Let Loose the Lions: A Novel

By Jamie Groccia

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• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 20, 2013
• ISBN: 9781479796083

Jamie Groccia

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Copyright © 2013 by Jamie Groccia.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Rev. date: 04/15/2020

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Contents

WHEN FERRIES COLLIDE

ANN IN PARIS

GROWING OLD WHILE STILL A YOUNG MAN

LIVING A LIFE OF MEDIOCRITY

ADRIFT

SHARDS OF MIRRORED GLASS

THE SEASON OF UNREMITTED DESPAIR

THE SUDDENNESS OF SHADOW

A LONG GOODBYE

WHEN FERRIES COLLIDE

Hamburg

Vera, Phillip’s wife, broke up with him by email, while she was in New York and he was in Germany working on his dissertation. Even though he was expecting it, he thought it heartless of her. He was deserving of a more personal break-up, one to his face, where he could reach and strangle her, or to cajole her into bed. Vera would never break it off with him while having sex, or after. They would take a walk in Central Park or along uptown Broadway, and make things as they were before, which in truth was really terrible.

Phillip read Vera’s email twice before he deleted it. She had deleted him as easily. Then to top it off, she put his stuff in storage. How could she break off with him by email when he was in Hamburg and easy to dispose? And all his stuff was easy to dispose of too. Phillip turned back to walk the wharfs of Hamburg harbor, to smell or taste the rats. It would be a more pleasurable experience than to reply to Vera’s email, the bitch. In truth, maybe, or at that moment, he preferred the rats to her. Yes, he preferred the rats that ran along the wharfs of Hamburg.

Phillip remembered that when he first met Vera four years earlier, he had written her love letters on yellow lined paper. He had written them in cursive. He had always hated email even then. One could not write love letters by email. If he had she would have deleted all of them. Phillip wondered if she still had his letters, if so by now they would be worn and well hidden. Perhaps she had put them in storage with the rest of his stuff. Vera had been a dancer in her early youth before they met. It had been her ambition to be a dancer before she turned to literature and became an English major. In his love letters, he tried to write some poetry, but most of it was pretty bad and took up too much paper. He found it difficult to write poetry on yellow-lined paper even in cursive. Phillip remembered now in Hamburg, cut off with her through email, that he had never seen her dance. Vera had danced as a child and as a teenager and right before she met him, but she stopped. She thought that her ankles were too weak to stand on her toes and dance on point for more than a minute or two even to music of even Mozart. She thought she’d never be a dancer who could dance at Lincoln Center near to where one day she would live, a half a block away to where she would die, shot and murdered at her very doorstep. Vera did not know all of this when she first met Phillip or when she broke off with him over the internet. She knew only that she lacked the talent to ever dance at Lincoln Center and mediocrity was not for her so she stopped. She would not dance again even in front of mirrors or down the streets off Central Park when she was drunk. Phillip remembered that he had never seen her dance, only knew of her ambitions from their conversations usually after having sex. He knew that she had spent her youth in dance studios in front of mirrors, before she turned to books and her ideas and theories on writing that were reflected in those mirrors. One day she would create a metaphor of shattered mirrors, of shards of mirrored glass, that one day after she was dead Phillip would smash the glass to smithereens like the allies did to Hamburg, but all Phillip remembered now walking the streets of Hamburg to his beloved wharfs that tasted and smelled of rats was that he had never seen Vera dance or even asked her to.

Perhaps he didn’t love her at all, or she him. She would have danced for him if she had. Phillip realized that he was approaching the harbors of Hamburg; that it was no time or place for regrets. He had to be careful or the rats would get him. He would have regretted had he known that years from now, in another country, on another street with many rats that he would die bleeding in the streets and that rats would come out that night and try to consume him, that he would one day live like Vera’s mirrors in the intestines and shit of rats.

Hamburg was an old port city when it was bombed to smithereens by the allies during the entirety of World War Two, and it was an old city those day’s that Phillip visited there. Its large deep water port was a major base of U-boat activity, a shipping port, and it was an industrial city converted to the manufacturing of munitions and armaments, all of which contributed to it being bombed to smithereens in the first place. The massive bombings, of course, went far beyond the port and the munitions and armament plants and visited itself on much of the civilian population, payback for the blitzkrieg that plagued London. Firestorms caused by the heat of the bombings first visited Germany there, unlike any seen until Dresden, with its rich oil refineries turned to napalm.

Hamburg paid the price of being too close to England, a benefit only before and after the war. During the early stages of the war, the short distance between the allied bases and Hamburg made protection of the city difficult for Goering’s Luftwaffe and by the end of the war the Luftwaffe was too decimated to provide any protection at all. The allied bombers took ready advantage of this by laying waste to most of Germany’s cities, not all of which housed munitions or armament factories, but by 1944-5 there existed among the allied high command a belief that by demoralizing the civilian population they could bring about an earlier end to the conflict. All this proved was that they didn’t know Hitler in 1945, just as they didn’t know him in 1938. It also affirmed Phillip’s theory that war was chiefly about revenge. World War Two, in Hitler’s mind, was as much to revenge Germany’s treatment after the First World War, especially by the French, as it was build an imperialistic Third Reich. Demoralizing the civilian population was simply code for destroying old cities with much historical importance. Killing as many of the citizenry as it did was viewed not as collateral damage as much as the necessity to punish Germany, in its arrogance, for bringing so much tragedy to the world.

When Phillip walked the harbors of Hamburg, its remaining wharfs and warehouses, he felt as if he was being attacked by rats, and he thought of Camus, The Plague. He would have quoted it, as he walked, in French, had he known the language. He knew, by heart, its ending, its last sentence, and he spoke it to himself, though if he spoke aloud he would not have been heard, because it was late and the wharfs were empty, except of course, by rats.

He knew what those jubilant crowds did not know but could have learned from books: that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.

Hamburg, along its wharfs, bore the taste and smell of rats.

In 1945 and later, the tens of thousands of civilian deaths were put in historical perspective by the allies who, as victors, were in the position to write history as they saw fit. After all, twenty-five million people lost their lives as a total consequence of the War, and the tens of thousands of dead Germans were glossed over in the scheme of things by the allies, east and west, but especially by the Russians. Stalin, who fearfully marveled at the allied air power when he was given a tour of the Western Sectors after the surrender, thought good, justice prevailed. War had turned normal people as ice cold as Joseph Stalin. Put another way, revenge had turned people psychopathic. World War Two was a War of revenge both in totality and in parts. The devastation of Germany was justified by the holocaust. The Germans, history implied, got what they deserved by looking the other way, implicit in the murder of six million Jews.

Ironically, after the war, no country really wanted them anywhere but in Palestine. It was what the Zionists wanted, too.

This was all part of Phillips dissertation on the causes and effect of the War on Germany which he was writing for his doctoral thesis at Columbia University. It was, from its very beginning, an unpopular thesis. The Chairman of the history department had told him so. The Cold War was over, and the years that resulted in the Cold War were increasingly irrelevant. Nobody had any interest in World War Two Germany, not even the Germans. Not until recent decades had they touched upon the subject in their schools. The remarkable rebuilding of Germany into a sleek financial, industrial and commercial world power was of interest, and why didn’t Phillip choose to make that the focus of his dissertation? That had been of more historical relevance. The rise of West Germany, coupled with the economic and social disintegration of the East was the proof of the superiority of democratic capitalism which brought about the winning of the Cold War. That was relevant, thought the rest of the historians on Phillips doctorial committee, not his obsession with war and revenge.

Phillip thought differently. The reason, he offered, that the Cold War remained cold for forty-five years, nearly two generations, was not because of the existence of the hydrogen bomb, enabling the destruction of the world, if deployed by the two feuding super powers, but because those powers had no actual basis for revenge. While they competing in the third world for political and economic advantage, they didn’t really despise one another. There were no rapes, murders and bloodshed on a massive scale to revenge. Korea and Vietnam were anomalies despite the many tens of thousands killed and these were American who died not Russians. For both America and Russia, and to a lesser degree China, they were wars of blunder, of misunderstanding of the concept of containment and the lines drawn on a map by George C. Marshall when he was Secretary of State. They were not fought on the soil of any major power but in the Third World where violence had always been an undercurrent of political and religious life. For both super powers the War was fought for no other reason than competition, despite the blunders of Korea and Vietnam. The competition was not even religious, unless capitalism and socialism could be considered so, like the basis for most of the Third World conflicts in the early and latter stages of the twentieth century. No, revenge was the both the cause and consequence of war in the mid-twentieth century and that was how Phillip was going to write his thesis though he didn’t have a clue on how to prove it.

That, rather than the reluctance of his dissertation committee, was at the crux of Phillip’s dilemma when he decided to visit Hamburg at the conclusion of his tour of the glistening cities of Germany’s prosperity. Hamburg was an old city that had decided to rebuild itself into a shipping and commerce presence at the mouth of the North Atlantic. Despite its rebuilding of the working class districts around the port into stale avenues of commerce, it remained and old and tired city. As a city of shipping, with its wharfs and warehouses, Hamburg did not attract many tourists. It was close to England, and brought in Englishmen, especially for football. It was not, however, a destination for many Americans or Japanese or even other northern Europeans. Like its cargo, it was more or less a transshipment point. Commercial cargo vessels came and went in droves every day, but not passenger cruise lines. It had of course its ferries to and from England, but they came for the football and the nightlife, and of course, they were filled with working class Englishmen and not the rich Japanese or Americans. It could be said, historically of course (according to Phillip) that Hamburg was not a cultural city and had reached its nectar of cultural popularity during the very early nineteen sixties with skittle music, with the arrival of the Beatles, and the English working class rock and roll bands that came along with them. Tourists, Phillip realized, were basically attracted to cultural cities or beautiful places, and Hamburg was neither. If not on business, Phillip thought, there was no real reason for being there.

Hamburg was a transient city, for those who did not live there, for people going to or coming from other preferable places or destinations. That was exactly why Phillip chose to spend some time there. He felt, for the moment, transient. As in his dissertation, he didn’t know where he was going next. He would have considered home, which was in New York, but he no longer really had a home there at the moment. He was married for three years to Vera, but he was three years into his dissertation and neither his thesis nor his marriage was any longer fresh. In fact his marriage had degenerated into a war, which like all true wars (according to Phillip) was one of revenge. They both had had affairs, more than one, during their three years together, and Vera, at last, had grown tired of it or at least him and had thrown him out. While Phillip had remained faithful in Europe, his European chastity was a poor attempt at atonement and distant reconciliation. It had no effect on Vera, and she had written him in email. Phillip was as upset she had broken it off with him by email as he was he had broken up with him at all. He hated email. He thought he deserved a more personal break up. She had put his stuff in storage and had taken a new lover, or so she wrote, or rather emailed. Cell calls to her remained unanswered as she preferred the distance of the internet. It was more dispassionate, which is how Phillip remembered her. She did not email if her new lover had moved into their apartment, but Phillip imagined that he had. He called his friend, Jacob Jacobson, to confirm his suspicions, but Jacobson refused to spy, leading Phillip to suspect that Jacobson was Vera’s lover. He wouldn’t answer her by email, and would not check his, again, until he was in another city.

Phillip had taken up residency in a new hotel near the waterfront on the site of a pre-war working class neighborhood of longshoremen, and their children, mostly killed by the Second Great War. The massive bombings of the harbor left nothing of the old houses most of them replaced by hotels, warehouses and buildings of commerce, but Phillip was still attracted to the waterfront. He liked the sound and sight of the large container vessels, the hooting of the tugs when the fog rolled in. He liked the smell of the sea, even if it was the north Atlantic. He took long walks in the neighborhoods along the harbor and would stop for Ale at one of the English/German style pubs or clubs, where bands still played. Skittle music was gone, as were the Beatles, and the bands that followed them were often as stale and unremarkable as the beer he drank. He thought sadly about Vera and that much of the fault for their breakup was his. He admired her for tossing him out onto the street, even though he was in Europe at the time. It took courage to start over again. He doubted himself that he had the courage it would take to start over, as he doubted his resolve to start over again on his dissertation like his committee at Columbia had recommended. For Vera he had no recrimination, no thoughts of revenge. He would not be at war with her. His affairs had all been brief and all with other students. He knew he was as transient to them as Hamburg was as transient to tourists. When he grew tired of Hamburg, and this was unfair to Hamburg, because he didn’t stay long in the city, he would ferry to England and make his way south to London, which was both a city of culture and beauty—excluding the working class parts which still had the charm of age. Unlike Germany, London was scared but not devastated by the blitz. It was rebuild in the same manner of regular western cities, with careful restoration of buildings of historical importance, but not much respect for the old and worn. The old and worn were torn down to make room for the new. Phillip liked London both the old and the new. It was truly a cosmopolitan city, full of vibrant ethnic groups, who all spoke with vibrant ethnic London accents. It was a cultural city, the city and surrounding suburbs and countryside filled with abbeys and cathedrals, and dusty, smog filled, car choked streets. Phillip, however, somewhat resented London, if only for its attitude, if someone deemed to compare it to a place like Hamburg let alone New York City. London was filled with British, and had hotels along the Themes. The city didn’t really have a harbor that being further south in South Hampton, but had instead both a great, if contaminated river, and the fog. One night he walked from the Thames to the Haymarket in Westminster to see Phantom of The Opera at the Majesty Theater, a gothic style building before the coming of the last century. He had seen it twice before in New York but it was a better production at the Majesty.

Phillip liked the fog better than he liked the Americans who lived up to their reputation of being pushy and liked being catered to while staying in the best hotels along the Themes. The Americans came from all over their country as if they were glad to get away to a place that was becoming as Americanized as Tokyo. Of all of the Americans, Phillip preferred the students, both undergraduate and graduate, because they didn’t have much money and stayed at the hotels even Phillip could afford. Despite with his conversation with Londoners in pubs or temporally exiled Americans, despite, or because of, his long walks along the Themes which replaced his long walks along the Hamburg harbor, he felt the beginnings of loneliness. He also felt the beginnings of London’s dreadful autumn rains, when the mist of the fog turned cold. He didn’t, however, want to return to America to face both Vera and his committee. He was supported only by Vera and a small stipend from his fellowship, but neither would support him upon his return.

Vera would not send him money at this stage of their relationship.

Phillip realized he had little time left. There was no time to squander even in London. It was getting colder, and the fog already started to roll in to mix with the smog and ash of ancient fireplaces. It was too foggy and cold for long walks along the Themes and even during the often times when he was drunk, though he still liked to walk in Westminster and saw Les Miserables on the West End. If he was to stay longer in Europe, it would be in southern Europe which meant for Phillip either Italy or Spain. He chose Spain.

Phillip left London and went to Barcelona by way of Paris, where he didn’t stay long. He did not like the city. It was, like London, too full of tourists and artists who seemed to confuse the twenty-first century with the nineteenth. Paris, also, had too many French who were aloof and caustic if you spoke French poorly. He found it true that, even if they spoke English, they pretended not to, and Phillip, who did not speak French at all, got better service by speaking German or even Spanish which did not identify him as American. The French found, in Phillips opinion, Americans boorish and, unlike the Japanese, ill mannered. They saw nothing wrong in being ill mannered in turn. Some even distained the American dollar which, along with American military protection, sustained them for a generation, after they lost the War. The French did not think that they had lost the war. Or so De Gaulle had told them. Their separate peace in the railroad car in Paris and the Vichy regime was an aberration. Hitler never conquered France. It was the Americans who occupied France in 1944. Phillip thought the French both short sighted, ungrateful, forgetful of Omaha Beach, resentful for liberation Yet, he thought the city was beautiful, far more so than London. As in Hamburg and London, Phillip walked in the older, more historic districts in the city. Paris, while much of the old had been replaced by the new, particularly by grand hotels, still maintained historical integrity. The city was simply untouched by the War. Surrender saved it from devastation by the Germans in 1940, and the allies left it untouched during the land and air battles in 1944. Paris, ironically (again, in Phillip’s mind) was ultimately saved at last, in the late spring of that year, by a German field marshal who did not set the city afire as ordered by the Fuehrer.

Paris was a beautiful city, a cultural city, a city of great importance. It was not Dresden and did not suffer the fate of Dresden. The War had been kind to the French, at least if to those that weren’t Jewish, and after the Second World War they did not seek vengeance on Germany as they did after the First. They seemed to take whatever vengeance they had in their hearts out on the Americans, and two generations later, that vengeance seemed to be ingrained in their national consciousness. Phillip, who preferred Manhattan, was not too crazy about heartland Americans himself. But then he had never been in the heartland, or seen America between the coasts.

Phillip found this attitude odder than the French feelings for Americans. At least the French were logical about their likes and dislikes. They liked good food and wine and pastries, because they were not liberated by them, and if they disliked Americans in general, they liked their music and their movies. In fact, while they disliked Americans, they admired American culture. The French were not liberated by American culture as much as they were seduced by it. They did not, therefore, resent it, and accepted it almost warmly as they accepted the American ex-patriots after the First World War. Phillip therefore went about his business in Paris, eating in restaurants, visiting museums, drinking wine at outdoor bistros as if he were a German Spaniard or a Spaniard German, and not as an American. After a week in Paris, he realized that he didn’t dislike the city after all. It buoyed Phillip that that Paris was as full with history as it was full with culture and that perhaps the surrender in the railroad car was whatever the French thought it was. In Phillip’s dissertation, be blamed the French in part for bringing about conditions in Germany that gave rise to Hitler and the War, that followed the vengeance in French hearts at losing an entire generation between 1914 and 1918. But even if that vengeance was justified; the war that followed it was not. Historically, some entity other than the Germans had to share the blame for that injustice. The rise of fascism had to be explained in the context of the century. The almost simultaneous ascension of Mussolini, Hitler and Franco could not be explained merely as a reaction to the Bolshevik Revolution or the Great Depression. It stemmed from something more insidious, the need for revenge. Revenge was the driving force for War in the twentieth century. If that wasn’t the case, then Phillip’s dissertation was as true as pulp fiction novels. Then again, it wasn’t the French who had bombarded all of Europe; it was the Americans and British in their B-17s. Phillip left Paris for Barcelona with a far better opinion of the city than when he had arrived. It was a good French city full of good French people, as long as he pretended not to be an American.

A Train to Barcelona

In the Paris railroad terminal, waiting for the train to Barcelona, to Spain that had once belonged to Franco, Phillip thought of the rise of fascism and the resulting violence it had spawned. Reluctantly, he turned his attention to his neglected dissertation. Fascism was thinly disguised imperialism, in conflict with the imperialism of other nations. It wreaked havoc on the world. In Germany, it rose from vengeance and brought vengeance back upon itself. Vengeance was the mirror image of redemption. Churchill, the great imperialist, who would never admit the British Empire was in decline, lived to see its demise. But, Churchill had redeemed himself, by leading the defense of his tiny island against the fascist onslaught. After the fall of France, Britain took on Germany and Italy alone.

It was strange, when it came to the crux of his dissertation that he thought of Churchill in the same breath of imperialism as Mussolini and Hitler. Churchill, in his own history, was not a fascist or even an imperialist. He was Britain standing alone against their tide. Britain withstood the blitzkrieg, and paid it back, many times over, in kind. Churchill wreaked the fire that was vengeance. Churchill was not a fascist, but his heart was filled with vengeance. If only Phillip’s Doctoral Committee back at Columbia could see it that way.

But one did not speak of Churchill and fascism in the same breath.

It was almost a day’s ride from Paris to Barcelona, and took out from his knapsack a well-worn book, How German Was It? by Walter Abish. He read it to its last sentence thought he knew the passage by heart.

Is it possible for anyone in Germany, nowadays, to raise his right hand, for whatever reason, and not be flooded by his memory of a dream to end all dreams?

At heart, Phillip realized, he was a fascist.

On his way to Barcelona, he traveled with a girls’ high school class tour, and found himself surrounded by seventeen and eighteen year old American girls who, although he was well into his twenties, liked his youthful looks, that he was well traveled in Europe, and could speak in other languages, although not French. From the girls, he did not hide the fact that he was American, although they recognized him for one at once. They were all beautiful young women and he wanted to have sex with every one of them because they were so young and seemed available. They also seemed to be not chaperoned. There were no adults among them. The adults must have been off in another car doing unspeakable things. It was a train from Paris to Barcelona and it was romantic. The girls all seemed to find Phillip romantic, with his long hair and his clean shaven face he hardly looked twenty. They laughed at his witticisms and were pretty witty themselves, at least for teenagers. Halfway through the train ride, one of the prettier girls asked him to join their party as their sole male guest. Phillip thought that perhaps one of the chaperones was a male, but he couldn’t be sure. He thought that their chaperones were off in another part of the train having sex, the only legitimate reason for leaving the girls unprotected on a train potentially transporting predators.

Phillip, though he desired having sex with one, if not all the girls at once, did not consider himself a predator. Yet, Vera had made him a free man, and when Phillip computed the time difference, he thought of her just waking up with her new lover and wondered if she had given him (or her) the space in the closet and in the bedroom draws that had once been his. Phillip was angry, or maybe just horny enough, to have sex with one of the students, especially, but not necessarily, if she was of age. Europeans were not hung up on such insignificant details having to do with age or sex, but then again, these girls were American. The girls found safety in numbers, and he found it almost impossible to cut one out from the herd. He found one that he liked the best. She acted older, even somewhat mature; she had olive skin and long dark brown hair with frizzy waves and deep brown eyes evidence of another race and for fifteen minutes he drew she aside and she held her own in a conversation about, of all things, late nineteenth century novels. She liked Henry James and Joseph Conrad, and the early twentieth century novels of Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf.

As if she was she was trying to prove a point, that she wasn’t full of shit, she took out the book she had been reading on the train, Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Phillip took the book and felt its weight before returning it to her. The girl reminded him of his sister, Ann, who was very fair and not dark at all. Ann liked the ending of books and read them to Phillip when they were children.

"Read me the end of Heart of Darkness," He asked. the girl.

All of it? she asked . . .

Perhaps just the last line, he said, if you don’t mind.

The girl opened up the book and turned to the last line of the last page, and read.

The offing was barred by a black bank of clouds, and the tranquil waterway leading to the uttermost ends of the earth flowed sombre under an overcast sky—seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.

The young girl was clearly going to be an English Lit major, a category of woman with whom Phillip had a lot of success, at least sexually. He remembered that Vera had been an English lit major when he met her, but he knew he wouldn’t end up marrying this one.

The rest of the girls eyed the couple not with envy or suspicion, but with the wide eyed innocence. It was like they knew Phillip wanted to have sex with the girl and it had been a long chaste tour of Europe for all of them. They giggled and encouraged the dalliance, secretly hoping for a sexual conclusion, impossible as long as they were on the train. The train made it as safe from sex as a train could be. The girls hoped that Phillip would leave the train with them at their next scheduled destination.

That destination happened to be at the French Riviera. Phillip got out with them, but only to stretch his legs and walk around. The two chaperones suddenly appeared and gathered the girls back into one herd, Elaine among them. They were suddenly and unfairly separated, two lovers of late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels, with nothing in common other than a brief conversation and a sudden dislike for trains. The French Riviera was as beautiful as Elaine, more beautiful in its own way than even Paris.

It had green cliffs that overlooked the blue green sea of the Mediterranean. In the distance were the vestiges of mountains. It was more beautiful than even La Jolla, California, where Phillip’s parents owned a house on a high hill overlooking the ocean. Phillip had a notion to stay with the girls, but he doubted that the chaperones, more or less his actual contemporaries, would allow him that. They were clearly young teachers, and while they might have had sex on what to them was a romantic train ride, they knew danger when they saw it. Phillip kept his distance and his fantasies to himself. The girls moved away from him as if in a dream. The beautiful girls were absorbed by the French Riviera and soon disappeared. He thought that the girls must have been students at a rich prep school, perhaps in New England. Suddenly, the girl who liked late nineteenth and early twentieth century novels broke free of the group and ran up to Phillip and handed him a note. Phillip looked at it.

My name is Elaine Bartow. I go to school in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Phillip took the pen from her hand, and scribbled on the back of her note and gave it back to her. His note read.

My name is Phillip Stone. Go to Columbia University in the fall.

Elaine Bartow read the note, clutched it, and ran happily back to the group. The two chaperones frowned, having witnessed this break in their ranks, but were either too slow or too preoccupied with one another to have done anything about it. Phillip again thought about staying longer in the French Riviera, but it was in season and expensive and he wanted to see Barcelona. It also wasn’t likely that he’d get to see Elaine again alone in the resort, at least not without getting arrested. Phillip hoped that he would see her in the fall. He was sure she was a senior and smart enough to get into the Ivy League school. Of course, by then he would be twenty-six and she might realize that he was too old for her, but maybe not. In any case, it was a fantasy that would see him through all the way to Barcelona.

Barcelona, the city by the sea, was like Paris an old city that had successfully refurbished itself. It had boulevards but its narrow side streets were hardly wide enough for an automobile to pass without its passengers seeing themselves in the windows of the small shops and cafes along the way. There was a Coca-Cola sign along one of the boulevards that reminded Phillip of America, and he hated it. It had nothing to do with the intrinsic culture of the city that was in its churches and pre-war and even pre-Franco buildings. Phillip noticed that there were as many McDonald’s restaurants than even in Paris. They seemed more out of place than in Paris a city which Phillip thought deserved it as an invasion of the worst of American culture. There were fewer museums, art houses, and even high class brothels than in Paris, although Phillip knew about them only by reputation. There were also fewer Hiltons and other American style hotels. The hotels were smaller and run by Barcelonans. The people, excepting some of the children, seemed to like Americans. It seemed to be a carefree city, a few decades way from the rule of Franco and his armies that policed the street in response to his growing paranoia, or guilt, of being the last and only surviving fascist leader. He had crushed those supporting the Republic, with the help of the Italian Air force in 1939, and had stood by Hitler and Mussolini, but had held on to his realm until his death.

Franco, Phillip remembered from his readings, never raised his right in salute.

Spain was not a vengeful nation, or one the Allies took vengeance upon thought Phillip, as Franco, to his credit, had kept the Spanish out of the War. After the War he was tolerated by America as a deterrent to the Communists, who had taken half of Europe and had even put Italy into play.

Barcelona, except for its dedication to its churches, was passionate about two things, football and bullfighting. Both sports were considered equally bloody, and Barcelona would wait impatiently for the kill and the arrival of Manchester United, football also a blood sport. Americans, unless they were truly assimilated into Barcelonan life, lacked the enthusiasm for either sport, but Barcelona forgave them for their ignorance for most Barcelonans were a forgiving people and dependent and grateful to the Americans for the dollars they brought to the city. Phillip liked to walk in Barcelona and while their dialect was not quite Castilian and somewhat influenced by the Basques, he found that his Spanish was quite understandable and he enjoyed his acceptance in Barcelona that he found lacking in Paris, until he pretended not to be an American.

Barcelona

It was in Barcelona that Vera finally answered her phone. She was in Manhattan and had begun to worry that her emails to Phillip, justifying their separation and her decision to leave him, had not reached him. Her emails to Hamburg had arrived when Phillip was in London; her emails to London had arrived when Phillip was in Paris, and her emails to Paris arrived when he was on the train to Barcelona, probably during his two hour stay on the French Riviera. But Phillip was not diligent when it came to checking his emails and chose to write old fashioned letters on yellow lined paper. Phillip had written her from each city, but not of course when he was on the train. He wrote her short letters in his clear, concise cursive, ignoring his small Mac that he used for his research and his letters to his dissertation committee at Columbia. He distained email. His cursive was more personnel, and even though his letters were short and somewhat curt, they were still painfully passionate. He admitted that he still loved her, but that she was right to break things off with him, but she seemed to have never got those either. Their failure to communicate was indicative of their marriage. They also seemed to be incapable of being faithful to one another, and he was increasingly uncertain that he’d be able to help support her in his professional life which seemed exceedingly dim. He told her in letters from all three cities that she wasn’t to blame, and he forgave her for leaving him when he was so far away. It wasn’t as if he was a soldier. Her pronouncements lacked the tragedy of a Dear John letter. Had he wanted to, he could have returned immediately to Manhattan, got his stuff out of storage, and stormed back into their apartment. But, he didn’t really want that. He was relieved more than angry with her actions. She was a strong willed woman who knew exactly what (who) she wanted and what (who) she didn’t want. Vera clearly did not want him any longer and he knew that he would have to live with it, as he had to live with the folly that was becoming his dissertation. He lived in a world of neglect. He had neglected Vera like he was now neglecting his dissertation; the only difference was that Vera didn’t have a committee breathing down his neck. In short, he was free of that commitment. He wished that he could also be free of his commitment to his dissertation, but he had more at stake in his PhD than he had even in his marriage.

Vera sounded worried over the phone. Where are you? I couldn’t reach you by letter and even when I was desperate enough to call you on the cell, you were forever out of service. Phillip did not tell Vera that after Hamburg he had turned his cell off.

I must have been on the train from Paris to Barcelona. It was a very long train ride. In fact, Phillip had turned his cell off in London, not wanting his dissertation committee questioning his area of research. "I didn’t expect you to write or call me. I expected a more personal breakup."

That’s unfair. You knew that this was coming, she said It’s why you spent so long in Europe. It had little to do with your dissertation. It had to do with us. You were just giving me an excuse to break it off with you.

It was all true, Phillip knew. Vera did what he expected her to do, but was not going to admit it. You put my stuff into storage, he observed as if it was an act of outrageous cruelty.

If I let you back into our apartment, our life together, Vera paused, well, it would start all over again. I just couldn’t bear it.

So, you put me out into the street, Phillip said, woefully he hoped.

You have lots of friends. You’ll land on your feet, she said. Besides, you could stay in the dorms with your girlfriends.

There haven’t been that many, he said. Besides, the relationships never lasted long.

You mean they were just sex, she said, but not angrily.

I mean that they wouldn’t take me in, Phillip said.

What about Jacobson? She asked. He’s your best friend and he has a big apartment south of Ninety-Sixth Street not far from the Park.

Phillip wanted to know how Vera knew where Jacobson lived, but he remembered that he had taken her there himself more than once.

I thought that maybe Jacobson had moved in with you, that he was your new lover.

You’re being paranoid. Jacobson is your friend, not mine. I just tag along, she said. Jacobson and I have never had sex. Besides, if we lived together we would live at his place. It’s so much nicer than ours, and it’s closer to downtown where I work.

Then it’s someone from work. Your new lover is someone you work with.

Vera paused before answering. Yes, but I think it’s just sex, nothing more.

I’ve been faithful to you in Europe, said Phillip I’ve been chaste as a bone."

I didn’t ask you to be. In fact I didn’t expect you to be, she said. I thought you’d be attracted to all those . . . Europeans.

Not a one, not even in Paris. Phillip didn’t mention the train ride to the Riviera.

I imagined you having sex all over Europe. But really, it doesn’t matter. Our unfaithfulness undid us, she said. "We were coming apart at the seams. Our love was dissipating," she said.

Dissipating? What the fuck does that mean? Phillip asked.

Phillips cell was losing power and Vera was breaking up, figuratively if not literally.

We were dissolving before each other’s eyes, she tried to say. Sometimes, we could barely look at each other. I know it was probably out of guilt, but in the end we weren’t even that sexually compatible.

I always found you sexy, argued Phillip.

They’re not exactly the same thing. I found you sexy but I didn’t want to have sex with you; not when you were with me, not when you were away, Vera said.

What about now? Phillip asked.

Not even now, she said. I love you and I worry about you, but love and worry are not enough.

Phillip wondered what would be enough. He neither loved nor worried about the girl on the train but he very definitely wanted to have sex with her. He also loved and worried about Vera and very definitely wanted to have sex with her too. Of course, unlike Vera, he didn’t have another lover, the reason, he surmised, for his stuff being put into storage.

Vera seemed to have read his mind. Your stuff is in storage because the apartment lease was in my name. Phillip was an unemployed graduate student when they found the apartment near Columbia University off Broadway and not permitted to sign the lease. The apartment was hers legally and there was nothing he could do about it. Anyway, there was nothing he wanted to do about it.

Phillip remembered the love letters he had written Vera their first year together again on yellow lined paper in cursive, how he had described her face and her dark beautiful looks, how he longed to kiss her upon her eyes and the soft places in the corners of her mouth They were so faithful to each other in the early days.

The marriage was over. It was as sad as an Edith Piaf song, and even though the song was in French and he didn’t know a word of what she sang, he understood it.

Vera was really starting to break up. Phillip’s cell battery was running on fumes or what amounted to fumes in a virtual world. Vera said something that Phillip could not make out. I don’t understand you. I can’t make out a word you are saying, he said. Maybe Phillip realized that he never could.

Vera, however, heard every word Phillip said and started to laugh at a perceived irony on her part. It’s all right. You’re all right. That’s all I care about. It’s the reason I called.

Phillip cell caught little of this. Someone was all right. Well, it certainly wasn’t him.

Goodbye, she said. I love you, and Vera closed her cell phone and turned it off so Phillip wouldn’t be able to call her back.

Phillip caught the Goodbye part but not the I love you tag line. He said goodbye to the dead phone, but did not consider calling Vera back. He would have tossed the phone into a sea if he was near a sea, but he was not. He didn’t want to see the phone break into little pieces in the street, so he put it back into his pocket and sat down in the street until he remembered that he was in Barcelona, and could walk the charming narrow streets in absolute solitude and feel sorry for himself Phillip, in fact, an identity crisis in Europe that touched on clinical depression. He was now as distant from his dissertation as he was from Vera, which made sense since both his wife and his dissertation committee were within a short walking distance in uptown Manhattan—but he thought that the old tenured professors probably lived in Westchester and would meet only to shake their heads at the idiots who would never turn in an acceptable dissertation, or get their PhD’s, as long as they were running the show. Phillip walked and walked and thought about Elaine on the train who was at the moment swimming half naked in the Mediterranean Sea, looking beyond the water at the high hills of the Riviera.

Phillip found himself at the large Barcelona railroad terminal walking up and down the long platform