlantic, heading east, a charming single-engine sound coming incongruously from the 747. Back in real time, I packed my things, hailed a cab, sat in traffic, looked out the window, and wondered what the hell I was doing. Then I sat at the gate with a bunch of Portuguese people who also wondered what the hell I was doing. People carry themselves differently when they have a reason to move from point A to point B. Waiting on line for the bathroom somewhere over the Atlantic, I could feel a teenage girl burrowing a hole in the back of my head with her eyes. When I turned to meet her stare, she asked me if I was Portuguese.

“No, I’m not.” I smiled and turned back around. She tapped me on the shoulder and held her fingers together. She squinted through the space in between to indicate “a little.” That, or she was crushing my head.

“None.”

She tapped again.

She was probably being held captive on a family vacation and couldn’t understand why a free woman such as myself would go voluntarily to prison when I could be eating dessert first and jumping on hotel beds. It’s how I still feel about Williamsburg, Virginia. But days later, as I stood at the top of an ornamental elevator with breathtaking three-hundred-sixty-degree views of Lisbon, I recalled her incredulous attitude. I struggled both to breathe into the wind and to remember why I had come here. In one of the last scenes of
Breakfast at Tiffany’s,
Audrey Hepburn is preparing to leave for Brazil by listening to Portuguese on tape.

“I believe you are in league with the butcher,” she says, proudly declaring the English translation of what she has heard.

“I believe you are in league with the butcher,” I said to the air. And the air blew my words back in my face.

I gripped a rusted railing and walked down to a small café, where a three-person band played fado music for the tourists. Except there were no tourists at the café. Just a handful of Portuguese families. They looked unhappy, with their elbows holding down paper tablecloths and their jackets zipped to their chins. It had been six days. I hadn’t communicated with anyone here or at home since I landed. I had nowhere to go. I bought an orange soda and gulped it down. Here was another thing you’d never find in America: glass bottles distributed on fence-free, poorly manned thirty-story towers. What a trusting and carefree people the Portuguese were! Even if I couldn’t understand a single word they said. I tried to remember what it was that Holly Golightly had translated. Perhaps if I could pluck out “In you I believe” I could strike up a very earnest conversation with someone.

LIKE EVERY TWENTY-NINE-YEAR-OLD WITH A DATE of birth and a driver’s license, I had spent the past year being asked if I was “freaking out” about turning thirty. I took pride in my blase response. What was there to freak out about? One day I’d be fifty and both shamed by and envious of my dread of thirty. Besides, a new decade is a chance to find oneself at the beginning of things. Oh, life. What a sweet little Etch A Sketch of time you are! Only now, in Lisbon’s central square, watching a one-eyed man play the accordion while surrounded by stray Chihuahuas, did it occur to me that just maybe this was the freak-out. I swore that if I had to do it over again, I’d exorcise my panic attack like a normal person—by getting sloppy drunk. And I wouldn’t do it in euros. I swore that I wasn’t too cool to grip the ankles of the next nice couple I saw and beg them to take me with them, wherever they were going.

Instead of doing that, I decided to make the best of it and hunt down an eighteenth-century opera house. This took me half a day.

On top of the language barrier, I had the labyrinth of Bairro Alto with which to contend. Perhaps the oldest part of the city was not the wisest destination for someone with no sense of direction. It is impossible to overstate the percentage of time I spent lost in Lisbon. There are large swaths of the city for which there are no maps. You can’t buy them, they don’t exist, stop asking. Some streets simply don’t have names. At one point I found myself spat out onto a relatively trafficked road and played the classic game of mime-slash-baseball-catcher with a well-meaning Portuguese woman. She studied my foldout map. I studied her studying the map. Her eyes bounced from squiggle to squiggle in curious panic. Wanting to pitch in, I attempted to speak Portuguese by severely mumbling Spanish. Which I also don’t speak.

When people regale one another with embarrassing foibles, one person will often claim that another looked at them “as if they were retarded.” This woman’s face is what they are referring to.

After some time she discerned where I wanted to go, and I discerned that she used to live in this very neighborhood. What luck! We parted ways. Half an hour later, when I finally located the street, it was just lying there—exactly one block parallel from where I first received my directions. What would I do if I had a Portuguese pen pal? I imagined trying to address the envelope. Wedged between the person’s name and the city I might put: Two lefts
and a
right
but more of an uphill right, then make another left and go up the stairs until you hit a nine-pronged fork in the road. Take the street that’s the second from your right and look for the house with the light blue shutters. Not the baby blue shutters. If you’ve hit the men hot-wiring a Vespa, you’ve gone too far.

Thus I found myself meandering down a pedestrian-less street I had just been down ten minutes prior, tipped off by the specific network of clotheslines and the mismatched garments that hung from them. When I turned around again, I saw a figure of a man approaching. He wore a silver wind-breaker that glimmered cheesily in the daylight. Since I placed no stock in one direction over the other, I decided to continue walking away from the man. But each time I turned an Escheresque corner, he turned the same corner. I was torn between behaving like the paranoid Brits on the tram and imitating the street sense of a native Lisboan. I could hear him getting closer. The guidebooks and hotel staff alike had warned me about pickpockets (the former in complete sentences, the latter via an unsolicited staging of the crime using a sucking candy and my personal space). But would a pickpocket really chase me down an alley? Is that not like a cat burglar with Tourette’s? Or a eunuch rapist?
With what?
The question is begged. Some people don’t have the physical skill set for a life of crime.

This not-so-private detective began cooing to me as if I were an underloved house pet—he had no real passion for catching me but felt obliged to go through the motions. Still, the distance between us was closing. Somewhere above, a kitchen window was open. I heard lunch being prepared and a sporting match on the radio. I could hear the plays of the game, so absent was any foot traffic on the street. I got the distinct feeling that people were attacked on this little bend of cobblestone all the time. Probably they were victims of petty crime or sexual harassment or found their faces on the business end of a broken bottle. And this probably wasn’t a good thing. But it probably wasn’t that big a deal, either.

In all fairness, it should be said that Lisbon is hardly a shady place. Twenty years ago, fresh out of the womb of fascism, it was. And one can still witness hints of this on the outskirts of the city, in the condition of the churches built in 1980, which are often so badly battered that they’re indiscernible from those built in 1680. The past is in plain sight in the form of ashtrays on public buses and spray-painted swastikas on the sides of apartment towers. But Lisbon is also a delicate place that’s been sucked into the modern world quickly. There are major international design fairs and direct flights that come here now. My most posh English friend spent her summers here and unironically encouraged me to visit a bar called Snob. Lisbon’s biggest nightclub is owned by John Malkovich.

I was not afraid of John Malkovich. I was not even afraid of getting mugged in Bushwick. Okay, Greenpoint. I was not even afraid of getting mugged in Greenpoint. So, what then? Was this real fear or just some manifestation of acute loneliness, the kind that afflicts people abandoned on desert islands or raised by wolves? Though even victims of first contact are probably less seized by terror than I was. Honestly, if you thought you had the only pineapple in the world and I came to your house and gave you a second pineapple, how long would it take you to get over the shock? Not very long. The real reason island dwellers and jungle orphans try to shoot you with poison darts before they meet you is that they instinctually mistrust their own kind.

By this time I had made a few more turns. I could hear footsteps descending the worn marble staircase behind me. That’s when I came upon a set of poultry. Two portly chickens blocked my path, brains too small to focus on their feet. Behind me, the footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs. All I had to do was keep walking. A few more turns and I’d be safe—either out of the labyrinth or hidden farther within it. For reasons still not fully known to me I stopped. I searched my jacket pockets, feeling for my camera. Maybe I wanted proof that I had been here so that when my body was found in the Tejo River, my camera still on my person, the police would have clues. Maybe I wanted to tempt fate or to make some larger sharklike point that once I stopped running, he would stop chasing me. Maybe I just liked the artistic composition of land fowl. I saw a flash of silver catching up with me.