Free Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach Page A

Squinting, I saw a long bar to my right and beyond that a large room. Music spilled out of it: the sound of an accordion and the voice of a woman singing. Probably a jukebox, I thought, heading toward the sound. But the music was not from a record.
    Standing there on a tiny stage, dressed in gold lamé shorts, a top hat, and tails, was a heavily made-up woman singing in French to an inattentive group of beer-drinking German tourists. The woman in the gold lamé shorts appeared to be in her early forties. Her hair was dyed the color of a marigold, and two deep lines placed her Cupid’s-bow mouth between parentheses. A small dog, almost obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke in the café, sat near the stage, patiently watching her every move, his ears cocked to the sound of her voice.
    “I love Paris in the springtime,” sang the woman into a microphone, “I love Paris in the fall.” Her voice rose and fell dramatically as she moved across the stage, a small figure caught in an unflattering, blue-white spotlight. I looked at my watch. It was after three. In Baltimore, I’d be sitting in the cluttered newsroom at the paper, drinking bad coffee and writing my Thursday column. I thought of my friends back at their desks, phones ringing, rushing to meet their deadlines, agonizing over a lead for their stories. Suddenly that life seemed strange to me. Being in a café in Paris in the middle of the afternoon did not.
    From the bar I spotted a woman sitting alone at a table. I pointed to the empty chair next to her and she motioned back that I could sit there. The woman, who was drinking wine and smoking a Gauloise, looked very French. Dressed in a pleated skirt and tailored white blouse, a black-and-white silk scarf artfully arranged around her neck, she epitomized the kind of simple elegance I associated with the women of Paris. I was surprised when she spoke to me in English.
    “I see you’re American, too,” she said. I turned toward her, wondering how she had identified me as an American. She seemed to know what I was thinking, and glanced down at my feet. I followed her gaze. She was looking at my black leather Reeboks, which, we both knew, were not the sort of shoes any Frenchwoman over the age of thirty would ever wear.
    “Only in America,” she said, smiling.
    We fell into conversation. Her name was Anne. She was a film producer from Los Angeles who, after a business trip to Cannes, had decided to spend a few days in Paris. Anne had some interesting observations about Frenchwomen.
    “Have you noticed how affectionate they are toward one another?” she asked. In fact, I had. It was not unusual for Frenchwomento walk along the street, arms linked, heads tilted together in close conversation. In cafés, they greeted each other with kisses and parted with embraces. I liked the way they were able to express affection without being self-conscious about it.
    I told Anne about the sad-looking middle-aged woman who performed on the street across from Deux Magots, the legendary Saint-Germain-des-Prés café. Small crowds would gather around her while she danced the can-can, wearing a black-and-gold dress, short black boots, and a cheap red wig fashioned into a topknot. Stark white makeup covered her sagging face; her mouth was a slash of purple. Midway through the performance, when she stopped to change from boots to high-heeled silver sandals, you could see the bandages wrapped around her swollen feet and toes.
    “It’s a hard way to make a living,” I said. “I found it painful to watch.”
    Anne nodded. “It’s a bit too close to what all women fear deep down, isn’t it?” she said. “Especially single women.”
    I knew what she meant. It was the fear that, through bad luck or illness or having no one to lean on, a woman might wind up alone and poor. I’d discussed this fear with my friends. Of course we always laughed when we talked about it. But the image of ourselves as old women living in a rundown hotel