Free Without Reservations by Alice Steinbach Page B

was always there, in the backs of our minds. Far off in the distance and unlikely, but there nonetheless. After such talks we always parted with the promise that, when the time came, we’d buy a large house and move in together.
    It was Anne’s first visit to Paris in ten years. She and her husband had celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday by staying a week at the romantic L’Hôtel on the Left Bank. They had divorced three years after the Paris trip. She had no children.
    I told her that it had been almost ten years since I had visited Paris.
    “It’s changed a lot, don’t you think?” she said. “And not for the better.” Now she found Paris too crowded and the food not as good as she remembered. Even the most beautiful square in all of Paris—the place des Vosges—had diminished in her eyes.
    “I wonder if it’s really Paris that’s changed,” I said, “or if it’s us.”
    Anne shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve changed that much at all.” Something about the way she said it suggested she considered this an accomplishment. And perhaps for her it was.
    Anne told me she was anxious to get back to Los Angeles and her work. She’d been gone for almost three weeks and was beginning to feel nervous about her absence from the action. “Out of sight, out of mind,” she said, explaining how competitive it was in the film industry. She asked me how long I intended to stay in Paris.
    When I told her that I was on a leave of absence from my job as a newspaper reporter, she shook her head in disbelief and, I thought, disapproval. “But don’t you worry about what could happen to your job while you’re gone?” she asked. “If I did that I’d practically have to start all over again.”
    Her attitude annoyed me, although I didn’t know why. Perhaps it aroused my own fears of losing my place at work.
    Then, to my complete surprise, Anne said, “It’s a bold thing to do. But maybe you’re used to doing bold things.”
    I assured her I was not. But her remark secretly pleased me. It was the way I wanted to be seen, if only mistakenly so.
    The thought put me in a good mood. I turned to Anne. “You know what I’d like to do? I’d like to go to the Ritz bar and have a drink.”
    “I’m up for that,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to get a look at the inside of the Ritz.”
    As we walked out of the café, we saw the woman in the gold lamé shorts sitting at a table, surrounded by admirers. She was smoking acigarette through a long silver holder and signing autographs for the German tourists, the dog perched on her lap. Who did she imagine herself to be? Marlene Dietrich? Edith Piaf? Was that the image that sustained her when she examined the realities of her life?
    It made me wonder: who did I imagine myself to be? Since arriving in Paris, I was less sure of the answer. Yes, of course, I was still a mother and a reporter and a person who missed her friends. But from time to time I seemed to glimpse another woman trailing along behind me. I noticed this woman was quite curious about everything, and adventurous to the point of going alone to the free wine-and-cheese art gallery openings held on Thursday nights along the rue de Seine. And as if that weren’t daring enough, one day she inquired at a
salon de beauté
about tinting her hair from brown to the color of a bright copper penny.

    Anne was dressed for the Ritz. I was not. So we hailed a taxi and stopped off at my hotel, where I changed into a white silk blouse and navy crepe pants.
    At the Ritz we ordered martinis. Anne made a toast. “To Hemingway,” she said, “who opened up the Ritz Bar on the day of Paris’s liberation in 1944.”
    I responded: “To Proust, who always wore lavender gloves when he visited the Ritz.”
    We went on to toast Coco Chanel, who had lived at the hotel, and were about to raise our glasses to Colette—for no reason other than being Colette—when a man approached us. An American who’d overheard our