Lawrence Block - Enough Rope

Of course, there aren’t forty-two thousand steps, but it did seem like it at the time. We were with the Dattners — by the time we got to Paris the four of us had already buddied up — and Harry kept wondering aloud why the genius who’d built the cathedral hadn’t thought to put in an elevator. And Sue, who’d struck me earlier as unlikely to be afraid of anything, turned out to be petrified of heights. There are two staircases at Notre Dame, one going up and one coming down, and to get from one to the other you have to walk along this high ledge. It’s really quite wide, even at its narrowest, and the view of the rooftops of Paris is magnificent, but all of this was wasted on Sue, who clung to the rear wall with her eyes clenched shut.

Andrew took her arm and walked her through it, while Harry and I looked out at the City of Light. “It’s high open spaces that does it to her,” he told me. “Yesterday, the Eiffel Tower, no problem, because the space was enclosed. But when it’s open she starts getting afraid that she’ll get sucked over the side or that she’ll get this sudden impulse to jump, and, well, you see what it does to her.”

While neither Andrew nor I have ever been troubled by heights, whether open or enclosed, the climb to the top of the cathedral wasn’t the sort of thing we’d have done at home, especially since we’d already had a spectacular view of the city the day before from the Eiffel Tower. I’m not mad about walking up stairs, but it didn’t occur to me to pass up the climb. For that matter, I’m not that mad about walking generally — Andrew says I won’t go anywhere without a guaranteed parking space — but it seems to me that I walked from one end of Europe to the other, and didn’t mind a bit.

When we weren’t walking through streets or up staircases, we were parading through museums. That’s hardly a departure for me, but for Andrew it is uncharacteristic behavior in the extreme. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts is one of the best in the country, and it’s not twenty minutes from our house. We have a membership, and I go all the time, but it’s almost impossible to get Andrew to go.

But in Paris he went to the Louvre, and the Rodin Museum, and that little museum in the sixteenth arrondissement with the most wonderful collection of Monets. And in London he led the way to the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert — and in Amsterdam he spent three hours in the Rijksmuseum and hurried us to the Van Gogh Museum first thing the next morning. By the time we got to Madrid, I was museumed out. I knew it was a sin to miss the Prado but I just couldn’t face it, and I wound up walking around the city with Harry while my husband dragged Sue through galleries of El Grecos and Goyas and Velázquezes.

“Now that you’ve discovered museums,” I told Andrew, “you may take a different view of the Museum of Fine Arts. There’s a show of American landscape painters that’ll still be running when we get back — I think you’ll like it.”

He assured me he was looking forward to it. But you know he never went. Museums are strictly a vacation pleasure for him. He doesn’t even want to hear about them when he’s at home.

For my part, you’d think I’d have learned by now not to buy clothes when we travel. Of course, it’s impossible not to — there are some genuine bargains and some things you couldn’t find at home — but I almost always wind up buying something that remains unworn in my closet forever after. It seems so right in some foreign capital, but once I get it home I realize it’s not me at all, and so it lives out its days on a hanger, a source in turn of fond memories and faint guilt. It’s not that I lose judgment when I travel, or become wildly impulsive. It’s more that I become a slightly different person during the course of the trip and the clothes I buy for that person aren’t always right for the person I am in Boston.

Oh, why am I nattering on like this? You don’t have to look in my closet to see how travel changes a person. For heaven’s sake, just look at the Dattners.

If we hadn’t all been on vacation together, we would never have come to know Harry and Sue, let alone spend so much time with them. We would never have encountered them in the first place — day-to-day living would not have brought them to Boston, or us to Enid, Oklahoma. But even if they’d lived down the street from us, we would never have become close friends at home. To put it as simply as possible, they were not our kind of people.

The package tour we’d booked wasn’t one of those escorted ventures in which your every minute is accounted for. It included our charter flights over and back, all our hotel accommodations, and our transportation from one city to the next. We “did” six countries in twenty-two days, but what we did in each, and where and with whom, was strictly up to us. We could have kept to ourselves altogether, and have often done so when traveling, but by the time we checked into our hotel in London the first day we’d made arrangements to join the Dattners that night for dinner, and before we knocked off our after-dinner brandies that night it had been tacitly agreed that we would be a foursome throughout the trip — unless, of course, it turned out that we tired of each other.

“They’re a pair,” Andrew said that first night, unknotting his tie and giving it a shake before hanging it over the doorknob. “That y’all-come-back accent of hers sounds like syrup flowing over corn cakes.”

“She’s a little flashy, too,” I said. “But that sport jacket of his—”

“I know,” Andrew said. “Somewhere, even as we speak, a horse is shivering, his blanket having been transformed into a jacket for Harry.”

“And yet there’s something about them, isn’t there?”

“They’re nice people,” Andrew said. “Not our kind at all, but what does that matter? We’re on a trip. We’re ripe for a change...”

In Paris, after a night watching a floor show at what I’m sure was a rather disreputable little nightclub in Les Halles, I lay in bed while Andrew sat up smoking a last cigarette. “I’m glad we met the Dattners,” he said. “This trip would be fun anyway, but they add to it. That joint tonight was a treat, and I’m sure we wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been for them. And do you know something? I don’t think they’d have gone if it hadn’t been for us .”

“Where would we be without them?” I rolled onto my side. “I know where Sue would be without your helping hand. Up on top of Notre Dame, frozen with fear. Do you suppose that’s how the gargoyles got there? Are they nothing but tourists turned to stone?”

“Then you’ll never be a gargoyle. You were a long way from petrification whirling around the dance floor tonight.”

“Harry’s a good dancer. I didn’t think he would be, but he’s very light on his feet.”

“The gun doesn’t weigh him down, eh?”

I sat up. “I thought he was wearing a gun,” I said. “How on earth does he get it past the airport scanners?”

“Undoubtedly by packing it in his luggage and checking it through. He wouldn’t need it on the plane — not unless he was planning to divert the flight to Havana.”

“I don’t think they go to Havana anymore. Why would he need it off the plane? I suppose tonight he’d feel safer armed. That place was a bit on the rough side.”

“He was carrying it at the Tower of London, and in and out of a slew of museums. In fact, I think he carries it all the time except on planes. Most likely he feels naked without it.”

“I wonder if he sleeps with it.”

“I think he sleeps with her.”

“Well, I know that. ”