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November 1 2011

Fly Solo

How can I travel when there’s so much going on at home? People frequently ask me that question, how do I make it work – just pick up and go? Doesn’t my home life suffer? Yes, for a while, and no. But if I didn’t move once in a while, everything would really fall apart, especially now that my children are out of the house – still in school – but nevertheless launched. It helps that I’m a writer and an assignment can get me out of town for a while. But any solo voyage is good for the head.

We didn’t travel too exotically with the kids when they were young, but still, we hit the road when we could afford to. When my son was a year and a half, my husband was working on a giant outdoor sculpture in the south of France, and the patron, I guess you’d call him, invited us to stay in his wild, gated James Bond house. We took the baby along, with the port-a-crib, and the bottles and all that other paraphernalia that constituted our traveling circus. We have a lot of lovely photos of him (my son…) running through fields of lavender, or on the beach at St. Tropez in a sun hat, images that will surely be brandished to his great embarrassment at some future celebration. I was jealous of the easy going mothers (not usually Americans, I have to say) who – topless – could juggle diaper bags with a glass of rosé and four passports and not drag themselves to bed weeping with fatigue. The mothers who didn’t care that juice spilled all over them or that their kids’ bottoms were getting toasted by the sun.

I tended to feel, after the exhaustion of every day, that these travels were possibly more of a vanity project for me. That the photographs are beautiful, blown up on the wall, but that the memories were only mine (and my husband’s) to keep. I was always delighted to get home, and found plenty of worthy photo opportunities there, too.

Still, I didn’t learn much, or quickly, so every time we could travel, we did. We took them to Paris to see our old haunts (where my daughter nearly died from septicemia), and for a long drive out west (where, in my fruitless search for authentic diners, we subsisted on an artery-destroying diet of Taco Bell, Carl’s Junior, and close to Monument Valley, all variations of Frito pie.)

We loved the time together, without the schedule bearing down on us. And that’s the part I remember – my tiny daughter and I scrunched together in a bed at the Holiday Inn Express in Barstow, California, the boys in the other one, and how we woke up that morning and drove across the desert, ending up at a comfy hotel in Santa Monica.

But again, I was glad to head home.

My kids are bigger and older, and though we travel together when we can, once a year or so, it’s different now. We talk and read and enjoy long meals together. We don’t force a transfer of our life to some inconvenient place, because we’re a nimble unit now. But I’m even more agile alone and I like to travel that way. I like soup and a cold beer for dinner, if that’s all I want. I enjoy travelling light. I suppose I always have.

I’m not at all adventurous and I’m pretty chicken sh– about risk taking, too. I’m not a great white hunter type, I don’t camp out in the desert or take boat rides across blackened lakes just for the thrill of it. But I do like solitude and anonymity. I enjoy carrying a small bag with the essentials (plus one dressy outfit, just in case). When I compartmentalize my belongings, it serves to compartmentalize me, as well. All of me is boiled down to its elements – one woman, two feet, one thinking brain, my one tiny existence to leave for a while and reflect upon. Okay, maybe four pair of shoes, but still.

So, in answer to people’s questions, travel is easy. Press “Purchase Ticket Now,” put it on the credit card. That’s all it takes. Home is alluring from a distance, and life is here when I get back and it’s always better than when I left. So, maybe what I like about travel is the moment I realize (and I do every time) that while I’ve been gone, nothing – and everything – has changed.

September 19 2011

Sex Scandals and Rev. Dimmesdale

In the September issue of Town & Country, I wrote a piece for the Social Graces column about sex scandals, American and French – mostly the difference in their aftermaths – and how they play out in the public. I think (and have written) a lot about fidelity and infidelity, and remain fascinated by how different cultures view every aspect of the institution of marriage. I was therefore not at all stunned by the extremely unapologetic tone DSK took in yesterday’s interview on French television (with the anchorwoman Claire Chazal, a friend of his wife Anne Sinclair’s). Yes, he called his transgression a “moral failing”, but he didn’t express any empathy for Ms. Diallo, his once-alleged victim (as an American counterpart would likely do, even while defending himself). These were rape charges, not a mere affair, and he faces more assault charges at home. He expected his wife to assert his innocence, and she did. Perhaps it’s easy to support your man if the crime he’s accused of is not just a moral one.

Several hours later, I watched the fictional take on CBS’s The Good Wife – which I saw shortly after Julianna Marguiles won an Emmy for her portrayal of the wronged political wife – bitter, betrayed, critically wounded by the lacerations her husband’s infidelity caused her.

Her husband, incarcerated Chicago State’s Attorney Peter Florrick, is portrayed with glorious hubris by Chris Noth. “I’ve looked in the mirror, and what I’ve seen, I didn’t like,” he says in an early episode, the gleam of ambition still clouding his vision while his reputation manager looks on approvingly. As in real life, his family’s humiliation is palpable, and public.

In his 1879 biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the writer Henry James praised The Scarlet Letter as the finest piece of literary writing yet to issue from the United States. “It belongs to the soil, the air, it came out of the very heart of New England,” wrote James about the novel, the tale of Hester Prynne’s adulterous hook-up with Dimmesdale, the powerful Puritan minister, and the fall-out they both endured. “The thing was absolutely American.”

You can say that again. Over one hundred fifty years later, Hawthorne’s masterpiece still defines our tropes towards judging those forbidden acts of extra-marital passion – we who are surprised it still happens. Not only does the sanctimonious crowd scorn Hester, who is forced to bear the infamy all by herself by wearing an embroidered A morning, noon and night for seven years. But when Dimmesdale addresses the crowd to declare the truth about his illicit act of carnal desire, he curses it along with himself, despite the life of virtue the puritanical code had cut out for him. There was nothing left for him to do, but perish on the spot.

Sound familiar? Superimpose Representative Weiner above the village square, or Arnold Schwarzenegger before the local clergymen, or Tiger Woods prostrate before the townspeople for Dimmesdale when he launches America’s first press conference confession. “People of New England!” he says, before revealing the stigma that burns his chest, his dirty little secret. The sex scandal remains the same, as does the sin, the anguish and, although Dimmesdale died before he could rehab in the Utah desert, so does the repentance. And sometimes – both here and in Europe – arrogance.

September 9 2011

In the Dark

I’m not sure what to make of this, but I’m writing this, my first blog post, in the dark. Okay, I do have a snazzy flashlight that has a built-in hook that I’ve attached to the lamp over my bed. I live in a remote area, and though we were spared any tragic impacts of the Hurricane Irene, we are going on two full days without power. We played board games and read books and the paper, ate up the food in the fridge and enjoyed a kind of 19th century day. The wind was crazy – the birch trees looked like they were going to fly away, and my dog Gus did a runner. Now, I’m working on a 53% charge on my computer, and since these entries are best served by the spoonful rather than ladleful, I hope that will be plenty to complete a thought, brevity not really my strong suit. My literary heroes, including some modern-day ones, wrote with a pen and paper and sometimes, a candle, unfettered by power grids and their surprising fragility. Every short story I ever wrote was done in longhand. I don’t know how I didn’t change and edit and do last-minute word substitutions and actually end up with anything that made sense. For the indecisive like me, the computer can be a curse, and I’m sure I’ve lost a lot of raw, visceral stuff from the doubts that my Mac allows me, and the ceaseless deleting, polishing, adding, erasing. See, I’ve been rethinking so much, I’m down to 27%. 23. 14. 7….