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Confession: somewhere in our forties, we became people who say no. Not to anything that mattered. To the second glass. To the ten o’clock table when a seven o’clock one was free. To the friend passing through who wanted to keep going after the others had gone to bed. We said it gently, to each other, the way a couple agrees on which coat to pack — and every no arrived dressed as wisdom. We had learned to travel beautifully. Lake-view rooms, unhurried mornings, the spa slot booked before the flight. It was lovely. I would not give a single one of those mornings back. But somewhere in all that loveliness a small door had swung quietly shut, and neither of us had heard the click.
I noticed it the night we nearly didn’t go to Montreux.
A friend — the one who never got sensible — sent a photograph of a poster and three words underneath. This is yours. The Montreux Jazz Festival, sixtieth edition, opening the third of July on the shore of Lake Geneva, back in its renovated home after years away. On the bill, buried among names I didn’t know, was one we did: someone we had worn thin on a shared pair of headphones twenty years ago, in the months when swapping songs was how we were learning each other. My husband read the message over my shoulder and we did the thing we do now. We began, warmly and fluently, to talk ourselves out of it.
The late nights. The crowds. The early flight the week after. Neither of us could remember the last festival we’d stood at — something before the children, in another decade, in another country. “We’re not really festival people anymore,” one of us said, and the other laughed, because it was true, and because it was the kind of true that had crept up on us without permission.
We went anyway. I told myself it was for work — that I would write it up for World Travel Magazine, notebook out, describing the famous acoustics and the lake and the sixty years of history. I brought the notebook. I want to tell you it was useful.
The Swiss Riviera does not prepare you for how tender it is. I had filed Switzerland under clean, correct, a little cool. Nobody had mentioned the Lavaux vineyards falling in green stone terraces straight into the water, or the Alps standing across the lake in a soft blue that changes its mind by the hour, or the way Montreux curls along the shore like a town arranged by someone who understood exactly what light does to water in July. From our balcony at the Fairmont Le Montreux Palace — a great belle époque hotel that has watched this festival happen since its very first summer — we stood and looked at the mountains, clear and close across the lake, and admitted the first small thing to each other. This alone. This would have been enough.
But the festival is not on a field behind a fence, which is what I had braced for. It is on the water. The stages line the promenade, some grand, some small enough to feel like someone’s front room, and the lake is never more than a few steps from your shoulder. We walked in holding hands, which we had not done in a crowd in years, mostly because we didn’t know what else to do with them.
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Here is the sentence I keep. Somewhere in the second hour, during the song we had not heard in fifteen years, he turned to me — not to say anything, only to check that I was hearing it too — and I understood, all at once, what a long marriage is quietly starving for. Not romance. Witness. Someone standing beside you at the exact moment the music does the thing it does, so that later you will not have to explain it, because they were there, and they felt the floor of their chest give way at the same instant yours did.
That is the feeling I had forgotten. Not youth, exactly, though I did feel absurdly, accurately twenty-five. It was the particular aliveness of standing in a crowd of strangers who need nothing from you, all of you turned toward the same sound, under a sky that has not quite finished being blue. A wider room in the body, one I had been keeping shut for the sake of good sleep and early starts.
Dinner afterward was meant to be the proper thing — a lake terrace, a bottle of Chasselas from the terraces we’d seen from the train, the slow ceremony of it. We meant to be sensible about the hour. We were not. We ordered another glass. Someone at the next table was humming what we’d all just heard. He reached over and moved the hair off my forehead the way he used to when we left parties at an hour I now consider theoretical, and neither of us said anything about it, because some things are better left un-remarked and simply kept.
Then the walk. This is the part I will hold onto longest. Past midnight, the promenade gone quiet, the lake black and holding the last of the stage lights in a low shimmer along its edge. Across the water the Alps were there again — the clear blue shape of the afternoon gone dark now, more felt than seen, a weight on the horizon we could sense without quite making it out. We didn’t talk much. The music was still going in both of us. We had said yes to the loud thing, the late thing, the thing we had very nearly reasoned our way out of, and it was still ringing.
I don’t know what to call the couple walking back along that lake. Not the one who booked the early table. Not yet, either, whoever comes next. Somewhere between the two, out past midnight, so glad we came. ◼
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© This article was first published online in July 2026 – World Travel Magazine.
