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“He’s here.”

Carey has rounded the corner and is facing me with her tan skin and her beautiful hair, her lips that are always perfectly glossed and her milk white teeth.  She’s not smiling.  My stomach falls through to my horribly pink feet, viciously pained from walking in faux leather heels that do not stretch.

I walk straight to my purse and unzip my ugly purple makeup bag, my mother’s Lancôme gift-with-purchase that she then gifted to me.  I pull out a Vicodin I stuck in there that morning.  Last year it was Xanax, which would be a more appropriate chemical compound given the current circumstances, but beggars can’t be choosers.  Anything to disconnect me from reality, anything to make the details feel soft and benign as a pilled cashmere sweater…

We pass wet roofs and flying birds.  Construction workers wait for trains in big boots while an Armageddon sunrise, blue and pink, washes over JFK.  I’m going home for Christmas.  Going home to what, I don’t know.  My brother just told me he’s staying in Colorado with his friend’s family.  My dad is going to camp in Death Valley with Carl, his friend from the 2^nd grade.  My nice grandparents died out a long time ago and the last one who didn’t matter that much anyway died three Christmases ago.

This is Christmas now.

The airport is filled with parents herding children.  Teenagers drag their feet against marble floors reflecting morning light, their faces marred with that appropriately sullen and irritated look that will blight them until the hormones balance out when they graduate high school.

There are holiday wreaths and plastic garlands, a token menorah plugged into an electrical outlet and hidden behind a Christmas tree for good measure.  Some Taylor Swift rip-off sings “Merry Christmas” while I try to find a bag of salted pistachios.  My dad used to eat pistachios.  The floor of his diesel F150 was littered with shells, next to lost Jujubes and strings of chewing tobacco.

The stupid things you remember.

“Jennifer Bahn.”

I’m sitting in the familiar discomfort of a black vinyl chair.  They mispronounce my name.  “Bahn” like ban.  “Bahn” like book ban or smoking ban.  I look up at the screen where half of my name is listed under the cleared list.  I feel myself primed to make a small scene.  Cleared?  I already have a ticket.  Why would I need to be cleared?  I brace myself for the worst: an oversold flight, some dry-toothed American Airlines agent asking me if I would like to forfeit my ticket for a $5 in-flight drink coupon.

“I’m Jennifer Bahn,” I say.  “I already have a ticket.”  And I pass her my carbon-copy-thin piece of paper.

“Well, we’ve changed your seating assignment.”

I stand at the ready.  She passes me a business class hardcopy on blue paper with black letters.

“Merry Christmas.”

There is a God.

I board the plane and organize my things.  A flight attendant takes my coat right as I’m about to cram it above my luggage in the overhead compartment.  “Would you like me to hang this up for you?” she asks.  I’m used to sleeping it over my head, creating a wheezing-cough-free-bubble from the masses crammed around me in steerage.

The disgusting things you’d rather forget.

I am handed a menu for Business Class Brunch.  I didn’t even know they served brunch on planes.  I can choose from a selection of corned beef hash with cream cheese and chives, a seasonal fruit appetizer, or cereal with fruit and berries.  Later on in my in-flight service, I am to be offered a light refreshment paired with freshly baked on-board cookies.  Oh, that’s what that torturous delicious smell is that wafts back towards row 27 right after my ill thought out snacks have been all but depleted.

The plane boards and the people sit down and I am not nervous about crashing because when I am in business class, I feel important and invincible.  Nothing bad happens to people in business class – we get brunch and cookies and fresh hot towels.  Planes don’t crash when I am in business class.  Oh, no, not today they don’t.

Over the course of five hours, I eat food that isn’t that good and movies that are equally unappealing but my legs can stretch into the generous abyss in front of me.  I have a thick blanket made of something other than old red felt and access to a bathroom used by only 5% of the plane’s in-flight population.  And in that space and time of relative comfort, I forget that I wish I had a real family with drunk uncles and cousins I may or may not like, I forget about wanting to marry into a gigantic family with 25-person dinners and weird histories and bad recipes, I forget that Christmas is just going to be me and my mom at a dinner table, eating by ourselves.  I look over at the mother next to me with her well behaved child and think, I can’t wait for my brother to accidentally have one of those, just so we can have Christmas again.

I’m taking half pills of Dominican Xanax to sleep through the next seven uncomfortable hours of my life, crammed in between a plastic wall and a sea of strangers. My brain grinds to a halt while Daphne Whatever-her-name-is stares at me from the cover of Love magazine — sixteen and bleached blonde and with one lazy eye. The engines rev and the passengers take their seats and I leave my most meaningless trip to Paris behind me…

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I spend my last day reclaiming Paris, walking through the sweet monochrome of the Marais, into bookstores and little designer shops.  I’m tired from a restless night under thin sheets.  It was too cold in the apartment and my wet hair kept me up like a boyfriend stealing the covers.

Frantic French teens run along the Rue de Perche, yelling things I cannot understand but a hostility I can feel.  In the center of the fray are two red-faced boys, both scrappy and twelve and utterly terrified, waiting to throw punches.  The uninvolved goad them on, finding an easiness on the periphery.  Passing them with an unaffected calm, a man with white hair cradling a black poodle in one hand, a cigarette in the other.

The boys continue to holler.

Most of the children here are quiet, peaceful.  Young boys and girls walk through morning streets with their parents, holding each other’s hands while they travel over cobblestone.  Sometimes I fear I would be too serious with my child – were I to ever  have one.  I fear that I would too often try to impress upon them the importance of each moment.  I fear that I would force them to notice the changing colors in every sunset, to see the endless nuance of life.  I fear he or she or they would hate me for it, shrugging me off like a child tired of their mother’s suffocating kisses.  “Mooooommmm,” they’d say, “I don’t caaaarreeeeeee.”  And a decade later they would rebel against me, choosing instead to see nothing, choosing to fly through life in a forcefully ignorant haze.  They would become one of the people who surround themselves with things, bury their lives in noise so they never have to confront themselves.  Everything keeps moving so you don’t have to think about how pointless your existence is sometimes.  Everything keeps moving so you can convince yourself you’re not just another lab rat on a hamster wheel.

I walk around the small neighborhood I’ve called home for the last ten days, wondering how I feel about Paris anymore.  Without love or infatuation or whatever it is I once felt here, Paris is just this empty, gray place with narrow streets and people in nice clothes.  The reflection of lights on the Seine makes you sad.  The sparking Eiffel tower on the horizon makes you feel alone.  This city laughs at your loneliness.

Just when I’m sure I hate this place, I come upon a courtyard, breezy and cold, filled with a few straggling tourists and an appropriately nosy security guard.  Gravel crunches underfoot.  There is a tactile nature to this place – a seeing and feeling and hearing that the quietness brings.  I find comfort in the silence of this time.  I sit on a damp bench and note how my hair catches in the breeze, fried bits of blonde straw over my pink nose.  My skin prickles against the cold.

I feel myself well up with tears because why, oh why would anyone ever want to take this away from me – this life that I have – knowing how much I care for it, even when imperfectly alone in perfect Paris.  I would die for the possibility of living forever, if that were even logically achievable.  I want to yell and scream and tear fistfuls of grass from wet soil, red-faced and tear-stained, an impossible American child missing her toy before its even been taken away.

I wait on the subway platform, the air too cold to ride my bike now.  It sits on the street, affixed to a pole while it prays silently to not be stripped of its wheels once again by some crackhead in need of twenty dollars.

A cold wind whips through my hair and chills me from the inside out.  What I have dreaded has returned: the darkness-induced malaise, the need to cuddle up to someone, that indescribable something.  My appetite for quieter things has returned, the hedonistic summer having overwhelmed, the heat having drained.

I need a break.

The G train arrives in the distance, flickering at the end of the tunnel like a freshly struck match, bits of trash incinerating between the wheel and the rail.  Here it comes, the watching again, the observance of everything because winter forces slowness.  I eye the other platform under my black hood in my black tights, listening to my music on shuffle – songs that remind me of dark times because there were so many.  Icy blue days on my icy blue walls, the familiar hissing of my radiator and the cold that stuck to the windows like dust.

Damien Jurado.  James Blake.  Kurt Vile.  Mother fucking winter of 2011.

My knuckles are ruddy from the cold, pale in the spaces in between.  I wait in the stillness that winter brings, its cold chills and goose bumps, the way my muscles ratchet against the bone.

Everyone on the subway looks charming in their button-up coats and their well-worn boots.  Kids playing dress-up.  I stand in the train behind a man reading some badly written newspaper with headlines like “SMARTEN UP, O.”

Michelle is home, organizing the spartan contents of her massive loft that she never spends any time in.  She sits at her large wooden table with the glass top that slides back and forth like water over driftwood, painting her nails some fashionable shade of dead corpse.

“Every New Years, I think about where I will be this time next year,” she says.  We never thought she would be here, living in New York, painting her nails in this beautiful empty space with 1.5 bathrooms and a crystal chandelier.  Then again, I’ve never prophesized my own life in any real way.  I’m supposed to be the editor of a magazine by now, living in some shitty apartment and wearing nice shoes, going to business dinners and paying off monthly installments of student loans.

I walk over to her giant bay of windows that looks onto a tableau of the giant windows of others.  We spy on her shirtless neighbor across the street.

“He’s always home,” Michelle says.  “And he’s got so many goddamn chairs.”

We watch him take something out of the oven while we contemplate his sexual orientation.  “I like him,” I say, “so he must be gay.”  He disappears towards the back.

We lay on her bed, The Beatles playing fifteen hundred square feet away, the radiator roasting us horribly because she hasn’t figured out that there are knobs to turn it down yet.  I laugh because I still feel like a kid even though I’m twenty-seven.  I laugh because Michelle is living in a loft in Tribeca and it all feels so surreal – being older, paying for things, crossing the street without having to hold someone’s hand.  Just another girl playing dress-up, practicing for her future life as an adult.

An hour later, the owner of the house arrives from a day of golfing, tan and sweaty and chortling anecdotes under a baseball cap.  Manservant has already provided us with white plates filled with various sliced meats and carved away cheeses.  Salami, swiss, beef and pork, everything room temperature and sweating in the excessive heat.

“Do you want anything to drink?”

This is the beginning of a very long weekend being waited on constantly.  We will not be allowed to provide for ourselves the rest of the trip.  In addition to manservant, there is a cook and a housekeeper.  After two days of feeling like a handicapped baby, I walk into the kitchen to get something for myself, waving my hands like white flags to the chef in an apology for invading his domain.

“Pear?” I ask, holding the fruit with the intention of wrapping it up in a napkin and taking it outside to eat with, you know, my teeth.

“We do it for you,” he says.

I insist it’s okay.  “I’ll just take it with me.”

“No, no, no.”

I reluctantly hand my pear to manservant, who will deliver it to me thirteen minutes later, cut with the same serrated knife that everything soft here is cut with (the cheeses and fruits all come out looking like DIY crafts projects) and served on a plate with carrot garnish.  I just wanted to eat my fucking fruit.  Just like I want to make my own coffee, scramble my own eggs, toast my own toast.

I hate being waited on.  The process is not only gratingly inefficient, but makes me uncomfortable.  Growing up, we had maybe two different maids for maybe a week apiece.  My mom was always grumbling about how they didn’t know where anything went and porcelain figurines were routinely disemboweled.  As a result, my mess has always been (comfortably), my mess.  My fruit, my fruit.

Manservant serves me wine that begins to warm mid pour.

Juan is from the island, though he currently lives in Puerto Rico, developing large swaths of property in – from what I can immediately gather from his rather, um, abrasive personality – what are likely hostile coups that involve burying the previously owners in their shanty houses before covering them with dirt and erecting something more profitable.

“My grandfather owned half of this fucking island,” he boasts with his trademark Central American slur.  He is nearing forty or turned it recently.  He has the aging face of a petulant baby, big eyebrows stuffed above eyes filled with raucous self-satisfaction and big pillow lips that laugh with his good fortune.

He says something about “being at the top” and American Express black cards.  “There’s nothing higher than this,” he says.  “Where do you go from here?”  He leans back in his char, his arms behind his head, his tennis shoes stretched out in front of him while he surveys his domain.  Actually, while he surveys his parent’s domain.  This is his family’s house.

Juan, apparently, does not care much for his family.  At breakfast one morning, he tells us his family is not “some big, white-teethed family that plays football on the weekends.”  He leans in over his eggs as though we are about to strike a business deal and says something starting with the word “fucking.”  I myself am not one to stray too far from the filthy word trough, but when Juan says “fucking”, it sounds especially depraved, vicious, even.  “Fuckkkeeeng,” he says, his tongue chocking on the “c” and the “k” in the middle.  He laughs like el diablo.

My disdain for Juan grows exponentially over the course of the trip, each hour providing another fifteen reasons not to like him.  He is offensively arrogant.  He talks over everyone and never listens.  You watch him sitting down at dinner, his eyes on the mouth of whoever is speaking, lying in wait until their lips cease moving so that he can move onto what he wants to talk about.

He rails George Clooney.  “Gay,” he spits.  “He has to be gay.  That guy could have anyone in the world and look what he goes after.  Trash.  He’s dating, what?  A waitress right now?”

Eva bristles.  “I know that girl.  She’s very nice.”

“He’s gay.  Anyone with standards that low has to be gay.”

Eva holds onto her wine glass and I watch her breathing become faltered in the way that it does when she becomes impatient or frustrated, a hiccupped seething.

I was not brought here specifically for Juan, though Jack did bring me thinking that, well, maybe something could happen and was worth a shot.  Shot in hell, I think, sitting across from him and feeling my skin burn feverishly in the physical irritation I develop while in his presence.  Funny enough, Juan sort of has a girlfriend: a trashy, unemployed Russian with a young child and a fake nose, who, oddly enough, George Clooney might likely be interested in as well.

The man next to me is on the bad side of sixty, the whites of his eyes yellowed like butter and his nose ruddy with broken capillaries, both of which are the result of a lifetime of excessive drinking.  He’s working on his third 9 a.m. Bloody Mary while he tells me about the laundromats he runs in the Dominican Republic and what to do when I go through their notoriously loose customs.  He leans in towards me when he speaks, offering me uninvited life advice like a creepy uncle.  I want him to go away.

I am saved by the flight attendant who hands Drunk Uncle a hot cup of coffee to sober him up upon our descent.

“Aren’t you a sweetheart,” he says, smiling through his tobacco-stained teeth.

Aren’t you a drunk.

I hope he doesn’t have children.

We are greeted at the gate by an employee of the airport who asks for the $10 per person “visitor’s fee” that Drunk Uncle warned me about.  “Crooks,” he slurred in between peppered swigs of spiked V8 and booze.  The man then takes our respective IDs and disappears into some office where our passports are stamped by someone who apparently doesn’t care to ask us questions about the purpose of our visit or personally assess the possibility we are drug mules or prostitutes.  Drunk Uncle also told me that the Dominican Republic was essentially just the halfway point for illegal activity, providing a place for coke-laden propeller planes to fill up their tanks en route to Miami and fraudulent South Americans to launder their cash.

The air outside is hot and sticky and decidedly warmer than New York City.  A man in a starched white uniform waves at us, a cell phone pressed against his ear.  This is Jack’s friend’s driver and manservant.  He walks us to a mini-van parked outside and we fly out of Santo Domingo.

From what blurs past my window, the outskirts of the city are grossly impoverished.  Houses are shacks made of cinderblock and corrugated metal.  Business signs are largely the hand-painted block letters of a failed graphic design student.  We pass a grocery store with a sign indicating you are not to bring your guns or your babies inside.  The poverty and the heat here feel like the kindling for terrible things under the right conditions.  The normal rules of the developing world seem prudish by the island’s standards.

Families of four ride on motorcycles with no helmets.  Mothers, fathers, infants, usually some tiny baby wrapped in a dishtowel.  Our driver lazily swerves in between puttering mopeds and barreling semi-trucks.  He brakes late and hard at red lights.  Eva is sitting next to me, grabbing the sides of her seat and muttering “oh my god”s with her characteristic breathlessness.  Jack’s sitting up front, having volunteered for the front seat in an accidental act of altruistic martyrdom.

“Did you just…did you just see that car???”

We have narrowly avoided what is likely our seventh car crash in the span of the last thirty minutes.  This driver – this happy, smiling man with big ears and a charmingly loose grip on the English language – is likely the worst driver in the Dominican Republic.

Jack is holding onto the space between the roof and the door, talking to either us or the driver, though it’s obvious that the driver sort of sees everything and sort of doesn’t care about any of it.  People walk through tidal waves of moving traffic.  Cars creep onto roads at the perfect time for cataclysmic carnage.  Motorcycles ride towards us in the opposite direction.  Half of the time there aren’t even painted lines on the road so as to aid in the flow of traffic by indicating who goes where, which would likely fuck with their incredibly inefficient system called Everyone Goes Everywhere Whenever They Want.

There is a lawlessness here that usually accompanies a haphazard respect for human life.  It’s different than the Auto Bahn chaos of Europe or the crazed fury of Mexico.  This is the kind of place where if you were to die, no one would care.

After an hour and a half of white-knuckles and held-in breath, we arrive at the gates of the “resort”, which is really an extremely large, extremely isolated community far away from the poverty of the Dominican city centers.  We drive through winding, empty streets with natural grass embankments and lush tropical flora, eventually arriving at an ambiguously Mediterranean house with a large glass door and a few security guards in powder blue polo shirts.

The driver takes my bag, wheeling it over the stone and grass walkway and into an over-air conditioned and massive living room filled with kitsch raw silk pillows and glass vases filled with fake flowers.  It’s like the Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland and some Orange County nouveau riche mansion had a one-night stand and this place was the resulting bastard child.

We walk through the house and into the backyard, where trees hang over a narrow blue swimming pool and Spanish tiles.  “Your room,” the manservant says, pointing to a guestroom with a giant king-sized bed swimming in white mosquito netting, flanked by bedside tables littered with inspiration self-help books with a vaguely Christian bent.  The towels in the bathroom are all monogrammed, as if to remind the guest where they are staying while they dry their hands after using the toilet.

To be continued…