Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [27]
It made me wonder: who did I imagine myself to be? Since arriving in Paris, I was less sure of the answer. Yes, of course, I was still a mother and a reporter and a person who missed her friends. But from time to time I seemed to glimpse another woman trailing along behind me. I noticed this woman was quite curious about everything, and adventurous to the point of going alone to the free wine-and-cheese art gallery openings held on Thursday nights along the rue de Seine. And as if that weren’t daring enough, one day she inquired at a salon de beauté about tinting her hair from brown to the color of a bright copper penny.
Anne was dressed for the Ritz. I was not. So we hailed a taxi and stopped off at my hotel, where I changed into a white silk blouse and navy crepe pants.
At the Ritz we ordered martinis. Anne made a toast. “To Hemingway,” she said, “who opened up the Ritz Bar on the day of Paris’s liberation in 1944.”
I responded: “To Proust, who always wore lavender gloves when he visited the Ritz.”
We went on to toast Coco Chanel, who had lived at the hotel, and were about to raise our glasses to Colette—for no reason other than being Colette—when a man approached us. An American who’d overheard our distinctly non-French accents, he invited us to join his group for a glass of champagne.
The group consisted of three married couples from California who were on their way to Egypt for two weeks of sightseeing. The women spoke of their eagerness to tour the Egyptian monuments and sail the Nile. The men, looking at their watches, spoke of calling their stockbrokers back in California. Paris was a one-day rest stop for them; they had spent most of the day shopping along the rue du Faubourg St.-Honoré.
The Californians were pleasant people who genuinely seemed to enjoy traveling as a group. That impressed me. “I guess I’m too selfish to travel well with other people,” I told Anne later. “Except for my sons, I’d rather travel alone.”
Somehow a journey taken alone seemed more of an adventure to me. Had I been traveling with a companion, I thought, I probably would not have met Anne or been here at the Ritz sharing a drink with the Californians.
“I envy you, your traveling alone for so long a time,” said one of the women in the group, breaking into my thoughts. But she said it in a low voice, while the others were engaged in conversation, as though she didn’t want them to hear.
“And I envy you,” I replied, “for being able to find so much pleasure traveling in the company of others.”
She seemed puzzled by this. “It’s funny,” she said, “but I never thought of it that way.”
At about 9:00 P.M. Anne and I left the Ritz. It was a fine evening with still about an hour’s light remaining. The sky over the place Vendôme was beautiful: pale blue, very high and filled with fast-moving white clouds. We said our good-byes in front of the Ritz and parted—Anne to her hotel a few streets away on the Right Bank and I to mine on the Left Bank. I decided to walk the mile or so back to my hotel, so I headed for the rue de Rivoli, about five blocks away. Halfway there I passed the Lotti, where, early in my marriage, I had stayed with my husband. On an impulse I decided to go in.
My only memory of the hotel was of the massive, antique furniture in our room, a room I had found dark and oppressive. Now, standing in the lobby, I could retrieve no other memories. It was as though I’d never been there before. I took comfort in the fact that, while the memories, along with the marriage, did not survive, the relationship did. After a few years of working out our post-divorce anger, we became loyal friends, my ex-husband and I.
From the Lotti I walked the half-block to the rue de Rivoli. The arcaded shopping street was bustling with tourists, who stopped to price the Rolex watches and fake Gucci handbags displayed in the windows. A few stopped to give money to the North