A waiter appeared with my omelette and salad. “Bon appétit,” he said, placing my meal on the small round table. He reminded me of someone. Belmondo? No. Louis Jourdan? No. I studied his face, a very Gallic one; a little gaunt but handsome in a bony way. It crossed my mind to flirt with him. This was Paris, after all, where women of a certain age were thought quite desirable. But before I could act on my thoughts, the waiter moved to the next table.
After polishing off the salad, omelette, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream, I ordered a café noir. Then I settled into one of the great pleasures of café-sitting: surveying the scene. At the next table, a young, shy-looking couple spoke softly in Japanese, trying not to call attention to themselves. Across the way, a darkly handsome man dressed in black sat sketching in a large notebook.
Outside on the terrace, catching the last bit of sun, were the deeply tanned Italians: beautiful women wearing gold jewelry, and sculpted, model-perfect men in Armani suits. And then, of course, there were the Americans—either overdressed or underdressed but always friendly—and the French, who ruled the Flore, rightfully so, and were elegant no matter their attire.
I sat sipping my second café, imagining the time when Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir practically lived at the Flore: writing, eating, and even seeing people by appointment there. It was not difficult to imagine. I could imagine doing it myself. Of course, at that moment, I could see myself doing just about anything, including ringing up friends to set up appointments: “Bonjour, mon ami, it’s Alice. Look, I’ll be at the Flore most of the afternoon and I’ve decided to have some friends over. Why don’t you come by sometime after one? Dress casual. See you then.”
At about eight I noticed a subtle change in the light. As the sun moved lower in the western skies, it washed the ancient Paris buildings with pale-pink patterns. The faces of those gathered at the Flore were tinted rosy by the softening light; everyone looked years younger. By now my eyes were growing heavy from jet lag. It was bedtime for me.
As I strolled back to the hotel, I stopped to watch a young couple near the tiny, romantic place Furstemberg. From a radio they’d set on the ground, the voice of Frank Sinatra rose like smoke, filling the air with words about a small hotel and the longing of lovers to be there together. I watched as they began to dance slowly to the music, arms wrapped around each other. The square was deserted except for the young dancers beneath the fragrant paulownia trees. Of course, even had the square been bursting with tourists, the dancers would not have noticed; they existed only for one another.
I knew that feeling. As I stood in the shadows, it all came back: the feel of Dick Reavey’s arms around me at the high school prom, swaying to the last slow dance of the night, the swish of my silk dress, the sharp edge of his white collar against my face. Swaying back and forth to the music, our cheeks touching, inhaling the scent of his aftershave, nothing else existed. Time stopped, and we hung there, dancing, not looking back, not looking forward. After the music ended, we’d walk off the dance floor hand in hand, dazed with longing. Some part of me still felt I would never feel that alive again.
Does anyone ever forget such moments? I wondered, watching the two dancers in the place Furstemberg. What if more of life could be like that? Like the last slow dance, where, to echo T. S. Eliot, a lifetime burns in every moment.
By 8:30 I was back at the hotel. The bed had been turned down and there were fresh flowers in the room, a bouquet sent by a friend living in Paris. The food had revived me, so I decided to try one of Françoise’s miracle beauty products. But which one? The mask, I thought, the one that Françoise promised would “tighten the skin and circulate the blood.”
With the bathroom window open, I stood in front of the mirror and spread the green cream on my face. I watched as the mask stiffened and small fissures appeared on the surface. For some reason, I thought of my thrifty Scottish grandmother. How she would have laughed at the idea of spending money on cosmetics! Her own beauty habits consisted of going into the garden early in the morning to splash her face with drops of dew.
“Aye, it’s nature’s own free moisturizer,” she would tell me on those Saturday-morning forays into the garden. If I closed my eyes now, I could still see it: a stocky, plain-looking woman in her sixties and a curious, plain-looking child of eight, both dressed in bathrobes and slippers, kneeling in the misty light of dawn and with cupped hands splashing dewdrops onto their faces. Afterward, I would fall back into the warmth of my bed, to doze and dream of the scones I smelled baking in the kitchen.
So strong was the image of that woman and child—one dead now for over thirty years, the other grown—that when I peeled off the stiff green mask, I half expected to see my grandmother’s face emerge.
Perhaps tonight I will dream of my grandmother, dream we are back in that garden, together again, I thought, climbing into bed.
But I didn’t. Instead I fell into a deep sleep. When I awakened the next morning, the Paris sun had entered my room, falling in slanted golden rays across the floor. I walked to the window and inhaled the golden air. The breeze carried with it the sound of children’s voices from a nearby playground; happy, laughing voices that called to one another in high, excited shrieks of irrepressible energy. The language of pleasure, I thought, is the same everywhere.
The sounds floated into my room, swirling around the dark armoire and the red velvet loveseat before drifting out the window into the skies of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. As I listened to the high, childish voices, I imagined them moving like laughing birds along the narrow street outside; I imagined them turning right at the rue de Beaune, a tiny street that ended at the Seine; I imagined them landing on the water, wings tucked back, playfully joining the river’s glorious rush through all of Paris, sending small cries of contagious joy throughout the city.
A gentle tapping on the door reminded me I had left a request for breakfast in my room. “Bonjour, madame,” said a cheerful young woman carrying a large tray with white china plates and silver pots. She placed it on the table, just between the two open windows. “Bon appétit.”
I sat down and studied the tray’s contents. Carefully laid out on a white linen cloth were fresh orange juice, croissants and brioche, strawberry jam, cheese, and a tall silver pot of coffee, accompanied by a smaller server filled with hot milk. I thought of my usual breakfast at home—coffee and a slice of whole-wheat toast dabbed with peanut butter, served from the top of my television set. Usually I ate this repast while making phone calls and watching Katie Couric on the Today show. In my former life, the one that existed until yesterday, it was my habit always to do at least two things at once; three, if possible.
But there would be no hurried phone calls or Katie Couric-watching this morning. Leisurely, I draped the linen napkin on my lap and took a sip of orange juice. Into my large china coffee cup I poured a combination of the strong black coffee and hot milk. I added two small cubes of brown sugar from the sugar bowl and stirred the mixture with a small silver spoon.
This is heaven, I thought, sipping the coffee.
I picked up a croissant, broke it open, and covered it in a painterly way with strokes of red jam. Then, just before taking the first bite, I raised the croissant and, in a celebratory mood, issued a toast to myself: Welcome to Paris, madame S. And bon appétit!
2
WOMAN IN THE HAT
Dear Alice,
At breakfast today in a café near the rue du Bac, I saw Colette. She was drinking coffee and smoking a cigarette, her wild, curly hair and knowing eyes enveloped in smoke. I almost said hello, but then remembered Colette is dead. Still, I decided to visit her in the flesh, so to speak, at Père-Lachaise Cemetery. When I arrived, she was there waiting for me. It pleased me to see that someone had placed a dozen red roses on the marble stone that says simply: ICI REPOSE COLETTE 1873–1954.
Love, Alice
During my first week in Paris I left the hotel each morning with a carefully worked out plan for the day. Knowing the plan was tu
cked safely in my handbag lessened the slightly chaotic feeling of living in a new kind of time, one that had no demands and no deadlines. I was unfamiliar with such a concept of time and it seemed slightly dangerous.
As I set out each day, I felt like a young child again, one who hadn’t yet learned the rules of manmade time: the rules of clocks and calendars, of weekdays and weekends. Except for the primitive markers of day and night, time lay ahead of me in a continuous, undefined mass. I began picturing it as some kind of strange but friendly beast whose appetites and desires were unknown to me. How, I wondered, was I to feed such an unpredictable creature? Having an agenda—I sometimes thought of it as a menu—helped give structure to this new kind of time.
At first I followed the plan precisely, as though I were a reporter on a daily deadline: Wednesday morning, rue de Buci open-air market and rue du Cherche-Midi; afternoon, Picasso Museum and place des Vosges; evening, organ concert at Sainte-Chapelle. I guess the idea of stepping out from behind the “camouflage of routine,” as someone once described it, still intimated me.
By the end of the week, however, I felt confident enough to exchange the old detailed plan for a new and much looser one. Instead of singling out specific places of interest, I decided to concentrate on the neighborhood that was to be my home. This area consisted, roughly, of the streets that lay between the Seine and the boulevard Saint-Germain, plus the square mile or so surrounding the juncture of the 6th and 7th Arrondissements.
The new plan was simple. I would walk—street by fascinating street.
For several days I did just this, getting to know the bookstores and galleries, the cafés and fruit vendors, the patisseries and flower shops. Each day I ventured farther and farther, extending my map of the familiar, gradually finding the places in my neighborhood that were to become part of my daily life. The bookstore in the rue Jacob devoted to gardening. A café on the rue du Bac that served small elegant sandwiches and pastries so delicious they were famous throughout Paris. The small grocery shop near the rue de Verneuil. The newsstand run by Jacques and Monsieur Jacques. The out-of-the-way tea salon on the rue de Beaune. Presided over by Madame Cedelle, this soon became my favorite place for lunch or a late tea in the afternoon.
It was there that I met Liliane, the most extraordinary looking woman in all of Paris.
I first saw her standing at the entry to the crowded tea shop, a woman with dazzling, almond-shaped eyes and skin the color of cognac. Liliane, a slender figure perched on stiletto heels, wore a short, tight, green velvet skirt paired with a peplumed, deep rose satin blouse. Positioned on top of her long, dark hair was a tilted purple hat made of fluted straw; attached to it, a stiff mousseline veil that just covered her eyes. The total effect was that of some exotic parrot set down among sparrows. So physically striking was Liliane that the sight of her caused a brief silence in the tearoom, as diners paused to take in her presence.
I watched as Liliane’s eyes scanned the tea salon looking for an empty table. There was none. To my amazement, she approached me. “Would you mind sharing your table with me?” she asked in English, her clipped accent carrying hints of time spent in England.
“Of course not,” I said. “Please. Sit down.”
Actually, I was delighted to have company. I pushed aside the postcards I’d been writing to my sons and motioned to a chair. Sharing a meal, I had learned, was one of the best ways to meet people when traveling alone. Sometimes a real friendship grew out of such a chance meeting. More often, though, what developed was a temporary friendship, one rooted in the mutual need of two strangers to find companionship in unfamiliar surroundings.
Suddenly, Liliane’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “It’s one of my favorite photographs,” she said, pointing to a postcard lying on top of my purse.
The card, which I planned to send to a friend in New York, was a reproduction of a famous 1926 picture taken in Paris by the great Hungarian-born photographer André Kertész. A bold-looking, vivacious woman reclines on an Art Nouveau love seat, her arms and legs arranged with abandon against the plush velvet cushions. Her pose gives the effect of a woman dancing horizontally. Kertész, whom I had interviewed once for my newspaper, titled the image Satiric Dancer. A print of the photograph hung in my living room at home.
“It’s a favorite of mine, too,” I said, picking up the postcard. “There’s such joy and fearlessness in that face, isn’t there? It’s like the look you see on a child’s face before the age of reason sets in.” We both laughed. “But I’m curious. How did you become familiar with the photo?”
“I studied photography in New York for a while and fell in love with Kertész’s work,” she said. “Brassaï, too. Do you know Brassaï’s photos of Paris?”
Liliane had hit on a passion of mine: photography. Within minutes we were discussing Brassaï, also a Hungarian, who had moved to Paris, where he became famous for his pictures of Paris nightlife in the 1920s; and Atget, the venerated master photographer of the city, who, beginning in the 1890s, photographed Paris almost every day for more than twenty years. After agreeing that Atget was the architectural historian of Paris and Brassaï the Colette of the camera, we compared notes on cameras we liked and why color prints could never approach the beauty of black-and-white photographs.
We finished lunch and ordered coffee. Then more coffee. By this time we had traded our personal histories, or at least as much as we wished to trade. Liliane, who was born in Rio de Janeiro but grew up in London, ran an interior design business from her Chelsea flat. Her two children, both teenagers, were away at boarding school. She made no mention of their father. She did mention, however, that she was not alone in Paris; an Englishman named Justin had accompanied her. The purpose of the trip to Paris, Liliane said, was to visit her ailing aunt.
I was surprised by the warmth and openness of Liliane’s personality; it contrasted so strikingly with her exotic, unapproachable appearance. But even her warmth and charm could not completely dissipate my awareness of her astonishing looks; from time to time I found myself studying her face as one would a painting.
She seemed interested in my trip and asked question after question: Don’t you get lonely? What did your sons think of your decision to do this? Don’t you worry about your job? Do you know people in Paris? By the time we rose to leave, it was as though I’d had lunch with an old friend.
Outside we walked along the rue du Bac, stopping to peer into the shop windows at some amazing display of antiques or ancient jewelry. As we walked, I noticed how much attention Liliane’s appearance commanded. Especially from men. I felt a twinge of envy, one I tried to brush aside. Liliane, I noticed, was not unaware of the stares she drew; she seemed to play to her audience in a flirtatious way, something she hadn’t done in the tea shop.
Before we parted, Liliane asked if I liked jazz. “Justin and I are going to a jazz club near your hotel after we visit my aunt,” she said. “Would you like to join us?”
“Yes, very much.” I agreed to meet them at La Villa at 10:30 that night. To my surprise, just before we parted, Liliane reached out and hugged me.
After leaving Liliane, I decided to walk over to the Musée d’Orsay. Along the way I saw a half-dozen things that made me think about pulling out my reporter’s notebook. A man sitting outside the museum impersonating the Mona Lisa; a dog roller-skating alongside his master; two women, identical twins who appeared to be in their seventies, dressed in matching pink outfits by Chanel; a man in a tall baker’s hat bicycling along the quai d’Orsay, a wedding cake balanced in the bike’s basket.
What great stories there are in Paris, I thought, half-convinced I should phone an editor and see if I could sell some ideas. The other half of me, however, stepped in quickly to remind me of why I came to Paris in the first place: Remember, this voice whispered, you’re here to take a break from seeing life as “newspaper stories.”
But it was a difficult habit to quit. I loved my work; it was an important part of my identity. In the twenty y
ears I’d been a reporter, I’d met people and gone through doors that were opened to me only because of my job. I’d met Princess Diana at the British Embassy on her first trip to the United States in 1986 and interviewed Elie Wiesel in his New York apartment just after he’d won the Nobel Prize. I’d done stories on mothers who murdered their children, and spent four months in a psychiatric ward chronicling the life of a young psychiatrist. I’d profiled artists and actors and scientists and what I liked to think of as “extraordinary” ordinary people. I could think of no job more fascinating.
But the work has its perils: spending large chunks of time immersed in another person’s life makes it easier to lose track of one’s own place in the world. I was determined not to let that happen on this trip.
Still, when I saw a performance artist climbing a thirty-foot beanstalk constructed of green plastic, it took real self-discipline to talk myself out of doing an on-the-spot interview with “Jacques and His Greenstalk.”
On the way back to my hotel I passed a shop near rue Bonaparte that featured in its windows several mannequins dressed in Chinese cheongsam-style dresses. One particularly caught my eye—a beautiful black silk number with a mandarin collar and elegant frog fastenings that ran down the left side of the dress. When I moved closer to the window I saw the silk was subtly patterned: raised silk threads, gossamer as spiderwebs, formed what looked like black-on-black calligraphy. The effect was both elegant and mysterious, a design that revealed itself, like a secret, only to the intimate observer. Impulsively, I walked into the shop.
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