The Best Travel Writing, Volume 10

by James O'Reilly, Larry Habegger, Sean O'Reilly (ed) (retail) (epub)

  Led by a desire to actually sleep indoors rather than a park bench, I called her. By some twist of luck, she had a brother who was out of town, who happened to have an empty apartment near the Bastille. I had the apartment for three months if I wanted it. I viewed this at once as both a miracle and a warning: the end of the list which had, in my mind, kept me alive. Perhaps the end of me.

  I set off at sunrise the next morning, fed by a warm baguette and the subtle light of the city. Gray to lemon yellow to gold. With light rain as my only company, I walked through Paris until I reached the famous pyramid, splashed with water nymphs in the form of diamond-colored drops, surrounded by Japanese tourists holding candy-colored umbrellas. Rain mixed with tears on my face as I sobbed, my face tracked with tears I’d never allowed myself to cry since forcing myself to get up off my living room floor all those years ago.

  There was no need for a tour, plan or guide: the month stretched before me, and unlike the rushed tourists who had to chase down the usual suspects in between flights, I had the extravagance of time. That first day I spent with the first sculpture I saw, the Winged Victory of Samothrace. A human figure with wings, perched on the edge of a boat, I imagined her taking flight each night after the Louvre closed. And as I sat on the stairwell looking up at her, I realized that this was not the end of me, but rather the beginning of me.

  The month went by slowly, like a painting as it takes shape under the hand of a painter with only one canvas and a thousand ideas, each day layered with new colors and textures.

  For thirty days, each morning I would walk through the city, stopping to buy my baguette and coffee, pretending to be offended when the waiter laughed as my grim attempt at French was replaced by sign language. Farther on I’d dodge the trash trucks and the early morning graffiti artists to get a place in line at a bakery hidden in an alley, where I’d buy a warm croissant from a baker who smelled like cherry pie. When I’d finally arrive at the square of the Louvre, the pickpockets would smile at me in greeting, while the flower seller pushed a nosegay of bruised violets or tiny pink roses into my hands. At the entrance of the Louvre, the staff would wave me in, as they squabbled in furious French with the illegal ticket sellers just outside the doors.

  After a few weeks, I could walk into the museum with my eyes closed. I knew the feel of the handrails, slightly worn yet smooth and cool. I heard the sound of the security guards shifting their feet, the hum of vented air, the sigh of shoes walking on marble. Each painting and sculpture seem to have waited for my arrival, dressed in their finest draperies and gilded frames, like flags in an endless procession of gladness.

  The women of the Louvre invited me to walk past the crowds into their private chambers. Teasing. Whispering. Welcoming. The Mona Lisa, small and stained green, her plucked eyebrows raised quizzically at the crowds who came to admire her. Gabrielle D’Estrees caught forever fondling one of her sisters, no doubt wishing she hadn’t. Marquise de Pompadour, impossibly coiffed and powdered, permanently poised in pastels. La Grande Odalisque, her body stretched before the world, waited for gossip and visitors. Here were women unapologetic about being women: whole, incomplete, messy, divided, fertile, plump, merchant, slave, prostitute, servant, old, nubile, lost, found, owned, free. I sat before them, held their gaze evenly, without blinking. Our stories were not the same, yet I found myself in each one of them.

  On my last day at the museum, I said goodbye to these painted women I’d met, who at first had seemed two-dimensional and flat, but really had come to life and become friends. Then I took a different route back to the apartment and found myself on the banks of the Seine. I walked along the river, my thoughts on that woman who, many years ago, sat in a field and wrote out a list to save her life. I’d carried her list with me around the world, and as I took it out of my bag, my hands shook so badly it seemed as though the paper would take flight.

  One last gesture, one last goodbye, one last promise made to that woman who was me so long ago. Her list was finished, and somehow I felt her end had come as well. I held the journal tightly and tore that final page of my past out. I folded it into a small paper boat, and set it in the Seine. It floated, small and white, like a dove, a peace offering to my old self. My eyes followed the little white boat as it moved down the river, past the barges, until it was gone. She was gone, too.

  She finally got what she had wanted the whole time: to be free and not defined by cancer.

  And I, too, was free. I still am.

  World traveler Amy Gigi Alexander writes tales of place interwoven with memoir and social commentary. Her work has been published in numerous literary magazines as well as National Geographic India, BBC Travel, World Hum, Lonely Planet, and others. Her award-winning travel essays have been translated and published internationally. Her work focuses on being an empowered woman, a solo traveler, and finding the good in the world. Her website is www.amygigialexander.com.

  PETER VALING

  The Lapham Longshot

  Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

  I wasn’t making any headway freelancing in Canada. A decade of effort and risk had come to little more than a contact list of editors who weren’t interested or couldn’t pay. Before trading in pen for hammer, or any tool with which I could earn a living, I decided to give America a try and thus go out with a bang. I decided that I would attempt to impress myself on at least one editor at a publication with money and clout in New York. I sent, in manilla envelopes, a selection of clippings and awards to Graydon Carter at Vanity Fair, to David Granger at Esquire, and to David Remnick at The New Yorker. I described myself as a writer in the art-of-fact tradition of Gay Talese and George Plimpton and sealed the portfolio with a photograph of myself that would do either writer proud. The effort cost $105 in copies and postage. It amounted to nothing.

  Then an acquaintance in the know suggested that I drop in on Lewis Lapham in person. I sent Lapham one of my manilla envelopes and waited. Meanwhile, I researched the legendary man of letters at the library. Lapham had headed Harper’s for years, and upon retirement founded Lapham’s Quarterly, a publication into which every four months he distilled millennia of literary insight into topics ranging from Magic Shows to Arts & Letters. During his career, he had published writers as divergent as Tom Wolfe and Christopher Hitchens, but what excited me most about the elderly scribe was that he proclaimed himself open to young talent (though he didn’t think much of what was currently on offer). Oh, yes, and he smoked. Lewis Lapham was my kind of editor, and it didn’t take much beyond a gut feeling for me to convince myself that great things would come of us meeting face to face.

  I sold the idea to my wife as a package. The trip would be an addendum to our weekend-long honeymoon, a break from our kids and an opportunity for me to relaunch my writing career. Besides, we had never been to New York. We booked flights and a week in a one-room, walk-up tenement house in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Then one morning in July, we departed for New York without hearing a word in response from Lapham.

  The first two days in New York I didn’t think of Lapham much. I’d check my email at a café each morning and then put work out of my head for the rest of the day. It was easy to do. Lee and I are walkers, and in the mornings we’d dress up, have something to eat on our bed and step out of the door of the tenement to see of the Big Apple what there was to see. We began with concentric circles of our neighborhood. In recent decades, the Lower East Side has undergone gentrification, with million-dollar condos replacing much of the once-working-class-turned-bohemian/skid-row Bowery. But the Jewish stamp on the borough has remained. Locales like the Eldridge Street Synagogue have been restored, and a host of trendy businesses run by young Jews have returned to the place of their forefathers. Indeed, some of these businesses had never left. The knishes we ate at Yonah Schimmel’s Knish Bakery were delivered up warm by the very same pulley-operated dumb waiter that had delivered them up from the basement a century ago. Sitting there eating the simple, doughy snack, surrounded by yell
owed clippings of Jewish celebrity patrons from Woody Allen to Barbra Streisand, I entertained all sorts of thoughts. I thought about Lee crying at the foot of the bed at three A.M. the previous night because I, drunk, wanted to sleep without AC, while she, sober, couldn’t handle the heat wave and the noise from the street. I thought about the Jews who had once lived in that tenement house, packed to the rafters and poor as mice. They must have had some wicked rows. Jews described by Blaise Cendrars in Easter in New York, his poetic tribute to the turn-of-the-century New York street, came to mind as well:

  They sit in shops, under copper lamps,

  Sell old clothes, books, arms and stamps.

  Yes, the bakery got my strong sense of nostalgia rolling, and it rolled along with me as hand-in-hand Lee and I strolled down boulevards and through alleys and parks. We poked into a tailor shop here and a bookshop there, and passed plaques commemorating Mark Twain and Brendan Behan on the pillars that marked the entrance to the Chelsea Hotel. The nostalgia lingered still. We tried to retire to the storied lounge for a nightcap, but it was under renovation, so we walked on until we arrived at Times Square. Even it, lit up as it was with ads for a dizzying swirl of products, held appeal for me. I asked a husky beat cop for directions to Jimmy’s Corner. He had never heard of it. We eventually found it in the “Dive Bars” section of our NYC city guide and spent the remainder of the night drinking draft in New York’s famed boxing bar. The handsome, well-spoken bartender appeared out of place. He was holding the bar down for the founder, his father, Jimmy, who was out of town cornering a fighter. Would he run this institution once his father retired? I asked. No, he was finishing a law degree in corporate law at Harvard and the bar would eventually be sold.

  Two days passed like this and then another two. Still no word had come from Lapham. This was no surprise, as according to the Quarterly website, the editor was currently out of town for a few days at a librarian’s conference in D.C. We were, however, in New York and would make the most of it. We devoted a day to fine art. Instead of going to a large gallery like the MOMA, we spent the morning at the Frick, an old mansion that had once belonged to a steel baron but which had been converted into a museum that held a small but varied collection of Vermeers, Titians, El Grecos, and Goyas. We were among few visitors in the stately rooms, and the docents didn’t reprimand us for edging close to the paintings we liked. My afternoon plan was to walk farther up Central Park to Rockefeller’s mansion, now converted into the Neue Gallery. I wanted to view some Klimts and Egon Schieles. I also wished to surprise Lee with lunch at the Cafe Sabarsky, which served Viennese pastries in an atmosphere that combined live classical music with a view of Central Park. Both gallery and café were closed, however, and we made do with concession food at the Park.

  We spent the afternoon on a hilltop overlooking the Hudson River. That we had reached the Cloisters was a miracle, as we had trudged the barren, winding road for over an hour in 40-degree (104°F) heat. When finally we crested the hill and the fragments of the Spanish monastery became visible, we collapsed under a small group of wilting trees and expelled what felt like our last breath. But to inhale again was divine. The river breeze blew up from the other side of the hill scents from hundreds of rare herbs and flowers. We recovered quickly and crossed the heavy stone threshold of the Cloisters. Several hours passed. By the time we exited, the temperature had become bearable. The walk down the hillside and then back down through Central Park was lively with conversation. The Cloisters was a treasure house of art from old Christendom, something we had not encountered since we were kids backpacking together through the towns and cities of Europe. The fifth day in New York thus came to an end, the two of us merrily making our way through a darkening Central Park, talking about God and art and God in art. Except that I ruined it with an attempt to contact Lapham. My acquaintance had told me that the editor would often spend late hours in his office, and that bit of information, emboldened by a few drinks at Jimmy’s, led me to the one payphone in the city that still worked. I dialed. The phone rang, and I pictured old Lapham hunched over his desk, reading my clippings by the light of a solitary Tiffany-shaded bulb. The phone continued to ring. Later, on the rooftop of our tenement, Lee and I had our second holiday fight. I had apparently smooth-talked her into another poorly planned, hare-brained adventure.

  What could I do at this point but to raise morale, and what better place to do it at than at the racetrack? I had staked around two grand on this Lapham longshot—what difference would a few more dollars make? So in the morning, after checking my email, we set out for the Belmont. In this postmodern New York City of spotless, air-conditioned subways and anti-busking bylaws, this was no easy undertaking. The direct train to Belmont had been cancelled due to a declining interest in thoroughbred racing, so along with a few elderly men, we boarded the first in a series of buses bound for the track.

  Even a bright summer’s day couldn’t deliver Belmont from its gloom. The dead mounted on the walls well outnumbered the few living in the stands, and my heart sank deeper when I compared the slovenly present to the elegant past. For over a hundred years, the Belmont has hosted the third leg of the Triple Crown. It was supposed to be regal. High and low society were supposed to mix in its stands in the same way they mixed in a Toulouse-Lautrec painting. I sank down in my seat, corn dog in one hand, plastic cup of beer in the other, and played a race. I cashed a 9/1 win. The spent horses cantered by, sweat-soaked in the sun. Someone screamed an obscenity at one of the jockeys. I thumbed the fresh roll of bills in my pocket.

  We now had some money to burn, and much of the day remained. We bussed it from Elmont through Queens and then hopped onto a subway to Harlem. There was no plan, so we walked up one street and down another, took breaks in the shade of doorways and drank tall beers out of paper bags. While loitering around one intersection, a neighborhood-wide water fight erupted in the heat. Kids pried loose a fire hydrant and were using trashcan lids to direct the stream of water against each other and at passing traffic. This was a happy corner of town, and we would liked to have stayed there longer, but Lee and I were hungry from all of the walking we’d done. At Amy Ruth’s Restaurant, we stuffed ourselves with Southern fare and then dragged ourselves to the nearest bus stop. As the bus turned a corner, a spray of water doused our laps through an open window. The kids were still at it.

  Lee had been generous not to mention the main purpose of this trip since our rooftop argument, and I was doing my best to keep failure from my mind. We arrived at Coney Island just as the sun had begun to set. I wanted to feel happy, to feel like I had felt watching those kids, but the old seaside amusement park slated for demolition only pushed me into a deeper funk. On the boardwalk, I listened to Chopin nocturnes banged out by a tourist on a piano that looked like it had been delivered up by the sea until Lee grabbed me by the arm. “Honey, let’s go for a roller coaster ride!” Up we creaked along an ancient latticework of wood and bolts. Each scream-filled apex opened up to a different blurry vista—to the now-dark and empty beach and its shimmering shoreline; to a cluster of forlorn highrises jutting out from behind the Ferris wheel; to an ocean that was flat black and hemmed in by the lights of New Jersey.

  I had run out of days. We were flying home in the afternoon, and I still hadn’t seen Lapham. But I had dressed for the occasion. At the entrance of 33 Irving Place, Lee kissed me and wished me luck. I stepped into a small, turn-of-the-century elevator and pressed 8. I didn’t know if Lapham would be in his office, or what I would say to him if he were. I wanted to forge a connection between us based on the man’s intimate involvement with the disappearing world of letters that I have loved for so long. It was no longer about anything else. What, after all, was I here to ask of him—a job? In hindsight, that’s exactly what I should have asked of him—a job that would support my family while allowing me to read old books. But in all the time that I had spent planning this trip, the obvious had eluded me, and it eluded me still. The elevator door opened.


  I wasn’t thinking clearly at all. I was going through the motions—knocking on doors, talking to faces.

  “Hello, I’m here to see Lewis Lapham.”

  “Is Mr. Lapham expecting you?”

  “No, but I’m a writer. I was told that he’ll see young writers.”

  “Mr. Lapham was sick this week and is catching up. Is there something you’d like to leave with me?”

  There was nothing but sweat in my hands. “My plane leaves this afternoon, back to Vancouver. Please tell him that Peter Valing is here to see him.”

  The secretary was merciful. She sat me in a cubicle and told me that she would ask her boss if he had a few minutes to spare. My eyes darted around the high-ceilinged and book-cluttered office. There were liquor bottles arranged on a nearby table. I peeked over the dividing wall. There behind a glass wall was Lewis Lapham. He was seated behind a large, cluttered desk and he looked as elegant—albeit a bit older and now bespectacled—as he looked in the photo on the Quarterly website.

  A minute later I was shaking hands with him.

  “Mr. Lapham, thank you for your time. I know I’ve come unannounced, but—”

  He didn’t cut me off. I just ran out of words.

  “Have a seat, Mr. Valing. I understand that you’ve come all the way from Vancouver.”

  “Yes,” I managed. “And it’s the hottest day in New York City history!”

  “So you arrived today?” He appeared confused.

  “No—I mean it’s the hottest day today. I arrived last week.”

  The phone rang. “Excuse me, but I have to take this,” said Lapham. I calmed myself. My eyes searched the stacks of papers on his desk. Quickly I noted the ashtray and the absence of a computer before my eyes returned to the stacks. I counted over a dozen manila envelopes.

  “I apologize. I’m a little behind today.”