IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 3 by Peter Nolan Smith

Bernard was waiting at Charles De Gaulle Aeroport. He arranged a week’s stay at a hotel in Paris' old Jewish Quarter. Opening night was that evening. He had been tapped to be the club’s DJ. The Rex was under an old cinema along the Grand Boulevard. The magazine held high hopes for the subterranean space to serve as a European crossroad for politics, fashion, and the arts.

“Why you want an American at the door?” I asked the publisher.

“It amuses me.”

“Like a Jerry Lewis movie.”

“Maybe, but you will piss off the Parisians.” Jean-Francoise offered this explanation and then added, “That will be funny.”

His sense of humor depended on my ignorance and by midnight hundreds of Parisians were gathered before the club. Their faces said that they were someone. I could figure out who.

“Do you know who I am?” asked a well-dressed man with wavy hair.

“Not a clue.”

The crowd jeered the man. I later learned he was the minister of culture.

I chose women by their looks and men if they had a good smile. The cashier spoke little English. If anyone famous stood too long before the ropes, she would hiss and point them out. I easily recognized Françoise Hardy from her years as the ‘Yeh-Yeh’ girl.

“Welcome to the Rex.”

I gave the singer of PREMIERE BONHEUR DU JOUR a good table to watch the Senegalese band on stage. Her cigar-smoking husband’s career spanned decades and he viewed my dismissive treatment of him as a sign of disrespect.

“You know who I am?”

Jacques Dutronc had a big hit with MOI ET MOI ET MOI. I knew him. He was married to Francoise Hardy.

”You’re no Serge Gainsbourg,” I replied and Jean-Francoise toasted my riposte with champagne. I could do no wrong, except to myself.

Every noon I waited by the famed Cathedral, as tourists and pilgrims flocked through the saint-encrusted doors. The souvenir sellers glanced at Lisa’s picture and shook their heads with a blasé shrug. She had lied about coming to Paris.

The hotel had no TV. There was no need. My room overlooked two gangs’ fight for control of Rue Des Ecouffes. I learned their names and took no sides. Neither was strong enough to win or lose more than an uneasy truce. When they got older, it would be a different story, but for now they were still kids and life was a game of bloody noses and hurt feelings.

Breakfast was an espresso and croissant at the closest café and lunch was its plat du jour. My dinner companions were gangsters, models and intellectuals at the ethnic bistros dotting the narrow streets of Les Halles. Models on the cover of Elle, dancers at the Moulin Rouge, twins from Blois, and a German countess opened their homes, apartments, and hotel rooms. Lisa’s face blurred during the kisses, caresses, thrusts, and seconds-long exhilaration of ejaculation, yet her ghost was stronger than my ability to forget.

For diversion I viewed obscure films at the tiny cinemas in St. Germain and books stolen from WH Smith store opposite the Tuilieries. I found Maxie Laing’s RUNNING, VS Naipul’s AMONGST THE BELIEVERS, George Stein’s THE LAST PORTAGE OF AH, and scores of other novels and non-fiction books I devoured to kill the minutes, hours, and days. Some were unreadable. I attempted ULYSSES tens of times. It became a door stopper.

Paris was a city for walking. My favorite ambulation was to pass through the Church St. Gervais, cross the Pont Louis Philippe to the Ile St. Louis, drink a beer at the Brassiere du Ile, and strolled over to Notre-Dame. The crippled trinket seller hadn’t forgotten my original quest and greeted my passage with amusement. “Ou tu vas?”

I told him my route and he wished me well.

Steal a book at WH Shakespeare, traversed the Seine on the Pont Neuf and ended up at the Palais Royale for a lunch at Dave’s, whose Chinese spare ribs were the best in town. These journeys brought me to the various gates of Paris and I soon knew the city better than a taxi driver. In truth eyes filled with gloom saw little of Paris. The African quarters offered no magic potions. The heroin along the Rue de la Quest was defeated by my phantom. I was killing time and my purgatory changed locations with the closure of the Rex in the summer.

Without a job I returned to New York. The city was alien after Paris. People were in a panicked hurry and the food was bland, except for pizza. At my apartment I shuffled through my mail. Mostly bills and no letters from Lisa.

Her vacant apartment remained in her name, indicating she might return some day. I didn’t have the luxury to wait. Two cops from 9th Precinct warned Internal Affairs sought my appearance before a Grand Jury. Neither had news of Vadim. No one had seen Lisa.

A nightclub in Germany offered a manager’s position and I told my parents I was going to Hamburg. My brothers and sisters thought it a great opportunity to see more of Europe. They had no idea that this trip wasn’t the Grand Tour.

The club on Eppendorfer Weg fronted for the Reeperbahn’s most notorious pimp. Nigger Cali paid a generous salary. I bought a car and rented a penthouse apartment. The lakeside vista was the ideal bedroom vista for an affair with a blonde lingerie model from an aristocratic family. Hilke’s weakness was roulette and mine was confusing lust with love.

Every two weeks we drove my BMW south to drop off Cali’s earnings from the ErosCenter at a Geneva bank. The trips were far from romantic since Hilke gambled the nights at various Spielhalles along the route, but looked a little like Lisa. Any blonde model would in the right light.

My younger sister visited Germany to investigate a US Army Colonel for embezzlement. A fellow Justice Department employee had passed on a report about my involvement at the Continental. She left for America convinced that I was a spy and Hilke was my KGB informant.

The truth was more disheartening and in December Nigger Cali presented a bill itemizing six months of sex. Everyone in Hamburg was on his payroll. Hilke was no exception. My BMW keys bought 24 hours and I wisely used the grace period to escape to Paris.

The south-bound train pulled out of the Bahnhof at midnight. Sleep was interrupted by stops throughout Germany and the Low countries. The morning dawned as a joyless mist. We were entering Paris. The gray dome of Sacre-Coeur threatened from the height of Montmartre. No one greeted me at the station. I took a taxi to the Marais. The old lady at the hotel had my room. As she set out a breakfast of coffee and a baguette, I called Bernard.

“Where are you?” Bernard sounded happy to hear my voice.

“Paris.” I couldn’t tell for how long. The 5000 Deutschmarks from Hamburg would last about two months.

“I quit my job and now spin records at the Bains-Douches. They need a doorman. You have papers.”

“Papers? Sure.”

My work papers were forged on the only color copier in France. The owner of the Bains-Douches deigned to not examine the document. Americans consider the French rude, arrogant, and chauvinistic, especially Paris waiters in July, when every other French person is on vacation, but the froggies were offering me a place to live and I was grateful for their hospitality.

Women were easy late at night. The nameless sex offered little succor. Heroin better soothed the beast gnawing my soul and no one noticed my losing weight, although the loss of appetite extended to more than food and winter passed into spring without a woman’s savage touch.

April brought the expected dreary rains followed by May’s warm winds swimming across the Mediterranean from Africa. My addiction was only skin-deep and kicking dope not as bad as listening to John Lennon’s COLD TURKEY.

Sherri and Che arrived to film S&M videos in Versailles. Frenchmen at the club greeted them with an adoration reserved for pagan idols. After the club closed for the night, Sherri, Che, and I ate at a transvestite African bar. More for the show than the food.

News from the Pacific Coast was good. Her bird was happy in the Van Nuys studio. She had won the best actress award at the Las Vegas Adult Film convention. The IRS had settled her delinquent tax bill for a fraction of the bill. LA was smiling faces.

New York was another story. My cousin reported that Jimmy Fats the bagman had been murdered to keep his mouth shut. Arthur had escaped an assassination attempt and my subleasee had called to say that I had been subpoenaed by a Grand Jury.

“You should stay out of New York for a couple more months.”

“More like a year.” Che was eyeing a Brazilian TV and Sherri seemed a little hurt by her lover’s distraction. She had been ignoring her own advice. “You can come live in LA.”

“What would I do in LA? Be a porno actor?”

”Lights, camera, action.” Che mouthed an obscene gesture to the TV. “You could be a star. The audience would identify with your type.”

“Me?” I was 30 and ten pounds overweight.

“The wankers don’t go to gym.” Sherri explained without any malice.

Palm trees and porno was a tempting offer, however I said, “Men in porno films are strictly extras. Better I stay here.”

“At least the girls are cute here.” Sherri commented, as Che went to the bathroom. The TV followed her inside and my cousin’s lips narrowed to a flat line. “You stop judging women by your lust-o-meter?”

“For the most part.” I wasn’t having any sex. “I can’t get Lisa out of my head. I wish someone would smack me on the head, so I could forget.”

“I could hit you with my high heel.” Che’s mischief had ignited Sherri’s sadist streak.

“I don’t want to suffer brain damage.” Her heels were stilettos and I downed my vodka. “At least not permanently.”

“Nothing’s permanent in this world.” Sherri stared at the bathroom’s closed door.

“All we are, are dust on the wind.”

“I hate Kansas, except in the WIZARD OF OZ. If only I could click my heels and make everything right.”

“Maybe you will one day. Until then you’ll have to be satisfied with men licking them.”

“Women too and I know just the one.” Sherri strode to the bathroom. She stepped inside and I could have joined them, except four was more than a crowd in such a small room. I left for the Marais with hopes of sleeping the day away till dusk. At noon old lady from the hotel desk rang to inform that I had guests.

Sherri and Che had an off-day and were in need of a guide. I dragged them over to the Louvre Museum for my special tour.

“Twenty minutes and then lunch at the Café de Pais.”

Most tourists sought to see the Mona Lisa and the more distant galleries were devoid of humanity.

“Best to let the paintings look at you.” I kept them moving through the long galleries.

“Same as being up on stage at a strip club.” Che pranced forward with hands cupped over her eyes. “Peek-a-boo.”

“I’ve been thinking about why you’re not with anyone now.” Sherri also averted her eyes from the paintings, as if the men on the tableaus were peeking toms.

"Why?"

“What are you’re favorite movies? CASABLANCA, THE APARTMENT, AND THE WIZARD OF OZ. Only one of them has a happy ending.”

“Jack Lemmon ends up with Shirley MacLaine in THE APARTMENT.”

“Only for that last scene. The rest of the movie he is in mourning like a dog without a bone. You’re the same with Lisa.”

“THE WIZARD OF OZ has a happy ending.”

“Dorothy goes home with her dog.”

“Man’s best friend. Not a happy ending to any boy-meets-girl story.”

“So I’m not so good at boy-gets-girl. Maybe I better change my top three movies then.”

“All my movies have happy endings.”

Sherri skipped away to join Che and they held hands like schoolgirls playing hooky. The eroticism of David's oriental harem paintings stopped them in their tracks and the girls were dying to get to their hotel.

“One more painting.”

At the Mona Lisa Sherri stood with her back to Da Vinci’s masterpiece. “I can imagine she is staring at me.”

“Cheap tart.” Che ruffled her red curls and the male tourists focused on the living rather than the dead. The women wandered to a hermaphrodite statue. Neither could keep their hands off the marble skin. Their wanton fondling stalled the guards from calling a halt to the free show. They exited from the museum laughing and disappeared into a Versailles-bound taxi.

They reincarnated Sodom in the nightclub every night of their visit. Women sought their secrets and the two actresses conducted re-education camps in the dark corners. Che used me for the show-and-tell.

“Sherri’s cousin is the best I had.”

“The best?” Her devotees cooed with unbridled curiosity.

“A man takes 2.8 seconds to cum and a woman 3.8 seconds,” Che announced with a professorial exactitude. “While he’ll never be as good as a woman, he’s certainly better than most men.”

It was nice of her to lie.

We held a bon-voyage dinner at the transvestite restaurant. The place was packed with prostitutes, porno actresses, pimps, and bikers. Morality had been put on hold for everyone, but me, and Che dug into the grave.

“You miss anything about the States?”

“Friends, family, and pizza.” Two dominatrix salaciously beckoned with whips. I waved them off.

“Nothing else?”

“He misses that skinny blonde from Buffalo,” Sherri groaned and Che smiled with a satisfied savoring of my agony.

“Someone said she was in Ibiza.”

“Then I’ll put that on my list of places to avoid.”

My strong face was a bluff and as soon as they left town, I flew to that island. My visit turned up no clues and in Paris I burned her photos. Flames consumed them in less than a minute.

If I couldn’t be lovers with a woman then being a friend was the next best thing and I put this to the test when a cover girl model with a duplex on Ile St. Louis needed a caretaker for her Scottish terrier. The South African liked drinking, flirting, and being a bitch. The order jumbled up according to the time of day.

Every week Brigitte travelled to distant fashion shoots and spent weekends at her husband’s villa in Cap D’Antibes. She said I didn’t need to pay any rent. “Take care of Angus, that’s all.”

I had no trouble with that task. Angus was a good drinking partner, but resisting Brigitte was more difficult. Helmut Newton and Guy Bourdin shot the nude body that exited every morning from the bathroom with her singing from the hallway mirror.

“No peeking.”

“I only believe in staring."

The tension excluded a platonic relationship, even though we slept in separate beds. I must have meant something to her. At parties she pretended to be my girlfriend. At the club Brigitte waited to make sure every woman left with any man other than me and few females dared to brave her jealousy.

“You’re everything I want in a man.” She cooed after a long dinner at La Coupole. “Faithful, funny, and smart. Too bad we live together, then again if we had sex, you and I wouldn’t be friends anymore.”

I was tired of being a friend and had to show my feelings. Brigitte modeled for a designer on Rue St. Honore. One night what I couldn’t say sober, I wrote drunk on the wall opposite the atelier. The words were big and I was so drunk that I never saw the gendarme until bumping into him. He was drunk too. “Qu’est ce-que tu fais?”

“I’m writing a poem.”

“Poem?”

His truncheon swung over my head and I fled his shouts, “Arrete, arrête.”

When Brigitte returned from work the next afternoon, she joked how the poetry police had almost arrested some fool for defacing the British Embassy.

“Maybe they will sentence him to life for bad meter.”

She was familiar with my handwriting from letters. Her ridicule was sharp. A glutton for abuse I didn’t move out.

Brigitte's husband suspected the worst and she told the ex-legionnaire that I was gay. The lie worked for a year, for her real beau was a French painter. I had written and article about his painting group. Philippe was good-looking and talented. Brigitte met him at the Bains. They went home that first night.

Brigitte declared she loved him and tried to prove this with her lovemaking, although the diabolical moaning from the bedroom was better suited to a porno set. I had to get out of the apartment and told the old lady at the Marais Hotel to ready my old room. It was almost home.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 4 by Peter Nolan Smith

That night I stopped at a disco on Rue Montmartre, intending to wait out Brigitte’s early morning departure. Philippe’s previous girlfriend danced with a natural wantonness to WARM LEATHERETTE. Her partner was a famous French singer. My eyes x-ed him from the surroundings.

Honey-hued skin covered the teenager’s long lean limbs. Lisa had possessed the same boyish body. Candia noticed my staring and I turned to the bar. The cold beer in my hand was empty and I would have left, if Candia hadn’t accosted me.

“Your friend Che says you’re good in bed.”

“She was exaggerating.” Lying was more like it.

“She didn’t seem the type to joke about sex.” A finger toyed with a froth of golden hair. “And I saw the way you looked at me.”

"My cousin says you can tell how someone fucks by the way they dance.” I was trying to scare her from any entanglement with someone almost twice her age, but Candia simply smiled and said, “Long and hard.”

“Shouldn’t you be home?” She was still in high school.

“I’m no Cinderella.” A kiss led to my hotel, where she stripped off my clothes with teenage hunger. She emerged the victor. On sweat-damp sheets Candia said, “You weren’t half-bad.”

“Not the best?” My flesh was raw.

“My ex was huge.” She stroked me to a painful hardness and lay on her stomach with her ass in the air. “I like it from behind. It makes you seem bigger.”

I attributed the marathon to her half-Puerto Rican/half Jewish blood. As she got dressed, I thought that was it, instead she said, “You have no one and I have no one. Everyone else does. Winter is coming on. I don’t like sleeping in a cold bed. You want to live with me?”

“What about love?” Staking my heart on a teenager’s whim was a risky proposal. My other choice was more of the same of the months before last night. I plyed the long odds.

“I think you know the difference.” She kissed my cheek once and went to the door. “Most men do by your age. So what will it be? Me or a long cold winter?”

“Warm in bed sounds good.”

Candia went home to inform her mother, while I crossed the river to Brigitte’s apartment. She considered my moving as a betrayal of her dog’s love. As a friend she should have wished me good luck.

“What does a man want from a woman? To be his bride? The mother of his children? What can little bitch know about love?”

“About as much as anyone.” No formula predicted the paths of the heart.

“You think sex will help you forget that girl from Buffalo?” Brigitte’s jealousy was more deep-rooted. “Fucking is not the answer.”

“Neither is sleeping alone.” I packed my bags in five minutes. Angus whined his good-bye and Brigitte asked for the keys. One word would have saved my long train ride to the 15th arrondisement, except the door shut and the TV came on to the news. I walked out of the building and caught a taxi on the bridge.

The driver knew the address. Candia’s atelier was located across from Paris’ Lost and Found Bureau. Her airy 1930s artist loft contrasted with the quartier’s dreary buildings. My house-warming gifts were a stereo tape deck and an unspoken vow of fidelity. Candia slept in my arms. My French improved in bed, although the honeymoon period had a short shelf-life.

I stole books about love and sex. The millions of words failed to solve my dilemma. Candia sensed the malaise and suggested a psychiatrist, who prescribed pills. The downers offered more emptiness and I threw them into the gutter.

We ate boudin with her mother on Sundays and dined at cous-cous restaurants on Monday. We vacationed twice in Normandy. Our reflection in the store windows mirrored those of content couples as long as I didn't look in our eyes.

Bernard and I opened a dance club near Opera. Le Reve’s plush décor harkened back to the 50s. The young rich loved the mix of soul and classic French hits stitched together by Bernard’s world hits. We hired a young black bouncer to handle the voyous. Jacques had run with several gangs from the outer suburbs. A two-year stint in prison had not ruined his smile. The young girls from the good neighborhoods thought the muscular Martiniquean handsome and came in droves to try their luck.

These beauties in turn attracted men who brought them drinks. A glass of champagne cost $20 and Le Reve coined money. A week after the opening an older man entered with two dowdy women in fluffy coats. His nose was splayed across his upper lip like a wet sox. An argument ensued with the cashier about the cover charge.

“Give one reason you don’t have to pay and you can come in for free.” I could tell he had been someone once.

“We never pay,” the ex-fighter rasped in a punished voice. “Not to un putain Amerlot.”

“Fucking American.” The insult was rewarded with an immediate response. “Jacques, escort these frogs out of the club.”

Puzzlement mired on Jacques' face and the fiftyish blonde woman glared with disbelief. She looked very familiar and I ran out to say they could come in, except they had already reached the boulevard.

“So can you explain why you threw out Brigitte Bardot?” Bernard asked at the door.

“Brigitte Bardot?” The boxer’s companion re-assembled into the legendary sex symbol as would any woman who was Brigitte Bardot.

The story of her rejection hit the morning papers and I expected the Paris Police to institute deportation proceedings, instead the passage of time had rendered the animal lover’s beauty passé to today’s youth and our business doubled with their appreciation of my indiscretion, though Bernard suggested more tact in the future.

"We will be old one day too.”

At home the story between Candia and me was fraying at the edges, for the happiness of a relationship can be measured by the distance between a man and woman in bed and my arrivals near dawn earned Candia’s back. Our lovemaking diminished to a monastic stalemate and her silence indicted every man as a potential threat.

We needed time apart and Candia spent the summer modeling in Japan. I called Tokyo every night. Her rare pick-ups mimicked Lisa’s vanishing act in Europe and my imagination painted of a pantheon of Japanese men eating sushi off her body. Sherri came to perform a series of lesbian films in Versailles. This time she was alone. Che had run off with a man.

“Why are we unlucky in love?” I asked at La Coupole Brasserie.

“We are lucky in love. It’s relationships we suck at,” Sherri eyed a fresh-faced Sorbonne student, then her lids drifted across her irises. She was treating her pain with drugs. “At least long relationships.”

“Any time I’ve been faithful to a woman, it’s ended badly.” Most of my romances had ended like a 747 cartwheeling into an Iowa cornfield.

“Any time you have been unfaithful you’ve achieved the same result.” Her remedy for a broken heart was an orgy of women topped by heroin. It was an old friend.

“Meaning?” Mine was more wine.

“Meaning you shouldn’t worry so much.” Sherri autographed a waiter’s bill. “You can’t do anything about the things you can’t do anything about.”

”Nihilism.” Nothing meant sitting in your bed alone with the clock ticking out the seconds at the speed of a 45 spinning at 16 RPMs.

“No, some things you can’t change, because they’re beyond your power.”

“So I should do nothing.”

“Something will happen when you least expect it.”

”And if it doesn’t?”

“Then I’ll push your wheelchair down the stairs when you’re 80.”

“That a promise?” Earlier would be better.

”We’re family. Remember?” At least Sherri had Boo although parrots usually outlive their owners.

“Cousin and cousin.” At 32 I should have had a wife, a car, and kids plus a dog and bills.

Every time my father called, he would asked, “When are you going to settle down?”

“You mean move to Boston and live like everyone else?”

I wish I had a better answer and he did too, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that living with a teenager in Paris was as settled as I could manage. He was a 9-to-5 guy and loved my mother at first sight.

Candia returned in late August. We didn’t have much time left. The phone rang at odd hours. If I answered, the caller hung up.

Suspicions bred accusations bound by resentment and we would have probably broken up, except Middle East terrorists bombed Paris to gain the freedom of three imprisoned comrades.

A Sunday night explosion on Rue Faux barely scratched its target and no one had been injured, however the rest of the street got off less fortunate than the Israeli bank. The blast shattered every window on the block, charred a dozen cars, and shoved our nightclub’s ornate entrance onto the dance floor.

“On a la chance.” Bernard gingerly ran his finger over the blistered woodwork.

“Yes, we were damn lucky.” If Le Reve had been open, the casualty list would have topped a hundred. The possibility of a thirty-two year-old American heading the ‘dead’ list didn’t deter a police inspector from interrogating un estranger as the primary suspect.

“Merely a formality.”

“Do I need a lawyer?” I asked the policeman and he shook his head with a laugh. “Not unless you are guilty.”

Bernard agreed with this assessment and advised to do nothing until charged or arrested. As a French citizen he was familiar with the Napoleonic legal aberration of guilty until proven innocent. His nonchalance demeanor evaporated with the contractor’s estimate that the repairs would take at least a month.

“This is impossible.” He ranted against the sloth of French workers. A few glasses of cognac redirected his rancor to the real culprits. “C’est le guerre.”

And the war killed and maimed innocent people throughout the French capitol, while the socialist government played tough guy. Having escaped one bombing I imagined lightning wouldn’t strike twice and resumed my normal walks around the city.

Two days later I had a coffee at the Café Tartine in St. Paul. I visited the Eglise St. Gervais and lit a few candles. Old habits died hard. I walked across the courtyard of the hotel de Ville, thinking about how nice the spring sun felt on my skin.

A powerful detonation knocked me off my feet. The ringing in my ears was replaced by the cries and I ran to the post office to wrestle the wounded from the debris. At home I washed off the dust and decided to not give the terrorists a third shot and bunkered for the siege’s duration at my girlfriend’s apartment.

Candia’s modeling agency cancelled her bookings. The seventeen year-old was more bored than scared by this enforced confinement. Her phone conversations were conducted in whispers.

“We should go to America.” Only one hope existed for us.

“You think I can work in New York?” Candia’s career was in a state of stagnation, since the better-paying commercials and editorial work in France were reserved for girls with Caucasian roots.

“They love girls like you there.” A mulatto stood a better chance in America, plus a friend was the photo editor for Details and another comrade shot photos for Elle.

“New York has to be safer than Paris.”

“Fantastique. I want to visit Disneyworld.” She squealed with teenage delight.

“Yes, we can go see Mickey.” I didn’t explain Orlando was over 1200 miles from New York and reaped the benefits of that deceit in bed.

In the morning I opened the atelier windows. A soft breeze carried the traces of Africa. I listened for anything else and heard no explosions. At noon Radio Nova announced Mitterand’s government had freed the Lebanese prisoners. Hearing the news, Candia hugged a Mickey Mouse doll.

“What about Disneyworld?”

“We can go after the summer.” I had a business to run.

“You promise we see Mickey.” Her feet stamped on the floor.

“I have to check on the nightclub.” I dressed quickly. Dishes flying at my head would complete her repertoire.

“You can sleep at the club tonight, if you love that place so much.”

Her suggestion was an order to be disobeyed. Flowers and a nice dinner would earn a reprieve, but she wouldn’t forget my promise to visit Disneyworld until passing through the turnstiles of the Magic Kingdom. Women have an unforgiving memory. I saw that a blessing as much as a curse.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 5 by Peter Nolan Smith

When a French worker says, “A month.” he usually meant six weeks, so I arrived at Rue Faux, expecting no change after a two week absence. I was pleasantly surprised to see a new wall, the entrance restored to its gaudy glory, liquor bottles over the bar, and the dance floor shining from a new layer of lacquer.

“Where have you been?” Bernard was cuing Willie Bobo’s SPANISH GREASE at the refurbished disc jockey booth.

“The bombs.” I shrugged my excuse.

“Eh, alors?” The new speakers favored the clean sound of the Latino Swing.

“I didn’t expect this much progress.”

“A phone call here. A phone call there.” His brother held office in the socialist government, the club’s liquor came tax-free from a military base, and our new bouncers were off-duty marines. Neither of us deemed these ‘favors’ inappropriate.

“Opening date is in five days.”

“Damn.”

“Problems avec ta copine?” Bernard nodded to the flute hitting a high note.

“Big problems. I promised Candia a trip to Disneyworld.” I rolled my eyes. “Now we’re opening I have to cancel.”

“Ah, quais, Mssr. Mickey et les filles.” Having known Candia since she was 14, Bernard was surprised that I had lasted longer than her other boyfriends and played Maurice Chevalier’s THANK HEAVEN FOR LITTLE GIRLS.

“If you want to go, go. We have one more week at least.”

“Thanks.”

I went upstairs to telephone Candia. She hung up a dozen times. Finally she answered and I blurted out, “I have a surprise for you. We’re going to Disneyworld.”

“I can’t. I have a job in Milan.”

“Then we can go to dinner at La Coupole tonight.”

”My plane leaves this evening.” ADDICTED TO LOVE was playing in the background. She hated Robert Palmer’s hit, since she hadn’t been chosen as an android model for the video. Another man had bought her the record.

“Oh.” I suspected that he was in the apartment and told Bernard that I would see him tomorrow.

“Embrace your chouchette for me.”

I exited from the nightclub to a carless street resembling a scene out of the 1870s. A tent had been erected under a balcony. A young clochard was cutting vegetables into a pot. The thin bum was better clothed than most derelicts sleeping under the Seine bridges, yet a tremor sizzled in my spine, as he lit his stove. It didn’t explode and I flagged a taxi, elated to have survived my fears.

At the atelier Candia was alone. A cigarette lay in the ashtray. The tip was bare of lipstick. Candia threw it in the trash and packed her bag for Italy. Her good-bye kiss was a peck.

Bernard and I worked twenty-hour days. Sleep was our only respite. Five minutes before the doors opened, the electricity blew the fuses. Bernard found the breakers and switched on the lights. We were ready for business.

Fun-loving Parisians flooded into Le Reve. Bernard’s DJing drove the teenagers onto the dance floor and they drank with an apocalyptical abandon. Candia showed up unexpectedly with her father. The old Puerto Rican ran a small boite de nuit in St. Germain. I bought a bottle of champagne. Candia's kiss was warm, but before I could hold her in my arms, Jacques tapped my shoulder.

“Someone to speak with you.”

I accompanied him to the door and Jacques pulled apart the curtains.

The young clouchard was struggling with a lighter.

“He say why?”

“No,” Jacques had only worked breaking and entering before my hiring him. All I had to do was say the word for him to prove his gratitude. “You want I make him go away?”

“No.” Twenty francs would buy the bum a bottle of wine and good luck for le Reve. “I’ll see what he wants.”

Jacques unlatched the ropes for the quartet of well-heeled youths from the 16th Arrondisement and I pulled out a few spare coins.

“Hey, you don’t recognize me?” The bum raised a smiling face.

Squinting I scrapped away the filth and hugged Danny Gordon for a short-lived embrace.

“When was the last time you bathed?”

“I didn’t think the French cared about personal hygiene.”

“Hey, I’m an American.” Parisian men’s one bar of soap per annum didn’t excuse his smelling like week-old garbage and I opened the ropes to the amazement of several customers dressed a la mode. “We have a shower in the basement. I’ll cuff you a couple of drinks afterwards.”

“That’s an offer I can’t refuse,” Danny broke out of his slouch. “I ran into your cousin in New York last year. She said you were here. Didn’t you leave right after Viktor Malenski got killed at the Continental?”

“No, I left about a month before that.” Three years since that deadly night hadn’t lessened the danger of the truth. “My partner and I started this club. I get paid to act rude to the French. Can it get better than that?”

“You’re my new hero.” He nodded to the cashier, who held her nose, as I led the ex-trumpeter to the basement changing room.

“So how about a shower?” I opened the taps of the washing room.

“Be a new man after that.” Danny stripped off his clothes and climbed into the steam-filled shower stall.

“You didn’t see Lisa when you in New York?”

“Ha, I was wondering when you were going to ask that.” Danny soaped his body. “Aren’t you over her yet?”

“Yeah, long ago.”

“Right.” He didn’t believe me either. “I saw her once. She was with Vadim.”

“She ask about me?”

“Didn’t get a chance to speak with her.” He soaped his hair. “Someone said they were living in Russia.”

“Thanks.” I left the washroom with his tattered clothes. They had outlived their usefulness several people ago. I dumped them in the trash bin and rummaged through a backstage closet. I hung a musty suit from the 1950s on the door and went upstairs with two cases of champagne. None of it vintage. Bernard was waiting at the bar.

“You throw Brigitte Bardot out of the club, then you let in a clouchard.” Ordering drinks Bernard asked, “So who is your guest?”

“He’s a friend from New York.” I ordered a whiskey.

“So the Americans are exporting bums to France.” My partner scoffed with the immense pleasure of hearing that an Amerlot had plunged to the bottom. His happiness was short-lived, for a twenty-minute shower and a suit transformed Danny into a modern-day Casanova for Le Reve’s haughty female clientele.

“A new man.” I led him to the bar.

“Same old me, just cleaner.” We toasted the East Village. Candia danced with him twice. Her father knew Danny’s dad. I had another drink. It wasn’t my last.

Candia announced her departure and I gave her a sloppy goodnight kiss.

“You are not so handsome as a drunk.”

“Everyone else is pretty.”

“Fool.”

“Love you.”

“You say those words so easy.”

“I mean it.” I escorted her to a taxi.

“Then what is love?” She shut the taxi door before my reply.

I drank the rest of the night with her father, trying to gather insight into his daughter. Instead he recounted his falling out of plane in the Korean War. “I didn’t die either.”

He had a lot of stories like that. So did Danny and me too. As the night drew to a close, I asked Danny. “You have anything in your ‘room’ you want to keep here?”

“No, ain’t nothing worth stealing.”

“What about your trumpet?”

“I hocked it in Spain.”

“Pawn it? You lived for your music.”

“Like you used to live for your poetry.” Danny chugged his whiskey.

“I couldn’t even write in meter.” The illiterati might have overlooked this fault, however my grammar school nuns had beaten a respect for classical cadence and proper grammar into our knuckles and editors came from the same school.

“Your stopping partially inspired my dumping the horn.”

“Please don’t follow my failures.” My blame plate was full. “You could have been another Chet Baker.”

“I’d rather be Horace Silver.” His band’s deconstructed version of SONGS FOR MY FATHER with Danny’s neophyte trumpet stubbornly orbiting the free-style band’s chaotic non-melody had been a show-stopper at the Mudd Club in the late-70s. "But who was I kidding? We sucked and no one cared if we sucked. We were young and pretty. I don’t regret quitting music and DJing and I bet you don’t regret stopping writing either. “All that ‘art’ shit was a monkey on our back. Now we can live as real men are supposed to live.”

Danny spoke with the coolness of a man who had abandoned a woman he didn’t love after seeing her with another man.

“Better than pretending to be Hemingway.” Ghosts of stories lurked in my skull as half-built ships in dry docks.

"Or Chet Baker." He pushed back his wavy hair.

"But why are you living on the street. You belong to a cult giving away their possessions?”

“I’m waiting for my ship to come in.” The ex-trumpeter nearly swooned off the stool. “The whiskey kinda went to my head. I’ll be fine once I’m out at sea.”

“Your parents bought you a boat?” A 50-foot catamaran was not beyond their means.

“I’m not taking their money anymore.”

“Yeah, fuck money.” I said, while wishing that his parents adopted me.

“I’m talking about fishing and not the rod-and-reel shit either. Nets and trawlers and thousands of hooks capable of tearing the flesh off your bones. And tons of fish on the wild sea.” His voice climbed an octave with an imagined voyage to the North Atlantic. “Fishing ala Captain Courageous for cod on the deep. Hacking fish from a line, as the ship plows into the sea and resurfaces streaming foam. Fishing in the black of night, the wind___”

“Stop already, I’m seasick.”

“Mal de mer has two cures. Land or drowning.” Danny possessed a convert’s devotion for his new profession.

“If you love fishing so much, what are you doing in Paris? I mean hanging a line off a bridge into the Seine isn’t that exciting.”

“No, a long-line boat from Gloucester is supposed to dock in Brest and I’ll fish the Georges Bank.” Danny picked at a front tooth.

“When is that?” I had lived in Gloucester. Fishing was a tough on and off shore.

“Maybe a week. The wait is unimportant, if I’m on a boat in the end.”

“I wish I could offer you a place to stay.” A week was a long time on the street. Even longer at my place.

“Thanks, I’m fine in my humble hovel.” Danny lifted a hand to forestall any extra excuses. “You remember what your cousin said about men wanting a virgin or a whore. Well, I have my girl coming from Madrid. Crazy girl. Young like your girlfriend. Her mother was a flamenco dancer. Likes having sex. Her body is insatiable____” Limb by limb Danny reincarnated an ancient sex cult’s goddess, finally accusing her of nymphomania. “It’s no Roman orgy. It’s hard work. You’ll see. Believe me, you’ll see.”

His prediction was almost a curse and that night as I was having sex with Candia, a super 8mm porno movie flickered in the shadows. The teenager noticed my distraction and asked, “What are you thinking?”

“About how much I want you.” I thrust harder into her vagina.

"Ouais?" She rolled out of bed to vainly examine my clothes for the telltale signs of infidelity without success, since the only traces of another woman were in my mind.

“I’m tired of living with another woman’s ghost.” She lay on the floor, fiercely clutching her Mickey doll. “If it’s not the skinny blonde from America, then it is someone else.”

"There’s no one, but you.” I reached over to Candia. She wasn’t having any of me and I fell asleep on my side of the bed, as dreams of Lisa were replaced by those of Danny’s girlfriend.

She sounded too good to be true, but whenever models, dancers from the Paris Ballet, French actresses, artistes, and svelte students from the Sorbonne tried to seduce Danny, he told them, “I’m saving myself for Elana.”

One night Danny didn’t show at his usual hour and I checked his shack. His canvas sea bag was gone. After the club closed I began to worry, since Paris was as tough a town as New York. When I reported his disappearance to the police on the third night, the gendarme joked that people disappear in Paris all the time.

I didn’t laugh, but should have.

Two nights later Danny approached Le Reve, newly shaven and with his haircut. When he hugged me, I smelled a woman’s perfume. “Let me guess. Your girl came into town.”

“I told you she would.’ He beamed the joy of a sailor on leave.

“I was beginning to believe she was a fragment of your imagination.”

“No, she’s the real thing.”

A slender female in a cotton shift was crossing Rue Faux. Her black hair was disheveled; several buttons had been popped from her dress, and her cheeks were flushed from exertion. She personified the wraith from my dreams and even more so when Danny whispered, “We had sex on top of the Opera house.”

“Good view.” Two bodies atop the art-deco palace.

“I didn’t go there for the view.” Danny introduced us.

“He talks about you.” A serpentine arm encircled his waist.

“What he say?”

“That you’re a genius for not wanting to be a genius.” The two appeared deep in love.

“I specialize at failurology.” I ordered three glasses of champagne at the bar and fended off my jealousy. “Here’s to making Danny happy.”

“To everyone’s happiness." Elana stopped my raising the glass. "Yours, mine, and Danny’s.”

“Watch out, my friend.” Danny slapped my back. “Elana has you in her sights.”

“I have a strict rule about sleeping with friend’s girlfriends or wives.”

“I like a man of principle.” Her body melted into his and I feebly excused myself to count cash in the office.

When I returned, the staff and customers had vanished from the bar. Plastic Bertrand’s JET BOY JET GIRL was playing underneath my feet. I descended the spiral staircase and pushed my way through the bustling crowd to the dance floor.

Danny was in the DJ booth and Elana was writhing against a shining steel pole, then the song segued to The Kingsmen’s raucous MONEY and she stripped off the cotton shift and flung it to a wide-mouthed Bernard. She deftly popped a flimsy bra to bare cupcake breasts and her fingers salaciously beckoned the men to join her in a dance.

My attempt to break through the mob came too late, for Danny leapt into the circle and yanked Elana by the hair. The club-goers were delighted by the impromptu Apache dance. Danny seized the girl like a Roman taking a Sabine woman. I advanced one step to cut in, then the song stopped and the crowd applauded the two dancers.

Bernard segued into Gainsbourg’s LOVE ON THE BEAT and Elana bowed her head. A string of black hair bisected her face. This apparition of a lost Mayan princess paralyzed nearly every man in the room and Danny held up an empty glass. “Hey, man. You’ll break your eyes that way.”

“I liked her dancing.” It had emptied my soul.

“Only liked?” Elana stepped into her dress and stuffed the bra into Danny’s pocket

"He loved it.” Danny laughed hard. “And you owe us a drink for the show.”

“More than one.” I ordered the bartender to give Danny and Elana whatever they wanted and left the nightclub to clear my head. The air was cold and I prayed against any more temptations. God averted his gaze, for a voice said with a Castilian lisp, “I saw your look.”

”What look was that?”

“The devil was trying to buy your soul.”

“What’s the temptation?”

“You and me naked in warm weather so sweat will form on my belly and___”

“You’re Danny’s girl.” I thought he was in love.

“Relationships don’t stop the work of the Devil.” Her hand grasped mine. “I tell you a story. I was born in Madrid. My mother she worked as a flamenco dancer and also took men home too. Una puta. One night she didn’t come back. Where she went, I never found out. My aunt took care of me. We moved to Barcelona and she worked the Ramblas. Men came to her room and I hid in the closet. At first I shut my eyes, thinking they were killing her. After a while I watched. It was better than TV. Sometimes I had to wait in the corridor with the other children. We played the same games as our parents; only it was a joke, then when I’m twelve a man comes to my aunt. He is handsome. He wants me to watch. Nothing more. My aunt tells me to leave. I say I have already seen her do everything. The man gives us both money. I think one day he will take me too. He never does he touches me. Not when I was thirteen fourteen or even fifteen. I watch and he wouldn’t let me touch myself either. Watch. Nothing else and then one day he stopped coming to see my aunt. Maybe she was too old or I was too old. You know what?”

”What?” I was helpless.

“You look a little like him?”

“I've had never been to Spain."

“That shouldn’t stop you from making my dream come true.” She rubbed her body against mine like a stray cat seeking a home and then slinked into the club, murmuring, “Moi et toi.”

I bit my lip and followed her into Le Reve.

Elana pushed a handsome boy off a stool. His frustration was almost audible, as my hand trailed up her thigh hiking the short dress higher.

“You touching me while other men watch thrills every atom in my body." She arched her neck back with eyes searing the ceiling. "They want to be you and I want you in me. Can we go someplace?”

A cheap hotel was across the street. No one would miss me for an hour, however my answer died with Candia’s entrance. She stormed out of the club and I leaped off the barstool in pursuit.

“What about us?” Elana caught me at the door.

“I’ll have to take a rain check.”

“Rain check?” I didn’t waste any time on translations and chased Candia to the corner. Our fight continued on the cab ride and in front of our atelier she tried to hit me with her high heels. I grabbed her arms and begged her forgiveness.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t do anything wrong. I’ve never been with another woman since I met you and you’re more to me than a warm bed.”

These words granted a temporary absolution and we went upstairs to make love so frantically that our ardor massacred every woman in my life to a first kiss in kindergarten, however in my sleep Elana danced out of the mist, wearing a sheet of sweat. My tongue must have been licking my lips, for Candia punched my arm, “If you dream about other women, sleep in another bed.”

I wandered into the living room. I was trapped by a ghost. This time one in the future.

The next night I constructed a bed of pillows in the nightclub office. My preparations were wasted. Jacques handed a note from Danny. The New Yorker was going down to his ship in Brest. Elana had also left Paris for good. I was staying in Paris. I had no idea what for.

IN ABSENCE OF AMNESIA - Chapter 6 By Peter Nolan Smith

At the beginning of 1986 Candia left for a photo shoot in the Alps.

Several days later She phoned to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a ski trip to Isola 2000. Having heard her opinion that skiers were too poor to vacation in the tropics, I bit my tongue and drank heavier than normal that weekend. Candia called on Sunday to say they were stranded by a snowstorm. After she hung up, I convinced myself this was a fling and everything would be like it was before, otherwise she would have never bothered with the call.

On the day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed for an evening of coaxing her into my arms.

Candia arrived late. A new silver fur coat adorned cinnamon skin untouched by the alpine sun and my heart crumpled like a cheap beer can. The telephone rang and she snatched the receiver out of my hand. After several whispers Candia announced, “I have to meet a client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner.”

“Go ahead.”

She left without mentioning what time to expect her home. It wouldn’t be early.

I had dinner at La Coupole and took a taxi to the club. It was an off night and I ordered a whiskey-coke. By 3AM I drank myself partially deaf and dumb.

“What’s wrong?” Bernard stopped my dancing on a stool to Arthur Lee’s HEY JOE.

“Nothing another whiskey-coke wouldn’t cure.” I shouted for a refill and Bernard annulled my order. “Go home and sleep this off?”

“A house is not a home.” I staggered to the entrance and a runway model from Baltimore waylaid my departure. “Care to join me for a nightcap.”

“Where?” I had champagne waiting in a bucket of melted ice.

“Where is unimportant.” And she whispered an obscene proposal. Her idea of a nightcap differed from mine. “So?”

My girlfriend was probably making love to another man, however I held the high moral ground. “Another night.”

“Another night?” The beautiful redhead graced the cover of Elle. No male in their right mind had refused her favors. “You’re making a big mistake.”

“It won’t be the first or the biggest.” I weaved out of the club into a flurry of errant snowflakes. My feet trudged across Place de La Concorde to the Seine. The river lay between the two banks like octopus ink and I lifted my leg onto the parapet.

Rue St. Honore. I ran off the bridge, as the flic yelled, “Arrête, arrête.”

I outran the fat flic into a thick snow softening the night. Cars glided almost noiselessly on the streets, as I marched relentlessly to the 15th arrondisement, realizing while I might not forget this trespass, I could forgive Candia’s sin. I just needed the chance.

Reaching the Impasse Dantzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. My key turned in the lock. The door opened with a creak. An empty champagne bottle was on the floor between shiny Gucci loafers. They were neither my size nor style. A man moaned behind the nearest closed door and I charged into the bedroom with a roar. A balding man lifted his arms too late to deflect my fist and he tumbled semi-conscious onto the floor. I threw Candia on the floor. The girl nursing my cold, the lover cuddling me after sex, and the dinner companion laughing at my jokes were gone

“Why?”

“You know why,” she spat with an unrecognizable hostility. “You never loved me. You loved a ghost. Your cousin told me about this ‘Lisa’ and she never loved you.”

I envisioned a deadly blow, police, and trial. No French court had convicted a man of a crime de passion, but my blow would have been revenge for her speaking the truth. I chucked the Mickey Mouse telephone through the window into the street, after which I scourged the couple from the apartment with the frayed wire. The man’s suit and shoes followed it out the broken window as a petty act of vengeance.

I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos. Five minutes later I fled the apartment fearing the arrival of the gendarmes, and hailed a taxi on the nearest boulevard. The hour and my bag explained the story and the unshaven driver shrugged knowingly, “Un hotel?”

“Ouais, le Hotel Marais.” My accelerated breathing worried the driver, who asked, “Mssr., vous etes okay?”

“Ouais.” I lowered the window. The cold air failed to pluck the splintered razors from my lungs. A bottle of tranquilizers rested in my coat. Three or four were on the menu. It took the driver 20 minutes to reach Rue Des Ecouffes. I paid with a 100-franc note.

“Keep the change.” The sky was fettered by glowering gray clouds. The day would have no dawn.

“Merci.” He drove away to pick up a couple holding hands.

I entered the hotel lobby with my hand gripping the bottle of tranks. The old woman was asleep at the desk. Waking her seemed a sin, except I had nearly broken the 5th Commandment twenty minutes before. I rang the bell and she blinked several times before recognizing my face from the previous stay.

“Ah, Mssr., je imagine que vous voulez une chambre.”

“Une chambre pour un nuit.” A room with a bath fulfilled my physical needs.

“Chambre 312.” She passed over a brass key and indicated the stairs.

It was the room from before. Nothing had changed. I sat on the soft bed and weighed my options. The pill bottle was only one route. The window was another. Neither would save my soul and I dropped three pills. The rest would have to wait for a more desperate occasion.

I woke to the shouts of the little gangsters on Rue des Ecouffes. The bells from a nearby church toned out the noon hour. The throbbing of my hangover was replaced by the resurrection of Candia’s infidelity. She had brought her lover on purpose. Jack Lemmon must have felt the same way in THE APARTMENT when he realized Shirley MacLaine was having an affair with his boss, Fred MacMurray.

My hands mimicked the act of strangulation. I choked her dead. Thin air was no replacement for a seventeen year-old’s neck, except I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts.

I tore up the photos of Candia naked in the changing cabinets of the Piscine Deligny, singing in Clermont-Fernand, and visiting her grandmother in Vichy. The shreds built a pyre in the hotel ashtray and burned with a chemical speed. The flames wrinkled her face and an acrid fume corkscrewed into my nose. Fearing Candia might invade my body, I flushed the flaming photos down the toilet, then left the hotel for a drink.

The icy wind hurried me to the Tartine on Rue Du Rivoli and I sat on the terrace sheltered by a glass wall. The waitress wrote down my order of a cafe au lait, croissant, and two shots of Calvados before disappearing inside.

Waiting for my breakfast I viewed passing couples with hatred. Two more Calvados numbed my senses to the grisly weather and diminished the bite of Candia’s words, Vanessa’s coldness, and Lisa’s disappearance. After a fifth applejack I failed to register someone sitting beside me, until he lit a cigarette.

“I’ve been looking for you.” Judging from the stubble Bernard had not woken at his apartment.

“Why?” My face was numb from the alcohol.

“I called your house this morning and spoke with your girlfriend.” Bernard signaled to the waiter for another round.

“More like my girlfiend.” Dropping an ‘r’ from friend was lost on the Frenchman. “What the bitch say for herself?”

“She is worried about you.” Bernard’s eyes pursued two schoolgirls.

“If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?” I blew into my hands.

“You Americans treat women as men. They are women and we have to protect the double standard, otherwise the battle between man and woman will be lost.” Bernard waved to a model heading to a casting call. “You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her. She said you were still in love with another love. Some blonde.”

I had told Candia the story once. I hadn't thought about Lisa since then. At least I didn't think that I had thought about her.

“I almost killed her.”

"Who? The blonde?" The French like stories of hot blood.

"Not the blonde." I had to forget Lisa someday. Probably when I was dead. "Candia."

“Excellent, and now she appreciates you.”

“Appreciates me?”

“Yes, a woman is a horse. You hold the reins tight and the horse will throw you. Too loose and she will run away.” He slapped his hands together. “Yeehaw.”

“You’ve been watching too many cowboy movies.” My parents had reared me to not hit a woman. It was their one rule that I obeyed without question. I was sadly learning that there should have been more.

“The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave.” Bernard inhaled deeply on his cigarette. “They have a little corps-a-corps. She stays with him. Not the man who lets her ugh-ugh with another caveman.”

The only drawings of a Neanderthals dragging a woman by her hair existed as TV cartoons, however man’s dominance over woman needed no historical proof in France. “This is the almost the 21st Century.”

“Eh, alors, the collapse of classic family structures reinforces the need to establish a rapport de force,” Bernard stubbed out his cigarette. “Yell at her, hit her, and make love. She expects you to act like a man, not a Mickey Mouse.”

“Couldn’t I be another animal?”

“No, you are not a dog, you are not an ape. You are man.” My passivity ignited his machismo for my own good. “I have seen you throw Brigitte Bardot out of a nightclub. Your friend Danny talked about your fights with the Russian mafia. Are you going to let a teenager push you around?” “Sometimes you have to know when to do nothing.”

“If you let this wound bleed, you will be no good for the next woman you meet.”

”I’m done with women.”

“Ha, there is always another woman. A plus tard.”

To prove his thesis Bernard stalked a fashionably-attired woman in her thirties. Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile and they linked arms.

Bernard was right. I had sung I’M A MAN a hundred times.

Restrengthened by the Yardbirds song, I shambled to the boulevard, foreseeing my kicking in the door, except every taxi was occupied and the urge to reclaim Candia was humbled by the icy drizzle.

I called Brigitte. She came across the bridge for lunch. Angus was happy to see me.

“I knew this would happen.”

“I knew you would say that.”

“Philippe said she was too young to be faithful.” This was hard to take coming from an adulteress, but my problem with Candia had nothing to do with her infidelity.

“I was faithful.”

“Only in body. That blonde in New York has a lock on your heart. Fool.” Brigitte offered my old place on the sofa. Sleeping with Angus might accelerate the healing process, however I opted to remain at the hotel.

The owner brought me tea and a baguette every morning. Candia came to the club and asked for a second chance. It was more like the fifth. We slept together three nights and I got a venereal disease. She said it came from a toilet seat. Our final good-bye was at the VD clinic.

I bought a typewriter and wrote a novella about a nightclub owner being offered fame and fortune by Satan. A French production company invested money in a script of GO-GO GIRLS FROM HELL. Bernard hired three models to cut a record TAKE ME HIGHER. The three models got pregnant from their boyfriends and blamed me for the miracle of Immaculate Conception. The hundred sample records of TAKE ME HIGHER arrived warped as potato chips and the film company lost interest without the girls.

Worse Vadim and Lisa showed up at le Reve.

“Surprised to see me here.” I bought a bottle of champagne.

“No, everyone said you were here.” Her eyes were distant.

“They said it was fun here.” Vadim held her hand.

“Some nights it is.” Usually the ones Bernard and I drank too much.

“You get back to New York?” Vadim ordered a better bottle of champagne.

“Not at all.”

“That’s good.” Vadim’s eyes followed the waitress to the bar.

“Vadim can’t go back to the States.” Lisa ignored his surveillance. Her beauty was passing from youth to near thirty.

"But we are welcome in Russia.” Vadim toasted me with a nearly empty glass.

“Back in the USSR.”

“You should come out there. Moscow is wild like New York.” Vadim glowed with pride. “Another few years and communism is dead.”

“Yeah, you two were made for Russia.” Lisa’s disdain extended to both of us and I wondered how Vadim had survived the last four years with her.

“I like any place fun.”

Bernard joined our table. We drank more champagne. Lisa kept saying she wanted to leave. Vadim wasn’t in the mood to sit in a hotel. Bernard and he became friends that week. Lisa never came to the bar again.<

Bernard accepted Vadim’s invitation to vacation over the holidays in Ibiza. He wanted me to come too, but instead I bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Paul.

A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. I dumped my spare change into the charity bowl for children. There were no good-byes.

My parents didn’t question my return and I celebrated a family Christmas with all the trimmings. My brothers and sisters sensed my smiles were superficial and asked me to stay, except Boston was too small after Paris and New York.

The Amtrak train took 5 hours to reach Penn Station. A taxi drove me to East 10th street. My apartment was small after living in Candia’s atelier, but the pizza at Stromboli’s was good and TV was in English. My friends initially greeted me with suspicion, since any absence from the city was regarded an act of treason to New Yorkers.

No one mentioned the Continental, Viktor Malenski, or Lisa, for Manhattan moves too fast to allow scandals to take permanent root. My mail from the past year held nothing from the NYPD and the phone messages complied by the subleasee were from friends and not Internal Affairs.

At the end of January I instructed Bernard to sell my share of the club. He warned this was an imprudent business move. I needed the cash. The money arrived the end of January.

An albino producer hired me to write a screenplay. We spent the winter in the Berkshire Hills, fleshing out a tale about a young mistress inheriting an offshore island in the Keys. He had me sign over the rights to WHERE THE HIGHWAY ENDS for $10,000 and a 1964 Triumph Tiger. The movie was made it to film.

“You should come out to LA,” Sherri said XXX companies were paying good money for porno scripts.

“You said that before.”

“And you said ‘no’.”

“Give me a good reason to come out.”

“Maybe you can meet a nice girl.”

“Are there any?”

“Well, maybe not nice, but sexy.” She never lied to me.

“I’ll be there.”

I flew out to the valley and wrote several screenplays, however the industry was switching from film to video for the fast-forward action crowd and starlets would rather fuck a car valet than a writer. North Hollywood was hell for writers.

Without Che’s star quality my cousin’s films had degenerated to sloppy free-for-alls. Her name dropped from star to supporting roles and Sherri’s condition worsened with an arrest for indecent exposure. After I bailed her out, she drove her battered Skylark directly to the dealer in Sunland.

“Maybe you should cool out. We could go to the desert.”

“So you can fuck me like everyone else?” This was the drugs speaking.

“No, so you don’t die.” Her arms and legs were stitched with tracks. She was nodding behind the wheel and we narrowly missed a semi-trailer on the Ventura Freeway.

"Let me drive."

"No."

"You're going to kill us." I was desperate, but not that desperate.

“I survived being deserted by my mother. I survived adoption. I survived these films. I survived Che leaving me.” She cried for an hour by the side of the road. I held her in my arms. Worst was sure to come.

“You can’t die on me. You promised you would push me down the stairs when I need to die.”

“I’ll live that long.” Sherri sniffed away the tears. “Even if it kills me.”

Several days later Sherri dropped me at LAX and I wondered whether I would see her again. Our friends and enemies died from AIDS, ODs, suicides, and stupid accidents. Natural causes were for the rest of the world and so were normal relationships.

New York women were looking for millionaires. I didn’t stand a chance against bald-headed bankers or loud stockbrokers. On a visit to Boston my mother suggested visiting Ireland to find a woman like herself or my sisters.

“I’ll even pay the ticket. I know you want to marry and have kids."

"I do.” It was the first time I admitted this goal.

“You’ll never meet a girl like that in New York.”

“Other people do. Maybe I’ll be lucky.”

“Lucky is for horse races.” She believed more in prayers than casinos. “What about Ireland?”

“I’ll save it for a rainy day.” Every Irish woman left the Emerald Isle once she’s old enough to breed or else she’ll have a brood of five by 20. I would go when the time was right and that time was not now.