It made me wonder: who did I imagine myself to be? Since arriving in Paris, I was less sure of the answer. Yes, of course, I was still a mother and a reporter and a person who missed her friends. But from time to time I seemed to glimpse another woman trailing along behind me. I noticed this woman was quite curious about everything, and adventurous to the point of going alone to the free wine-and-cheese art gallery openings held on Thursday nights along the rue de Seine. And as if that weren’t daring enough, one day she inquired at a salon de beauté about tinting her hair from brown to the color of a bright copper penny.
Anne was dressed for the Ritz. I was not. So we hailed a taxi and stopped off at my hotel, where I changed into a white silk blouse and navy crepe pants.
At the Ritz we ordered martinis. Anne made a toast. “To Hemingway,” she said, “who opened up the Ritz Bar on the day of Paris’s liberation in 1944.”
I responded: “To Proust, who always wore lavender gloves when he visited the Ritz.”
We went on to toast Coco Chanel, who had lived at the hotel, and were about to raise our glasses to Colette—for no reason other than being Colette—when a man approached us. An American who’d overheard our distinctly non-French accents, he invited us to join his group for a glass of champagne.
The group consisted of three married couples from California who were on their way to Egypt for two weeks of sightseeing. The women spoke of their eagerness to tour the Egyptian monuments and sail the Nile. The men, looking at their watches, spoke of calling their stockbrokers back in California. Paris was a one-day rest stop for them; they had spent most of the day shopping along the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré.
The Californians were pleasant people who genuinely seemed to enjoy traveling as a group. That impressed me. “I guess I’m too selfish to travel well with other people,” I told Anne later. “Except for my sons, I’d rather travel alone.”
Somehow a journey taken alone seemed more of an adventure to me. Had I been traveling with a companion, I thought, I probably would not have met Anne or been here at the Ritz sharing a drink with the Californians.
“I envy you, your traveling alone for so long a time,” said one of the women in the group, breaking into my thoughts. But she said it in a low voice, while the others were engaged in conversation, as though she didn’t want them to hear.
“And I envy you,” I replied, “for being able to find so much pleasure traveling in the company of others.”
She seemed puzzled by this. “It’s funny,” she said, “but I never thought of it that way.”
At about 9:00 P.M. Anne and I left the Ritz. It was a fine evening with still about an hour’s light remaining. The sky over the place Vendôme was beautiful: pale blue, very high and filled with fast-moving white clouds. We said our good-byes in front of the Ritz and parted—Anne to her hotel a few streets away on the Right Bank and I to mine on the Left Bank. I decided to walk the mile or so back to my hotel, so I headed for the rue de Rivoli, about five blocks away. Halfway there I passed the Lotti, where, early in my marriage, I had stayed with my husband. On an impulse I decided to go in.
My only memory of the hotel was of the massive, antique furniture in our room, a room I had found dark and oppressive. Now, standing in the lobby, I could retrieve no other memories. It was as though I’d never been there before. I took comfort in the fact that, while the memories, along with the marriage, did not survive, the relationship did. After a few years of working out our post-divorce anger, we became loyal friends, my ex-husband and I.
From the Lotti I walked the half-block to the rue de Rivoli. The arcaded shopping street was bustling with tourists, who stopped to price the Rolex watches and fake Gucci handbags displayed in the windows. A few stopped to give money to the North African women begging under the arcade, their ashen, sad-eyed children sprawled on the ground next to them. I thought of the elegantly coiffed women I’d seen earlier emerging from Carita’s, a famous hair salon a few blocks away. So glossy and perfect, they seemed to come from a species unconnected to these dirty, untended women begging along the rue de Rivoli.
Across the street in the Tuileries I could hear the wind moving through the trees; it made a rustling sound, like that of a woman waltzing in a taffeta dress.
In a few minutes I reached the turnoff to the Pont Royal, the bridge that would take me across the Seine to my hotel. I walked on. Past the Louvre and across the bridge; past the small cafés and brasseries; past the closed butchers’ shops, and the patisseries still redolent with the scent of fresh-baked bread.
Near my hotel I stopped to examine a display of stylish hats in a millinery shop, some with veils as gossamer as spiderwebs. Suddenly I saw myself reflected in the window, peering out between the expressionless faces of two mannequins wearing small tilted hats with veils. Perhaps, I thought, I should buy a hat with a veil. Like Liliane’s.
Just then I spotted an elderly woman walking toward me. She was carrying something. As she moved into the circle of light spilling out from the window, I saw she was cradling a small, smiling dog in her arms. Wrapped in a heavy woolen scarf, the dog looked at me quizzically. The woman, however, never lifted her eyes from the narrow sidewalk. As she passed, the air filled with the familiar scent of gardenias; it was the same cheap perfume adored by my grandmother.
I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and pretended it was my grandmother passing by. Suddenly Grandmother’s voice sprang out from the corners of my childhood: Och, Alice, that canna’ be you? she asked in her achingly familiar Scottish accent.
I began to list all the women whose lives had intersected with mine that day. My friend Susan. The singer in the gold lamé shorts. Anne, the film producer. The women at the Ritz on their way to Egypt. The North African women begging on the rue de Rivoli. And now, turning the corner and passing just out of sight, the elderly woman cradling a dog.
How, I wondered, did we become the women we are? Was it just the accident of birth that ultimately placed some of us at the Ritz, drinking champagne, and others on the streets, begging? Or was it the fragility of permanence—the stunning ease with which an entire life can be broken and changed, in minutes, on an ordinary day. And why was it that I could imagine myself being any one of these women, doing whatever I had to do to make my way through the world?
Women do that, I thought. They learn to adapt. I watched my mother do it, and my grandmother too. Through marriage and divorce, through too little money or too much, too many children or too few, through sorrow and joy and all the longings that were not and never could be named, women, I learned, adapted.
At first the lives of women frightened me. They seemed so fragile, so dependent on fathers and husbands and brothers and lovers. Gradually, though, I noticed how supple their lives were beneath the surface. Then I realized it was this flexibility that enabled them to survive. I saw, too, that sooner or later, by choice or by chance, most women faced the task of adapting to a future on their own. When at my most optimistic, I thought of it as independence; in darker moods, as survival. Either way, women had to do it.
But now as I approached my hotel I left behind both past and future. I was here in Paris, alive, feeling only the simple pleasure that comes from entering the moment. The night air on my bare arms, the lamps from the nearby café punching holes of light into the darkness, the elegant, veiled hats arranged in a shop window, the skies overhead changing from pale lavender to deep violet: this was what existed for me.
In my hotel room, the bed had been prepared for sleep, its soft, cream-colored sheets neatly turned back. I opened the large French windows to let in the gentle night air and then sat down at my desk.
I began to write:
Is it possible to change your outer geography without disrupting the inner geography? The travels within yourself? Today I traveled back to my past and forward to a future shaping itself somewhere at the edge of my thoughts. But I also traveled to a place less often visited: the childlike purity of the ticking moment.
5<
br />
FIVE EXTRAORDINARY DAYS
Dear Alice,
Yesterday I had a big breakthrough, one that made me feel like a true Parisienne: I entered the Café Flore as though I belonged there. Instead of moving awkwardly, like a timid outsider, through the crowded terrace, I strode to my table with all the icy hauteur and conspicuous self-regard of Simone de Beauvoir. It seemed to work, this new attitude. Within minutes I assumed my new role as one of the café insiders, passing judgment on all who entered. Is belonging that simple? A matter of attitude? Or is attitude just another form of self-deception?
Love, Alice
For several days the spring rains had moved back and forth across Paris with enough force to send even those with raincoats and umbrellas scurrying for cover beneath café awnings. “So much rain means Paris will be very green this summer,” said Monsieur Jacques one day while I waited out a sudden storm inside his tiny newsstand. Still, despite his prediction, I was totally unprepared when a week later on a fine, fresh morning I walked out of my hotel to find lush green grass covering all the narrow sidewalks. For a moment I thought I was hallucinating.
I looked around to see if people were walking on the grass. They were. In fact, no one was paying much attention to what seemed to me quite an extraordinary event. Gingerly, I stepped out from the hotel doorway and onto the green that carpeted the sidewalk. I bent over to examine it. Just as I was about to pluck a blade of grass, an elegantly dressed woman passing by said, “It is carpet, madame. Green carpet put down by the art and antiques galleries to celebrate Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.”
She pointed to the nearby corner, where the rue de l’Université met the rue des Saints-Pères. “See, madame, the hanging trees?” I followed her gaze upward to the overhead wires. Small, decorative trees—boxwood and holly and some flowering white plant that I couldn’t identify—hung upside down from the wires. “They mark the streets of the celebration,” she said. “What we call the Carré Rive Gauche.”
Without waiting for a reply the woman nodded and walked on, her high heels sinking ever so slightly into the green of the carpeted sidewalk.
Although I was grateful for her explanation, it raised more questions than it answered.
As I walked toward the Musée d’Orsay—navigating the green carpet with far less aplomb than my French counterpart—I struggled to translate the phrase “Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.” Five days. Five days of something. Five days of the extraordinary object. That was it. But what did it mean? And who was celebrating whatever it meant? And what was the Carré Rive Gauche?
It was strange, the feeling that suddenly seized me: here I was, on a tiny ancient street in Paris, a grown woman embarked on a reallife adventure, yet all I could think of was Nancy Drew. As I grew up, I had helped her solve The Clue in the Crumbling Wall and The Secret of the Old Clock; now it was she who walked beside me, ready to tackle The Mystery of the Five Days of the Extraordinary Object. It was a pleasant feeling, perhaps because it connected the two parts of me: the woman and the girl I once was.
The girl gave way to the woman, however, when I turned the corner and saw Naohiro standing in front of the museum, waiting for me. He had not yet seen me. Impulsively, I stepped into the shadows of a café doorway so I could observe him without being seen. He is waiting for me, I thought, studying him. In his black, open-necked shirt and black pants he looked like a dancer, his body lithe but powerful, his stance gracefully relaxed. He is waiting for me, I thought, and it is all I can do to keep from running across the square to his side. But I didn’t. I wanted to prolong the anticipation.
Suddenly a voice interrupted my excited daydreaming: This is the good part, it whispered in my ear. Enjoy it while you can. You know it won’t last.
I knew this voice well. But I was not about to let it ruin my day. Nothing lasts forever, I shot back. In fact, most things that threaten to last forever often become quite annoying.
And with that, I hurried across the street and up the museum steps, thrusting myself into the powerful orbit of Naohiro’s glance.
“Hello,” he said simply, moving quickly to close the distance between us.
“Hello,” I said, slightly out of breath, although perhaps not from climbing the steps.
As we walked toward the museum entrance, he took my hand. By now, being with Naohiro seemed easy and natural. Why this should be so was as puzzling to me as any mystery that Nancy Drew was ever called upon to solve. The difference was that I could live without solving this mystery. At least, I liked to think so.
Although our original plan had been to spend the afternoon in the museum, Naohiro and I agreed the day was too beautiful to waste indoors. Besides, we had picked a bad time to visit the Orsay; tourist buses were arriving and long lines had formed at the entrance. But the decision pleased me for another reason. I wanted nothing to intrude upon my time with Naohiro, not even the great paintings in the Orsay.
I suggested we have lunch on the Île Saint-Louis, a small island filled with glorious seventeenth-century architecture and quiet, narrow streets lined with tiny shops and elegant residences. He agreed, asking if I wanted to walk or take the Métro to the island.
“Let’s walk,” I said.
It amazed me that I, who at home traveled even short distances by car, no longer thought of a forty-five-minute walk as more than a pleasant stroll. In Paris I walked almost everywhere, as most Parisiennes do. By the end of a month I understood why so few French people are overweight. My own weight, despite a hearty appetite, was lighter by five pounds.
The fact is, I hadn’t walked this much since I was a child. In those days, walking was my chief form of transportation. Mother refused to learn how to drive the family car and my frugal Scottish grandmother didn’t believe in spending money on streetcars when one had “two pairfectly good feet to tread about on.” Distance, it seemed, was not a factor. At least not if Grandmother was in charge. I remember she and I once walked from our house to that of her friend, a distance of about seven miles. Naturally I complained all the way, suggesting to Grandmother that it would cost a lot more to replace my worn-out shoes than to spend twenty cents for a streetcar ride.
Now, of course, I look back on those walks as a time of profound sharing. As we walked, we’d break into laughter at the posturing of some conceited neighborhood cat or another; try to spot the first snowdrops or last rose; comment, sometimes wickedly, on the outfits worn by innocent, unsuspecting pedestrians; pick out the houses we liked best and least (we favored designs, though that word was never used, incorporating large bay windows and façades of whitewashed bricks); all the while listening to the sounds of dinner plates being set on tables inside kitchens, radios tuned to afternoon soap operas, and children practicing scales or playing some easy beginner’s tune like “Who-o Goes the Wind.”
And so it was with Naohiro as we walked along the Seine, laughing and talking and stopping to look at the view or examine the antique postcards and used books peddled by bouquinistes from their zinc-topped boxes. I could feel it: the same subtle casting of lines between us, the same kind of connection I remembered from childhood.
Finally, we reached the Pont Saint-Louis, the tiny bridge just behind Nôtre-Dame cathedral that connects the Île de la Cité to the Île Saint-Louis. We walked over it behind a tall, dark-haired girl carrying a cello. As we reached the other side we passed an elderly woman accompanied by an overweight bulldog, a package wrapped in bloody butcher’s paper clamped between his teeth.
Naohiro and I exchanged glances. “His dinner?” I wondered aloud.
“Or her dinner?” said Naohiro. Either way, we decided, it was a unique French twist on the concept of carry-out food.
We reached the café—Le Flore en l’Île—and took a table overlooking the Seine. It was quiet and uncrowded on the small island, one of the few areas in Paris with no Métro stop. Only six blocks long and two blocks wide, I’d always thought of Île Saint-Louis as a lovely floating village, m
oored to the banks of the Seine by ropes of bridges. Always in past visits to Paris—hectic visits, during which I tried to cram six centuries of culture into a week’s stay—the day eventually arrived when I needed a brief vacation within a vacation. And always I’d head for an afternoon on the island.
Naohiro and I had just ordered a bottle of wine when we heard the music: the sounds of a cello, soft and pure, hanging in the air, then drifting out over the Seine toward the Left Bank. It was the young woman we’d followed across the bridge. Seated at the corner of the long, narrow street that runs through the island, she was playing, head tilted down, her black hair spilling like ink over her shoulders. Back and forth she drew the bow, releasing a sound of sweet innocence, like that of a child singing a nursery rhyme.
As she played, I suddenly heard the high, childish voices of my sons saying good night as they did so many years ago. Good night, Mommy, they’d sing down from their rooms. The sound echoed in my head—Good night, Mommy, Good night, Mommy—until I heard the last note reverberating from the cello into the air, where it echoed briefly before disappearing.
I sat silent, ambushed by love for my sons. And by regret. Regret for the past, when I didn’t or couldn’t give them the nurturing they needed, and regret for what they—and I—could never have back. The irony was that now, when my sons no longer needed it, my love for them was unconditional. But the past, I knew, still had the power to cast its long shadow. Sometimes, when either of my children came up against a thorny problem, I found myself worrying: did I give him what he needs to deal with this? Could I have done better? I could do better now, I thought. Now that it’s too late.
“What do you think of?” Naohiro asked, moving his chair closer to mine.
“Of my sons. And of my regrets about the things I’d like to do over again as a mother.”
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