The Pursuit of Happiness (2001) (68 page)

‘I hope you’ll get some rest during the transatlantic crossing,’ he said. ‘You look tired, Sara.’

‘I am tired. And yes, I do plan to spend most of the next seven days on the SS
Corinthia
fast asleep. If they allow me on the boat, that is.’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘You can’t board a transatlantic ship without a passport, can you? And if the Department of State stopped Eric from getting a passport …’

‘Don’t worry - they’ll issue you a passport.’

Joel was right. At five that afternoon, the clerk at the Rockefeller Center passport office handed me a spanking new green travel document, valid for five years. My lawyer accompanied me to the office, just in case my application had run into difficulties. But no questions were asked, no objections raised. The clerk even wished me ‘Bon Voyage.’

We managed to find a taxi amidst the rush-hour madness on Fifth Avenue. I had just under forty-five minutes to make it to Pier 76, where the SS
Corinthia
was docked and setting sail that night at seven thirty. I stared out of the cab window as night fell on Manhattan. I suddenly wanted to jump out, run to the nearest phone booth, and call Jack. But what would I have said?

‘Do you believe things happen for a reason?’ I heard myself saying.

Joel looked at me with care. ‘You’re talking to the original Jewish agnostic, Sara. I don’t believe in some Almighty plan, or even that dumb thing called “destiny”. I believe you should try to live your life ethically, and otherwise hope for the best. What else can we do?’

‘I wish I knew, Joel. I wish …’

‘What?’

Silence.

‘If only Eric had gotten his passport …’

‘Sara …’

‘Or if he’d gone to Mexico the next day … If he hadn’t looked back in that taxi on the way to the airport, and seen the midtown skyline … If only …’

‘Don’t play the
if only
game, Sara. You can never win it.’

We inched our way west on 50th Street. We reached Twelfth Avenue. We turned south towards 48th Street. We pulled into the gates of Pier 76. We got out of the cab. The driver handed my suitcase and typewriter to a porter. He lurked nearby. I suddenly found myself clutching on to Joel’s coat sleeves.

‘What am I doing here?’ I asked.

‘Getting on that boat.’

‘I’m scared.’

‘You’re leaving the country for the first time. It’s only natural to be anxious.’

‘I’m making the wrong call.’

‘You can always turn around and come back. It’s not a life sentence, you know.’

‘Tell me I’m crazy.’

He kissed me gently on the head - like a father giving his daughter his blessing.

‘Bon voyage, Sara. Wire me when you find your footing.’

The porter cleared his throat, hinting that it was time to get aboard. I hugged Joel. Gently, he detached my hands from his sleeves.

‘What will I do over there?’ I said.

‘At the very worst, you’ll survive. Which is what we all do.’

I turned and followed the porter up the gangplank. Just before we reached the main deck, I spun around. The taxi carrying Joel Eberts was pulling out of the gate. I kept my eyes at street level. To look up would have meant paying a final mournful tribute to the Manhattan skyline. I didn’t want a long goodbye. I just wanted to leave town as quietly as possible.

S
EVEN DAYS AFTER
slinking out of New York Harbor, the SS
Corinthia
docked in Le Havre. I stepped on to French soil, my equilibrium still wobbly after all that time at sea. I immediately took a taxi to the railway station, and caught the express to Paris.

A week later, I checked out of my hotel on the rue de Sevres and moved into a small
atelier
on rue Cassette in the Sixth. I lived there for the next four years. Initially I took French lessons and squandered the days in cinemas and brasseries. Then I found a job in a small Franco-American advertising agency on the Champs-Elysees. Through colleagues at work, I was parachuted into the center of Paris’s burgeoning American community - for this was the time when the weakness of the franc, the luxury of the GI bill, and the ongoing witch hunt back home meant that the French capital was heaving with expats. Initially, I resisted mingling with my compatriots. Inevitably, though, I found myself getting more and more tangled in the American community. Especially after I met Mort Goodman - the executive editor of the
Paris Herald-Tribune
- at a party.

‘I’m sure I know your name from somewhere,’ he said after we were introduced.

‘Did you ever work in New York?’ I asked.

‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I was with
Collier’s
for three years before getting the job over here.’

‘Well, I used to write a bit for
Saturday/Sunday.’

‘Oh hell, you’re
that
Sara Smythe,’ he said, then insisted on taking me out to lunch the next day. By the end of that lunch, he offered me the chance to contribute the occasional feature to the paper. I kept on churning out copy for the advertising agency, but started having my by-line appear every few weeks in the
Herald-Tribune.
Three months after I started getting published in that paper, Mort Goodman took me out for another lunch and asked if I’d like to try my hand at a column.

‘Traditionally, we’ve always had a resident American-in-Paris write a weekly piece on life in the capital, local color,
la mode du moment
… whatever. Now the guy who’s been doing it for the past two years has just got himself fired for missing four deadlines in a row, due to his little love affair with the bottle. Which means the position is open. Interested?’

Of course, I said yes. My first column appeared on November seventh, 1952 … three days after Eisenhower beat Stevenson for the presidency. That election - and McCarthy’s accelerating hearings in Washington - hardened my conviction that the best place for me at the moment was right here in Paris. And I liked the place. No, I wasn’t one of those dumb romantics who swooned every time I smelled the aroma of a freshly baked baguette in my local
boulangerie.
Paris to me was a complex, contradictory entity - simultaneously rude and gracious, erudite and banal. Like anyone interesting, it was deeply contradictory. Its epic grandeur - its sense of self-importance - meant that Paris saw itself as a unique entity within which you, the resident, were privileged to dwell. In this sense, it reminded me of New York, as it was totally indifferent to its citizenry. The Americans I met who hated Paris - and railed against its arrogance - were usually people from smaller, more intimate cities like Boston or San Francisco, where the local
beau monde
stroked each other’s ego, and anyone in a position of power or authority felt as if they counted. Parisian arrogance meant that nobody was important, nobody counted. It’s what I loved most about the city. As an expat, you didn’t try to be ambitious in Paris. You tried to live well. You always felt as if you were an outsider … but, after everything that had happened in New York, I embraced that
etranger
role with relief.

And Paris, in turn, embraced me. The column gave me a profile there. But so too, I discovered, did the circumstances surrounding my expatriatism. I never mentioned anything about my brother. Much to my surprise, however, many members of the American community knew about Eric’s death, just as they had also heard how I’d been dropped from
Saturday/Sunday.
I avoided talking about such matters - because I didn’t like the idea of using the blacklist as a form of social currency … and also because, according to Smythe family values, there was something deeply gauche about seeking sympathy for any personal misfortune. But I still found myself being made a member of an eclectic, raffish community. Having lived a rather singular life in New York (and having never been the most gregarious of people), it was liberating to find myself now plunged into something of a social whirl. I was out on the town at least five nights a week. I drank with the likes of Irwin Shaw and James Baldwin and Richard Wright and many of the other American writers who were living in Paris. I heard Boris Vian sing songs in some St Germain
cave,
and actually attended a reading given by Camus at a St Germain bookshop. I became a habitue of late-night jazz haunts. I indulged in long lunches with friends at Le Balzar (my favorite brasserie). I developed a taste for Ricard and casual affairs. Paris treated me well.

I was kept in regular contact with things New York, courtesy of Joel Eberts. We wrote each other once a week - generally to discuss financial matters (when it became clear that I was going to be staying in Paris for a while, he found someone to sublet my apartment), and also for Joel to forward any mail that came my way.

In June of 1953, his weekly update ended with the following paragraph:

There is only one personal letter in the batch of mail I’m enclosing this week. I know who it’s from - because it was hand-delivered to me by its author: Meg Malone. She waltzed in here a few days ago, unannounced, insisting I tell her where she could find you. All I said was that you had left the country. Then she handed me the enclosed envelope, and insisted that I forward it to you. I told her what I told her brother: that you had specifically requested that any mail from Jack be held by me. ‘I’m not Jack,’ she countered - and lawyer that I am, I had to concede she had an argument there. She said nothing else - except that, if I didn’t forward the letter, I’d be her sworn enemy for life. The fact that she said this with a smile made me like her … and also made me honor her request. So here’s the letter. Read it if you wish. Throw it away if you don’t want to. The choice is your own.

Timing is everything in life. This letter arrived at the wrong moment. It was the night after the Rosenbergs had been executed at Sing-Sing for allegedly selling atomic bomb secrets to the Soviets. Like just about every American I knew in Paris (even those who usually voted Republican), I was horrified by this despotic act - and one which, yet again, made me despise the forces which had destroyed my brother. For the first time in my life, I had actually done something vaguely political - attending a candlelight vigil in front of our Embassy (along with around three thousand Parisians, led by notables like Sartre and de Beauvoir), signing a petition condemning this act of state murder, and feeling completely ineffectual and furious when the word came through (around two that morning, Paris time) that the executions had gone ahead. The next day, Meg Malone’s letter arrived courtesy of Joel. My first thought was:
tear it up … I don’t need to hear any apologias for Jack Malone.
Instead, I ripped open the envelope and read:

Dear Sara,

I don’t know where you are, or what you’re thinking. But I do know that Jack loves you more than anything, and has been in something approaching constant agony since you disappeared. He told me everything that happened. I was horrified by what he had done. I can fully understand your grief and fury. But … yes, here comes the
but
… he is as much a victim of the insanity that has gripped our country as your brother. This is not to condone his choice, or to excuse an action which many would interpret as self-serving. Faced with an appalling choice, he panicked. In doing so, he knows he killed your love for him. He has been trying to make contact with you for nearly a year, but has failed. Your lawyer informed him that you were refusing to read his letters. Once again, I cannot blame you for feeling that way. And, believe me, the only reason I am writing to you now is because Jack is currently suffering from something akin to a nervous breakdown - which is related entirely to the overwhelming guilt he feels about naming your brother and losing you.

What can I say, Sara? Except this: I know how deeply you once loved him. I don’t ask for a miraculous reconciliation. All I ask is that, somehow, you find a way to forgive him - and to communicate your forgiveness to him. I think it would mean an enormous amount to him. He is now a deeply unhappy man. He needs your help to find his way back to himself. I hope you can put the tragedy you suffered to one side, and write him.

Yours,

Meg Malone

I was suddenly angry. All the pain I had put away suddenly came roaring back. I rolled a piece of paper into my Remington. I typed:

Dear Meg,

I think it was George Orwell once who wrote that all cliches are true. With that in mind, here’s my response to your plea on behalf of your brother:

Jack has made his own bed. He can lie in it. Alone.

Yours

Sara Smythe

I pulled the letter out of the machine. Within a minute I had signed it, folded it, shoved it into an envelope, addressed it to Meg, and affixed the appropriate stamps and air-mail sticker to its front.

Two weeks after I mailed that letter, a telegram arrived for me at the offices of the
Herald-Tribune.
It contained four words:

Shame on you.

Meg

As soon as I read it, I balled up the telegram and threw it away. If Meg’s reply was designed to make me feel awful, it succeeded. So much so that I ended up going out with a new friend from the
Herald-Tribune
- Isabel van Arnsdale - and drinking too much vin rouge, and telling her the entire damn story. Isabel was the paper’s chief sub-editor - a stocky Chicago woman in her late forties. She’d moved over to Paris in ‘47, right after her third marriage collapsed. She was known to be a consummate journalistic pro, and someone who could put away a bottle of whiskey, yet still seem sober.

‘Jesus Christ,’ she said when I finished telling her the tale of the past year. ‘Correction: Jesus-
fucking
-Christ.’

‘Yeah - I could use a spell of boredom,’ I said, sounding deeply tipsy.

‘No - what you could use is a life without encumbrance.’

‘There’s no such thing.’

‘True - but take it from a veteran of three crap marriages: there are ways of insulating yourself against further pain.’

‘What’s the secret?’

‘Don’t fall in love.’

‘I’ve only done that once.’

‘And, from what you said, it ruined your life.’

‘Perhaps. But …’

‘Let me guess: when it was right, it was … I dunno …
Transcendental? Incomparable? Peerless?
Am I getting warm?’

‘I just loved him. That’s all.’

‘And now?’

‘Now I wish he’d leave me alone.’

‘What you mean is: you wish you could stop thinking about him.’

‘Yes. That is what I mean. I still hate him. I still love him.’

‘Do you want to forgive him?’

‘Yes I do. But I can’t.’

‘There’s your answer, Sara. From where I sit, it’s the right answer. Most women would never have had anything to do with him after the way he initially disappeared on you. To then betray you and your brother …’

‘You’re right, you’re right.’

‘Your response to his sister’s letter was the proper one. It’s finished, over,
kaput.
Don’t look back. He’s a bad piece of work.’

I nodded.

‘Anyway, as you already know, this town is crawling with interesting guys. Not to mention a lot of uninteresting guys who are still
baisable,
if you catch my drift. Go out, have some more adventures. Believe me, in a couple of months, you’ll have gotten over him.’

I wanted to believe that. And to accelerate this distancing process, I continued my series of cavalier flings. No, I didn’t turn into a
femme fatale,
with three guys on the go at once. I was an old-fashioned serial monogamist. I met someone. I took up with them for a little while. I let the thing run its course. When it started getting serious, or tiresome, or simply routine, I’d jump ship. I became an expert at disentangling myself from a relationship with the minimum of fuss. Men were useful for companionship, for occasional acts of tenderness, and for the ephemeral pleasures of sex. Anytime I found someone getting too dependent on me, I’d end it quickly. Anytime a guy started trying to change me - to wonder out loud what on earth I was doing living in a small
atelier,
and why I favored Colette-style pants suits over more ‘feminine’ apparel - they’d be politely shown the door. In the four years I resided in Paris, I had three marriage proposals - all of which I turned down. None of the men in question was wildly inappropriate. On the contrary, the first was a successful merchant banker; the second, a lecturer in literature at the Sorbonne; and the third, a would-be novelist, living on Daddy’s trust fund. All of them were, in their own way, thoroughly charming and intelligent and emotionally stable. But each of them was on the lookout for a wife. That was a role I wasn’t interested in ever playing again.