Without Reservations (6 page)

That was it. I had to have the dress. Of course, wearing it meant I would have to be intensely aware of my posture, both upper and
lower, for the whole evening. But given my infatuation with the image in the mirror, that seemed a reasonable price to pay.

By 5:30 I was back at the hotel. Thirty minutes later the phone rang. It was a radio producer from Baltimore, calling to confirm I was in my room. At six, Paris time—noon, Baltimore time—I was to be a telephone guest on
The Allan Prell Show.

For the past seven years I’d been a regular guest on this radio talk show. It was something I enjoyed doing. Allan Prell was both smart and funny and so were the listeners who called in to talk about everything from politics to books. Before leaving on my trip, it was suggested I do a radio interview on the show from Paris. I agreed. And now the familiar voice of Allan Prell was on the other end of the long-distance line.

For forty-five minutes Allan and I talked about Paris. About the price of a glass of orange juice at Deux Magots—seven dollars—and the cost of a cup of coffee at the Flore—five dollars. About the hotels on the Left Bank. About what I was doing. Listeners called in to ask questions. Commercials came and went, bringing into my room on the rue de l’Université the voices of Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr., and Morris the Remodeler. I could picture the radio studio, could see Allan in his white turtleneck swiveling back and forth in his chair, could even identify the voices of some callers. It was all so familiar.

And yet, sitting in my Paris hotel, only a few blocks away from the Seine and the hotel where Hemingway lived, it already seemed like somebody else’s life.

When the interview was over I sat for a while looking around the room. My gaze stopped at the wine-red love seat. Suddenly I thought:
it looks just like the love seat in the Kertész photo.
I got up and walked to the small sofa. Then, without thinking, I tried to arrange myself on it like the woman—the Satiric Dancer—in the picture. It wasn’t easy.

Close enough
, I said to the empty room when finally I managed to get both legs onto the back cushion. After all, I was not young, not a dancer, and, although I fancied myself amusing at times, definitely not a satirist.

When I arrived at the jazz club that night, there was no sign of Liliane and her friend. I decided to wait at the bar. La Villa was crowded, filled with affluent-looking men dressed in expensive suits worn with black T-shirts, and model-perfect women wearing creations from the salons of hot young Paris designers. The verdict of success was in the air; it rose up through the smoke and dim light, creating a halo of self-approval. I was glad I’d worn the new black silk dress. Although not up to the level of high fashion present in the room, it had a simplicity that might pass for elegance. At least that was my hope.

Just then I spotted Liliane sitting at a small table with a man who could have stepped out of a Brooks Brothers’ ad. She waved me over.

“Hello again,” she said as I approached them. Liliane looked spectacular. She was wearing a black silk dress with long sleeves made of crisscrossed green silk ribbons. On her head was a small hat of black tulle; a tiny green bird nested inside the tulle. Her
companion stood up and nodded but did not speak; his handsome square-jawed face maintained its Mount Rushmore impassivity.

“This is Justin Moore,” Liliane said. “But be warned—he is not in a good mood.” She laughed but her eyes darted nervously in Justin’s direction. I sat down, slightly put off by the awkward beginning to the evening. Immediately, Justin and Liliane returned to some sort of squabble that obviously had been interrupted by my arrival. Embarrassed, I sat there until Liliane turned to me.

“A lover’s quarrel,” she explained, laughing. “Sorry. But you know how these things are.” She laughed again and turned to pick up Justin’s hand. He did not look amused. And he made no attempt to smooth over the situation.

Liliane, meanwhile, tried harder and harder to cajole Justin into a better mood. She grew flirtatious and then flattering, telling me about Justin’s accomplishments as a banker. And about his exquisite taste. “I met Justin when he hired me to decorate his flat in London. But his eye is so good he really didn’t need a designer.”

I asked Justin a few questions about himself. He answered in a bored tone, making it quite clear he felt no need to impress me.

His dismissal did not bother me. I was completely oblivious to the idea of personal slights; my attention was focused on the intriguing dynamics between Liliane and Justin. Particularly fascinating to me was how different she was in his presence. Gone was the easy openness I’d seen at lunch; replacing it was an extreme awareness of how Justin reacted to her. She became manipulative, changing her tactics if they seemed not to please him. It struck me that despite the ease with which she attracted men, she wasn’t really comfortable around them. Some impulse seemed to take over in the presence of a man, one that changed Liliane from a freestanding entity into a needy, dependent person.

It was a familiar pattern to me. I’d seen it in my mother, a beautiful woman who even in her seventies elicited the attention of men. By that time, however, she no longer wanted it; in fact, she once confessed to me she had never really been comfortable in the company of a man. “Your father came close,” she told me when we were both old enough to talk of such things, “but sometimes even with him I found myself pretending to be someone I wasn’t.”

Still, she married again less than a year after my father’s death. It was a sad marriage, one that depended a good deal on both participants giving up their real personalities. Only when my mother reached her sixties was she able to assert her independence, able to free herself of the fear of being on her own. “I always thought of it as being alone, not on my own,” was the way she described the fear that dictated so many of her actions.

I thought I saw that fear of being alone in Liliane, too. I watched as she leaned close to Justin, leaned until the tiny green bird on her hat almost touched his forehead. She began talking. Her face looked anxious, crumpled. I couldn’t hear what she was saying and I didn’t want to.

After all, I was a stranger who knew none of their mutual history. It was like walking into the middle of a movie: I arrived too late for the beginning and wouldn’t be around for the end. Still, I was quite caught up in the drama of whatever was being played out between them. It didn’t matter that I no longer existed to Liliane and Justin except, perhaps, as a deterrent to things getting really out of hand. By this time, Liliane was no longer a real person to me. The woman I’d met at lunch had vanished. And while I hated to admit it, I found myself deriving some small satisfaction from the belief that I no longer was susceptible to being compromised in such a way by a man.

“Let’s go,” I heard Justin say to her. “I didn’t want to come to begin with.” His face was cold and impassive.

Liliane turned to me. “I’m sorry. But we have to leave. I’m not feeling well.” I saw she was close to tears.

I didn’t know what to say. It was such an intimate situation, one I shouldn’t be witnessing. “Never mind,” I said. “I’m not uncomfortable staying here alone. I just hope you’re all right.”

Liliane and Justin rose to go. He nodded coldly. I nodded back just as coldly. I watched them thread their way between the small tables. My eyes followed the black hat with its tiny green bird caged in tulle until it disappeared.

I stayed on at La Villa until almost midnight, losing myself in the supple gymnastics of great jazz. Just as I was about to leave, a saxophonist started playing “How High the Moon.”

The sound started off slow, almost like a love song, then the drummer weighed in with his steel brushes, coming in softly just behind the beat, then moving into a big sound along with the saxophone until the whole place was jiving. In the middle of all this, a figure ran across the years to meet me:

It is my twenty-year-old self and she is back in New York, sitting in Birdland, listening to Charlie Parker. Next to her is Will, an artist and the man she loved. Or thought she loved. How young they both look. And how fearless. I’d forgotten how fearless she was, this young, laughing woman whose head is tilted toward her companion, just as Liliane’s had been.

But then my twenty-year-old self leans back and I see something else in her face, something similar to what I’d seen earlier in Liliane’s: an anxious look that telegraphs a willingness to be whatever the man sitting next to her wants her to be. Even if it means betraying her own needs.

How easy it was, still, to conjure up those old feelings. Not just for Will, but for all the boyfriends and lovers that I’d reinvented myself for in the name of love. Along the way I’d made some bad choices when it came to men. And a few good ones.

For some reason, I thought of Colette; wise, resilient Colette, who knew about “that lightheartedness which comes to a woman when the peril of men has left her.” I never interpreted Colette’s observation as meaning she thought women would be better off without men. What I took it to mean was: women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities.

It came to me then, sitting at La Villa, that it had been a long while since I’d thought of love as the center of my life. The peril of men, it seemed, had left me some years back. I no longer believed that romantic love had the power to shape or transform me. My life had a shape, one that suited me just fine.

When I arrived back at the hotel, the night manager handed me, along with my room key, a telephone message from Liliane. I climbed the stairs to my room and sat on the bed reading Liliane’s words: “Please forgive Justin’s rudeness. He was not feeling well. I’ll call before I leave Paris.”

I thought again about the look on Liliane’s face that night; that anxious look that says no price is too high to pay if it means not being alone. I thought of my own slow conversion to independence, of how long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.

But I also thought of the twinge of envy I’d felt earlier in the day about Liliane’s attractiveness to men. There was pleasure in that, too; in being the focus of a man’s attention.

As I soon would be reminded in my unexpected encounter with a man named Naohiro.