“You’re delusional. You don’t work for the museum. That is a fiction, a lie we told Hank, just for—for I don’t know what reason.”
“I know that. I’m not proposing that I go to Paris, per se.”
“Well then, how will you go, if not per se?”
“I’ll go as you. As Herbert Widener. I’ll get the drawings, have a fine time doing it, and take however long you want me to, and you can just disappear into whatever vacation your heart desires—paid, I might add, while everyone thinks you’re off in Paris working.” This put him into a much more involved silence. I fiddled with the decanter, holding it up to the sun as if this could tell me something about the wine. Herbert thought and thought and thought some more.
“You’ll go as me.”
“Mmm.”
“What if you run into someone who knows me?”
“Why would I?”
“I don’t see why you would.”
“The Steins don’t know you.”
“No, they don’t.”
“Does anyone in Paris know you? I mean by sight.”
“Well, a few friends of course, but no one you’d have any reason to deal with.” A long pause. “You can’t stay at the Mahler.”
“At the what?”
“The Hotel Mahler. All my friends know I stay there. They’re probably checking the register every day, just waiting for me to show up.”
“I won’t even stay in the neighborhood. What neighborhood is it?”
“The Fourth—”
“Send me to the Fifth.”
“No, farther. We’ve got to put you somewhere out of the way. It is, I would say, an intriguing plan, as long as no one who knows me sees you.”
“So I’m going?”
“It’s unthinkable.” A sip of scotch. “Let me think about it.”
My first passport was shared with my mother and our dog, Max. In the picture she is seated, holding Max, and I’m standing at her side. I was twelve. Louise wanted to take me to North Africa.
Louise kept a shrine on a small credenza in her bedroom. Among photographs and candles, postcards, and especially memorable traffic citations, Louise always had propped her folded and dirty, lipstick-kissed, grad school transcript. She had studied anthropology—in fact, was studying to become an anthropologist—when the pursuit was interrupted by her pregnancy. Louise took a leave. After I was born, the plan went, she would return, Dad splitting the day care, but that never happened. She had two years of grad school, the last devoted to a professor named Margaret Chang-Sagerty (her red lips on the transcript), whose specialty was something about Morocco. We were going to North Africa to spend a month among the “Mohammedans” Louise had studied at school.
We planned to travel in winter, stretching my two-week Christmas break into four and deflecting the objections of my teachers with the promise of hard study and a special report when I returned. Louise insisted I take the report seriously, and I did, and she did too. Our report was astonishing, but I’ll get to that. Louise liked to smoke, and she smoked more when she was happy. The weeks leading up to our trip were shrouded in a bluish haze, saturated with lists, borrowed luggage, special hats and phrase books, and punctuated by lessons in Spanish and French from friends of Louise who came to our house with bottles of wine and talked.
It was hard to concentrate at school. At lunch I pretended there was no water. I thought Fez was in the desert. Doug Hedges was my best friend, and I told him Louise and I were going to ride to Fez on camels.
“Fez isn’t in the desert,” he said.
“I know that,” I told him. “We could still ride on camels.”
“Why?”
Louise made maps and “itineraries” after dinner on beautiful, translucent onion paper that she’d lifted from work. We used different colored pens for the different days. She hated her job (insurance receptionist—“deflectionist,” she called it) and asked her friend Constance Pruitt to phone in sick for her the first two weeks, then call and get a “medical leave.” Constance sounded like Louise on the phone. She hated “assless bosses” as much as Louise did, and this subterfuge appealed to her.
We thought of everything except the passport. On the day before our departure, Louise went to pick up the airplane tickets and they asked for our passport. We didn’t have one which is how Max ended up in the picture. Three bulky suitcases and a knapsack (“only what can be carried”), one frantic boy, and a calm mother, all stuffed into Constance’s car with Constance and the dog, we went in the morning downtown to Immigration on our way to an afternoon departure for Madrid. Louise held Max on her lap in the photo booth and I stood, and then we waited several hours for the paperwork to be completed. The dog was well behaved. Constance kept me happy playing cards. On the way to the airport we left Max with Jean-Baptiste (of the drunken French lessons) and arrived with about an hour to spare before our flight.
My private life at that time (every child has one) had become exceedingly complicated, mostly because of puberty. I stared in the mirror constantly and was embarrassed to be caught at it. I began forming elaborate ideas about myself and my mother—who we were in the world and who we ought to be. On the airplane I insisted on wearing a tie. It was ridiculous. We had to buy a clip-on at the drugstore because neither of us knew how to make the knot. Somewhere I’d gotten the idea that I was the kind of child who should travel in a tie. This evolving scenario included Louise, who needed to become a kind of Auntie Mame in order for the tie to really resonate properly. It wasn’t a huge stretch—she had so much life and spine and humor—but no woman is Auntie Mame, and Louise had no interest in becoming her. On the airplane to Chicago, the first of three links to Madrid, she ordered a club soda and I was disappointed. I gestured to the champagne and said she should have some.
“Why?” she asked, wrinkling her brow.
“You love champagne,” I said.
“Not on airplanes. It gives me a headache on airplanes.”
“Well, I’d like to try a little.” This from a boy who had always complained that wine stank like vomit, beer was urine, and liquor poison.
Louise laughed and turned back to her magazine. “What a ridiculous boy.” Her rebuke surprised me but did nothing to diminish the elegant vision I had conjured. The story in my head was not a lie but a kind of reality-in-progress. I had all the guileless relativism of a child. Louise’s rebuke didn’t mean I was mistaken; rather, reality had not yet caught up to my imagination. (And of course at this point, in the guise of memory, my childhood has become exactly this kind of mutable, irrefutable thing.)
We made it to Spain but never Morocco. Morocco required a visa we didn’t have, and now it was too late. Louise wrote most of my report in a wonderful cheap hotel in Barcelona where we stayed for four weeks, a long, elaborate fiction about our adventures in the market culture of Fez. The report was encyclopedic and stunning, with photos taken from a reference book and drawings, by me, of a Fez based largely on Barcelona’s old quarter. Afternoons were spent in cafés on the Ramblas drinking colorful sodas and playing solitaire (or rummy with Louise, when she wasn’t busy scripting seventh grade paragraphs). The nights went on and on into hours I thought even adults could not inhabit, and I was a great hit in my clip-on tie, dancing with Louise at a club called El Sol, where the waiters gave me free snacks and admired my cards.
I was pleased that my second passport would not include Max. When Herbert finally agreed to my plan (against his better judgment, he said), it was