Chapter 23
23
Lisbon, Portugal
April 25, 2010
Tess had told me weeks ago to clear my schedule for a birthday surprise. Thinking she meant a nice dinner, or a trip to Jane Austen’s house, I’d assumed one day was enough.
It was not. My birthday surprise was a ticket: British Airways, Heathrow to Lisbon round-trip, a whole week. Hotel, too, and all courtesy of Tess.
“Isn’t it brilliant?” Tess had said, hands clasped together to rein in her excitement. “Zara was talking about Monte Carlo, hitting the casinos and all that, but Callum jumped in and suggested Portugal.”
“He did?”
“Said gambling wasn’t your thing, but you’d mentioned wanting to see Lisbon.” I had, of course, in passing, and now Callum had used it to rescue me from the high-roller tables of Monte Carlo. Thoughtful, and confusing, after the way we’d left things on the Heath.
I’d had to scramble to rearrange my tutoring students and study groups for the trip and postpone the start of classes at two new schools I’d lined up. One was the Lycée Francais in South Kensington and the other was Muswell Hill Academy, an elite private school north of Highgate. The headmaster wasn’t willing to pay my fee up front, only at the end of the course, so I felt comfortable negotiating a much higher fee—the most I’d ever asked for. He didn’t bat an eye.
I’d barely had time to call Liv and Andre and apologize for missing the birthday we’d planned—going to see the new documentary on Banksy, and then a mini tour of London’s best street art. “Got a better offer, is it?” Andre said. “I see how it is.” He said it jokingly, but there was hurt in his voice. What could I do, though? The flight was already booked. We’d do the whole tour when I got back, I promised, movie tickets on me, but he only said, “Don’t forget to come round the flat and pick up your mail before you fly off. You’ve got piles.”
For a week, the trip seemed unlikely—flights still grounded by the cloud of volcanic ash—but airspace cleared just in time. And now here I was, in a baroque hotel room that adjoined with Tess and Ginny’s, Zara across the hall, Hamza and Callum and Seb a few rooms down. Theo had been the only one to miss out, apologetically unable to leave Madrid, reshuffling all his volcano-canceled meetings.
We were staying in a hotel called the Pestana Palace, an actual nineteenth-century palace built by a marquis with coffee-plantation money. The staff would neither confirm nor deny that Prince was staying there, in the Marquis Suite, but Ginny had seen him getting into a car when she came back from grabbing cigarettes.
This hotel made the Savoy feel austere. Everything was ornate and antique, Regency style, bright colors and dark wood and vases. There was a Turkish spa, a rare-bird enclosure, and a two-story chapel with stained glass windows. Early this morning, I’d gone down to the chapel while the others slept off the food and wine. The windows cast red and yellow patterns on the floor mosaics, and it looked like something I would’ve shown Mom in the library a dozen years ago, her finger tracing the twin stone staircases, spiraling down the page. I wished she could see me here. I wished she knew how things had turned around for me, at last. She had always believed they would.
After, I returned to my room and drank espresso on my small stone terrace until the others woke up. I looked down the hill at the wide Tagus River and the huge red suspension bridge that spanned it—the Ponte 25 de Abril, named after Portugal’s Freedom Day, which was also my birthday, and also today.
I’d been nervous about the trip, at first. We’d only been friends three months, and suddenly I’d be with them 24/7 for a whole week. I’d have to spend for meals, drinks, incidentals. Buy a few new outfits, too, since I was determined not to dip into Faye’s closet anymore.
But now, three days in, all my nerves were gone. We spent our days exploring Lisbon, Callum our tireless guide: ruins, churches, monasteries, the oldest operating bookstore in the world, an art district called LX Factory. Nights, we ate good food, drank wine, sampled dark, mysterious fado bars. I didn’t even try to hide my excitement, to play it cool for the others, who traveled so often and so easily. I probably couldn’t have, anyway. Callum recognized my elation, and it put us, for once, in agreement. Our guards lowered just a little; we laughed more.
Tonight would probably undo that. I’d been looking forward to my birthday dinner all week, but I knew Callum would be dreading it—just the kind of fancy night out he was sick of. The girls had required no less than two Michelin stars for the occasion. Their treat.
The restaurant was nondescript from the outside, easy to miss, but inside, high vaulted stone ceilings arched over us. The building looked very old, a contrast to the sharp white tables and modern light fixtures. “Used to be a monastery,” Callum said, following my gaze.
Before I could reply, the host was leading us to our table. Someone was already sitting there.
Theo. He stood up, grinning at my confusion. His large hands spread open in front of him.
“What?” I said stupidly. “Why aren’t you in Madrid?” He caught me up in a hug, and I could feel his chest jerking with laughter.
“The flight’s hardly an hour, so thought I’d pop over. Just for the main event. And then I’m a pumpkin, first thing tomorrow morning.”
“You came just for the night?” I said. What I thought was, You came just for me? Leaning into him, I let his length, his smell, his arms undo whatever hesitations I’d had about the Michelin-starred evening. With Theo, I never felt out of place.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Callum frown and turn away. Probably Theo and I were making a scene, pressed together in the hushed restaurant. I stepped back. Theo pulled out a chair for me, next to his.
A soft-spoken waiter came to ask which of the tasting menus our table would be having; we all had to get the same thing, all eleven courses. Seb wanted the avant-garde “evolution” menu, but Callum suggested the classic menu, a modern, upscale take on traditional Portuguese dishes. Theo wanted me to decide, and I wanted very much not to, but eventually we settled on the classic menu, with the wine pairing. The per-person price, in tiny font, was €350. Roughly $460, more than I spent on food in a month, though no one would let the birthday girl pay. A hot thread of acid nudged gently up my esophagus, and I reached for my water glass. This was what I’d wanted, wasn’t it? But still, the number clanged in my head, echoing like a rung bell.
“All right?” Theo asked, shrugging an arm over my shoulders.
I lowered my voice so only he could hear. “It’s just a bit overwhelming,” I said.
He squeezed me into him for just a moment. “It’s meant to be, that’s sort of the magic,” he said. “Just relax, I know you’ll like it.”
The first course arrived with a flurry of servers; eight of them came together and, in a perfectly timed and choreographed flourish, deposited small plates in front of us. Each plate held a thimble of frothy liquid and a marble-sized white something topped with a dollop of black and a tiny pink flower. “Your first taste moment ,” the waiter began, in his hushed voice, “is a trout liver cream topped with trout roe, alongside an elderflower lemonade foam. The chef suggests that you eat one bite, sip the foam”—he mimed sipping from the tiny cup—“then finish with the second bite, and the foam again.”
I glanced around to see if anyone else thought these instructions were funny, but they were looking expectantly at a thin, attractive, birdlike man who had arrived with a bottle of wine. He poured a small amount into each glass, elegant and unhurried, and then stood between me and Tess, holding the bottle out, describing for the table the provenance and character of the wine. He did so in a voice so low and soft that it was actually impossible to hear him; he went on for a full minute, and I caught “Algarve” and “grape,” and nothing more. It felt like a Saturday Night Live skit.
“Could you hear anything that fellow said?” Theo asked when the wine man had gone.
“He said it was from the Algarve,” Tess said. “That’s all I got.”
We all ate as instructed—bite, sip, bite, sip, and the food was gone in less time than it had taken the flock of servers to set it down. It was tasty, of course—the fish savory and rich, the lemonade foam sharp and light. Our plates were instantly gone, and we hurried to drink our small pour of wine, as the servers gathered ranks to ambush us with the next tiny course.
The next “taste moment” was the chef’s take on a traditional Algarve carrot salad: thin slices of carrots in sweetened cashew milk with green olives. The “olives” were actually just liquidy orbs, squeezed green olive juice that had been somehow, bafflingly, coached back into the shape of the original fruit. The birdlike man came by again and spoke in his silent way about the next wine. I wondered if we could get him to do it in mime.
The next few courses were a blur. Then, with much fanfare, the waiter announced the chef’s most famous dish—a runny egg, the yolk covered in delicate gold leaf.
I was beginning to feel a bit queasy, and not just from the food. I felt like I was in some kind of ritual of wealth. And it wasn’t the kind of ritual you could exit. The theme here was supposed to be traditional dishes, but this food bore no likeness to anything I’d eaten in Lisbon so far.
All over the city, at every meal, Callum had been passing us Portuguese foods to try—custard tarts, sardines, salt cod with potatoes and eggs. I looked up at him now, and we made eye contact across the table. Was he used to this kind of rite? The others were egg-focused, so I risked a tiny, ambiguous shrug in his direction. His lips quirked up to one side, and he nodded minutely.
It didn’t make me feel any better. It just meant there were two of us here, going through the motions. And those motions cost enough to buy dozens of insulin vials. Hundreds, thousands of test strips.
Theo put his arm around me in my chair, asked how I liked the food. I told him it was great. I didn’t want to disappoint him, after he’d come all this way just for my birthday. Or Tess, who’d been so generous, arranging the meal for me. It wasn’t her fault—I’d been sure I would like it. At this table, only Callum had recognized my discomfort. But I’d never shown the others a true version of me, so how would they know?
This meal was meant to be the grand finale to what had been, to me, a perfect day. We’d spent it wandering Lisbon—hilly mazelike streets, peaks and valleys, hundreds of stairs—enjoying the endless street parties for Freedom Day, which celebrated the 1974 military coup that overthrew the dictatorship. Almost no shots were fired, and elated civilians put red carnations in the barrels of the soldiers’ guns. Today, the flowers were all over the city, wherever we went.
We ended up in a wide-open plaza by the river, where people were beginning to gather for the sunset. A helicopter came overhead: hovering, deafening. We covered our ears and looked at each other. Suddenly, red carnations were raining down on us, scattered from the helicopter. I was so overwhelmed—the magnificent noise of it, the red flowers falling headfirst through the sky, top-heavy, spinning end on end. The happiness felt like a heaviness in my body, like gravity pressing me into this beautiful spot, holding me here until I understood that everything, in that moment, was perfect. Whatever I’d come here for—left home for—it had all been worth it.
I should’ve known that dinner would be a disappointment, in comparison. Callum caught my eye over the next course and gave me another encouraging smile, and I wondered what he was thinking. In that moment, all I wanted was to be on Parliament Hill with Liv and Andre, eating baklava with my fingers from a Styrofoam tray.
When the wine man returned and began his soundless, noiseless explanation of the bottle, while everyone listened politely as if they could hear, I couldn’t help it—I felt the absurdity building inside me, in the shape of a laugh, and that laugh wanted very much to come out. I pressed my lips together tightly, but I could feel them turning up into a smile, so I pressed my fingers to them. The wine man was over my shoulder, so he couldn’t see, but Callum was watching me, and his dark eyes were smiling, too, and then his mouth was quivering. I held my napkin to my mouth and made the laugh into a strangled sort of cough. Theo patted my back absently, like I was a baby in need of burping.
Just as I was getting a handle on myself, the lead waiter came over with a small cast iron pot in his hands. “Before you have your moment with the squab,” he said, as solemnly as a priest, “the chef wanted you to see how the squab is smoked, here, on a bed of hay.” Grasping the lid on the pot, he marched around the table, opening it ceremoniously for each of us to smell and see. I wondered how many times a night he performed this squab-smelling ritual.
When I was a kid, every few months, Mom would get out the pancake mix and announce breakfast for dinner. She’d make it fun and silly, like she was confused whether it was morning or night. I got to shape the pancakes into faces or animal shapes. Probably I was thirteen or fourteen by the time I figured out that pancakes were a meal she made when the groceries ran out before the paycheck came in. Just add water.
Something was humming behind my ribs again. Maybe a laugh, but it also felt possible, in this moment, that it could be a scream or a sob. I had wanted this. Now I just wanted it to be over.
I stood up. Before I could even push my chair back, a server was at my side. “ Senhorita? ” he asked.
Flustered, I said, “I’m just going to the bathroom.” I needed a few minutes of stillness. Silence.
“Ah, of course, we will take you,” he said, motioning for a server to escort me. “The chef will hold the next course for the table.”
“Oh, that’s not necessary.”
The waiter looked at me blankly. Of course it was necessary. They couldn’t serve the next course, every plate hitting the tablecloth at the same millisecond, if I was not there. And probably the food would be ruined if they held it until I returned. I sat back down.
“I’ll wait till later,” I said. Theo patted my leg, kissed me, reminded me not to forget my wine.
Since I’d moved to Highgate, I’d been telling myself that this was it: I’d made it. I’d transformed my life, transformed myself. I’d even believed it, after a while, when I saw that the people sitting around this table believed it, too. I’d lost myself, but hadn’t I wanted to?
Here I was, living the kind of life my father had told me I would never have. I had succeeded, if that was the goal—showing him he’d been wrong to doubt me, showing Mom she’d been right to encourage me. I was doing it. And it was nice here, at the top. It really was. But it was just gold leaf on a runny egg.
My parents hadn’t urged me to succeed and do well so I could have nicer things than them, or eat at nicer restaurants, or have more impressive friends. They had only wanted me to live without the strangling weight of worry. My mother wanted me not to have to balance my checkbook. To just know the money was there when it was needed. She didn’t want me to feel the exhaustion of it, every day, the way she had, draining the years from her life.
My parents had just wanted me to be free, but I did not feel free; I felt like I was suffocating under a different weight. And I didn’t know how to get out from under it, now that I’d worked so hard to leave myself behind.