Page 33 of French Kiss

13

Game On

July10

Amsterdam

My trip had been plannedfor months. Shelby and her girlfriend, Amrita, planned to join me before Shelby started her new job, and we’d mapped out a week-long itinerary that would take us from Amsterdam to Bruges, in Belgium, and over to Luxembourg. Then they’d go back home after a stop in London, and I’d continue on by myself, traveling through France and into Germany.

I had left most of my itinerary open, but I had a feeling Italy might find its way in, or if I felt bold, Greece. I’d never been to any of those countries. I’d spent a year in Japan during college, and I’d had a little time to explore South Korea and Vietnam while I was there, but I’d never been “the other way,” as Shelby referred to Europe. She’d been a couple times. She loved Amsterdam and couldn’t wait to introduce it to Amrita and me.

So by the fourth day of our trip, Shelby, Amrita, and I were at an outside table at Cafe Wester, each drinking a cocktail and staring at the mellow green water of Prinsengracht, one of Amsterdam’s canals.

“This is so necessary,” Shelby said.

“It feels different drinking a beer here, doesn’t it?” I asked, lifting my Heineken and leaning back on the bench. Shelby and Amrita sat next to me, all of us facing the canal. “I could be drinking the same beer at home, and I’d be completely aware of everything I need to do later and who I might run into. I could be relaxing, but there’d still be a layer of not being able to let go entirely.”

“Totally,” Amrita said. “I haven’t taken a day away from the bakery in the two years since I started it, if you can believe.”

She hadn’t suffered through med school as Shelby had. She owned a cupcake bakery, which she’d grown into a thriving business, but she was thinking about selling it and getting a business degree. Shelby had asked me not to mention anything about it on the trip. With Shelby much further along in her career, Amrita felt anxious thinking about school. Her Indian family mostly lived in London and, “every damn one of them went to medical school or dental school,” she said, in a lilting British accent. “I’ve always been the black sheep and I sort of liked that. I’m not sure I’m ready to be back in school.”

“You’ll be great at it.”

“It’s not that. I just don’t want to stop working on my bakes. They’re the lifeblood of me, you know.”

“I know,” Shelby said. “You may recall that I’ve eaten about a thousand cupcakes in the past two years while you worked on recipes. I owe the extra ten pounds I’m dragging around on my ass to you.”

“You were too skinny anyhow. I did you a favor then,” Amrita said, aiming her camera at a man in a long coat feeding birds on the opposite bank of the canal.

She’d brought a heavy Leica camera and two lenses on the trip and carried them with her everywhere we went. At first I found it annoying that we had to keep stopping while she framed a shot and looked around to see what else she could capture wherever we were. Then I gave in to the slower pace and started to follow her lead, looking around at doorways, door knockers, the angle of the sun on the water, and the way the canals looked through the spokes of a bike.

Her process forced me to notice the world around me. “Look up,” she said over and again until I started doing it without her prompting. And then I’d see cloud formations and flower baskets hanging from eaves that I would have otherwise missed. I noticed how many of the canal-front houses had hooks on the facades, just below the rooflines, and it prompted me to ask one of the locals about them. I’d learned that in the vertical homes that rose straight up from the canals, stairways were narrow and hard to navigate, so the hooks were used with rope as pulleys to lift furniture into the homes through the front windows.

“I can’t believe I’ve got you here now,” Shelby said to Amrita. “And you haven’t been calling in to the store every five minutes. I’m proud of you for letting go.”

“Well, I do have cameras in the store, and I do look at the footage,” Amrita said. “But yes, I’m in the moment here, and it’s awesome.”

“Now that I know you like to travel—”

“Don’t even finish that sentence,” Amrita said. “Ten days. That’s all I’m giving you. And after three days with my family in London, you’ll be desperate to get back to the States as well.”

“Ten days is huge. That’s all I’m taking. It’s Hannah, here, who’s traveling for a month.”

“If not now, when will I do it?” I asked. In truth, I’d originally planned a three-week trip, but a month seemed more luxurious, and since I didn’t know when I’d next be able to travel like this, I’d decided to take the extra week.

“Hey, I’m not begrudging you,” Shelby said. “I just can’t take off the time.” Her field was different than mine, and with her extra fellowship in fertility, she still had a lot of training ahead of her.

Shelby finished her drink and went inside to get us another round, never asking if we needed one. That was the beauty of being on vacation—we could go with the flow of the day—though I still felt the unconscious pull of having to be somewhere. It would take a few days to get over the urgent thought that I had to finish up whatever I was doing and move on to the next task. I’d been trained to think that way in med school.

I looked out over the canal, where a small boat motored by and two bicycles were chained to the rail.

In the time we’d been sitting outside, at least a hundred bikes had passed, their owners often smoking with one hand and holding a phone or cup of coffee in the other, each of the bikes propelled forward on its own trajectory, none of them crashing as their owners navigated the streets and each other. The sun had risen early, and we’d spent the day walking to the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh Museum before settling on this bench in the afternoon for a drink. I checked my phone, not really sure why, and again recognized the unshakable urgency to be someplace. It would take a few more days of vacation to throw those urges off completely.

“So what did you decide? Are you gonna get your end away with him?” Amrita asked. Her shoulder-length dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she adjusted the grey and white scarf she had wound around her neck.

“I’m sorry?” I’d adjusted to some of the British slang she used, but that one was new.

“This fellow Maddox. You gonna have sex with him?” My dilemma over whether to meet Maddox in Paris had dominated the conversation for the past two days, and I worried that everyone was getting sick of me and the subject.

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