Uncertain Voyage by Dorothy Gilman

Author:Dorothy Gilman [Gilman, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780449216286
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2020-06-29T00:00:00+00:00

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The next morning she took a guided tour of Paris and visited Notre Dame and Montmartre but the few English-speaking people on the bus traveled in couples and sounded cross and demanding; in retrospect the tour of Copenhagen seemed to her a singular act of fate for there were no magic people here in Paris, there was no one to rescue her from either her isolation or from The Pale One who followed like a specter. Stoically she crossed Notre Dame and Montmartre off her list, and before she attempted the Eiffel Tower bought a sandwich. Wandering through the Tuileries she came to the sailing pond and sat down on a bench in the sun and unwrapped her lunch. It was peaceful here—water always soothed her. A stiff breeze rippled the pond’s surface like crepe, and small boys in short pants chattered and shouted over their sailboats, skating them across the water with shouts of joy and racing to recapture them with boat hooks. The childrens’ nurses gossiped in the background under the trees just as they had done when Seurat and Renoir affixed them forever to canvas. Melissa sighed, her sadness a burden today. It seemed that everything numbed her now: Paris, the thought of flying to Majorca tomorrow, the money she was spending on her trip, her aloneness, the obscurity of her future. She could no longer separate her fears or choose one among them to fight, they formed a collective weight that crushed her. But what she really mourned, she knew, was Adam, for in losing him she had lost all hope. It was not that she hoped he might happen to her again, or even someone like him, but rather that with Adam she had dared to trust both herself and life; with Adam she had dared to use all of her faculties, to see and hear and taste and feel again; and now, shaken and lost, she had fallen into muteness, the magic incantations gone. She could not be sorry that once she had sung a song of life, but its echoes barely reached her in this mausoleum she inhabited now. It was hard to see life go, she thought, to feel the stillness return: the stillness not of tranquility but of apathy.

She was scattering the crumbs for the pigeons when she became aware of a woman standing over her and speaking to her in French. Melissa looked up and smiled, grateful to the first person who had spoken to her today. “But I do not understand French,” she said. “Do you know English?”

The woman’s gestures became more rapid, her eyes narrower, and she held a ticket, pointing to it. Gradually, and in astonishment, Melissa understood what the woman was telling her: it cost money to sit on this bench in the sun, and Melissa must pay her.

Melissa’s lips tightened. It was another rebuff. She groped in her purse for fifty centimes, dropped the coin scornfully into the woman’s palm and walked away with tears in her eyes.

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