How Did You Get This Number.
by Sloane Crosley.
To my parents. For everything.*
* Everything except the two-week period in 1995 directly following the time you went to Ohio for a wedding and I threw a party in the house, which is the most normal thing a teenage American can do, aside from lie about it, which I also did, and Mom eyed me suspiciously for days, morphing into a one-woman Scotland Yard, marching into my bedroom with a fistful of lint from the dryer to demonstrate that I had mysteriously washed all the towels, and then she waited until we were in a nice restaurant to scream, "Someone vomited on my couch, I know it!" and Dad took away my automotive privileges straight through college so that I spent the subsequent four years likening you both to Stasi foot soldiers, confined as I was to a campus-on-the-hill when I could have been learning how to play poker at the casinos down the road and making bad decisions at townie bars. I think we can all agree you overreacted. Everything except the two-week period in 1995 directly following the time you went to Ohio for a wedding and I threw a party in the house, which is the most normal thing a teenage American can do, aside from lie about it, which I also did, and Mom eyed me suspiciously for days, morphing into a one-woman Scotland Yard, marching into my bedroom with a fistful of lint from the dryer to demonstrate that I had mysteriously washed all the towels, and then she waited until we were in a nice restaurant to scream, "Someone vomited on my couch, I know it!" and Dad took away my automotive privileges straight through college so that I spent the subsequent four years likening you both to Stasi foot soldiers, confined as I was to a campus-on-the-hill when I could have been learning how to play poker at the casinos down the road and making bad decisions at townie bars. I think we can all agree you overreacted.
For everything except that, I am profoundly grateful. I have only the greatest affection for you now. Also: I vomited on the couch.
He had no especial desire to meet or to know any of these people; all he demanded was the right to look on and conjecture, to watch the pageant.... He was now entirely rid of his nervous misgivings, of his forced aggressiveness, of the imperative desire to show himself different from his surroundings. He felt now that his surroundings explained him. n.o.body questioned the purple; he had only to wear it pa.s.sively. He had only to glance down at his attire to rea.s.sure himself that here it would be impossible for anyone to humiliate him.
-WILLA CATHER, "PAUL"S CASE," 1905
Show Me on the Doll
There is only one answer to the question: Would you like to see a three a.m. performance of amateur Portuguese circus clowns?
But as I sat in an open-air bar on my last night in Lisbon, drinking wine with my coat still on, I couldn"t bring myself to give it. These weren"t the universally frightening species of clown, the ones who are never not scary. No one likes a clown who reminds them of why they hate ice-cream-truck music. These were more the Cirque du Soleil-type clown. The attractive jesters found on the backs of playing cards. They had cla.s.s. They had top hats. And I? I had a pocketful of change I couldn"t count. I had paid for my wine in the dark by opening my hand and allowing the bartender to remove the correct coins, as if he were delousing my palm. It was the December before I turned thirty. I was in a place I had no business being. The last thing I needed was a front-row seat to some carnie hipster adaptation of Eyes Wide Shut. Eyes Wide Shut.
Besides, I had nothing left to prove. When you spin a globe and point to a city and actually go to that city, you build an allowance of missed opportunities on the back end. No one could accuse me of not living in the moment if I opted out of one lousy underground freak show. I had done enough on the risk-taking front just by it being winter and me being the sole American in all of Lisbon. If you had taken a flash census of the city, you might have found a few other Americans, businessmen and women holed up in three-star hotel suites, surrounded by a variety of ineffective lighting options. But I knew in the pit of my stomach that I was the only tourist from my country drifting around Europe"s sea capital.
While the emotional sum total of my trip would eventually add up to happiness, while I would feel a protective bond with the few objects I acquired in Lisbon-a necklace from a street fair, a piece of cracked tile, a pack of Portuguese cigarettes called "Portuguese"-hidden between the cathedral and castle tours was the truth: I have never felt more alone than I did in Lisbon. A human being can spend only so much time outside her comfort zone before she realizes she is still tethered to it. Like a dog on one of those retractable leashes, I had made it all the way to Europe"s curb when I began to feel a slight tug around my neck.
The problem wasn"t merely the total annihilation of English, as if English had taken too many sets of X-rays at the dentist"s office and had been radiated to the point of disintegration. I do not roam the planet a.s.suming that everyone speaks English. The problem was I dove headlong into an off-season culture that a.s.sumes everyone speaks Portuguese. A delusion that I adopted at first, and that inspired a temporary Portuguese patriotism in me, accompanied by a self-shaming for not being fluent myself. I had traveled to Romance-language regions before, sometimes alone, and found that as much as people like you to attempt communication in their language, what they like even more is for you to stop butchering it. In most cultures, the natives will let you get about four sentences in before they put you out of your misery. In Portugal, I kept waiting for that kindly metaphorical hand to reach across the pastry counter or the gift-shop register, pinch my tongue, and say, "Enough already." I was going to be waiting a long time. How poorly did I have to imitate their infamously irregular verbs before someone squished my cheeks into submission? Was this place not "sleepy," as the guidebooks described, but completely unconscious?
In the time I spent there, I barely heard Spanish or German or Russian, either. My ears captured the clunky tones of English but once-and from an elderly British couple seated behind me on a wooden tram. With a controlled panic in their voices, they discussed the winding route of the tram and the seemingly arbitrary stops. It was a conversation that might not have caused a fight had it taken place on still ground. But their words were becoming heated as the wife"s devil-may-care att.i.tude clashed with her husband"s conviction that they were being whisked away from the city"s center into sketchier pastures. The tiff ended with the husband making his wife unb.u.t.ton her coat, sling her purse over her shoulder, and put her coat back on over that.
"Just do it, Joan," he said through his teeth. "Don"t make a scene about it."
Joan complied, temporarily pacifying her husband. This new costume made her look like one of the ancient Portuguese ladies, their spines bobbing beneath their cardigans as they scaled the city"s steep inclines. The jostling act of transformation, of removing arms from sleeves and slinging bags on shoulders, also made her a more obvious bait for pickpockets. In the end she resembled a cartoon of a boa constrictor that had just swallowed a lawn chair. The resulting image is not one of a pregnant snake but of a snake who has just swallowed a lawn chair.
I considered saying something, engaging with them. I was relieved by the sound of kindred vowels. Days of talking exclusively to myself and I was finally ready to take the gag out of my throat and rejoin the land of fluency. Lack of human-on-human communication works like a liquid fast-first you miss the solid sustenance, then for a long time you wonder why you ever needed it, then you miss it so acutely it makes you dizzy. I a.s.sumed a symbiotic need for these Brits to break their fast. I could be their conversational prune juice. But when they made their way to my end of the tram in preparation for the next stop, I just stared at them with the pa.s.sive contempt of a local.
I FOUND MYSELF WAITING ON LINE FOR LISBON"S main attraction: an antique freestanding elevator that springs up the city"s center and leads to nowhere. When I got to the highest level, I climbed the narrowest staircase to the tippy top. America is lacking in this, I thought. All of our public structures are self-explanatory. When you press the PH b.u.t.ton, you"re going to the penthouse. Not the stairs that lead to the landing that lead to the lookout above the penthouse. Our bas.e.m.e.nts are conveniently located at the base. No cellars that lead to subfloors that lead to catacombs of ruins. The Goonies The Goonies was just that one time, and it was a movie. was just that one time, and it was a movie.
The wind blew hard as I leaned on a railing that would have been ripe for a lawsuit if this was Paris"s Eiffel Tower or Seattle"s s.p.a.ce Needle. My calves throbbed from days of rushing through Lisbon"s seven hills as if I had anywhere to go. I was like a cat that urgently needs to be on the other side of the room for no apparent reason. I looked out toward the ocean in the direction of home, squinting at the horizon. Then I apologized to the travel G.o.ds for thinking I could do this, remembering there"s a reason we don"t always fulfill the wishes of our younger selves once we"re grown.
The idea of going to Lisbon began as a b.a.s.t.a.r.d idea, the daughter of impulse and video montages with a drop of Casablanca 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 ... 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. 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, 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 pa.s.sport soon, I might grow up and find myself serving French fries and French dressing to visiting Parisians. 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 pa.s.sport soon, I might grow up and find myself serving French fries and French dressing to visiting Parisians.
With each pa.s.sing 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: 1. No traveling to places that would deplete my life savings getting there.2. No war zones.3. No places I had been before.And finally:4. No places so romantic they would depress the foie gras out of me.I closed my eyes and pushed. I was prepared to go to South America or South Dakota. I was prepared to go to Iceland in the middle of winter or to Ulaanbaatar in the middle of Mongolia. Contingent on fare restrictions and blackout dates for Ulaanbaatar Air. I stuck my finger on the spinning world to make it stop.It landed at the corner of 20N and the Tropic of Cancer, smack in the center of the Pacific. For the briefest of moments, I saw myself floating on a raft, gazing at the stars, using coconut sh.e.l.ls for a bra.... This wasn"t so bad. Then I imagined becoming a member of that select club of people in human history who have resorted to drinking their own urine. New rule:5. No ocean.
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 pa.s.s 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 h.e.l.l I was doing. Then I sat at the gate with a bunch of Portuguese people who also wondered what the h.e.l.l 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 s.p.a.ce in between to indicate "a little." That, or she was crushing my head.
"None."
She tapped again.
"Porque Portugal?"
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 att.i.tude. 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, Breakfast at Tiffany"s, Audrey Hepburn is preparing to leave for Brazil by listening to Portuguese on tape. 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 cafe, where a three-person band played fado music for the tourists. Except there were no tourists at the cafe. 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: gla.s.s 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.
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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 cla.s.sic 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 embarra.s.sing foibles, one person will often claim that another looked at them "as if they were r.e.t.a.r.ded." 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 and a right right but more of an uphill right, then make another left and go up the stairs until you hit a nine-p.r.o.nged 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. but more of an uphill right, then make another left and go up the stairs until you hit a nine-p.r.o.nged 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 s.p.a.ce). 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? With what? The question is begged. Some people don"t have the physical skill set for a life of crime. 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 pa.s.sion 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 s.e.xual hara.s.sment 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 Sn.o.b. 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.
"s.h.i.t," I muttered.
"Hola, gata!" He raised his voice. "Where you going?" He raised his voice. "Where you going?"
I had no idea. Oh, how you cut to the core of me, random Portuguese thief! I quickly snapped a picture of the chickens.
He was close enough for me to hear the swoosh of his pants as he approached. Jesus, Jesus, I thought, I thought, is he wearing a full-body tracksuit? What is that, nylon? is he wearing a full-body tracksuit? What is that, nylon? The chickens straightened their necks in his direction. They looked frightened and stupid. I clutched my camera in my hand and quickly speed-walked back to civilization. The chickens straightened their necks in his direction. They looked frightened and stupid. I clutched my camera in my hand and quickly speed-walked back to civilization.
Sn.o.b WAS A PLACE WHERE I SAT AT A FELT-TOP table illuminated by a desk lamp. I watched soccer with a few senior citizens. They were as surprised by my presence as I was unsurprised by theirs. Apparently, the whole scene becomes just that-a scene. It transforms into a chic hotspot sometime around two a.m. I could see how, when filled up a bit more, the bar might not have been the most depressing watering hole of its generation. I glanced at my watch. Eleven p.m. The foray into an advanced time zone was working in my favor, but the language barrier was not. I was caught in socialization purgatory. If I left Sn.o.b, the situation elsewhere would be just as dead, lonely, reminiscent of game night at Jean-Paul Sartre"s house, etc. But if I waited for things to heat up, I"d be equally overwhelmed. Lisbon is designed for bar crawls and multilevel discos that close after sunrise, for nights that make your top-ten lists: Top Ten Drunkest. Top Ten Wildest. Top Ten Involving Grain Alcohol, a Leotard, and a Spider Monkey. I wish someone had told me this. But how could anyone have? How could anyone have warned me that a Sat.u.r.day night in Lisbon rivals Ibiza in dry-ice expenditures? I never asked.
One of the old men tore himself away from the game to bring me a bar menu. I ordered a basket of fried pierogi filled with shrimp and cream cheese. I took one bite and stared at the TV for two more matches. Has anyone in history been more engrossed in a televised sporting event? I drank two whiskey sodas and got into a cab. Because the roads of central Lisbon cut in and out of each other at such windy angles, the bad news is that it took me a few minutes to realize my driver was drunk. The good news is that there is such a thing as the international language of slurring. As soon as I had a bead on the neighborhood of my hotel, I asked him to let me out. Elaborate Christmas-light formations were strung above the roads. My head spun. I walked up to my hotel, grateful to have made it home. Even if I was greeted by a broken radiator and a lone bath towel that could tear the skin off a baby.
I turned on the radio and listened to the news in Portuguese, which was delivered with such enthusiasm that it was impossible to separate from the commercials that buffered it. I sat on my rock-hard bed and, not finding a remote, got back up to turn on the TV. There are ten zillion channels in Portugal. Half of them are QVC. Almost half of them are p.o.r.n. And everything in between is both. I can"t tell you how many late-night programs I stumbled upon in which a topless woman in a Santa hat bounced up and down behind a counter of state-of-the-art blenders. Or how many men with Burt Reynolds mustaches came up behind these women brandishing s.e.x toys that, upon closer inspection, were meant to peel carrots. Have you ever seen a naked woman jerk off a paper-cup dispenser? Have you? Some things can"t be unseen.
I clicked off the bedside lamp and went to bed, pulling the covers above my head. Streaming in through the rough lace of the bedspread were splotches of the light from the apartments and restaurants up the hill. I could hear gla.s.ses clinking, people laughing on balconies, lovers fighting in the streets. This was, hands down, the most pathetic day of my twenties.
BUT THE NEXT MORNING, THE BEGINNING OF MY last day in Lisbon, something had changed. I woke up at a reasonable hour. I stretched and cranked open my window and stood at the far corner, where I could see the fog rolling over the river and the two perfect peaks of the bridge sticking up through it. Down the hill, the city was a mix of browns and reds and stucco. Seagulls flew over the palm trees along the sh.o.r.e, palm trees that I had failed to notice before. It"s going to be a good day, It"s going to be a good day, I thought. I turned on the TV to see one of Santa"s elf slaves, still naked and still riding a vacuum cleaner. She shook her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in agreement. I thought. I turned on the TV to see one of Santa"s elf slaves, still naked and still riding a vacuum cleaner. She shook her b.r.e.a.s.t.s in agreement. A good day indeed A good day indeed.
In the military, they have a kind of sanctioned hazing so systemic that even the recipients get on board. They break you down so they can build you back up again, a friend once told me. And perhaps that"s what Lisbon had done to me-made me feel lost and stupid and envious of those who don"t feel lost and stupid. Only so I could begin the next day feeling profoundly lucky to be there. The city and I had been in the s.h.i.t together, fused into a state of understanding, despite our differences. I looked in my guidebook and memorized "good morning" in Portuguese, repeating it aloud like a phone number fresh from the operator: Bom dia. Bom dia. Bom dia, como vai? Bom dia. Bom dia. Bom dia, como vai?
I walked down to the river and miraculously found my way back to the hotel without asking for directions. The winds of luck were no longer blowing straight into my face. It was as if I was reborn with a traveling superpower. The power to discern. Here is what to order for breakfast today. Here are the right b.u.t.tons to press on the ticket machine. Here is the bus you want. There is a sweet teenage boy, and behind him is the sweet teenage boy who will steal all your money. I went east, to Belem, a neighborhood known for its elaborate monastery and custard tarts. I went to the monastery, where I sat down and thought generally of G.o.d. With its interior of candelabras and stained gla.s.s and exterior of endless spires dripping with concrete saints, it made American churches look like Fisher-Price models of Christ"s house. It had the chaotic facade of the Sagrada Familia and the excessive b.u.t.tress count of Notre Dame. I meandered through the manicured sculpture gardens, licking custard from my thumb. If I had only one pudding-like substance to consume for the rest of my life, it would be that custard.
When I reached the port, I discovered a monument jutting out over the water. The Tribute to Explorers, The Tribute to Explorers, said the statue"s stone name tag. The wind blew but seemed less adamant about choking me than it had been at the top of the freestanding elevator. I was standing on the exact piece of land where Christopher Columbus docked in 1493, when he returned from the Americas. A few years later, Vasco da Gama pushed off from the same spot. said the statue"s stone name tag. The wind blew but seemed less adamant about choking me than it had been at the top of the freestanding elevator. I was standing on the exact piece of land where Christopher Columbus docked in 1493, when he returned from the Americas. A few years later, Vasco da Gama pushed off from the same spot.
I removed my shoes and dangled my legs over the stone cliff. I felt like a little kid at the dinner table, my feet bobbing in the air. I also felt connected to the people who inspired these statues. Subtract the scurvy, the smallpox, and the genocide infliction, and how different were we? I was comforted, thinking that not only had this trip to Lisbon been no accident, but also that these men had the same view of this river that I had now. Take away a building here and a bridge there, and how much could the curve of salt water have altered over the centuries? I looked up at the giant stone nostrils as they jutted out, permanently distracted by the scenery. The sun was setting on the horizon. The tarts were beginning to settle in my stomach. As I got up, I knocked one of my balled-up socks, which went tumbling down the stone and into the water below. Yesterday, this incident would have been tacked on to a chain of poorly executed attempts at tourism. But because this was today, I thought, At least it wasn"t the shoe. At least it wasn"t the shoe.
That night I found myself with a lower-than-usual tolerance for QVC p.o.r.n. I paced in my room, making U"s along the foot of the bed. On the nightstand my camera was running low on batteries. There were piles of brochures and keepsakes, napkins and matchbooks. Who knew they would be treated so preciously when they left their respective a.s.sembly lines? This was my last night here. I grabbed my coat. As I pa.s.sed the man behind the front desk, I winked at him, punching my fists into my pockets and holding them close to my body so as to indicate an awareness of potential pickpockets.
I clomped down the uneven cobblestone hills. At the base of one staircase I could see electric lanterns framing the doorway of a cafe I had pa.s.sed before. I hadn"t gone in because I knew the staff had seen me from the windows, looking overwhelmed and guidebook-dependent each morning. I walked into what I expected to be a closet, but it turned out to be a sprawling, multi-balconied bar. At night, the cafe traded cappuccino for hard liquor. The back porch overlooked the bridge, the river, the castles and cathedrals-the whole city. I took out a paperback book, lifted my gla.s.s of wine from the bar, and settled on the balcony, where it was getting cold enough to see my own breath.
And then they sent in the clowns. A girl in her early twenties came into the bar and sat facing me a few tables away. After we exchanged the international head nod for "You"re at the same place as I am," she got up and sat one table closer.
"Como vai?" she said in Portuguese, followed by an "English?" in English. she said in Portuguese, followed by an "English?" in English.
She had thin blond hair with fuchsia streaks that crept out from beneath a propellerless beanie. Her eyeliner made me question the clarity of the mirrors in her house. Her right arm was covered with what looked like kabbalah bracelets. I wanted to tell her that I was fairly certain that karma points were not doled out in proportion to the number of bracelets you wore. But since I could barely ask for the cheese plate, I just smiled wider instead. Si, English. Si, English.
She moved closer and sat next to me. I shut my book and smiled. I couldn"t stop smiling. Not because I was thrilled at the prospect of hair and makeup tips from this woman but because it was my only means of expressing myself. I am not a professionally trained mime. My companion, on the other hand, probably was. She was wearing white gloves that stopped at her wrists. With them, she gestured at her two friends, who had just arrived at the bar. When that didn"t work, she screeched at them in high-speed Portuguese. She must do her training at remedial mime college, She must do her training at remedial mime college, I thought. I thought.
A boy and a girl, not older than twenty, came over and started debating with her. My eyes bounced back and forth between them as if I was watching my second sporting event of the week. And my presence was as irrelevant to them as it had been to the tiny football players on TV. The boy was extremely animated and matched the girls sequin for sequin. Eventually, I was folded into the conversation in the usual Lisboan fashion-with the conviction that the longer one speaks Portuguese, the more apt your foreign subject is to understand it. It"s the Portuguese version of screaming English in order to better communicate. Everyone knows that works.
The three of them convened. They were an unusually good-looking bunch, even caked in makeup. I looked at the girls" heart-shaped faces and the boy"s sloping nose. Each had a look of the purebred that many Americans find appealing, colony of mutts that we are. The boy flicked up his top hat as he leaned in to hear his female companions. I noticed the second girl was wearing two different types of shoes-a feather-covered high heel and a flat moccasin. I scanned up her legs, trying to compute how she was able to stand evenly.
I shook my head from face to face like a rotating fan. They were my sideshow freaks, and I was theirs. But they were growing frustrated with my lack of fluency. I wondered : did I speak English at the same speed they spoke Portuguese ? It seemed unlikely. You know, I wanted to tell them, Portugal and Brazil may be the only hubs of your tongue in this world, but this is a language that"s out there. I mean, it"s around. The chances of there being more Portuguese to speak tomorrow are very good. No need to get it all out now.
"Wait, wait." I flipped my book open to the blank papers at the end. I sketched a quick map of the earth, using the kind of sloppy squiggling that makes Florida the size of Italy. In the circle I drew the picture I had in my head when I came here: that of a plane going from New York to Lisbon, leaving a dotted line in its wake. It looked smaller on the page than it had in my head.
"Naway Yorkah! "said the boy. the boy.
When they managed to ask me what I was doing there, I drew two equally sized figures: one a stick drawing of myself and the other a full gla.s.s of ink-colored wine. Pushing the book aside, I supplemented my sketch with the universal hand gesture for "sucking back the sauce." They looked concerned. The boy huddled his eyebrows together. I worried that he might cry real tears, ruining the perfectly rendered one already painted on his cheekbone. On him, I imposed a backstory of his entire clown family dying in a clown car pileup. He was then raised by some unfunny guardian who drank too much and beat him with the lion-taming crop and made him work the cotton-candy mills. Now even the faintest suggestion of substance abuse takes him back to his days spinning sugar, wishing his alkie clown overlord would choke on his foam nose.
"No, no." I drew three winegla.s.ses in a row, circled them, and drew a hard line across the gla.s.ses.
"NOT AN AL-CO-HOL-IC," I enunciated, dragging the pen back and forth.
Relieved, they settled in. The girls rearranged the wire skeletons beneath their skirts. The boy brushed aside his jacket tails and relaxed. And we proceeded to play Pictionary at a third-grade level. When I ran out of margins, the second girl ran up to the bar and returned triumphantly with a fistful of fresh c.o.c.ktail napkins. It"s amazing what you can glean from people by doodling. Using stick figures to represent themselves, I learned that they were in fact in clown college. Not in addition to regular school but with the specific intent of becoming professional clowns. A topic they took very seriously.
In the most elaborate doodle of the night, they asked me to join them for their dress-rehearsal clown practice. It was just down the street. There would be comedy sketches. And fire swallowing. Or maybe b.l.o.w. .j.o.bs, the sign language for which is practically identical. There was also a party for one of their cla.s.smates, just back from the hospital after an unfortunate altercation between a tightrope and his groin.
"Never play leapfrog with a unicorn, huh?" I asked under my breath.
They ignored me and kept drawing, interrupting each other with gobs of Portuguese. By the time they finished, their doodle looked like an early sketch for The Scream. The Scream. Overlaid with an early sketch for a three-ring orgy. Overlaid with an early sketch for a three-ring orgy.
"Frankly, there"s just not enough midget sodomy in this picture," the first girl instructed the boy, "and ask yourself: is that really where cotton candy is meant to go?"
"It melts in more places than your mouth," said the boy, defending his contribution.
For all I knew they were just discussing the weather. They rotated the paper on the table without picking it up, their row of smiling faces like telephone wires.
Would I like to see a three a.m. performance of amateur Portuguese circus clowns? Oh, no, thank you. I declined for the same reason that I had run from the man in the alley. For the same reason I flew to Lisbon to watch hours of QVC p.o.r.n. The freedom of being an adult, that condition which landed me here to begin with, came with a heavy price. I was beholden to no one. My family and friends back home had flight numbers and dates, sure, but I could be absolutely anywhere. Or, as my father used to put it, "dead in a ditch on the side of the road." As opposed to all the ditches built in the centers of roads. Point was: who were these clowns? If I went with them, I could wind up in a bas.e.m.e.nt somewhere, unable to call for help in the proper language. Or, knowing Lisbon, the catacombs beneath the cellar beneath the bas.e.m.e.nt.
However, with each gla.s.s of wine, our communication morphed from frustrating to liberating. The stick figures became increasingly elaborate, bordering on perverse. They went through p.u.b.erty, developing scalloped b.r.e.a.s.t.s and generous crotchal endowments. It was enough to make you wish all human relations could be boiled down like this. We should all have to carry around paper-doll versions of ourselves, pointing to what hurts, pointing to what doesn"t. It was like those ridiculous ABC After School Specials After School Specials on AIDS and child abuse and cla.s.s warfare, the ones that made on AIDS and child abuse and cla.s.s warfare, the ones that made Degra.s.si High Degra.s.si High look like quality programming. look like quality programming.
"Show me, Suzy," said a permed and frost-tipped child psychologist. "Show me on the doll where the bad man touched you."
And Suzy would point. And the adult in the room would nod. And Suzy"s hair would get tousled, because everything was going to be okay. She didn"t have to be afraid anymore. How nice that must be, I always thought. Not the scarredfor-life or my-stepfather-is-up-for-parole part. But the part where you could momentarily explain all your vital information with the extension of an index finger. All you have to do is point, and with the speed of a near-death montage, every issue in your life is transferred to the closest listener. For a brief moment, the brain you"ve made such a mess of is someone else"s problem. Here, you take this. I"ve been living with this model for thirty years, and I don"t know what to do with it anymore.
"Okay," I said.
"Okay?" asked the girls in unison.
I pointed at the surrealist orgy sketch and made a walking gesture with my fingers. There"s no such thing as a stockpile of missed opportunities. You just have to trust that the world knows what it"s doing when it sends a bunch of circus freaks your way. Also, I had never seen cotton candy used like that before.
"Okay, I"ll go with you."
They embraced one another and then me. We had time for one final round before clown practice, and I watched my first friend"s eyes flicker beneath her beanie bangs. A wry smile came over her face. She grabbed my book and pinched the acknowledgments page, poised to tear it out.
"Si?" She looked at me. She looked at me.
"Go for it." I nodded.
She clutched the pen and scribbled, blocking the others with her elbow. When she was done, she revealed a doodle-confession regarding an affair with her teacher (a stick figure with a pipe in his mouth and extra-large clown shoes). The second girl muttered something to the effect of "No, you you shut up." The first spoke in Portuguese but continued to draw at the same time, as if employing a type of sign language for my benefit. Closed Captioning for the American Tourist. She slung her arm around my shoulders, keeping me on her side as the bedlam unfolded. She felt possessive of me. I was her discovery, just as Lisbon was mine. shut up." The first spoke in Portuguese but continued to draw at the same time, as if employing a type of sign language for my benefit. Closed Captioning for the American Tourist. She slung her arm around my shoulders, keeping me on her side as the bedlam unfolded. She felt possessive of me. I was her discovery, just as Lisbon was mine.
This, finally, was something I understood. People who have spent time in Lisbon talk about the city as if it"s theirs. The city allows for this sense of possession in a way that more heavily trafficked places do not. If you are in Lisbon in December, it is very possible to walk past a store window, knowing that it will not host another reflection for whole hours. It is possible to look out onto the river and feel that you are the only one to look at it this way for centuries. And it is possible to be minding your own business and accidentally befriend a monolingual home-wrecking lady clown and her band of merry mimes.