AS GOOD AS A REST
by LAWRENCE BLOCK
Andrew says the whole point of a vacation is to change your perspective of the world. A change is as good as a rest, he says, and vacations are about change, not rest. If we just wanted a rest, he says, we could stop the mail and disconnect the phone and stay home: that would add up to more of a traditional rest than traipsing all over Europe. Sitting in front of the television set with your feet up, he says, is generally considered to be more restful than climbing the forty-two thousand steps to the top of Notre Dame. Of course, there aren’t forty-two thousand steps, but it did seem like it at the time. We were with the Dattners—by the time we got to Paris the four of us had already buddied up—and Harry kept wondering aloud why the genius who’d built the cathedral hadn’t thought to put in an elevator. And Sue, who’d struck me earlier as unlikely to be afraid of anything, turned out to be petrified of heights. There are two staircases at Notre Dame, one going up and one coming down, and to get from one to the other you have to walk along this high ledge. It’s really quite wide, even at its narrowest, and the view of the rooftops of Paris is magnificent, but all of this was wasted on Sue, who clung to the rear wall with her eyes clenched shut.
Andrew took her arm and walked her through it, while Harry and I looked out at the City of Light. “It’s high open spaces that does it to her,” he told me. “Yesterday, the Eiffel Tower, no problem, because the space was enclosed. But when it’s open she starts getting afraid that she’ll get sucked over the side or that she’ll get this sudden impulse to jump, and, well, you see what it does to her.”
While neither Andrew nor I is troubled by heights, whether open or enclosed, the climb to the top of the cathedral wasn’t the sort of thing we’d have done at home, especially since we’d already had a spectacular view of the city the day before from the Eiffel Tower. I’m not mad about walking stairs, but it didn’t occur to me to pass up the climb. For that matter, I’m not that mad about walking generally—Andrew says I won’t go anywhere without a guaranteed parking space—but it seems to me that I walked from one end of Europe to the other, and didn’t mind a bit.
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