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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