The Travelers by Chris Pavone Read Free Book Online

of gratification, the investment of pain for the promise of pleasure.
    When the empty
amuses bouches
plates are whisked away, he turns to Elle.
    “You’re something of a legend, you know, Will Rhodes.”
    “Ha! That’s a ridiculous thing to say, but I thank you for saying it. And you, Elle Hardwick? Who are you?”
    “
Australian Adventurer
magazine. Speciality in adventure.”
    “Are you new?”
    “New to what?”
    “To this.” He sweeps his hand across the table. “I’ve been going to these for a long time. Put on by winemakers. By hotels. By cruise lines and liquor distributors and restaurateurs. Hundreds of them, cocktail parties and luncheons and long boozy dinners. All for the benefit of the people who write about these topics. People like me. There aren’t that many of us, you know. And I would think I’d’ve come upon everyone, sooner or later. But I’ve never come upon you. As it were.”
    Good God, did he really just say that? “If you’ll forgive the phrase.”
    She grins at his dirty joke. Not insulted, not scandalized, not embarrassed. Amused? More? “I guess I
am
rather new. Still looking for one’s big break. How’d you get yours?”
    There are professions with specifically demarcated milestones—partner, tenure, vice-presidency. But Will’s isn’t one. “I guess that depends on what you call a big break.”
    Elle regards him over the rim of her wineglass. “So tell me, Mr. Will Rhodes, what was your first job? I’m going to interview you.”
    “Oh I don’t think so.”
    “Please?”
    Will shifts in his chair, turns to face this woman, wearing the hyperstylized hair and meticulously applied makeup of a good-looking woman who is making a concerted effort to be spectacular. Like a tall man wearing boots.
    “It may not be easy to understand, from where you sit,” she says, leaning toward him a few inches, which somehow seems a lot closer. “But you
are
at the top of our field. And I
am
near the bottom. You can’t blame a girl for wanting to climb up a bit.”
    It’s true: he’s a big fish in a small pond. And here is this attractive angler, casting her lure his direction. “After college I moved to New York, which is one of the things that people do in America when they want to write.”
    “Is that so? I’d never have imagined.”
    “I had a series of miscellaneous jobs while looking for freelance work: pitching stories and submitting spec articles, contributing short pieces to trade magazines. Getting poorer and poorer with each passing month. You know how it is, I imagine?”
    “I do.”
    “I finally landed an editorial job at a glossy magazine, with health insurance and a regular paycheck. A few months later, a writing position opened up, on the food desk.”
    “Did you always want to write?”
    “I did.” It was way back in third grade when Will decided to become a writer. He took his book reports seriously, he edited his high-school paper, he got a journalism degree at what may have been the last moment when ambitious young people still aspired to be establishment print journalists. Not only to write for a living, but to write about other things, other people, not about themselves; reporting, not memoirs and blogs and tweets and status updates, not a permanent state of navel-gazing.
    “Did you always want to write about
food
?”
    “I’d never given it any thought. The grade-schooler me could never have imagined that his adult self would write the equivalent of book reports about Italian blue cheese.”
    She laughs, covers her mouth a split second too late for decorum.
    “I eventually got a better job at a food magazine, where I worked for a few years. Then
Travelers.
”
    On the face of it, he has achieved what he set out to achieve. He is a full-time professional writer. He has been on three safaris, visited Machu Picchu and the Galápagos and Antarctica, seen the northern lights and the midnight sun, ridden the Orient Express and the
Queen Elizabeth,
seen the