Before Thirty
Jeremey sat on the S7 towards the airport. He had a friend who once said that planes were such a romantic form of transportation, but for Jeremey, they barely held a light to trains. Well, real trains anyways. Not these inter-city trains that just brought you from the city to the airport. Trains like in Anna Karenina or Before Sunrise. In a way, that’s why he came to Vienna, in the dead of winter. Vienna fell into the class of cities that he denigrated to his ex-girlfriend: cold, expensive, and bad food. The other reason was that he found extraordinarily cheap tickets a year ago. He didn’t really know what he wanted to do in Vienna, what there was to do, aside from a pilgrimage to the greatest movie
He looked to his right and his father was asleep. His father had the unique ability to fall asleep anywhere, anytime, even on a twenty-minute train ride to the airport. As Jeremey grew older, he found that he was starting to inherit his father’s gifts. At some point this trip, his father made a comment about his hairline which really set Jeremey off. Why would he say something like that? Two days ago, their flight touched down, and they arrived in the city much the same way as they were leaving. When they arrived at the hotel, the agent at the counter working to check them in was a slight young man with a moustache, wearing a pin that identified him as a trainee. He looked a little like that kid from The Grand Budapest Hotel. Jeremey had enough terimity not to vocalize his thoughts anyways. How old was he now that entry-level employees started looking like kids to him?
There were many museums in Vienna, more than he wanted to visit than he possibly could in the two nights they were there. Yet they gave it an honest shot. The Belvedere, the Sisi Museum, the Kunsthistorie, the Leopold, and of course the Albertina. Jeremey lingered outside longer than he normally did to take in the view. Jesse and Celine never really entered the museum or any of the museums for that matter. They opted to spend their time gavalanting around the city, building up romance and sexual tension. A bit gauche, but would he have chosen to spend a precious second away from young love to be in the stuffy art museums of Vienna? What did he know of art before he turned twenty? What did he know of anything before he turned twenty? What did he know of anything now?
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There was a girl sitting across from him in the train, with big sad eyes. She was wearing a thin parka with a massive fur trim around her hood and her arms. She met his gaze, and they held eye contact for a while before he looked away. If his life was the movie, or any movie for that matter, he’d go chat with her. “What are you reading,” he would ask. That’d be funny because she was watching TikToks without headphones on. He was headed to the airport home with his admittedly sleeping father. It was poor timing for any sort of move. With the social movements of the day, strange men propositioning women was particularly frowned upon now. He had work tomorrow, and buying an additional ticket would invalidate the entire point of this trip. Most importantly, he was almost thirty now. When Celine and Jesse meet again in Paris, there’s a comment she makes about a furrow that he has in his brow, that it’s almost like a scar. He’s closer to the age they would be when they met again. Gone was the time for meeting new people; had he already met the great love of his life? Perhaps he had.
It would be a bit sad if he had, since there were no romances currently in his life. Yet in retrospect, every single one of his romances was a bit grand. The long and the short, the serious and the transitory. In the screening room of his memory, everything had a cinematic glow, warm or cold, a montage with a little soundtrack to it. His ex who he had thought was the one. The romance that never really started on exchange. That one girl he met in Vancouver. The night he spent with the Argentinian girl. Oh, the trip that he was supposed to take during the pandemic, the trip that was planned nearly five years ago to the day. A day in Vienna with a friend who had recently broke up with her boyfriend. That was the last time he had planned to come to Vienna. He had been saving his Vienna trip.
Now that he was here, he wasn’t sure if he regretted it or not. Did he save himself the disappointment of coming here with a woman in a few years, utterly disappointed that she didn’t want to have sex in a field and try to get free wine from a bar? No danger of those misconceptions with his father. They stayed at a nice hotel next to the opera house. Or had he ruined coming to Vienna for the first time, exploring it with a girl? He probably wouldn’t have had much respect either for a woman who would have tolerated his insistence for a five-minute photoshoot outside of an old record store or a walk along a canal in search of a poet.
He was too old for those sorts of experiences again, Jeremey realized. Not that the events could never occur again, but he would never see it with fresh eyes, full of wonder. He could never recapture the feelings in Before Sunrise; he had only his own to look back upon. As they raced through his mind, it was the Ferris Bueller Chicago montage that played alongside them. Now he understood why people said it was important to travel when young. Broadening horizons early was a privilege, and he had long moved past the age of staying in hostels without ever really staying in one, but traveling is traveling, and much more comfortable at the Ritz than on a field. However, there were some things found on an old coach train compartment that can’t be found even on the most comfortable business-class jets.
It was a bit of a coda. To be traveling in Vienna as a single man, starring down the long barrel of his thirties, with his father. His long-suffering father, who tolerated his penchant for art museums. If Jesse and Celine did end up meeting in Vienna in six months time, it would have been winter in Vienna as well. Early summer was such a wonderful time in Europe: not yet too hot, not everyone was on vacation. It would be summer again soon enough.
