Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [3]
I arrived at the decision to take a leave of absence in January of 1993. With great anxiety I approached my editor and told him what I’d like to do. Within days I had his approval; we agreed I would leave in April and return the following January. I was elated. Then it hit me: I had no real plan for all the free time now available to me. Except for the first stop. In some unspoken way I’d known all along that I would begin my new life in Paris.
“Why Paris?” friends asked. “Why not?” I would reply breezily, reluctant to reveal the truth. The truth was that I was pursuing a fantasy—the fantasy of living in a small hotel on the Left Bank just as my journalistic idol, Janet Flanner, had done. From 1925 to 1975, Flanner’s famous “Letter from Paris” appeared in The New Yorker. The pieces, now collected in book form, still stand as small masterpieces of intelligence and style; like many writers, I studied them as a painter does Cézanne. For years I had wanted to walk, book in hand, through the streets and into the cafés Flanner described so vividly. Now I was about to do it.
But after Paris, what? I wanted to keep my plans flexible, but not so loose that I was just wandering aimlessly about. After thinking it over, I came up with two ground rules. One: I did not want to flit from place to place; I wanted to stay a while in the places I chose to visit. And two: my agenda would not include exotic locales. This allowed me to immediately rule out such places as Las Vegas and Katmandu. I reasoned that while part of my goal was to see if I still had the skills—and the nerve—to make it in a new setting, some kind of cultural connection was necessary.
For the next several weeks I pieced together a list of possibilities from clippings, articles, and guidebooks I’d collected. Several places in England and Scotland were on the list. So was almost every region in Italy, from the Veneto to Campania. At one point I considered spending all my time, after leaving Paris, in Italy. But when I came across an article in my travel file on a course given at Oxford on the history of the English village and another on traveling by train through the Scottish Highlands, I abandoned the all-Italy plan. I also moved two of my initial “Possibilities”—Ireland and Provence—into a lesser category headed: “Possible Possibilities.”
In the end I left Baltimore with a hotel booked in Paris, an apartment almost secured in London, a place reserved in the Oxford course, and a room of my own on a Scottish sheep farm. The rest, I figured, would be negotiated as opportunities presented themselves.
But even the slightest of plans can go awry. Life intruded while I was away, more than once. On my way to Scotland, word came of the sudden death of a beloved sister-in-law, and I returned to Baltimore for her funeral. Later, another urgent family matter caused a change in my plans. Life’s like that, I told myself on a sad plane trip back to Italy: with awesome impersonality it ambushes us, changing our lives and the lives of those we love in an instant.
Of course, on the day I arrived in Paris to begin my leave, I knew nothing of what lay ahead, good or bad. All I knew was a feeling of utter astonishment at finding myself in a small hotel on the Left Bank of the world’s most beautiful city.
It was from this hotel, at the end of my first week, that I wrote the simple truth of what I had been seeking:
Last night on the way home from a concert at Sainte-Chapelle, I stopped on the Pont Royal to watch the moon struggle through a cloudy night sky. From the bridge my eyes followed the lights of a tourist boat as it moved like a glowworm across the water. Here in Paris, I have no agenda; here I can fall into step with whatever rhythm presents itself. I had forgotten how wonderful it is to stand on a bridge and catch the scent of rain in the air. I had forgotten how much I need to be a part of water, wind,