Paris Times Eight (10 page)

But she hammered away at her point. “You haven't a job and you haven't any money, and let me tell you something about that fact of life, you never seem to give it much thought, lost in your world of books and make-believe. When you don't have money, life is miserable. Even Paris can feel like a trap if you can't eat or go to all the nice places you are telling me about. Believe you me, four walls in Paris will look as depressing as four walls in Toronto if you can't go out and enjoy yourself.”

I knew she was right. I recalled the stench of the Turkish toilet, the rumors of bedbugs. I didn't come to Paris for a life of squalor. I wanted the world of ideal beauty that Paris still represented to me. In that phone booth I suddenly did an about-face. I shouted at my mother suddenly that she had convinced me. I had a return ticket, after all. “But just for a year, to finish the master's. And then I'm coming back,” I wailed.

“Of course you will,” my mother clucked. “Because Paris will always be there, waiting for you.”

Whitman said something of the same when I went to bid him adieu. “There'll always be a bed here for you,” he smiled. “Come back next year, when Sylvia will be quoting her granddaddy Walt, “I sing the body electric.” I said he could count on it. The old man looked at me searchingly, as if trying to make sure I meant it. Reaching out to me with a gnarled hand, he touched my cheek, softly patting it in good-bye. I pushed past the day's stream of pilgrims waiting their turn to come in and browse. To feel, for even just a fleeting moment in time, the magic. I knew not to look back.

THREE

Material Girl
·
1986
·

THE NEWSROOM AT
The Globe and Mail
thrummed with noise. Telephones rang. Radios blared. Men—and there were mostly men working there in those days—cursed and slammed desk drawers sheltering bottles of rye. I didn't have a desk. When I first arrived at Canada's national newspaper, immediately upon graduating with a master's degree in English—my dream of becoming a journalist unfolding in Toronto, and not in Paris as I had expected—the editor in charge just told me to find a desk not in use. “Every man for himself,” he grumbled, before yelling at someone to bring him the day's proofs. I roamed the newsroom in search of a place where I could type out, one finger at a time, my stories. I passed by the darkroom, where the bastion of male photographers had postered the walls with bare-breasted pinups, and also the windowless alcove where teletype machines rattled as they spewed endless streams of wire copy onto a grime-thick floor.

I came upon the film critic, perched over a keyboard at one of the few desks supporting a word processor. Absorbed in thought, he bit down on a cigarette, as he raucously typed, and was seemingly oblivious to the long tail of ash that fell with a hush on the keys as he pounded out his review. He hit the send button, releasing his words to an editor, and abandoned the desk. I pounced. The chair was still warm. I blew hard over the letters to make them less dirty. Just then a mouse, black as print, scurried over the keys. It had been nesting in one of the drawers in a bed of chewed-up clippings. A veteran crime reporter sitting next to me laughed when I shrieked. Leaning far back in his chair, he stretched his legs out in front of him, using my new-found desk as a footrest and issuing a challenge. “Do you mind?” I said, eyeing his dirty soles with a look of prissy disdain. It was all I could think to say. He pulled away, leaving me alone. I had claimed my turf. Every day afterward, whenever I came into the newsroom, as soon as he saw me he dragged his feet off the desk that he was reserving for me in his menacing way, soon enabling me to be as productive as the best of them.

It was
1985
. The world was climbing out of a recession. Confidence had muscled itself back in, and it wasn't long before I felt caught up in the fast-forward motion of the times. As soon as I started at the paper, in the first days of January, I was busy. I covered dance, my specialty, as well as pop music, theater, and fashion. I also had my own daily entertainment column, launched that fall during the Toronto International Film Festival, highlighting my new life in the orbit of celebrity. I was hobnobbing with the playwright Arthur Miller and the actor Raymond Burr, the crooner Tony Bennett and the American choreographer Paul Taylor, the filmmakers Alan Rudolph and Brian De Palma, and the Russian prima ballerina, Natalia Makarova, a dance-world superstar, as well as the pop diva Chaka Khan. I went day and night to screenings and rock concerts and parties. By the end of the year I had churned out close to two hundred bylined articles, an impressive number considering the paper only came out six times a week. My life seemed to have taken on a momentum all its own. I was no longer indigent, no longer a wallflower. I was salaried, with a closet full of new, expensive clothes. I also had a growing reputation as an upstart. I wrote from the hip, even trashing a recent production of
The Nutcracker.
Soon angry letters to the editor poured in from the barefoot team, the modern dance brigade. They were upset about what they called my callowness, saying I was too young to have so much power. They said my style of criticism, which I thought fearless, but they called reckless, was costing them their Canada Council grants. They demanded I be reassigned, or else, said one independent choreographer leading the charge in an interview on
CBC
radio, I would be physically removed from the theater if I dared show up to cover any more of their shows. The newsroom applauded. “Way to go, kid,” said an especially crotchety newsman, patting me on the back. “You've earned your stripes.”

So it was the right career path. I loved the pace. I fed on the natural-born aggression of the newsroom. I fit in, despite a proclivity for designer dresses. It should have made me deliriously content, wanting for nothing. But when there wasn't a deadline or a show to cover, no Alice Cooper phoning me long-distance from a tour stop in Japan, I panicked. I found that I couldn't bear being alone in my own apartment. I didn't know what to do with myself, which, in large part, was why I worked so hard—to keep myself distracted from the feeling that deep down, I felt dissatisfied. Lost. Devoid of meaning. Sure there were suitors, more than there had ever been. I was young and spirited. I had, as my editor told me, great gams. Some of the guys at work had a bet going as to who would be the first one to ask me out. To all appearances I was suddenly popular. But I kept thinking there was something missing.

I might not have been able to put my finger on it, if it weren't for the letters. They were wispy things, written in a faint, slanted hand on thin blue paper, the envelope stamped “airmail.” Little by little they had started arriving about a year earlier, when I was finishing off the last of my university courses. They were from Stefano, someone with whom I had indulged a brief fling, only a few weeks long, during a summer undergraduate course in Siena. He was originally from Switzerland and spoke German as well as Italian, languages I had no knowledge of. His English was weak, and so we hardly ever spoke at all, communicating mostly just with our bodies in the darkness of a threadbare apartment overlooking the lush Tuscan hills. I had liked the foreignness of him, as well as his physical beauty. He was muscular, with golden wavy hair and lips as roundly sculpted as those of Michelangelo's
David.
But I quickly grew bored. He might have been sex on two legs (he told me that in Italy he sometimes worked as a gigolo, servicing mostly older American women whom he, startling me with a sudden command of the English language, described as succubi), but I churlishly wanted more in the way of intellectual stimulation. I wanted to share ideas. When I was about to return to Toronto, he had asked for my address, and I gave it to him, not really thinking he would write. But he did.

The letters came in a trickle at first. Then, after I once wrote back, mostly from guilt, they arrived in a torrent of love-soaked words. He declared eternal devotion. He called me his angel on earth. He said he was waiting for me. I thought that silly. I had no intention of running back to him. But as my life as hard-nosed journalist began to rapidly unfold, taking me farther away from my dream of becoming an artist, I began to look forward to those passionate missives from abroad, even taking them with me into the newsroom where I would read them quietly, in the midst of all that tumult, and think of the path not taken. My life had become complicated, weighed down by consumer products and pursuits. His world, by contrast, had stayed simple, true to some eternal truth. He signed his letters “love” and, on the back, often sketched some ancient Italian vista—ruins amid the cypress trees. Meanwhile my editor shouted for his copy. The phone wouldn't stop ringing. Was this it? The rest of my life? I refolded the letter, delicate as tissue, and put it back into my purse.
Love.
It wasn't a word spoken of much at the newspaper.
Love.
It made me yearn for something more.

I knew I couldn't tell anyone about Stefano, my phantom lover. My friends would just laugh. Me. The academic turned careerist. Willing to throw it all away, and for a stud. But secrets aren't secrets if you can't share them with at least one person. I chose my pair of ears, perhaps not so wisely. I told my mother. Her response wasn't at all what I expected. She urged me to go after him. She told me I was crazy not to. Those letters are so beautiful, she said. A gift. She was smitten by the Tarzan-like idea of him, the pretty sketches. Said I was lucky, that I ought to cherish what he was offering me, because it was rare in this cut-throat world of ours. “Wish it were me,” she said. At that time, there were no romantics in her corner. She was back to having affairs with married men. “Safer,” she told me. “No strings attached.” She persuaded me to give my long-distance affair a chance, in order to avoid becoming like her. January
1986
marked my first-year anniversary at the paper. It was also the month I turned twenty-six. For my birthday my mother squeezed a little money into my hand for a ticket to see him. “Go,” she urged me. “Find love.”

I sent a telegram, telling Stefano I would be coming to see him. He had moved back to Zurich and, in a telegram back, suggested I meet him there, in his hometown. He had a real job now, working in a home for the mentally challenged, feeding them, dressing them, wheeling them through gardens. A life of charity. But I didn't want to know any more about that. This was a quest for romance. I didn't want to go to a city that seemed unsympathetic to that spirit. I wanted to go to Paris, the city that to me most symbolized beauty and desire.

I still imagined I would one day live there. I hadn't given up on that dream, despite landing a full-time job in Toronto right out of university.
The Globe and Mail
didn't have a Paris office. But I imagined that it might. With the economy continuing to improve, the paper was in the midst of opening up a number of new foreign bureaus. I had let my editor know of my interest in Paris. He in turn told me about the Journalistes en Europe fellowship program, enabling foreign journalists to study mass communication at the Sorbonne for a year. This seemed custom-made for me. I had missed the deadline to apply for the
1986
program, but was keen on applying for the following year. I wanted to know if it would be possible to live in Europe with Stefano. Was he really my destiny? Was Paris? In my mind I had started to conflate the two. Both represented the same thing. They were objects of desire, utopian ideals. When I thought of Stefano, he was no longer the person who incessantly played on his portable tape recorder “Video Killed the Radio Star” by British synthpop group The Buggles. I had hated that song. It was what had convinced me that we were never to be. We didn't like the same kind of music. Three years later I had switched mental gears. Or maybe I wasn't thinking at all, not rationally anyway. Ignoring my initial instincts, I willed myself to follow a fiction, an idea of Stefano as the personification of love. I had just been too intellectual the last time, I told myself. I had been too self-conscious. I hadn't opened my heart.

Stefano had said that all he could spare would be a weekend in Paris. I was to meet him on a Friday afternoon, when he would take the train in from Zurich. I figured that would be about the right amount of time to sort out the rest of my life. I bought an air ticket for a five-day stay. I would get there two days early, and until Stefano arrived and I relocated to a hotel, I would stay with a friend who had moved to Paris to work in the fashion industry. I was scheduled to arrive mid-February, around the time the ready-to-wear collections were being staged in Paris at the Louvre. My friend Tova worked at that time for a big-name designer and said she'd be swamped and wouldn't have much time to socialize. But she offered me the keys to her place, where she said she didn't have a bed, just a futon on the floor. “But it's very central,” she emphasized. “And you'll have the place pretty much to yourself.”

We had discussed these arrangements over the telephone, a straightforward
20
th-century thing to do. After I hung up, I realized that I had never picked up the phone to dial Stefano. Partly it was because of the language barrier. But after I thought of it, I supposed that I had preferred him at a remove, a long-distance letter that I waited for, an emotional experience crystallized in images and feathery words. On the plane ride over I worried that I might not be able to tolerate the reality of him any more than I had the first time, almost three years earlier. I thought of the me then, and the me who had boarded the plane that evening with a new set of black Mandarina Duck rubberized luggage bought expressly for the trip. I also had a Walkman and a separate carrying case for all my makeup. When Stefano had seen me last, I didn't wear makeup. I didn't even pluck my brows. I had had just two changes of clothes. I had worn flat-soled sandals that made him call me his little Roman gladiator. I was bookish, idealistic, a student with no obligations except to the books. Life had changed since then. I now had credit cards and debt. I had grown used to eating out in expensive restaurants, going to premieres, mingling with stars, driving in white stretch limousines, flying to New York just to catch a show. I no longer wrote poetry. I hadn't read a novel in years. Who had time? I looked out the window at the night sky and saw a starless black hole. I felt a twinge of panic. I hoped against hope that I was doing the right thing.