“Bonjour, madame,” a voice sang out from somewhere in the back of the shop. It was a pleasant custom, the way French shopkeepers greeted each customer personally, and one that ran counter to any notion of the French as rude and unfriendly.
“Bonjour,” I sang back. Then to my utter surprise I heard myself say: “I’d like to try on the black dress in the window. Well, I mean, not the one in the window but one like it in my size.”
“Oui, madame,” she said, eyeballing me from head to toe—the typical French approach, I had learned, in determining size.
That was all right with me. The truth is, I was sure that no size existed in this particular dress that would fit me, so unforgiving was its narrow cut. Still, for some reason, I was willing to give the dress a chance, even if—quelle horreur!—it meant humiliating myself in the eyes of the salesclerk.
As I waited for her to bring the dress, I wondered what was behind my sudden need to acquire a glamorous black silk cheongsam. Was it the challenge of meeting Liliane—the exotic, fabulous-looking, man-attracting Liliane—at La Villa? The idea almost made me laugh out loud.
“Here it is, madame,” said the saleswoman, interrupting my thoughts. She hung the silk dress in a small room and ushered me in, tactfully leaving me alone to try it on.
Without much optimism I removed my slacks and blouse. I slipped the dress on over my head. To my surprise it kept on going, undeterred even when it encountered my hips. After hooking up the little frog closures and pulling in my stomach muscles, I turned to look in the mirror. Not bad. In fact, better than I would have thought possible. When I moved, I noticed that the slits on either side of the dress flashed just the slightest bit of red silk lining, another elegant secret.
That was it. I had to have the dress. Of course, wearing it meant I would have to be intensely aware of my posture, both upper and lower, for the whole evening. But given my infatuation with the image in the mirror, that seemed a reasonable price to pay.
By 5:30 I was back at the hotel. Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was a radio producer from Baltimore, calling to confirm I was in my room. At six, Paris time—noon, Baltimore time—I was to be a telephone guest on The Allan Prell Show.
For the past seven years I’d been a regular guest on this radio talk show. It was something I enjoyed doing. Allan Prell was both smart and funny and so were the listeners who called in to talk about everything from politics to books. Before leaving on my trip, it was suggested I do a radio interview on the show from Paris. I agreed. And now the familiar voice of Allan Prell was on the other end of the long-distance line.
For forty-five minutes Allan and I talked about Paris. About the price of a glass of orange juice at Deux Magots—seven dollars—and the cost of a cup of coffee at the Flore—five dollars. About the hotels on the Left Bank. About what I was doing. Listeners called in to ask questions. Commercials came and went, bringing into my room on the rue de l’Université the voices of Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr., and Morris the Remodeler. I could picture the radio studio, could see Allan in his white turtleneck swiveling back and forth in his chair, could even identify the voices of some callers. It was all so familiar.
And yet, sitting in my Paris hotel, only a few blocks away from the Seine and the hotel where Hemingway lived, it already seemed like somebody else’s life.
When the interview was over I sat for a while looking around the room. My gaze stopped at the wine-red love seat. Suddenly I thought: it looks just like the love seat in the Kertész photo. I got up and walked to the small sofa. Then, without thinking, I tried to arrange myself on it like the woman—the Satiric Dancer—in the picture. It wasn’t easy.
Close enough, I said to the empty room when finally I managed to get both legs onto the back cushion. After all, I was not young, not a dancer, and, although I fancied myself amusing at times, definitely not a satirist.
When I arrived at the jazz club that night, there was no sign of Liliane and her friend. I decided to wait at the bar. La Villa was crowded, filled with affluent-looking men dressed in expensive suits worn with black T-shirts, and model-perfect women wearing creations from the salons of hot young Paris designers. The verdict of success was in the air; it rose up through the smoke and dim light, creating a halo of self-approval. I was glad I’d worn the new black silk dress. Although not up to the level of high fashion present in the room, it had a simplicity that might pass for elegance. At least that was my hope.
Just then I spotted Liliane sitting at a small table with a man who could have stepped out of a Brooks Brothers’ ad. She waved me over.
“Hello again,” she said as I approached them. Liliane looked spectacular. She was wearing a black silk dress with long sleeves made of crisscrossed green silk ribbons. On her head was a small hat of black tulle; a tiny green bird nested inside the tulle. Her companion stood up and nodded but did not speak; his handsome square-jawed face maintained its Mount Rushmore impassivity.
“This is Justin Moore,” Liliane said. “But be warned—he is not in a good mood.” She laughed but her eyes darted nervously in Justin’s direction. I sat down, slightly put off by the awkward beginning to the evening. Immediately, Justin and Liliane returned to some sort of squabble that obviously had been interrupted by my arrival. Embarrassed, I sat there until Liliane turned to me.
“A lover’s quarrel,” she explained, laughing. “Sorry. But you know how these things are.” She laughed again and turned to pick up Justin’s hand. He did not look amused. And he made no attempt to smooth over the situation.
Liliane, meanwhile, tried harder and harder to cajole Justin into a better mood. She grew flirtatious and then flattering, telling me about Justin’s accomplishments as a banker. And about his exquisite taste. “I met Justin when he hired me to decorate his flat in London. But his eye is so good he really didn’t need a designer.”
I asked Justin a few questions about himself. He answered in a bored tone, making it quite clear he felt no need to impress me.
His dismissal did not bother me. I was completely oblivious to the idea of personal slights; my attention was focused on the intriguing dynamics between Liliane and Justin. Particularly fascinating to me was how different she was in his presence. Gone was the easy openness I’d seen at lunch; replacing it was an extreme awareness of how Justin reacted to her. She became manipulative, changing her tactics if they seemed not to please him. It struck me that despite the ease with which she attracted men, she wasn’t really comfortable around them. Some impulse seemed to take over in the presence of a man, one that changed Liliane from a freestanding entity into a needy, dependent person.
It was a familiar pattern to me. I’d seen it in my mother, a beautiful woman who even in her seventies elicited the attention of men. By that time, however, she no longer wanted it; in fact, she once confessed to me she had never really been comfortable in the company of a man. “Your father came close,” she told me when we were both old enough to talk of such things, “but sometimes even with him I found myself pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”
Still, she married again less than a year after my father’s death. It was a sad marriage, one that depended a good deal on both participants giving up their real personalities. Only when my mother reached her sixties was she able to assert her independence, able to free herself of the fear of being on her own. “I always thought of it as being alone, not on my own,” was the way she described the fear that dictated so many of her actions.
I thought I saw that fear of being alone in Liliane, too. I watched as she leaned close to Justin, leaned until the tiny green bird on her hat almost touched his forehead. She began talking. Her face looked anxious, crumpled. I couldn’t hear what she was saying and I didn’t want to.
After all, I was a stranger who knew none of their mutual history. It was like walking into the middle of a movie: I arrived too late for the beginning and wouldn’t be around for the end. Still, I was quite caught up in the drama of whatever was being played out betw
een them. It didn’t matter that I no longer existed to Liliane and Justin except, perhaps, as a deterrent to things getting really out of hand. By this time, Liliane was no longer a real person to me. The woman I’d met at lunch had vanished. And while I hated to admit it, I found myself deriving some small satisfaction from the belief that I no longer was susceptible to being compromised in such a way by a man.
“Let’s go,” I heard Justin say to her. “I didn’t want to come to begin with.” His face was cold and impassive.
Liliane turned to me. “I’m sorry. But we have to leave. I’m not feeling well.” I saw she was close to tears.
I didn’t know what to say. It was such an intimate situation, one I shouldn’t be witnessing. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not uncomfortable staying here alone. I just hope you’re all right.”
Liliane and Justin rose to go. He nodded coldly. I nodded back just as coldly. I watched them thread their way between the small tables. My eyes followed the black hat with its tiny green bird caged in tulle until it disappeared.
I stayed on at La Villa until almost midnight, losing myself in the supple gymnastics of great jazz. Just as I was about to leave, a saxophonist started playing “How High the Moon.”
The sound started off slow, almost like a love song, then the drummer weighed in with his steel brushes, coming in softly just behind the beat, then moving into a big sound along with the saxophone until the whole place was jiving. In the middle of all this, a figure ran across the years to meet me:
It is my twenty-year-old self and she is back in New York, sitting in Birdland, listening to Charlie Parker. Next to her is Will, an artist and the man she loved. Or thought she loved. How young they both look. And how fearless. I’d forgotten how fearless she was, this young, laughing woman whose head is tilted toward her companion, just as Liliane’s had been.
But then my twenty-year-old self leans back and I see something else in her face, something similar to what I’d seen earlier in Liliane’s: an anxious look that telegraphs a willingness to be whatever the man sitting next to her wants her to be. Even if it means betraying her own needs.
How easy it was, still, to conjure up those old feelings. Not just for Will, but for all the boyfriends and lovers that I’d reinvented myself for in the name of love. Along the way I’d made some bad choices when it came to men. And a few good ones.
For some reason, I thought of Colette; wise, resilient Colette, who knew about “that lightheartedness which comes to a woman when the peril of men has left her.” I never interpreted Colette’s observation as meaning she thought women would be better off without men. What I took it to mean was: women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities.
It came to me then, sitting at La Villa, that it had been a long while since I’d thought of love as the center of my life. The peril of men, it seemed, had left me some years back. I no longer believed that romantic love had the power to shape or transform me. My life had a shape, one that suited me just fine.
When I arrived back at the hotel, the night manager handed me, along with my room key, a telephone message from Liliane. I climbed the stairs to my room and sat on the bed reading Liliane’s words: “Please forgive Justin’s rudeness. He was not feeling well. I’ll call before I leave Paris.”
I thought again about the look on Liliane’s face that night; that anxious look that says no price is too high to pay if it means not being alone. I thought of my own slow conversion to independence, of how long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.
But I also thought of the twinge of envy I’d felt earlier in the day about Liliane’s attractiveness to men. There was pleasure in that, too; in being the focus of a man’s attention.
As I soon would be reminded in my unexpected encounter with a man named Naohiro.
3
AT SAINTE-CHAPELLE
Dear Alice,
There is a certain mysterious quality about Paris that I find in no other city. Paris, it seems, has her hidden, secret places. Walk down any street in the city and you will see the huge wooden gates with peeling green paint that separate the passerby from the lush courtyards and elegant mansions inside. Paris guards her inner beauty from the casual observer. To find it one must look beyond the façades. It is true of people also, I think: their spirits exist behind their façades, beyond their words.
Love, Alice
I met Naohiro on the train to Giverny. I’d noticed him earlier at the St.-Lazare station, buying a ticket: a slim, attractive man, elegantly dressed completely in black except for a white sweater thrown across his shoulders. He was Asian; Japanese, I thought, although I wasn’t absolutely certain.
For weeks I’d looked forward to visiting Giverny, a small village halfway between Paris and Rouen. It was there that the great French painter Monet had lived for the last forty years of his life, devoting himself to his painting and his gardens. I’d been putting off my visit to Giverny, waiting for the perfect day: one with a breeze, when sun and shadow would play across the surface of Monet’s Japanese water garden, just as it had when he painted it.
Such a day arrived at the end of May. A perfect day for Giverny, I thought the instant I saw the fast-moving, slightly overcast sky through my window. Wonderful as the streets of Paris were, I longed for the countryside, for the fertile smell of the earth and the feel of grass beneath my feet.
It was from my mother that I had learned the guiding role nature plays in how we map out the geography of self. She was the granddaughter of a landscape gardener who worked on the grounds of a castle in Scotland. For a time, her world was one of towering trees and rose gardens, of heathered hills that stretched to the horizon, of clear water that revealed the salmon, gleaming like silver arrows just beneath the surface.
Later, my mother’s interest in the natural world was encouraged by both her parents. From her stern father she learned the botanical names and the science of nature; from her sturdy mother the pleasures of planting and digging in the earth, of being a part of nature’s cycle of life and death. But my mother’s gift for observation—the mark of a true naturalist—was her own.
A day in the country, I decided, was definitely in order. There was no doubt in my mind that, surrounded by nature’s immutable realities, I would find what I needed: a perspective on where I fit into the world.
I had just settled into my seat on the train when Naohiro appeared in the aisle next to me. He tilted his head in a slight bow. “Do you mind if I sit here?” he asked, in almost accentless English. Still, his voice confirmed what I had guessed at the train station: he was Japanese.
“Please do,” I said, looking up from the map I was studying. He sat down. Immediately I was aware of a scent about him that seemed familiar. It was crisp; he smelled like pine needles. Quickly it came to me, the reason why it seemed so familiar. It reminded me of Hiroshi, my son’s Japanese friend, who had stayed with us during a Christmas holiday. It was the same scent that filled the guest bathroom after Hiroshi had shaved and showered.
But I was aware of something more about Naohiro than his scent. His presence made me feel self-conscious: of my appearance, of the way I was sitting, of my movements and gestures. I was not unfamiliar with such symptoms: it was the behavior of a woman reacting to a man who attracts her.
As the train left the station, Naohiro reached into a small briefcase and pulled out a book. It was the same guidebook to Giverny that I had bought in Paris. I started to say something but stopped, remembering the conversations with my son about the reticence of the Japanese. In his four years as a teacher and translator in Japan, my son had grown to admire the Japanese. And I had grown to respect his careful insights into that culture. So I said nothing.
I turned my attention to the view, one that included the Seine winding its way alongside the train. This part of the river bore little resemblance to the glamorous Seine that bisected Paris. Sweet a
nd unsophisticated, this Seine meandered like a country cousin across the pastoral landscape. Through the window I saw young boys fishing from its banks, their dogs dozing beside them in the sun.
Naohiro’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Is this your first time to Giverny?” he asked.
“Yes, it is,” I said, trying to conceal my surprise that he had initiated a conversation. “What about you?”
“No, I have been before. But this time I go especially to see the Japanese prints.”
I had read about Monet’s collection of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Japanese prints, and of their influence on his work. “Are you an artist?” I asked, forgetting my resolve to not ask him personal questions.
He smiled. “No, I am a businessman.”
“Do you live in Paris?”
“No, but I come to France two or three times a year.”
He seemed not to mind my questions. Still, he asked me nothing about what I did or why I was in France.
As he spoke, I studied his face. It was a handsome face, slightly weathered and somewhat impassive. Except for his eyes. They were the eyes of a man who possessed wit and intelligence and, I thought, a certain sadness. I was drawn to what I saw, or imagined I saw, there.
In the hour or so it took to reach Giverny, Naohiro and I talked mostly about Paris. About our favorite streets—his was the rue de Nevers, a street I did not know, and mine the rue du Bac; about the squares we thought most beautiful—place des Vosges for him, place Furstemberg for me; the open-air markets we liked—one on rue Daguerre, the other on rue de Buci. On one thing we agreed: that the best view of Paris was from any one of the bridges that crossed the Seine. Particularly the Pont Royal or the Pont-Neuf. As we talked I could see that Naohiro knew Paris far better than I did.
Without Reservations Page 4