Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [84]
A sense of discomfort followed my reprisal of the movie’s romance-fantasy plot. The sad truth, no, the pathetic truth, was that it struck too close to home. It was not a scenario I wanted to examine in detail. Not now, anyway.
Three days had passed since I’d left Milan with a group of travelers. After Venice, our first stop, we were headed for Tuscany, Umbria, and the Amalfi Coast. Of the sixteen people traveling together, all but three—myself and two other women—were traveling with a partner of one sort or another. Our guide was a smart, formidable Australian woman who had lived in Italy for many years. She was also tall, an attribute that proved to be almost as valuable as her fluent Italian. When separated from the group by crowds or a tendency to malinger at a shop window, her long neck and elegant head bobbing above the thronging tourists proved a reliable compass.
We had traveled by train from Milan to Venice, stopping over in Verona for lunch. In Verona, by pure chance, I sat at a table with the three people who would become my closest pals on the trip: Marta and Bernie, a middle-aged married couple from Connecticut; and Vivian, a writer from New York whose husband had died two years earlier. Vivian was, as the French like to say, a woman of a certain age. Although I became close to Marta, Bernie, and Vivian, it did not follow that we were a foursome. My friendship with Marta and Bernie existed separately from my relationship with Vivian and, as the trip progressed, each had its own dynamic.
Marta, a short dark-haired woman with a quick, intelligent face and an acerbic wit, was amazingly well-read. She also was overweight; so much so that it sometimes physically slowed her down. Her husband, Bernie, was also quick-witted and well-read. I liked being around them. They obviously enjoyed one another’s company and were respectful of their differences. I was impressed that Bernie, energetic and always ready to go, showed no impatience when Marta was unable to keep up. When such a situation arose, Bernie, in subtle ways, saw to it that his wife did not feel left out or self-conscious. Relaxed in both attitude and attire, Marta and Bernie seemed living examples of the what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach to life.
Vivian, on the other hand, was always perfectly turned out. Even racing to catch a train in the morning, Vivian was an exemplar of exquisite grooming and detailed accessorizing. In appearance and philosophy, Vivian was a true romantic. She believed in and was motivated by the idea of keeping romance alive in a marriage or relationship. To her this meant never allowing your significant other to see you if you were not coiffed and looking your best.
“Men want to see the finished product,” she told me, “not the work in progress.”
I could only imagine the enormous effort required by this approach but, according to Vivian, it kept alive the romance in her marriage until the very end. Professionally, Vivian put the same philosophy to use. She wrote romantic novels—a genre not to be confused with romance novels of the bodice-ripping kind.
But for all her attention to matters of appearance, in the end it was not color-coordinated outfits or attentive grooming that defined Vivian. She was a novelist, after all, and what interested her most—after the feats of self-adornment had been gotten out of the way—were other people’s stories. In conversation, she was surprisingly adept at asking the kind of unexpected question capable of teasing out a person’s intimate feelings.
“Are you in love?” Vivian asked me on our second night together in Venice. We were having dinner, the group that is, on a beautiful