Two Apples

By Dennis Vannatta

 

Noah and Emma were in the fourth day of their visit to Lisbon. They were enjoying themselves immensely, for the most part. They woke to cloudless skies every morning. The Portuguese seemed genuinely friendly. Prices were low compared to Switzerland, their last trip overseas. Although a wine enthusiast, Noah had never drunk port, convinced it would be too sweet for him.

But, trying to get in the spirit of things, he’d sampled port standing up at a yard-long bar in a little shop, found that he liked it, and after that ended every evening with a glass of port on the rooftop bar of their hotel, the Parque Eduardo VII spread out beneath them.

For her part, Emma, who wouldn’t dream of eating a sardine dripping oil from a can, ate them with great relish two nights in a row in rice dishes whose names she couldn’t pronounce.

The strangest accent, Portuguese. It sounded more Russian to them than Spanish, which they’d expected. But the accent was part of the charm of the city, which they planned to recommend to friends back home.

Nothing is perfect, of course. Yes, Lisbon was a lovely city built, like Rome, on seven hills, and its cobblestone sidewalks leant it an old-world charm. Public transportation was cheap and efficient, but they wound up doing a lot of walking anyway, and in this respect the hills and cobblestones were a drawback.

Under the best of circumstances, Noah had to be mindful of his feet. He wore orthotics in his shoes because of fallen arches, which embarrassed him. He was only in his early forties and thought of fallen arches as an old-man thing. The hills bothered him, and he ended each day with his shoes and socks off, massaging his feet, careful to sit on the opposite side of the bed with his back to Emma so she wouldn’t witness the disgusting spectacle.

The hills didn’t bother Emma, but the cobblestones did. She wasn’t entirely blameless in this because she insisted on wearing heels, not the five-inch stilettos she wore back in the U.S. but two-inch ones. (“What do you call these? Paring knives?” Noah joked, and Emma rolled her eyes.)

Fortunately, they’d encountered not a single drop of rain, or the cobblestones would have been impossible for her. As it was, she half-stumbled more than once and twisted her ankle coming out of the Basilica da Estrela in the Bairo Alto. Noah didn’t waste his time suggesting she wear more comfortable shoes.

Heels, even the “paring knives,” enhanced legs that were pretty damn good even without them. Men looked at her legs when she walked past. She knew it, and Noah knew it. It gave him a thrill of pride although it also exacerbated his sensitivity about his fallen arches.

“Do you want me to massage your feet?” he asked her on the evening of the day she turned her ankle.

“No, my feet are fine,” she said. But a minute later she opened the bottle of Tylenol.

 

*

They couldn’t have known, but probably they would have been better off not saving the Alfama for their last day in Lisbon, when they were increasingly feeling the effects of walking.

In the Alfama, a warren of streets meeting at odd angles as if by surprise and then shooting off any which way, public transportation was pointless, and once they rose up out of the metro in the Praça do Comércio, it was walk, walk, walk.

“Maps are almost useless here,” their Fodor’s said, and Noah and Emma soon learned the truth of it.

“Let’s head for that castle, the Castelo de São Jorge, I believe it is,” Noah said, twisting his mouth around as if that would give it the flavor of the original Portuguese. They could see one turret rising above a row of tile-fronted buildings, flowers hanging down from tiny balconies and window boxes.

“It can’t be more than two blocks away as the crow flies,” he said, and Emma smirked at yet another of his “country” expressions. Emma was from Chicago and Noah from a town downstate smaller than her high school.

Noah noticed the smirk but chose to ignore it.

“We’ll just start walking, and when we get to an intersection, we’ll take whatever street seems to be going upward, in the direction of the castle. Just keep angling upward. The views are spectacular—that’s what the Fodor’s says. The castle itself is mostly a fairly recent redo, so the views are the thing. That’s what the Fodor’s says, anyway.”

In their brief time in Lisbon, they had learned not to be too scrupulous about things like crossing with green lights, so at the first break in the traffic Noah started across the street. He immediately stepped back onto the curb, though, when he saw that Emma wasn’t following him. She was standing there reading the Fodor’s.

“Did you find a better way? Or maybe you don’t want to go to the castle?”

She looked up and smiled brightly.

“Oh no, I’m sure the castle will be fun. I’m just reading, that’s all.”

She closed the book and took off across the street, Noah hurrying along behind her.

They began walking the streets, angling upward.

Two hours later, they still hadn’t found the castle. Hadn’t caught so much as a glimpse of it since they crossed the street at the base of the hill.

“I don’t know how we could have missed that son of a bitch,” Noah said, peering morosely at the street map in the Fodor’s. Emma laughed, and Noah tried to grin in self-deprecation, but it came out as a grimace.

“Don’t take it so hard, Noah. We’ve enjoyed the Alfama, haven’t we?”

“I suppose so. Still . . .”

In fact, the morning hadn’t been a waste at all. They’d come across two churches in their wanderings, paid a modest fee to tour one and entered the other free of charge. Each in its own way was magnificent, beggaring any church they’d seen in the States.

Of course, Emma just had to read every single word in English on every single sign and plaque, but Noah was used to that. He was glad she was having a good time. That was the purpose of the trip, after all, to get out of the old rut and see if they couldn’t enjoy each other’s company again.

When they weren’t touring churches, they were browsing through souvenir shops for something to take back to their nieces, the twins Isabelle and Lorelei. Emma finally decided on ballcaps for each. The caps—pink with a gold shield or heraldic device and PORTUGAL in white lettering across the bill—were identical to avoid fights over who got which.

Noah was about to ask if eight-year-old girls would really care about ballcaps when he was brought up short by the image of Emma on her morning jogs in the neighborhood. She’d wear a ballcap with her long blond ponytail flopping up and down out of the hole at the back of the cap as she ran in a halter top or T-shirt in warm weather or a sweatshirt in cold, but always shorts and those legs, those long legs.

From behind the drapes in the living room, he’d watch her as she jogged away from the house and would wait for her and watch as she jogged back, dreaming of wrestling her good-naturedly onto the bed, protesting but laughing as he pulled off her sneakers and socks and shorts.

Then they’d make love. It was a thing they might have done in the early years of their marriage, probably did do, in fact. But Noah didn’t expend much energy trying to remember. What would be the point now?

They came out of the souvenir shop, and Emma had the ballcaps safely tucked into the large zippered bag she carried in lieu of a purse. Noah looked at his watch and saw that it was after 1:00.

“Time for lunch. Let’s find some place we can sit inside in the AC and rest our dogs,” he said.

“Rest our dogs,” Emma repeated, but she had her face turned, and he couldn’t see her expression. He told himself that she’d said it wryly but affectionately.

 

*

They found a café with sandwich boards in front sporting photos of various dishes, the names underneath in Portuguese and English. Accompanying the sandwich boards on the outdoor patio were five wrought-iron tables covered in red and white checkerboard tablecloths, each shaded by a red and white umbrella.

Emma seemed to be heading in the direction of a vacant table, but Noah guided her inside where the air conditioning was almost as cool as he would have liked.

“What are you going to have to drink?” Noah asked as he looked over the menu.

“Not another Coke Zero, I can tell you that. I’ve had two already this trip, and I don’t plan on having another one the rest of my life.”

Emma was a Diet Coke person. Noah preferred Diet Coke, too, but he wasn’t a fanatic about it.

“Maybe they’ll have lemonade,” Emma said. “I wonder what lemonade is in Portuguese.”

When the waitress came over, Noah ordered a Coke Zero for himself and asked if they had lemonade, but she didn’t understand him. He thumbed through his little Portuguese-English dictionary, then asked for limão bebida. The waitress returned a few minutes later with a Coke Zero and a green bottle containing a pale liquid.

Emma took one sip and announced, “Lemonade! And delicious. Quite refreshing.”

Noah beamed, but Emma turned her attention to the menu and made no further mention of his triumph with the lemonade.

The food was supposedly genuine Portuguese fare. Noah chose a dish that was described as duck. In fact, there were several duck dishes on the menu, and Noah wondered if duck actually referred to chicken in Portuguese.

When his food arrived, he tasted it and said that, duck or chicken, it wasn’t bad at all. Emma ordered a cod-cake dish, took one bite and declared that the cod-cake tasted like fish sticks except not as good. She did eat the lettuce and shredded-carrot salad, though, and both rolls that came in the little basket. Noah was still eating when she finished. She was sitting across from him with her bare feet up on the chair beside him.

She had beautiful feet. Noah continued eating with his fork in his right hand. Casually, he dropped his left hand onto her feet and gave them a little squeeze, but she twitched his hand off.

“Don’t. My feet are hot.”

She had beautiful feet except for a yellowish callus on the ball of each foot and a yellowish rim of callus on the back edges of her heels. She used a pumice stone on her feet every day in the shower but couldn’t get rid of the calluses—because of her daily runs, she said.

Once during a fight, Noah had said, “You’re not so goddamn perfect. You have calluses on your feet.” She’d laughed, but he could tell that it’d hurt her. He never mentioned her calluses again but held them in reserve, just in case he really needed them sometime.

The moment he’d finished the last forkful of his rice, Emma yawned and stretched and said, “You know what would be nice? A nice piece of fruit. I haven’t had a nice piece of fruit since we got here.”

“There’s watermelon and cantaloupe and honeydew on the breakfast buffet in our hotel every morning. You’ve been eating that.”

 

“That was more like fruit cocktail. I’m talking about a nice piece of fruit. . . . O M G, no sooner said!”

She pointed at something behind him. He turned and looked. Behind a little counter was a row of shelves holding bottles of wine, baskets of long, thin loaves of bread, and little vases of flowers. On the top shelf was a clear bowl containing two bright red apples.

“Can you believe that? Two apples. Perfect,” she said.

Noah pushed himself away from the table, stood up, and said, “Whatever my lady desires.”

“Come back with your shield, or on it,” she said.

Their waitress came to the counter as soon as she saw him standing there.

“Hi, could we have those two apples?” he asked, pointing at the top shelf.

She turned and looked behind her and then back at him, frowning in puzzlement.

“Apples. Those two apples,” he said again, pointing. She turned and looked, turned back to him, mystified.

“Pommes,” he said, thinking maybe she’d know French. No luck. Little wonder. They hadn’t heard anyone speak French since they’d been in Portugal. Germans, now, their hotel was crawling with Germans. Noah had had two semesters of German in college. What the hell was apple in German? No, he didn’t remember any German Nein Deutsch.

“Apples!” he said, raising his voice without really intending to.

Another waitress came over to the counter. Noah pointed at the apples and said, “Apples.” The second waitress looked up at the shelf, and she began to laugh. Then the other waitress got the joke and laughed, too.

They both pointed at the apples and began talking over one another so that he couldn’t understand what they were trying to tell him. But then he caught it, one word: plástico.

“Oh, they’re artificial,” he said.

“Não. Plástico,” the waitress said, and then the two of them began laughing again with Noah joining in until he turned and saw that Emma was laughing so hard she was leaning over on her elbow for support. Then, because she was laughing enough for the two of them, Noah stopped.

 

*

 

When they left the café, they turned to the right but only because they had to go one way or another, so why not right?

Noah sensed that they’d come about halfway down the long hill, and if they just kept on going down at every intersection, before long they’d be back to the busy street that ran beside the Tagus, and then it’d be only a few blocks to their metro station.

Soon, though, the street began to rise gradually instead of descending toward the river.

Noah was all set to turn around when Emma said, “Are you sure we’re going in the right direction?” And he said, “How the hell should I know?” and continued on.

A young couple was coming down the street toward them, holding hands and taking up most of the sidewalk. To pass them, Noah and Emma squeezed over alongside a very low wall that bordered a drop-off of a dozen feet or so to a concrete area below.

If I gave her just a little tug, Emma would go right over the side, he thought, and was shaking his head at the crazy notion when Emma suddenly lurched—did she stumble on the cobblestones?—jostling Noah and sending him over the wall.

The wall sloped slightly outward as it descended from the street to the common area—fortunate for Noah, who did not fall straight to the concrete but half-skidded, half-rolled his way downward. If he didn’t hit the bottom with lethal force, he hit it hard enough that he felt something give in the shoulder that he’d separated twice before he quit the football team in high school.

He let out a scream of pain and clapped his hand over his mouth in embarrassment.

Three backdoors opened onto the common area, an old-fashioned baby buggy beside one, trashcans and boxes by the others. No one appeared in response to his scream.

He looked up at the top of the wall. There was Emma peering down at him.

He called up to her, “It was an accident, sweetheart! I know you didn’t mean to do it!”

She disappeared.

“Just keep going, either way, doesn’t matter,” he called out. “Just go lower at every intersection you come to. Just keep going lower and back this way.

 

Eventually you’ll find me.”

There was no reply from above. He couldn’t see her. She was gone.

He tried to stand up, but a jolt of pain shot from the back of bis head through his bowels. He was afraid he’d suffered something much worse than just a shoulder separation. He lay on the concrete, looking upward.

Occasionally he’d see the heads of pedestrians moving past. He wanted to call up to them but didn’t. He didn’t know their language.

He didn’t want to be in Lisbon anymore.

In his pain and misery, he felt like shouting, I want to go home! But then came a terrifying moment when for the life of him he couldn’t remember where that was.

 

Dennis Vannatta from US is a Pushcart and Porter Prize winner, with essays and stories published in many magazines and anthologies, including ActiveMuse, River Styx, Chariton Review, Boulevard, and Antioch Review. His sixth collection of stories, The Only World You Get¸ was published by Et Alia Press.