Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach Read Free Book Online

watched them thread their way between the small tables. My eyes followed the black hat with its tiny green bird caged in tulle until it disappeared.

    I stayed on at La Villa until almost midnight, losing myself in the supple gymnastics of great jazz. Just as I was about to leave, a saxophonist started playing “How High the Moon.”
    The sound started off slow, almost like a love song, then the drummer weighed in with his steel brushes, coming in softly just behind the beat, then moving into a big sound along with the saxophone until the whole place was jiving. In the middle of all this, a figure ran across the years to meet me:
    It is my twenty-year-old self and she is back in New York, sitting in Birdland, listening to Charlie Parker. Next to her is Will, an artist and the man she loved. Or thought she loved. How young they both look. And how fearless. I’d forgotten how fearless she was, this young, laughing woman whose head is tilted toward her companion, just as Liliane’s had been.
    But then my twenty-year-old self leans back and I see something else in her face, something similar to what I’d seen earlier in Liliane’s: an anxious look that telegraphs a willingness to be whatever the man sitting next to her wants her to be. Even if it means betraying her own needs.
    How easy it was, still, to conjure up those old feelings. Not just for Will, but for all the boyfriends and lovers that I’d reinvented myself for in the name of love. Along the way I’d made some bad choices when it came to men. And a few good ones.
    For some reason, I thought of Colette; wise, resilient Colette, who knew about “that lightheartedness which comes to a woman when the peril of men has left her.” I never interpreted Colette’s observation as meaning she thought women would be better off without men. What I took it to mean was: women would be better off when they no longer needed men more than they needed their own independent identities.
    It came to me then, sitting at La Villa, that it had been a long while since I’d thought of love as the center of my life. The peril of men, it seemed, had left me some years back. I no longer believed that romantic love had the power to shape or transform me. My life had a shape, one that suited me just fine.
    When I arrived back at the hotel, the night manager handed me, along with my room key, a telephone message from Liliane. I climbed the stairs to my room and sat on the bed reading Liliane’s words: “Please forgive Justin’s rudeness. He was not feeling well. I’ll call before I leave Paris.”
    I thought again about the look on Liliane’s face that night; that anxious look that says no price is too high to pay if it means not being alone. I thought of my own slow conversion to independence, of how long a time it took me after my divorce to understand that being alone is not the same as being lonely.
    But I also thought of the twinge of envy I’d felt earlier in the day about Liliane’s attractiveness to men. There was pleasure in that, too; in being the focus of a man’s attention.
    As I soon would be reminded in my unexpected encounter with a man named Naohiro.

3
A T S AINTE -C HAPELLE
    Dear Alice
,
    There is a certain mysterious quality about Paris that I find in no other city. Paris, it seems, has her hidden, secret places. Walk down any street in the city and you will see the huge wooden gates with peeling green paint that separate the passerby from the lush courtyards and elegant mansions inside. Paris guards her inner beauty from the casual observer. To find it one
must look beyond the façades. It is true of people also, I think: their spirits exist behind their façades, beyond their words.
    Love, Alice
    I  met Naohiro on the train to Giverny. I’d noticed him earlier at the St.-Lazare station, buying a ticket: a slim, attractive man, elegantly dressed completely in black except for a white sweater thrown across his shoulders. He was Asian; Japanese, I thought,