Without Reservations (10 page)

As I walked along the narrow lane from Susan’s apartment toward the center of Montmartre, I heard my own footsteps following me like a carefree playmate on the first day of summer vacation. I listened as a small, buoyant voice said
School is out and I’m in Paris!
Halfway up the tree-lined path I stopped to watch a small gray turtle crawl beneath a bush edged with tiny yellow flowers.

It reminded me of the turtles Grandmother and I used to see at Woolworth’s five-and-ten when I was little. Their shells painted in bright colors, these tiny turtles, perhaps fifty of them, crawled around in a glass tank. For about twenty-five cents you could buy one and they’d paint your name on it. I longed for a turtle named Alice, but no matter how pathetically I begged, Grandmother refused. It was cruel, she said, to paint living creatures; and, besides, the thrifty Scotswoman in her could not see spending money for something you could likely find in your own backyard.

The sun came out. It filtered down through the leaves, creating a playful pattern of light and shade that danced before my eyes. The air smelled of lilies of the valley. As I walked beneath the canopy of trees, wrapped in the delicate fragrance, caution fell away. It didn’t matter that I had no idea which street led to the place du Tertre or to my Métro stop. Destination no longer ruled. My only map was that of free association: I would follow each street only as long as it interested me and then, on a whim, choose a new direction.

Such was my happiness that only my poorly accented French prevented me from saying to a formidable-looking woman sweeping down her sidewalk,
Très jolie, madame!

A chilly morning had turned into a warm, humid afternoon and the tourists crowding Montmartre’s streets looked wilted. It was time, I decided, to slip into a café for a cool drink.

From the outside, the café on rue Saint-Rustique looked quiet and slightly mysterious. When I peered through the door I could make out very little in the dark interior. Although I had seen a number of bright, lively outdoor cafés along the way, somehow the slightly dangerous look of this place attracted me.

I stepped inside and stood near the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It was cool, and the smell of beer hung pleasantly in the air. Squinting, I saw a long bar to my right and beyond that a large room. Music spilled out of it: the sound of an accordion and the voice of a woman singing. Probably a jukebox, I thought, heading toward the sound. But the music was not from a record.

Standing there on a tiny stage, dressed in gold lamé shorts, a top hat, and tails, was a heavily made-up woman singing in French to an inattentive group of beer-drinking German tourists. The woman in the gold lamé shorts appeared to be in her early forties. Her hair was dyed the color of a marigold, and two deep lines placed her Cupid’s-bow mouth between parentheses. A small dog, almost obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke in the café, sat near the stage, patiently watching her every move, his ears cocked to the sound of her voice.

“I love Paris in the springtime,” sang the woman into a microphone, “I love Paris in the fall.” Her voice rose and fell dramatically as she moved across the stage, a small figure caught in an unflattering, blue-white spotlight. I looked at my watch. It was after three. In Baltimore, I’d be sitting in the cluttered newsroom at the paper, drinking bad coffee and writing my Thursday column. I thought of my friends back at their desks, phones ringing, rushing to meet their deadlines, agonizing over a lead for their stories. Suddenly that life seemed strange to me. Being in a café in Paris in the middle of the afternoon did not.

From the bar I spotted a woman sitting alone at a table. I pointed to the empty chair next to her and she motioned back that I could sit there. The woman, who was drinking wine and smoking a Gauloise, looked very French. Dressed in a pleated skirt and tailored white blouse, a black-and-white silk scarf artfully arranged around her neck, she epitomized the kind of simple elegance I associated with the women of Paris. I was surprised when she spoke to me in English.

“I see you’re American, too,” she said. I turned toward her, wondering how she had identified me as an American. She seemed to know what I was thinking, and glanced down at my feet. I followed her gaze. She was looking at my black leather Reeboks, which, we both knew, were not the sort of shoes any Frenchwoman over the age of thirty would ever wear.

“Only in America,” she said, smiling.

We fell into conversation. Her name was Anne. She was a film producer from Los Angeles who, after a business trip to Cannes, had decided to spend a few days in Paris. Anne had some interesting observations about Frenchwomen.

“Have you noticed how affectionate they are toward one another?” she asked. In fact, I had. It was not unusual for Frenchwomen
to walk along the street, arms linked, heads tilted together in close conversation. In cafés, they greeted each other with kisses and parted with embraces. I liked the way they were able to express affection without being self-conscious about it.

I told Anne about the sad-looking middle-aged woman who performed on the street across from Deux Magots, the legendary Saint-Germain-des-Prés café. Small crowds would gather around her while she danced the can-can, wearing a black-and-gold dress, short black boots, and a cheap red wig fashioned into a topknot. Stark white makeup covered her sagging face; her mouth was a slash of purple. Midway through the performance, when she stopped to change from boots to high-heeled silver sandals, you could see the bandages wrapped around her swollen feet and toes.

“It’s a hard way to make a living,” I said. “I found it painful to watch.”

Anne nodded. “It’s a bit too close to what all women fear deep down, isn’t it?” she said. “Especially single women.”

I knew what she meant. It was the fear that, through bad luck or illness or having no one to lean on, a woman might wind up alone and poor. I’d discussed this fear with my friends. Of course we always laughed when we talked about it. But the image of ourselves as old women living in a rundown hotel was always there, in the backs of our minds. Far off in the distance and unlikely, but there nonetheless. After such talks we always parted with the promise that, when the time came, we’d buy a large house and move in together.

It was Anne’s first visit to Paris in ten years. She and her husband had celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday by staying a week at the romantic L’Hôtel on the Left Bank. They had divorced three years after the Paris trip. She had no children.

I told her that it had been almost ten years since I had visited Paris.

“It’s changed a lot, don’t you think?” she said. “And not for the better.” Now she found Paris too crowded and the food not as good as she remembered. Even the most beautiful square in all of Paris—the place des Vosges—had diminished in her eyes.

“I wonder if it’s really Paris that’s changed,” I said, “or if it’s us.”

Anne shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve changed that much at all.” Something about the way she said it suggested she considered this an accomplishment. And perhaps for her it was.

Anne told me she was anxious to get back to Los Angeles and her work. She’d been gone for almost three weeks and was beginning to feel nervous about her absence from the action. “Out of sight, out of mind,” she said, explaining how competitive it was in the film industry. She asked me how long I intended to stay in Paris.

When I told her that I was on a leave of absence from my job as a newspaper reporter, she shook her head in disbelief and, I thought, disapproval. “But don’t you worry about what could happen to your job while you’re gone?” she asked. “If I did that I’d practically have to start all over again.”

Her attitude annoyed me, although I didn’t know why. Perhaps it aroused my own fears of losing my place at work.

Then, to my complete surprise, Anne said, “It’s a bold thing to do. But maybe you’re used to doing bold things.”

I assured her I was not. But her remark secretly pleased me. It was the way I wanted to be seen, if only mistakenly so.

The thought put me in a good mood. I turned to Anne. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to the Ritz bar and have a drink.”

“I’m up for that,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to get a look at the inside of the Ritz.”

As we walked out of the café, we saw the woman in the gold lamé shorts sitting at a table, surrounded by admirers. She was smoking a
cigarette through a long silver holder and signing autographs for the German tourists, the dog perched on her lap. Who did she imagine herself to be? Marlene Dietrich? Edith Piaf? Was that the image that sustained her when she examined the realities of her life?

It made me wonder: who did I imagine myself to be? Since arriving in Paris, I was less sure of the answer. Yes, of course, I was still a mother and a reporter and a person who missed her friends. But from time to time I seemed to glimpse another woman trailing along behind me. I noticed this woman was quite curious about everything, and adventurous to the point of going alone to the free wine-and-cheese art gallery openings held on Thursday nights along the rue de Seine. And as if that weren’t daring enough, one day she inquired at a
salon de beauté
about tinting her hair from brown to the color of a bright copper penny.

Anne was dressed for the Ritz. I was not. So we hailed a taxi and stopped off at my hotel, where I changed into a white silk blouse and navy crepe pants.

At the Ritz we ordered martinis. Anne made a toast. “To Hemingway,” she said, “who opened up the Ritz Bar on the day of Paris’s liberation in 1944.”

I responded: “To Proust, who always wore lavender gloves when he visited the Ritz.”

We went on to toast Coco Chanel, who had lived at the hotel, and were about to raise our glasses to Colette—for no reason other than being Colette—when a man approached us. An American who’d overheard our distinctly non-French accents, he invited us to join his group for a glass of champagne.

The group consisted of three married couples from California who were on their way to Egypt for two weeks of sightseeing. The women spoke of their eagerness to tour the Egyptian monuments and sail the Nile. The men, looking at their watches, spoke of calling their stockbrokers back in California. Paris was a one-day rest stop for them; they had spent most of the day shopping along the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré.

The Californians were pleasant people who genuinely seemed to enjoy traveling as a group. That impressed me. “I guess I’m too selfish to travel well with other people,” I told Anne later. “Except for my sons, I’d rather travel alone.”

Somehow a journey taken alone seemed more of an adventure to me. Had I been traveling with a companion, I thought, I probably would not have met Anne or been here at the Ritz sharing a drink with the Californians.

“I envy you, your traveling alone for so long a time,” said one of the women in the group, breaking into my thoughts. But she said it in a low voice, while the others were engaged in conversation, as though she didn’t want them to hear.

“And I envy you,” I replied, “for being able to find so much pleasure traveling in the company of others.”

She seemed puzzled by this. “It’s funny,” she said, “but I never thought of it that way.”