Without Reservations (11 page)

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.

F
or 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.