Exposure

days—a short time by most vacationers’ standards, yet this is monumental. I’ve slept in the same bed every single night for the past five years, with the exception of one evening I passed slumped in a chair at my mother’s bedside in the hospital. Four days is an eternity to be away from my routines, stranded far outside my precious, hateful safe zone.
Yet somehow…
I don’t feel as I’d expected. My panic faded when we left the town behind, calm growing with every kilometer we put between us and civilization.
“Ooh,” Caroly calls. “This is lovely.”
I follow her voice across the living room and into the master bedroom. Its double glass doors open onto an overgrown garden and in the far, far distance, you can make out a steeple and the roofs of a tiny village, and the dark stripe of a river snaking through the valley.
Caroly bounces on the bed. It’s wide, made up in a thick, colorful quilt and lit by matching sconces on either side. So different than my dark bedroom, set for seduction. No pigeons roosting beyond the windowpanes, just the hum of insects getting ready for their evening shift. No twinkling city lights, but soon enough, surely more stars than I’ve seen in half a lifetime.
“I wonder what sort of moon it will be.” I should know these things. People who leave their homes know these things; people who keep their curtains open and enjoy things as vast and crushing as the sky.
“Just past full,” Caroly supplies, staring through the windows at the sinking sun. The edges of her dark-blonde curls are tinted pink by the light, skin stained rosy. I move to sit beside her, taking her hand atop the covers.
“This was a very good idea.”
“How are you feeling?”
I shrug. “I’m still a bit raw from the journey. And from the…differentness. I doubt it will fade completely while we’re here, but it’s the being here that’s important.” I squeeze her hand. “Getting you your stone cottage. A trip to mark the official start of all these new changes.”
And so much will change when this holiday is over. A few days of leisure in a calm place where I may stand a chance at truly relaxing, then the stress of the drive and the train and the taxi. Then home, blessed familiarity with the added excitement of Caroly. Her things have been moved in; welcome additions that make me see my flat through new eyes. A brief domestic respite before the hard adjustments begin. Necessary struggles.
I accepted a job two weeks ago, one that fell into my lap custom-made, the answer to an unarticulated prayer. The elderly proprietor of a shop in Gobelins offered me part-time work, mending antique watches and other mechanical curiosities. His eyes and back and fingers are growing too weak for the task.
I took Caroly there one afternoon and the owner had been at work, operating on the guts of a grandfather clock. He’d been struggling with the escape wheel, and Caroly volunteered me to take a look. To say I “dabble” with clockwork is to say an alcoholic “enjoys the odd tipple”. I’d never have offered my help, afraid to sound too pushy or patronizing. But my help was welcomed gratefully, and we left an hour later, she with a new charm for her bracelet and I with an offer of sporadic employment, doing the thing I love best.
Well, the thing I love best aside from seducing Caroly.
The wage I’ll make from the antique shop is a fraction of what I commanded as a prostitute. But I have much in savings, and I’ll earn enough to feel I’m contributing. Far more worrisome than the pay cut is that the job will demand I walk ten blocks to the shop, several days a week. That’s ten blocks outside my miniscule comfort zone, but a pretty enough commute, with walk signals at most of the street crossings.
“You’ll be getting paid to do exposure therapy,” Caroly had suggested as we marked up a map with colored pens. You’d think we were negotiating a route into darkest uncharted Africa, not a two-kilometer stroll through the only city I’ve called home. She’s right though. The prospect of enjoying so many new mechanical challenges will ease the way there, and the promise of seeing Caroly when I return home will make the return trip bearable. As much as it scares me, I’m eager to look back a year from now and see just how much more manageable the journey might feel.
I’ve said goodbye to my clients over the past month and a half, all beloved acquaintances, welcomed visitors to my lonely realm. Yet as my world’s grown bigger, I’ve found there’s no room for them in it. The monogamy I never thought I valued has grown magnetically attractive and changed my priorities. As much as I’ve cherished the years I spent with those women, their company enabled me. It fed my bank account but also my crippling anxiety, and a time has come when I finally prefer to feel frightened and alive rather than safe and numb.
I lace my fingers with Caroly’s. “You did very well driving.” She’d been as nervous as I’ve ever seen her…save perhaps for the evening she first turned up on my threshold.
“I did, didn’t I? It’s been so long, I wondered if I’d remember how. Thank goodness the French drive on the right. Otherwise I’d probably have drifted into the other lane out of habit and gotten us killed. But we made it.”
“We did.”
“I’ll be our chauffeur if you’ll translate. Provençal may as well be Esperanto, to my ears.”
Caroly is American, and after living in Paris for two and a half years her French is strong, if inelegant. She has a keen eye for anything artistic, a thousand names for the color blue, but no ear for languages. I speak French of course, and English and Portuguese and Spanish as well, and passable Italian. These are the ways in which a shut-in does