Letter To Maxim

THE STORY OF you is starting in me again. When I think of you, I see a road, a long gray stretch of lonely two-lane highway, a yellow stripe painted down its middle, a road in the middle of nowhere. You and I are standing by the side of the road hitchhiking, but no cars come. It is some obscure place in Canada: Thunder Bay. We are on our way cross-country, headed for the Canadian Rockies. And after that? Who knows.

Cold, overcast day, even though it's July. You wear a wool cap pulled down around your ears, a fisherman's sweater, blue jeans on your skinny legs. Under the cap, round, saucerlike brown eyes, uptilted nose, shiny brown hair. If it weren't for the astrologer's beard, you'd look like the little Dutch boy.

You're doing tricks to amuse me. Handstands. Now you juggle potatoes and onions. You learned these tricks from a circus acrobat who taught a course at the university where you went for one semester. I say I could never learn to walk on my hands. You say of course I could. "There was a man of forty in my class, and he learned." It's never possible to argue with you.

No cars come, the clouds grow darker and lower. We haven't been caught in the rain at night — yet. It's my worst fear. We shoulder our backpacks and walk a mile back down the road to an all-night truck-stop diner. All night the big diesel rigs pull into the parking lot like dinosaurs at a watering trough.

We sit and order coffee, taking advantage of the free refills, tanking up on sugar and cream. We've been buying food at supermarkets and cooking it over makeshift campfires — a can of beans, an onion roasted on a peeled green stick.

This place smells deliciously of frying potatoes and meat. Men, alone or in twos or threes, sit quietly over coffee and food or wait blankly, their cigarettes burning away between their fingers. Except for the waitress, I'm the only woman. I can't escape the eyes that assess me as I walk to the ladies' room carrying my backpack. I’m wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a sweater. My hair is wild and bright. I'm twenty-two years old. I have years to go until I'm safe.

In the ladies' room I take off my sweater and T-shirt and wash myself. My dark eyes in the mirror leap out of a sunburned face. I look like a little wild animal — a raccoon, or a ferret. Since the bathroom is empty, I strip off my pants, climb onto the sink counter, and wash my crotch.  I have my period, I'm tired of feeling sticky. I put on a limp pair of clean underwear from my pack, pull on my pants, walk back out. The men look at me again with their cold eyes. I think they think I'm a dirty hippie, a slut.

At the table you are drawing with a purple crayon all over the menu. You are making it into a letter to send to your younger brother in France. He has never seen the world, he doesn’t even know it's out there. You didn't either, until you moved from your father's sheep farm in the provinces to Paris. Even then, you thought that was all there was, your working-class enclave where all night long you could hear Arab music blasting from the windows of Tunisian and Algerian seasonal workers, who endured with you the loneliness and snobbery of the most beautiful city in the world.

You didn't know about the world until you met Sylvie. She was nineteen. She had escaped her own family, out in the country where they could remember starving through several wars, to come to Paris and marry a Tunisian so he could get his papers. She lived in one room with him and worked in a home for old people. She liked old people; they were gentle. At home, she and Beshir had horrible fights. He raged against the racism in Paris, then against Parisians, then against the French in general. He hit her a couple of times and she left.

I knew her too; I loved her too. Who wouldn't? She had soft brown hair and laughter like bells. She was hungry to see everything and know everything. She had befriended me, a gawky American college student thumbing my way through France with my backpack and purple socks. We slept together on gray beaches. She tried to organize me, scolded me about losing my washcloth, and I let her. She was the link that connected you and me.

"We're both dogs," you said to me during our first week in Canada, when we were still rapturously discovering all we had in common, "and Sylvie is a cat." That was true. She could sleep anywhere, all curled up, and wake with a stretch, looking and smelling fresh and perfectly content with herself. She liked eating little slivers of food — salade nicoise, the tip of an ice-cream cone. She was effortlessly tidy and self-contained and hated to be confined in any way. She swore she would never marry again. She said, "In friendship I'm as faithful as the moon, but not in love," and that was true too. While you and I were trailing across Canada, arguing about who knew her better, whom she loved more, she had already pursued and left two American men, Boston Charles and Chicago John, and gone back to Paris for further adventures.

You look up from your menu-letter finally, and your eyes are soft and sad. But your letter is full of excitement, enthusiasm: we are having a wonderful time — "plein d'aventures"; he should come, he should do this, too, you lecture Paul. Older brother, advice giver.

I read it and think, I'm not having a good time anymore. I don't know when I stopped.

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