“I’m happy for you. I know I said that, but I really am.”
“I’m not ready to say good-bye to him. Not yet. Can you say good-bye to Jack?”
I shook my head. I didn’t feel I could ever say good-bye to Jack, but I didn’t want to say that aloud. Seeing Constance, listening to her plans with Raef, made me realize Jack and I could go on. We didn’t have to end in Paris or New York—or anywhere else, for that matter. It made my stomach feel buttery to think it.
The waiter brought us more coffee. For a little while we watched the café, the crowd moving around, people coming and going. The crowd looked different from the crowds in Berlin or Amsterdam. Younger, perhaps. Lighter. I felt the ache that I had felt the last time in Paris: that life was here as it was present in few places. And although that didn’t make logical sense, I still felt it, still needed to know it somehow.
“Let’s call Amy,” Constance said after the waiter left. “It doesn’t feel right to be here without her.”
“Okay,” I said, because it was the perfect idea. “Let’s call her.”
*
We Facetimed Amy.
Constance hadn’t heard from her except for a few random texts; I hadn’t, either, even after I sent the pictures of Constance riding a mechanical bull in Kraków. Somehow being united again persuaded us to believe that she had to pick up and answer our request. Constance texted her first to tell her we were calling. Amy didn’t answer the text. But a few second later, when we clicked on Facetime, Amy immediately picked up and answered with a signature line.
“What’s up, bitches!” She laughed.
It was Amy, our Amy, and she looked happy but strange confined to the small computer screen. She looked thinner, too, bonier. Her eyes sparkled. She looked like someone who had run many miles but wasn’t quite put back together.
“Oh, it’s so good to see you!” I said. “I missed you so much. We both have!”
“No, you haven’t! You’ve been slicing off some sweet boy flesh for yourselves! I watch your Facebook posts! All those Instagram shots.”
Maybe, maybe she was overcompensating a little with her enthusiasm. Constance leaned close to the screen, her glasses glinting a little.
“What did you do to your hair?” she asked Amy. “I can’t quite see on the camera.”
“Cut it. This gay guy grabbed me in my mom’s salon and insisted on a new hairstyle. I’m officially middle-age bobbed! I look like I just had a baby or something!”
“It’s just wonderful to see you, Amy,” I said. “You look fantastic.”
“I feel great. I’ve been going to the VFW hall in town and flirting my ass off with a bunch of old soldiers. They’re like training wheels for me. Getting back in the game little by little.”
“Good,” Constance said. “I’m glad you picked up our call. It’s been too long. We miss you so much.”
“And you two! Is love in the air over there? What the hell? I leave you alone for a couple of weeks and you go over the moon on me.”
Constance blushed. So did I. Neither one of us answered.
“Oh, jeez, you both have it bad!” Amy said, her voice slightly lagged in time. “Really bad. So now where are you? Are you back in Paris?”
“We just got here,” I said. “We’re staying for four days, then we’re flying home.”
“Are you coming alone?”
I glanced at Constance. She didn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“Jack is coming with me,” I said.
“I might be going to Australia,” Constance said. “It’s not for sure yet.”
“You love these guys, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said softly. “I guess we do.”
“Well, then, don’t be a pair of prudes. Ask for what you want. I’ll tell you this, the dating outlook around here is pretty grim. All boys or old men. I’ve got this one married jerk who won’t leave me alone. He has a belt buckle with an entire buckboard wagon on it. You wouldn’t believe someone like him exists, but he does. Every Saturday night, he shows up at the VFW hall, only he doesn’t say Saturday night, he says Date-ur-day night. He’s a weird little man.”
“Are you dating him?” I asked.
“Nooooooo,” she squealed. “No way. Oh, good God, no.”
“But everything is okay?” Constance asked. The question was deliberately vague. Despite discussing it a thousand times, Constance and I were unsure what Amy thought about leaving, about the whole wrap up of her time in Europe.
“I’m okay,” she said. “I know I haven’t been a good friend lately. I’m sorry I wasn’t in touch more. I couldn’t do it right away. It was hard coming back. Embarrassing. My parents were pissed. They couldn’t leave it alone. My mom likes to drop my fiasco—that’s what she calls it, Amy’s fiasco—into conversation every now and then just to keep me humbly under her thumb.”
“Mothers and daughters,” I said.
Constance nodded.
“It was just a big bust,” Amy said. “Just Amy’s fucked-up summer trip.”
“Things happen,” I said. “Crazy things. It wasn’t all that bad.”
“Yes, but not to you two.”
“You never know what’s going to happen,” Constance said. “The saints teach us that much, at least.”
“Trouble is, I’m far from a saint,” Amy said.
“You’re pretty saintly,” I said.
“Honestly, though, I’m pulling back a little. I’m being a little less wild, a little less robust, you might say. I’ve been cutting down on my drinking, and I’ve been running again. It’s been a long time since I had steady exercise. I need it. I ran a 10K last weekend. I’m in surprisingly decent shape.”
“You look good,” Constance said. “Healthy.”
“Well, I’m trying.”
We talked a little more, mostly focused on gossip about recent Amherst graduates. Amy had a good supply of tall tales about our old group. Finally, Raef and Jack returned. They sat and had a coffee and smiled at Amy and said hello, and then Amy was the fifth wheel and felt it.
“Okay, I’m going to scoot,” she said. “Later, bitches.”
“Take care of yourself,” I said.
“Always,” she answered.
She hung up or whatever it is you do when you sign off from Facetime. The screen shrank down and swallowed her, and she was gone in an electric burp that sounded odd in the café, sounded as if she had returned to the mother ship and wouldn’t beam down again anytime soon.
34
We checked into the Hotel Trenton, a modest pension on the Left Bank, not far from the Jardin du Luxembourg, a block or two from the Sorbonne. It was an extravagance on our limited budgets, but Jack argued it was worth it. We would only be in Paris together for the first time once—and only once—and to huddle together in a hostel wouldn’t do to commemorate such a moment.