Fiction
As she looked at me I felt terrified. I couldn’t read her face; there were such a strange assortment of contortions. Our bags were packed neatly by the door and she looked at them, then at me and then at them and back at me.
What? I wondered. Why was she looking at me like that? I know it’s been a few years since we got a baby sitter, hopped on a plane and went on vacation. Okay, it’s been… how old is Ron Jr.? Ten? Okay, it’s been ten years since we’ve had a vacation.
“You got the bags?” Monica asked me. “I’m tired.”
Jessica, my sister/baby sister emerged from our daughter’s bedroom – our five year old Mellissa in tow. Both she and Ron Jr. asked us to bring them back something from Paris, France while Ron Jr. had to throw in that he didn’t really feel like he even “needed” a baby sitter, much less Auntie Jess.
Jessica and Monica smiled. My wife kissed the kids and I followed her, making a point of slobbering over Mellissa just so she could squeal. Jessica was 21 and finishing college. She needed a break from studying and practically jumped at the chance to babysit her niece and nephew. I had to ask her why.
“Because you two need to get away,” she said.
“How so?” I asked.
“Trust me,” she said. “Monica’s needed this for a long time.”
It took us about 45 minutes to get to JFK International Airport. We sat in silence. We took the Air Train and got off at Terminal One, made our way through the explosion of people and to the Air France counter. Monica said one thing to me the entire time: I’m going to see how Jess is doing with the kids.
“It’s only been one hour,” I replied. “Can it just be about us?”
Monica looked at me and sighed at my plea. She opened her pink cell phone, closed it, opened it again and pressed “7” for “Home” on her phone. She caught me rolling my eyes. She turned her back to me and began to converse.
So I looked around. Terminal One is a huge dome of tinted glass. It’s beautiful, surrounded by food courts and other things I won’t be buying. After just a minute (because if I know my sister, she got Monica off the phone quickly to make me happy) Monica turned to me.
“You’re done conversating?” I asked.
“Is conversating a word?” she deadpanned. “Don’t you mean conversing?”
Whatever, I thought.
What was I really doing? Why did I spring a few G’s for tickets to France when Monica and I haven’t spoken in years? Somehow our conversation went from how much we love each other’s company to what do Junior and Mellissa need. It would be far easier to say that because I had an affair, or she did, that we hit a wall somewhere and are desperately trying to break through. But the truth is we’re simply bored with each other.
Maybe.
So we made our way to the counter and got our boarding passes. They labeled our bags and dropped them down a shute. We went through TSA’s checkpoint. We sat in the waiting area with the other 300 passengers – in silence.
I could see the plane from the window of Gate 22 – a Boeing 777. It looked nice and shiny from up here. And I watched it being loaded by all these weird looking loading machines while fuel trucks pumped jet fuel and another truck was propped up on hydraulics in the back. They were bringing food in. Back and forth and back and forth everyone went. Pure chaos down there, I thought. It’s so much easier just putting graphics on a page for a client.
Perhaps Monica’s job as a teacher is as fierce, but before I could turn to ask her she was gone. I looked and looked and it wasn’t until they called for Zone 3 passengers that Monica emerged again – on her cell phone.
It was an eight-hour flight. We watched movies, in silence. We ate, in silence. We slept, presumably in silence although I’m a snorer. Every now and then we looked at each other and she gave me that look I didn’t understand. But instead of asking, I put my head down.
We touched down in Charles De Gaulle International Airport. We had both fallen asleep after watching some depressing movie where Cameron Diaz plays the mother of a dying child. Great movie. Appropriate actually, being that I’m the husband in a dying marriage.
Monica woke up first, her brown skin glowing in the sunlight, her lips full and her eyes big and wondrous. I remember looking at her the morning of our honeymoon and feeling so blessed to spend the rest of my life with her.
“Where is it?” she asked.
“Where is what?”
“My phone! Where is my phone?”
Monica had one of those phones that connected to satellites or something. They could call from Europe to America. This was ironic because we had never been to Europe until now. And from the look of things, she wasn’t going to use the phone now either.
“Where is it Ron?” she cried to me.
“Why in the world do you think I have it?”
“Because you were complaining about me having it!”
By now passengers were disembarking and frowning as they looked at us. We were together on the left aisle of this wide body plane. Monica was at the window, her phone perched on her left hip. No one could have stolen the phone unless they were ghosts. And ghosts don’t need to fly on Air France.
We called the flight attendants who sighed heavily and sympathetically as they searched for the phone with us. Twenty minutes after the last passenger was gone, the captain himself told us that we had to leave. Monica snatched her carry-on from the overhead bin, almost hit me with it and practically ran off the plane with tears in her eyes. I almost apologized for her, but didn’t care anymore.
Standing by a yellow replica of the Eiffel Tower was my wife. Fuming.
“You’re really going to tell me that you don’t have my phone!”
I walked past her. She had to follow me. I knew where the hotel was. Behind me she was barking. So much so that when we hit a stretch of solitude, I asked her a question: Why did you agree to this trip?
“You know why?” she replied, running to Customs.
After Customs, we went to baggage claim four and waited for our luggage. CDG listed our flight number – 1889 – and even gave an estimated time for the last bag to hit the belt. I kept looking at the Air France sign and wondered if we would air out our issues in France.
The time hit zero, which meant that the last bag was dropped. Everyone had their bags except us. Monica sighed hard and flopped in her chair, her head in her hands as she instinctively reached on her left hip for her phone that wasn’t there. This made her sigh again. A lost phone and no luggage. This wasn’t going as I had planned.
I had planned to see if we still loved each other. To say that we hit a rut was an understatement. We were in quick sand. I imagined my wife silently sobbing in the seat as I went to the customer service counter. When I returned, Monica was gone again.
It took me twenty minutes to find her. She was exchanging money. Once upon a time, dollars for francs was a bargain. Dollars for Euros? Not much so.
“Our bags are in New York,” I said when I found her.
“New York?” she said. “They never made the flight?”
“No, but I gave the lady our hotel and they said the bags should be here tomorrow. Do you have anything important in there?”
“Just… We’ll everything,” she replied. “I can’t go out without a change of clothes!”
“Well let’s just stay in the hotel,” I said. “It’s one night. We’re here for six more.”
Monica looked fidgety. “What will we do?” she asked.
“Talk.”
There was that weird look again.
Okay, what Monica didn’t know what that the Hotel Des Olympiads was a two star hotel with no TV in the rooms. Yes, no TV. I did that on purpose. But I swear I didn’t hide her phone.
We took a train from the airport to a bustling station called Gard De Nord. And this time we spoke a little. Monica looked at the French country side and for the first time in forever, she smiled. At me. And then she gave me that weird look.
We took the Paris “4” train to a quaint station called Simpleton, found our hotel and checked in. I could see from her face that Monica was not pleased, not even with the well groomed and exceptionally fat cat that sat on the counter. She was even more upset when we got to the room – 430 – top floor there.
“Where’s the TV?” she asked.
“There, um…” I stuttered, suddenly thinking that this was a bad idea. “Isn’t one?”
She rolled her eyes and sighed real hard. “I’m going downstairs,” she exclaimed.
“To do what?”
“Use the phone, check on the…”
“The kids are fine!”
“How do you know?”
“Because Jess is there! Why can’t we just…”
“You don’t really think I’m going to go an entire week and not check on my kids?”
Now it was time to say what I really wanted to. Now it was time to talk about us. But all I could say was… “No, I guess not.”
And Monica brushed past me and left. She came back twenty minutes later. I was lying on the bed and thinking, wondering, praying that this trip would be a good idea. That one day we could look back and say, “It may be rough, but we had Paris. We’ll always have Paris!”
I turned on the AC – it was a hot July day, with the temperature hovering around 85. That was nothing compared to the heat when Monica returned to the room. I asked, “How are they?”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine,” she replied. “That phone call is going to hurt my credit card.”
“Oh,” I said. “So, you want to go out?”
“No,” she deadpanned.
“You’re not hungry?”
“Tired.”
“But you slept on the plane.” She rolled her eyes. I didn’t care. We were in Paris, France. We could sleep at home and I told her that. She rolled her eyes again. “What now?” I asked in complete exasperation.
“I haven’t slept all night in years.”
I took notice. She hadn’t been that candid in years either.
“What?”
Looking down, she repeated herself. “I haven’t slept in years. I guess you don’t notice things like that.”
“What do you mean? If I’m sleep, how can I?”
“It’s not just that!”
“When then?”
She sighed, rolled her eyes and said, “Okay Ron, you want to talk? Let’s talk!”
“Finally!”
“I was considering a divorce before this trip.”
Whoa. “Whoa,” I said. “What…”
“We’re not a couple anymore. Why did you bring me here?”
“Why did you come?”
“You know why?”
“No I don’t.”
Her eyes grew huge. “You DON’T! ARE YOU KIDDING ME?”
Stupidly, I shook my head.
“You mean you don’t remember that my Dad took my Mom here before she died?”
Oh.
My.
God.
I forgot that.
“I…”
“You forgot,” she said. “My Mom died in October 2000. You went out to see a Yankee playoff game instead of going to the wake.”
But it wasn’t the playoffs, it was the World Series and they were playing the Mets! I dared not explain my behavior. “That was over ten years ago and you said you forgave me.”
“But it’s not just that … I felt so depressed after Mellissa was born, but all you could say was how happy you were to have a daughter. But my mother never got a chance to see her. And Mellissa looks just like her. Did that ever occur to you?”
“Did you ever tell me?” We were both standing up then.
“How…” she said quietly. “How can you tell your husband something like that?”
I shrugged. Then I said, “You just did.”
Monica was quiet. She asked me, “Did you take my phone?”
“No,” I said. “Maybe it was an act of God. We were supposed to be locked in this room. We were supposed to speak to each other.”
“Are you sleeping with anyone else?
Where did that come from? “No,” I said. “But I’ve been tempted.”
“With Angela Jenkins from work right?”
“Um… yeah… how did you…”
“She sent you an e-mail, saying that she wanted to have an affair with you.”
“I never read…”
“Of course not, I deleted it.”
I sighed. “You know I would never…”
“No I don’t,” she said, “because you don’t speak to me anymore. I’m a burden to you. I bring your day down. You’d rather hang with your friends or your sister because your wife can’t get over her mother’s death after ten years.”
I said nothing. Angela left our company abruptly. She never mentioned the e-mail to me. I’m guessing that my non-response meant disinterest and she was embarrassed. Monica was 100% correct. She has been a drag. I thought that in ten years and a new baby everything would be okay.
“I think we need counseling,” I said and then she gave me that weird look again.
“I’m… surprised,” she replied.
“At what?”
“That you still love me. That you want to save this.”
I smiled. We sat on the bed. “Are we going to save this?” I asked.
“We have a lot of work to do,” she sighed. “But I believe God wants this to work.”
“We’ll always have Paris.”
She laughed. “If we get divorced, at least we went to France beforehand right?”
It was a weird joke, but I laughed. And we laughed together, all night until the luggage came. We agreed to set up martial counseling with our pastor and we agreed to talk every day at some point.
For the next six days, Monica spent $200 checking on the kids and complaining about her cell phone. But when she said that she’d like to have a better hotel next year and bring the kids, sans Jessica, I knew that we were going to be all right.
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