Without Reservations (28 page)

W
hen the plane landed at Malpensa airport outside Milan, the pilot’s voice announced brightly that the ground temperature was a “mild” 78 degrees. No mention was made, however, of the rain that pelted the windows, or the wind that caught the rivulets of water in midstream, blowing them sideways across the glass. This omission did not surprise me. It is a truth universally acknowledged by those in the travel business that less is more when it comes to imparting bad-weather news to tourists. If this was not true, most travelers would ignore the guidebooks and, regardless of destination, simply pack three things: rainwear, a down parka, and clothing made of tropical see-through mesh fabric.

This was my first trip to Milan. It was also my first encounter with Malpensa airport. I whispered the name to myself:
Malpensa.
It was a forbidding name, I thought, one that summoned up Edgar Allan Poe. Or Bram Stoker, the man who created the strange, dark world of Count Dracula. My intuition was right. Malpensa turned out to be the Transylvania of airports: a place of such twists and turns that conceivably an innocent tourist might arrive only to disappear and never be heard from again.

All airports, of course, present the weary traveler with any number of obstacles; but the frustration mounts when a language barrier is added to the mix. Foolishly, I had counted on the Italian classes taken twenty-five years earlier to get me through the basics.
Too late I remembered that the sole purpose of all those classes was to foster a deeper appreciation for Italian opera. So unless I was prepared to stop a porter and say:
Such sweet warmth runs through my veins
, or,
I cannot tell if your cheerful mood is real or not
—words I seemed to recall as being from Donizetti’s
L’Elisir d’Amore
—I was totally out of the conversational loop.

It was hot, humid, and crowded in the airport. It was also incredibly busy, with long lines waiting at every ticket counter and information desk. I needed some directions but couldn’t bear the thought of standing in line. I was a tired, perspiring woman wearing a coat suited for upper Norway and I wanted out. It was time to turn to my secret weapon: a small glossary of useful phrases in Italian and English.

What I needed to know was where to catch a bus I’d been told about, one that would take me into Milan for one-third the cost of a taxi. I flipped through the section on travel. The closest thing I could find was
A che ora parte il treno?
“At what time does the train leave?” It wasn’t perfect but I could work with it. I stopped a man who looked like an airport employee, figuring that I would change the word “train” to “bus” and then ask him to point out the direction. “A
che ore parte il bus-o?
” I asked, throwing in for good measure the extra Italian-sounding
o.

The man in the cap stared at me. For some reason I repeated my question in English, saying “Where is the departing bus,
per favore?”
He stared again. Then he walked off. Similar inquiries produced similar results. Determined to find my way out of the airport, I moved into a stream of arriving travelers who seemed to know where they were going. I followed them straight to the bus. Their tour bus. Which was headed for Lake Como. I stood there in the rain and watched it pull away.

Buck up, I told myself. If Freya Stark can raft down the Euphrates River at the age of eighty-six, I ought to be able to find my way from the airport into Milan.

And sure enough, just thinking of Freya encouraged me to carry on. A minute later I spotted a taxi and, as though divinely inspired, I opened the door and jumped right in.

The taxi ride from Malpensa to my hotel in Milan took over an hour. Most of that time I’d practiced saying, sotto voce, the Italian words I would need to ask the fare at journey’s end.
“Quanto costa, per favore?”
I said over and over again. It seemed simple enough. And it was. The driver understood perfectly what I meant and proceeded to answer me in Italian. Naturally I hadn’t a clue as to what he was saying. A porter came to my rescue. “The fare, Signora, is 172,000 lire,” he told me, picking up my bags.

A six-figure fare for a taxi ride! Trying to hide my alarm, I got out my currency converter. It was bad. But not as bad as I thought. Without tip the fare was $95. With tip it came to about twenty dollars less than I was paying for my hotel room. Worth every lire, I thought, just to get out of Malpensa.

I had chosen to stay in a big, modern, chain hotel that catered to foreign businesspeople. Recommended to me by one of the few people I know who’d actually spent a night in Milan—most of my friends cited Milan as a city that was “too industrial, too commercial,” bypassing it for Florence or Venice—the hotel had offered a special promotional rate. I took it immediately, knowing how expensive a city Milan is.

It was busy inside, the lobby buzzing with the voices of men
wearing business suits and women in chic outfits speaking the language of business. No tourists here. Although it was not what the French would call a
hôtel de charme
, I liked the looks of it. For one thing, it seemed exactly like all the chain hotels I’d ever stayed in. And given my language deficits and the fact that Milan was a complete cipher to me, it offered exactly what I needed: familiarity.

That’s when I noticed something unusual taking place in the hotel. Bridal gowns—racks and racks of bouffant white dresses and tulle veils—were being rolled into a large area just inside the entrance. I watched as a small, excitable man speaking in rapid Italian directed the operation. Each time a hotel guest passed by, he gestured dramatically to the racks, saying loudly, first in Italian, then English:
“Attenzione!
Look out!”

“What’s going on?” I asked a porter standing nearby. He explained they were setting up a bridal trade show, one scheduled to open the next day. I watched a few minutes more, then left for my room. When I stepped off the elevator I walked into a blizzard of white bridal gowns. The doors to almost every room along the corridor were open and inside I could see rows of silky beaded gowns being arranged for display. A dummy wearing an ivory dress of heavy embroidered silk with huge puffy sleeves stood in the hallway, an island of serenity amid a stream of workmen and seamstresses scurrying about. It led me to wonder if the excellent rate I was paying had anything to do with my room being situated in the middle of
Brideshead Revisited.

Actually, I rather liked it, the activity and excitement generated by all these people bustling around with their beautiful merchandise. Instead of going straight to my room, a solitary guest in a large hotel, I saw an opportunity to hang about and be a part of the festivities.

I wheeled my suitcase past more racks hung with creamy satin
gowns, stopping in front of my room. I unlocked the door and stepped inside. It was dark and stuffy. After opening the curtains and raising a window, I sat down on the bed and looked around. It was a perfectly adequate room, the kind I often stayed in when I was on the road, reporting a story for the newspaper. It suits my mood, I thought, although I wasn’t sure what my mood was. Then I suddenly caught sight of myself in the mirror opposite the bed. What I saw was a woman who looked a little lost; a woman who looked as though she were missing someone. Which I was. I was missing Naohiro.

I sat on the bed thinking about the three days we’d spent together in London. After an unexpected business trip to Paris, Naohiro had stopped in London to see me. He was on his way back to Tokyo. I had just finished my course at Oxford and, although I hadn’t planned on returning to London, the prospect of seeing him sooner than we had planned was an unexpected gift. But the thought of meeting Naohiro again made me nervous. On the train from Oxford to London my head buzzed with questions. What if Paris had been a fluke? What if we met and one of us—or both, for that matter—felt nothing? Had I been wrong in feeling that Naohiro and I had connected in some deep way? The closer I got to London, the more nervous I became.

As if to summon up his presence, I pulled out from my travel case one of the letters he’d written me and began reading it. By the end of the first page—a very amusing description of his encounter in Paris with two French students who insisted on speaking to him in beginner’s-level Chinese—I was laughing out loud. I had forgotten how sharp a sense of humor Naohiro had, and how despite our cultural differences we found many of the same things funny. By the time the train reached London I had read two more of his letters. They were the perfect antidote to my anxiety, I thought, hurrying
off the train, eager to meet the man I’d unearthed again in his written thoughts.

Still, when I met Naohiro for lunch a few hours later, some of my nervousness had returned. He was already seated when I arrived at the restaurant. Immediately he rose and walked toward me. Watching him gracefully thread his way between the tables, I realized there was no need to wonder any longer if I would still find him attractive. My big worry now was: would
he
still find
me
attractive?

Suddenly Naohiro was standing in front of me. For a minute or two we stood face-to-face, not speaking. Naohiro broke the silence.

“It is good to see you again,” he said, bowing his head slightly. Then he moved closer. “You are well, I hope.”

“I am. And you? Did things go well for you in Paris?”

“Yes, I am happy to say. But not as well as they did the last time I was in Paris.”

I looked at his face, trying to figure out if he meant what I hoped he meant. I decided to test the waters. “And when was that visit?” I asked.

“It was on the occasion of
Les cinq jours de l’Objet Extraordinaire.”
Naohiro paused. “I believe you were in Paris at the same time, were you not?”

“Yes, but I seem to remember many more days than five that were extraordinary.”

He laughed. “So do I.”

For the next three days Naohiro and I wandered through London like happy children: stopping to eat when we were hungry, popping
into a shop or gallery that drew our interest, exploring the storybook houses in the tiny mews that dot London, and riding, with no particular destination in mind, the red double-decker buses.

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.