Parts Unknown

Part I



London

1998





Chapter 1





I rubbed my fingers across the crisp traveler’s checks, over and over. With enough money, I could do anything. I’d be safe. I carefully placed those American Express checks in my security neck pouch, next to my brand-new passport and my acceptance letter to Butler College. I fervently hoped the money I’d saved this summer would somehow last me through the next year of expenses. Otherwise, I’d have to dip into Uncle Paulie’s fast-dwindling stash.

I didn’t like to think about Uncle Paulie.

But it was July 31, my twenty-first birthday, and today was the day everything was supposed to change. So I shook off the memories, tucked the strings of the tan polyester neck pouch inside my shirt, and took a last, long look at my favorite place. My childhood bedroom was on the second floor of our narrow Victorian house in a converted attic. My room wasn’t much to look at, but it was all mine. Hidden in the back corner of the house, accessible only through the back door of a bathroom, a staircase away from everyone, it was the only place I really felt at home.

All the upstairs ceilings sloped inwards, and in my room the only spot you could stand up straight was on the left side, where my bed was. To the right were two dormer windows with window seats covered in yellow twill. I used to sit there for hours, sketching the varied roofs of the neighboring house. But I was through with art now. Finished. Moving on.

Like most Victorians, the rooms in the rest of the house were small, narrow, and dark. The way Mom had decorated them, with floral William Morris–inspired wallpaper covering every wall and ceiling, made them even more oppressive. I longed for a clean, empty space to rest my eyes, but there was always something to look at: tea cozies, fireplace implements, chintz-covered furniture, antimacassars, and always those busy wallpaper patterns pressing in. My spartan room, in contrast, had nothing to hide.

Saying a fierce, silent farewell to my little room, I dragged my duffel down the creaking wood stairs to the front door, mentally itemizing its contents. I’d tried to keep to the essentials. Aside from clothes and a warm coat, I’d packed my favorite purple stuffed pig; gel for my newly cropped hair; a sketch pad with a blue cloth cover; and three pencils: 2H, HB, and 2B. All you need are those three pencils, and you can create any degree of shading. Turn the imaginary into three dimensions. Despite my desperate resolutions, I hadn’t been able to resist throwing that pad and pencils into my bulging bag at the last minute.

“Goodbye!” I yelled, but the house was empty, except for Dad. In the summer he had a half-day off every other Friday, and spent that afternoon in thrall to ESPN. He emerged blinking from the basement television room and drove me forty miles north from our house in San Jose to the San Francisco airport to catch my evening flight. He smiled and talked the whole way about nothing I could remember, even moments after the words left his mouth. Instead, I slumped in the passenger seat, watching the hideous landscape of highway 101 shoot past: trash-strewn freeway margins, endless office parks, gray heaped on gray. 101 was the commerce route of the Bay area: straight, clogged, merciless, and utterly devoid of charm. Dad’s fingers tapped lightly on the steering wheel of his powder-blue Cadillac as he drove along, never glancing my way. I was glad, after all, that he hadn’t chosen the longer, more beautiful route to the airport along highway 280, where you could see deer grazing by the roadside near the deep blue reservoir. Via 101, I’d have fewer last moments to miss, fewer regrets to tally.

At last, Dad pulled into the maze of ramps leading toward the international terminal, no doubt counting the minutes till he could say goodbye. My flight was leaving at 6:25 pm, arriving in London late the following morning. After check-in, Dad and I poked around the duty-free shops and walked aimlessly through the boarding area, my backpack heavy with bottles of water and a London guidebook to read on the long flight. Soon enough, he started thrumming his fingers impatiently on the sides of his pants. I offered, “It’s okay, Dad, you can go now. I’ll be fine,” and gave him a tentative hug.

He pulled away but kept his hands on my shoulders. “Vivian,” he began, as if a prelude to something very important. I waited, not breathing.

At last, he said, “Have a good year, honey.”

“Thanks, Dad,” I managed.

He walked off with quick, decisive strides, his spine straight, shoulders back. He didn’t turn around.

Soon he’d pull out of the airport maze, free of another responsibility, and of the terrible guilt he and Mom never acknowledged. I’d seen his car sometimes that summer when I drove home from babysitting in the late evening. It would be parked around the corner from AJ’s, the dumpy little building on nearby Lincoln Avenue housing a second-rate topless club. I knew he was in there with my former classmate Andrew, his arm around Andrew’s shoulders, dispensing fatherly wisdom while they watched the girls gyrate, slack-jawed in front of beers. Andrew standing in for the absent son. The son who was never coming back.

But I tried not to think about that either, because soon I’d be gone. I was leaving it all behind again. I had the address of the Montague Hostel in my backpack, scrawled on my map of London for safekeeping. The plan was to spend three weeks on my own, staying at this hostel while exploring the city, then move in to the Butler College student residence hall near Russell Square when school started at the end of August.

I stood still, alone in that airport. Each minute a black marble dropping with a finite chinking sound into a big bowl of time.

It was my birthday, so I bought a Hershey bar to celebrate.

The last marble dropped. The gate agent began boarding. I walked with trepidation into my real future.

~ ~ ~

Stumbling off the plane eleven hours later, after a nervous, sleepless flight, I entered the vast swirl of Heathrow Airport. Sandwich carts, fancy shops--Harrods, here, in the airport--all bright glass and escalators. The line for customs and immigration seemed to stretch for miles, doubling and tripling back on itself in a sea of tired travelers smelling of unwashed hair and unbrushed teeth. At last, I dazedly pushed my passport over the counter to the clean-shaven officer. “And how long will you be staying?” he asked, squinting at my red-rimmed eyes. “Oh! yes!” I suddenly remembered, scrounging my neck pouch out from under my t-shirt, to his restrained amusement. Rummaging around, I produced my now-crumpled admission letter to Butler College. He eyed it, nodded, and produced a frighteningly large stamp. With a professional ka-chunk, an entire page of my passport was now filled with a big black box, bearing the words:



Leave to remain in the United Kingdom on condition that the holder does not enter or change employment paid or unpaid without the consent of the Secretary of State for Employment and does not engage in any business or profession without the consent of the Secretary of State for the Home Department is hereby given until 31st August 1999.



And on top of that, a pentagonal imprint: Home Office Immigration Department.

It was so proper and official. I felt safe, accounted for, and as a sea of people swept me down a set of escalators, as I followed the line-in-a-circle signs to the Underground, I felt a sudden sense of belonging. This, here, right now was the beginning of the place I was meant to be.

I dragged my luggage onto the Piccadilly Line, clutching a map of the Underground, following the little dots my only clue to where I was. We shot out through viridian fields, strange motorway signs, my first view of roundabouts. And then, the train dove under the ground (thanking god I didn’t have to change trains; holding the straps of my stained duffel for dear life). The stops sounded so desperately foreign—Osterley, South Ealing, Acton Town—and then, finally, Holborn. I wedged my dirty, exhausted self into an ancient-looking gray contraption. It was already packed, and the elevator riders closest to me had nowhere to hide as my large bag kept hitting them in the ankles while the elevator jounced upwards. “Sorry, sorry,” I kept saying, and then: outdoors at last. London.

I blinked in the sunlight, trying to orient myself, flapping open the London street map Dad had obtained from AAA. It was huge, flying around in the breeze, and I’d stupidly marked the hostel in black, on a blue-lined map. Where—oh, there it was. About six blocks’ walk, with my sixty-pound duffel. Why hadn’t I brought a suitcase with wheels, for heaven’s sake? Alright, then. Up Kingsway. Oops, wrong direction. Okay, proceeding again, toward Southampton Row. Stop, rest a minute. Was that a Wimpy Burger I saw? I blinked, and looked again. Yes, Popeye’s pal was the boss of his very own burger chain. I’d have to try one, later, after shedding this duffel. My arms were about to fall out of their sockets. Left, on Russell Square, past a big green park—Bloomsbury Square. Left, at last, on Montague Street. White-painted row houses with brightly painted doors, etched glass skylights above. Mine was the one with the red door.

The snappish 18-year-old at the check-in desk, her hair a cornucopia of tiny pigtails festooned with multicolored hair elastics, couldn’t find my reservation at first—after I’d phoned it in weeks ago, long distance from San Jose. I dubiously surveyed the scarred wood desk, the bulletin boards papered with flyers and warnings (“Breakfast ONLY between the hours of 6 and 9!! No exceptions!!”), the scuffed linoleum. Student types with dreadlocks, shaved heads, purple fuzzy hair filtered in and out of the dining room off the lobby, chattering in a medley of languages and accents. Backpackers seemed a different species, but I could at least pretend I belonged here, with my army-drab duffel and spiky brown hair.

Finally, Ms. Fancy Hair finished my paperwork, and I handed her a wad of traveler’s checks, good for three weeks’ stay. Perhaps, I considered belatedly, it might have been wise to pay for all three weeks after I decided I really wanted to stay here. But it was too late. “You’re in Dormitory 2, on the right!” she yelled after me. “Just choose any bed!” I made for the stairs gratefully, suddenly exhausted beyond reason. A nap, then that Wimpy Burger, beckoning in the distance. I hadn’t eaten since the tiny, square-ish omelet Virgin Atlantic had provided for breakfast, seven hours ago.

The door of Dormitory 2 was wide open, and in dismay I realized it was in the midst of heavy cleaning; no, scratch that, heavy petting. The room had four sets of faded blue-painted bunk beds; a rusty old-fashioned vacuum cleaner lurked on the rug, still running. The erstwhile cleaners had decided to take an exercise break—the girl’s shirt was off, and she was on top of the guy, her hands all over his jeans.

“Oh! I’m so sorry,” I squeaked, backing away. The girl’s heavy-lidded, unusually bulging eyes followed me as she lazily pushed her wispy blonde hair off her face. “No bother really,” she rasped, in an Irish accent. “Just come back later, okay?”

I shoved my duffel onto the first bunk bed I saw, and ran for it.

~ ~ ~

Back in January, I’d pulled this improbable year in a foreign country out of a hat with a desperate flourish, disguising the fact that I had no idea what I was doing. It was my best hope, really, because I was fresh out of ideas. I had hoped from the beginning that Dawson College would be a new start, far away from my imploding family and from memories I didn’t want to remember. I was going to, well, blossom. But, I came to realize, Dawson wasn’t far enough.

My surprisingly high test scores had helped me get into this place, a small Ivy League wannabe school, number twenty on the US News and World Report’s list of liberal arts colleges. I’d thought it would be my life’s great adventure, but it turned out to be just like anything else—at first it was all exciting and different and new. But then everything settled into a routine, and once I got used to the routine, I found out that nothing had changed in the end; going all that way didn’t make any difference at all.

If you could map out my college life, it would look like one big square. The top right corner of the square was my room, where I spent most of my time. The bottom right corner was the art building, where I kept my art supplies in an art-major-approved locker, and hung damp monotypes in the halls. The far corner was town—Twyford, Connecticut, with its white-spired church, one bohemian coffee cafe, and a surprisingly good Chinese restaurant. The top left corner was the student center, where I’d walk with my one friend Sharon to get chocolate-chip frappes when we were sick of the food in the downstairs dining hall.

If you mapped out my life as a teenager, it also looked like a square. The top right corner was my room, where I spent most of my time. The bottom right corner was my school. The far corner was Valley Fair mall, where I took the VTA bus every weekend with my high-school friends Kim and Leslie. We’d always try on clothes at Express and buy one Mrs. Fields’ cookie apiece. The top left corner was the library. I biked there weekly, checked out seven romance novels, and read one each day.

Clearly this wasn’t a coincidence. Maybe this was all my life was meant to be—one big square, with me in a corner of it, never getting to the middle.

This past January, midway through sophomore year, I had spent a while in my dorm room with a ruled notebook and a pen that sported a spangly clown head on the top. As is the manner of cheap novelty pens, this one kept splattering blue ink on my hand as I wrote:

Career ideas

1. Graphic designer

2. Commercial artist

3. Children’s book illustrator

4. Receptionist??? Peace Corps???

A year and a half too late, I was realizing that my choice of school had effectively canceled out anything I might want to do with art for an actual career. The studio art program at Dawson was so rigorously liberal arts—so far to the left of what career preparation would be—that there were no courses on computer-assisted design, or commercial illustration, or anything remotely resembling training for a job in the real world. With my advanced knowledge of oil-painting technique, I was well suited for picturesque starvation in some attic, or garret, or wherever failed artists ended up.

In fact, I shouldn’t have come to Dawson College to be a studio art major if I really wanted to be a successful artist. I should have gone to Rhode Island School of Design or California College of Arts and Crafts. Or I should choose to focus on a career with prospects—biologist, say; or Realtor. My parents were marginally supportive at best about my pursuit of art. I was starting to think they might have a point.

And meanwhile, time just schlumped along, days passing, slipping into the next, and the next, with little variation, until I wondered what the point was, anyway.

It was time to do something about it. For the twentieth time, I eyed the flyer I’d posted on my bulletin board way back in October.

Junior Year Abroad. Application deadline: January 31. Rome, Aix-en-Provence, Salzburg. The flyer informed me that I could only apply if I had four years’ language experience in Italian, French, or German. Well, I didn’t. Stupid high-school Spanish classes.

But there was one more option listed, one I’d filed in the back of my mind.

London.

And now I wondered: why not?

I’d never thought much about the United Kingdom, but it seemed decent—and foreign—enough. I searched my memory for facts about it, mostly dredged up from my middle-school geography report on the place. For one thing, England seemed so civilized, chock-full of castles and trifle, princesses and charmingly spelled words. In fact, the more I remembered, the more it began to seem like paradise, where policemen didn’t carry guns, and the art museums were all free. Staring at that JYA flyer, I knew it was my next escape route. In a whole new country, I’d be starting from zero, and this time, it might work.

Unfortunately, on further investigation, the details started getting in the way. For starters, art majors couldn’t just hop to foreign countries willy-nilly. There was no art program at Butler College, London. There wasn’t even an art history program, as I discovered during some fevered research and phone calls the following day, in lieu of going to class. I couldn’t get into their program unless I was majoring in one of their disciplines. And so, I considered, was being a mediocre art major worth giving up a year in London?

I loved painting, more than anything. But it was getting me nowhere. I would have to downgrade myself to hobbyist rather than career painter. A person had to make a choice at some point, and better to cut the art career short now, while living on Uncle Paulie’s precious, tainted money, than after graduation when I was on my own, and trying to make a living painting, what? Doll heads and plastic spiders? For whom? It was surprising, how quickly a life of artistic dreams could die, right then, in the space of 24 hours. I let all those thoughts that lurked constantly in the back of my mind—the ones that said, “You’re not good enough, and you never will be”—I let them push their way to the front, examined them, and realized that they were probably true.

But it was okay, because I could replace my plans with a new dream, the last idea I could grasp like the flimsiest of lifelines. London would save me. It had to. A year away from my unsatisfactory life, and from the memories I hadn’t managed to escape by coming all the way to the East coast. A year when something—anything—might happen.

~ ~ ~

And here I was, jet-lagged, starving, and temporarily homeless. Since I wasn’t going to be napping, I might as well lunch, I reasoned fuzzily as I left the hostel. Then maybe sit in that lovely park for a while. The sunlight from just a few minutes earlier had faded, replaced by ominous gray clouds. I turned around, puzzled. I had no idea which way I’d come from, and I’d left my map in the dormitory. There was certainly no way I was going back there.

I lost my bearings right off. Bloomsbury Square was half a block away, but I turned the wrong direction, and then off down another street entirely. I was so tired that I couldn’t be bothered to back-trace my steps, and just kept walking till I came to a main street—High Holborn. That Wimpy Burger was nowhere to be seen, so I jingled the pound coins Desk Girl had given me as change, and directed myself toward a little local-looking sandwich shop painted bright green, a nice spot of color on this desolate gray street, where I was now being splattered with rain. I ordered a ham sandwich, looking forward to my first London meal. I was handed two squares of pocked dark wheat bread, with one slice of ham inside. No condiments, not even lettuce. Not even a little mayonnaise. Worse, there was no room to dine inside—the three tables were taken up by a group of loud middle-aged women and their shopping bags. Miserable, I made my way back outdoors, munching the unsatisfactory sandwich as I laboriously attempted to retrace my steps.

By the time I had circled back to Bloomsbury Square, the sun had reappeared. I wasn’t sure why I’d thought that park was so pretty when I’d first passed it. It was just a big green square intersected by concrete pathways. The grass was withered in half of it, and the park just lurked there really, offering nothing useful or pleasant to look at except for some utilitarian benches scattered about. I sank onto a damp bench, morosely finishing off the crusts of my miserable lunch. A pair of office workers on a break relaxed on a tartan blanket under a nearby tree. The smart-looking woman wore a gray pinstriped skirt and shiny, pointy pumps. The man was pasty-colored, with a receding chin (you’d always see good-looking women with dumpy guys, never the other way around), but they lay contentedly on the blanket, their arms around each other, kissing sporadically in between flipping through their respective tabloid papers.

Everybody had somebody, except for me. I didn’t even have a family I trusted, much less a lover. And what was I doing here in this cold, damp, godforsaken place, where a girl couldn’t even take a nap, for crying out loud? What was I going to do, really, for a whole three weeks in London before school started?

This was so different from what I’d expected, the precise fantasy of fulfillment I’d had the Monday back in January when I’d met with my advisor, Professor Newman. I’d done all the math beforehand. “I’d like to change my major,” I informed him. “And it should be really easy. I have the exact same number of history credits as I do art credits. We can just transfer the major and I won’t need to take any make-up classes this semester, even.”

Professor Newman raised his eyebrows. Those eyebrows had a life of their own, sticking out in all directions, just like his outrageous beard, big curly salt-and-pepper whorls. “Why?”

I fidgeted. “Studio art isn’t getting me anywhere. I’m not standing out and I’m not excelling. I’m just . . . average. Just getting Bs. So what am I supposed to do, with a college degree consisting of Bs in studio art?” I craftily neglected mentioning my plan of going to London.

I’d taken Intaglio Techniques I with Professor Newman, in which I’d received a B. He wasn’t rushing to undermine my self-analysis. Instead, he began to pontificate. “The whole idea of going to a liberal arts college is that you come out a well-formed citizen, a citizen of humanity . . .” I started not paying attention; I’d heard this song and dance before. Heck, it was what had convinced me to come to this little school, in this little town. I watched his eyebrow hairs wave as he talked, more animatedly now, as I tuned back in: “. . . . anywhere, with your college degree. Don’t turn your back on art in your sophomore year just because your grades aren’t up to your expectations.”

“Professor Newman, I’d just really like to change my major. Please.”

So he signed the paperwork, his eyebrows quivering ominously, and I was free. I could see myself climbing exuberantly onto one of those red London buses already, alive inside my very own picture postcard.

~ ~ ~

I was just so tired and discouraged, I must have fallen asleep on that bench, because when I suddenly started awake, the park had emptied. I looked at my Snoopy watch: it was seven p.m. My first day in London—a total bust. What an idiot, to imagine that things would magically be different here. I was still the same Vivian Lewis who had gotten on that plane the night before, but instead of a warm home to go to, the only prospect before me was that sleazy hostel, full of people I couldn’t begin to understand.

Nothing was different in my life at all. I couldn’t figure out what enabled that couple I’d seen earlier to align themselves so precisely together on that blanket. How did they fit so perfectly? What was the answer that I just . . . kept . . . missing? I scrubbed my hands through my short-cropped hair in frustration.

I dragged it out as long as I could—went to McDonald’s for dinner, because it was nearby and familiar. When they charged me five pence for ketchup packets, I almost started to cry. This place was impossible to understand. I couldn’t believe what a huge mistake I’d made, and I was stuck here for a whole year. I used up every last bit of ketchup, out of spite.

By eight p.m.—it was still light outside, I noticed, in this different latitude—I reluctantly dragged myself back to the hostel, as slowly as possible, stopping at a nearby shop to purchase a proper London street map. I slowly climbed the stairs to Dormitory 2. It was lively now, with people sitting on the bunks talking about their day—guys and girls, all mixed up in one room. I was so innocent; I’d had no idea. I looked around and gasped. Where was my duffel? And who was this guy sitting on the bed I’d chosen?

“Hi,” I said tentatively to the room at large. “I just got here today, and . . .”

“Scott’s bed! You took Scott’s bed!” an elaborately tattooed American girl squealed. “You’re the one!”

“I didn’t know—they told me to take any bed . . .” I had never felt more shy in my life.

A skinny guy with darting eyes, squatting on my erstwhile mattress, glared at me. “I’ve been staying here for two months, and this is my bed, okay? You can have the top bunk.”

Apologizing, I climbed the rickety ladder and grabbed supplies from my duffel, which had been tossed up there. I made my way to the bathroom—also unisex, ack!—changed, and hastily got in bed. I could see no way of communicating with anyone in that room. They were an alien species, talking fast, smoking cigarettes, comparing itineraries. I was still so tired, but I couldn’t fall asleep. The mattress was thin and sagged hopelessly in the middle. I couldn’t get comfortable scrunched on the sides, and when I lay in the center loose springs poked me. Every time I moved, the mattress creaked ominously. At 11 pm, the lights went out, and everyone settled in, turning, muttering, snoring. In the bunk underneath, Scott was making strange noises. Was he having sex or something? I peered cautiously over the edge, my eyes adjusting to the dark. His eyes were squeezed blissfully shut. It was just him, thank god . . . oh, gross.