Without Reservations (8 page)

“What do you think of?” Naohiro asked.

I pointed to our faces, moving over the water. “Ukiyo-e,” I said stumbling over the word. “The floating world.”

He laughed. “You are a quick student. I shall take care in what I teach you.” But I could tell he was pleased by my response.

I found something to like in his response, too, hinting as it did at a shared future.

We left Giverny and arrived in Paris just after six. I knew that Naohiro was staying at a hotel near the Eiffel Tower and wondered if he had friends waiting for him. It was Saturday night; I had no plans and was on the verge of asking him to have a drink with me when he asked if I had dinner plans.

We agreed to meet later at Tan Dinh, a Vietnamese restaurant that served, he said, some of the best food in Paris.

Although I’d never eaten at Tan Dinh, I knew of the restaurant. It was near my hotel on the rue de Verneuil, an old and captivating street I’d discovered the day I arrived here. I walked there often, using it as a shortcut to the Orsay Museum or just to enjoy its charm. A narrow street of small shops, a few fine restaurants, and old but expensive apartments hidden behind large wooden gates, it captured the Paris I loved best.

After leaving Naohiro, I returned to the hotel, where I found a letter waiting. It had been forwarded from the newspaper to my home in Baltimore and then to Paris. Sent by a reader in response to the last column I’d written before leaving—one in which I explained my hopes for the year—the note wished me good luck on my journey. The writer ended with a line from Eudora Welty: “All serious daring starts from within.”

I sat thinking about how once I was daring not only on the inside but on the outside as well. In my adolescent years, after my father died, I feared nothing. Or at least I pretended to fear nothing. I made dangerous choices in those years, thinking myself bold and adventurous. Later I would come to understand I hadn’t been daring at all, just driven by confusion and hormones. The person capable of true daring, I knew now, possessed two admirable qualities: curiosity and courage.

Given that definition, I guess in my adult years I had committed some daring acts. Not anything like living among Amazon tribes, as a friend of mine, a writer, had done. But a few years back I did go head-to-head in interviews with the likes of George F. Will and William F. Buckley, Jr. That, I decided, was daring enough for me.

As I showered and dressed, I thought of Naohiro; of how little I knew about him. Coming back from Giverny on the train I did learn a few things: that he worked in Tokyo in the electronics industry, lived in an apartment there, traveled a great deal, and had studied as a young man in California. He said little about his personal life and I did not press him for details.

But I wanted to. Most of all I wanted to know: was he married and did he have a family? Still, I did not ask. What lay at the bottom of my unusual reticence, I suspected, was a wish to avoid the disappointment I might feel if his answers were not the ones I wanted to hear.

I slipped on the black silk dress I’d bought at the small shop in Saint-Germain. Around my shoulders I draped the antique shawl—
thin cut-velvet the color of a ripe tomato—I’d picked up in a thrift shop on the rue du Bac. Looking in the mirror I fancied myself—with excessive generosity—quite the chic Parisienne. Already, fantasies were flitting like butterflies in my head. About Naohiro and me.

Oh, God, I thought, walking from the hotel to the restaurant. Is this what I left my job and home for? To become gripped by an intense infatuation? One with no possible outcome except disappointment? The feeling depressed me.

But the truth is, it exhilarated me even more. I thought of Doris Lessing’s observation that “A woman without a man cannot meet a man, any man, of any age, without thinking, even if it’s for a half-second, ‘Perhaps this is THE man.’ ”

If ever there was living proof that Lessing had scored a bull’s-eye with that one, I was it.

When I arrived, Naohiro was there waiting for me. Tan Dinh was a small, elegant restaurant with exquisite food and an impressive wine list. Naohiro asked if he could order for both of us. I said yes. Wine appeared; a Bordeaux. Then one by one the elegant dishes arrived: Saigon chicken rolls, steamed ravioli with smoked goose, lobster prepared with ginko leaves, and a mysterious, delicious dessert flavored with hazelnuts.

As the evening progressed I grew more and more comfortable with Naohiro. The wine, no doubt, helped. We talked of books and movies, of the pleasures and pains of traveling, and finally of ourselves.

Naohiro began by telling me about his two children, a son and
a daughter, both in their early twenties. His daughter lived with him; his son was away at school. He spoke of them with great affection. And with humor, too, as he described his daughter’s attempt to curl her straight hair with a permanent.

“I think,” Naohiro said, “she was trying to look like Cher.” We both laughed. But I think he knew what I was waiting to hear.

“Their mother,” he said, “died two years ago.”

Something in the way he said this suggested I should not ask any more about the matter. Still, I felt he had confided something that was painful for him.

I told him about my family, then about my job and why I had left it to come to France. He asked me to tell him about my work.

“It’s never the same,” I said. “That’s one of the things I like about it. One week I’m doing a story on Siamese twins and the next I’m interviewing Jeanne Moreau over lunch at a fancy hotel.”

To my surprise, he was eager to know what Jeanne Moreau was like.
Jules and Jim
, it turned out, was a favorite film of his.

“She’s one of the most intelligent and charming people I’ve ever met,” I said. I told him how impressed I was with the way she expressed herself in English. “Her images were poetic. But precise in the way that poetry is. And her face … It’s endlessly fascinating.” I laughed. “She told me that at twenty she was considered ‘unphotogenic’ and that it hurt her to read such a description. But as a woman in her fifties, she had stopped—and this is the way she put it—‘looking into the mirror that others hold up to me.’ ”

As I told this to Naohiro, it occurred to me that Moreau’s declaration of independence from “looking into the mirror that others hold up to me” was a deft description of what I was after on this trip.

Naohiro was a very good listener. He nodded his head as I talked, as if to encourage me to continue. So I did, telling him a bit
more about my job. When I stopped talking, however, he said nothing.

It still unnerved me a bit, this habit he had of not jumping in immediately to offer his opinions on another person’s thoughts. I started to say something to break the silence, but stopped. Maybe it was I who needed to learn how to be quiet instead of cluttering the moment with too many words.

After dinner we walked along the rue du Bac until we reached the Seine. We turned onto the quai Voltaire, and headed toward the lights of Nôtre-Dame. Near the Pont-Neuf a tall, thin man dressed in jeans and a black turtleneck sweater was bent over a guitar, singing “As I walked out on the streets of Laredo …” His voice was pure Texas.

Naohiro asked me to explain what “streets of Laredo” meant. Was Laredo like concrete? he asked. I explained—as tactfully as I could—that Laredo was a city in Texas. He laughed at his mistake, a warm, open laugh that, like the Bordeaux we’d shared, sent the blood rushing to my head. A dizzying sense of closeness enveloped me. I started to take his hand. Then I stopped. It seemed too forward a gesture. If Naohiro noticed this small, canceled movement on my part, he said nothing.

We walked along in companionable silence, stopping at the edge of the Seine to watch the
bateaux-mouches
glide up and down the river. Inside the lighted boats, people were eating dinner as Paris drifted by. A feeling passed through me, one I couldn’t quite identify. Not happiness, exactly; more like the absence of worrying about finding happiness.

When we arrived at my hotel, Naohiro asked if I had plans for the next day. I had none. “Then I would be happy if you would visit Sainte-Chapelle with me,” he said. I agreed.

That night before I fell asleep I studied the family photographs I’d brought along on the trip: of my sons, of my brother and sister-in-law, and of my parents, both dead. I was particularly drawn to a photograph of my father as a young man, sitting in a rickshaw in China. He was an adventurer, my father, and almost all the pictures I have of him were taken in some exotic locale: standing near the top of Sugar Loaf Mountain in Rio de Janeiro, patting an elephant’s trunk in India, posing with my mother on a foggy Edinburgh street.

He died when I was eight.

Before my brother and I were born, my father had taught at a university. But it was not the life he wanted. His love of the sea and of the places it could take him drove him to maritime school, and then to a life at sea. His family and friends didn’t understand this choice; his brothers never stopped their campaign to draw him into the family business. Always, my father listened politely; always he politely declined the offer.

In the years after his death, it grew harder for me to hold on to the memories of my father. Not just those that had to do with the relationship between the two of us, but his physical appearance as well. Then one day when I was about twelve I realized I no longer remembered what he looked like. Even now, when I tried to picture him, what I saw was the man in the photographs, the one who always looked utterly at home, no matter how foreign the background. He had a gift for that, I thought. Fitting in.

My father had a gift for spontaneity, too. Like a child, he always seemed ready to do anything that turned up, go anywhere that beckoned. When he returned, there would be presents for my brother
and me; wonderful dolls from Brazil dressed in swirling samba skirts and, from India, carved ivory elephants crossing a bridge.

In his spare time my father wrote short stories. About places with exotic names like Bitter Creek and Silver Bow. They were adventure stories, he told me, set in the West. I think he sold a few of them to some magazine or another. Once he let me use his typewriter. I’d never seen one up close before and it was as exciting as anything I’d ever done, pecking out my name on the little round keys with letters in the middle.