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by Deborah Copaken Kogan

  By fall, we were inseparable. We sat in on each other’s classes, we went out for weekly dim sum brunches, we cooked enormous Thai feasts for Lampoon dinners, we read books to each other, we slept together almost every night. Mostly in his bed, because my roommate was involved in some illicit substance trafficking, which meant way too many doorbells ringing after midnight, as well as loud 4 A.M. screenings of Pee-wee’s Playhouse for all the acid heads tripping in our living room. Matthew’s small, single room became our own little Eden: a place to sleep, to work, to talk, to think, to dance around in the buff, to play music, to write, to make love, to escape from the madness and clamor of everyday life. Isn’t that what love is, after all? That mythic place where two can dwell—alone together—connected, naked and joyful?

  But as winter set in, the relationship started to falter. Or rather, while I was falling deeper and deeper in love—allowing myself to imagine our future together, the shape of our children’s faces even, the ones we’d have after roaming the world for a couple of years together as journalists, his text accompanying my photographs, why not?—Matthew began to look for the exit. The transition was subtle at first. A night here and there spent apart. Less ardor in bed. Entries in his sacred leather-bound journal I was no longer allowed to read. But then the pace picked up. The withholding of sex. Small barbs about my physique: my nose was too big, my legs too short, my hair not blond enough, not straight enough, not good enough. Hey, I knew I was not beautiful. Then again, I’d never really considered myself so monstrously ugly until Matthew began slipping away.

  “You mean I look too Jewish,” I’d said.

  Matthew was half Jewish. He liked his WASP half much better. “No,” he laughed, turning crimson, “it’s not that.” But I could tell I’d hit a nerve.

  The final coup de grâce—the apple, if you will—was when a girl he’d met in Nantucket (very blond, long legs, small nose, no noticeable imperfections, annoyingly nice) came for a visit on a weekend a big, formal party was planned. “She’s just a friend of mine,” he said. He explained that we—meaning Matthew, his friend Richard, the girl and I—would all go to the party together, double date. Unfortunately, he neglected to mention that I would not be his date that evening but rather Richard’s. And he kissed the pretty girl from Nantucket right in front of my eyes.

  I hated him after that. And I vowed, for the second time, to never, ever let myself fall in love again.

  Two years later, when he joined Michèle and I for dinner that night in a seafood restaurant in Georgetown, Matthew seemed changed: contrite, humbled, even slightly needy. He told us he’d been hired as an associate producer on a documentary being produced in D.C., but that the job was a place holder, something to do until he figured out what it was he actually wanted to do, to be. He was living with his parents, trying to save money. He did not appear to be happy about the whole situation.

  Later in the evening, when we were alone, he confessed that graduation and the realities of the workaday world had opened his eyes, made him understand things he hadn’t understood before. He apologized for insulting me, for his idiocy, his immaturity. He asked for my forgiveness. Because I was going to be stuck in D.C. for two months shooting, because I was bored, because he used to think I was ugly and now apparently didn’t, because I’d never recovered from seeing him kiss that perfection of a girl in front of me—because, like all spurned lovers, I wanted him to fall in love with me again so I could gain back my dignity—I agreed to forgive him. But in my heart, of course, I never did.

  Hell hath no fury like a woman made to feel like a hideous, big-nosed midget.

  One night, after a romp in my quaint Georgetown hotel room, I was caught off guard when Matthew actually did declare his love for me. He should have never let me go, he said. I had no idea how to respond. I tried to reciprocate the sentiment, thinking maybe I should try to love him back, reattach the apple to the tree with some Super Glue and twine. Thinking that I should force myself to love him back because maybe my life would be more meaningful with a tiny bit of love thrown in it. But even as the words were coming out, they felt false. In fact, after his kindhearted and rather endearing admission, I felt little more than a sense of bittersweet vindication.

  Michèle, the consummate française, said she was glad at least one of us was getting laid. But though she put up with Matthew during our many dinners as a threesome, she warned me against taking in stray mutts. “Mark my word,” she said, as we drove to Dulles airport, “he’ll come to visit you in Paris, and then you won’t be able to get rid of him.”

  When I got back to Paris, there was a message from Matthew on my answering machine. He’d booked himself on a flight. He was scheduled to arrive in Paris mid-May, after the documentary he was working on was completed. His ticket was nonrefundable. And it was one-way.

  It was March, a few days before my twenty-fourth birthday, and as I wandered aimlessly around Les Halles that first day back I felt restless and unsettled. I chalked it up to jet lag and to having been away for so long, but I also knew it was more than that. The reunion with Matthew had unhinged me. I’d enjoyed hearing him tell me how stupid he’d been; I’d relished the caresses to both body and ego. But now I was angry at myself for allowing it to happen, apprehensive about his arrival. Also, the stories I’d been working on had unhinged me. I was having dreams about pregnant women smoking crack pipes. A couple of the girl gang members had left angry messages on my answering machine when a group picture they posed for—and specifically asked me to put in a newspaper to make them famous—appeared on the front page of The New York Times.

  I called Tiny, the bleached-blonde gang leader, at her parents’ home in Watts. “You got us in trouble,” she said. “My mom grounded me for a whole month.” This from a girl who was trying to raise enough money to buy her own gun.

  “Tiny, I told you I was taking pictures for the Times.” I looked out into the bright, ivy-covered courtyard of my Parisian home. My neighbor, the portly nudist, was cooking himself some eggs. I pictured Tiny sitting all alone in her dark, airless house, with the Jesus commemorative plates and posters plastered all over the living room walls.

  “Yeah, but I didn’t know people actually read the fucking thing,” she said.

  On some level, I sympathized. The more I hung out with those girls, the more I realized how much of their tough-chick act was just that. An act. Sure, they beat each other up during initiation ceremonies, collected money to one day buy an arsenal of weapons, engraved tattoos into one another’s arms and shoulders and threatened classmates who dissed them. But they also giggled and talked about boys and ate Oreos and snuggled teddy bears and had crushes and wrote bad poetry and read Tiger Beat together. When one of their homegirls gave birth to a baby, the whole gang showed up at her house with an enormous bag of chips, a jar of salsa and a pink onesie they’d all chipped in to buy, and they each took turns feeding and burping the child. With the girls’ fathers in jail or dead or nonexistent and their mothers working double shifts to pay the rent, the gang was one of the only real families they had ever known.

  Sitting there listening to Tiny yell at me over international phone lines, I realized I should have taken this lack of parental influence into consideration. I should have removed my journalist cap, with all of its high and mighty principles of impartiality and neutrality, for just a brief moment, just long enough to warn the gang what the notoriety might do to them. I should have explained that the world might not be ready for underprivileged girls—or any girls, for that matter—who aggressively stick up for themselves. Perhaps I should have made it clear that millions of people read The New York Times every day. I apologized to Tiny for getting her into trouble. She told me if she ever saw me again, she would kill me.

  A WEEK LATER, on a cool day in mid-March, I stopped for a morning coffee at the Père Tranquille and stared out the window at the well-tailored people sinking down the
escalator into the Les Halles Métro station. They had briefcases and newspapers stuffed under their arms, important-looking coats, shiny shoes, purposeful strides. They knew where they’d be for the next eight to ten hours, and they knew the following day would bring more of the same. I glanced down at my heavy camera bag and at my rugged, scuffed Paraboots with their thick rubber soles and wondered what it would be like to trade places with one of them, to have the type of job where work meant commuting to an office in delicate leather pumps.

  I called Marion from a smoke-filled phone booth in the café to tell her I was on my way to the agency. She said she had a meeting outside the office, but she suggested we grab a bite at the Pizzapino in our neighborhood for dinner, reminding me that the last two times we’d made plans, I’d had to call her from the airport to cancel. I apologized and told her I’d meet her there at eight, come hell or high water.

  “What does that mean, ‘hell or high water’?”

  “It means I’ll be there,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  A half hour later, I strode into the Gamma office just as the noisy AFP machine was spitting out a wire report on new violence that had just erupted in Tîrgu-Mureş, a small Romanian city 150 miles north of Bucharest. There had been more gunfire, the report said. Many tanks. Angry mobs with truncheons. Something about ethnic Hungarians fighting Romanians or vice versa, which in retrospect was just a tiny, canapé-type appetizer of the simmering ethnic hatred that would soon be unleashed in that corner of the world.

  I tried to sneak out of the agency quietly, but Henri grabbed me by the collar. “Copaken!” he hollered, pronouncing my last name incorrectly as usual (accent on the first syllable instead of the second, short a instead of long. It came out sounding like a Native American war cry: “Koh-pa-KEN!”).

  Henri handed me four 500-franc notes, less than $400, along with the wire story ripped from the machine and told me that while I’d missed the last flight to Bucharest, a plane was taking off from Charles de Gaulle airport and flying to Budapest, Hungary, in exactly one hour, and if I didn’t have my ass firmly planted on one of the seats of that plane . . .

  “I know,” I said, “you’ll break my face.”

  Henri allowed himself a proud, fatherly smile.

  “But how do I get from Budapest to Tîrgu—Tîrgu what is it called?” I asked, now running with Henri down the hallway to Gamma’s photo-filled reception area.

  Practically pushing me out the front door, he said simply, “Tîrgu-Mureş. Figure it out.”

  The next flights out to either Bucharest or Budapest weren’t until the following afternoon, which would mean arriving in Tîrgu-Mureş, wherever the hell that was, a full twenty-four hours later; by then, the story could be over. My apartment was a fifteen-minute Métro ride from the agency. The airport was a forty-minute taxi ride from my apartment in light traffic. Doing the math in my head, I figured if everything was running smoothly, I’d have exactly five minutes to pack. That left zero minutes to argue. Or even think.

  I’d had short notice for stories before—two hours, sometimes three—but one hour would really be pushing it. On autopilot, I sprinted out of the agency, down the stairs of the Denfert-Rochereau Métro station and into a car of the express RER, whose doors were closing as I jumped in. During the whole short ride, I stared at my watch, whispering, “Come on, come on, come on . . .” whenever the train stopped. At Châtelet-les-Halles, I ran up the escalator, bumping into annoyed passengers in their delicate leather pumps who cursed at me in French, and then I wove my way through the mazelike underground shopping mall. I rode up another three escalators, out the entrance, past the Père Tranquille, through the tiny crowded streets of Les Halles and finally up the stairs to my third-floor apartment, two steps at a time. I yanked my suitcase out of the closet and threw everything that looked moderately clean into it.

  From the refrigerator, I took out an enormous rectangular Tupperware container filled with eighty rolls of Fuji 100 ASA color slide film and a dozen or so rolls of Tri-X black-and-white film, which, to save space, had already been shucked out of both their cardboard boxes and their little black plastic cylinders. Then I grabbed forty more rolls of Tri-X that I hadn’t had time to dislodge and compact, but you can’t go anywhere without an ample supply of black-and-white film because who knows when you might need it? Tîrgu-Mureş? Where the hell was Tîrgu-Mureş?

  Just as I was about to leave, I realized the phone situation in Romania would probably range from difficult to impossible. Phones in communist countries had no international direct dial and were notoriously unreliable. Control the flow of information, and you control the population. So I pressed the outgoing message button on my answering machine and recorded the following fast and frantic message: “Bonjour. C’est Deborah. S’il vous plaît, laissez-moi une message après le beep sonore—Hi. It’s Deborah. Please leave a message after the beep. Mom, Dad, I’m in Romania. I’ll try to call.”

  The answering machine was still making its strange clicking noises as I locked my front door and ran down the stairs. Then it was back through the streets of Les Halles again and out to the Boulevard Sébastopol. It only took three minutes to find a taxi—a record in Paris—but it felt like twenty. I had a brief panic attack on the way to the airport until I located my passport in the zippered pocket of my jacket. Normally I kept it in the camera bag, but since I’d just recently returned to Paris from D.C., it was still in the jacket along with my cardboard stub from the transatlantic flight.

  At the airport, I cut the line at the ticket counter, yelling, “Journaliste! Journaliste!” and waving my Gamma press pass. Another guy carrying a giant Nagra tape deck and microphone was trying to do the same.

  “Excusez-moi, mademoiselle,” he said. “I was here first.” He was over six feet tall. He had enormous black leather boot–clad feet, thick black hair, a thick black leather jacket, black jeans and a black T-shirt stretched taut against his chest. It wasn’t bright inside the airport, but he wore a pair of black Ray-Bans anyway.

  “Oh, yeah?” I said, puffing out my puny chest, ready for a fight. “Well, I have to get on this flight, too, okay? So just calm down, uh”—I picked up the name tag off his suitcase and turned it over with a quick flick of my wrist—“Nicolas.” Then I turned to the beleaguered man behind the ticket counter. “One ticket to Budapest, please.”

  “No, you calm down,” Nicolas said gruffly, turning over the name tag on my suitcase with even more gauntlet-throwing fanfare, “DÉ-bo-rah.”

  “It’s DE-bra, okay, DE-bra. Not DÉ-bo-rah. You people never get it right.”

  The ticket vendor, a Romanian, looked at both of us with exasperation. “Both of you calm down,” he said, handing us our tickets simultaneously. “If you run, you might make it.”

  Just then, a TV camera crew of four panting men came sprinting up to the ticket counter. “Journalistes! Journalistes!” they shouted, waving their TF1 press passes in the air. Nicolas and I made a mad dash to the gate just as the stewardesses were closing the doors. The TV guys missed the flight.

  I sat down in my seat. Nicolas, laughing, threw his bag into the overhead compartment above me. “That’s just great. Adjoining seats,” he said, trying to squeeze his enormous body into the narrow cushioned slot assigned to him.

  After ignoring each other for the first half hour, we gingerly started to speak. Nicolas was a reporter for Radio France International. He’d been in Timişoara. He’d covered Bucharest. His mom had escaped from Romania, and he had grown up speaking Romanian at home. Best of all, he knew where Tîrgu-Mureş was, and he knew how to get from Budapest to Tîrgu-Mureş. He thought it would be a good idea if we drove together. Knowing not one thing about the country I was about to enter, least of all how to get from Budapest to some place called Tîrgu-Mureş, who was I to argue?

  We checked into a hotel in Budapest, where, after a tortured exchange with the international op
erator, I called Marion from my room to apologize into her answering machine for missing dinner once again.

  The next day, at the crack of dawn, Nicolas and I rented a car and drove to the Romanian border. I slept most of the way from Budapest until Cluj, where we were waylaid by a group of angry Romanian demonstrators. Nicolas recorded some sound, I took a few shots and then we jumped back in the car to drive the seventy-five miles or so still remaining until we reached Tîrgu-Mureş. The roads between Cluj and Tîrgu-Mureş were barely paved, cutting through hilly green farmland and bordered every now and then by a tunnel of trees planted at precise, identical intervals. We were in the heart of Transylvania, legendary stomping grounds of Count Dracula. “You have a boyfriend? Live with someone?” Nicolas asked.

  I stared out the window. We were stuck behind a barely alive horse pulling a rickety old cart and an equally rickety old man slowly down the road. There was no room on either side to pass them. “You’re not my type, if that’s what you’re asking. Try driving on the grass.”

  “I can’t. Too many rocks.” Nicolas looked insulted. “And that’s not what I was asking. I was just making conversation. Boy, are you defensive.” He was wearing the exact same all-black outfit he had worn the day before. When we were picking up the rental car, he had to fish something out of his suitcase, so I took the opportunity to peek inside. Every piece of his neatly folded clothing, with the exception of a few white T-shirts, was black. Even his briefs were black. “Must make it easy to get dressed in the morning,” I’d said to him, but he didn’t laugh.