The Travelers (5 page)

“Ca était, monsieur?”
the bartender asks.

“Formidable, Pierre. Formidable.”

The room is filled with an appealing assortment of women wearing chic skirts and high heels, and the accompanying men in wavy hair and silk scarves, laughing and arguing and jabbing each other with the tips of their fingers and the force of their convictions. Will likes it here.

Paris is one of those places where Will can’t help but imagine living. He’s always doing this, weighing the possibility of living here, of living there, the pros and cons of occupying some town or another, living a different life. This is what travel is for: dipping your toes into unfamiliar waters, seeing if it suits.

He often needs to fight the urge to write that he’d love to live somewhere—the Marais or Malibu, the Dordogne or the Cotswolds. This sentiment is not what readers want; it’s not experiential. But even though he never makes the case explicitly, he’s pretty sure the idea emerges: this would be a fine place to inhabit an alternative universe.

Will pays his check, says good night to Pierre, and steps out to the quiet nighttime street.

There are parts of Paris where the after-dark life is dense and loud, taxi-hailing and making-out, cigarette smoky and cell-phone loud, “
J’arrive!
” But this part of the 1
^ère
arrondissement
isn’t. Will walks a very long, very quiet half-block before he freezes—

He left his notebook on the bar.

He spins, retreats in that rushed distracted way of anyone who has left behind something important, not paying much attention to anything else. Certainly not enough to notice the big guy walking toward him, studiously not meeting Will’s eye.

Will meanders through the mostly deserted streets, lost in himself, until the not-so-distant sounds of a woman’s yelp and a slamming door drag him back to awareness. Sometimes he’s too oblivious to the threats that lurk in the late streets of big cities. He looks over his shoulder now, quickens his pace.

Back in his hotel room, amid plush velvet and a surfeit of throw pillows, gleaming chrome fixtures and virgin white tiles, the solitary quiet of this generic cocoon, Will’s regrets return. Everything that had raced through his mind while the plane plummeted is now occupying his consciousness again like political protesters, chanting loudly, refusing to be ignored, presenting the united front of this message: he should be happy, but he’s not.

Will wants everything to be perfect. He wants the perfect wife, the perfect kids, the perfect old townhouse, perfectly restored, where he’ll serve perfect food accompanied by perfect wines in perfect glasses. He wants his suit to be perfectly tailored, his shoes perfectly shined. He wants the hotel room to be perfect, the overnight train ride, the local tour guide. And he has made the relentless pursuit of perfection his career.

But perfection is always over the next horizon. The next job, the next meal, the next trip. Next year, or maybe the year after.

Chloe now isn’t quite as perfect as the ideal of Chloe had been, before. And they’re broke in a way that often looks permanent, living in a crumbling house in a dodgy neighborhood, waiting for the extra income that’s always more likely next year, money to finish renovating the house, to furnish it for the baby they’re trying to conceive, to start living grown-up life, still in the imprecise future, after some nonspecific milestone, floating up ahead in the indefinite unsatisfying
soon.

Will knows that he’s very lucky, that he does something uniquely enjoyable for a living. But he is jaded, and he is bored. He increasingly suspects that he chose the wrong career, and possibly the wrong wife too. He is thirty-five years old, halfway to dead, and he has already made the most important decisions of his life. Have they all been wrong?

ST-ÉMILION, FRANCE

“Thank you to everyone for coming ’ere tonight. From America. From England and Sweden and,
comment dit-on,
Africa South? From Australia, even!” The winemaker holds his hands over his head, and claps, and everyone joins. “This is our two ’undredth anniversary
au château
! We are very ’onored that you are able to join our celebration.
Merci
à tous! À table!”

The long table is out back of the château, on a broad stretch of flat grass before the terrain slopes down toward the river, rows upon rows of grapevines receding into the night. Gurgling fountains with floating candles occupy either end of the lawn, and the long table between is set with dozens of little votives in glass cubes, the perimeter flanked by torches on posts, the trees strung with lanterns. Flamelight flickers everywhere.

Will finds his place card, heavily inked calligraphy with an excess of flourishes, silver napkin rings, little vases holding tiny sprays of miniature white calla lilies. He loves this about the French, their unabashed pursuit of beauty. It makes him feel unself-conscious about his own often-mocked perfectionism.

On Will’s left is a woman wearing the severe frown of someone who’s prepared to be disappointed by everyone and everything, all the time. Will recognizes her name, a veteran wine journalist famous for her idiot-savant palate, troglodyte social skills, and unremitting snobbery.

And on Will’s right, wow, someone he definitely hasn’t met before
.
“Elle Hardwick,” she says, holding out her hand.

“Nice to meet you. Rare to find someone who’s willing to go by one letter alone. Like Bono, but even bolder.”

“Ah, no.” She smiles. “That’s Elle spelled as in the magazine.” She has a pronounced Australian accent. “Or the French pronoun.”

“Or the supermodel?”

“If absolutely necessary.
Elle, qui s’appelle Elle, lit
Elle.”

“I guess that makes more sense.”

“Glad you agree. And what do people call you?”

“They call me Mr. Rhodes. Will Rhodes.”

“Oh, Will Rhodes! I’m a fan. A pleasure to meet you.
Genuine
pleasure.”

Will reluctantly turns away from Elle, to do his ten minutes’ duty with the belligerent oenophile. Unsurprisingly, she has a distinct distaste for Americans, and more generally for men. There’s no charm of Will’s to which she is not allergic, and he feels himself sinking deeper and deeper into the quicksand of her odium.

This social nightmare on one side is tailor-made pre-penance for the alternative on his other, and Will relishes the discomfort of the woman’s hostility and dismissiveness, the absurd perfection of it, the delay of gratification, the investment of pain for the promise of pleasure.

When the empty
amuses bouches
plates are whisked away, he turns to Elle.

“You’re something of a legend, you know, Will Rhodes.”

“Ha! That’s a ridiculous thing to say, but I thank you for saying it. And you, Elle Hardwick? Who are you?”

“
Australian Adventurer
magazine. Speciality in adventure.”

“Are you new?”

“New to what?”

“To this.” He sweeps his hand across the table. “I’ve been going to these for a long time. Put on by winemakers. By hotels. By cruise lines and liquor distributors and restaurateurs. Hundreds of them, cocktail parties and luncheons and long boozy dinners. All for the benefit of the people who write about these topics. People like me. There aren’t that many of us, you know. And I would think I’d’ve come upon everyone, sooner or later. But I’ve never come upon you. As it were.”

Good God, did he really just say that? “If you’ll forgive the phrase.”

She grins at his dirty joke. Not insulted, not scandalized, not embarrassed. Amused? More? “I guess I
am
rather new. Still looking for one’s big break. How’d you get yours?”

There are professions with specifically demarcated milestones—partner, tenure, vice-presidency. But Will’s isn’t one. “I guess that depends on what you call a big break.”

Elle regards him over the rim of her wineglass. “So tell me, Mr. Will Rhodes, what was your first job? I’m going to interview you.”

“Oh I don’t think so.”

“Please?”

Will shifts in his chair, turns to face this woman, wearing the hyperstylized hair and meticulously applied makeup of a good-looking woman who is making a concerted effort to be spectacular. Like a tall man wearing boots.

“It may not be easy to understand, from where you sit,” she says, leaning toward him a few inches, which somehow seems a lot closer. “But you
are
at the top of our field. And I
am
near the bottom. You can’t blame a girl for wanting to climb up a bit.”

It’s true: he’s a big fish in a small pond. And here is this attractive angler, casting her lure his direction. “After college I moved to New York, which is one of the things that people do in America when they want to write.”

“Is that so? I’d never have imagined.”

“I had a series of miscellaneous jobs while looking for freelance work: pitching stories and submitting spec articles, contributing short pieces to trade magazines. Getting poorer and poorer with each passing month. You know how it is, I imagine?”

“I do.”

“I finally landed an editorial job at a glossy magazine, with health insurance and a regular paycheck. A few months later, a writing position opened up, on the food desk.”

“Did you always want to write?”

“I did.” It was way back in third grade when Will decided to become a writer. He took his book reports seriously, he edited his high-school paper, he got a journalism degree at what may have been the last moment when ambitious young people still aspired to be establishment print journalists. Not only to write for a living, but to write about other things, other people, not about themselves; reporting, not memoirs and blogs and tweets and status updates, not a permanent state of navel-gazing.

“Did you always want to write about
food
?”

“I’d never given it any thought. The grade-schooler me could never have imagined that his adult self would write the equivalent of book reports about Italian blue cheese.”

She laughs, covers her mouth a split second too late for decorum.

“I eventually got a better job at a food magazine, where I worked for a few years. Then
Travelers.
”

On the face of it, he has achieved what he set out to achieve. He is a full-time professional writer. He has been on three safaris, visited Machu Picchu and the Galápagos and Antarctica, seen the northern lights and the midnight sun, ridden the Orient Express and the
Queen Elizabeth,
seen the Red Sea and the Dead Sea and Death Valley and the Valley of the Gods. Take that, Johnny Cash.

Now what?

“And there you have it, Elle Hardwick: my résumé.” He takes a sip of water. This is going to be a long night, and he doesn’t want to get too drunk, too early. No, he wants to get just the right amount of drunk, at the proper time.

“What has been your secret of success, Mr. Rhodes?”

“No secret. Not that much success.”

“Come on.”

“Oh I don’t know. I guess I work hard.”

“Meaning?”

“I read a lot. I eat and drink a lot. I
learn
a lot.”

“And the writing bit?”

“I revise a lot. Writing
is
revising.” Enough. This is as long as he should talk about himself, which was already too long. “And you? What did you do before…um…”

“Australian Adventurer.
I’m freelance for them, actually. Not on staff.”

“Right.”

“Before this, I…I guess you could say I got around. For example: I got around to that panel discussion you were on, in Austin.”

For a second Will draws a blank, then remembers. “Oh good God. You didn’t.”

“I certainly did. I thought you were brilliant, Will Rhodes. Absolutely brilliant. But I didn’t recognize you without the beard. You look better this way.”

He appraises her in the candlelight, the dimples and the half-smile, the arched eyebrow, the long elegant neck and the tan toned forearms, the ring finger that doesn’t bear a ring. A beautiful sexy stranger who lives very, very far away.

“So, any advice for me? What should I absolutely make sure to do?”

Will knows how he wants to answer, but suddenly he’s afraid of the double entendres, the direct glances, afraid of flirting too much. Flirting usually seems innocuous, nothing will come of it, no harm, no foul, just fun. But here, now, her? Will is not so sure. This doesn’t seem all that innocent.

“You should say yes to everything.”

“
Oui
, Monsieur Rhodes?” She raises that eyebrow again. “
Every
thing?”

Will’s night rushes by in the distracting haze of this woman’s alluring gaze, course after course—soup and fish and meat and salad and cheese and dessert—with wines to match from the famous cellar, and the wax cascading down the sides of the candles in windblown patterns, spreading leeward onto linens splattered with ruby drops from the pheasant’s berry sauce and golden drips from the fish’s saffron sauce, littered with bread crumbs and flakes of white-dusted cheese crusts, and spent wooden matches and ashtrays filled with lipstick-stained cigarette butts, and purses and eyeglasses and corks and a knocked-over vase whose single lily lies on the table, as if reclining, having had too much to drink, deciding to just go to sleep here in the midst of the party, good night.

“So let’s get back to our interview, Mr. Rhodes. Tell me,” Elle says, leaning forward, elbows on table, “about your childhood.”

“Well, Ms. Hardwick, I was born a poor black child.”

A burst of surprised laughter escapes her. “We don’t hear a lot of references to
The Jerk
in Australia.”

“I’m surprised you hear any.”

“Well, I do get out, every so often.”

“And we’re all grateful for it.”

“Are you, Will Rhodes?” She arches that eyebrow.

“Yes. I think I am.”

They stare at each other, holding gazes for a time-stopped eternity, before she breaks the spell. “So where are you from? How far has your life traveled to arrive here at this table, with me?”

Will takes a sip of wine, swirls it on his palate, pretending to do a bit of his job before returning his attention to something that’s not.

“Nondescript upbringing in St. Paul, Minnesota. Do you know where that is?”

“Hmm. Do I fly over it on my way to New York?”

“You fly over everything on your way to New York.”

“Well then, I know
exactly
where it is.”

“I graduated from a Midwestern university with negligible employment-related skills and a fortune’s worth of student debt. Does this go on in Australia? Borrowing for university?”

“Of course. Are you still broke then? Uni couldn’t have been that long ago.”

“You flatter me.”

“I suppose I do, Mr. Rhodes.” That sly grin again, something more than a little playful. This is a dangerous woman here.

“Well, to be honest, Ms. Hardwick, I never did dig out from that financial hole. I’ve moved sideways in my debt structure. Excavating new subterranean passages, like a whole ant colony of interconnected financial obligations that bears a passing semblance to solvency around a fundamental core of what is, in essence, bankruptcy.”

Will never believed that writing would make him rich, but his extreme level of unrich has come as a shock, and it’s possible that in a few years his job may no longer even exist. Not even Chloe is aware of the full extent of Will’s—of their—financial woes. When they first started dating, Will was so ashamed of the sorry state of his affairs that he refused to acknowledge to himself that there was any problem at all; he just surged forward. Matters improved when they started living together, sharing expenses. But Will is still carrying an embarrassing load of consumer debt, and he has found himself unable to come clean to his wife.

“That’s a truly sad story, Will Rhodes.
Très triste.
”

“This is what keeps me up in the middle of the night. Spirals of self-doubt and fear, and this recurring nightmare that I’ll end up living in a trailer park in north Jersey, alone and destitute on my deathbed, frothing-at-the-mouth resentful that no one ever suggested I learn Mandarin, or code-writing, or, I don’t know, trusts-and-estates law.”