A whole weekend in Montreal? At a hotel? With a bed?
“Yes,” she had said.
Marcus had his one and only suit dry-cleaned, his shirts laundered and ironed, his hair cut, and he shaved. He spent sixty dollars on a cologne he would never have considered buying before. Friday morning he dressed in front of the mirror that was steamed at the edges. His skin was shaved and smooth, his clothing crisp, and he smelled like the sea.
“Yes,” she had said.
“OK,” he said to himself, smiling at the thought.
He drove his Saab 900 with a rip in the driver’s seat. They passed northbound rigs with screaming tires. They listened to NPR until the nation was behind them. They crossed the border north of Brasher Falls State Forest, across the St. Lawrence River, and over Cornwall Island in Canada. The border guard told them to enjoy their stay.
Marcus turned right onto the 401 going east, and from there it was a straight ride into Montreal. That right turn had made everything feel very close, as though the city itself had them in a tractor beam.
Lydia popped in a cassette tape she’d found in the glove compartment. “So,” Lydia had said, as Modern English played “I Melt with You” on Marcus’s cassette.
Marcus raised his eyebrows. “Yup.”
“What’s the big plan?” she asked.
“Check in. Clean up. Go out.”
“So quickly?”
He had made reservations at a restaurant with excellent reviews. The pictures on the website showed a stylish, modern, cosmopolitan space with beautiful people having lively conversations about fascinating topics that entertained themselves and everyone around them. He couldn’t imagine himself at one of the tables and almost didn’t book it. But he could picture her there. He could visualize that room reflecting off her eyes. That he wanted to see.
He called from his house in New York. They answered in French. He spoke English. He spelled his family name for the man on the phone. Of seven letters, two don’t exist in English. Twenty-eight percent of himself was erased in translation.
Ødegård.
His name is derived from a Norwegian term given to the farms emptied by the Black Death of 1349–50. It is a name that still whispers of absolute despair seven centuries later. It is a name that has no place in a restaurant in Montreal with someone as vivacious and present as Lydia Jones.
Momentarily panicked by this thought while driving, he didn’t answer her question and instead asked, “What did you bring to wear?”
Lydia smiled at that. Apparently she had been thinking about something other than the Black Death of 1349–50, because she said: “Do you remember that cat suit Halle Berry was wearing in Catwoman?”
The car followed Marcus’s thoughts into the neighboring lane. Lydia coughed and Marcus returned, though begrudgingly.
Lydia shook her head at him. “You white boys and that cat suit.”
Marcus looked at her forearms and, after, her cheeks. There was copper to her skin. It held sunlight. He tried to open his mouth to answer but had nothing to say.
Lydia ejected the tape and adjusted the radio to a French station playing American music.
After ten minutes of silence, Lydia’s bare feet on the dashboard, Marcus said, “I’ve never been a white boy before.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’ve never really thought of myself as white. I’ve just been me.”
“That’s the essence of white privilege right there.”
“I’m not so sure. I’m not American. I’m Norwegian. We don’t have the same history. We never had anyone else there to define ourselves against, other than the Swedes and Danes who occupied us. I mean . . . I see we’re different. But I didn’t grow up thinking about it the way people do here.”
Lydia smiled at him. “That might be why this works.” And then she tilted her head to the side. “We’ll see.”
The hotel was stylish and glowed lavender by the reception desk, where a perfectly quaffed Moroccan man in his late twenties smiled and took their passports as he clacked away at the keys with the lightness of Art Tatum.
Lydia wore jeans, a powder-blue button-down, and a faded corduroy jacket snatched from a secondhand store, giving her the look of an off-duty model from 1978. In his memory of the day the world seemed to wrap itself around her so that everywhere she went was a perfect fit.
They were issued two plastic cards for keys. A green light, a downward push, and they were in.
Lydia’s suitcase was a rolling garment bag small enough to use as a carry-on. He had packed a leather gym bag. Behind him, Lydia slipped wordlessly into the bathroom while he opened the folding suitcase rack and placed his own bag there, only to find that it drooped between the two nylon straps. He removed the bag, folded the rack, and studied the room for a new plan.
That is when Lydia walked out of the bathroom smelling like Ivory soap and wearing nothing but satin blue panties. She slithered between the bleach-white sheets like a princess, rolled onto her belly, and gave him a look.
Canada was not Mars. It was not an alternative dimension or the far side of the universe. The prevalence of French notwithstanding, Montreal was firmly North American and not the Europe many pretended it to be. And yet, to cross an international border was still a statement—even an achievement of a sort. It was to stand in another history. A place unlike the one on the other side. A life apart. Here, the rules of order, the experience of cause and effect, the very memory of continuity and change were different. Not all the differences were better. But the awareness that the difference existed—that difference was possible—was a kind of freedom. It was a freedom that empowered him. That aroused him. That gave him confidence to put away the fears he’d been building up in himself over the previous month.
He
