Flirting with Danger (17 page)
Read Flirting with Danger Online
Authors: Siobhan Darrow
I
had been in Moscow almost five years before I got my transfer to London in 1995. I had loved Russia deeply, obsessively, but I had been cut off from the rest of the world for so long and taxed by the difficulties of day-to-day life in Moscow. I knew it was time to make my life easier.
Moving to London was exhilarating. The royal family was at war, with Diana and Charles taking potshots at each other in the British media almost every day. CNN had an insatiable appetite for that soap opera, as well as for the unending trauma in Northern Ireland, where a yearlong cease-fire was crumbling. I seemed to have good luck with breaking news. My mother said that if I were sent to cover a dog show a riot would break out. In London I covered all kinds of stories, from IRA bombs exploding to eccentric old ladies who rescued donkeys from around the world to more plodding political analysis on Britain’s position in the European Union.
Whenever news broke, I had to jump and become an “expert” in a matter of hours on any subject, whether it was the repatriation of stolen Nazi gold or Albania’s economic crisis. I loved the range of stories and different people I met every day, from presidents to homeless drug addicts and everything in between.
Even Uncle Leon from afar could tell how good the change was for me.
Sweetheart
,
It was a joy and delight to catch you on the television reporting on the recent bombing in London. You look much better since your posting to England. Apparently the English food must be preferable to that in Moscow. I hope this factor helps with your prospects of finding a suitable mate in the coming year
.
Uncle Leon
Uncle Leon was right. I was ready for a man, and tired of the slim pickings in Russia. The advent of e-mail radically improved my prospects. At least, it broadened my geographical scope. I discovered that essentially I could date anyone from anywhere in the world, even though I was still on the front lines in different parts of Europe. It had the added advantage, as so many cyberdaters have found, of allowing me to get to know a date from the safe distance of cyberspace.
In London, my social life was still a disappointment. I had been so anxious to get away from Russian men that I never stopped to think what their British counterparts might be like. For the most part I found them inbred, pale, and wimpy. Many were unable to
look me in the eye. Consider what Princess Diana had to go through with her quintessential British male. It soon became clear that there was nobody here for me.
Jordan, a Hollywood-producer friend who acted as my Jewish godfather, tried to help by launching his own search for me in Los Angeles. He felt indebted to me for showing him a good time when he had visited St. Petersburg with a group of filmmakers a few years earlier. I had snatched him away from his boring tour group and taken him to some of my favorite haunts, like Peter the Great’s three-hundred-year-old collection of anatomical abnormalities, a grisly exhibit of deformed fetuses, two-headed lambs, and Siamese twins pickled in jars.
I started to get e-mail from men Jordan decided were desirable suitors. Looking back, I have to question whether that museum choice had given him a warped impression of whom I might be interested in. Still, these cyberdates brightened up many lonely nights I spent locked in a hotel in Albania because of a shoot-to-kill curfew, or trapped in Belfast waiting for the Irish to throw more petrol bombs at each other. My favorite cyberromance was with a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon.
SCREEN NAME: LKoplin
LOCATION: Beverly Hills
BIRTH DATE: 9/18/50
SEX: male
MARITAL STATUS: divorced (almost)
HOBBIES: family, friends, music, the Beatles, ragtime guitar
,
skiing, reading, learning, life
OCCUPATION: Plastic surgeon
PERSONAL QUOTE: “To love another person is to see the face of God.”
Dear Siobhan
,
I thought I’d start by sending you my AOL profile, which forced me to compress a lifetime into an obscenely short list. I understand you are doing some terrifically exciting stuff overseas and am very anxious to hear about your international life and times. My quote of the day (just the first half; if you like it more to follow):
“So through the eyes love attains the heart; for the eyes are the scouts of the heart, and the eyes go reconnoitering, for what it would please the heart to possess.”
L
Dear L
,
How brave to send a blind e-mail to some strange woman overseas. Loved the verses you sent me and would love another installment, although in our case it is not eyes but words in cyberspace that must do the reconnaissance. How very modern and old-fashioned at the same time to be courted by words alone
.
I don’t have a computer profile but I guess if things get bad enough and I resort to joining a computer dating service my profile would go something like this:
NAME: Siobhan (shi-von)
BORN: 10/10/59
HABITAT: airplanes, hotels in places nobody in their right
mind wants to be
FAMILY: one Tibetan terrier (Max)
OCCUPATION: professional snoop, voyeur, troublemaker, storyteller, witness to man’s genius and folly (TV reporter)
THINGS I LOVE: my family, friends, yoga, reading, writing, nature, walks, the ocean, animals of all kinds, Italy, food, epiphanies, scuba diving. (I like skiing too, and what I lack in style I make up for with a fearless approach to slopes.)
PERSONAL QUESTION: Wondering what almost divorced means. Is that A: getting divorced and the paperwork hasn’t gone through yet, B: bored with wife, thinking about divorce, C: none of my business?
Look forward to hearing from you
,
S
Dear S
,
How thrilling to receive a message from a beautiful war correspondent flung far across the Atlantic Ocean
.
I loved your computer profile. In getting my e-mail today there were two different e-mail ads for “How to get a date with a beautiful woman: what to say, how to get their phone number, how to build your self-confidence, and what conversation is appropriate on the first date.” Well, now, let me tell you, as a guy newly released on the dating scene (more later) this seems kind of interesting to me. But then I realize, “Hey, wait, look who I’m writing to at this very moment!” So the messages were deleted. I did not order anything and will just have to wing it like the rest of us
.
About your multiple-choice question, papers filed last fall
,
temporary settlement done, final terms of money and custody of children (I have two) is scheduled for December. Sounds very clinical but what lies at the deeper unspoken level is that the marriage is well over; we are living separate lives
.
I like to be around people who love and appreciate nature, walk through it, touch it, smell it, and embrace it. I love people with big brains, full of interesting stories and facts, inquisitive and well-read. Even more fun if they get to write about it, share it with others: that’s how we get to look inside each other, right?
Larry
Dear L
,
Thanks for your honest answer to my somewhat impertinent question. Sounds like it’s been a tough year. Speaking of people’s insides, I’ve just spent the week at War School. It’s a sort of survival course for war correspondents run by former SAS guys
.
They operate pretty much as TV reporters do. Small mobile groups with no backup are dropped into hostile environments to gather information; only difference is they’ve been trained to survive and we just seem to know how to find trouble. I was looking forward to a relaxing week off work lolling about in the Welsh countryside but instead it was serious boot camp. We were shelled, shot at, forced to drag big bleeding bodies across muddy fields and stuff their fake oozing guts back inside them
.
What has been really frightening about this is realizing how unprepared journalists generally are when they go into war zones. I feel 1000 percent more confident now knowing that I could actually stop someone’s arterial bleeding instead of standing idly
by and watching a colleague die in the field. How the hell did you survive medical school?
Besides general triage medicine they also taught us useful urban skills, like how to move a land mine or disarm a grenade. Never know when this could come in handy
.
S
I started to think that this kind of cyberdating was much easier than having to wash my hair and get dressed and actually go out on a date. Tired after a day’s work covering bombs or riots, I could at stay home in my pajamas and weed out the undesirables much more quickly. I could also get lost in a fantasy and avoid the real-life pitfalls.
Dear S
,
Glad to hear you went to medical school, even if only for a few hours. I, for one, am very interested in moving a land mine, as I’ve never known anyone well versed in the subject. I wonder how difficult it must be for you to sustain any meaningful relationships when you are so often on the go, in dangerous locations. Exhilarating, yes, but a crimp on sharing a cup of coffee and croissant with an important person on a Sunday morning?
My dear Cyber Surgeon
,
You raise a sore point. I have been privileged to see history-making events on a daily basis. What I see in a week, most won’t
see in a lifetime. But I have paid a heavy price in the relationship department. I have such constant input that nothing seems to sink in or get absorbed. I jot things down in my journals, fragments that I promise to make sense of later, epiphanies shoved down and forgotten as some new experience gets packed on top. I want to stop, stay still, and travel the rugged internal terrain. I’m tired of wars, riots, and other people’s misery. I feel like hiding under my desk when news breaks so I don’t have to cancel another dinner party or miss my yoga class
.
S
It was oddly reassuring to think of this man, whose life was all about order, going to the same office every day and trying to chisel perfect-looking humans. My life was the opposite as I went out each day into chaos to expose humanity’s flaws. His efforts at creating perfect noses and thighs seemed futile to me. I thought of moving to Beverly Hills and putting up a shingle next to his office,
SOUL DOCTOR
, capturing some of his customers as they emerged. Clearly their souls must have been hurting to need so much rearranging of their exteriors.
My cyberromance with Larry trundled along for a number of weeks. We even spoke on the phone once, but somehow the more disembodied he was, the better I liked him. In one of his e-mails, Larry quoted Dylan Thomas on the importance of defying death by living a big life. Days later, Princess Diana did just that.
When Diana’s car crashed in Paris, the London bureau chief woke me up at one in the morning. I couldn’t sense how huge a story it would become; perhaps no one could. All I felt was another intrusion in my life. I had to drag myself out of bed and figure out
who was going to walk Max. I interrogated the taxi driver for his opinions on the way to the bureau.
“I’m stunned, love, just stunned,” he said. “But running around with that playboy trustfunder with four Ferraris, I’m not surprised that she ended up in trouble.” Taxi drivers were sometimes the only source I had time to talk to before being thrown on the set and turned into an expert on what the “people” thought. I knew the second I walked in the bureau that I would be live on television for endless hours answering questions to which I didn’t always know the answer.
Interest in the Diana story was so intense that my producers put me on the air every fifteen minutes for updates, keeping me on standby for hours at a time. At first we were looking for anything concrete to report: reactions from Buckingham Palace, feelings of the people who came to drape flowers all over the gate outside, anything. Only after many hours of frantic reporting did I have a chance to take a breath and think about Diana’s death. I had covered her closely for nearly a year, reporting when she went public about an affair, an eating disorder, her suicide attempts, her unhappiness in her marriage. The British media endlessly dissected her every utterance, some arguing that she was mentally unbalanced, while others found her openness refreshing.
Just about any woman who is plagued by low self-esteem, who worries about her weight, who has trouble with men, who tries to find herself at the gym or with psychic healers—any woman with everyday problems in the modern world—found a spokeswoman of sorts in Diana. She communicated an image of caring with which ordinary people could identify. She took her sons to McDonald’s and to amusement parks. She was into aromatherapy. She was a woman loved by many but who still felt alone. I felt like a soul sister.
I stood outside Buckingham Palace doing live shots all day when she died. Before the sun rose we had set up a satellite truck to broadcast indefinitely. When the first trickle of people started bringing their flowers and grief to the gates, we had no idea that so many would eventually come that they would bury the gate in a mountain of flowers. They were all kinds, the quintessentially reserved English old ladies, new Labour businessmen, mothers with children. It was as if all the repressed emotions of centuries erupted on the streets that week. Diana’s death was like a lightning rod for unresolved loss in this country. It was a chance for virtual grieving. All those who couldn’t cry for their own hurts and losses joined in this communal torrent of sorrow.
I often called my mother when I was desperate for background information, since she was often quicker than getting information from CNN’s library in Atlanta, which was hampered by the time difference. She is an expert on everything, with an innate predilection for accumulating knowledge. No matter how obscure the topic or location I called about, she always seemed to have something to tell me from her encyclopedic mind. Sometimes, being mortal, she puts the phone down to consult her Encyclopaedia Britannica, with me holding on in a hotel room in Ashkhabad or Tirana. Whatever she told me went from her mouth to ears around the world. When Diana died, it was my mother’s finest hour. It was the middle of the night when I called desperate for something to say about Westminster Abbey, a rumored site for the funeral. My mother, from her bed, listed the poets and noblemen buried there and rattled off other fascinating details about obscure relations and protocol. Her knowledge of the royal family was vast. And what she didn’t know, my stepfather, Tim, did.