Laura van den Berg - The Isle of Youth - Stories

The day my husband left me, I followed a trio of acrobats around the city of Paris. The whole time my husband had been talking — telling me, presumably, why he was leaving — I was watching these acrobats do backflips and handstands in synchrony, an open violin case at their feet. They wore black masks over their eyes and white face paint. The little gold bells that hung from the sleeves of their red silk jumpsuits jingled like wind chimes. My husband and I were in the Jardin des Tuileries, sitting on a bench underneath a tree. We had come to Paris for the weekend, to revive our marriage. It was what the books and the couples counselor had recommended. The day he left was our last day there. We were, in fact, supposed to fly home that evening. We’d risen early to go to the Louvre and had gotten into a fight because he didn’t want to wait in line to see the Mona Lisa .

“You have patience for things that I don’t,” he said while we were on the bench. “That’s just the truth.”

He said other things, too, but I was busy watching the acrobats perform in front of a fountain. They made a tower by standing on each other’s shoulders and then leaped down, landing en pointe like dancers, their ballet slippers barely making a sound when they hit the pale dirt. Now, that’s teamwork , I thought.

When I looked over at my husband, he wasn’t sitting next to me. He was standing, his hands filling his pockets.

“So I guess that’s that,” he said.

“I guess so,” I said. It was dawning on me that I might have missed something important.

“I’m going now.”

“Wait a second,” I said. “Surely we can still fly home together. Surely we’re not that bad off.” I checked my watch. It was noon. Our flight was only six hours away. Our luggage was packed and awaiting us in our hotel room and I was pretty sure I’d put my toiletries bag in my husband’s suitcase. He told me he’d already canceled my ticket and left an envelope of money in our room to pay for a new one.

“It’ll be better if we find our own way home,” he said. “I explained that to you already.”

“You said that just now?”

“Yes.” He sighed. “Just now.”

From the bench, I watched my husband disappear into a gaggle of French teenagers with backpacks sagging from their shoulders. I’d known this was coming. That the books and the counseling and the trip to Paris were all just passing time. But I hadn’t expected it to happen right then, in the most romantic park in the most romantic city in all the world, or with so little drama.

I went back to the acrobats. When they folded up the violin case and marched out of the Jardin des Tuileries in a single-file line, I followed them. They wound expertly around clumps of pedestrians, never breaking formation, like ghosts walking among the living.

They went into the streets, past the Concorde, and down the Champs-Élysées. On the way, they stopped at a café and sat outside, smoking cigarettes and drinking espresso. They were there for over an hour. It was July; I imagined the acrobats were hot in their silk suits and face paint. I watched from a nearby food stand, eating a ham-and-cheese croissant. For once, I was grateful for my nonexistent sense of style. My clothes couldn’t have been plainer, a pale yellow sundress and black Teva sandals. A man in running shorts came up to me and said something in French that I could not understand. I shooed him away by flapping the wax paper my croissant had been wrapped in. Finally, one of the acrobats slipped euros underneath his saucer and then they all stood, dropped their white linen napkins onto their chairs, and filed out of the restaurant. The same acrobat who paid was at the head of the line. He also carried the violin case.

We went down the Champs-Élysées, past Ladurée, where I was momentarily distracted by a tower of yellow, pink, and purple macarons in the front window. A million different languages buzzed around me like radio static. My husband had refused to go to the Champs-Élysées because he said he would be revolted by the gross display of materialism. I looked at the shopping bags swinging from slender wrists and the mannequins posing in store windows and felt glad to be doing something that he would not. So there , I thought. Life goes on.

At the Arc de Triomphe, the lead acrobat stopped and opened the violin case. I watched them do the human tower trick again and then the leader pulled blue plastic balls from the case and they juggled. A couple had their picture taken with the two nonlead acrobats. The tourists were pale-haired, inelegant. They looked American, meaning they could have been my husband and me. The couple dropped coins into the violin case before leaving. The acrobats snapped up the case and moved along.

I followed them all the way to the Palais de Chaillot — where they preformed briefly, unable to command the attention of the people wading into the huge oblong fountain — and then the Eiffel Tower. If I lost sight of the acrobats for a moment, it was easy to find them in the crowd; all I had to do was listen for the singsong of the bells. By that time, I had tired of walking, and as I watched the acrobats do backflips and frontflips, I realized I didn’t have a hotel reservation for the night. I had my passport, wallet, and guidebook in the satchel I was carrying. That was all. I sat down on a bench. A part of me was hoping that all this time, my husband had been following me around the arrondissements too. That, when I was least expecting it, he would sit down next to me. Or jump out from behind a tree and say, “Surprise!” That together we would still watch the lights of Paris grow smaller from the departing plane. I checked my wristwatch. It was five o’clock. Our flight — his flight — was an hour away. Soon my husband would be boarding, lifting his carry-on into the overhead compartment. He liked aisle seats. I hoped he didn’t get one.

By the time the acrobats left the Eiffel Tower, dusk was falling, and I had become less concerned with being cautious. I followed close enough to see where sweat had seeped through their silk jumpsuits, forming shapes that looked like wings. They went to a small restaurant with a yellow awning called Florimond’s, where they got a table inside. In my broken French, I asked the maître d’ for a table in the same section. Both the acrobats and I sat facing the restaurant’s front patio and the street. Two empty tables stood between us. I pretended to study the menu. I felt my knee and noticed my dress was missing a button. When I stole glances at the acrobats, they were all looking at menus and smoking.

I decided to order a big meal. I decided to eat until I felt like bursting. I started by asking for my own bottle of wine. As I sipped my first glass of wine, I felt something in the room change, like all the electrical currents had been moving in one direction and then suddenly started going in another. Or, as my husband would say, the “emotional weather” was different. He was always accusing my emotional weather of changing without warning. The forecast had predicted clear skies and then, out of nowhere, here came the rain clouds. Time after time, I tried to explain that I didn’t have much control over my emotional weather, and viewed the local weatherman with newfound empathy whenever I saw him on the evening news. I stared at my hands as I thought of these things. These moments that pass for a life.

I heard a jingling and when I looked up, the lead acrobat was sitting across from me. I gasped and knocked over my wineglass. The acrobat righted the glass and mopped up the wine with a napkin.

“Merci,” I said. I could see his dark eyes through the holes in the mask, which, up close, reminded me of the one Zorro wore in the movies. The white paint on his mouth had flaked away. I noticed the pinkish color of his lips.