The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

  Above the tables in Le Grand Véfour are small plaques in memoriam to those who occupied them. Mark and I sat side by side on Napoleon and Josephine’s banquette. Our lamb medallions were drizzled with basil sauce this time, and our wedding cake was topped with pulled sugar roses. The freesia and lilies that Madame Ruggieri and I had chosen for the tables were almost unnecessary, upstaged by the room itself.

  “I’m your wife,” I whispered to Mark at some point during dinner. He reached around me on the banquette, grasped my hip and pulled me toward him, sensing my incredulity at the pronouncement. I wasn’t thinking about how long, or if, we’d last. I simply needed to name what I had become, as if saying the word meant I had simultaneously transformed into a more true and worthy soul. But I didn’t feel the least bit changed. Instead, I sensed I had boarded the finest and sturdiest of ships but was terrified of water, and furthermore, it was too late for me to disembark. Now, my destiny was choosing me.

  “I guess that makes me your husband,” he whispered.

  “Forever,” I said, and shrugged, punctuating the word with finality, rather than doubt.

  “I’m sure of it,” he said, and we toasted each other, almost silently.

  The dining room was brightly illuminated, but white curtains covered the lower half of the windows, blocking the view. Mark and I, my family, my friends—we were safely contained on an island in the middle of Paris. All that was visible from our table was the sky, the green tops of the linden trees, and the limestone columns that have framed the gardens for over two centuries.

  Within a few weeks, after our honeymoon, I was back in Paris, sorting through gifts of crystal and china, and I read in the paper about Guy Martin, the thirty-three-year-old chef who had taken over at Le Grand Véfour. Such things made headlines in France.

  Two decades later, while planning the trip to Paris to commemorate our anniversary, I remembered that news story and was stunned to learn that not only was Martin still there, but in 2010 he’d bought the restaurant outright. Whether it was fate or choice or some kind of compromise that had carried him to this point, Guy Martin—like Mark and I—had remained devoted to the decision he made all those years ago. I was intrigued. I wanted to meet him and hear what he might have to say on the subject.

  As I left for Paris, I was uncertain what awaited me. I suppose I wanted to recall the promise of my wedding day, to experience anew the splendid room, and to peer back on my less-weary self with eyes that were now two decades older and two decades more married. It was a sensation I sought, an assurance that longevity, whether in a restaurant or a relationship, does not have to equal decrepitude. I wondered whether my marriage had measured up to the place where it began, or vice-versa.

  I hadn’t expected to make it this far. Three years earlier, my relationship and all my beliefs had been shattered when I fell, briefly, for another man. Had the object of my obsession wished it, I would have walked across the ocean to Africa, where he lived, to start a new life with him. But he didn’t, and my heart splintered in the aftermath. Agonized, I broke down, unable to move from my bed for weeks and then months as I stared out the window and flooded my pillow with tears for another man.

  I reached to Mark to rescue me, and incredibly, he did. My husband saw me as more deserving of pity—or at least compassion—than punishment and forgave me for what was certainly a betrayal, but also, in his eyes, a most human transgression. In retrospect, I chock it up to midlife and hormones and the insane need to try and stop the mirthless passage of years. We were quite roughed up by the episode, but once I emerged on the other side—alive, first of all, and stronger—there were no more doubts that we would stay together. Forget about people changing, moving apart, growing in opposite directions. For Mark, to fail would have been to acknowledge a twenty-year mistake, and he couldn’t brook such a waste of his time and judgment. Plus, we had never stopped loving each other.

  But Mark and I would have to celebrate that victory—and our milestone—together, later, at home. He was stuck stateside with a pressing deadline, and besides, we were broke again and couldn’t justify two tickets to France. So I would be dining solo at Le Grand Véfour. It wasn’t at all what I’d hoped, but I was curious nonetheless and even excited, for both that transcendent realm of my six-course lunch and the fact-finding mission with Guy Martin that would accompany it.

  The day before my reservation at Le Grand Véfour, I retraced the path I took on my wedding day. I visited the palatial mairie off the rue de Bretagne where, after the ceremony, the mayor of the 3rd arrondissement handed us our official livre de famille, with blank pages for up to eight kids. Had the playground across the street been there on our wedding day? If so, I never noticed. Before I had my children, now fourteen and seventeen, a sandbox and jungle gym were all but invisible to me. Now I stood near the playground trying to remember how Mark and I had traveled the meaningful distance from the mairie to Le Grand Véfour. Had a car taken us? How did my friends get there? I didn’t recall being a jittery bride, but I was surprised to have erased that detail as well.

  This time I took the metro to Bourse and walked over to the gardens, where I lingered over an alfresco breakfast of café crème and a brioche. It was an April day erupting with color and heat, and I tried to imagine how the courtyard must have appeared long ago at this time of year, from up above in Colette’s salon. “The Palais-Royal stirs at once under the influence of humidity, of light filtered through soft clouds, of warmth,” she wrote. “The green mist hanging over the elms is no longer a mist, it is tomorrow’s foliage.”

  After my coffee and stroll, I took the long ride back to my old neighborhood near Père Lachaise, where I was staying in a hotel. At the front desk I felt the ions shift in a blast of sensory memory; to my disbelief, standing beside me was one of my husband’s dear friends who had been a witness at our wedding. We were utterly stunned into silence and then, laughter. An Australian artist, he was living in Arles and had done the paintings in the hotel. I hadn’t seen him in eight years, and his wife had recently passed away. Mark and I weren’t able to attend her funeral service, and I still felt awful about it. We hugged, caught up on all our children, had a drink, and wondered where the time had gone.

  The following day, upstairs at Le Grand Véfour, I met Guy Martin and told him about the strange coincidence and how pleased I was that my friend would be joining me for lunch. He wasn’t surprised.

  “This is a magical place in a magical setting,” Martin told me. “There’s nowhere else in the world like it. When you do an important celebration here—no matter what happens down the line—it will always lead to exceptional things.”

  When I walked into the restaurant, it enveloped me in the familiar. Twenty years seemed utterly insignificant—both the vestibule and dining room appeared untouched by the passing decades. But incredibly, nothing felt stale or neglected. It was there still, that gleaming lightness that made me feel like I was swimming in soda and that heady sensation of being instantly transformed into someone of consequence. As I stood on the carpet in a pool of sunlight, I nearly ached with life. The room was still shiny and alive and bursting with anticipation.

  Although at first it seemed unchanged, upon closer inspection I noticed subtle nods to the present day—hidden fixtures brightened the female forms painted on the wall, and the lace curtains that once ran along the perimeter had been replaced by etched glass.

  But the soul of Le Grand Véfour was still there, preserved not only in the décor but also in the traditional recipes, which Martin was constantly reinterpreting and updating. The point, he said, was to allow for the inevitability of change and to let history propel you forward rather than weigh you down. Nothing stays the same, he insisted, because nothing ever can.

  “I’m growing every day,” he said. “The same goes for my cooking. It’s not a static thing. It is always in perpetual motion.”

  I wondered out loud whether there was some wisdom to be gleaned here, and what I could extrapolate a
bout life and marriage. Mark and I had survived, but I still sometimes wondered how I could wake up to the same man, every day, for the rest of my days here on earth. Martin said that in his case, the key was to remember the person he was back then and to trust the impressions that had brought him there in the first place.

  “When I came here from Savoie, the Palais Royal gardens smelled like home. I couldn’t believe I was in Paris,” he said. “The first time I pushed in the door of the restaurant, I gasped. It was just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “It was a coup de coeur, like when you meet someone—you aren’t certain, but you know something happened. You just know. I knew I belonged here.”

  In other words, I needed to envision the young man I’d fallen in love with and trust that I would feel the same way about him if we met today. I needed always to remind myself why it was Mark I’d chosen to marry. And I needed to recall the much younger woman I had been—the one who was never going to settle—and believe that even if I tended to be guided somewhat by passion, I also possessed a good dose of sense to harness the free will required for a sound decision.

  I closed my eyes and saw Mark and me with our limbs entwined, never imagining that I could one day be middle- aged and scarred by an episode of doubt, looking to a Paris restaurateur to shine a light on my future while illuminating my past.

  For twenty years, Martin had setbacks and dark times, and when Michelin took away his third star, it was his own version of the infidelity that nearly destroyed my marriage—and certainly my faith in the institution. But as guardian of Le Grand Véfour’s culinary legacy, he also led it into the twenty-first century with the same devotion that motivates those too optimistic, or hopeful, to entertain the idea of failure: hard work, flexibility, creativity, love.

  “I never thought I’d be here for twenty years,” he says.

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “Sometimes I’m still surprised.”

  “Yes, me too,” I said.

  “But as long as I feel good here, and as long as I have faith in what I do, I’ll stay,” he said. “Life is very short.”

  That, I realized, could also mean, why bother? Other adventures and other paths constantly tempt every man and woman in this life, forever posing the question of whether it takes more courage to stay put or move on. After all, in marriage—and in food—twenty years is already no small achievement.

  This time I sat in Jean Cocteau’s chair with my old friend, who had been here with us two decades ago. It was a strange thrill to now feel my own history in this room. The chilled bottle of pink Champagne we drank was the same kind Mark and I had served at our wedding, probably the same kind I’d shared with Nicolas, and the same I’ll drink with my husband on our fortieth anniversary. Even the food managed to be revelatory: Martin’s modern turn on Le Grand Véfour’s classic ravioli, now prepared with the finest foie gras in the land, seemed to prove that the best use of the past is to chart the course for the path ahead.

  Still, I missed Mark. He had alluded to his tenacity all those years ago, and because of it, I had something to celebrate. We had weathered what for many couples would have been insurmountable. And if I could learn anything from a restaurant that had withstood centuries and wars and misfortune—and a chef who taught me that fidelity does not have to mean compromise—then we too would last forever.

  I knew that just outside in the gardens, lovers kissed, babies tumbled, and a work crew trimmed the lawn, leaving the smell of cut grass. We could see none of it above the newly etched windows, just the sky over Paris—eternal, faithful, delicious.

  Marcia DeSanctis is a journalist and writer whose work has appeared in many publications, including Vogue, Departures, The New York Times Magazine, Recce, Best Women’s Travel Writing 2011, Best Travel Writing 2011 and Town & Country. Her story Masha won the Solas Grand Prize Silver Award for Travel Writing in 2011. Formerly, she was a network news producer for ABC, NBC, CBS and Dow Jones. You can visit her at www.marciadesanctis.com.

  ANGIE CHUANG

  Learning to Pray

  In a Kabul kitchen, a journalist discovers the secrets of sisterhood.

  The yellow door looked far heavier than it was. Every time we Americans—Laila and I—swung it open, we pulled or pushed too hard, and it flailed wildly on its hinges. Back and forth, back and forth. It had a large, crooked black English letter painted on it. “What does the K stand for?” I asked, puzzling at it as if it represented a secret code. “Kabul,” the city we were in? “Karzai,” a show of support for the president? Nearly three years after the U.S. had overthrown the Taliban, most Afghans still spoke of him with a trace of hope.

  Nafisa smiled: “It stands for kitchen.” Our laughter filled the room.

  This was our space, the room in the compound-style Kabul home where we four young women, American and Afghan, spent most of our waking time together. Nafisa and Nazo enjoyed our company as they did their household chores. The men had their own spaces, such as the saloon, or sitting room, in which they made important decisions. But the kitchen was the women’s space, where we could have private conversations, sharing secrets with little worry that someone might walk in or overhear. The kitchen was where Nafisa and Nazo could be themselves.

  Nafisa and Nazo were sisters-in-law, both in their twenties. Nafisa had moved a year before from Pakistan to marry Nazo’s brother Ayub in a union arranged by their families. The two young women did all the cooking and most of the housework together, and as a result, they spent more time with each other than with anyone else in the house. Nafisa had liquid brown eyes and straight black hair, and was serene and serious. Nazo’s startling green eyes had an impish glow, and her curly dark hair was always trying to escape from her chador, or headscarf. They chatted, bickered, and laughed with such ease that I sometimes wondered if Nafisa’s marriage had been arranged for her compatibility not only with Ayub but also with his sister, Nazo.

  Ayub was on a business trip in Kandahar when we arrived, so Laila, Nafisa, Nazo, and I shared the room usually occupied by the newlyweds—the only one in the house that had access to a western-style flush toilet. The room barely accommodated the double bed and the two sleeping mats.

  It was May 2004. After September 11, I had begun to report on the Shirzais, an Oregon-based Afghan immigrant family, and their plans to reconnect with their country as it rebuilt post-Taliban. I first met Laila Shirzai in my official role as a journalist, but we soon became friends. She was an ideal travel companion, a hybrid between American and Afghan. She’d grown up in Pakistan’s Afghan-refugee enclaves and attended high school and college in the United States. This trip had been her idea, and we stayed in the home of her aunt, who was Nazo’s mother and, of course, Nafisa’s mother-in-law.

  Laila and I had fallen into the foreign yet comforting rhythm of the sisters-in-law’s days. Shortly after the 4:30 A.M. prayer call, they would pray while we snoozed. Then they came in with a tray of bread and tea to rouse us. Many days, Laila and I helped the two young women in the kitchen as they prepared meals; we chatted as we stood side-by-side, chopping onions and tomatoes. We also went shopping together and attended a birthday party for Nazo’s friend. And we visited Nazo’s school, an overcrowded, slapdash attempt to restart girls’ education a decade after the Taliban had banned it. (Nazo, at twenty-two, was in the tenth grade because of the time she had missed.) Often, we just sat on the edge of the concrete-covered well in the house’s courtyard, leaning into each other under the fig trees.

  One morning, I got up earlier than usual and lingered with a cup of tea in the kitchen as the household began its day. Nazo came in, wearing her school uniform of a black shalwar kameez, a traditional tunic-and-pants outfit, and a white headscarf. Her English was not as fluent as Nafisa’s, so she often asked me for help with unfamiliar or forgotten words.

  On this morning, she said, “I cannot remember the word that means you are sleeping but you are seeing things like you are waking.”

  “Dream,” I said.


  “Ah, yes,” she said, with a sly giggle. “Drreeam.”

  She paused, a glint in her green eyes.

  “Did you have a dream last night?” I asked.

  Her pale cheeks turned pink. “Yesterday I dream about Yellow Pants.” She covered her face with her hands.

  “Yellow Pants” was her nickname for a black-haired young man whom she had spotted in Nafisa’s wedding video, wearing bright goldenrod trousers and a black shirt. The men and women had celebrated and danced in separate rooms, so she hadn’t seen him in person at the wedding—only in the video. A few days ago, Nazo had shown us the video of the men dancing in their room and told us she was having friends at her girls’ school inquire about the man in the yellow pants.

  There was no dating in Afghanistan, and chances were, Nazo would have an arranged marriage like Nafisa and her brother. But if she happened to spot someone, she knew how to put the wheels in motion. A vast and seemingly invisible network of women might contact Nazo’s mother, and the two of them might be able to meet in a formal setting, in the presence of the two families.

  “What was Yellow Pants doing in your dream?” I said, and playfully nudged Nazo.

  She shrieked from behind her hands and pretended to run out of the kitchen. Then she returned, looked me in the eye, and deadpanned, “He was dancing. Just like in the video.”

  I wondered if she really meant that, or if “dancing” was a euphemism. It was hard to know sometimes how innocent—or not—she and Nafisa were, what they understood of relationships, love, sex. Nafisa and Nazo had asked Laila and me about our love lives, but American-style dating was unfathomable to them. I told them about my past relationships—one with a man whom I wanted to marry, others with men I had no intention of marrying—and how and why they’d failed. But Nafisa and Nazo only furrowed their brows with compassion as I described various breakups, and I started wishing I had a simpler answer for them. As for Laila, she always changed the subject quickly, not wanting to tell them about the white American boyfriend from college she was keeping a secret from her family.