Without Reservations (2 page)

The answer, one that arrived in bits and pieces over the next few months, surprised me.

What you need to do
, a voice inside me said,
is to step out and experience the world without recording it first in a reporter’s notebook. After fifteen years of writing stories about other people, you need to get back into the narrative of your own life.

It made sense to me. But how to go about doing that? I thought of taking a leave of absence from my job, of traveling to an unfamiliar place where all the old labels that define me—both to myself and others—would be absent. Maybe then, somewhere along the way, I would bump into that other woman. Or, if she no longer existed, maybe such a trip could help me find out who took her place. Although the idea appealed to me, I pushed it aside as impractical, both personally and professionally.

Yet I couldn’t let go of the fantasy; it sprang out at odd times. In the middle of the night, I would get up and start figuring out what such a plan might cost and how to finance it. I spent hours in the bookstore’s travel section poring over possible destinations. At dinner, talking and laughing with friends, I would wonder about my capacity to be a woman in a strange city, without an identity, without friends.

Then I ran through all the reasons why I shouldn’t do it. What would I do with my house? Who would take care of my cat? What if some emergency arose at home? Would my editors give me a leave? And if they did, what about the column I wrote twice a
week? Would it be assigned to someone else? Suppose I got sick in some strange place? Suppose I disappeared, never to be seen again?

But something was working deep inside me and, like a tropical storm, it gathered momentum before hitting me full force with its message:
you are a woman in search of an adventure
, said the voice inside.
Take the risk. Say “Yes” to life instead of “No.”

Still I hesitated. It was time, I thought, to get some feedback from friends. When I ran the idea by those closest to me, the response was unanimous:
Go. Your children are grown and, except for your cat, you’re an independent woman.

They were partly right. In many ways, I
was
an independent woman. For years I’d made my own choices, paid my own bills, shoveled my own snow, and had the kind of relationships—with the exception of sons and cats—that allowed for a lot of freedom on both sides.

But lately I’d come to see that no matter how much I was in charge of my finances and my time, I was quite dependent in another way. Over the years I had fallen into the habit—a quite natural one, I believe—of defining myself in terms of who I was to other people and what they expected of me as mother, as daughter, as wife, as ex-wife, as reporter, as friend. For a while, at least, I wanted to stand back from these roles and see who emerged.

I arrived at the decision to take a leave of absence in January of 1993. With great anxiety I approached my editor and told him what I’d like to do. Within days I had his approval; we agreed I would leave in April and return the following January. I was elated. Then it hit me: I had no real plan for all the free time now available to me. Except for the first stop. In some unspoken way I’d known all along that I would begin my new life in Paris.

“Why Paris?” friends asked. “Why not?” I would reply breezily, reluctant to reveal the truth. The truth was that I was pursuing a
fantasy—the fantasy of living in a small hotel on the Left Bank just as my journalistic idol, Janet Flanner, had done. From 1925 to 1975, Flanner’s famous “Letter from Paris” appeared in
The New Yorker.
The pieces, now collected in book form, still stand as small masterpieces of intelligence and style; like many writers, I studied them as a painter does Cézanne. For years I had wanted to walk, book in hand, through the streets and into the cafés Flanner described so vividly. Now I was about to do it.

But after Paris, what? I wanted to keep my plans flexible, but not so loose that I was just wandering aimlessly about. After thinking it over, I came up with two ground rules. One: I did not want to flit from place to place; I wanted to stay a while in the places I chose to visit. And two: my agenda would not include exotic locales. This allowed me to immediately rule out such places as Las Vegas and Katmandu. I reasoned that while part of my goal was to see if I still had the skills—and the nerve—to make it in a new setting, some kind of cultural connection was necessary.

For the next several weeks I pieced together a list of possibilities from clippings, articles, and guidebooks I’d collected. Several places in England and Scotland were on the list. So was almost every region in Italy, from the Veneto to Campania. At one point I considered spending all my time, after leaving Paris, in Italy. But when I came across an article in my travel file on a course given at Oxford on the history of the English village and another on traveling by train through the Scottish Highlands, I abandoned the all-Italy plan. I also moved two of my initial “Possibilities”—Ireland and Provence—into a lesser category headed: “Possible Possibilities.”

In the end I left Baltimore with a hotel booked in Paris, an apartment almost secured in London, a place reserved in the Oxford course, and a room of my own on a Scottish sheep farm. The rest, I figured, would be negotiated as opportunities presented themselves.

But even the slightest of plans can go awry. Life intruded while I was away, more than once. On my way to Scotland, word came of the sudden death of a beloved sister-in-law, and I returned to Baltimore for her funeral. Later, another urgent family matter caused a change in my plans. Life’s like that, I told myself on a sad plane trip back to Italy: with awesome impersonality it ambushes us, changing our lives and the lives of those we love in an instant.

Of course, on the day I arrived in Paris to begin my leave, I knew nothing of what lay ahead, good or bad. All I knew was a feeling of utter astonishment at finding myself in a small hotel on the Left Bank of the world’s most beautiful city.

It was from this hotel, at the end of my first week, that I wrote the simple truth of what I had been seeking:

Reading this postcard I see myself, carefree and exhilarated, standing in the middle of the bridge, halfway between the Louvre on the Right Bank and the quai Voltaire on the Left. What I see is a woman who is not thinking about observing life but experiencing it. The observations would come later, in postcards sent home.

From Milan and Siena, from tiny villages along the Amalfi Coast and small towns in the Cotswolds, from London and Oxford, the postcards were waiting for me when I returned, each one recounting like a spontaneous child the impressions of a day spent exploring
the world. As I read them, I relived the days spent at Brasenose College in Oxford; the momentous meeting in Paris with Naohiro, a Japanese man who read my soul; the sunny Italian days in Sorrento; the days of self-discovery in Asolo, a village at the foot of the Dolomites.

It was not a new habit, writing postcards to myself. It had begun about fifteen years ago, while traveling alone to Bornholm, a remote island in the Baltic Sea. It was homesickness that prompted me to write that first time; the postcard served as a companion, someone with whom I could share my feelings.

Over the years, the postcards took on another role: they became a form of travel memoir, preserving and recapturing the feelings of certain moments during a trip. When I see such a postcard, the handwriting oddly familiar, it startles me and, like Proust’s madeleine, has the power to plunge me back into the past.

Until recently I was convinced—quite smugly so—that I’d invented this form of travel writing. But about four months ago, while going through a box of papers collected from my mother’s apartment after her death, I came across a postcard she’d written to herself from Dublin. The picture is a charming view of O’Connell Street and the Gresham Hotel. She writes:

Tears sprang to my eyes as I read these simple words in a handwriting as familiar as my own. It is the handwriting that signed my grade-school report cards; the handwriting that scribbled out the lists I carried to the corner grocery store; the handwriting that,
over the years, in countless letters, supported and encouraged me in good times and bad.

Holding the postcard in my hands, I thought of my sons and of the future. Would they someday read my postcards, I wondered, and think of me, as I do now of my mother?

If so, I hope they see me soaring like a bright kite into a big blue sky; happy and adventurous, going wherever the wind takes me.

—Baltimore,
January 1999

F
or weeks I had imagined my first day in Paris: I could see myself sipping a
citron pressé
at the Flore, a famous Saint-Germain café that was once the haunt of Picasso, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and Camus; then darting in and out of the shops on the rue du Bac or browsing the bookstores in the historic rue Jacob. Always in this fantasy I saw myself responding with curiosity and excitement to the pulsing street life of Paris.

I had night dreams, too, along with the daydreams. In one particularly appealing dream, I bumped into Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who once lived on the Left Bank in a hotel just blocks from where I would be staying. I accepted their invitation to Sunday breakfast at their favorite café, the Deux Magots. Waking from this dream, I scribbled a note to myself:
Must have Sunday brunch at Deux Magots.

In another dream I entered an unnamed passageway on the Left Bank and, after a short walk, emerged on the Right Bank in the Marais district. Both during the dream and after, I felt quite pleased with myself at having made this historic discovery, one that eliminated the need to cross the Seine by bridge.

I liked these dreams, both the day and night versions. They seemed to signal a willingness on my part to go where the moment
took me and to trust it would take me to an interesting place. They also reminded me of how it felt to approach every day as I once had, guided less by expectations than by curiosity.

On the day I left for Paris, I drank champagne with a friend in the Air France lounge at Dulles airport. “Here’s to a successful trip,” said my friend, raising her glass. I raised mine in reply, saying, “And to an interesting one.”

What I didn’t say was that “success” was not something I was seeking from this venture. In fact, I was determined
not
to judge this trip, or its outcome, in terms of success or failure. Too much of life—my life, anyway—seemed to be aimed at achieving success and avoiding failure. I was determined not to carry that baggage with me on this trip.

“You must be excited,” my friend said. “I know I would be.”

I laughed. “That’s an understatement. I’m probably the most excited person in this airport,” It was true. I felt the way I did at twenty when, on the spur of the moment, I threw some clothes into a suitcase, bought a ticket at the airport, and left for Turkey.