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

went off on assignment to the Middle East, she moved to New York. She took an apartment just a block from my old place on East Thirteenth Street.

But even though our tracks covered the same ground, we never met. I was shy about calling her; I suspected I wasn’t quite cool enough to make it past the velvet ropes of her acquaintance. In 1996, when I finally picked up the phone and dialed her number, I realized it had been thirty years since our first exchange of letters.

The voice that answered was the voice of those silverfish-nibbled pages. Pickets of exclamation marks fenced her sentences. Word leaped suddenly into BOLD TYPE. Her accent seemed as hybrid as a Labradoodle or a Cockerpoo. Big round English vowels suddenly deflated into Aussie flatness with just a hint of Yankee drawl. It was like listening to Queen Elizabeth channeling Nicole Kidman.

Nell suggested we meet for breakfast. I was surprised; I hadn’t imagined encountering the queen of the night in daylight. She proposed an East Village café right near my old apartment on Thirteenth Street. Sliding into the cab, I was delighted to hear the cabbie say it again: “Ya want Toideenth and Toid?”

The café faced what was once the Variety Vaudeville Theater—as apt a place as any to meet up with Nell. But the sign on the door said CLOSED TILL 11. It was just after nine. Apparently the queen of the night kept more conventional hours than the rest of her neighborhood.

While I waited for her, I wandered down the block to take a sentimental look at my old apartment. When I first arrived in New York, my school friend Kate, who was studying acting, had been living there and I’d been appalled by the overturned garbage in front of the stoop and the stink of urine in the foyer. In Sydney, even students could share houses in desirable neighborhoods, or find little flats like the one I’d had, with park views and a garden. “How could Kate live in a place like this?” I thought. A few months later, when I’d become better acquainted with the realities of Manhattan real estate, I begged her for a room.

Someone had given my old brownstone a coat of paint and put an intercom on the door. In my day, guests had to shout from the street if they wanted to be let in. The Spanish bodega was gone from the building next door. The rasping of its shutter had been my morning alarm clock. Now, it looked as if the street had priced itself out of reach of students and Hispanics.

It was a chilly, late winter morning. To keep my mind off the cold, I pulled a couple of Nell’s letters from my bag and reread them as I waited. They reeked of our sun-drenched childhoods, of warm summer evenings and sticky school uniforms. Even her Sydney address, Coolabah Avenue, was enough to set the tune to “Waltzing Matilda” on auto-rewind in my brain:

Once a jolly swagman camped by a billabong,

Under the shade of a coolabah tree …

Standing there on that Manhattan street corner, the billabong stretched in front of me, red rocks reflecting in its limpid surface. Overhead, a flock of pink and gray galahs burst from the twisted branches of the coolabah tree and swirled into the burning blue of an Outback sky.

She had a dancer’s walk: the slight turnout of the toes, the bounce on the balls of her feet. She wore a long sweater, leggings and a well-tailored hacking jacket. A slash of dark red lipstick accentuated the auburn of her signature bob. The New York Times was tucked under her arm. “My father’s influence,” she said. “He made me a newspaper junkie.” Her most recently opened establishment, a little restaurant named The Kiosk on the Upper East Side, had a frieze of newspaper mastheads accenting the wallpaper.

We peered longingly into the cozy dimness of the closed café. There was a Starbuck’s a block away, but when I suggested it as an alternative, Nell looked at me as if I’d proposed we drink hemlock instead of coffee. “Oh NO,” she exclaimed, wrinkling her nose. “It’s SOOOOO bland.” Instead, we set off at her long-legged trot in search of something with the right atmosphere.

“Bruce Chatwin said EVERYONE should walk twenty miles a day,” she declared, and it seemed we might have to go that distance to find something acceptable at such an unfashionable hour. But then she remembered the twenty-four-hour Café Orlin on St. Mark’s Place. For its denizens, 9:30 A.M. was more likely to be the tail end of a very long night rather than the start of an ordinary morning.

Sure enough, the window table was occupied by two tall transvestites wearing fake tiger skin and hiding the night’s ravages under polka-dot scarves and huge, Grimaldi-esque dark glasses. “The girls are HERE!” Nell exclaimed approvingly as one got out a bottle of watermelon nail polish to touch up a tired manicure.

As we sat down I pulled out the letter Nell had written to me back in May 1966, in which she boasted of her late-night pajama party—“We talked ALL night (sorry, a bit of exajuration (or however you spell it) there we got to sleep at 1.30 AM!).” She laughed—a throaty roar that reminded me of her sister Sally, sequestered with Darleen in the sanctum of the Big Sister’s Bedroom while I hovered by the door, eavesdropping and trying desperately to get the joke.

For the best part of a decade Nell’s life had been like a continuous pajama party. But instead of the relatively staid hour of 1:30 A.M., she rarely got to bed before five. “I’d wake up at five the next afternoon without seeing daylight,” she said. Defying the short half-life of most New York clubs, Nell’s had remained hot for years. She said it had been a relief when the celebrity tide finally ebbed. “The drinking, smoky rooms, very high heels, up till dawn … I was never