Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress (47 page)

“What are the chances of this?” Ruth marveled. “My God, you’re like my long-lost little
bubehluh.
” Then she cupped my chin in her hands and smiled. “You do know what a
bubehluh
is, don’t you?”

By the time I arrived back at Studio House, it was nearly 8:00
P.M.

“Where were you?” asked Bob, as I wobbled in grandly, reeking of gin.

“Apartment hunting,” I said, flopping merrily onto the couch. “Yee-ha.”

“You’re in a freakishly good mood,” said Bob. “Did you have any luck, or are you just drunk?”

“I started off the day with a husband collector who spent forty-five minutes educating me about Swiss divorce law,” I said. “Then, I had frozen pizza with a twenty-year-old trumpet player after telling him that my mother was engaged to Herbie Hancock. I spent the afternoon reciting Italian ice cream flavors to an Italian in Italian. Then, I drank three gin gimlets with an eighty-year-old former leftie from Brooklyn.”

I kicked off my shoes with a flourish. “If that doesn’t get us an apartment here,” I sighed, “we might as well just go home.”

The next week, we learned that we’d been approved for all three apartments.

Suddenly, we not only had a place to live, but a choice. Hearing the news, I shouted, “NOT JUST ONE BUT THREE! THREE! COUNT THEM!” Then I started leaping around the studio, squealing: “I DID IT! I WON I WON I WON!” Because, did I forget to mention? Apartment hunting was a contest: whoever landed the most apartments, I believed, won.

Instead of falling at my feet in awe and gratitude, however, Bob just said wearily, “I told you it would work out. Did we really have to go through all that melodrama?”

We decided to rent the one-bedroom next door to Ruth. Once we had a place to live, I was finally able to calm down. For the first time since we’d stepped off the plane, I felt something akin to genuine peace and excitement. With our “legitimation cards” from the Swiss government, a signed lease, and our annoying little cell phone in hand, we had finally, truly arrived.

Since I couldn’t begin my own work until our personal effects arrived from Washington, I found myself with three blank weeks of calendar pages spread before me. Finally, I was an unransomed Woman of the World, living abroad, with nothing but adventure at her disposal. I could take a high-speed train to Paris or Zurich. I could tour the local art galleries, visit the Olympic Museum in Lausanne, even ride a funicular in the Alps. Yet one cultural experience clearly eclipsed all others in its immediacy and importance. I was, after all, a girl who’d once emptied an entire one-pound bag of M&M’s into her grandmother’s silk evening bag, then eaten every one of them.

“Fuck the museums,” I said to Bob. “The guidebook says there are chocolate makers here who give private tours of their facilities.”

The owner of the
chocolaterie
seemed surprised when I showed up alone.

“I thought you said you were a group,” she said. “We only do group tours, madame.”

“Oh, but I am a group,” I insisted. “Trust me.”

As the woman led me to the back of the shop, she eyed me suspiciously. In order to appear more Swiss, I’d dressed for the occasion in a slinky black sheath, a stylish white linen coat, full makeup, and high heels. It was nine o’clock in the morning. I was dressed like this to stand in a kitchen, surrounded by three harried chocolate makers in chocolate-spattered aprons.

They looked at me like, “
Quoi?
” (Translation: What?)

When most people are in an awkward situation, their impulse is to clam up and be as deferential as possible. I, however, feel immediately compelled to start talking. I prattle away, a veritable fountain of logorrhea. And of course, this virtually guarantees that the situation will only become ten times more awkward than it already is.

Seeing the confounded looks on the chocolate makers’ faces, I wasted no time digging myself a hole. “
Bonjour,
” I said brightly. “
Je suis Madame Gilman, et
…” I suddenly felt compelled to justify my existence to them—always a dangerous thing. “
Et j’ai une grande passion pour le chocolat!
” I proclaimed. I’m Mrs. Gilman, and I have a grand passion for chocolate. Yep, that is exactly what I said. And as soon as those words were out of my mouth, I wanted to stick my head in the chocolate machine and kill myself.

This time, the look of contempt from the chocolate makers needed no translation: I was possibly the biggest asshole to set foot in Geneva since the Duke of Savoy had tried to invade it back in 1602. I knew I had to say something quickly to modify my bombastic and ridiculous entrance. Not knowing what else to do, how else to salvage my reputation, I lied. I told them that I was a schoolteacher. Back home in America, I explained, my students loved a book called
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.
And I figured that since I was in Switzerland, I should see how chocolates were made just so that I could tell my students about it.

“So I’m here, you see, for the little children,” I said bathetically. “The little children of America.”

Which was partially true, I supposed, in so much that I was there for my own little inner American child.

There is still some justice left in this world because the chocolate makers of Switzerland, at least, still revere the public schoolteachers of America. As soon as they heard my explanation, their tone changed completely. “Oh, you are a professor,” they said admiringly, then got very busy giving me a tour of the kitchen and showing me photo albums of their work. It became clear that I was standing amid the Michelangelos of chocolate. They crafted actual sculptures out of chocolate: Grecian urns, Easter tableaus, chocolate soccer fields, chocolate violins, chocolate bears, chocolate penguins skiing down chocolate mountains on tiny chocolate skis.

They ran the chocolate machine for me so I could watch them coat dark truffles and imprint them each painstakingly by hand with a little, filigreed thimble. They showed me the kilos of pure chocolate they melted down in an enormous vat that made the entire room an olfactory orgasm. They showed me trays upon trays of fresh chocolate-dipped fruits, truffles, and hazelnut creme.

Finally, the master chocolate maker said, “I’m afraid that’s the end of the tour, madame.” Peeling off his rubber gloves, he then gestured toward the racks of hundreds of newly crafted chocolates. “But please,” he urged. “Be our guest. Eat whatever you like.”

Eat whatever you like.

Hearing these words was like having a seizure. Because of course, by that point, I wanted to eat EVERYTHING. More than that, I wanted to BE everything—I wanted to plunge my hands into the vat of liquid milk chocolate and rub it all over myself, then lift it up and pour it over my head and COAT MYSELF ENTIRELY IN CHOCOLATE and roll around the floor in the cocoa dusting myself like a giant truffle. I was in a delirium—I was a chocolate pervert surrounded by chocolate pornography—I could easily have had an orgy of one in that kitchen—CHOCOLATE, CHOCOLATE-EVERYWHERE. ME AND THE CHOCOLATE, FINALLY, AS ONE!!!!

But I had to keep myself in check. Because I’d told everyone that I was a
teacher.
I thought of Mrs. Mutnick back in kindergarten, who’d charitably believed that I was changing my name to “Sapphire.” I thought of Mrs. Goldsmith in sixth grade, who’d encouraged me to audition for the Christmas pageant. How could I besmirch such a much abused and underappreciated profession by behaving like a complete pig in their name?

Demurely, painfully, I shook my head. “I couldn’t possibly,” I said, waving away the trays. Then, trying to change the subject as quickly as possible, I said miserably, “The bunnies. They, too, are milk chocolate,
non?
”

After I left, I felt stunned. It was hard to remember the last time I’d said no to anything—let alone anything covered in milk chocolate. Had I really just turned down an all-you-can-eat buffet? What was happening to me? Who was this person? Not knowing what else do to with myself, I walked through the narrow streets toward the waterfront.

Silhouetted by mountains, Geneva sits at the mouth of a large, glacial lake. Bisected by rivers, laced with bridges, the city has an expansive, breezy, maritime feel. Boats bob in its marinas, and a spectacular man-made geyser shoots up hundreds of feet in the air. Known as the Jet d’Eau, this is the symbolic landmark of Geneva—the liquid equivalent of the Empire State Building or the Washington Monument—the city’s prized contribution to the eternal “who can build a bigger penis” contest that seems to go on between civilizations.

For a long time, I stood on the Mont Blanc Bridge, which links the two banks of the city across the RhÔne. The night before, slightly homesick, I’d bought a phone card at the train station and telephoned friends back home. Lucy had just had a baby; for as long as I’d known her, she’d wanted a family. My friend Desa, meanwhile, was busy starting her own business, which she’d been talking about since college. It felt slightly strange talking to them when I was sitting in a residence hotel in Geneva, in what might as well have been an alternative universe, where I was taking such a different, untrammeled path. But as we talked, our inverse experiences sounded strangely, eerily similar.

“I had no idea that having a baby would be anything like this,” Lucy told me. “Nobody ever tells you how truly frightening and difficult it is. Sometimes, I feel so completely frustrated and helpless.”

“Every day,” Desa said, “I tell myself, ‘Remember, you’ve always wanted to be your own boss. Think about where you’ll be in five years.’ But each morning, I wake up in a cold sweat.”

“Until now,” said Lucy, “I only really thought of the big picture. You know, how wonderful it would be to have a child. And it is. But the day-to-day reality is baby-poop, breast pumps, and smelly diapers. Whoops, gotta go. Case in point: Precious here just spit up all over the sofa.”

My friends and I had reached the age when we had the great, good fortune to be living out some of the dreams we’d had when we were young. Now, we were discovering the truly hard part: the realities.

Having a new baby made you psychotic with exhaustion and self-doubt. Professional success could make you delirious with insomnia and anxiety. Living abroad rendered you lonely and infantilized. And no matter what road you took, you still had to brush your teeth every morning, pay your bills, do your damn laundry, worry about taxes, check your breasts for cancer, argue with your loved ones about whether to defrost the refrigerator. Nobody, after all, it seemed, was exempt from banality.

“Those bastards,” Desa and I laughed over the phone. “What happened to all those perfect ‘happily ever afters’ they promised us?”

Moments of pure bliss were often accidental. Getting something you’d consciously worked toward, on the other hand, was often far more emotionally complicated. Fulfilling an ambition was an experience that could oscillate wildly between terror and exhilaration, helplessness and fulfillment, anxiety and mind-numbing boredom.

But squinting across the water, I felt for that one instant that everything was right with my world. What would my seven-year-old self think, I wondered, if she could see me here in Switzerland, surrounded by mountains, old clock towers, and a lake even bigger than the one she’d swum in every summer? She’d probably be pissed, I realized. She’d be pissed that I’d turned down the opportunity to stuff my face with as much free chocolate as humanly possible. In her eyes, I’d be deranged.

Oh, well.

Since coming to Geneva, I’d invented a little game with myself, in which I calculated the time back in New York City, then imagined what the people I knew might be doing. Back in Manhattan, it was early morning now, just the verge of rush hour. The sky would be suffused with light from the east; as the sun rose, it would cut through the spaces between the buildings and striate the pavement with dramatic, dusty slats of gold. Downtown, garbage trucks would be grinding away on their rounds, the subways would be filling up, storekeepers throwing pails of water out onto the sidewalk. Vendors along lower Broadway would be setting up stands, kicking out the legs on card tables to display I ♥ NY T-shirts, one hooded guy on the corner acting as a lookout. My father would be getting to work early to prepare some briefs; he’d be stepping off the elevator and walking to his office on the forty-eighth floor in a building that overlooked Ground Zero. From his window, the Statue of Liberty would also be visible, standing sentry in the pearlized Hudson.

Suddenly, my gaze switched from this reverie to the reality of the Jet d’Eau, now spraying water across the lake in great parabolas. Geneva was a U.N. headquarters. On the bridge behind me, Indian women in saris walked leisurely by. A French cycling team barreled past. Teenagers skulked across in their oversized pants, their bumper-car sneakers. (Teenagers everywhere:
they
looked the same.) On the shore, two Arab women in hijabs stood with their husbands, tossing bread crumbs to the swans. A little blond boy raced across the bridge on a Razor scooter while his very pregnant mother waddled behind him frantically shouting at him in French to slow down and wait by the light. WAIT BY THE LIGHT. Rows of United Nations flags on either side of the bridge flapped wildly in the wind, the silk of them straining, flailing, seeming to dance. On the street in front of the HÔtel des Bergues, a truck suddenly backfired, and for a moment, everyone flinched, then exhaled. Looking across the right bank, I could see the office building where Bob was working, struggling with a hopelessly slow computer, his face poignant in its frustrated concentration, a cup of cold coffee abandoned by his keyboard. The sun seemed to burnish my skin, the wind raked through my hair. I felt weightless, exhilarated. This was it. I was doing something I’d dreamed of. I was living in the middle of the world, and all of us were in it together, each one of us extraordinary and yet, really, no different from each other. I flung my arms back and for a minute, it felt like I could levitate. Then I laughed, loudly, like an American. Like a defiant bride. Like a seven-year-old girl with a rhinestone earring clipped to her nose. I had absolutely no idea what would happen next. But then, I suppose, no one ever does.