The Possibility of Paradise
Most people would claim that they loved to travel, yet so little actually knew how. Knowing how to travel was, like anything, equal parts natural talent and acquired skill. Traveling did not have a monotonous rhythm. It did not consist of going down the lists in the guidebooks, and ticking off must-see sights. It did not mean never looking up from the 4 inch screen of camera or phone. Traveling was finding an answer to the question, why did I, and millions like me, decide to come here in the first place?
Lilah and Cameron were standing before Starry Night Over the Rhone in the Musee d’Orsay in Paris eight weeks after a flight from New York to Madrid started them on their European adventure. They suspected that the world looked different from what their professors saw over the rims of their tortoise-shell glasses. They were tired of listening to life-advice from their stupid drunk friends, and they were tired of worshiping football and alcohol at stadium cathedrals and frat house monasteries. They went to find something new to believe.
“Look, there’s us! That grey shawl does wonders for you,” Cameron said with a grin. He was pointing at the tiny faceless couple at the bottom of the canvass. He resumed his place by Lilah’s side after getting a number of glaring looks from old French madames for standing far too close to the art and talking much too loudly.
“It’s breathtaking,” she sighed.
The two figures were shuffled close together with their heads tilted sideways, as though they too were admiring a painting, as though they were admiring Lilah and Cameron. Lilah began to think of the painting as another reality, and the frame as the portal. It was a reality where things came in thick coarse strokes, watery lines, and monoliths of color and contrast.
She wondered if it occurred to the people in the painting how tiny they were. Two parts in a million that moved together to form a massive and shouting machine. The deep and rough brushstrokes of the sky, and the wet yellow lights, consumed the figures, saturating them in the city’s wild and brilliant dance. The dance was universal of all cities, in fact she was in the dance right now. It was in that dance where possibilities were endless, where every choice opened a new universe. All she wanted was to be absorbed by that dance, to live amongst the colors, drinking in the violet wine of the darkest sky, inhaling the blurred yellow smoke, and watching night after night that exhilarating show.
“What if.” She bit her bottom lip and raised an eyebrow. A tiny wistful smile flickered at the corner of her mouth.
“Well,” she paused again.
“Well what,” he said, growing impatient.
“I was just thinking, what if we decided to live here?”
She was being sentimental, he thought. Of course she knew they had to go back. They had spent the last two months trekking through Europe stopping in Madrid, Barcelona, Rome, Athens, Budapest, Berlin, London, and Dublin, before Paris. They had driven across green countrysides in their trusty little station waggon, wandered through lush forests cloaked in white mist before coming to the noisy, abstract cities. They had crashed on couches of people he was so loosely connected with he couldn’t remember their names, but Lilah had referred to them as friends. He had liked their time in Europe, especially finishing the afternoon at a cafe, and the night at a club. Even if the life Lilah was dreaming of was possible, he wasn’t made for it.
“What if we lived like Michel and Jane?” she asked as she flopped her head onto his shoulder.
“It would be exhausting, after a while.”
“No. It would be fun! Going to the theater, having dinner at a different restaurant every night, going to parties, wasting weekends away in a museum, drinking all the time.”
“We went to parties all the time in college, and we drank all the time in college. Actually we still drink all the time now.”
“But not with our hip-intellectual friends. And we don’t drink like classy Europeans,” Lilah said with a grin.
“Well, I guess not,” Cameron said. He knew all too well what Lilah was trying to do: saying what she really thought but disguising it as a joke. It allowed her to gage his opinion, without revealing her own.
He turned his head slightly to see her profile. Her eyelashes were light and long, hanging over her eyes like tiny thatched roofs. Her nose was small and speckled with freckles. She looked much younger than him, and yet she was almost a year older. Lilah had a childish sense of excitement and wonder that made people think of her as ditzy, and yet she was the smartest person he knew.
“But wouldn’t you get bored after a while? Once your life is that easy what do you have to work towards?” said Cameron.
Lilah turned to him, the softness in her face becoming stern, “They work for their goals. Michel’s first movie came out and Jane is working on her novel.”
“She’s been working on her novel since forever. Besides, it’s not like we have the same financial situation as Jane,” said Cameron.
“What do you mean?” she asked, pressing her lips together.
“Oh come on, like her parents weren’t giving her money before she met Michel. And I’m not entirely sure if they stopped giving her money after she met Michel. Either way she has no income of her own. Doesn’t that bother feminist you?”
“Ok, Jane was not getting money from her parents. She’s had plenty of jobs in the past, and she’s always saved her money. She is just at a point where she’s switching careers,” said Lilah.
“Oh so she’s made enough money to afford an apartment in downtown Paris?”asked Cameron.
“Look, I don’t know her exact money situation, but she’s not the type to rely on other people, she’s just not.”
She watched as Cameron frowned and narrowed his eyes in surrender. She knew this face well. It made an appearance whenever he was annoyed, and yet it still made her laugh inside. Cameron had a face that almost everyone would describe as “boyish.” With his big hazel eyes and round face, he only got cuter when he was annoyed. Lilah had mentioned this before, to which he replied with his usual annoyed face.
She knew Cameron would not be convinced. It always surprised her how often he thought about money. Whenever they were visiting their friends apartments, the first thing he would say to her when they were alone was how much he thought the apartment cost and whether it was too much or too little. She remembered the time in their junior year when he got annoyed with her because she told her mercedes-driving friends how little she payed for her used corolla. Sure Lilah wanted to make money, but she just didn’t have the available brain space to think about it 24/7.
Cameron had no reply. Lilah would see what she chose to see. He turned his attention to the painting. It was bizarre to think that the scene had formed out of nothing more than vibrant liquids squirted from puny tubes on to a relentless canvas. A hundred and thirty years ago, a talentless, insane man sat down to paint. He had built something that would bring purpose to his life long past his death. It was a stunning essay of canvas and color, and like all essays there would be those who wouldn’t see the point. Cameron thought this would go on long past his death (after all, how many people had died since the roman sculptures in the next room were first viewed?). He would leave, and go to his life, job, and future, but the painting would still be here. He imagined coming back to Europe again, in ten, twenty years. He’d take some time off from wall street, go on vacation with his wife and kids. He would come back to this very painting. He loved the idea of the future; there was so much that he wanted to happen, so much that was just out of his reach, but it was the thrill of the chase that kept him moving forward.
“We could do it you know, live in Paris, or Budapest, or Venice, or any where we’ve been,” said Lilah.
“We can’t. We don’t belong here.”
“Maybe you think you don’t.”
“But you always said you didn’t belong in college,” added Lilah.
“I didn’t belong in college, or at least not at our college.”
“Then where do you belong?”
“I don’t belong anywhere. ” replied Cameron.
Lilah turned back to the painting, facing it head on. The colors of the painting seemed to swirl and bleed into reality, engulfing it as the two merged into one. Cameron now noticed that Lilah’s knees were bent, her feet staggered, her shoulders squared, her gaze unbreakable. He was terrified that she was going to run. And in that moment Lilah felt as though one bounding leap would send her into the painting for good.
