How Did You Get This Number (22 page)

“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.

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 the 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.

Three guards, two women and a man with boobs, put on latex gloves, and one of them handed me a pair of scissors so that I might autopsy the mysterious package myself. For no particular reason beyond being given a knifelike object, I imagined stabbing one of them with the closed scissors. An excessive means of teaching them the hypocrisies of airport security? Sure, but in the visual, I also knew karate. So I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

Two of the guards stood behind me as I sliced open the top of the bubble wrap. I thought this would be satisfactory. You could see the wooden top of something decorative. No wires or egg timers here. Still, they encouraged me to keep cutting. As I roughly sliced through layers of tape and plastic, I thought,
If I was going to blow up a plane, why would I do it so conspicuously?
Terrorism isn’t customarily the terrain of reverse psychology.
Ceci n’est pas un ticking suitcase!
The whole Trojan horse bit doesn’t have a place in the era of metal detectors.

No matter, I still retained a skeptical appreciation for the law. Sometimes the best way to see your tax dollars at work and protectors in action is to get caught yourself. It’s when they gestured for me to take off my shirt that I lost that.

“Your shirt,” said one of the female guards, pointing to make herself clear.

In my carelessness with the scissors, I had actually managed to cut my shirt along with the bubble wrap.
Surely
, I thought,
this will get me off the hook. I can’t even cut bubble wrap successfully. Who’s going to blow up a plane? Not I.

She picked up the thermometer and held it the way one might hold a rabbit one has just shot. She quickly felt along the body for any irregularities but found none. She set it down and they all ran cotton swabs over the thermometer and consulted their military-style computer. They took turns frowning at one another, then at the thermometer, and then at the hole in my shirt. Something was showing up on the screen, but they couldn’t categorize it. Whatever traditional bombs are made out of, this was not it. There must be some rarely registered airport security category that also includes gunpowder. If you are guilty of possession of these rudimentary explosives, men in wigs and brass-buttoned coats take you into yet another room and slap you senseless with their gloves. Only then may you board the plane.

Man Boobs called in a supervisor, a diminutive but determined gentleman with bags under his eyes that looked like mine but permanent. He asked me to have a seat. He wanted to know where I got the thermometer, and I told him. He wanted to know when I had purchased it, and I told him. He wanted to know if I had purchased it or if someone had purchased it for me, and I told him, adding an “I wish.” He wanted to know how much I had paid for it, and I beamed when I told him. But I wasn’t about to tell them about the mercury. I had made it this far. The thermometer was the one piece of Paris that was mine. I was a terrible godless lying American idiot, but the fucking thermometer was mine.

Bracing for the possibility of a lie-detector test, I tried to wind my mind back like a speedometer. Only a few hours earlier I was still ignorant of the thermometer’s innards. I looked at the digital clock on the desk. I could feel myself about to confess. All I wanted was to crack open a fleece blanket as the flight attendants encouraged me to peruse my options for duty-free grilling equipment and Clinique.

“Okay.” The supervisor clicked his pen and slid it into his shirt pocket. “Just make sure you declare it at customs when you land.”

You mean if I land,
I thought. If I really did have designs on blowing up the plane between here and New York, notifying customs was a bit of a moot point. It made me wonder what else they were willing to let go. I yanked my shirt down so that the hole was more of a slit and less of a belly-button peep show. I put the thermometer underneath my arm like the musical instrument it wasn’t. A woman’s voice came through the PA system, first in French and then in English. My plane was starting to board. I got up and thanked them for detaining me.

I
f you have to ask, you can’t afford it. This is the second most useful piece of romantic advice I have ever received. It arrived at our house with the Tiffany catalog, that manual so thick it had to be forcibly removed from the mailbox. Unlike other catalogs, with their cheap vertebrae of staples down their spines, this one was fused with glue. There were no prices listed in it. It was just layout after layout devoted to isolated jewels, as if they were criminals. Their crime? Fostering unreasonable desires in the hearts of consumers. There were moonstone necklaces that would pay for college. Not like tuition. Like to found a college. There were earrings that would rip the lobes off your face and call you Sally for crying about it. There was an amethyst bow that froze, sorority sweet, for the camera but smuggled a sharp weapon behind its back. The catalog opened with antique estate jewelry. This was the Blinging Out the Dead section—one-of-a-kind baubles older than sea turtles. They dared you to imagine all they had seen. And you accepted, leaning into the gloss of the page until you could almost make out your own reflection. Had they been loved? Ignored? Better traveled than you’d ever be? These sparkly roaches would outlive everyone. This ring, that necklace, had been with a person, now gone, on the best day of her life and the worst. And so they were reminders of how very odd it is to be young. When you are ten or eleven, you know in your heart that you have yet to hit either of those days. But both are out there. Waiting for you. One like the shiny front of a brooch and one like the piercing tack hinged to the back.

In the latter half of the catalog were the engagement rings so new they held the promise of a whole life yet to come. But a very specific kind of life. Here, said the book, here is what your epilepsy-inducing diamond will look like from above. Here is the angle at which you will show it off to your friends. Here is what it will look like tilted and sliding with sweat as you shake hands with a squash racquet even though you don’t even like squash. Harold likes squash. And you don’t see why you have to like everything a man twenty years your senior likes. Now here is the ring digging into your hand with each unforced error, pressing the very spot where your fifth-grade boyfriend once placed a ring made of gum wrappers. Finally, here is what your ring will look like in profile when you remove it in a Ritz-Carlton in Dallas four years hence, placing it on the nightstand along with a stranger’s watch and what’s left of your blackened heart.