In this time of lockdown—and, for many, unimaginable loss—there is nonetheless a strange and gratifying ray of light. In the cocoon of the tiny French village where I’m sheltering, I’m interacting with a greater array of long-lost friends than I have in decades.
I was very young when I left America, barely out of my teens, and I never thought it would be three decades before I returned there to live. I remember so well the eve before my departure for London. I was with my equally young first husband, in New York. At dawn we were taking one of those cheapo charter flights that no longer exist; I think it was People Express. I had two large suitcases, one of clothes, one of books. We were starting a new life; one that twisted and turned and eventually, took different paths.
In 2017, after nearly 30 years, I did the reverse trip. I moved to Manhattan from my home in Paris with three large suitcases, one of summer clothes, one of winter, and one of books. In my hand luggage I took a few treasures—a photo album, a Russian lithograph I had bought on the Portobello Road 20 years before, my grandmother’s Limoges teacups.
But I was traveling light. I was starting another new life.
As a foreign correspondent for many years, I’ve roamed the earth and made many places my home. My closest friends are in Paris and London, the Berkshires, Maine, Monaco, Boston, New Jersey, Vienna, Sarajevo, Africa. Wherever I lived I tried to make some kind of nest, and a new circle of friends. I gathered many friends, many adventures.
But there are many other people I care for, and love, whom I lost track of. Life does that. You can’t stay in touch with everyone, even in the age of WhatsApp and FaceTime. You edit your life of friends in the way Marie Kondo edits her underwear drawer.
But corona, the evil pandemic, which is as peripatetic as I am, changed all that.
This “time of the virus,” as I call it, has brought lost friends and acquaintances back to me. In the rural village where I am sheltering, in the Vercors of France, far from everything (with a former husband, our son, and an extended family), I’ve reconnected with people I have not heard from in years. At night, after I pour water on the fire and retreat to my unheated room, I WhatsApp a friend in London. In normal life we meet once a year in August at a mutual friend’s house in Greece for a holiday.
Now we speak every night. We talk about banal things. It doesn’t matter. It’s the human contact that matters in times like these. “Tonight I ate spaghetti with venison meatballs,” he tells me. “Waitrose had a package in the frozen meat section.”
“I wonder what the recipe for a perfect tuna melt is,” I respond. “Mustard or relish?”
I message other friends whom I have lost track of. Some are sheltering in the English countryside. Some have remained in cities. Some, like me, are sharing spaces with their exes. Some are alone. Corona has somehow crossed over timelines, social strata, and years; people I let slip from my memory are now next to me, virtually.
A woman I barely knew wrote me because she saw an article I had written for Vanity Fair. We exchanged a few emails. By the fourth one we were telling each other things we have never told anyone else.
In a way it’s part of a fatalistic mindset that acknowledges human mortality and impermanence: The pandemic has scared the pants off all of us, so we’ve broken down social barriers. It reminds me of that old Tracy Chapman song: “If not now, then when?” What’s the point in waiting anymore to get in touch, to unburden your worries, to tell secrets?