Authors: Cleary Wolters
“Rent.” I was glad Phillip had worked in restaurants too. He knew exactly what I was talking about. Our waitress was a pro. She could flip our table five times in an hour, as efficiently as she ran her section of the American café. If we were going to linger, we needed her permission to do so, or she would have us fed, paying our bill, and homeless in ten minutes. Phillip handed her a big bill when she came back with my orange juice and he asked her if she would accept his most sincere thanks for letting us camp for a little while. He told her that his sister—that would be me, I guessed—was having an anxiety attack and we needed to sit still for a while.
Just as he said this, I saw Piper and Donald heading our way, looking like a couple of movie stars, and I really did feel an anxiety attack looming. Piper dressed up so well. She wore a blue pantsuit; the jacket was tailored and hugged her waist, and the pants fit loosely, flaring slightly at her ankles as she walked. She wore pumps and pearls, and had I not been feeling so anxious, I might have thrown her on the table and had her for breakfast. Phillip caught me gawking, and he grabbed my leg under our table and firmly squeezed my thigh. His infectious grin spread across his face. “You like that?” He was referring to her look, Piper’s confident, worldly businesswoman’s costume.
“Um-hmmm.” I had a carbon copy of Phillip’s perverse grin plastered on my face when she slid into the booth next to me.
“What a coincidence!” Piper was joking of course. I thought she was about to make reference to running into each other in an airport in Zürich. “Weren’t you two in my bed this morning?”
Donald plugged his ears with his fingers, turned bright red, and sang “La, la, la, la!” as he scooted into the booth next to Phillip. I’m sure he thought it an unspeakably cruel universe that had the two
lesbians at the table, and not him, sleeping with Phillip. Garrett and Edwin hadn’t known what was going on for the last couple of days with their friends, but Donald knew. “I’m leaving you!” Donald pretended to break up with Phillip. It was no secret that Donald harbored a huge crush on him.
“Yes, you are!” Phillip agreed with him, but in a very different context. “Want to feel something big?” he said flirtatiously, and Donald blushed again immediately. It was so much fun making him blush; his color changed so instantly and dramatically to red. Even so it registered on his face that he understood what Phillip had meant after he reached under the table and let Phillip guide his hand. As soon as he felt the soft leather of the garment bag, he sat straight up in his seat, looking excited and delighted and doing a weird chicken-wing flap against his side. He looked like a schoolboy when he did this.
“I’m going home?” It was both a statement and a question.
“We can stay in Zürich for a few days if you want,” Phillip offered, knowing full well how badly Donald wanted and needed to get home.
“Not!” Donald had barely let Phillip finish his offer of lingering in Switzerland before offering his own curt reply.
Donald and Garrett were the first ones to fly out. Garrett would take Donald to the Blackstone in Chicago and wait for us there. Very soon after their flight left, Phillip and I reconnected with our New York Yankees fan from Africa and started another chase, Phillip right on his tail and me pulling up the rear at a rapidly increasing distance. I considered hijacking one of the electric carts when I thought that I had lost both of them. But they doubled back. They hadn’t come back in search of my pokey butt; the guy had gone to the wrong terminal, I guessed. I turned around when he passed me. This put me ahead of Phillip for a moment, but it didn’t last. Phillip passed me while heckling me, as if it were a race I was losing.
I lost them again, and again they must have doubled back. Our African wore a panicked look as he passed me this time. I wondered briefly if I was missing something important.
Is he trying to shake
us or someone else?
I stopped and scanned the people behind me and then looked beyond Phillip as he came and went. I stayed still. I wanted to know if there was perhaps someone else following the African whom he was concerned about. But from what I could tell, no one was in hot pursuit of either the African or Phillip.
I was fairly certain no one else was on our tail.
If he wasn’t trying to lose us or someone else, what the heck was he doing?
I adjusted the bag on my shoulder and took off to catch up with Phillip. I came to yet another hub, but they had not doubled back this time. He and Phillip were standing by the window when I approached. The African spoke rapidly.
“Nous avons un problème. Je ne peux pas trouver mes amis.”
I understood that. He couldn’t find his friends.
We were all supposed to follow Donald and Garrett out of Zürich on alternate flights. Phillip would meet everyone at the Blackstone Hotel in Chicago. I would be flying back east, picking up Edith and Dum Dum, and heading out to San Francisco to wait for Piper’s return from Chicago. I was going to buy this gorgeous iron bed with a canopy she had shown me in a catalog. I really had to stop my premature chicken-counting nonsense. Edwin was the only one who left Zürich that day. He would get a message back to Garrett and Donald to sit tight. We were stuck.
After spending the entire day searching the airport with the Yankees fan from Africa, we had found one of the lost couriers. Our contact was looking at passengers and we were looking at their bags. Phillip, Piper, and I could not fly home until this was resolved. The African was finally ordered to give up the search by
his people
and Alajeh told us to stay in Zürich. The African would get on a flight back to wherever
his people
were. I didn’t envy him, having to return there to face the music. The friend of the Yankees fan had either gotten caught in the airport where their flight had originated or stolen the luggage from Alajeh and the Yankees fan’s
people
. If that was the case, we would never see this guy again and it was clear the guy knew this. He nearly cried when he told us it was time to give up.
I couldn’t help but imagine myself in his predicament, and what
remained of my giddy mood from earlier in the day vanished. An apropos sense of impending doom replaced it. I had never considered the possibility that one of our friends might do something as stupid and greedy as steal the heroin. The cozy sense of everything being as it should and some yet unknowable divine plan unfolding crumbled too. Nothing was right—that guy’s expression solved all my mysteries at once.
That’s how this ends
.
We grabbed a taxi into Zürich, asking the driver to take us to a cheap hotel, and he took us to what he called a “pensione.” A pensione is like a cross between a youth hostel and a residential hotel. Each room had two beds, just a little bigger than twin-size, and there were no private baths or toilets. It was quite a step down from Hôtel Carrefour de l’Europe, but we would have to be very careful with the money we had left or we’d find ourselves penniless in Switzerland using Phillip’s overused American Express card.
In Zürich, Phillip and I fought—bitter mean battles fueled by our renewed lack of funding and faith and our current dilemma. We argued over who was suffering more. From Phillip’s perspective his circumstances were much worse than mine. His mounting lies to Meg were destroying their future, and there was the ever-present American Express bill.
When we weren’t fighting, we were on the phone with Alajeh. Apparently, we could not leave Zürich until the fate of the final missing bag was determined. He told us not to worry; he knew we were not responsible for it having been stolen, and he would fight to the bitter end to make sure we were not blamed. Great! Piper made herself scarce while Phillip and I beat each other up over the world we had created for ourselves.
We were found blameless for the bag’s disappearance, so we left Zürich. We all went back to deal with our various obligations at home. Piper had already moved herself to San Francisco. She helped me move my stuff, including my cats, up to Vermont, where Larry, my former coworker and bartender in Northampton at Spoleto, promised to babysit them. He and his wife would care for them while I was away. My house was far from livable yet. But I didn’t
want to pay rent in both San Francisco and Northampton while living in neither place. Piper understood why I was doing this instead of moving the cats out to San Francisco at that moment. There was too much uncertainty about where we were going to be for the next few weeks to try to move Edith and Dum Dum there.
I had to plan for the possibility that I would never make it back to them. Piper knew that already, but I think she put the possibility of getting busted out of her mind, while she was subjecting herself to the same questionable fate. Having the house in Vermont meant we didn’t need to rush. It was fall, after all, and Vermont is one of the most beautiful places to be at that time of year. We could take our time, get the cats settled, and enjoy the fall foliage once more, before we all took off for the land of palm trees and fog.
Larry and his wife, Melony, had agreed to let me move up to Vermont while the rehab on the house was being completed. I would use what was intended to be their office, in the main house, as my bedroom and storage facility. Once Piper and I had everything in, I let the cats out of their carriers to inspect their new room. We kept the cats’ new world limited to the office-turned-bedroom while we had a drink with Larry. He was dead tired and we were tired too. We’d flown in from Switzerland, driven from Boston to Northampton, packed my house, and landed in Vermont.
We met some of Larry’s children. He and Melony had three dogs and four cats, but the main house was a big place, so it never felt like a zoo, more like a circus, and Larry was the great ringmaster. He had a dramatic flair. The first time I’d met him he’d been dressed like Charlie Chaplin, mustache and all. He’d actually looked like him, and it was not Halloween. If the lights had dimmed and he was suddenly standing under a spotlight while he told of how he had worked a double at Spoleto before returning home that night to my unexpected arrival, it wouldn’t have added much to his drama. I had always thought since Larry dressed so oddly well, was handsome, and carried himself the way he did, he was gay. But he was more complicated than that. He wasn’t quite as gay as I had thought he was either. We had that in common now.
Their chocolate Lab put a quick end to our late-night socializing. He was curious about the new visitors in the office and had gotten into the room with Edith and Dum Dum. Edith was on top of the bed and Dum Dum was under it. Larry grabbed his dog, but not before he tried to give Edith a big wet nose kiss. Edith swatted at his nose and looked like she had seen a monster. Larry showed me how to lock the office door and promised to help introduce the cats to all their new friends in the morning.
My bed looked like it was in the right house now; it matched. I had a great four-post bed made of cherry mahogany and topped with a feather mattress, goose down comforter, and pillows. Piper and I cuddled in our fluffy white cloud with each other and the cats. We slept like babies that night. It was so peaceful there. The next morning, I opened my eyes, in Newfane, Vermont, and it took me a moment to figure out where the hell we were and how my cats had gotten there.
I looked out the big picture window across from our bed, into the endless backyard. There was nothing there but woods. I could smell smoke from a fireplace. Edith and Dum Dum were curled up on opposite sides of the sunny window seat in the window I was looking out of. A big black tomcat, named Blackie, was stretched out in between them. He was twice as big as Dum Dum. He could have easily posed a threat to our serenity and my hope of residing peacefully in the main house until the carriage house was ready. But my girls appeared to be completely unfazed by the proximity of this big stranger.
Blackie clearly had no issue with the girls. He looked like a big happy drunk, lying on his back in a vulnerable position, his back legs stretched out straight and his paws hanging loosely over his chest, like a dog playing dead. I wondered how he’d even gotten into the room. I had locked the door to the office before we went to sleep, but the door was slightly ajar now. I figured Piper had let him in when she went to the bathroom or we had a lock picker among us.
Blackie?
In any case, we had not been woken by a cat fight, and now they all slept like they’d been friends for years, atop the cushions
that fit perfectly into the long and wide space under the picture window.
I was also surprised that my cats had already expanded their world from our bed all the way to the window seat. I didn’t expect that they would be this calm when they met the two other dogs or three other cats who lived there. Aside from one spitting hiss for the poor chocolate Lab who’d tried to kiss Edith, it turned out to be an uneventful introduction to their new environment. So far.
I got out of bed and walked over to the window to take my place in the cat lineup and to get a peek at the state of my house next door. We had arrived after dark, so I couldn’t really see it then. But now the contractor was out there, pulling old roofing up and tossing it aside. The building was lifted up on blocks of wood that had been stacked Jenga-style until the house was level. They were pouring a foundation under it later that week to replace the crumbled rock and mortar mess that had previously failed to support the building correctly. New windows were leaning against an exterior wall, and the sliding barn door had already been removed and the side of the building it used to occupy had been sealed and sided with cedar planks. The new siding would match the rest of the house after it turned darker and grayer with age.
I could hear Larry drop a pile of firewood on the brick hearth out in the living room, and the squeaking fireplace door opened—a thump—then the clank of the heavy iron and glass door closed. There were certainly no helicopters, boom boxes, or car alarms out here. I suddenly got so excited; like on a Christmas morning, I couldn’t behave. I had to wake Piper up.
I jumped into my fluffy white down comforter and straddled her, sat up, and started playing bongos on her chest lightly. Piper woke. I can’t imagine why. She laughed and bucked her hips up, tossing me off her and onto the floor. I knew she had to love me; otherwise, I’d have been beaten to death.