Without Reservations (13 page)

Yes, yes, I know. Now go away
, I replied, eager to be reunited with my dazzlement.

Naohiro turned and introduced me to the Japanese couple. They had been explaining to him, he said, the significance of
Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.
Every year, apparently, the art and antiques dealers of the area—known as the
Carré Rive Gauche
—hold a celebration for five days and nights, during which time they place in their windows one rare item relating to a chosen theme.

“This year, the theme is ‘Extraordinary Gardens,’ ” said the woman. She explained that this was the third time she and her husband had been in Paris during this festive, open-house event. “It is one time when everyone feels free to walk into the galleries, even when you cannot afford to collect such beautiful pieces.” Her English was close to perfect and her voice charming: soft and sibilant, it reminded me of water splashing across pebbles.

We accepted an invitation from the Japanese couple to join them in visiting other galleries along the neighboring streets that formed the
Carré Rive Gauche.
Passing La Villa, I suggested we stop in to listen to some jazz and have a drink. Immediately, everyone agreed. Later, sitting at a table, I couldn’t help but think about my visit here with Liliane and Justin. Being with a man, I decided,
did
change a woman’s responses to the world. Sometimes it just made life more fun.

When the four of us exchanged good-byes, it was close to midnight. I could see an indigo sky spilling down into the spaces between
buildings at the end of each long narrow street. Naohiro and I walked slowly along the rue Jacob. At this time of night, men and women were returning to their apartments from an evening out, from a good day or a bad one, from whatever routine guided their daily lives. As lamps were lit, small halos of light appeared on the sidewalks, guiding us like stepping stones to some unknown destination.

As it turned out, our destination was a café on the boulevard Saint-Germain, where we sat on the terrace watching Paris go by. Happy and relaxed in a way I hadn’t experienced for a long time, I thought again of how fortunate I was to have this chance to take a detour from my normal life.

I blurted out my thoughts to Naohiro. “I feel so lucky to be here. It’s like a fairy tale.”

His response was immediate. And once again to the point. “No,” he said, “it’s not a fairy tale. This is real.”

In the days that followed I had a mantra: “Let tomorrow come tomorrow.” It was a quote I’d come across a few years back, one I’d never been able to put into practice.

“Let tomorrow come tomorrow,” I thought, waiting at the hotel for Naohiro, trying not to count the days left to us. So far I’d done a pretty good job of it, letting tomorrow come tomorrow. But it was difficult, this living in real time only, and not diluting it by looking back or skipping forward. No wonder it’s never really caught on with most people, I thought. It’s just too hard.

We had arranged to meet at one o’clock, after Naohiro’s final meetings with a group of French businessmen. But he arrived almost
an hour late, looking exhausted. He apologized, telling me the negotiations took longer than he’d anticipated. Our plans were to visit Père-Lachaise, a trip I’d looked forward to all week. But he seemed so tired I suggested we postpone our visit and instead have lunch at Madame Cedelle’s
salon du thé
just a few blocks away on the rue de Beaune. It was a place we had taken a fancy to: the food was excellent and the ambience an interesting combination of coziness and elegance.

Naohiro did not resist my suggestion to abandon the visit to Père-Lachaise. I took it to be a sign of how tired he was.

Outside, a damp wind blew down the streets and fast-moving gray clouds traveled past a barely visible sun. By the time we turned the corner into the rue de Beaune, a few raindrops were hitting the green carpets on the narrow sidewalks. It was the next-to-last day of the five extraordinary days in the
Carré Rive Gauche
and, against all reason, I found myself wondering if the rain would make the carpets grow.

When we arrived at the café, Naohiro immediately ordered tea. His face, even in the flattering rosy light of the tearoom, looked pale. I wondered if he was getting sick. The tea, however, seemed to revive him, and throughout lunch he seemed his usual self. With one surprising exception: he allowed himself to be more vulnerable than he had been in our past meetings.

“You know what is hard for me to accept?” he asked halfway through the meal. We had been talking about some of the advantages of age. “That the future will come and I will not be in it to see my children and their children grow into old age.”

He told me of once sharing a taxi in Tokyo with a stranger—a man in his fifties—who, for some reason, reminded Naohiro of his son, then twenty. “It is difficult to explain, but I felt myself to be in the presence of my son as he will be thirty years from now. It was a
very real feeling—that I was riding in the taxi with my fifty-year-old son.” Naohiro looked away for a moment. “I have never forgotten that experience. It made me both happy and sad.”

I was moved by his words and the longing expressed in them. His willingness to reveal himself stirred in me a similar desire to speak openly of private thoughts.

“Has it ever occurred to you,” I asked him, “that we are shaped more by our sorrows than our joys? When I look back, it’s not the happy times that still have power over my life. It’s the places where things went wrong.”

Naohiro said nothing. But I didn’t really expect a response. It was enough to express such thoughts out loud, without feeling guarded or awkward.

“Sometimes I wonder if that’s all I add up to,” I said. “The sum of my sorrows.”

“And is that so bad? To be the person of your sorrows?” Naohiro asked. He paused for a long time, but I could see he was not finished. “I grew up near Hiroshima fifty years ago,” he said finally, “and I do not forget the person of that sorrow. I bend still to him with respect.”

It caught me off guard, this particular reference to his past. For some reason—perhaps because of my son’s lively young friends in Japan—I tended to connect the Japanese people with the prosperous, influential Japan that now existed, not the ravaged, postwar country of fifty years ago. This glimpse into Naohiro’s life moved me.

I put my hand on his arm, looking into his face to see what was there. What I saw was not what I expected; not the fatigue or illness so visible earlier in the day. What I saw was longing. I recognized it because I felt it, too.

“Let’s go home,” I said. “Let’s go back to the hotel.”

Late in the afternoon, after Naohiro had fallen into a restless sleep, I sat in a chair at the window and watched him.
Now what?
I thought. Tomorrow had become the next day and then the day after that and the day after that. Soon—tomorrow in fact—we would be down to our final day together.

I needed a way to think about this, about Naohiro. Just a small adventure, perhaps? I was well aware that traveling alone was the perfect setup for brief, intense encounters of both the romantic and platonic kind.

But even as I tried to dismiss, or at least downgrade, what I felt for Naohiro, another voice from some place deeper down said,
Face it. This man awakened in you a feeling you’ve been denying. A longing for closeness, the wish to be known and loved.
But had I really seen that in Naohiro? Or just imagined it?

I sat down on the bed next to Naohiro. Instantly he awoke.

“Hello,” I said. “How do you feel?”

“Happy,” he replied. “How do you feel?”

“Ready to buy that apartment on the place des Vosges.”

“Even with the tatami mats?”

“Especially with the tatami mats.”

I dreamed that night of the birth of my older son; of the intense bond I felt when he was put into my arms for the first time. Looking
down at his face in the dream, I said,
Hello. I was wondering when we would meet.

The next morning I awoke feeling that someone was in the room with me. I sat up in bed and looked around. No one was there. Still, the feeling of someone standing close by me was so real that it took several minutes to convince myself I was, in fact, quite alone.