Loving foreign cities is a bit like having an illicit love affair with someone you know is bad for you, but damn, he smells of hotel rooms and leather motorcycle jackets on hot summer evenings when time is nothing but a concept. You just cannot help yourself: salvation might be a wonderful thing but the road to it is just too long and winding.  

Cities beckon. Come here, they whisper, there are museums full of art you have never seen, cafes with pistachio tarts and rich black coffee grown under the moonlight high in the mountains, streets that lead somewhere, somewhere else, somewhere fraught with danger and promise.  Tik tok therapists have done a good job of convincing me that chemistry is a red flag; lust too soon and danger looms, pay too much attention and you lose your anchor on the earth.  Walk away from chemistry; actually run from it. Be cool, detached, never make the first move.  It is a dog eat dog fight out there, in the urban jungles, and chemistry will get you taken out like a mafia target. 

But, just like salvation, chemistry has gotten a bad rap: the best moments of my life have been soaked in sweet, red cherry chemistry,  richly textured,exploding with lusciousness. Smashed berries with merlot red presence, just begging to be explored. Irresistible. 

Of course it has to be Paris. Paris of Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Paris of Rodin and Renoir, always slightly naked but oh so couture with those streets like silk scarves fluttering in the morning breezes.  Paris is the Fragonard museum and the lovely French girl who told me to wear perfume behind my knees if I wanted to live an interesting life. Paris is the Seine and underground metros with art nouveau signs, all green and yellow, and orange. Paris is getting lost and never wearing a watch. Paris is always an assignation with the unknown. 

London is romance and old books, but some of those old books are subversive goth stories about lives lived in shadows and mists. “To be or not to be” is graffiti at the skatepark; the London Eye peers over palaces and parliaments and boat rides along the Thames. London is so vibrant, so full of street music and open air festivals, abundant in languages and sensations, its belly stuffed with life.  There is history everywhere, linear grey stone buildings that have stood for centuries, stories of princes and courtesans, rebels and scientists all share the same streets.  Dotted with underground jazz bars and exotic eateries, London is a city made for the senses to come alive.  London is that fun friend who has more than a few benefits. 

But I can’t help thinking about cities I have never visited. Shanghai at dusk, drenched in tango music and delicate tones of sky and rain. Rome of beautiful architecture, sanctuaries, and Visconti films. Budapest with its art nouveau hotels and its whiffs of exotic perfumes, handmade and poured into numbered bottles only for certain women. Vienna and Istanbul, the spy capitals of the cold war, littered with dead letter drops and dangerous crossing points from light to shadow.  Cities that lure me across distances are like that space between aloneness and desire: anything could happen. Kisses in cool libraries, wines discovered in dusty old cellars, music made only in that one place, in that one city, for that one night. 

The cities I dream the most of live inside books. Los Angeles is a femme fatale, all unsolved crimes and dark alleyways, mapped out by Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler, by James Ellroy and Walter Mosley. I want to be the one who slips into the diner in the middle of the night, fleeing from jazz clubs and mafia lovers, with a handful of diamonds I need to fence before I can get out of town. I can only meet the dealer after dark, in his office in the corner booth.  Crime is my trade and danger is my name in the Los Angeles of the noir writers.  

The Dublin of James Joyce, W.B Yeats and Seamus Heaney,  and the pubs where Samual Becket spent evenings. Dublin might appear to be a friendly city, with its food festivals and abundant music, but it is riddled with ghosts who have poems to whisper and stories to tell of that night, that plate of oysters, that walk along the Liffey.  So too Berlin, gritty and metallic, a city of angst ridden love stories and 1920s patina, that stretches into post-unification stories of long lost lovers reunited. Nabokov wrote The Gift in Berlin, a goodbye letter to a life he was forced to flee. Berlin is jazz and spy stories, hedonism and explorations. Berlin is a dominatrix with multiple stamps in her passport, who can say hello in twenty languages. 

And then there is Athens, which I first encountered in the poems of George Seferis and the novels of Roberta Latow. A beguiling curve of shadow and light, narcotic scents and hot sweaty love in the long afternoon. Athens was the city I dreamed of the most, its pale apricot buildings, its terracotta and cool marble, its whiff of forbidden holiday romances.  The streets smell of olive trees and fruit stalls, of black coffee and pastries with a hundred layers. Athens was a love at first encounter, a love I needed new perfumes for.  A narcotic landscape unfolding around me, the Athens of Roberta Latow novels was intoxicating, forbidden, one step away from surrendering to the unknown. I can’t get enough of it. I couldn’t get enough of its warmth and wildness, its shimmering streets and illicit meeting places.  

Irish writer Edna O’Brien, no slouch when it comes to love affairs of the most tempestuous kind, wrote of the allure of cities  “Cities, in many ways, are the best repositories for a love affair. You are in a forest or a cornfield, you are walking by the seashore, footprint after footprint of trodden sand, and somehow the kiss or the spoken covenant gets lost in the vastness and indifference of nature. In a city there are places to remind us of what has been” .

Cities are those illicit loves: we could be anybody in a darkened bar, Manhattan in hand, just waiting for what’s next.  Chemistry be damned: this is full on combustion with a twist of ruby red adventure.