Chapter Three

Voyageur

Paris, 2007.

The man at customs wanted to know where I would be staying. ‘P-Pigalle’ — I stuttered, hyper-alert after two months in New York, where the threat of terrorism is never felt more than at the airport. He paused, stared just a little too long, a slight flicker of amusement dancing across his blue eyes. I didn’t know if he wanted more information or if it was just a pause. I’d never been to France before. Was he flirting … ? Or was this a test? Were they going to scan my eyes like they did at JFK?

‘Here!’ I handed him a card with the name and address of the hotel I booked online. His head pulled back to his chin, eyes twinkling in delight.

‘Well I see you there later, then!’ he laughed with a colleague, showing my card. They both smiled at me and I realised I was free to go.

I walked through the airport down the escalators to the Métro station, feeling relieved but a little embarrassed. New country, completely different rules to America …

Airport security man was still laughing and staring when I turned back to look.

The first thing that struck me was how different the crowds were in Paris. The Métro was packed and hot, just like the subway in New York, but no one was encroaching into my personal space, no one was desperate to strike up a conversation or perform like in extroverted New York.

The dang-ding-dong of the train announcements, a musical scale in a minor key, sounded every few minutes, and the loudspeaker referred to us as ‘voyagers’, which made me feel like a passenger on a ship in the 1950s.

I exhaled deeply for the first time in months, feeling strangely at home on this packed train in a foreign country.

I could barely speak the language, but I felt at ease, familiar. Like I had a place there. Even the ground felt like I had walked it once upon a time in a past life.

The second I alighted from the Métro at Pigalle, the cheap flight from New Jersey to Charles de Gaulle — so cheap that none of the in-flight TVs worked, there were some dubious foodstuffs lodged into my seat, and I thought I saw a rat scamper across the aisle at one point — was forgotten.

I. Am. In. Paris.

I realised that I had always, always wanted to come to France. What took me so long? It had been a toss-up between travelling the world and pursuing a career as a freelance writer, and I’d chosen writing. It wasn’t until I’d worked long and hard that I didn’t have to be pinned to a particular location, that I could earn money from afar.

An unexpectedly large job rewriting a twenty-page website on the topic of things to try before you die had planted the now or never idea in my head, so I spent the whole fee on a return ticket to the USA. I was thirty, and I’d never really travelled internationally before. I’d spent the previous two years building up enough writing work to be able to live freelance in Australia, untied to any particular city or locale. Going further — living overseas — seemed the logical next step.

I picked New York because I loved Joan Didion and found the writing culture exciting, particularly the number of options and the sheer volume of print media. I had an idea that I’d find some literary companions — maybe even get a job as an intern at an eccentric literary agency or a busy magazine.

I was desperate to find people who talked about more than house prices, renovations, and football matches — all I seemed to hear about in Australia. Even among writers I felt like I was a frog stuck in a very small pond. The number of people employed in different writing fields in New York surely meant that by the law of averages, I would meet some like-minded souls and encounter more opportunities.

Since the airfare was so huge, and the flight so far, I’d decided to stay for three months. It was risky, but possible. I couldn’t get a visa for any longer, or I would have made it a year.

Mum was worried, which was understandable, even when I lied and said I’d saved more money than I actually had. Mum’s open-mindedness in some aspects was at odds with a more conventional anxiety about job security. She seemed endlessly disappointed by my inability to ‘settle down’ in one place or job for an extended period of time, and I didn’t want her to try to talk me out of the trip. I told her I was going only after I’d purchased my non-refundable ticket.

But poverty in a foreign country was preferable to sitting in an office with the same group of people in the same room five days a week. I needed variety, I loved challenges, and if I wasn’t learning anything new, whatever the job was, it felt pointless.

At that point in my life, I detested ‘sameness’ the way other people craved it for security. Many of my friends had settled into mortgages and started creating their own families, but I had a sense of urgency, a compulsion to jump without a parachute and try to live in a foreign country as a writer.

But heading to New York without a lot of money (or even a credit card) was a lot tougher than I expected. The Australian exchange rate was sixty cents to the US dollar, so my income from writing had shrunk from its already-meagre state, and accommodation cost twice what it did in Melbourne.

For two months I lived in a thirty-person Chelsea hostel where we had to be out by 10.00 a.m. each day and weren’t allowed back before four. I lugged my laptop out in the snow to file my Australian newspaper columns at the New York Public Library, which was warm and had good wi-fi. I smoked cheap cigarettes on the steps while it opened — a habit I’d adopted since landing — patting the lions’ concrete manes for luck in the cold but beautiful snow. I wandered through the library’s free exhibitions, took breaks for dollar bagels and coffees from food trucks, watched buskers who rapped and moonwalked, and chatted to strangers everywhere because everyone was so interesting. There was just so much to do and see. The variety was overwhelming — in the best way.

The week before, an illustrator I’d befriended in Brooklyn had offered me a week’s work supervising eccentric stamp collectors at an auction house on the Upper East Side. I made sure the men didn’t steal the million-dollar stamps or touch them with their un-gloved hands (only tweezers allowed), and I was paid US$500 in cash. I used almost half of it to get that cheap flight to Paris.

What girl in their right mind flies to Europe with no money?

Despite all logic and reason, Paris felt like the best decision I’d made in my life.

Why, at thirty, had I chosen to live in a grimy hostel in New York, sharing a room with multiple snorers, when back in Melbourne I could have my own apartment and enough writing work to keep me happy and well fed — minus the giant rats and unfortunate exchange rate?

The real reason was that I needed to be in a place where more than one other person made a living in the same way as me. There was something lonely about always being the anomaly in my social circle. In Melbourne, I had only one other friend who earned her living as a freelance journalist, and I’d had to work quite hard to find her. My mentor, an astrologer who’d carved a writing niche with an unusual blog, lived in Sydney. Facebook and social media were barely a thing back then. Unless I physically flew to my writer friends interstate (which I did, out of sheer desperation for meaningful connection), most of my companionship came from email. Finding like-minded folk in Australia was hard, and I never wanted to be the kind of person who complains about something but never does anything about it.

Most of my friends at that time gazed on my freelance lifestyle as a kind of delusion, or a phase. Perhaps it was a mixture of envy, confusion, and pity. None of them really understood the ins and outs of my work, and I got bored explaining when I was still learning myself.

Mum didn’t really understand it, either, and I think she’d been disappointed to learn it wasn’t just a phase.

My sister offered the most support.

Ayala had miraculously been booked to go on a work trip to Philadelphia while I was in New York, so for two nights I slept in the twin bed of her four-star hotel room, and we went sightseeing together around her work. After that Chelsea hostel, the Sheraton Valley Forge might as well have been the Palace of Versailles. We explored the oddly contrasting sites of the biggest mall in America and Valley Forge National Park, which held hand-built huts from the Revolutionary War. She sent my clothes off for laundering on her hotel account and bought me huge American-sized portions of takeaway salad for lunch.

As we walked on the median strip of the freeway that led to the mall, just minutes away, Americans honked at us, confused we weren’t in a car. I loved seeing my sister in the context of another country — walking despite the hotel begging us to catch the shuttle, laughing off the honks from the drivers.

Aside from the adventure of travel, the most content I ever felt was when I was in the zone of writing, tap dancing across the keyboard, creating stories — from the nugget of an idea or a curiosity, by interviewing people, by finding new things and weaving them into something else. It was really the only thing that lit me up, the only thing that made me feel alive. Every time I learned something, every time I met someone, every time I observed something wacky, mundane, good, or bad — I had to write it down. Everything else fell by the wayside in pursuit of that feeling: fulfilment and authenticity, like I was finally doing what I was meant to do. If I went more than a day without writing — even just in my journal — I felt physically ill.

To make actual money from it was the biggest high I could ever achieve, and I still got goosebumps when an editor sent me an un-pitched story commission. Occasionally, I’d be sent a reprint fee out of the blue, and that, too, felt like money for daring to be myself and follow my instinct.

New York hadn’t disappointed me in its array of interesting new companions. The first person I sat next to at a cafe was a fellow freelancer who talked openly about writing for Vanity Fair. Everyone was always giving me their ‘card’ for possible future work or just correspondence. I went to a writer’s meet-up I’d found on a forum, in a coffee shop near Bryant Park, and was one of ten who worked freelance. We went drinking at a bar in Soho and then had some kind of networking dinner at a penthouse on Fifth Avenue. The Americans were so eager, open, and enthusiastic about even the biggest pipe dreams — in New York, I had none of the naysayers and doubts-echoed-back-to-me that I’d always had in Melbourne when I dared to verbalise my crazy dreams.

The Writers Guild of America was striking for better wage conditions from the day I arrived, and I found it so incredibly inspiring to see such solidarity — hundreds of picketing writers in New York outside particular offices; just a handful of the 12,000 who were striking across the country. In Australia, I’d been a member of the arts union as a freelance writer, but twice they’d given me completely inaccurate information because Australia simply didn’t have the size and scope to support such a ‘niche’.

I realised what a cottage industry the writing profession was in Australia, in the context of the world, when I got to America.

Perhaps if I’d waited until I could afford to eat and sleep better, I would have missed out on knowing the truth.

And now here I was in Paris, where things were even more fascinatingly different.

At airport customs, I’d listed writer on the disembarkation card, and the official had peered over his glasses at me with an approving smile.

‘Écrivain … ?’

I nodded in reply.

‘Beaucoup d’inspiration,’ he’d said approvingly, before waving me on to the next round. It all felt so far from Melbourne, where whenever I mumbled out ‘writer’, people would look at me, slightly bored, adding (depending on how much they’d had to drink) something like ‘but how much money do you earn from that?’, which deeply offended me and made me not want to talk about it.

When I’d emailed mum about the trip to Paris, her reply had been happy and enthusiastic, which was rare.

You’ll get to explore your French heritage, she wrote. I didn’t quite understand what she meant. I wondered if it had to do with dad.

At Pigalle station, I began the steep climb up the Métro stairs with my suitcase, and an older man in a suit loudly tsked beside me, waving off my hands without touching me, silently taking over the responsibility of my heavy load. At the end of the climb, after an enthusiastic merci beaucoup from me, he nodded gruffly as if helping me was his Gallic duty, and I was slightly grotesque for thanking him so profusely. He went on his way.

Even the illegal market vendors spruiking rotten bananas near the sex shops by the Moulin Rouge looked glamorous. Dirt was pretty, in this city.

I.

Am.

In.

Paris.

I kept announcing it to myself, not quite believing it.

Unlike New York, which had been surprisingly full of rubbish bins, Paris was far, far prettier than the movies.

I’d never seen such a beautiful city in my life.

I pulled out my little map and made my way down Boulevard de Clichy, marvelling at the symmetry and detail of the buildings. The people in bistros and cafes all facing outdoors like on a movie set, the beautiful city in their outlook, scrawling on pages and looking thoughtful, or talking closely and passionately to friends. Something about the way the tables were placed meant that dining solo was an immersive experience. In Melbourne, I thought, eating alone was a bit more of a lonely affair.

The French language, which I adored but couldn’t completely understand, made even the smallest overheard snatches sound like intense philosophy. Cobblestoned streets pulled me back into another era and the signs on windows played with my internal monologue, so that I started talking to myself in a sort of Franglais.

I feel like I’m dans une petite village.

Arriving at the Hotel Paris in Montmartre, I wasn’t so surprised to find its interior was just like the exterior — très petite. I carried my suitcase up three flights of stairs, and squeezed and leapt around the door to get inside, because the bed filled the tiny room. But I didn’t care.

A bed! A lamp! A French hotel room and a door I could close! I had never seen such a perfect little hotel room. I went to the window, which looked out to rows of symmetrical shutter windows directly across, and I saw an elderly man drinking a glass of wine at a table near his own window, poised in perfect elegance in his own private world, reading a book.

Merde, I was beaucoup tired. It was only around midday in New York, but by early evening in a Paris winter it was already dark. I hadn’t slept much before my early morning flight, and this little bed in a room of my own with a door that closed was the most beautiful thing to happen to me in the past twenty-four hours.

But there was no way I was sleeping.

I dumped my bag, brushed my teeth, and whipped out my red scarf.

I looked at the map of Paris I’d bought at a bookstore in New York, and studied the walk from Montmartre to just near the Eiffel Tower.

I had come to find Gisèle.

By then it had been ten years since mum or any of us had heard from Gisèle. How could she just disappear? Trying to access the French phone book from Australia was pointless. Even in Paris, I knew I would need to physically go to her old address, because I couldn’t conduct a phone call about much more than the basics in French.

Had I left this voyage too late?

24 Boulevarde de Grenelle.

I walked down the hotel stairs and stood outside for a moment, marvelling at the streets that were so beautiful, so different to streets of Melbourne, and yet so, so familiar. I felt this uncanny feeling, like I was home, and I had family living here. Being in such an ancient city had me feeling the past had half become the present. The ghosts of my ancestors seemed closer than ever. But mostly, it was dad who seemed close.

I had barely enough euros to last me two days, so eating at one of the many bistros I kept passing was out of the question. Instead, I spotted the red flashing lights of a cafe that was also a tabac and went inside. The place was filled with men of about fifty or sixty talking through stubs of cigarettes and drinking espresso and wine at the bar. Some wore berets.

They looked richer, to me, than any man I’d seen at a pub in Australia. Something about their elegant sense of self-dignity defied their means.

‘Bonsoir,’ I murmured, conscious not to speak as loudly as I had in New York. ‘Une café crème, s’il vous plait?’

I drank my perfect little coffee with its perfect little sugar cube in that smoky little tabac, and paid my two euros to the man behind the counter.

I pulled out my map again and saw that I was close: Gisèle’s apartment was just across the Seine. At the Louvre, I asked a couple to take a photo of me, the pyramids glimmering in the late winter light and my face lit up in hope with my red scarf whipping in the wind.

When I got to the Seine, I felt I’d fallen through a crack in the walls of time. The lights on the river, the reflections of the ancient buildings, the whirr of scooters going past, and a French accordion drifting from a bistro in the background — every few metres I had to stop and just stare, taking it all in, feeling like I’d been here before and yet it was also new and comforting. It was impossible to fathom ever being tired of looking and listening to everything in this city.

I felt so inspired by the beauty that I allowed myself to think crazy thoughts: Gisèle had moved across Paris, and the concierge would give me a forwarding address. Even if she was at the other end of the city, I would find her tonight, we could be eating dinner together by 9.00 p.m. Aren’t I lucky! she’d say with her bright smile, kissing me on both cheeks and being strong and firm, a physical reminder of parts of dad that I’d never known.

Family.

I walked and walked, and finally made it to the apartment building I’d posted all those letters to, so long ago. The concierge was warm and smiling, but he didn’t speak a word of English.

‘Ah — bonsoir … Je cherche Gisèle de Satoor de Rootas,’ I said, showing him her name on a piece of paper, flipping it for the French words for ‘forwarding address’ from the little yellow French–English dictionary on top of my tourist map.

But Gisèle was gone. He didn’t know where. Taking over from the previous concierge who’d worked there for twenty years, this new man had only been working in her building for a month. He was indeed désolée, but there was nothing he could do.

He shrugged, looking very sorry for me.

I walked back in the freezing cold, disappointed and wondering what else to try. Time was running out and I had barely enough money to stay and search for two nights.

Once back at my hotel, I emailed mum and explained what happened.

She seemed sad that I’d got my hopes up, typing, She’s probably dead, Lou.

But falling asleep in Paris that night, I had the clear feeling that I wasn’t alone. I dreamed dad was in the laneway below, standing in an overcoat, smiling up at my window. He looked younger and happier than I’d ever known him to be.