Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [25]
The sun came out. It filtered down through the leaves, creating a playful pattern of light and shade that danced before my eyes. The air smelled of lilies of the valley. As I walked beneath the canopy of trees, wrapped in the delicate fragrance, caution fell away. It didn’t matter that I had no idea which street led to the place du Tertre or to my Métro stop. Destination no longer ruled. My only map was that of free association: I would follow each street only as long as it interested me and then, on a whim, choose a new direction.
Such was my happiness that only my poorly accented French prevented me from saying to a formidable-looking woman sweeping down her sidewalk, Très jolie, madame!
A chilly morning had turned into a warm, humid afternoon and the tourists crowding Montmartre’s streets looked wilted. It was time, I decided, to slip into a café for a cool drink.
From the outside, the café on rue Saint-Rustique looked quiet and slightly mysterious. When I peered through the door I could make out very little in the dark interior. Although I had seen a number of bright, lively outdoor cafés along the way, somehow the slightly dangerous look of this place attracted me.
I stepped inside and stood near the door, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. It was cool, and the smell of beer hung pleasantly in the air. Squinting, I saw a long bar to my right and beyond that a large room. Music spilled out of it: the sound of an accordion and the voice of a woman singing. Probably a jukebox, I thought, heading toward the sound. But the music was not from a record.
Standing there on a tiny stage, dressed in gold lamé shorts, a top hat, and tails, was a heavily made-up woman singing in French to an inattentive group of beer-drinking German tourists. The woman in the gold lamé shorts appeared to be in her early forties. Her hair was dyed the color of a marigold, and two deep lines placed her Cupid’s-bow mouth between parentheses. A small dog, almost obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke in the café, sat near the stage, patiently watching her every move, his ears cocked to the sound of her voice.
“I love Paris in the springtime,” sang the woman into a microphone, “I love Paris in the fall.” Her voice rose and fell dramatically as she moved across the stage, a small figure caught in an unflattering, blue-white spotlight. I looked at my watch. It was after three. In Baltimore, I’d be sitting in the cluttered newsroom at the paper, drinking bad coffee and writing my Thursday column. I thought of my friends back at their desks, phones ringing, rushing to meet their deadlines, agonizing over a lead for their stories. Suddenly that life seemed strange to me. Being in a café in Paris in the middle of the afternoon did not.
From the bar I spotted a woman sitting alone at a table. I pointed to the empty chair next to her and she motioned back that I could sit there. The woman, who was drinking wine and smoking a Gauloise, looked very French. Dressed in a pleated skirt and tailored white blouse, a black-and-white silk scarf artfully arranged around her neck, she epitomized the kind of simple elegance I associated with the women of Paris. I was surprised when she spoke to me in English.
“I see you’re American, too,” she said. I turned toward her, wondering how she had identified me as an American. She seemed to know what I was thinking, and glanced down at my feet. I followed her gaze. She was looking at my black leather Reeboks, which, we both knew, were not the sort of shoes any Frenchwoman over the age of thirty would ever wear.
“Only in America,” she said, smiling.
We fell into conversation.