Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [16]
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.
3
AT SAINTE-CHAPELLE
Dear Alice,
There is a certain mysterious quality about Paris that I find in no other city. Paris, it seems, has her hidden, secret places. Walk down any street in the city and you will see the huge wooden gates with peeling green paint that separate the passerby from the lush courtyards and elegant mansions inside. Paris guards her inner beauty from the casual observer. To find it one must look beyond the façades. It is true of people also, I think: their spirits exist behind their façades, beyond their words.
Love, Alice
I met Naohiro on the train to Giverny. I’d noticed him earlier at the St.-Lazare station, buying a ticket: a slim, attractive man, elegantly dressed completely in black except for a white sweater thrown across his shoulders. He was Asian; Japanese, I thought, although I wasn’t absolutely certain.
For weeks I’d looked forward to visiting Giverny, a small village halfway between Paris and Rouen. It was there that the great French painter Monet had lived for the last forty years of his life, devoting himself to his painting and his gardens. I’d been putting off my visit to Giverny, waiting for the perfect day: one with a breeze, when sun and shadow would play across the surface of Monet’s Japanese water garden, just as it had when he painted it.
Such a day arrived at the end of May. A perfect day for Giverny, I thought the instant I saw the fast-moving, slightly overcast sky through my window. Wonderful as the streets of Paris were, I longed for the countryside, for the fertile smell of the earth and the feel of grass beneath my