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

him, my second night in New York, from the railing of a ferry boat, standing alongside that other monumental American icon, Walter Cronkite. The boat party was something Columbia Journalism School did every year, to welcome its incoming class. That night, as I stared up at the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center, I thought I’d never leave.

But my infatuation with New York City burned itself out like a brief affair. By the end of the year I was happy to go anywhere, even Cleveland. And Sydney shimmered in my memory like a glorious mirage.

When I go home to Sydney now, I visit friends who haven’t seen any reason to leave. These days, their books get reviewed in the New York Times, their plays are staged in London, their screenplays are bought by Hollywood. One writes from his house on the harbor, and if his kids need to get to basketball practice, he ferries them there in the little speedboat parked at the end of his yard. And while it’s no longer necessary to become an expatriate in order to find an international audience, the audience at home has become more interested in indigenous things. Talent doesn’t have to be lauded elsewhere before it’s acclaimed.

Nell’s younger sister had become a prize-winning artist without leaving Sydney; just a few years earlier, a stint abroad in Paris or New York might have been required before Australians would have taken her work seriously. Her brother was a solar-energy scientist, doing his research at the University of New South Wales and exporting his expertise to remote Sudanese villages. Her older sister Sally had come home from London just as the Australian movie industry was beginning to flourish. One of her first credits, Animal Handler on My Brilliant Career, led to her own brilliant career in film production. One month she’d be in London, working on the Royal Albert Hall scenes in Shine, the next she’d be in the Outback, on a shoot with Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda.

Nell’s siblings lived within a few miles of each other and within walking distance of the beach. Sometimes, when she compared her life with theirs, she wondered if she’d stayed in Manhattan too long. “Do you think I could do this in Sydney?” she asked as the cab crawled through Soho traffic. Sure, I replied. I’d just read somewhere that Sydney had more restaurants per head of population than any city other than San Francisco. But she looked dubious. The Sydney she left, in the early seventies, was still a very small place. And when she went back, she spent her time in rushed visits to childhood friends. Her image of the city seemed colored by that more claustrophobic time.

And yet things kept happening that gave her doubts. Her old school, Abbotsleigh, had asked her to send a brief bio for an anniversary yearbook. She’d toiled over her entry. “I didn’t want to be too … I didn’t want to sound too …”

Too “tall poppy,” perhaps?

“Well, I needn’t have worried, because when I got the book and read the lives that all my classmates have had, I was the dullest one in there!”

That night, at her club, she flitted from table to table as the room slowly filled. The club was in its tenth year—ancient for a New York night-life venue. And while the limos no longer disgorged roomfuls of celebrities, the place did a steady business as, among other things, the chief downtown redoubt of the city’s stylish young black crowd.

“Over there, I think, was the blow job,” said Nell, pointing an elegant, red-nailed index finger at a corner of the nightclub dance floor where a young woman allegedly performed oral sex on the rap star Tupac Shakur. “How anyone saw it I don’t know. It’s wall-to-wall bodies in here.”

Nell no longer presided at the club every night. But she had an affection for the place that was evident as she wandered from floor to floor, plumping pillows on the sofas, adjusting the lighting levels, putting a tilted lampshade straight. She paused in the ladies’ room to show off the “wallpaper”—hundreds of old postcards she shellacked herself back in the days when she and her partners were creating this fantasy of a British gentlemen’s club.

“See how we did the stairs? When the oriental rugs get worn we cut them up and have them made into runners. You see that chandelier? It still gets dusted every day.” Like Janine’s tiny village, this place, too, had its routines, the small, unglamorous details that are the foundation of a larger-than-ordinary life.

When Nell reached the dance floor, she strutted and twirled across the polished boards. She wore a clingy leotard and a frothy tulle skirt that showed off the legs the New York Times’s drama critic in 1994 called the best “this side of a Folies-Bergère revue.” The twelve-year-old who tap-danced at the breakfast table now had a dance floor of her very own.

I had planned to stay, to see out the night with her. But by midnight I was already tired, and the club had barely begun to come to life. I left her there, being fabulous, and began the journey home to a place where the last lights in town had probably gone out hours ago.

13

Yours, Faithfully

There is no yellow mailbox at the end of my driveway anymore. The mailman doesn’t come to us out here, in this tiny village at the foot of Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains.

Instead, every morning, a little before noon, we go to the post office to pick up the mail. It’s a pleasant walk, even when snow dusts the neighbors’ hay bales and sits heavily on the wooded foothills rising to the west. When the weather starts to warm, the old Arabian stallion emerges from the barn opposite my house and rolls in the dirt like a puppy, four feet in the air, turning his silvery coat chocolate brown.

The post office is right in the center