It was late June, and the sun would not set. The hotel room had two beds side by side, \u201ceach just slightly wider than the human body,\u201d I wrote in the diary that I kept for that week and that week only, then buried in a box for many years. The bathroom was hot and airless; the towels were thin. The one window looked out on a roof heaped with rusted scraps. And so I found myself on the C\u00f4te d\u2019Azur.<\/p>\n
In the other bed was a young woman who looked about my age. We each created ads for a living. Our agencies had sent us here, to the Cannes advertising festival, on a heavily discounted package designed for ill-paid 20-somethings early in their careers. The mission was to learn something from our elders, those men (they were still mostly men) who wore T-shirts with suits and wrote copy like \u201cThe necktie is society\u2019s leash\u201d \u2014 an ad for Harley-Davidson \u2014 and who I imagined were in the fancier hotels on the seaside promenade, bathing in Champagne. <\/p>\n
Hotels were my specialty: I worked in Hawaii, where I had become a poet of tourism, championing beach resorts as sites of liberation. The target audience was the older woman I would one day be, longing for youth, forgetting that it had been a state of near-constant desperation. Once I tried out the line \u201cRemember who you were before you had a permanent address.\u201d The client scoffed. \u201cEveryone has a permanent address,\u201d he said. At the time I lived in a converted garage by a cemetery, the third place I\u2019d moved in a year. <\/p>\n
My roommate, Chantal, was from Switzerland. I tried to describe her in the diary: \u201cCropped hair the color of a calm fire. A face like Audrey Hepburn\u2019s, neatly arranged bones, eyes quick. Lean as a soldier, with a tattoo along her side and half her lower back.\u201d It was 11 p.m., and I\u2019d eaten nothing all day but a greasy croissant from the hotel\u2019s minimalist breakfast buffet. She was meeting friends for dinner. Would I come? <\/p>\n
In the maze of the old quarter, we sat at a table outside, on stone stairs descending from another century. Her friends were all Swiss but kindly spoke English. Here they are, spilling from the diary\u2019s pages: Olivier ducking to disguise his height, talking about all the things he wanted to do with his life, and all at once; Lukas with his grazed head and face long and serious behind fine-tuned glasses, pausing to search through words, wanting only the precise ones; Sasha, burly and cheerful, expelled twice from school for pranks \u2014 including throwing a chair out a window, on a bet, because he needed lunch money \u2014 whose dream was to buy a camel for the commute to work; and Mark, who was quieter, so I had to lean in as he talked about riding a motorcycle from Thailand to Myanmar, and who was handsome enough to make me nervous.<\/p>\n
The restaurant was unexceptional \u2014 plastic chairs, coarse tablecloths, low guttering candles \u2014 and perfect. I ordered salade de ch\u00e8vre chaud, a careless toss of greens under rounds of goat cheese with the sheerest veil of bread crumbs, gently crisped in a hot pan. The greens were fresh and cool, and the cheese was still warm. We talked for hours. They drank three bottles of wine; I sipped. When the bill came, they told me, \u201cYou owe nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n
How did they know how to live like this, giving themselves to the moment, this murmur of voices, these reflections off glass, with no need for it to lead anywhere? Always I had this longing for plot, motivation, story \u2014 some shimmer to chase through the night. I wondered if this was the American in me, a compulsion to conquer. I did not understand simply being in the world. <\/p>\n
The next three nights, Chantal took me down to the promenade, to the parties in tents along the beach. They were all the same: \u201cBad, loud music and bad, thin wine,\u201d the diary reminds me. Sometimes we ran into Americans so drunk, their eyes were full of tears. They bragged about their expense accounts: \u201cAll the receipts say \u2018Heineken!\u2019\u201d Everything they said, they shouted. I stayed with the Swiss. <\/p>\n
At one party, the bouncer wouldn\u2019t let me in because I didn\u2019t have an invitation, so Mark slipped me his over the fence. When I made my way through the crowd to thank him, he was suddenly shy. I had dismissed him as a pretty boy, not fully given to any cause. But at 4 in the morning, the two of us were still there, talking about the French political scene (of which I knew nothing), mandatory military service and Switzerland\u2019s policy of neutrality. Maybe, in that moment, I wished for a little less neutrality. <\/p>\n
In the fall, I would meet the man who would become my husband. Not again would I be so adrift in a strange city, in the night\u2019s smallest hours, when it\u2019s no longer clear that time is running forward. Now as many years have passed as I had lived back then. I found the diary when I was cleaning out boxes this spring, and these people \u2014 whom I never thanked properly for their kindness, whom I never saw again \u2014 were returned to me. <\/p>\n
I like to think I learned something from them. How to be at ease with the present; to drink wine just for its lightness on the tongue; to linger over an ordinary, unfussy meal; to not want, want, want without end.<\/p>\n
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