“I feel our spirits have met,” I said.
He nodded. “I feel it is so.”
“It is a good feeling.”
“Yes,” he replied. “It is a good feeling.”
I looked at Naohiro’s face to see what was there. He met my eyes with a steady, open gaze, one that evoked in me many different feelings.
In the days ahead, Naohiro and I would come to know a great number of things about each other. Still, of all the moments we shared, none, I think, was more intimate than the day we stood together in the light of Sainte-Chapelle.
4
FELLOW TRAVELERS
Dear Alice,
Do not forget the woman in gold lamé shorts, the Ritz, the sound of the leaves in the Tuileries, the veiled hats that reminded you of Mother, the light pouring out of the shops along the rue du Bac, the lavender skies, the smiling dog, the people you encountered on this day. Do not forget the last time you saw Paris.
Love, Alice
It was after ten and I was on my way to Montmartre for a late breakfast with Susan, an American friend living in Paris, when suddenly it hit me: I didn’t want to see her. This feeling puzzled me. After all, it was I who had called Susan to arrange the visit.
Like me, Susan was a woman who decided to take a detour from the life she’d spent a decade carefully constructing. “A year in Paris and then I’ll be back,” I remember her saying when she took a leave from her job at a Washington design firm. The year had turned into two, then three, and by the time I arrived, Susan—now a successful commercial artist—was entering the fourth year of her “stay” in Paris.
I found it surprising, the way she’d disconnected so easily from her past. True, she was divorced, her only daughter now in her mid-twenties and living in London. But Susan had left behind what seemed an extremely satisfying life: a circle of loyal and familial friends, a successful career, and a deep affection for the city in which she’d grown up. Although I didn’t quite understand her reasons, I admired her ability to accept in midlife the challenge of reinventing herself.
But then Susan had a habit of reinventing herself. When I first met her at an embassy party in Washington she was thin and blond and quite vivacious. We struck up a conversation that night, one that resulted in our having dinner together the following week. When she walked into the restaurant I hardly recognized her. Her hair was carrot-colored and her makeup very dramatic. Somehow, it suited her. She liked to change her appearance, Susan told me; it was a way of expressing her artistic talent.
Our friendship, I suppose, was built on mutual loss. She was newly divorced; I was newly separated. We were both in that strange passage from married life to single-mother-looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places. But Susan was also wickedly funny, a quality I valued in a friend. Once when I complained about being at an age that required never looking at yourself in full sunlight, Susan’s riposte was immediate. “You know what can age you twenty years overnight?” she asked. “If all your friends got face-lifts the day before.”
As I climbed the steep streets to Susan’s apartment, I wondered if my reluctance to see her was simply anxiety about revisiting a time that, for both of us, had been confusing and painful. Five years had passed since I’d seen her, at a party to celebrate her move. She arrived with the man she was about to dump; I arrived with the man who, I knew, was about to dump me. We consoled each other with the contemporary maxim “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” But neither of us really believed that. We left the party—without our dates—and went on to a jazz club, where, slightly tipsy, we promised we’d always be friends.
But were we still friends? I wondered. Or just former friends facing an awkward reunion?
Although Susan’s directions to her apartment—“Past the windmills on rue Lepic and you’re practically there”—had seemed clear enough on the phone, the steep, narrow Montmartre streets had a life of their own. After thirty minutes of confused wandering I arrived finally at an address that matched the one I’d written on a scrap of paper. Situated on a quiet, rural-looking lane, the small apartment building seemed a world away from the tourist-jammed streets around the place du Tertre. Here, there was an air of a country village. An apricot-colored cat sat on top of a fence, bathing himself in the sun. A woman entered a courtyard, her face veiled behind a huge bunch of lilies and baby’s breath. The sounds of Mozart drifted down from a window. It was a pleasant surprise; I hadn’t known such neighborhoods existed in Montmartre.
I rang the bell. Immediately the door opened. “I was watching for you from the window,” Susan said, hugging me. She led me into the large, airy room behind her. I recognized the furniture at once: the white sofas and black leather chairs, the faded Turkish rugs, the Matisse print on the wall, the old, burled-maple table Susan and I found together at a flea market. It was as though I were back in her Washington apartment. Even the placement of the windows was similar, except the view through them now was of Paris, not the Potomac.
“My God,” I said, “this is like entering the Twilight Zone.” We both laughed. She understood my shock at seeing the way she’d recreated her Washington home in the Paris apartment.
“I believe in change,” she said, laughing again, “but only when it’s for the better.”
I laughed again, thinking of her chameleonlike appearance when I first met her.
She led me into her bedroom. It, too, was just as it had been in Washington. It was strange, I told her, but all the old furniture looked even better here.
“I know,” she said. “It’s as if all these things have finally found the place that suits them best.”
I followed my friend into the small, sunny kitchen, where she set out fresh orange juice, croissants, butter, raspberry jam, cheese, and coffee. I watched her pour coffee and warm milk into large white cups. She was thinner than I remembered and her hair, dark now, was cut very short, like Audrey Hepburn’s. But other than that she looked the same.
We sat at the table and talked. We talked about family and friends. About ex-husbands and the pleasures and trials of being single. About the excitement of Paris. We laughed and interrupted each other and exchanged wry congratulations on how gracefully we both were aging.
Finally I asked Susan about her decision to remain in Paris. “I don’t know all the reasons why,” she said. “Mostly I think I felt I’d outgrown my life in Washington. Not my friends—I still miss them. But every day I would get up and do exactly what I’d been doing for twenty years. And one day I just didn’t want to do that anymore.” She paused. “And then when I got to Paris, I fell in love.”
So that was it, I thought: a man. Cherchez l’homme.
“Not with a man,” Susan said, as if reading my thoughts, “but with Paris. With the life here.”
I was curious about Susan’s new job, which I knew, in terms of money and prestige, was several notches below her Washington one. True, she was successful in her new profession as a commercial artist but in letters to me she’d described herself as someone who still loved her work but was no longer obsessed with it. This was quite a change.
When I first met her, Susan was the most openly ambitious of all my friends; a woman who made no attempt to hide the fact that, after her daughter, work was her life. But even then I suspected that Susan, like me, occasionally found herself reversing the order, putting her work before her family obligations. At least temporarily.
Certainly it was true for me. In my most honest moments I recognized that earlier in my career, when the push to success was all uphill, my own children had sometimes taken a back seat to my work. Or, more bluntly, to my ambition.
Now, here we were, sitting in Paris, two women who had seemed to be on some kind of straight track to a planned destination but now found themselves somewhere else. “Do you remember those early days?” I asked her. “How naive we were? And how ambitious?” I laughed. “It’s almost embarrassing to think about.”
“Well, I’m still ambitious,” Sus
an said. “Just in a different way. And I suspect you are, too.”
She was right. I was still filled with ambition. More mellow, perhaps, but ambition nevertheless.
We sat talking about how your expectations change when you move into your fifties: about work, about love, and about a future that didn’t seem as endless as it once did. At a certain point in one’s working life, Susan and I agreed, the question becomes: what ultimately is one working toward? Personal achievement? Contentment? Wisdom? Retirement?
“For me, it’s finally all about the work and nothing else,” I said. “Not money or prestige.” I made a face. “Although I wouldn’t mind a bit more money.”
Near the end of our conversation Susan asked: “What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?”
I thought about it for a few minutes. “Hope,” I said. “With it, I guess anything’s possible. But without it …” My voice trailed off. I suddenly had thought of Naohiro. Hope? Or no hope? It occurred to me to tell Susan about him, but I didn’t. Something inside me wanted to protect the relationship from outside opinions or advice. At least for a while.
I looked at my watch; it was almost two. I rose to go, telling Susan how much fun it was to see her again. We hugged and said good-bye, promising to get together for dinner the following week.
As I walked along the narrow lane from Susan’s apartment toward the center of Montmartre, I heard my own footsteps following me like a carefree playmate on the first day of summer vacation. I listened as a small, buoyant voice said School is out and I’m in Paris! Halfway up the tree-lined path I stopped to watch a small gray turtle crawl beneath a bush edged with tiny yellow flowers.
It reminded me of the turtles Grandmother and I used to see at Woolworth’s five-and-ten when I was little. Their shells painted in bright colors, these tiny turtles, perhaps fifty of them, crawled around in a glass tank. For about twenty-five cents you could buy one and they’d paint your name on it. I longed for a turtle named Alice, but no matter how pathetically I begged, Grandmother refused. It was cruel, she said, to paint living creatures; and, besides, the thrifty Scotswoman in her could not see spending money for something you could likely find in your own backyard.
The sun came out. It filtered down through the leaves, creating a playful pattern of light and shade that danced before my eyes. The air smelled of lilies of the valley. As I walked beneath the canopy of trees, wrapped in the delicate fragrance, caution fell away. It didn’t matter that I had no idea which street led to the place du Tertre or to my Métro stop. Destination no longer ruled. My only map was that of free association: I would follow each street only as long as it interested me and then, on a whim, choose a new direction.
Such was my happiness that only my poorly accented French prevented me from saying to a formidable-looking woman sweeping down her sidewalk, Très jolie, madame!
A chilly morning had turned into a warm, humid afternoon and the tourists crowding Montmartre’s streets looked wilted. It was time, I decided, to slip into a café for a cool drink.
From the outside, the café on rue Saint-Rustique looked quiet and slightly mysterious. When I peered through the door I could make out very little in the dark interior. Although I had seen a number of bright, lively outdoor cafés along the way, somehow the slightly dangerous look of this place attracted me.
I stepped inside and stood near the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It was cool, and the smell of beer hung pleasantly in the air. Squinting, I saw a long bar to my right and beyond that a large room. Music spilled out of it: the sound of an accordion and the voice of a woman singing. Probably a jukebox, I thought, heading toward the sound. But the music was not from a record.
Standing there on a tiny stage, dressed in gold lamé shorts, a top hat, and tails, was a heavily made-up woman singing in French to an inattentive group of beer-drinking German tourists. The woman in the gold lamé shorts appeared to be in her early forties. Her hair was dyed the color of a marigold, and two deep lines placed her Cupid’s-bow mouth between parentheses. A small dog, almost obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke in the café, sat near the stage, patiently watching her every move, his ears cocked to the sound of her voice.
“I love Paris in the springtime,” sang the woman into a microphone, “I love Paris in the fall.” Her voice rose and fell dramatically as she moved across the stage, a small figure caught in an unflattering, blue-white spotlight. I looked at my watch. It was after three. In Baltimore, I’d be sitting in the cluttered newsroom at the paper, drinking bad coffee and writing my Thursday column. I thought of my friends back at their desks, phones ringing, rushing to meet their deadlines, agonizing over a lead for their stories. Suddenly that life seemed strange to me. Being in a café in Paris in the middle of the afternoon did not.
From the bar I spotted a woman sitting alone at a table. I pointed to the empty chair next to her and she motioned back that I could sit there. The woman, who was drinking wine and smoking a Gauloise, looked very French. Dressed in a pleated skirt and tailored white blouse, a black-and-white silk scarf artfully arranged around her neck, she epitomized the kind of simple elegance I associated with the women of Paris. I was surprised when she spoke to me in English.
“I see you’re American, too,” she said. I turned toward her, wondering how she had identified me as an American. She seemed to know what I was thinking, and glanced down at my feet. I followed her gaze. She was looking at my black leather Reeboks, which, we both knew, were not the sort of shoes any Frenchwoman over the age of thirty would ever wear.
“Only in America,” she said, smiling.
We fell into conversation. Her name was Anne. She was a film producer from Los Angeles who, after a business trip to Cannes, had decided to spend a few days in Paris. Anne had some interesting observations about Frenchwomen.
“Have you noticed how affectionate they are toward one another?” she asked. In fact, I had. It was not unusual for Frenchwomen to walk along the street, arms linked, heads tilted together in close conversation. In cafés, they greeted each other with kisses and parted with embraces. I liked the way they were able to express affection without being self-conscious about it.
I told Anne about the sad-looking middle-aged woman who performed on the street across from Deux Magots, the legendary Saint-Germain-des-Prés café. Small crowds would gather around her while she danced the can-can, wearing a black-and-gold dress, short black boots, and a cheap red wig fashioned into a topknot. Stark white makeup covered her sagging face; her mouth was a slash of purple. Midway through the performance, when she stopped to change from boots to high-heeled silver sandals, you could see the bandages wrapped around her swollen feet and toes.
“It’s a hard way to make a living,” I said. “I found it painful to watch.”
Anne nodded. “It’s a bit too close to what all women fear deep down, isn’t it?” she said. “Especially single women.”
I knew what she meant. It was the fear that, through bad luck or illness or having no one to lean on, a woman might wind up alone and poor. I’d discussed this fear with my friends. Of course we always laughed when we talked about it. But the image of ourselves as old women living in a rundown hotel was always there, in the backs of our minds. Far off in the distance and unlikely, but there nonetheless. After such talks we always parted with the promise that, when the time came, we’d buy a large house and move in together.
It was Anne’s first visit to Paris in ten years. She and her husband had celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday by staying a week at the romantic L’Hôtel on the Left Bank. They had divorced three years after the Paris trip. She had no children.
I told her that it had been almost ten years since I had visited Paris.
“It’s changed a lot, don’t you think?” she said. “And not for the better.” Now she found Paris too crowded and the food not as good as she remembered. Even the most beautiful square in all of Paris—the place des Vosges—had diminish
ed in her eyes.
“I wonder if it’s really Paris that’s changed,” I said, “or if it’s us.”
Anne shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve changed that much at all.” Something about the way she said it suggested she considered this an accomplishment. And perhaps for her it was.
Anne told me she was anxious to get back to Los Angeles and her work. She’d been gone for almost three weeks and was beginning to feel nervous about her absence from the action. “Out of sight, out of mind,” she said, explaining how competitive it was in the film industry. She asked me how long I intended to stay in Paris.
When I told her that I was on a leave of absence from my job as a newspaper reporter, she shook her head in disbelief and, I thought, disapproval. “But don’t you worry about what could happen to your job while you’re gone?” she asked. “If I did that I’d practically have to start all over again.”
Her attitude annoyed me, although I didn’t know why. Perhaps it aroused my own fears of losing my place at work.
Then, to my complete surprise, Anne said, “It’s a bold thing to do. But maybe you’re used to doing bold things.”
I assured her I was not. But her remark secretly pleased me. It was the way I wanted to be seen, if only mistakenly so.
The thought put me in a good mood. I turned to Anne. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to the Ritz bar and have a drink.”
“I’m up for that,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to get a look at the inside of the Ritz.”
As we walked out of the café, we saw the woman in the gold lamé shorts sitting at a table, surrounded by admirers. She was smoking a cigarette through a long silver holder and signing autographs for the German tourists, the dog perched on her lap. Who did she imagine herself to be? Marlene Dietrich? Edith Piaf? Was that the image that sustained her when she examined the realities of her life?
Without Reservations Page 6