It's with Karen that for the first time Jim feels like a grown-up. Something about having her in his life makes wearing a suit and tie feel less like playing pretend, makes fucking with Dwight seem silly, makes three years of pining after an engaged woman seem bizarre and melodramatic.
And grown-ups go on trips together.
``````````````````````````
He wants to go by train. She teases him about wanting a conductor's hat, secreting model trains in his basement. But they take a train to Penn Station, and then transfer to another headed to Montreal. She has her own iPod, and they listen to Fela Kuti an ear bud apiece. He takes it and begins to scroll through before she takes it back.
“You're gonna put on some of your indie bullshit,” she says.
The landscape is scraped white fields. He's pretty sure they're somewhere in Vermont. She rests her head against arm, and switches the music to Boy Least Likely To. He kisses the top of her head.
``````````````````````````
At the hotel, she stands naked in the cold on the balcony and stares out at the city. He brings a blanket from the bed, but she shrugs it off. “The air feels good.” She convinces him to take off his boxers and t-shirt and they stand together, where they touch the only part of his body not singing with the cold air.
`````````````````````````
He hasn't been surprised to find out she's aggressive in bed. He has been surprised to find out he is. He'll find himself baring his teeth, gripping her throat, holding her down. He'll whisper, rasp things into her ear that he would have laughed out loud at to say to anyone else, half incoherent non-sentences, scream for me i want oh yell oh god you feel so. He'll feel embarrassed afterwards, but she seems almost beyond embarrassment. After their first night together, he looked in the mirror, and his back was thatched with red welts and scratches.
``````````````````````````
Their hotel is in the middle of the Plateau. She leads him around to favorite restaurants where she orders for him in French. She teaches him how to ask for the check. They spend too much money in a record shop. She wants to take him to an art museum.
“Art's not really my thing,” he says. “What about this, um Point-a-Calleiree Museum? The underground tour?”
“Pointe-à-Callière,” she says and takes his arm.
After the museum, which was dull, they wander around. There are artists everywhere, despite the snow and cold, with easels. Jim cranes his head to look at one, and Karen notices. They stop. The artist is an old man with patchy white beard. Karen asks him something in French and he laughs in return. Jim leans in to look. It's the street in front of him, he realizes. It looks like something Pam would like, he thinks.
Karen leans in to look with him. “Do you want to buy it? I think he's a bit in love with me, so I could you get a good price.”
He stands up, feeling caught somehow, and puts his hands in his pockets. “No. You want to get a drink somewhere?”
She tilts her head and raises an eyebrow. “Dude, it's like, one in the afternoon. And I know that you handle your liquor like a fourteen-year-old girl.”
He tilts his head back in response and laughs. “Dude, it's like, vacation. And if you mean that alcohol brings out my deep and abiding love for the mall and sophomore boys, well then, guilty as charged.”
````````````````````````
The underground city is huge. He likes it.
“This is like, like--,” he says.
“Like something out of Logan's Run, I know,” she finishes.
“Oh my God, Fillipelli. Yes. You win, like, everything there is to win for that.”
“I did not know it was possible to win that.”
“Very few people do.”
````````````````````````
They find a wine bar. It's cozy. She knows what cheese to order with what wine. He could be happy here, he thinks. As Michael's number two, he sees a lot, and he knows that Scranton's days are numbered. The numbers are still weak, the warehouse chains are continuing to nibble them to death. Lay offs are coming, the office will be gone before long, and there will be the future. A future out of the office. He puts a hand on Karen's leg and wonders how hard it would be to learn French.
```````````````````````
He thinks the third day will be the hard one. With girlfriends in the past, he found that he could spend a weekend with them, it was just that once the weekend was over, he needed to get away. He wakes up early, and hears the shower running. He realizes he has to pee. He steps into the bathroom.
“I have to, um, pee,” he says.
He can hear her laugh. “Well, I think you should be able to take care of it. The one at waist level is the sink, the one a little lower is the toilet.”
“That was a narrowly averted disaster there, Fillipelli.”
For some reason, he feels the need to sit down while he pees. The same instinct that would never let him take a shit at a girlfriend's house.
“I'm about to flush, you probably want to step away from the water for a second.”
He's about to leave when she speaks again. “I swear to Christ, if you leave me in this shower by myself, I will tell everyone at the office that you like Sleepless in Seattle.”
He steps into the steam and hisses when the water hits him. "So I have a thing for Meg Ryan.”
````````````````````````
They spend the last day at a movie theater, seeing movies they could have seen in Scranton. That night they get dinner at an incredibly nice French restaurant, someplace where the furniture seems to swallow them both, so that there is nothing outside of their table. He has coq a vin, at her suggestion, and discovers his new favorite food. The have two bottles of wine, and he feels himself wanting to make a statement of some sort.
“I think you're aces, Karen,” he says, raising the remnants of his wine glass.
She bursts out laughing, actually snorting a little bit, and raises her own wine glass. “Well, I think you're twenty-three skidoo, Jim. You've got moxie.”
The wine is leaning heavily against him, but he really does want to say something else. Something more. Something to make it real and actual between them. Something to make it stick. Something to make it so it's just him and her and no one else around the edges, so that her green eyes would be the only ones he sees when he closes his own. But he doesn't know what that would be. So he laughs back and clinks his wine glass against hers.
```````````````````````
They have a sleeping car, but a strange older man, who reminds them both a bit of Creed and immediately removes his pants and shirt, revealing a huge appendectomy scar and yet leaves his black socks and sock garters on, has the third bunk. They bought some bottles of good wine before they left, and Karen grabs one and leads Jim to the smoking car, where she bums a cigarette from someone. They drink the wine from plastic cups as Karen smokes. Jim takes a puff and is immediately light headed, his fingers thrumming with his heart beat. They are standing by an open window at the end of the car. Karen kisses him, acrid with cigarette smoke and pungent with red wine. He kisses back, feeling that old natural language of two bodies meeting. His right hand moves up to her waist, pressing his thumb into the hollow of her of hips. She takes his hand and deliberately slides it on top of her breast. His glass of wine drops with a chuckling clatter as he lifts his other hand to cup her jaw, before reaching behind her and swinging the bathroom door in. They stumble inside.
She presses against him in the bathroom, her hand already undoing his belt. He frames her face with his hands and groans as he feels her hand touch him. He pushes against her face, and then turns her around. She's wearing a skirt, and he pushes it up before pulling down her underwear. She cranes to look at him, her face deadly serious. Her hand is snaking in between her thighs, and he leans forward to kiss her again as he pushes into her.
Her hand is splayed against the opposite wall, and he laces his fingers over hers. She begins to moan loudly, and he covers her mouth with his other hand. She bites the pad of his thumb. He catches a glimpse of his own face in the mirror and stops dead. This is not me, this is not her. He grunts as he feels her push back against him.
Suddenly there is a knock at the door. They stop, each holding their breath. There is a moment of silence, and then there is another knock at the door, and a voice speaking French. Karen motions him against the far wall, and then opens the door, exposing only her head, and says something in French. Jim clutches at his pants. Karen shuts the door and turns back to him, smirking.
“I told him I was ill.”
```````````````````````
Afterwards, with Karen asleep on the sleeper bunk below him, he listens to his own iPod, to a Travis song he's deleted and then put back on about five or six times, because he can't decide if he wants it on there or not. It's almost as if he can feel Scranton getting closer, looming up. As he begins the song again, he is deeply regretful that he is on a train, that he can't simply twist the wheel and turn the whole contraption around, that the track he's on is not the one of his choosing.
