Without Reservations

by Alice Steinbach

  After a brief turn around the floor, I thanked Albert and returned to sit on the sidelines. I didn’t know why I felt so uptight; there were quite a few people making fools of themselves on the dance floor. So what was stopping me?

  A man’s voice interrupted my thoughts: “It’s time you got up and danced,” said the voice. It was Barry. Before I could say no, he pulled me out of the chair and onto the center of the floor.

  “Now, with the aid of my partner,” Barry announced to the class, “I’m going to show you how to do the quickstep.”

  Oh my God, I thought, he’s going to use me to teach the quickstep to the rest of the group? The only thing I knew about the quickstep was that I’d seen it done a few weeks earlier in a movie called Strictly Ballroom. And that it was, well, quick.

  “Barry,” I said, “you’d better get another partner. I can’t do this.”

  “Sure you can,” he said. “Just follow me, lovey.”

  What can I say? It was like watching a caterpillar turn into a butterfly. Barry was Fred Astaire: incredibly light on his feet, graceful, gentle in his touch but firm in his lead. After a few minutes of tension I relaxed and gave myself up to the dancing. And to Barry.

  Through the quickstep—Quick-quick-slow; quick-quick-slow—I let Barry lead me. And the cha-cha: One, two, cha-cha-cha; one, two, cha-cha-cha. Then the foxtrot and the samba. By this time when Barry told me to do something I did it.

  Once again I was the sixteen-year-old girl at the Latin American Ballroom, uninhibited and in touch with my body. I arched my back. I pointed my toes. I turned my head, first to one side, then the other, dipping as I did so, just like the ballroom dancers I’d seen on television. It was almost laughable that I, who did not like to be given directions, who liked instead to do things my own way, was so willing to do exactly what Barry told me to do.

  For hours we glided, dipped, swooped, and laughed our way across the hallowed floors of Lincoln College. I danced with almost everyone there, including the man who liked to dance by himself. He turned out to be quite good, I thought, when he had a partner.

  By the end of the evening no one in the group had any defenses left. We were all quite willing to make fools of ourselves by performing, under Barry’s instructions, some of the dances from Saturday Night Fever.

  Standing next to one another in a straight line, we danced to the sound of the Bee Gees singing “Stayin’ Alive …” I moved from side to side, first lifting one arm up toward the ceiling, index finger pointed; then swinging the same arm down across my body, I pointed to the floor. Just like John Travolta. Minus the white suit, of course.

  We repeated this dance several times. The music grew louder and the room warmer. Perspiration dripped down my back and my hair stuck to my neck in a clump; I was sure my makeup had melted into an unflattering Phantom of the Opera look. But I didn’t care. And I didn’t care that the music was corny and the dancing hopelessly unhip. This was not about being hip; it was about having fun. Pure, sheer, unabashed fun.

  Why, I wondered, couldn’t I feel this way more often? The answer, I decided, was that having fun isn’t really what most of us do best. What most of us do best is work and worry. Often we combine the two into one consuming preoccupation: worrying about work. Are we doing a good job? Where do we stack up in terms of our colleagues? Do we work hard enough? Do we work too hard? And how can we do what it takes to have a successful career without sacrificing family life?

  Worrying about children is high on the list, too. And it makes no difference, as I well knew, whether the children are three or thirty. A child is a child is a child. At least in the eyes of a parent.

  Most of us are also quite skilled at worrying about money, about relationships, about our looks, about our health, and about weather. Worrying about weather seems to have become a national pastime. At least that’s the impression given by the number of television hours given over to discussing rain, snow, heat, humidity, wind chill, barometric pressure, and jet streams of air arriving from somewhere or another.

  I found myself trying to figure out how much of my life had been consumed by worrying. If totaled up in years, what would it amount to? One year? Five? Ten? Whatever the figure, it was too high.

  I once read an article on the psychoanalysis of worry. In it a British psychoanalyst, a man named Adam Phillips, expressed his view that worrying is an attempt by the worrier to simplify his life. “… specific worries,” he wrote, “can be reassuring because they preempt what is in actuality an unknowable future.”

  It made sense to me. Is there anything we dread more than an unknowable future? And is there anything more likely to obscure our fear of this unpredictable future than the act of worrying? If we worry about weather or a bad haircut, for instance, we are relieved of the need to worry that something terrible may be waiting around the corner, ready to ambush us.

  But worrying, I found, was quite a difficult thing to do while dancing the quickstep with Barry. Having fun was not.

  Later, walking home in the moist night air, the domes and spires of Oxford stabbing the dark-blue sky above, I felt completely relaxed and carefree. I glanced at my watch; it was nearly midnight. The lateness of the hour surprised me. Then I realized that while dancing with Barry and the others I’d not been measuring time. I’d been living it.

  When I got back to my rooms at Brasenose, I took out my journal and began writing down my feelings about Barry and the way dancing made me happy and carefree. Then I started to think it wasn’t dancing that made me feel that way; it was giving myself up to dancing. I wasn’t used to doing that, throwing myself so completely into something that had no definable goal. Or at least I hadn’t done it for a long time.

  Still, it wasn’t hard to remember how as a girl I walked miles in winter to skate on frozen ponds and, in summer, swam fast-moving rivers to lie dreaming on sun-warmed rocks. I had no goal when I did such things. Unless it was simply a not-yet-diluted instinct to enjoy the world I saw around me.

  When that changed I wasn’t sure. All I knew was that for the last couple of decades I had organized my life too much around the illusionary principle of success and failure. Naturally, it was the verdict of success I wanted the world to hand down to me. Maybe my reluctance to join the others in a night of ballroom dancing was simply my fear of not being very good at it. Of failing.

  But somehow when dancing with Barry I never once thought about failing. Or, for that matter, succeeding. It was enough to be alive and having fun, surrounded by music and laughter and people who, though I barely knew them, seemed on this night as familiar to me as lifelong friends.

  I suppose it will always puzzle me, the riddle of why an important lesson is sometimes taught by the unlikeliest of professors. By Barry, for instance. Perhaps I was just ready to learn. Maybe it’s that simple. Although answers, once we’ve found them, always seem simple.

  I wondered: was this then to be my Oxford learning experience? The lesson I would remember long after I’d forgotten rural England’s economic history and patterns of settlement? Was Barry to be the Oxford instructor I would remember above all others?

  As if to answer, the church bells in Radcliffe Square began sounding their midnight chimes, telling me: Yes, yes, yes.

  12

  MOTHER OF THE BRIDE

  Dear Alice,

  Milan seems like home to me. It’s one of the big surprises of my trip. Today, sitting in the sun in the Piazza della Scala, an elderly man asked if he could sit next to me. I nodded. The man, who looked down on his luck, opened a magazine of crossword puzzles, which he completed by copying the answers from the back of the book. Later when he saw me consulting a map, he asked in near-perfect English: “May I be of help to you?” It’s a friendly—and surprising—town.

  Love, Alice

  When the plane landed at Malpensa airport outside Milan, the pilot’s voice announced brightly that the ground temperature was a “mild” 78 degrees. No mention was made, however, of the rain that pelted the wi
ndows, or the wind that caught the rivulets of water in midstream, blowing them sideways across the glass. This omission did not surprise me. It is a truth universally acknowledged by those in the travel business that less is more when it comes to imparting bad-weather news to tourists. If this was not true, most travelers would ignore the guidebooks and, regardless of destination, simply pack three things: rainwear, a down parka, and clothing made of tropical see-through mesh fabric.

  This was my first trip to Milan. It was also my first encounter with Malpensa airport. I whispered the name to myself: Malpensa. It was a forbidding name, I thought, one that summoned up Edgar Allan Poe. Or Bram Stoker, the man who created the strange, dark world of Count Dracula. My intuition was right. Malpensa turned out to be the Transylvania of airports: a place of such twists and turns that conceivably an innocent tourist might arrive only to disappear and never be heard from again.

  All airports, of course, present the weary traveler with any number of obstacles; but the frustration mounts when a language barrier is added to the mix. Foolishly, I had counted on the Italian classes taken twenty-five years earlier to get me through the basics. Too late I remembered that the sole purpose of all those classes was to foster a deeper appreciation for Italian opera. So unless I was prepared to stop a porter and say: Such sweet warmth runs through my veins, or, I cannot tell if your cheerful mood is real or not—words I seemed to recall as being from Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore—I was totally out of the conversational loop.

  It was hot, humid, and crowded in the airport. It was also incredibly busy, with long lines waiting at every ticket counter and information desk. I needed some directions but couldn’t bear the thought of standing in line. I was a tired, perspiring woman wearing a coat suited for upper Norway and I wanted out. It was time to turn to my secret weapon: a small glossary of useful phrases in Italian and English.

  What I needed to know was where to catch a bus I’d been told about, one that would take me into Milan for one-third the cost of a taxi. I flipped through the section on travel. The closest thing I could find was A che ora parte il treno? “At what time does the train leave?” It wasn’t perfect but I could work with it. I stopped a man who looked like an airport employee, figuring that I would change the word “train” to “bus” and then ask him to point out the direction. “A che ore parte il bus-o?” I asked, throwing in for good measure the extra Italian-sounding o.

  The man in the cap stared at me. For some reason I repeated my question in English, saying “Where is the departing bus, per favore?” He stared again. Then he walked off. Similar inquiries produced similar results. Determined to find my way out of the airport, I moved into a stream of arriving travelers who seemed to know where they were going. I followed them straight to the bus. Their tour bus. Which was headed for Lake Como. I stood there in the rain and watched it pull away.

  Buck up, I told myself. If Freya Stark can raft down the Euphrates River at the age of eighty-six, I ought to be able to find my way from the airport into Milan.

  And sure enough, just thinking of Freya encouraged me to carry on. A minute later I spotted a taxi and, as though divinely inspired, I opened the door and jumped right in.

  The taxi ride from Malpensa to my hotel in Milan took over an hour. Most of that time I’d practiced saying, sotto voce, the Italian words I would need to ask the fare at journey’s end. “Quanto costa, per favore?” I said over and over again. It seemed simple enough. And it was. The driver understood perfectly what I meant and proceeded to answer me in Italian. Naturally I hadn’t a clue as to what he was saying. A porter came to my rescue. “The fare, Signora, is 172,000 lire,” he told me, picking up my bags.

  A six-figure fare for a taxi ride! Trying to hide my alarm, I got out my currency converter. It was bad. But not as bad as I thought. Without tip the fare was $95. With tip it came to about twenty dollars less than I was paying for my hotel room. Worth every lire, I thought, just to get out of Malpensa.

  I had chosen to stay in a big, modern, chain hotel that catered to foreign businesspeople. Recommended to me by one of the few people I know who’d actually spent a night in Milan—most of my friends cited Milan as a city that was “too industrial, too commercial,” bypassing it for Florence or Venice—the hotel had offered a special promotional rate. I took it immediately, knowing how expensive a city Milan is.

  It was busy inside, the lobby buzzing with the voices of men wearing business suits and women in chic outfits speaking the language of business. No tourists here. Although it was not what the French would call a hôtel de charme, I liked the looks of it. For one thing, it seemed exactly like all the chain hotels I’d ever stayed in. And given my language deficits and the fact that Milan was a complete cipher to me, it offered exactly what I needed: familiarity.

  That’s when I noticed something unusual taking place in the hotel. Bridal gowns—racks and racks of bouffant white dresses and tulle veils—were being rolled into a large area just inside the entrance. I watched as a small, excitable man speaking in rapid Italian directed the operation. Each time a hotel guest passed by, he gestured dramatically to the racks, saying loudly, first in Italian, then English: “Attenzione! Look out!”

  “What’s going on?” I asked a porter standing nearby. He explained they were setting up a bridal trade show, one scheduled to open the next day. I watched a few minutes more, then left for my room. When I stepped off the elevator I walked into a blizzard of white bridal gowns. The doors to almost every room along the corridor were open and inside I could see rows of silky beaded gowns being arranged for display. A dummy wearing an ivory dress of heavy embroidered silk with huge puffy sleeves stood in the hallway, an island of serenity amid a stream of workmen and seamstresses scurrying about. It led me to wonder if the excellent rate I was paying had anything to do with my room being situated in the middle of Brideshead Revisited.

  Actually, I rather liked it, the activity and excitement generated by all these people bustling around with their beautiful merchandise. Instead of going straight to my room, a solitary guest in a large hotel, I saw an opportunity to hang about and be a part of the festivities.

  I wheeled my suitcase past more racks hung with creamy satin gowns, stopping in front of my room. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was dark and stuffy. After opening the curtains and raising a window, I sat down on the bed and looked around. It was a perfectly adequate room, the kind I often stayed in when I was on the road, reporting a story for the newspaper. It suits my mood, I thought, although I wasn’t sure what my mood was. Then I suddenly caught sight of myself in the mirror opposite the bed. What I saw was a woman who looked a little lost; a woman who looked as though she were missing someone. Which I was. I was missing Naohiro.

  I sat on the bed thinking about the three days we’d spent together in London. After an unexpected business trip to Paris, Naohiro had stopped in London to see me. He was on his way back to Tokyo. I had just finished my course at Oxford and, although I hadn’t planned on returning to London, the prospect of seeing him sooner than we had planned was an unexpected gift. But the thought of meeting Naohiro again made me nervous. On the train from Oxford to London my head buzzed with questions. What if Paris had been a fluke? What if we met and one of us—or both, for that matter—felt nothing? Had I been wrong in feeling that Naohiro and I had connected in some deep way? The closer I got to London, the more nervous I became.

  As if to summon up his presence, I pulled out from my travel case one of the letters he’d written me and began reading it. By the end of the first page—a very amusing description of his encounter in Paris with two French students who insisted on speaking to him in beginner’s-level Chinese—I was laughing out loud. I had forgotten how sharp a sense of humor Naohiro had, and how despite our cultural differences we found many of the same things funny. By the time the train reached London I had read two more of his letters. They were the perfect antidote to my anxiety, I thought, hurrying off the train, eager to meet the man I�
�d unearthed again in his written thoughts.

  Still, when I met Naohiro for lunch a few hours later, some of my nervousness had returned. He was already seated when I arrived at the restaurant. Immediately he rose and walked toward me. Watching him gracefully thread his way between the tables, I realized there was no need to wonder any longer if I would still find him attractive. My big worry now was: would he still find me attractive?

  Suddenly Naohiro was standing in front of me. For a minute or two we stood face-to-face, not speaking. Naohiro broke the silence.

  “It is good to see you again,” he said, bowing his head slightly. Then he moved closer. “You are well, I hope.”

  “I am. And you? Did things go well for you in Paris?”

  “Yes, I am happy to say. But not as well as they did the last time I was in Paris.”

  I looked at his face, trying to figure out if he meant what I hoped he meant. I decided to test the waters. “And when was that visit?” I asked.

  “It was on the occasion of Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.” Naohiro paused. “I believe you were in Paris at the same time, were you not?”

  “Yes, but I seem to remember many more days than five that were extraordinary.”

  He laughed. “So do I.”

  For the next three days Naohiro and I wandered through London like happy children: stopping to eat when we were hungry, popping into a shop or gallery that drew our interest, exploring the storybook houses in the tiny mews that dot London, and riding, with no particular destination in mind, the red double-decker buses.

  One afternoon, after a trip to Harrods where Naohiro bought a watch for his daughter, we passed a movie house that was showing Strictly Ballroom. I had already told him about Barry and my night of dancing at Oxford. To my surprise, he seemed quite interested, asking questions about the difficulties of various dances. In Japan, he told me, ballroom dancing was considered rather exotic.