The New Life of Hugo Gardner by Louis Begley

Author:Louis Begley [Begley, Louis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2020-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

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I was astonished by the promotion and immeasurably happy and proud. Paris! The city I had come to love as a schoolboy on vacations with my parents and to know very well during my army tour. And I was there as the bureau chief of the best news magazine in the world, the youngest bureau chief in the magazine’s history. I don’t think my head was swollen any more than it had always been. But I was consumed by passion for my work and determination to succeed beyond my bosses’ and anyone else’s expectations. The few hours each week I didn’t spend at the office, attending press conferences at the Élysée, interviewing politicians, or playing squash on the rue Lauriston courts, I devoted to making habitable the little apartment I had rented on rue Marbeuf, within easy walking distance of the office. It isn’t an exaggeration to say that I did not miss Jeanne at all, and it wasn’t because I had found a substitute for the sex with her. Far from it, I had not gone out—in the old-fashioned sense of that expression, meaning that since I arrived in Paris I had not taken any girl out to the movies, a drink, or dinner. There were a couple of attractive women working at the Time office. I’m not sure what the company policy was, if indeed any sort of policy was in effect, but I disapproved totally of anything resembling an office romance, a disapproval that as I recall extended to Newsweek colleagues, on the theory that they were our direct competitors. No, I didn’t miss Jeanne because I wasn’t thinking about her. I hadn’t forgotten that she was there thinking about me, indeed staying in touch. Naturally, just as I promised before leaving, I gave her my office telephone number and, when finally, after pulling many strings, I managed to have a telephone installed in my apartment, my home telephone number as well. She called frequently, her ability to reach me limited only by my work schedule and the time zone difference between New York and Paris, and we had long talks on Sundays. She knew better than to call me before nine in the morning my time, three in the afternoon hers, that being the one day in the week when I didn’t need to bound out of bed at six to speak to my supervisory contacts in New York, but at nine sharp the phone on my night table would ring, and I would hear her voice. It was in the course of one of those interminable calls, which had me guessing willy-nilly at the size of the phone bill she was running up, that she told me triumphantly that she had managed it: Saint Laurent had offered her a position in its press department in Paris. A wave of immense pleasure swept over me. I found I wanted her with a force and urgency I would not have thought possible. Soon, she had her little apartment on the rue de Penthièvre.

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