Without Reservations (9 page)

I fell asleep that night thinking of my father: the explorer, the man who embraced the world so warmly, the man whose face I could never quite remember but kept searching for anyway.

It was midmorning when Naohiro and I arrived at Sainte-Chapelle. We climbed the winding stone steps from the lower chapel, designed as a place of worship for the royal servants, to the upper chapel, reserved for the kings of France.

Naohiro walked to the center of the chapel. I followed. “Stand next to me,” he said.

And I did, trying to see what it was he saw. There, beneath the chapel’s soaring, vaulted ceiling, surrounded by towering walls of glowing stained glass, it seemed that light and glass had conspired to form a new element: one composed of ice lit from within by fire.

I have no idea how long we stood there, Naohiro and I, in the light of Sainte-Chapelle. Finally I turned to look at him. His head was bowed slightly but his eyes were open.

“Thank you,” I said, “for bringing me here.”

He nodded but did not answer or turn to look at me.

But I continued to look at him. And as I looked a great tenderness sprang up in me; a tenderness for the spirit of the man standing by my side. Finally, he turned to me. In silence we stood together in the light, looking at each other.

I no longer felt self-conscious; I felt only my need to share this moment with him.

“I feel our spirits have met,” I said.

He nodded. “I feel it is so.”

“It is a good feeling.”

“Yes,” he replied. “It is a good feeling.”

I looked at Naohiro’s face to see what was there. He met my eyes with a steady, open gaze, one that evoked in me many different feelings.

In the days ahead, Naohiro and I would come to know a great number of things about each other. Still, of all the moments we shared, none, I think, was more intimate than the day we stood together in the light of Sainte-Chapelle.

I
t was after ten and I was on my way to Montmartre for a late breakfast with Susan, an American friend living in Paris, when suddenly it hit me: I didn’t want to see her. This feeling puzzled me. After all, it was I who had called Susan to arrange the visit.

Like me, Susan was a woman who decided to take a detour from the life she’d spent a decade carefully constructing. “A year in Paris and then I’ll be back,” I remember her saying when she took a leave from her job at a Washington design firm. The year had turned into two, then three, and by the time I arrived, Susan—now a successful commercial artist—was entering the fourth year of her “stay” in Paris.

I found it surprising, the way she’d disconnected so easily from her past. True, she was divorced, her only daughter now in her mid-twenties and living in London. But Susan had left behind what seemed an extremely satisfying life: a circle of loyal and familial friends, a successful career, and a deep affection for the city in which she’d grown up. Although I didn’t quite understand her reasons, I admired her ability to accept in midlife the challenge of reinventing herself.

But then Susan had a habit of reinventing herself. When I first met her at an embassy party in Washington she was thin and blond and quite vivacious. We struck up a conversation that night, one that resulted in our having dinner together the following week. When she walked into the restaurant I hardly recognized her. Her
hair was carrot-colored and her makeup very dramatic. Somehow, it suited her. She liked to change her appearance, Susan told me; it was a way of expressing her artistic talent.

Our friendship, I suppose, was built on mutual loss. She was newly divorced; I was newly separated. We were both in that strange passage from married life to single-mother-looking-for-love-in-all-the-wrong-places. But Susan was also wickedly funny, a quality I valued in a friend. Once when I complained about being at an age that required never looking at yourself in full sunlight, Susan’s riposte was immediate. “You know what can age you twenty years overnight?” she asked. “If all your friends got face-lifts the day before.”

As I climbed the steep streets to Susan’s apartment, I wondered if my reluctance to see her was simply anxiety about revisiting a time that, for both of us, had been confusing and painful. Five years had passed since I’d seen her, at a party to celebrate her move. She arrived with the man she was about to dump; I arrived with the man who, I knew, was about to dump me. We consoled each other with the contemporary maxim “a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.” But neither of us really believed that. We left the party—without our dates—and went on to a jazz club, where, slightly tipsy, we promised we’d always be friends.

But were we still friends? I wondered. Or just former friends facing an awkward reunion?

Although Susan’s directions to her apartment—“Past the windmills on rue Lepic and you’re practically there”—had seemed clear enough on the phone, the steep, narrow Montmartre streets had a
life of their own. After thirty minutes of confused wandering I arrived finally at an address that matched the one I’d written on a scrap of paper. Situated on a quiet, rural-looking lane, the small apartment building seemed a world away from the tourist-jammed streets around the place du Tertre. Here, there was an air of a country village. An apricot-colored cat sat on top of a fence, bathing himself in the sun. A woman entered a courtyard, her face veiled behind a huge bunch of lilies and baby’s breath. The sounds of Mozart drifted down from a window. It was a pleasant surprise; I hadn’t known such neighborhoods existed in Montmartre.

I rang the bell. Immediately the door opened. “I was watching for you from the window,” Susan said, hugging me. She led me into the large, airy room behind her. I recognized the furniture at once: the white sofas and black leather chairs, the faded Turkish rugs, the Matisse print on the wall, the old, burled-maple table Susan and I found together at a flea market. It was as though I were back in her Washington apartment. Even the placement of the windows was similar, except the view through them now was of Paris, not the Potomac.

“My God,” I said, “this is like entering the Twilight Zone.” We both laughed. She understood my shock at seeing the way she’d recreated her Washington home in the Paris apartment.

“I believe in change,” she said, laughing again, “but only when it’s for the better.”

I laughed again, thinking of her chameleonlike appearance when I first met her.

She led me into her bedroom. It, too, was just as it had been in Washington. It was strange, I told her, but all the old furniture looked even better here.

“I know,” she said. “It’s as if all these things have finally found the place that suits them best.”

I followed my friend into the small, sunny kitchen, where she set out fresh orange juice, croissants, butter, raspberry jam, cheese, and coffee. I watched her pour coffee and warm milk into large white cups. She was thinner than I remembered and her hair, dark now, was cut very short, like Audrey Hepburn’s. But other than that she looked the same.

We sat at the table and talked. We talked about family and friends. About ex-husbands and the pleasures and trials of being single. About the excitement of Paris. We laughed and interrupted each other and exchanged wry congratulations on how gracefully we both were aging.

Finally I asked Susan about her decision to remain in Paris. “I don’t know all the reasons why,” she said. “Mostly I think I felt I’d outgrown my life in Washington. Not my friends—I still miss them. But every day I would get up and do exactly what I’d been doing for twenty years. And one day I just didn’t want to do that anymore.” She paused. “And then when I got to Paris, I fell in love.”

So that was it, I thought: a man.
Cherchez l’homme.

“Not with a man,” Susan said, as if reading my thoughts, “but with Paris. With the life here.”

I was curious about Susan’s new job, which I knew, in terms of money and prestige, was several notches below her Washington one. True, she was successful in her new profession as a commercial artist but in letters to me she’d described herself as someone who still loved her work but was no longer obsessed with it. This was quite a change.

When I first met her, Susan was the most openly ambitious of all my friends; a woman who made no attempt to hide the fact that, after her daughter, work was her life. But even then I suspected that Susan, like me, occasionally found herself reversing the order, putting her work before her family obligations. At least temporarily.

Certainly it was true for me. In my most honest moments I recognized that earlier in my career, when the push to success was all uphill, my own children had sometimes taken a back seat to my work. Or, more bluntly, to my ambition.

Now, here we were, sitting in Paris, two women who had seemed to be on some kind of straight track to a planned destination but now found themselves somewhere else. “Do you remember those early days?” I asked her. “How naive we were? And how ambitious?” I laughed. “It’s almost embarrassing to think about.”

“Well, I’m still ambitious,” Susan said. “Just in a different way. And I suspect you are, too.”

She was right. I
was
still filled with ambition. More mellow, perhaps, but ambition nevertheless.

We sat talking about how your expectations change when you move into your fifties: about work, about love, and about a future that didn’t seem as endless as it once did. At a certain point in one’s working life, Susan and I agreed, the question becomes: what ultimately is one working toward? Personal achievement? Contentment? Wisdom? Retirement?

“For me, it’s finally all about the work and nothing else,” I said. “Not money or prestige.” I made a face. “Although I wouldn’t mind a bit more money.”

Near the end of our conversation Susan asked: “What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?”

I thought about it for a few minutes. “Hope,” I said. “With it, I guess anything’s possible. But without it …” My voice trailed off. I suddenly had thought of Naohiro. Hope? Or no hope? It occurred to me to tell Susan about him, but I didn’t. Something inside me wanted to protect the relationship from outside opinions or advice. At least for a while.

I looked at my watch; it was almost two. I rose to go, telling Susan how much fun it was to see her again. We hugged and said good-bye, promising to get together for dinner the following week.