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MARRIAGE AND A SMALL-TOWN HOME ARE LEFT BEHIND |
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F E A T U R E S Bad Trips
Visit Friendly Uzbekistan!
Big Island Blacktop
D E P A R T M E N T S Romancing the Road
Passages:
Table Talk
Salon Taste
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E A R L I E R Tuesday April 22 A night from hell in Los Angeles
A full list of all Wanderlust articles |
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BY JENN SHREVE | it was an important journey. I was 20 years old and about to indulge in the
first fruits of my hasty departure from premature matrimony. I was going to
Paris under the presumptuous alibi of furthering my education, leaving the
small town I'd called home for nearly all my life. I had been to Europe
before (a two-week whirlo-tour), spent a summer as a missionary in Fiji,
traveled to Mexico and the Caribbean, but this was different. As the jet
engines roared beneath me, I sighed with relief. Things had changed.
I was never going back there, not to live at least.
The flight attendant came by and I ordered red wine. I knew it would
become a staple, and I was trying to acclimate as best I could before
arrival. In my hands was a book, given to me by a well-traveled friend:
Hemingway, "The Sun Also Rises." In it was an inscription: "There is much
of drinking in this book. There is much of sex. There is much of you in
this book. There is none of me, so don't look for it. Pay special attention
to bulls and alcohol. Love, Matt."
I found myself engrossed in the world of post-World War I Paris -- a bawdy Eden of merry prostitutes, glasses of Pernod and curt, poetic sentences. I was lost in
myself, my escape from marriage and the boredom of growing up in a place of
strip malls and artless satisfaction with mediocrity. Between catnaps -- I
had the good fortune of having an empty seat to my right -- I read and
drank, letting my eyes wander to the man just two rows up from me. He was
engrossed in reading. I was pleased.
This was in the days of in-flight smoking sections, and I had puffed away
studiously throughout the flight. Still, upon landing in Heathrow, I couldn't
shake the need to have a cigarette on the ground. I saw the reader from two
rows up just finishing his cigarette and walking away, but when I
approached, he returned, lit another cigarette and asked me why I was
there. We were on the same program and began engaging in traveler's small
talk. He'd been to Paris many times. I'd been there once. We both smoked.
We were taking the same courses. We'd have coffee. He left.
Another man approached -- tall, handsome, with blond curls tossed furiously
about his face. He lit a cigarette. We repeated the whole scenario. He was
not on my program, but lo and behold, we were seated next to each other on
the flight to Paris.
I began to understand the character my friend implied was an incarnation of
me: Brett. A sensuously inclined lover, drinker, smoker, who attracts men
as she breaks them. In my young, freshly single, itchy-to-rebel state, I
embraced this woman. I loved her, and her Paris would be mine. I made a
dinner date with the man on the plane for the next evening.
We met in the Parc du Champ de Mars, which stretches out beneath the Tour d'Eiffel. It's a magnificent garden, with crisscrossing trails leading to
crepe vendors and red-tinted cafes. In the name of adventure, we decided
upon taking the Metro and getting off at the first place that sounded
familiar from a book we had read or a piece of pre-departure
advice. We got off at a friendly-looking stop and wandered about, but didn't find anything to hold us there.
We got back on the rattling
train with poetry sandwiched between advertisements on the walls and French
paupers singing botched versions of "American Pie" for a
couple of francs -- "pour la musique, s'il vous plaît."
The Left Bank. It was a lucky guess for two who had decided to scour the
tour books sometime after settling in. We wound through crooked
cobblestone streets looking for a certain glow, an ambiance that would
reach out and grab us from a crowded restaurant window.
The meal was incredible. I revelled in my ability to read the menu, despite
my three-year sabbatical from French classes. I giggled when served pommes
frites. Until then, French fries had been relegated to the world of fast
food, the only food consumed or sold in my hometown. I fumbled with my
bread. Where to put it? What to scoop up with it? I sipped the wine, till
warmth smoothed all over me, washing over the sauce, the chicken, the
cheese. Each bite transported me.
I had never had a meal such as this, and
it carried me further and further from the man sitting across from me, who
I slowly realized was a total bore. The more I consumed, the less I
considered him a person, but I wanted romance and all the dreadful lust
that seeped through Hemingway's phrases, so I kept on.
I was still
carrying the book. Brett was near me, and Hemingway was waiting for her
while sipping scotch miserably between the lines.
The next step was obvious: Find a local bar, someplace the Michelin guide
would never bother with, and get shitty.
Looking back at that night, reviewing
our objectives and methods of executing them, we were amazingly successful.
We settled in a warm, red and gold tavern, where cheap beer flowed freely
and the locals stopped eyeing us suspiciously after the fourth or fifth
round. The toilet, I discovered, was a porcelain-lined hole in the ground
with two chilled metal poles conveniently placed for balance. With each
round -- we had joined ranks with two Belgian musicians in town for a
benefit concert -- the balancing act became more difficult, the
conversation more slurred, the words in the book less focused.
How we got back to his hotel rooms remains a mystery. Sloppy, drunk sex
ensued. I woke at 5 to his hovering figure, smiling smurkishly at me. "I
have to go." I took a taxi to my metro station, but couldn't remember how
to get home from there. Still drunk, I stumbled, finally, to my door and
figured out which was my room number. Then I remembered the book. Where had I left it? At the bar? His room? I couldn't remember, but I wanted it back. I felt I had lost its magic in the practical application of its fiction. I
wanted to return to its world, long past and veiled in romanticized visions
of truth.
He called the next day and I asked him to find my book. He called again a
few days later to say he had it; he'd like to see me again, to return it. I
looked at the new copy bought at Shakespeare & Co., where Hemingway had a
rather extensive line of unpaid credit and around the corner from where my
attempt to enter the writer's world had taken place over my first meal in
Paris, and said I'd call him back.
I didn't. I had gone for café au lait with the
reading man who sat just beyond me in the plane. Things were going well.
The part of me that was in that book, as told in the long-lost inscription,
would remain with the experience I'd left behind. Hemingway could wait. Share your tales of romantic encounters abroad in Table Talk.
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