Last Night in Geneva, August 2009

I did not succeed in finding a picture of geneva that wasn't boring.

Dark comes in from the edges of the view like dust collecting on a windshield. Tatiana, nineteen, beautiful, long-legged, nervous, and engaged to the exiled prince of Syria, says there are bats. She says if you clap your hands the bats will come and circle around your head. The traces of the French language in her English make it sound like she’s always laughing, so I never know if she’s joking. Then again, there’d been a fox the other morning, while I was teaching in the kitchen a fox, red-tailed and skinny nosed and just like pictures, ran right across the lawn as though it were making fun of me for being American. The fox was real, and Tatiana isn’t joking about the bats. I don’t clap.

Tatiana is lonely and it’s terrifically charming. Her loneliness needs me. I’m never an annoyance, I’m precisely the person she was waiting for, I find myself giddily useful. I am certain she makes everyone feel this way. It’s a kind of genius. I hold my breath when she talks to me. I sit barefoot in my tiny summer shorts and pull my waxy skin knees to my chest, waiting for what she’ll tell me next, seeing how much I can get. Tatiana tells a story about the time her fiancee came home from a party with Lady Gaga’s number in his phone. I try to paint my face casual. I think she’s testing me.

The lawn spreads out like the world’s most expensive picnic blanket. It’s impossible not to talk about money when describing Geneva. Imagine the feeling you have when you deposit a large check and know you’re going to be able to pay your rent without thinking about it for at least the next few months. That feeling is what Geneva looks like. That deposit slip and what it does to the way you breathe is the street layout and the quality of light, the cafes and the lake and the giant, pointless, obliging jet of water that rises up to mark the city like a place holder or a pin in a map.

But money isn’t specific enough, anyway. Geneva isn’t the money you use to buy hotel rooms or plane tickets or heavy food or booze or revenge or oblivion. Geneva is not the way that money carbonates your blood and makes you do stupid things. When I say money I mean very specifically that Geneva is the money you leave, sleeping on clean sheets, in your bank account and use to pay your rent on time.

Everyone who knew anything told me, after I came back, that Geneva was boring. No one had warned me before I got there. I imagined mountains and lakes, money and diplomacy, a whole world of Gatsby’s lawn and a pleasingly gritty underbelly. Really, I was thinking about Paris and London. Paris and London feel desire, hard as blood-surging veins, and from it they want to impress you. They buy your drink, they push you up against the wall on the way home, show off their gadgets and their good education. Geneva, on the other hand, is like being on a date with someone who doesn’t want to sleep with you. I walked around and around the sleepy, winding streets in a dress with a large skirt, and tried to get the city excited about something, about anything. It wouldn’t even move its eyebrows or open its mouth. I walked out to the end of the tiny, slick stone pier under the jet d’eau, almost falling down about a hundred times in my heels. When I got to the end I stood still, poorly balanced. The water was getting in my face. The sunlight was like a postcard.  Aware I was in a famous and famously beautiful place in the world, I wondered what I was supposed to do about it. Eventually, I turned around and walked back.

Tatiana is my student’s older sister. I live in their house like a governess in a book, and they all speak French and I don’t. The family reeks of family, for all the mother’s absence, and the father’s disappearance to work on his money and his race-cars, they have the easy faces and bickering shorthand that mean family. They are the kind of family that can make the most perfectly happy person feel like some abject orphan in a melodrama, pawing the windows. Perhaps I only felt that way about them because I don’t speak French. I feel a lot of ways because I don’t speak French, starting with fat. I’m convinced that if I spoke French, I’d never feel fat again.

Beyond the end of the lawn where the corners are getting blue, falling in a musical progression, small cafe-lights point out Lake Geneva’s calm-shouldered surface. Yachts and their close relatives skim the water like large, complacent insects. The answering shore’s houses agree with our house about wealth and heritage and summer. They have an easy conversation, after-dinner armchair talk, things they’ve said many times before. Tatiana points at a house straight across the water, exactly the size and shape of a museum. She says she used to be in love with the boy who lives there and now he’s engaged to someone else, just like she is. She says his family is Russian. When she says family and Russian she means it. The meaning reaches back at least to where civilization started getting interesting. Everyone I meet here lives and breathes my high school European History textbook. I ask her if they’re still friends. I’m ready with stories about my ex whom I still love dearly, how we became real friends and then actually I dated his wife for a little while and everyone was ok with it and happy and isn’t that great. Tatiana says that she and the Russian cannot speak anymore. When she congratulated him on his engagement he said she was dead to him. She says to me that that was a manner of course, of good manners, of proper action. This is the way things are, with our kind of families, she says. I do not tell my story; America, as it turns out, is all the jeans and t shirts, all the sloppy kissing a stranger that everyone says about it.

In the afternoons, finished teaching, I’d go to the old part of the city and climb around in the hills, stand near the churches, stand near the castles, stand near the cafes, stand near the street-signs, stand near the flower clock and the lawns the people sitting on the lawns and the other people standing near the flower clock because they’d heard you were supposed to stand near the flower-clock. I didn’t want to buy food when I could just eat back at the house, so I’d get dizzy and then the dizziness would make me feel like I finally belonged in Europe. I’d walk home and look at the lake and think about Byron and Mary Shelley and the summer of 1816, and wait for their ghosts to talk to me. But they never did; I think they were too distracted by all the European teenagers in bikinis on the beach. I didn’t blame them.

I still haven’t clapped for the bats and the weather is so perfect that it’s like there’s no air at all. Tatiana tells me about her fiance’s family. When they were exiled from their country, his father brought as many people as he could, boatloads of them, with him to France. Once there, a few miles outside of Paris they built an exact imitation of where they’d come from, so that you could live a whole life there and think you were still in Syria. The world exhales pockets, trapdoors, secret rooms. I’m already holding my breath; now my held breath holds its breath. The night is complete and the kitchen is shows up in the darkness, asking us to come inside and eat off the clean counters. Tatiana tells me about meeting her fiance’s father’s four wives. She says it’s not what you think. I say no, I don’t think anything, and I don’t, except that I’m not going to remember this story right and later I won’t do it justice and people won’t believe me. I think that must be how the best secrets keep themselves secret, and how there exists outside Paris a perfect imitation of Syria 50 years ago. This story is going to sound ridiculous when I tell it; if I were really good at collecting the world I wouldn’t tell it at all. Tatiana goes inside to get cookies. I clap my hands and then close my eyes when the bats come.

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