She didn’t say anything else. We stood in the bathroom, both of us brushing our teeth, both of us looking at the other’s reflection in the large mirror over the sink.
I smiled. But I had too much toothpaste in my mouth to do it properly, so I spit some out, then put my eyes back on Constance’s eyes.
She stopped brushing and looked at me, her eyes getting teary.
“Could this be real?” she asked. “Can this be happening? Are we just making things up in our heads?”
She said it so softly that it broke my heart. It contained so much tenderness, so much longing, that it seemed to surprise her as she spoke the words.
“You and Raef? Yes,” I said, “I think it is. I think you found your true.”
True was an old word whose meaning we three had cobbled together to indicate things that felt indivisible. Amy and Constance and I were true. Cold beer at a ball game, an open fireplace in a small cozy bar, the scent of grass on a spring morning, lilacs, the sound of a bee as it hit the screen door over and over—those were true.
“It feels like it is, but that’s crazy, isn’t it? I don’t know what to think about it. I really don’t. I’ve known him for a day, maybe a little more. And I promised my parents to stay with you.”
“Don’t think. Just go along. Follow it and see what happens. We didn’t come to Europe to be big chickens, did we?”
She looked for a while into my eyes. Then she spit out her toothpaste and came back to reality.
“Well, I’m not going without you,” she said, her face bent to the faucet. “I would never do that, but I didn’t know where things stood with you and Jack—if we could all travel together, maybe. I swear, I feel like I’ve been drugged. I’ve never felt this way.”
“When is the jazz festival?”
“Probably the last week we’re here.”
“You should go with him. I don’t know what Jack’s plans are. But even if I had to travel on my own for a while—”
Constance shook her head.
“No. Absolutely not. I won’t even consider it. I’m not leaving you alone in Europe.”
“I think I want to go back to Paris, anyway,” I said, feeling the rightness of it even as I spoke. “Maybe I can talk Jack into that. We’re flying out of Charles de Gaulle, so I could just go a couple of days early. We’ll see. He has a friend who has an apartment in Vienna, too. He has plans to go there. It will all work out. There are plenty of people our age traveling around.”
“He’s your true,” she said, straightening and meeting my eyes again. She dabbed a towel at her mouth. “I know that without question. You’re like a picture that suddenly comes into focus when he’s around. It’s adorable. He’s nuts about you, too. Raef said so.”
“I don’t know what to make of him. I’m like a guy who goes fishing and suddenly hooks an enormous fish. You never expected to be in contact with such a thing,” I said. “It’s all ridiculous, isn’t it? First trip to Europe and we’re gaga over a couple of boys.”
“They don’t feel like boys, though, do they?”
Constance wouldn’t let my eyes go. She wouldn’t let me dismiss Jack and Raef so easily. She wouldn’t let me relegate them to college romances, silly flings that came and went quickly. She put her towel down at her side.
“No, they don’t feel like boys,” I said, my eyes still on hers. “But I think Jack has a secret. I don’t know what it is, but there’s something behind his travel in Europe. I can’t tell if he’s traveling to something, or away from something. But something’s there. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
“Have you asked him?”
I shook my head.
“No, not straight out. It’s a feeling I have. A sense that there’s another piece to the puzzle and it’s missing right now. He challenged me a little about going to work at Bank of America, kind of inferring that it would be soul killing. I told you about that.”
“You could google him. I googled Raef and found out he’s all over the jazz message boards. It reassured me to see that somehow.”
“Oh, Lord, I don’t even know his last name. He’s just Jack Vermont. How absurd is that? Remind me to ask his freaking last name, will you?”
She nodded as she rinsed out her brush and then reached over and squeezed my hand.
19
We had our first fight, or squabble, or tiff, or who-exactly-is-this-person-and-why-out-of-all-the-people-in-the-world-am-I-spending-time-with-him-question-mark-question-mark-question-mark, at a table—one of those obnoxiously cute café tables I spotted everywhere in Europe but never in the States—beside a canal on the outskirts of the city. Constance and I had a train to catch to Berlin later in the evening, so Jack and I had decided to rent two black bicycles—the ubiquitous black bicycles that glide everywhere in Amsterdam (Jack had even made a lovely metaphor talking about the bicycle paths as ant trails, the Dutch so many black leaf-cutter ants bringing vegetation back to the nest)—and to spend the morning riding around the city. Naturally—because it was Jack—the weather cooperated. A perfect slice of sunshine, not too hot, not too cold, descended on the city, and the canals glistened and Jack laughed and held my hand whenever we stopped and we flirted nonstop, and we kissed twice in absurdly beautiful locations, the water glistening, the city clean and fresh, and the flowers, glorious flowers, everywhere.
Then Wolf-Jack appeared.
He did not come to huff and puff and blow my house down.
He came with a smile, and he came with lunch and a tall pilsner that sweated in the sun. He came looking handsomer than any man had a right to look, and he came with his bike leaned against mine, at a tiny restaurant on a tiny street near a tiny cobblestone life-fucking snapshot.
*
“Are you sure you really want to hear this?” he asked innocently. “It’s not that big a deal. It’s just a theory, but you probably won’t like it.”
“Sure, I do. I’m always open to theories. Bring it on!”
“It’s something I read, that’s all. When you started talking about New York City, it came to mind. I read someplace that New York is a prison that the inmates have built for themselves. That’s all. It was a concept that someone was kicking around.”
“Go on.”
“You sure you want to hear this? It’s just a notion.”
“Notions are good.”