I returned last week from a 10-day trip to Venice and Paris, undertaken in honor of my 40th anniversary. Having been too busy or broke to mark previous anniversaries in a similarly grand way, I packed the pent-up energy of four decades of delayed celebration into this journey.
But celebration mixed with anxiety as I monitored news of the newest COVID surge for weeks before our departure. I am a grandmother and blessed to have an elderly mom. Over the past three years, I have adopted a lifestyle that minimizes exposure to this virus through masking in indoor settings, using air filters and increasing ventilation at home and avoiding crowds. For a long time, I did not take the subway or buses. The first year of the pandemic, I walked everywhere in NYC, clocking miles.
At the beginning, avoidance was easier as more people were cautious. Now, I find myself often the sole masked person, or more accurately, the sole person who wishes to avoid COVID like, well, the plague. It is lonely. With varying degrees of success, I have tried to adopt the attitude that COVID-avoidance is counter-cultural. Punk.
I survived the flight from New York to Venice — featuring a cacophony of coughs, sneezes and throat cleaning — never once removing my mask, even to drink (I snaked a straw through the side). I strolled fearlessly along the city’s canals and piazzas, choosing outdoor cafes. I made it through the Film Festival — where I was The Masked Woman of Venice — unscathed.
Arriving in Paris, I was delighted by the outdoor courtyard of our flat in the Sixth Arrondissement, the abundant sunshine, the city unfolding before me, begging to be explored. This was my fifth trip to Paris. My goal was to walk over as many bridges as possible, see a handful of museums and eat in outdoor cafes.
If I had only stuck to that vision, I would likely not be writing this essay from quarantine, having tested positive for COVID upon my return home.
In the throes of fever, I have retraced my steps and am horrified to see that — perhaps in the spirit of overdue celebration — I compromised dramatically. Though I kept my mask on at the Louvre, the d’Orsay, the Pompidou, the Nissim de Camondo and the Palais de Tokyo, I did take it off at a small museum, only to have a close encounter with a security guard coughing violently between bouts of noisy nose blowing.
Did he infect me or was it at the world-famous subterranean jazz club, Le Caveau de la Huchette, that I was sickened? Blisteringly hot with neither air conditioning nor fans, I removed my mask inside. People were jammed into every inch, dancing or watching from the sidelines. The scene was sticky, sweaty, electric; exactly what I craved before COVID. Now it was a den of contagion.
Maybe it was within the crowded inferno of the Metro that I got zapped, or on the packed funicular from Montmartre to Sacre Coeur. Or at the steamy, underground burlesque show at Théâtre ChoChotte which I patronized in the spirit of marital adventure.
Perhaps it does not matter where I got COVID but what does matter is that I knew the risks. I took precautions… and then I didn’t. And that’s COVID’s secret power. It doesn’t care how good you have been, how cautious, how considerate of others. It’s waiting for that one evening that you think, hey, I’m on my anniversary in Paris…why not be carefree like everyone else?
Yet I had a premonition. On the final day of our trip, as we were walking through Belleville, a story popped onto my newsfeed, the kind I would normally scroll past: “ ‘Neurotic, paranoid’ Howard Stern says his fear of COVID is causing fights with wife Beth Ostrosky.“
The story details the struggle that the radio personality has been having with his wife over his caution and fear of contracting COVID. Evidently, she wants to party like it’s 2019, and he won’t. My heart swelled in empathy. In the article, he admits to being scared he will get very sick. Erroneously, he labels his behavior “paranoid” and “neurotic.”
I nearly swooned against the side of the Père Lachaise cemetery where Marcel Proust, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde and Frederic Chopin are buried. Au contraire, Howard, I thought. In a time of madness, you are a clear-sighted prophet preaching the gospel of intelligence and sanity. Denial of the power of COVID is the ultimate mental illness.
My memories of Paris would be far better without the souvenir of COVID.
Let us be like Howard Stern.
Dicker’s short-story collection, “Lolita at Leonard’s of Great Neck,” will be published next spring.
Shira Dicker
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