Rich Rewards (2 page)

Surprisingly, I said that to Jean-Paul. “I’m really frightened,” I whispered to his ear.

“Do not be. I can tell, you are a wonderful woman.”

I imagined that to him “wonderful” just meant big, especially big-breasted; still, it was gratifying, even exciting to hear.

The evening went on more or less like that, sexy dancing alternating with intellectual discussion: the deposition of Stalin by Khrushchev, the revolt of Polish workers in Poznan. Jean-Paul approved of both, although he carefully explained that he was a Socialist, a non-Communist.

We all got very, very drunk. But I still do not quite understand how the next thing happened, which was—the three of us went back to our hotel, mine and Marshall’s, and we all fell into bed together.

Oh yes, one would say in the Seventies, well, of course: threesies. But it wasn’t like that, really. None of us was “into” kinky sex; we hadn’t even heard of it, although the idea must have been somewhere in our minds. More explicitly, there was some token reason for the arrangement: the Métro had closed down for the night, and Jean-Paul lived out near the Place d’Italie, something like that. Anyway, there the three of us were, stripped down to a few modest undergarments, in our bed. Me in between the two men.

Drunkenness put Marshall instantly to sleep, and he was always an exceptionally heavy sleeper. I think that Jean-Paul and I were awake all night, wordlessly stroking, caressing—our hands making love to each other. Incredible, thinking of it now, to have been so drunk and so wide awake and so violently aroused, all night.

Around dawn I whispered to Jean-Paul that he should dress; I would meet him outside in five minutes. He whispered back that we would not have long; he had an important meeting at eight.

For the next couple of hours, we wandered around those streets, down to the river, beside it, in the chilly, rising mists, in the smells of a Paris dawn. I don’t think breakfast, eating anything, occurred to either of us.

“You will come back? You could come alone, from London?” Jean-Paul asked me at some point.

“Yes, in a week or so I’ll come.” God knows how I thought I would manage this, but I knew that I would. I had to.

“I think that I love you very much,” Jean-Paul said later, in a highly serious, considering way.

It was easier for me. “I love
you
—”

But how readily we both attached that word to all we felt, our whole complex of emotions, our lust and fatigue and simple human affection, simple curiosity about each other. In my case, love also had to do with prior loneliness, despair; for Jean-Paul it must have arrived confused with political idealism, hopes for mankind.

We separated on a corner near the Sorbonne, where Jean-Paul’s meeting was, having exchanged addresses, phone numbers. Tears, and impassioned kisses.

I went back to our hotel and to Marshall, and that afternoon he and I took the boat train back to London. Le Havre, Dover, Victoria Station.

In London I began to go every afternoon to American Express to ask for letters, under my own, my maiden name, Daphne Matthiessen, that having been my arrangement with Jean-Paul. Every afternoon, as my heart pounded, nerves tightened, the clerk would leaf through all the letters under “M” and then, with porcelain English courtesy, he would inform me that there was nothing. After several days of this, I decided to ask also as Daphne White, using Marshall’s name, although no one ever wrote us there. Jean-Paul had met me as
Daphne White; would he have forgotten Matthiessen, a harder name? No, there was nothing for Daphne White either.

Not hearing from Jean-Paul made me desperate, wild: I had to see him. Only much later in life did I learn that certain men, although they may love you a great deal, do not write letters.

For Marshall I concocted a story about a friend from my boarding-school days, St. Margaret’s: Ellie Osborne was going to be in Paris for a weekend. She was terrifically rich, I could stay at her hotel with her, I wouldn’t need much money. And she was such a rude arrogant person that Marshall would not like her at all. Besides, he had a lot of work to do, didn’t he? And we had just been to Paris, and he hadn’t liked it.

I did in fact have a rich arrogant friend from St. Margaret’s named Ellie Osborne; Agatha and I used to imitate her nasal bray.

Marshall just said, “Okay, for heaven’s sake,
go.
”

Next I went to a post office to put through a call to Jean-Paul, which took an hour of the most excruciating anxiety, ending with a terrible connection. Jean-Paul’s voice faded in and out, as though drowning in the waves of the Channel which separated us. But I heard him say that he loved me, he had missed me horribly. He would meet me at the Gare du Nord.

It was a terrible trip, fraught with much more anxiety: I so feared that he had not actually heard me—one of us would get the time or the station wrong. What I really feared, but could not admit to myself, was that finally being together, finally making love, could not live up to the violence and weight of our expectations. In any case, on that Channel boat and then on the train to Paris, I was anything but a
happy young woman, a budding adulteress, gaily off to meet her handsome French lover in Paris.

But he was there, beautiful Jean-Paul, as I got off the train; clinging together, we passed through all the barriers, we raced down long hollow corridors, we jolted along on the Métro, across the whole city to the Place d’Italie, where he lived. And we made love almost as soon as we were inside his room—one attic room, one big lumpy bed, chairs, books—and we were entirely delighted with each other.

How serious we were as lovers, though—how unrelievedly intense. It is amazing that we could stand it, with no leavening laughs, no simple silliness. We both behaved as though the world’s future depended on the perfection of our congress, and very likely we thought that it did.

The room where we were, for most of that weekend, was large and bare, books being almost Jean-Paul’s only personal possessions, and he could not afford many books.
Moby Dick, Ulysses, Don Quixote
—he seemed to have been fond of the heavier classics—and an enormous book that he later gave me by a writer of whom I had not heard: David Rousset,
Les Jours de notre morts
, about the concentration camps. I labored through it, a true labor of love, and of anguish; by then my pain for the lack of Jean-Paul was mingled with the horrors of the Holocaust.

But I now see that so far I have failed to give a sharply differentiated picture of Jean-Paul: handsome, virile, an intense young French intellectual—in Paris, in the middle Fifties. Surely that description would have fit a lot of young men at that time and place. Even the fact that he had fought in the Resistance, with the Maquis, and that he had a long scar on one leg and a minor limp—well, there were a lot of limping heroes around in those past days. But I supposed that he would remember me, if he did at all, just as vaguely: a big
dark bosomy American girl, intense, with expensive American tastes—more about that humiliating last fact later.

I do remember what then seemed an exceptional quality of niceness in Jean-Paul; he was, and still is, a genuinely kind person. For example, this comes back: when I told him, what I had never said to a lover before, that such large breasts were quite a nuisance to me, so heavy and shapeless, really—instead of telling me that they were beautiful, terrific breasts, which I would have known to be untrue, in a very considering way he said, “I used to have a girl friend, here in Paris, and her breasts were what they call perfect. But your breasts, they
say
something to me, they are yours.”

Of course I loved him. Totally.

Between us that weekend we had almost no money. With a couple of implausible phone calls to Marshall, I had stretched the time out to almost a week: I was sick, I stupidly said. True to my begging description, my story about staying with rich Ellie Osborne, I had brought almost no money with me, and Jean-Paul was living on some sort of instructor’s stipend. We subsisted on eggs and cheese, occasionally some grapes—that fall, especially beautiful: perfectly rounded, an ashy dark blue and wet and sweet. We drank a little wine.

We walked: up through steep Rue Mouffetard, with its tempting open markets, occasionally as far as Boulevard Saint-Michel, and down to the Seine, passing but not stopping at those student cafés, those terraces of unconsciously jabbering people. Walking, clutching each other, talking—what about I cannot remember at all. I suppose we talked about our love and desperation, our hopelessness. Or maybe the future of Europe.

And then, one afternoon, although absolutely in love—
this is going to be a vividly embarrassing moment—I was suddenly seized with a longing for a “perfect” martini. It was a hot day, but still, at this point in my life, I cannot think of a more boring, trite and exhausted topic than that of the perfect martini. (Several local columnists still seem to find it absorbing, which says a lot about San Francisco, I think.) In my mind—Christ, how inappropriately!—there arose a vision of the Ritz Bar in Boston, that small, whitely decorated room that to me, the year before as a Wellesley girl, had seemed a pinnacle of elegance. I wished that Jean-Paul and I were there, each with a cold martini.

“Do you know what I’d like right now?” I asked Jean-Paul, making it idle. “A cold martini.”

He smiled, fresh-skinned, clear-eyed, beautiful and kind. “Well, there is nothing so difficult in that. Let’s go in here.”

And he guided me onto a small terrace; we had wandered across the Seine, and were somewhere near Notre Dame. He ordered a martini,
bien froid.
And I got, of course, a glass of dark sweet vermouth with a twist of lemon and a piece of ice in it.

“It’s good, but it’s not exactly what I meant. It’s different in America,” I said, more or less explaining what must have been a clear look of disappointment.

It would probably be quite wrong to say that at that moment we both realized our futures did not lie together; quite possibly Jean-Paul, a realist, knew all along that I was just a big sexy American girl about whom he felt very intensely, for a while. Still, it is significant that that episode so clings to my mind.

And I do not remember any conversations about a possible future together; perhaps it only now occurs to me that this might have been? At that time Jean-Paul was telling me that he wanted badly to write a novel, but he was not sure he had the time. He was more concerned with the direction
of his party, the National Liberation Front, which was an amalgamation of Resistance groups.

And I was concerned with Marshall, my lack of money—those dull and imponderable problems.

Well, we finished our drinks, my martini and Jean-Paul’s beer; we walked back to Jean-Paul’s room and we fell into the tangle of his bed, and made love, again and again. Our lovemaking forms a sort of continuum in my mind; it was what we always did. No single act was more, or less, memorable than another. Conversely, I do remember one particular act of love with Jacob, in a motel room near Ocean City, Maryland, one August afternoon: my first experience of sex with grass.

Then the next day Jean-Paul and I stood in the Gare du Nord: desperately serious, as only extremely young people can be—near tears, saying goodbye. Even our last time together had been cut short: a political emergency.

Once back in London, I got very sick, almost immediately: it was frightening; I was sicker than I had ever been before—or since. Sick with love is what I thought it was, and in a way I was right; for one thing, all those walks to American Express, where I hoped for some word from Jean-Paul, in the freezing London weather, cannot have helped. When I went out into the air, it was as though I had been scalped; any wind went through my head like knives. At last I yielded and stayed in bed for a while, and I began to get well enough to quarrel with Marshall—dully, hopelessly.

Finally I did hear from Jean-Paul, who said that he had been too miserable to write to me. Also he had been much of the time in Italy; his party was trying to effect a liaison with the Italian Action Party, another Resistance splinter group. His life would contain much travel now, he wrote; he
would usually be not in Paris, but he could always be reached through his mother, in Fresnaye, a small town in Normandy, near the coast. And he gave me that address.

Well, anyone could tell what happened next: the impassioned letters that slowly diminished in their frequency, their intensity. Until, one day, although I still thought of myself as hopelessly, permanently in love with Jean-Paul—and I may even have been right, as I now see it—I was also, in another way, “in love” with someone else. Or with several people; this would have been soon after my divorce from Marshall—a festive, liberating time for me, all around. It could have been more or less the same for Jean-Paul.

Once, about ten years after we had seen each other, many years after we had not written, finally, any more—in a lonely mood, no doubt occasioned by the demise of another love affair—I did write to Jean-Paul. I cannot remember what I said, probably some wistful attempt to recall our gone young passion. He answered with wisdom and kindness, no wistfulness. He said, “I think you have the need at this moment for an actual presence, a person there with you. And that I cannot be for you. I live with a woman whom I think of as my wife. But please to write to me again. I do not want to lose you this time.”

But I did not write.

I have even been back to Paris a couple of times, and never called or seriously thought of calling Jean-Paul. I did, though, think of him; I wondered if we could be passing each other on certain streets, not recognizing each other. Once—such a mistake—I mentioned this fantasy to the man I was there with, mean Derek, and he said that most likely Jean-Paul and I had in fact done just that; we had passed and not recognized each other. He assured me that by now Jean-Paul
would be middle-aged and fat, an anonymous French bourgeois. And so, in a way, until that morning in San Francisco, I must have accepted that version of Jean-Paul. Middle-aged. Fat, unrecognizable.