Bastille area - The Male Harem

PHOTO: TheSultanette — Sultanette-approved entry only. Hotel Daniel, Vienna.

Instagram posts with #solotravel just topped 5 million. Searches for “solo travel” on Google Trend have doubled over the past five years. These stats are brought to you by Nina Sovich’s Wall Street Journal piece “Alone Again, Blissfully” (Saturday/Sunday, 9/21-22). And this is not about boomers on cruises. According to Sovich, millennials are leading the way, and if you don’t know they’re in charge you’re on vacation in Siberia.

The easy explanation is that we’ve become a nation of commitment-phobics, our most intimate relationship with our smart phones. But Sovich suggests that beyond our technical devices, we’re discovering another significant other. Ourselves. And that rather than a sign of arrested development ”being alone is an expression of sanity and self-worth.”

I have cherished memories of traveling with Male Harem members (as much in the hotel room as out). But I can recall equally rich moments traveling with a favorite ménage à trois – me, myself and I. The Sultanette proposes that when traveling solo – not enclosed in the bubble of another – we’re more open to those around us. And the world responds. “People talk to you more when you travel on your own,” observes Molly Dunn, a brand strategist, single in New York City, who has caught the solo travel bug.

But even couples are loosening the knot to experience a solitary getaway. “Solo travel no longer means you are single” says Robin Brooks, director of marketing at UK-based Exodus Travels, who notes that more married people are traveling alone. Example: The couple from Austin, Texas, married with two kids under five. He’s in tech, she’s in a startup. They tag-team vacations with childcare, so they can pursue separate passions. “We all have our unique interests,” says Brooks. “Just because you love someone doesn’t mean you can travel with them.”

And single women are going four star. They make up nearly half of the clients of the high-end travel agencies in the Virtuoso network, and 300,000 members on the Solo Female Traveler Facebook page. So never mind that maître d’ in Vienna who piteously replied to me, “I’m sorry” when I told him I would be dining alone.

Unwilling to be maître d’ shamed, I made my way the following night to the renowned Purstner, known for its wiener schnitzel – pounded tender, delicately breaded, the size of a Frisbee. But getting there offered the downside of traveling alone – getting lost without a travel buddy to help make sense of the GPS. “Ah yes! Just take a right and two lefts” said every helpful citizen I stopped along the way, but no combination of turns yielded my destination.

Through sheer resolve for a schnitzel fix, I finally stumbled upon Purstner, and the maître d’ greeted me without a trace of contempt for my single reservation. “Excuse me,” I burst out by way of explaining why I was thirty minutes, “but how is it that everyone tells you to take a right and two lefts, but I never find my way?” He smiled graciously, leaned in and said, “Madame, what you must remember is that Vienna is a circle. One never turns completely left or right.”

I never lost my way in Vienna again. And I realized that day that if you just keep walking in narrowing circles, you’ll always arrive exactly where you need to be. Which brings me to a favorite destination on The Sultanette’s bucket list: Serendipity.

It was a chilly, dismal afternoon in Paris. I was rattled from the all-night flight, the passport line, the treasure hunt to my Airbnb in the quartier Bastille. A brief walk would clear my head. As I turned down a bleak Faubourg St. Antoine it began to drizzle. I passed a park populated by scraggly pigeons. Considered buying a Paris Match at a newsstand to practice my woeful French. Why had I fallen for that cheap flight so late in the season? Why was I … alone?

And then as if bursting from shades of grey to technicolor, Paris presented herself. Not the Eiffel Tower or Champs-Elysées or Hotel de Crillon Paris, but the Paris of the Marché Bastille. The street before me was lined with purveyors of piled-high pommes and poires, artichauts and champignons. And Parisians going about their day. Mothers with small children, workers on their lunch break, grandmaman with her shopping cart and faithful terrier.

At the end of this street, the marché opened into a lot bearing a trove of tchotchke’s – books and cooking pans, scarves and gloves, ashtrays, candles and costume bijoux. An hour must have slipped by when I realized I was hungry. I had retraced my steps to the food stalls on my way to finding a restaurant along St. Antoine, when I spotted a chalk board with one word that needed no translation. Couscous! An arrow pointed towards a nondescript restaurant behind a tower of cabbage heads.

Inside, I was greeted by blessed warmth and a smiling proprietress. With lunchtime over, I chose one of the four empty tables, placed my order, and watched her scoop it into a bowl from a trio of battered pots steaming on a tiny stove. After presenting it to me, she sank down at one of the tables to watch the crowds go by.

And as the spicy couscous warmed my bones and cleared my jet lag, we began to talk: How it was cold out there, and where I was from. How she had moved from Algiers with her husband and child, and life in Paris and New York. Is that really what we spoke about in our clumsy attempts at French and English? Did it matter? We were two women taking a pause from life on a rainy day at the Marche Bastille.

When you travel solo, you quickly learn that you’re not alone. It’s the world you’re traveling with. An interesting stranger, another story, and a new adventure waits at every turn. Join the crowd.

In Paris, everything is perfectly clear below the surface. A recording on the Metro cautions you to watch the gap in French, English, and German. Meticulously numbered and color-coded subway lines assure you’ll never end up at the Front Populaire when your destination is Chateau de Vincennes.

Station names are literary triumphs. Where New York subway stops are prosaically titled 33^rd, 59^th, or 86^th streets, the Paris Metro gives you La Motte-Picquet-Grenelle. Emile-Zola on the khaki colored line is just two connections from Victor Hugo in royal blue. It’s all to give the illusion that you can find your way around.

But once you ascend to Paris plein-air, your Paris Classique par Arrondissement street guide might have been written by Jacques Derrida. A sudden minefield of intersecting rues is designed to keep you forever one turn away from the Brasserie Extraordinaire. Even the grand boulevards change names every three bistros.

Paris is so elusive it even keeps the French guessing. A woman I met who lives in a toney quartier, told me she once complained to her neighbor that the neighbor’s male housekeeper was making a show of his masturbation technique at a facing window. Next day, the neighbor reported, Mais non! He was merely polishing the candelabra!

Marie Antoinette lost her head trying to get around town. When her attempt to flee the guillotine failed because her entourage missed a turn in one of the city’s medieval warrens, it fatally slowing her escape resulting in her arrest at Varenne. So determined to keep The Sultanette’s head on one crisp October morning, I left the lux garret I’m renting in the Bastille area with directions in hand.

I was scheduled to meet with the directrice générale of a prominent publisher at 11:30am (it is bourgeois to schedule a morning meeting before 11:00am) to ply her with questions about the book research I’m doing here, on one of France’s sexiest tales of illusion. (If you want to know more, you’ll have to buy the book or see the movie that Hollywood will beg the rights for.)

After breezing through my Metro connections, I had time for a serving of butter-laden carbohydrates before arriving at exactly 11:25am at the address in my email instructions. I pushed my way through the door at the street, a heavy chunk of timber fitted with wrought-iron loops and hinges that could have kept a herd of peasants at bay. It opened into a dark, cobblestone passage where I again checked my instructions: Once inside, first door to the left, sixth floor. Easy enough.

Except that the first door on the left, a formidable leaded glass affair, refused to budge. Did she mean the first door at the circle of buildings after the passageway? I advanced to the sunny courtyard and tried that first door on the left. Success! I found the publisher’s name listed in the foyer, bagged the lift and began to wind my way up the grand staircase.

At the summit, breathless but victorious, I rang the door bearing the publishers name. A housekeeper answered. From what I could make out of the gloomy interior, the place hardly looked like an office but maybe the French preferred a lounge atmosphere to the cubicle design. In Franglais, I announced to her who I was meeting. She looked clueless.

Now a woman arrived at the door wearing pajamas, her coiffure more boudoir than bureau. Again I explained my mission. The woman seemed to know who I was referring to and either indifferent or unmindful of her appearance, began to grill me about the purpose of the meeting.

Next a man’s voice interrupted from the apartment’s dark recesses. To reach the office, the voice said, somewhat irritated, I must go back downstairs to the door at the entrance. Either that, or he told me I was a foolish, dim-witted American and should take the first avion home.

With the stunning realization that I’d rung the prominent publisher’s flat, possibly disturbing his morning coucher avec la femme, I thanked the voice for his direction, and spouting apologies to the pajama lady that would have appeared fawning in Louis the Fourteenth’s court, I retraced my steps to the original doorway.

I gained entrance with the help of a guy smoking outside (the French still shamelessly smoke and kiss in public), loped to the sixth floor, and was greeted by the directrice générale.

She was tall and slim with perfectly strayed wisps of hair framing a face that bore not a stitch of makeup as far as I could detect. Dressed in black tights and high-tops, a scarf twisted and draped around her neck with careless aplomb, she hardly met the New York Times female CEO image. But this was Paris after all, where nothing dares to appear as it seems.

Over the next two hours, we talked about love and sex, coupling, complicity, feminism, politics, writing, literature, and well-crafted lies. She never checked her emails, rang her assistant or responded to a text. When I confessed my earlier detour, she was amused.

Beyond the insights gained in those two hours, I experienced a near-extinct commodity. Undivided time. Maybe that’s what this city, in its frustratingly unaccountable whimsy, was able to hold close.

I thanked the directrice and made my way back to the Metro. But as I was going down the steps, I stopped. Where did I need to get to in such a hurry? I headed back up to the inscrutable streets of Paris and started walking.

The Male Harem

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