“Raef may show up, anyway. Jack is off doing something with his grandfather’s journal.”
“I have to start a job in a month.”
“Did you get your paperwork in?”
She didn’t look at me; she kept her eyes on the paintings. Constance was never mean, but neither did she miss anything. She knew I had been stalling about the paperwork due to Bank of America.
“Most of it,” I said. “Not every scrap.”
“You, the girl with the Smythson calendar, not getting everything in? The girl who consults her Smythson more than people consult the Bible? Shocking.”
“It will all get done. God, you’re as bad as my father.”
“Are you sure Jack hasn’t made you rethink your choices? It’s not like you to miss deadlines. He’s made you question some things, maybe. That’s healthy.”
“Oh, he’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. Jack is a ship passing in the night. I see that now.”
“Really?” she asked and raised her eyebrows. “Okay, if you say so.”
“You think he isn’t?”
“I suppose what I think doesn’t matter.”
“He is a ship. A big, ugly tourist ship that’s about a mile high and unseaworthy and serves too much food and has bad steel-drum music playing all day long. He’s charming, I’ll admit that, but come on. I really don’t have time for him right now.”
“Of course you don’t.”
“If I were in a different place, you know, psychologically, I don’t know, maybe. Maybe then it would be worth exploring. But he was awfully mean.”
“So you check your messages a thousand times a day to make sure he hasn’t texted you? Is that your tactic? That’s a good plan to fend him off that way. That’s not Barbie brain at all.”
“Are you trying to kill me, Constance? First you make me look at every piece of art in Berlin, then you tease me about Jack.”
“I thought you hated Jack.”
“I don’t hate Jack. We just don’t fit in the same way I thought we did.”
“Methinks thou dost protest too much.”
“I need a drink. Maybe I’m a little confused.”
“We’ll get a drink shortly, I promise.”
“Maybe a lot of drinks. You don’t think New York is a prison we build for ourselves, do you?”
“No, I don’t think so, sweetie.”
“It’s such an obnoxious thing to say to someone who is headed to New York in a few weeks. At the very least, it’s impolite.”
“Yes. Yes, it is.”
“I don’t care about the idea behind it, but why be so mean?”
“An imponderable of the universe.”
“Men are idiots when you get down to it.”
“They sure are. Always will be.”
“Then why do we bother with them?”
Constance shrugged and slipped her arm through mine. It was pretty in the museum, and the breeze hitting against the side of the building finally brought rain. I squared my shoulders and realized I had to stop perseverating—good SAT word—about Jack. It was childish, but I couldn’t quite get rid of the sense that maybe I had overreacted. Maybe I had let something pretty good go. Maybe I should have ridden it out a little while longer. It was like looking at clothes in a thrift shop for a long time, then, when you finally found something cute or just right, you decide not to buy it. It’s not that you can’t live without it, but it does get under your skin that you walked away. You wonder if it’s still there, if it was as flattering as you remember, and you realize if you had simply bought the darn thing you could have let your mind rest. Jack was the worst kind of question mark, a handsome, dashing guy who had made the mistake of saying exactly the wrong thing at exactly the wrong time.
What was the mental trick? If I tell you not to think of a pink elephant in a tutu, that’s all you can think of. Jack looked good in a tutu.
After the museum, we went to Checkpoint Charlie. It was one of the rare instances with Constance when we didn’t really know our destination but arrived at a must-see spot almost by magic. We walked and talked and wandered and window-shopped, and suddenly Constance told me we had arrived at the outdoor Allied Museum in Berlin-Zehlendorf. I made her swear that she hadn’t deliberately led us to yet another sightseeing destination, and she crossed her heart and held up two fingers in some sort of Scout vow.
“I swear I didn’t,” she said. “I’m as tired as you are, I think. The last thing I wanted was another museum.”
“You never get tired.”
“I am tonight.”
We stood for a while watching the foot traffic move around the open spaces. I knew the name Checkpoint Charlie, but I didn’t know much more about it. Constance read from the Lonely Planet guide that it was the most famous “gate” in the Berlin Wall, known as Charlie for the letter C. I’m not sure why, but the sight of the Berlin Wall, the sense that people had been killed here trying to escape to freedom, got me choked up. Here was a real prison, I thought, not a make-believe one. I hooked my arm in Constance’s, and we followed the cobblestone path that wove past various signs outlining the history of the checkpoint. We stopped for a long time to read about Peter Fechter, an East German teenager who was shot in the pelvis on August 17, 1962, while trying to escape from East Berlin. According to the brief history, his body lay tangled in a barbed wire fence, and he bled to death in full view of the world’s media. American soldiers could not rescue him because he was a few meters inside the Soviet section. The East German soldiers could not help the boy for fear of provoking Western guards. Something about the idiocy of the situation, the pointlessness of borders and political divisions, made me feel restless inside.
“This may have been my favorite thing to see in all of Berlin,” I told Constance when we finished following the cobblestone path and went to get a drink at last. “I find it fascinating. I don’t know why exactly, but I do.”
“It’s a sad chapter in history.”
“You can’t fence things in or out. Not really. Not for long. That’s what Checkpoint Charlie says to me.”
“Let’s get you a drink and bowl of soup.”
I nodded. Something about seeing Checkpoint Charlie reaffirmed my desire to travel. To understand the world, you needed to see the world. For the first time in a while, I felt the rightness of my career, my job, the plan I had made for myself. As corny as it sounded, I wanted to be a citizen of the world. I was okay. Everything was okay. And when a little later in the café two German boys came up to us to ask if they could buy us a drink—boys the age of Peter Fechter—I told them no, no, they couldn’t, because Constance and I were demon lovers, and we were here on our honeymoon, here without need of male company. It was the best way I knew to get a man to leave you alone.