Anywhere But Here
A serialized memoir of my year-long romp around the globe as a reluctant tourist in search of a life less ordinary.
Check back each week for the latest installment.
Chapter 1
And So It Begins, Again
I’m sweating like only a menopausal woman can in this steamy French kitchen in Arles, and it’s only thirty minutes into this one-on-one cooking class. I’ve had a growing hate-hate relationship with cooking and I’m hoping this class will jolt me back to at least a love-hate relationship. I once thrilled to the art of deboning a chicken or straining tomatoes through cheesecloth, but a flip switched somewhere about age 55. There’s a lot of things that happen in your 50s — hot flashes, desiccated skin, disappearance of muscle — but one of them is an airhorn blast of utter honesty: Woooonnnk! Wake up you idiot, the play is almost over! Do you really want to spend the last act doing a chore dressed up as a passion?
The cooking class was included in the French language classes I’d signed up for in the first days after landing in Provence. In my defense, I was still heady from the Delta check-in kiosk’s confusion when we arrived at O’Hare with one suitcase and a carryon for the year ahead: “We cannot determine your return dates,” it read as we scanned our one-way tickets to France, our first stop “on tour” around the world. Heh-heh. That’s right, Mr. Algorithm, because there is no return to this fresh hell that’s ensnared me.
I was fleeing again. I knew I was doing it again, this fleeing. But there it was. There comes a time in everyone’s life when you want to run away. Life gets complicated. Love fails. Jobs bore. Friendships betray. Or as it may be, condos implode. And you simply want to leave. I just happen to act on those desires more often than most.
My urge to run stems from a fear. I fear the stultifying sameness of a routine and even worse, a routine life. A little life, to be exact. I read far too many Vanity Fair articles about throwing dinner parties with interesting artists and hosting guests at a summer home in Positano. My delusions, suffice it to say, are grander than my daily life, and that can be an equation for flight. I live by Geoff Dyer’s motto, “When I am no longer capable of disappointment, the romance will be gone.” Thus, in a not irregular frequency, the reality of crossword puzzles and dinner at 6:30 (like old people) catches up with me and sends me fleeing.
I live by Geoff Dyer’s motto, “When I am no longer capable of disappointment, the romance will be gone.”
That and a genetic restlessness. My mother rearranged the furniture in our house at least quarterly. I’d leave for school in the morning from a beige living room and return to a green flocked wallpaper and a piano on the other side of the room. My sister picks up where my mom left off, but she adds in her garden. The primrose moves to the corner and the lilac gets cut back, a fence gets added this year, a pergola the next. The bee balm is no more, replaced with Black-Eyed Susans. My brother buys homes just so he can “redo” them, and when they’re done he starts over. We’re a restless family driven by the need for change like salmon propelled upstream. The pursuit is the romance of life. Stability is death.
In the span of twenty years, Rex and I have moved ten times, including once to a Pacific island.
When the restlessness strikes, usually masquerading as disappointment in the condo I live in or the job I do or another infernal episode of Wheel of Fortune, I normally pick up the phone and call our real estate agent — an agent who is so keen on us he sends random gifts just to say thanks, again. In the span of twenty years, Rex and I have moved ten times, including once to a Pacific island.
But this time I was stuck. For one thing, I was middle-aged — 56 to be exact. Fleeing gets exponentially harder with each decade’s ossification. Things accumulate in closets, routines develop, you become attached to your Posturepedic mattress. Plus, people expect things of you, mainly that you to “act your age” so they don’t feel bad, and five decades into this theater production, acting your age means no more cavalier invincibility of youth. And certainly no selling everything and leaving, again.
Fleeing gets exponentially harder with each decade’s ossification. Things accumulate in closets, routines develop, you become attached to your Posturepedic mattress.
But mostly I was stuck because practically overnight our condo had become an albatross.
I was trapped, my least favorite word
All the windows in our 1970s highrise needed to be replaced we were informed. We returned one night from an emergency condo board meeting owing $115,000 in a special assessment for our condo unit alone. Turns out our past condo boards had kicked the façade maintenance can down the road for a full decade and the rain and wind had done their evil magic and seeped and wept and seeped some more into the structure, and now the windows were warped and leaking like a ship taking on water and the brick façade was threatening to crumble and fall.
Oh, and if we stayed, we would continue to suffer the wrath of our neighbors.
The very serious engineers at the very serious meeting told us that there was no turning back. Do this or the City would be paying a visit, they said. All of which meant if I fled, as was my instinct, I’d have to deduct $115,000 from the condo’s sales price, if I could sell at all. And if we stayed, we would owe far more each month in special assessments than the leaky windows and party boy twin brothers next door warranted.
Oh, and if we stayed, we would continue to suffer the wrath of our neighbors. If you have ever lived in a condo building, then you know how chilly an elevator ride can be when you are persona non grata. And that we were.
What kind of freaks were we, they screamed, who wanted to sell their home?
My husband Rex had months ago done his civic duty and joined the condo board. Bless him. When the cost of the window “situation” had become increasingly clear, he had made the logical suggestion that we put the building up for sale to the highest bidder, given that developers at that moment were chomping on the bit to buy condo buildings in distress and “deconvert” them to apartment buildings. A developer would buy each owner’s unit at above-market rates and then turn them all into rentals, making said developer scads of money. The estimated amount for our unit was, frankly, astonishing.
Good lord, it was as if we’d asked a mother to give over her child for experimental medical treatment.
Thus the decided chill on the elevator and in the hallways. We were “those” people who wanted to sell and who had no commitment to the building. Who had not raised their children in the building. Who had not partied at the pool like the hippies they were in the 1970s. Who had not, well, settled in. Deeply. Inconceivable to me, me who has no idea what a “forever home” is. But there it was. They didn’t want to move. They didn’t want to sell. What kind of freaks were we, they screamed, who wanted to sell their home? And above all, How could we do this to them?
I might just pause here to mention how cruel people can get when threatened.
But like in all things seemingly too good to be true, there was a hitch. To sell to a developer, we needed 75 percent of all owners to vote yea.
“Who knows,” said Rex. “Maybe they’ll all realize they can make out and still live there, as renters, if they’re so in love with the building. They’d have money in the bank to pay their rent for the rest of their lives.” Mr. Practical.
Me, I took to my bed.
I was trapped. My least favorite word.
Deux Ex Machina
Until, that is, over a bottle or three of wine, our friends Mike and Todd suggested Plan E. Why not rent out the albatross for a handsome sum — since we all knew the building would never sell with those lifers taking charge — and hit the road with them for a year? They’d minted money on a condo flip and were planning to live on the proceeds as they traveled the world, staying in Airbnbs for less than rent in Chicago would cost. Well, almost anyway.
We could join them, going around the world, one month in each place. “You’d always wanted to live overseas again, right?” they prodded. “Use this time to scout a new, cheaper place in some exotic locale where you can live while you waited out the 20 years of window expenses?”
Music to my ears.
So what if they were twenty years our junior. What have you got to lose, they asked? Indeed, I thought, as Vanna turned over another letter the next night and Rex opened more hate email. What have I got to lose? I can work from the road, because I’m a writer for social policy wonks, and that can be done anywhere. Frankly, I’ve met only three of my many clients face to face as it is. Rex is retired. We have no children. We can rent out the place for enough to cover our mortgage and new assessment, and new rental. We can put our furniture in storage and let travel works its transformative magic. Yes indeed, there was now nothing but my unnatural attachment to my Posturepedic mattress keeping us from saying yes.
Indeed, I thought, as Vanna turned another letter over and Rex opened more hate email — What have I got to lose?
The next night, over more wine we made out our lists of where we wanted to go. Todd chose Zermatt, London, Singapore, and Vancouver. Mike opted for Berlin, Croatia, Seychelles, and South Africa. Rex chose Edinburgh, Scandinavia, Adelaide, and Tahiti. I picked Arles, Japan, Cambodia, and a Greek Island. That list would fall apart within months of launching this grand escape but that night it all seemed giddily possible
And so here I am, in Arles, the place where Van Gogh cut off his ear, sweating through this cooking class in my teacher’s kitchen, an Earth Mother cave of legumes and grains lined up in jars, of misshapen clay urns, and a door to a courtyard with a camellia tree. The latest condo vote was 56 percent voting yes to sell, which is a long, long way to 75 percent. I am putting it all behind me for the time being while I listen to the instructions.
My instructor is middle-aged soft, with a lazy, wispy voice like Sandy Dennis in Come Back to the Five and Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean.
And a British accent.
Despite my mission to learn French, and despite this class being advertised as part of my French lessons, she is speaking English, and now so am I. She is also not cooking my requested dish, lapin, that Frenchiest of French meals.
“I am a vegetarian,” she informed me when I arrived, “so I have rearranged the menu.” Instead, we will cook artichotes en barigoule.
Well actually, she will cook and I will watch.
The onions in the skillet begin to steam up the window. I wipe the sweat from my forehead and peel off a top layer of clothes. Le Chef is now lecturing on the superiority of a German brand of mixer. “The American brands are insufficient,” she says staring at me intently. My hip and lower back ache from the hard stone floor. I shift from one foot to another to stay alert. It’s like watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood when you were expecting The Electric Company.
So, to recap, I am taking French cooking classes as part of French language classes but taught by a vegetarian British control freak.
After thirty minutes, she lets me soak a bit of dry bread in water, add an egg yolk, and mix.
Woo-hoo! I’m whisking. In France.
“Not like that,” she snaps, taking the whisk from my hand. What’s this, do I detect a suppressed rage? Is she one of those women with the warm smile at the PTA meetings but who explode over a mushroom skinned the wrong way at home?
She quickly recovers with a feigned smile. Control freak confirmed.
So, to recap, I am taking French cooking classes as part of French language classes but taught by a vegetarian British control freak.
As the best German hand mixer whirs and rattles in a bowl, chef’s preteen daughter comes with a dripping tree branch of fresh bay leaves, along with a bag full of slimy snails. And not the kind you eat. The daughter, blushing and lanky, rescued them after last night’s rain, Le Chef explains for her, and she will add them to the big blue snails in the Tupperware container that she is breeding.
“Show her,” Le Chef nudges.
The daughter reluctantly lifts the lid. I take a step back from the putrid smell. From a distance I dutifully peek at the snails lying lie inert in the corner of the bare container. The daughter’s face crumples. Tears begin to flow. She pokes at the snails. Nope. Dead. She drops the Tupperware on the table and flees upstairs.
Le Chef gives me a look. “C’est la vie,” she adds. The first French I’ve heard.
The kitchen clock ticks loudly. We have moved on to wrapping single strips of bacon (“My one concession” she said when the bacon first appeared) around the dozen artichokes. Now she is laying out twelve pieces of string that she has cut into exact lengths.
One. string. at. a. time.
Tick–, tick–, tick–,
She winds the string, — tick–, tick–, tick — and finishes with a perfect, perfect knot.
My skin may explode.
Why do I do this to myself over and over? Allow people like Sandy Dennis here, whose expertise is on par with my own, to show me how to cuisiner something I could do perfectly well from a cookbook? Why do I let other people label themselves experts but I can’t do the same for myself? Instead, I pay for the pleasure of learning nothing? Perhaps a conversation for later, on a couch. Right now, I am being instructed to hold the oven door open. Which I do, obediently.
The escape
I begin to plot my escape. I will make an excuse — “Oh dear, I’ve lost track of time. I need to meet a dear friend who was in Paris and wanted to see Provence while she was there on a business trip so I invited her to stay overnight and I’m meeting her at the train but first I have to buy her favorite dessert and some lavender that she wanted because she won’t have time to shop, and” — — I would never make a good spy. My lies are too complicated.
No, I will just say that I must leave, it’s later than I thought. Period. Oh who’s kidding whom. I will never be able to stick to that. She’ll look at me, crestfallen, and I’ll start to babble on about meeting my friend at the train station while I’m setting the table for the artichokes meal.
I glance to the living room. The table is not set. Maybe I’m off the hook.
The timer dings. The artichokes come out of the oven. I begin my beg-off but she cuts me off with a terse, “Nonsense.”
I begin my beg-off but she cuts me off with a terse, “Nonsense.”
I have no gene pool for conflict and so with that declaration, the daughter is summoned to set the table. And by that I mean moving her snails and other pets to a sideboard along with a batch of yellowed school papers, overripe avocados, curled photos, rubber bands and a pair of shoes.
My will to leave is no match for Cher Chef. I sit. I smile. I eat an artichoke. Two in fact. They are, as all things French cuisine, superb. I try to make conversation with the tweenager, in French no less. Thankfully she is like all teenagers, monosyllabic.
I gobble up the food and after what seems like an eternity make my excuses and rise to leave. We pretend to be sad that the wonderful day is done and make noises about how much was learned, how much there is still to learn, all said with my hand on the door handle ever so gradually depressing it until the latch springs like the gate of the prison opening to freedom.
The malady
Outside, down the street, I actually skip a few steps, this exquisite freedom after captivity is as intoxicating as being done with the dentist for another year.
A few doors from home, I reward myself with a stop at Circa, a soothing boutique featuring the work of Arles’ artisans. Inside, a teenager is plunking the keys on a baby grand piano as I enter. The piano, in rich rosewood from the 1930s, dominates the front of the shop like a pedigree race horse on parade. I’m beautiful, I know, it whispers. A discreet “not for sale” card sits atop it. I imagine it in the living room of a colonial Kenyan coffee farm where Denys sits in a leather chair with a smoky Irish whiskey listening to Karen play.
The owner, a sultry-voiced Sade in silk slacks, looks up from her Louis XIV desk,
“Bonjour,” she purrs. “Puis-je vous aider?”
Her girlfriend smokes laconically in a chair in the corner dressed in a Kimono. She gets up, stretches like a cat, and walks into another room.
“Non,” I mumble, “seulement regarder.”
I am having a hard time focusing on the art and not her. Her beauty is mesmerizing, her self-possession so natural. The entitlement that comes with beauty. I stroll into one of the alcoves and pretend to stare at a painting but steal glances at her writing out an invoice on lavender stationery. She looks at me over her half-moon glasses.
“Do you like that one?” she asks.
“I do,” I say, stumbling for French.
“Me too.” She switches effortlessly to English. “What about it do you like?”
In my book, there are few things worse than being asked about art. People claim there are no wrong answers, but there are. Oh, there are.
Emmanuelle — I’ve named her — sweeps over silently and stands behind me, staring at what I’m seeing. “Mmm,” she murmurs, as if she’s just eaten a plump scallop in a sublime sauce. I feel like a parka-clad out-of-towner in the wrong shoes.
And suddenly, just like that, the artichotes en barigoule are not sitting right.
In my book, there are few things worse than being asked about art. People claim there are no wrong answers, but there are. Oh, there are.
I ignore the sudden shift in my gut and mumble a reply in English. I really do need to leave, now. But, she is adding something no doubt intriguing and brilliant about the painting. My stomach offers a long deep rumble in reply. I pretend not to hear it. She turns slowly to look me up and down. I feign interest in a painting by the door, while gauging the distance from here to my front door. There must be some Einsteinian theorem of distance-to-relief that signals my GI tract. The closer the bathroom, the greater the urgency. Luckily for me (or not if my theorem holds), my home is right around the corner and there is a bathroom on the first floor.
I must flee. It is past redemption at this point. Mortification is imminent.
So flee I do, ungracefully, with a lame “merci, I’ll be back,” followed by a cheek-squeezing race-walk to my front door. I can now officially never return to Circa.
Pinch me, I’m dreaming
Despite the disastrous cooking excursion, our days in Arles are one long advertisement for the French way of life. I wake up early and lie in bed conjugating verbs and remembering all the French words I fail to remember on the spot in the supermarket. I fall back to sleep and dream wildly for several hours. Out of bed by 10:00 am, climb the curving stone stairs to the third-floor kitchen. Workout, check.
Open the terrace door. Listen to the birds and the school children playing at recess. Perfect my corpse pose on the terrace looking up at blue sky. Put the espresso on, heat up some milk. Eat a bowl of yoghurt and miniature, delectably sweet, fresh strawberries, like none I’ve ever tasted. Enjoy that first sip of coffee. Open the laptop to the New York Times. Read about Trump. Remember that I’m in France and don’t really have to care about Trump. Skip to the Style Section.
We spend our afternoons looking at art, browsing a quirky bookstore, discovering a bed of indigo irises in a perfect courtyard. We shop for fromage and pain de chocolates. Rex christens himself International Man of Leisure and me Lady Splashmore (as in I’ll have a splash more.). We idle in the sun and a mediterranean blue sky at the bistro next door. “We have only a vegetable tarte left,” the waitress apologizes. No matter, we say, we’ll take it. Ten minutes later the most delicious eggplant quiche I’ve ever had. And I really don’t like eggs. Or eggplant.
Are We the Same People We Once Were?
We retreat to our terrace where I lounge in the wicker chair and crack open Queen of the Desert by Gertrude Bell, which I filched from the bookshelves of the phantom owners. Staying in someone else’s home is like cleaning out the clothes closet of someone who has died. Their essence is everywhere but they are not. This couple is very simpatico with me. Books stuffed on shelves, photos from their travels in Africa, red walls, artistic touches. They have the authentic artifacts that the rest of us buy at Anthropologie.
Staying in someone else’s home is like cleaning out the clothes closet of someone who has died. Their essence is everywhere but they are not.
I turn the page and settle in. Gertrude Bell is venturing alone in the 1920s into what is now Iraq and doing the colonial thing and mapping it. Travel literature has always been a love of mine. The discomfort of someone else’s travel fascinates me. Frozen fingertips, delirium, shitting uncontrollably in the desert, hot flashes in Borneo. It’s mesmerizing.
And the perfect complement to this moment in my life.
Here she is, entering a grand home surrounded by date palms to get the name of a person she is searching for. Or later there she is poring over maps spread out on a table in a stifling hot room, maps she hopes will lead her to a forgotten city. Or at night in a tent there she is writing in her diaries by candlelight when a man approaches with news of the delayed camels for the caravan. They will arrive in the morning, he tells her. All of this place unknown. All of it embraced. All of it rendering unlivable her other daily life with teatime and ladies lunches.
The discomfort of someone else’s travel fascinates me. Frozen fingertips, delirium, shitting uncontrollably in the desert, hot flashes in Borneo.
My own travel may not be the grand upending of life like Bell’s shift from London tea rooms to a desert tent and more akin to cooking with someone else’s pots and pans, but it’s upended me nonetheless.
Language, customs, the sky — it’s all just that much different to make me think anything is possible. Who are we, these people who are eating lunch on a sunny terrace, babbling on in fractured French to the café owner, before visiting an art exhibit? Who are we, these people who shower every morning in a dank, dark basement bathroom and don’t even care? I feel a new life emerging.
Hours later Rex shakes me awake from my nap for our happy hour Scrabble game with a glass of wine and a bowl of green olives. I suspect he prepares for this daily battle by reading the dictionary in his free time because he once again slays me. How does one get an 84-point word? Later, after I’ve licked my wounds, I relent and cook a meal. We eat and chat. Clean up. Shut off lights. Pad down the stone stairs to the bedroom for writing and reading until late. At home, I would have fallen asleep at 9:30 to the refrains of “Chicago Med.”
Old dogs, new tricks…learning to speak again
I knew it couldn’t last.
The damn French classes are going badly. What was I thinking? I have never had a facility with spoken language, so now at 56, it’s just going to magically appear? I had signed up for four times a week with a language school, a casual affair run by a young American who came to Arles a decade ago, and who speaks perfect French with the blunt forcefulness of an American. No purring sexiness there.
Each morning, I set off up the cobble-stoned hill to a grand 11-foot wooden door, where I ring the bell and wait for the buzz, reveling in the prospect that the few roaming tourists mistake me for a local. The door buzzer burps its welcome, giving me three quick seconds to lift a medieval looking latch and enter. I can never get it open. Something about turning and pushing but I’m never quite sure which of the three knobs to use and so an exasperated middle-aged woman who owns the first-floor gallery greets me with a tut-tut and a demonstration of basic door functioning, again.
For about two weeks, this pit-staining stress continues. Most of the time, I feel like Elyse in the movie Diner during the football quiz. Pressure.
I smile, hoping my sheepishness will charm her this time. It does not. She returns without a word to her desk. I wait for the French teacher to escort me upstairs while reading the many, many signs that my prison warden has installed in this shop. “Don’t touch the paintings.” “Don’t lean on the desk.” “Close the door tightly.” “Don’t use the elevator.” I am beginning to sense a pattern here. I smile to myself. I must exasperate her.
I’m saved by my teacher. Up the stairs to the second floor classroom, the interrogation commences.
French teacher: Quest-ce-que dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit dit.
Me, mind racing: Wait, that was a question? What did she just ask me? Was that the verb “can?” Je peut or is “can” je veut? Peut, yes, yes. So that was “can you” do something. Do what? What!? Word sounded like piano. Yes, that’s it: can you play the piano? okay. Can I? Yes! I mean Oui, je — what’s the conjugation of jouer? — drop the “er” right. Je Jou — — wait, is that how you pronounce it? But why would she ask me about piano? Pause.
French speaker: silence, brows furrowed, blank look.
Me: Um. [thought bubble] Not the right pronunciation but plow on girl, this is taking too long. Oui, je jou — whatever, mumble — the piano. Franglish works. Whew. But wait, another damned question coming back at me. It was a question, right? I’m now aware of me thinking very, very hard. My mind wanders to this meta-thinking. She’s still talking. I’m hearing every third word. Just nod.
Time transpired: 10 seconds. Only 59:50 to go before the class is done.
For about two weeks, this pit-staining stress continues. Most of the time, I feel like Elyse in the movie Diner during the football quiz. Pressure.
There are no textbooks. Instead, I and Emma, my teacher, sit around talking. She knows only about six words in English. No reprieve. We talk about real things, about our lives — she is from Bordeaux, her mother is from Madagascar, her father is French, her husband is a professor, they travel a lot, she has two kids. At least that’s what I heard. Who knows what the real story is.
At one point I try to tell her about Chicago but as the French are wont to do, she zeros in on its problems. So I’m left trying to discuss race and segregation in rudimentary French, which is rife with peril. She wants a picture. Yes, good idea, I think. But for some reason, all Google offers of “southside Chicago” is Robert Taylor homes at their worst. Alors. I have done my part to cement the notion of American racism and violence in yet another European’s superior mind.
She takes pity and resorts to a picture book. A picture book. I want to explain, but I don’t know how.
The sessions trot along and I am learning absolutely nothing. My eyes have glazed over. I am making up Franglish words. Emma is actually laughing at me now, with that French sanctimony they must learn in the crib.
I really do hate her at this moment.
She takes pity — worse! — and resorts to a picture book. A picture book. I want to explain, but I don’t know how.
Fail
The session ends, and I climb back down the stairs like Charlie Brown after the football game.
The door awaits. I stare it down, lift the bolt, turn the knob. Nothing. I lean my forehead against the door. I hear the warden sigh and get up from her desk. She turns the knob without a word. I nod and leave.
Oh screw it, I think to myself. There’s a certain joy in not understanding. It’s like being senile as the world frets.
Oh screw it, I think on the walk home, as people chatter around me and I understand nary a word. There’s a certain joy in not understanding. It’s like being senile as the world frets. I walk around thinking my own thoughts, talking to myself. No deciphering “code” comments, no engaging in deep conversations about another’s problems. Instead, basic commands, simple questions (where is the bathroom?), simple replies. Bliss. Yes, the secret to life.
Reunion
I stop in a flower shop and buy a bouquet for the house. Mike and Todd arrive today, and I’m excited to see them. We’d arrived ahead of them while they attended a few work-related boondoggles in the gift card industry, conferences with Circ de Soleil in Vegas, that kind of thing. Rough life. The florist asks if I want the flowers wrapped. “Non, merci,” I say, “Ma maison est… right there,” I blunder, pointing to our front door. She takes pity on me and switches to English.
Mike, Todd, and Mitzi, their quaking Italian greyhound — If reincarnation is true then I want to come back as a gay man’s dog — arrive late in the day. We break out the champagne and catch up. There are few friends who can so naturally sync like we do despite our twenty-year age gap, mostly over the nomadic life and travel.
The four of us had travel-bonded only a few years earlier when Rex and I were living in a Chicago loft in a former Kodak factory — my eighteen-month mistake in thinking lofts were artistic. Mike and Todd were in a condo upstairs from us and we’d invited them down for a cocktail when Mike spied a poster of Prague’s Laterna Majika hanging in my kitchen. He’d spent a year in Prague after college teaching English and instantly recognized the poster. It was travel love at first sight.
Nothing like sharing Immodium to seal a friendship.
We gabbed on about where we’d been and where they’d been, and cemented a lasting friendship on a later trip to Easter Island with them, which included a shared bout of “stomach upset” and an unexpected overnight in Santiago. Nothing like sharing Immodium to seal a friendship. From there, the four of us have traveled together on spontaneous jaunts to the Seychelles, Berlin, Rome, and other big rambling trips that Mike pulls together in a game of competitive travel-points collecting. So what if a trip from Chicago to Chile involves a stop in Dubai? It’s only $300 in business class!
The champagne upended in its ice bucket, we head out to our dinner reservations at Chardon, a restaurant of roving chefs. Experimental and always re-inventing itself. It felt ordained. We walk the winding streets in pitch darkness. A cat slinks past. Bats swoop. A glowing light in a cobbled alley signals Chardon’s locale.
We enter through a miniature courtyard into a small room with a swayback wood floor, with seats for ten, tops. Kat, the Aussie sommelier cum waitress cum front-of-the-house charmer, greets us. Kat is one of those women who simply reeks sex even with her hair tied up in a Rosie the Riveter wrap, wearing blue pants and a gray t-shirt. The boys all flirt.
I’m smitten. Here is someone who is living for her art and letting that love sweep her along life’s path.
She tells us her story as the other patrons wait their turn for her attention. She met the owner of Chardon in Melbourne on a tram. They liked each other, hung out. Said chef invited her and her partner — the chef who would be cooking for us tonight — to Arles for three months to cook whatever they liked. Why not, she said. It was a year of yes. So here they are, two months into their three-month stint. Next up is London and then, they’ll see what happens.
I’m smitten. Here is someone who is living for her art and letting that love sweep her along life’s path. No long-planned trajectory. No lockstep beeline to the preordained vision of one’s life. Instead, all zig. All zag. She met the owner of Chardon on a tram. What could go wrong? But then again, it might be life-altering. What’s to lose? What indeed?
And what a meal. The dishes keep coming — influences from the world over. And the wine keeps pouring. Try this Riesling, try this Australian pale red, try this Vouvray. And this French Sancerre. Okay, we say, compliant sops that we are.
We are soused. But oh so happy.
Bonus: we get many, many recommendations for where to eat in London, Melbourne, Paris and more. The serendipity of travel.
In my tipsy glow, it comes to me, there is something here, in this woman’s life, in this restaurant, in this French city that rings a deep inner bell. She’s got balls, that’s for sure. She is passionate about her life. She pursues a vision. Without permission. Without doubts. A year of yes.
Departures
As the last week of our stay in Arles nears, we begin our final walk-abouts, saying goodbye to this lovely place. We stroll through the Saturday flea market with its bras and socks next to bins of lavender and rows of stinky cheese. I say goodbye to my rotund, ruddy-cheeked butcher and her husband. A village butcher shop in France is a suffer-no-fools place and my first foray had ended with me fleeing with a single saussison that had been sitting atop the counter, prewrapped, ready to go. But now, we have managed to talk about the finer points of steak cuts. She wishes me a safe journey. We buy one last $3 bottle of wine at the Spar.
We sit on a bench along a stream and talk about next places, ready despite everything for the next new scene. We stroll along the periphery of the colosseum, down the hill to the cute square where Van Gogh hung out. We return to Café Bou-Bou for a café aux lait. Goodness in a cup. Sun and 65 degrees, warming like turtles on a log.
We congratulate ourselves on being brave and outgoing for the past month, and vow to continue. Later, after a dinner on the patio, we fall into bed, our last night in this ancient, listing beauty. Tomorrow, a train to Marseille and a flight a few days later to London followed by a train to Edinburgh. The spring idyll is over. It is on to our next destination and the rest of the year. It is too soon to declare “this is it,” but if the rest of Europe comes anywhere close, Chicago may be a past-tense home.
I pick up Queen of the Desert for one last time.
“Are we the same people I wonder when all our surroundings, associations, and acquaintances are changed?” Bell asks as she wraps up her travels and returns to England. Indeed, are we?
Stay tuned for next week’s disastrous Edinburgh — the honeymoon is over.
