Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [77]
One afternoon, after a trip to Harrods where Naohiro bought a watch for his daughter, we passed a movie house that was showing Strictly Ballroom. I had already told him about Barry and my night of dancing at Oxford. To my surprise, he seemed quite interested, asking questions about the difficulties of various dances. In Japan, he told me, ballroom dancing was considered rather exotic.
“Why don’t we go in and see the movie?” I asked Naohiro suddenly. “I saw it before going up to Oxford and it’s just wonderful. Funny and touching and … well, it’s just wonderful.”
Without hesitating, he agreed.
For the next two hours we sat together in the dark theater laughing and rooting for the “good guy” dancer to win the dance contest. When we stumbled out into the late afternoon light, I was exhilarated and happy. Naohiro’s mood seemed to match mine exactly.
That night, Naohiro and I danced together for the first time. After seeing the movie, I had told him of my first evening in Paris; of watching a young couple dance under the paulownia trees in the place Furstemberg, oblivious to everything but each other. And I told him of how seeing them stirred up memories of my high school prom and the last slow dance with the boy I had a hopeless crush on.
“What does this mean, the last slow dance?” Naohiro asked. “It sounds sad.”
I didn’t quite know how to answer him. In a way, the last slow dance was sad. I tried to tell him about the custom at high school dances of ending the evening by announcing the last slow dance. “In some way,” I said, “it’s what everyone’s been waiting for all evening. The chance to release all that pent-up teenage emotion by holding the other person in your arms.”
“We have nothing like that in Japan,” he said. “But perhaps we could turn on the radio and you could teach me this last slow dance.”
We turned on the radio. The sound of Fred Astaire singing “The Way You Look Tonight” filled the room. Naohiro held out his arms. I entered them. We danced, our cheeks touching. He was an excellent dancer. I closed my eyes, lost in the music and the feel of Naohiro’s arms around me. It was the high school prom all over again. Only much better.
When the music stopped, Naohiro said, “That was not sad at all. It was a very good last slow dance, was it not?”
“The best last slow dance of my life.”
“Well, then, we should make a habit of doing the last slow dance each time we meet,” he said.
An hour after arriving at the hotel in Milan I had unpacked and was ready to hit the streets. I needed a destination and had picked Milan’s most famous attraction: the Duomo, a huge wedding cake of a cathedral, with 135 spires and over 3,100 statues. I marked on the map the location of my hotel; then the location of the Duomo. I drew a red arrow between the two. Maybe I’d get there and maybe I wouldn’t; that was beside the point. What mattered was that when I stepped out of my hotel I knew which way to turn. Once I did that, the flow of the city would carry me along. Perhaps even to the Duomo.
Outside, the rain had stopped and the sun was struggling to break through the clouds. The busy street that ran past the hotel was not very inviting; its gray buildings, mostly offices with a few banks and dreary coffee shops scattered between, depressed me. But I continued to walk, turning one corner and then another and then another. At the last turn I found the Milan that spoke my name.
Before me, at the center of four tree-lined streets, was a small green park, where two young women were walking, pushing babies in their strollers. An old man sat reading the newspaper. Children ran up and down the paths, their high-pitched voices shrieking in delight. A woman sold gelato from a stand, filling the cups with pale green pistachio ice. I bought some.
It was then I heard it; the sound of a tram rumbling around the corner, its clang clang clang as familiar to me as Grandmother’s voice calling