There are few feelings more suffocating graduating from college, returning home, and facing the prospect of grinding out the years in the middleclass mediocrity of small-town America. Or so I thought. I had dreams to be a writer and to live the life of an artist. Which is to say, I was jobless, and found few sympathies among the residents of Minnetonka, Minnesota, where everyone wanted to know if I'd follow in my fathers' footsteps as a urologist.
After a few months, I wised up and bought a one-way ticket to Paris. I let a tiny fifth-floor room in the Hotel La Louisiane in the 6th Arrondissement. The hotel sits amid a maze of close streets lined with art galleries and cafés. It was a favorite of Jim Morrison. I had promised myself to take my art seriously, and the hotel seemed perfect, with it's small, spare rooms. No TV.
I moved like a ghost among the crowds; I wanted to retain my anonymity, and I spent hard hours in writing, but little came of it. It was in the midst of this austere experience, perhaps because of it, that I happened to become involved in the most extraordinary sexual encounter of my life.
I had been in Paris about five months, and Spring was just in evidence as the early daffodils were shooting up in the gardens, and the new green leaves bursting forth on the trees. I was sitting alone in the back of the eleventh-century church of St. Germain de Pres, waiting for the concert to begin, when the two girls sat down next to me. I smiled. They were pretty. French. The music started and I turned away. Beethoven has always moved me, and amid the loneliness of my Parisian existence, the feelings of warmth and old ties that the commanding Ode to Joy called up in my caused me to wipe my eyes with a corner of my sleeve. It was that tear, Bernadette later said, which started it all.
It began with a few words on the way out of the church, a coffee in a nearby café, then more-frequent meetings at night in the Café de la Palette. Bernadette was no sentimentalist; indeed, she was a hard case, wild, flamboyant. She and Anju were in their mid-twenties and had come to Paris recently as an escape from their own small-town existence in the Lorraine, as dedicated to tasting every pleasure Paris had to offer as I was to avoiding them and staying true to my work.
Why those two chose me I cannot know. I became the gravitational force in their wide orbit; I would go to the clubs and watch them dance, stay at the table until dawn switching to coffee when the wine was gone and they switched instead to Kahlua. After several weeks, another young loner named Girarde was looped into our orbit by Anju. A brooding young philosopher with black hair, knit eyebrows and a hunched, thin frame, he was in a sense a French counterpart to my own American version of a young Hemingway in Paris.
The Spring warmed, and Girarde and I struck up an easy, if distant, friendship. The magic of Paris, with a new girl and the world at your footsteps, is intoxicating even for a tightly-wound artist-to-be such as me. Bernadette on my arm, Anju on his, we would sit on the footbridge over the Seine and watch the sun set with a bottle of wine, amid other groups of ex-pats and local French students. I was happy, dangerously happy.
Yes, of course. Bernadette and I began having sex, and she had an avidity which I had never experienced before in my few American girlfriends. Incredible as it may seem, I left her wanting more, because I couldn't release my promise to dedicate my vital energies to work, and what she wanted was a complete and total immersion into a world of sensuality. I am fairly sure that, during some of this frustration, she dallied with other men. I did not see her every night, and our liaison was a loose one. No commitments, no promises. I often wondered whether she and Anju would return, and yet they always did.
We had intrigued them, Girarde and I, we were a useful counterbalance in their life of the moment, which I sensed was an explosion and rebellion from the confines of their own, prior life.
It was this curious state of affairs, then, that led to this most unique event. The four of us were sitting at a back table, tucked away in Café de la Palette and I was listening intently to Girarde's explanation of his theory of memory and identity, which had just been published in a small academic journal. We were ignoring the girls, and Bernadette ran her hand across my lap and flopped against me, head on my shoulder.
