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OUR WEDDING TOOK PLACE at Paul’s father’s home in southwest France: a stone castle in the midst of rolling cornfields, off a narrow country road lined with English plane trees that made of it a green tunnel, specks of sunlight bursting through the leaves. I thought of the opening passage of James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime, even though he was referring to life in a city, every time we sped along the road from the stone house toward medieval Lectoure, the nearest town.
September. It seems these luminous days will never end. The city, which was almost empty during August, now is filling up again. It is being replenished. The restaurants are all reopening, the shops. People are coming back from the country, the sea, from trips on roads all jammed with cars. The station is very crowded. There are children, dogs, families with old pieces of luggage bound by straps. I make my way among them. It’s like being in a tunnel. Finally I emerge onto the brilliance of the quai, beneath a roof of glass panels which seems to magnify the light.
Our actual wedding day began with a massive hangover from the pink-champagne party the night before. Paul and I had planned on respecting the tradition that bride and groom shouldn’t see each other the day of the wedding, but we were so hungover, we didn’t wake up until around 11 a.m., just hours before we were due at the church. During the Catholic ceremony Paul almost gave the elderly priest a heart attack when he said, “I, Paul de Bendern, take you, Lisa, to be my wife.” Lisa was my sister.
My family, meanwhile, had reunited happily. Paul and I loved spending time with Bruce and my father, who were still together. They had made up with my mom; we even all went on vacation together sometimes. It was a testament to my mother’s warm and forgiving nature and to my father and Bruce’s effort to bring us all together again. At my wedding dinner my mother stood up on a chair, her arms around Bruce, and said how excited she was that her daughter was marrying into royalty—“but I thought I’d introduce you all to a real queen!” And with that she thrust the flamboyant Bruce forward. The party roared with laughter. Nothing made me happier than watching my mother and Bruce, the original best friends, stand on a chair side by side and make a toast together as my father looked on. I wrapped my arms around her ankles and gazed up at her with admiration.
That day I looked around at all the guests—the collection of friends and family who had gathered from as far away as Peru, New York, Hong Kong, and California—then back at Paul, who was beside me, holding my hand. After all the years of hard work, unsuccessfully searching for love, the kidnapping in Fallujah, the ambush in the Korengal Valley, the car accident in Pakistan, I was so grateful to be sitting in the middle of the rolling hills of France with my family and closest friends, happy, drinking, and celebrating life.
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AFTER THE WEDDING, I was finally able to go back to work. I was in a transitional phase in my photography, trying to edge out of daily news stories and focus almost entirely on more time-consuming magazine features and projects. In mid-September, three months after the wedding, I sat at my desk having an unsettling conversation with an editor from National Geographic. Sometimes the long lead times between the start and finish of a story for National Geographic made me question the impact of the work I was doing for them. Eighteen months passed between when I began a story and when I saw it in print. After years of photographing for the Times, I had grown used to the immediate gratification of working on stories and seeing them published within days or, at most, weeks. I had to convince myself that the stories I was photographing could have as much relevance published long after I shot the photos as those published the day after I shot them.
The editor and I had been talking about an assignment I had just begun shooting.
“Don’t shoot this story like a New York Times story,” he advised, in a slightly patronizing way. “Take your time with this story, get into it. Use the time you have to explore.”
He was right: I had spent so many years working on stories on deadline that I had to retrain myself to shoot with time and patience. I understood where the editor was coming from but was annoyed with the conversation, which left me feeling that he didn’t have faith in my vision as a photographer.
Minutes after I hung up the phone, it rang again. The number showed a Chicago area code and I thought it might be the fraud department of my credit card, telling me for the millionth time they had blocked my card because it showed usage overseas.
I picked up the phone, exasperated.
A man’s voice: “May I speak with Lynsey Addario, please?”
“This is she.”
“This is Robert Gallucci, the president of the MacArthur Foundation.”