Foreign Correspondence

by Geraldine Brooks

  “Will you cook them?” I asked Janine, thinking they would provide poor fare for three hungry boys. Janine shuddered. “No, I have nothing to do with this … this … hobby … of his. I hate killing. Juan loves to hunt, but I make him give away what he kills.” In return, sometimes, people brought her samples of what they made from her husband’s trophies. She went to the kitchen and returned with some home-canned pâté, made by a neighbor after Juan had a good day in pursuit of grebes. It was, I had to acknowledge, averting my eyes from the corpses of their relatives, delicious.

  From September through January, Juan scheduled his building projects to allow maximum time for la chasse through the piny woods of the Lubéron. When he was home, he cleaned guns, listened to an electronic bird-call imitator that helped him identify quarry or tended his hunting dogs. He asked if I wanted to see his kennels.

  We scrambled together up the steep slope behind the house. Behind a high wire fence, more than a dozen tails wagged. The dogs were kept four to a pen, and inside each pen was a doggy-sized villa, complete with stucco walls and traditional Provençal red roof tiles. Juan went from pen to pen, speaking to each dog and doling out dinner—a mixture of kibble, yesterday’s baguettes and tasty-looking leftover daube. As he introduced each dog he explained its strong points like a proud father. Some were retrievers, skilled at finding the tiny corpses of blasted songbirds. Others had the courage for running down the big-tusked, drooling sanglier, or wild boar.

  When we returned to the house I asked Janine how she liked the dogs. “I have asthma, so I don’t like them too well,” she replied dryly. I had often wondered how couples cope when one has a passionate interest that the other finds dull or distasteful. But I had rarely seen such an extreme case as this one.

  It was almost time for Janine to pick up her youngest son. Together, we drove back into the town square to wait for the school bus from nearby Pertuis.

  Janine greeted the other mothers in the square. She had grown up with all of them, their lives lived together in the lockstep of a small village. Thirty years earlier, they’d taken the bus together as children. Now they waited for it together, as mothers. While they waited, they chatted, as they had the day before, and almost every other day of their lives. It was the kind of continuity that never existed in a restless new country like Australia, where people are always moving in and moving on. I thought of our street in Concord: none of the neighbors of my parents’ generation had been born there, and none of my generation had stayed.

  When the school bus arrived Janine’s son emerged looking tired from his long school day and almost staggering under a bookbag-rucksack packed heavily enough for a five-day wilderness trek.

  Janine chatted with him about his homework on the short drive home. At the dining-room table she sat down with him, spread out his textbooks and went over that night’s requirements for every subject. As she returned to me in the sitting room, he went uncomplainingly to work on what looked set to be several hours of study.

  As the light drained from the sky, we said our goodbyes. Tony and I climbed into the car and headed back down the hills toward Lourmarin.

  All those years ago, I had written to Janine because I was hungry for the wide world, and yet my letters had found their way to this narrow sliver of provincial village life. In the years since we wrote to each other, as my world had expanded, hers had contracted. Janine and her husband, and the extended family surrounding them, lived a life that was as unchanged in its essence as the little village of St. Martin itself. Juan’s rifles may have been made of modern alloys, but men here had always hunted. His construction company may have used cranes and reinforced concrete, but the craft of building a house wasn’t that different from the one pursued here by sixteenth-century masons. And Janine’s world, caring for her children and her aged parents, living a life in a place where she knew not just every person but every stone, could be the same intimate world of a woman born in many centuries other than the present one.

  The next night we found ourselves in the France of my teenage fantasy, aloft on a thermal of intellectual hot air. The walls of the art gallery were white and floodlit, providing a good background both for the avant-garde art and the even more avant patrons. The men wore long black trench coats, the women short black skirts. The conversation bounced from aesthetics to the strike and to politics in general. It was my stereotypical French scene, animated to order from a dusty corner of my youthful imagination.

  Tony stood in contemplation of one work—a pink velour soft-toy mouse with its stuffing removed, nailed to a well-worn kitchen cutting board.

  “It represents Mickey—an international icon of good and evil,” explained the artist, a tall, gaunt, stringy-haired man clad in leather. “As Baudelaire says, we must examine the morality of the toy.”

  Tony raised a questioning eyebrow.

  “The mouse Mickey, he is supposedly benign, cheerful, and yet he is also the leering face of global cultural imperialism.”

  “Oh,” said Tony. “And what about the cutting board?”

  “The icon, the mouse Mickey, he is crucified on a surface that is ambiguous also,” said the artist. “The cutting board is an object used to create sustenance, but also to dissect flesh.”

  We moved on to the next room, where a second artist had taped his unframed work to the walls. They were small pages of text with a few calligraphic arrows and an occasional doodlish line drawing.

  “It’s a synthesis of alchemy and tantra,” explained the second artist, an older, plumper man also clad in leather. “It’s post-postmodern.”

  Our friends Jean-Pierre and Sylvie noticed the glazed look in our eyes and decided it was time for dinner. Saying farewell to their artist friends, they shepherded us toward a cozy restaurant.

  Jean-Pierre and Sylvie were back in France in between trips to arrange exhibitions of Tibetan tiger rugs and Navajo sand paintings. Their work with the paintings of the Aborigines had grown into a worldwide campaign to draw attention to art of threatened cultures everywhere.

  Inside the restaurant, Jean-Pierre took off his jacket to reveal a faded green T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Australia.” I assumed he’d worn it in my honor, until Sylvie complained that she could rarely persuade him to wear anything else. They were planning an extended return to Australia, to study more Aboriginal artists.

  “I can’t wait to get back to the desert, to the light and the clear air,” enthused Jean-Pierre. “Australia,” he sighed. “It was a rebirth for me.”

  Down the table, their son Benjamin, now twelve years old, scowled. He needed another trip to Australia like the plague. Thanks to his parents’ nomadic existence, he’d had enough rebirths in his short life, and he wanted to stay put. In Provence he had been identified by the government as a “hope of the region” in juvenile table tennis. Much to their astonishment, Jean-Pierre and Sylvie had raised a jock. I wondered if he’d caught the bug during his early exposure to Australia’s sports-mad culture. Whatever the reason, “le ping-pong” was, to Benjamin, the meaning of life.

  I thought of Janine’s boys, their rock-solid daily routine, their steady small orbit of school and village. I wondered if Benjamin really would prefer that life. Or if Janine’s boys would want to swap with him the chance to visit Indian reservations or to live in traditional Aboriginal communities.

  For the first time, it occurred to me that my childhood had offered the best of both alternatives: the stability of a secure and reliable real world, and the infinite adventure of the invented one inhabited by my pen pals—those helpless ciphers on whom I had projected the fantasies of my imaginary life.

  12

  Breakfast with the Queen of the Night

  I returned from Janine’s quiet village in January 1996 with just one piece of my pen-pal puzzle still missing. The last person I had to find was the first to whom I’d written: Sonny Campbell—“Little Nell”—the older girl on the other side of Sydney who had the “brainwave” so many years earlier, “thi
nking you might like to be my pen-friend.”

  She should have been the easiest to contact. Unlike the others, I didn’t have to track her down. I knew exactly where she was. And it was a long way from where she’d started. While her name wasn’t in lights, it was on a very big awning in New York City.

  “The magic is back. And its name is Nell.”

  In 1987, I was in Cairo between assignments, leafing through a months-old copy of Vanity Fair. Sometimes U.S. glossies made it past the ravages of the Egyptian censors. This time the lead sentence of a piece on New York night life compelled me to flip back a page and study the Annie Leibovitz picture that accompanied the article. A leggy odalisque reclined on a velvet chaise. The article told how this striking woman had made a rat-infested electronics store into a nightclub named Nell’s that had become the city’s new hot spot. As the limos lined up outside the velvet-roped entrance, she had turned away Cher and made movie stars like Michael Douglas wait for admission. Mick Jagger, Warren Beatty and various exiled European princes vied for a nod from the fabulous proprietress.

  “[S]he reeks of Berlin 1930,” wrote Vanity Fair’s Bob Colacello. “She wears black and red: short tight clothes that emphasize her dancer’s figure, backless dresses that expose her lovely pale skin. But there’s a spark beneath her pallor, a sweet-water freshness that transcends her Cabaret chic. Despite her apparently febrile existence, Nell is a sensible, clean-living, hardworking kid from Sydney, Australia.…”

  My pen pal had grown up to be crowned New York’s new “queen of the night.”

  Nell’s last letter to me, in July 1967, began with an apology: “Well, I’m ashamed of myself. I’m TERRIBLY sorry for not writing for so long.” She went on to list her onerous responsibilities: “school is awfully tough at the moment … exams … monthly tests … studying a lot … lots of ballet classes … rehearsals … having a concert soon.” And then, the dreaded sentence: “Because of these reasons I don’t think I can write to you anymore.… I have very much enjoyed receiving your letters.… I hope you find yourself another pen-friend more reliable than me.”

  I did, of course. Writing to Nell had been just the first chink in the door to a wider world; she had emboldened me to seek out the others who would allow me to kick it open.

  After the letters stopped, I still heard about her, here and there. She left school at sixteen, as she’d planned, and spent a year in acting classes. Then, when her father got an assignment in his newspaper’s London bureau, she went with him. Her big sister Sally was already in London. The two of them flatted together while Nell worked as a soda jerk, tap-dancing between tables and belting out show tunes. One of her customers was the director Jim Sharman, who cast her in The Rocky Horror Show. When the stage play later became a cult movie, Nell played the tap-dancing biker’s moll who remains one of its icons.

  And then I lost the plot of her story. I didn’t know that she returned to Sydney from London in 1985, the same year I came home from the United States. And when I went off on assignment to the Middle East, she moved to New York. She took an apartment just a block from my old place on East Thirteenth Street.

  But even though our tracks covered the same ground, we never met. I was shy about calling her; I suspected I wasn’t quite cool enough to make it past the velvet ropes of her acquaintance. In 1996, when I finally picked up the phone and dialed her number, I realized it had been thirty years since our first exchange of letters.

  The voice that answered was the voice of those silverfish-nibbled pages. Pickets of exclamation marks fenced her sentences. Word leaped suddenly into BOLD TYPE. Her accent seemed as hybrid as a Labradoodle or a Cockerpoo. Big round English vowels suddenly deflated into Aussie flatness with just a hint of Yankee drawl. It was like listening to Queen Elizabeth channeling Nicole Kidman.

  Nell suggested we meet for breakfast. I was surprised; I hadn’t imagined encountering the queen of the night in daylight. She proposed an East Village café right near my old apartment on Thirteenth Street. Sliding into the cab, I was delighted to hear the cabbie say it again: “Ya want Toideenth and Toid?”

  The café faced what was once the Variety Vaudeville Theater—as apt a place as any to meet up with Nell. But the sign on the door said CLOSED TILL 11. It was just after nine. Apparently the queen of the night kept more conventional hours than the rest of her neighborhood.

  While I waited for her, I wandered down the block to take a sentimental look at my old apartment. When I first arrived in New York, my school friend Kate, who was studying acting, had been living there and I’d been appalled by the overturned garbage in front of the stoop and the stink of urine in the foyer. In Sydney, even students could share houses in desirable neighborhoods, or find little flats like the one I’d had, with park views and a garden. “How could Kate live in a place like this?” I thought. A few months later, when I’d become better acquainted with the realities of Manhattan real estate, I begged her for a room.

  Someone had given my old brownstone a coat of paint and put an intercom on the door. In my day, guests had to shout from the street if they wanted to be let in. The Spanish bodega was gone from the building next door. The rasping of its shutter had been my morning alarm clock. Now, it looked as if the street had priced itself out of reach of students and Hispanics.

  It was a chilly, late winter morning. To keep my mind off the cold, I pulled a couple of Nell’s letters from my bag and reread them as I waited. They reeked of our sun-drenched childhoods, of warm summer evenings and sticky school uniforms. Even her Sydney address, Coolabah Avenue, was enough to set the tune to “Waltzing Matilda” on auto-rewind in my brain:

  Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

  Under the shade of a coolabah tree …

  Standing there on that Manhattan street corner, the billabong stretched in front of me, red rocks reflecting in its limpid surface. Overhead, a flock of pink and gray galahs burst from the twisted branches of the coolabah tree and swirled into the burning blue of an Outback sky.

  She had a dancer’s walk: the slight turnout of the toes, the bounce on the balls of her feet. She wore a long sweater, leggings and a well-tailored hacking jacket. A slash of dark red lipstick accentuated the auburn of her signature bob. The New York Times was tucked under her arm. “My father’s influence,” she said. “He made me a newspaper junkie.” Her most recently opened establishment, a little restaurant named The Kiosk on the Upper East Side, had a frieze of newspaper mastheads accenting the wallpaper.

  We peered longingly into the cozy dimness of the closed café. There was a Starbuck’s a block away, but when I suggested it as an alternative, Nell looked at me as if I’d proposed we drink hemlock instead of coffee. “Oh NO,” she exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “It’s SOOOOO bland.” Instead, we set off at her long-legged trot in search of something with the right atmosphere.

  “Bruce Chatwin said EVERYONE should walk twenty miles a day,” she declared, and it seemed we might have to go that distance to find something acceptable at such an unfashionable hour. But then she remembered the twenty-four-hour Café Orlin on St. Mark’s Place. For its denizens, 9:30 A.M. was more likely to be the tail end of a very long night rather than the start of an ordinary morning.

  Sure enough, the window table was occupied by two tall transvestites wearing fake tiger skin and hiding the night’s ravages under polka-dot scarves and huge, Grimaldi-esque dark glasses. “The girls are HERE!” Nell exclaimed approvingly as one got out a bottle of watermelon nail polish to touch up a tired manicure.

  As we sat down I pulled out the letter Nell had written to me back in May 1966, in which she boasted of her late-night pajama party—“We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) there we got to sleep at 1.30 AM!).” She laughed—a throaty roar that reminded me of her sister Sally, sequestered with Darleen in the sanctum of the Big Sister’s Bedroom while I hovered by the door, eavesdropping and trying desperately to get the joke.

  For the best part of
a decade Nell’s life had been like a continuous pajama party. But instead of the relatively staid hour of 1:30 A.M., she rarely got to bed before five. “I’d wake up at five the next afternoon without seeing daylight,” she said. Defying the short half-life of most New York clubs, Nell’s had remained hot for years. She said it had been a relief when the celebrity tide finally ebbed. “The drinking, smoky rooms, very high heels, up till dawn … I was never really a party person, and the club was like a party every night.”

  I looked at her over the froth of my cappuccino and wondered why she was saying such a thing. If this woman wasn’t a party person, who was? Perhaps she was adopting Australian camouflage, coloring herself marsupial gray. It’s one thing to be queen of the night in New York, but Australians know a tumbril is always waiting.

  As the club’s pressures eased, she finally had some energy for other interests. She enrolled in art class (“I’d always be the last one there—hung over, wearing sunglasses”) and met a fresh-faced blond sculptor named Eamon Roche, who had become her partner in life and work. Together they were about to open a Vietnamese restaurant. Although the space was still a building site, Vogue’s editor Anna Wintour had visited the curing concrete and dangling wires the day before—“wearing about $20,000 worth of clothes”—looking for a hot venue for a party for a celebrity “so big she can’t say who it is.” Nell wasn’t sure the restaurant would be ready, but that was part of the allure: “Everyone in this town always wants to be first.” A Vogue function would be an ideal opening, for Wintour would bring the models, and a sprinkling of models made a room look right to the rest of fashionable Manhattan.

  It wasn’t the career Nell had imagined for herself in those long-ago Sydney letters. But when the time came to launch herself as an actress, she’d found that she didn’t have the temperament to sit through drizzly London winters, patiently auditioning for small parts. Instead of capitalizing on her high profile after the release of The Rocky Horror Picture Show, she’d run off to Norfolk with a romantic poacher—“a bit of a D. H. Lawrence fantasy, I’m afraid—all my clothes were stained with blood from hiding his dead pheasants in my pockets.” When she did turn up for a rare audition, “It was, ‘Take me as I am or not at all.’ Just because my hair was Schiaparelli pink and I had a broad Australian accent didn’t mean I couldn’t play Jane Eyre.”