Foreign Correspondence: A Pen Pal's Journey by Geraldine Brooks (best ereader for epub .TXT) 📕

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, “thinking 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