Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [24]
We sat at the table and talked. We talked about family and friends. About ex-husbands and the pleasures and trials of being single. About the excitement of Paris. We laughed and interrupted each other and exchanged wry congratulations on how gracefully we both were aging.
Finally I asked Susan about her decision to remain in Paris. “I don’t know all the reasons why,” she said. “Mostly I think I felt I’d outgrown my life in Washington. Not my friends—I still miss them. But every day I would get up and do exactly what I’d been doing for twenty years. And one day I just didn’t want to do that anymore.” She paused. “And then when I got to Paris, I fell in love.”
So that was it, I thought: a man. Cherchez l’homme.
“Not with a man,” Susan said, as if reading my thoughts, “but with Paris. With the life here.”
I was curious about Susan’s new job, which I knew, in terms of money and prestige, was several notches below her Washington one. True, she was successful in her new profession as a commercial artist but in letters to me she’d described herself as someone who still loved her work but was no longer obsessed with it. This was quite a change.
When I first met her, Susan was the most openly ambitious of all my friends; a woman who made no attempt to hide the fact that, after her daughter, work was her life. But even then I suspected that Susan, like me, occasionally found herself reversing the order, putting her work before her family obligations. At least temporarily.
Certainly it was true for me. In my most honest moments I recognized that earlier in my career, when the push to success was all uphill, my own children had sometimes taken a back seat to my work. Or, more bluntly, to my ambition.
Now, here we were, sitting in Paris, two women who had seemed to be on some kind of straight track to a planned destination but now found themselves somewhere else. “Do you remember those early days?” I asked her. “How naive we were? And how ambitious?” I laughed. “It’s almost embarrassing to think about.”
“Well, I’m still ambitious,” Susan said. “Just in a different way. And I suspect you are, too.”
She was right. I was still filled with ambition. More mellow, perhaps, but ambition nevertheless.
We sat talking about how your expectations change when you move into your fifties: about work, about love, and about a future that didn’t seem as endless as it once did. At a certain point in one’s working life, Susan and I agreed, the question becomes: what ultimately is one working toward? Personal achievement? Contentment? Wisdom? Retirement?
“For me, it’s finally all about the work and nothing else,” I said. “Not money or prestige.” I made a face. “Although I wouldn’t mind a bit more money.”
Near the end of our conversation Susan asked: “What is the one emotion that you would like to feel for the rest of your life?”
I thought about it for a few minutes. “Hope,” I said. “With it, I guess anything’s possible. But without it …” My voice trailed off. I suddenly had thought of Naohiro. Hope? Or no hope? It occurred to me to tell Susan about him, but I didn’t. Something inside me wanted to protect the relationship from outside opinions or advice. At least for a while.
I looked at my watch; it was almost two. I rose to go, telling Susan how much fun it was to see her again. We hugged and said good-bye, promising to get together for dinner the following week.
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