Twenty-five minutes after the ball dropped on New Year's Eve 1982 a masked assassin shot dead the main investor a block away from the Continental Club on West 25th Street. The FBI and NYPD's Internal Affairs investigating Viktor Malenski's murder quickly drew lines between the dots. My ex-girlfriend was living with the dead man’s partner. My boss had been wearing a wire. I had paid bribes to cops in patrol cars. The scandal hit the papers. My name had been mentioned twice. Everyone thought I knew something. They were more right than wrong.
Thankfully a phone call from Paris saved me from turning state's witness. The nightclub owner Serge offered me a position of 'physionomiste'. My inability to speak French was considered a plus. A ticket was waiting at the airport and two days later I left New York without leaving a forwarding address and a planned rendezvous with Lisa,who said she wanted to leave Vadim. She never showed at the steps of Notre-Dame
Paris was a relief. The nightclub on the Grand Boulevard was popular. I got free food, drinks, and the right to treat the French as rudely as necessary. They loved me for this rude behavior. It was the perfect job for an American in Paris.
Any time I thought about returning to New York, I would call my friends. They said an Internal Affairs investigation in the 20th Precinct was in full swing. The FBI had asked several people my whereabouts. Paris was home and I made the best of it.
Young models from foreign lands and svelte dancers from the Folies Bergeres dragged me to flats throughout the various arrondissements. My troubles were 3000 miles away. 1982 became 1983 and 1984 arrived without any commitment to a conventional life.
All that changed when a mischievous teenager with a froth of golden brown hair accompanied me to my hotel room in the Marais.
I attributed our having sex five times in one night to Candia's half-Puerto Rican/half Jewish blood. The next morning she didn't leave my hotel room for three days. The ancient hotel proprietress smiled at my foolish and once murmured in a spy's whisper, ""Attention, Mssr., les filles ont tres dangeroux and Paris teenagers are experts at toying with a man's heart."
"Thanks for the warning."
I ignored her and would have done the same if the entire city of Paris shouted out the truth; that I was justd a another stupid man who confusesd lust for love, especially after the long-legged model/actress invited me to live with her in La Ruche, an artist commune.
Staking my heart on the whims of a girl fifteen years my junior was a dangerous proposition, however the atelier in the distant 15th arrondissement overlooking the Lost and Found bureau of the Paris Taxi Commission was a welcome change from the Marais Hotel. Famous artists had lived on its ground and I started writing a novel about pornography in LA.
Candia modeled in Germany, Italy, and Paris. We laughed, fought, made up, and went on vacations. Her father ran a small nightclub on the St. Germain, tres declasse, but I like Johnny. He was from the Bronx. He had a thousand stories on Paris in the 1950s and 1960s. I also got two free drink once a week, whihc was no small thing. Johnny's place wasa clip joint for tourists.
Life was bliss and 1986 was a good year until Paris was hit by a horrendous bombing campaign in April.
Explosions rocked the French capitol with unexpected frequency. The attacks killed and maimed innocent people throughout the winter and spring, while the Gaullist government played tough guy with the terrorists demanding the release of their imprisoned comrades. The Prime Minister Chirac announced on the radio that France would not submit to blackmail, although everyone in the city understood that a few more victims were destined to join the casualty lists before the two parties agreed on a final price to end hostilities.
The summer passed without any detonations, but that lull was broken by four deadly blasts in September.
One explosion on Rue Faux had destroyed the lobby of the Israeli bank on the corner of the Grand Boulevard. No one had been injured in the blast, however the fiery shock wave had shattered every window on the block, torched a dozen cars, and ravaged our nightclub's ornate entrance.
On Monday morning the owner and I surveyed the wreckage.
"On a la chance." Serge ran his finger over the heat-blistered interior.
"Yes, we were damn lucky."
If Le Reve had been open for business, the casualty list would have run into the hundreds.
The comptoir had withstood the shock wave, but scores of bottles had been concussed to shards and the smell of alcohol overwhelmed the odor of charred wood. A mustached man in a rumpled suit clambered over the damaged interior with a callous deliberation. This was not his first time at a crime scene.
Serge introduced me to the police inspector as the 'physionomiste', which meant more a diviner of souls than a doorman with a list.
"L'Amercain." The police investigator pronounced my nationality with an accusatory tone. Ronald Reagan had tested the bonds of 'Lafayette we are here' with an April bombing raid on Libya. The French government had refused the F-16s access to French air space. 1917 was a long way in the past from 1986.
"With an Irish passport and working papers." I presented my documents. Everything was in order.
"Irelandais." Irish translated to IRA and bombs to the cop's dog brain. "I have a few questions."
"Only a few." We sat at a charred table. Serge poured cognac from a salvaged bottle. The nightclub impresario was elegant even in his dusty paratrooper overalls.
"It is merely a formality." 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 of the bombing. He asked the same set of questions a dozen times. I repeated my answers without deviation.
The truth was always easier to remember than a lie.
"Thank you for your assistance." The chain-smoking investigator had not interviewed anyone else on our staff.
They were French.
"Do I need a lawyer?" The French justice system considered everyone guilty until proven innocent and the policeman shook his head with a nicotine laugh. "Not unless you are guilty."
"I'm not. I was in bed with my girlfriend."
"We will check out your alibi." The 'flic' folded his notebook and exited from the club.
I downed my cognac.
"You try to be so cool, but you run around like a chicken without feet after a few questions by the police." Serge had a knack for messing up American axioms.
"It's 'chicken with its head off'."
"I like my way better." The French were as infallible as the Pope, but his blasé demeanor evaporated upon hearing the contractor say that the repairs would take at least a two weeks.
"This is impossible. I have a business to run." Le Reve was extremely popular with the BCBG of Paris. The young rich from the 16th arrondissement spent their parents' money with an abandonment missing from their bourgeois lives. A bottle of cheap champagne cost 600 francs and a whiskey-coke 120 francs. Le Reve was a cash cow for all concerned parties.
"Today is Monday. Tomorrow I get supplies, Wednesday we take out the wreckage." The wine-nosed contractor recited the litany of this reconstruction to the centime.
"Enough, enough." Serge waved away the contractor, who shrugged with inbred Gallic nonchalance. After his departure he ranted against the sloth of French workers. A few cognacs redirected his rancor to the real culprits.
"C'est le guerre."
He was right. It was a war.
I bid Serge good-bye and returned home on the Metro. The nervous passengers warily studied unattended bags. Bombs didn't have to be big.
Getting off on my stop in the 15th arrondissement deflated my anxiety. The only potential target on Rue du Basfroi was the Bureau des Objets-Trouves across the street from Candia's atelier and I doubted if anyone was turning in a bomb to Paris' Lost and Found.
Candia greeted me with a kiss. Her nose wrinkled with a twitch and the thin teenager pushed me away with both hands, as if the odor might have clung to her clothing.
"You smell like a pig barbecued in brandy." Her description of my scent sounded delicious.
"The bar was destroyed by the blast and the front was burnt by the flames."
I took off my jacket and hung it on a hook.
Candia hated a messy apartment.
"It'll be at least a month before we open."
"And you get 'chomage'?" Candia clapped her hands in eager anticipation of my answer. Chomage or unemployment imcome would pay for flightsto JFK.
"I guess I do." We had been together for a year. Sometimes I forgot that the half-French/half-Puerto Rican girl was young, especially in bed with the lights out.
"Then we can go on vacation." The eighteen year-old's and my schedules were in constant conflict. She lived in the day and I had the nights.
"What about your work?" Her modeling agency had been fighting fashion editors to get her a magazine cover. An innocent face surrounded by blondish curls should have been an easy sell, but the better-paying commercials and editorial work in France were reserved for girls with Caucasian roots.
Candia had no chance of passing for white.
"Work is slow." The bombing campaign hurt every aspect of life in Paris. "We could go to America for a week."
"Let me think about it." I hadn't been to my East Village apartment in three years. My subleasee said that Internal Affairs hadn't called for me in six months. Terrorism was safer than facing corrupt NYPD cops.
"You never want to go anywhere." Candia stormed upstairs and slammed shut the bedroom door. Teenage tantrums were her specialty.
At thirty-three I was old enough to be her younger uncle from New York.
She didn't let me into the bedroom until 11. Our bodies didn't touch that night. Candia didn't want me around the atelier and in the monring I got dressed in heavy boots, jeans, and a leather jacket.
"Where are you going?" Candia asked from under the covers. Her agency had called to say it was closed for the duration of the bombing campaign.
"To check on flights to the USA." I bought my tickets from an agency in Les Halles.
"As if we are going anywhere." She pulled the blankets over her head.
I didn't bother to reply and left the atelier for the Metro.
While we made love with regularity and I told her that I loved her once a day, I couldn't remember the last time the words 'je t'aime' crossed her lips. Something was broken between us and it felt like something neither of us could fix.
The train to Les Halles was empty. The randomness of the attacks frightened people. My travel agency was shut and its closing was not for lunch. I tried to call Candia from a cafe. The phone rang without an answer. She was playing a game and I slammed the receiver into the cradle.
Distant bells tolled the hour and I strolled over to the Marais to light a candle at Eglise St. Gervais. Old habits died hard, even for non-believers.
Scattering clouds dotted the sky and the September sun warmed the streets. The few girls on the sidewalks sported short dresses. I decided to take a steam at the Hamman on rue Des Rosiers. Inside the sauna I fell asleep on a bench for several hours and then ate a pastrami sandwich at the Rosenburg Deli.
I called Candia's atelier with the same result.
No answer.
It was getting late and I crossed the courtyard of the Hotel de Ville headed for St. Michel. I loved this walk over the Seine and I took off my jacket. The warm weather reminded me of Indian Summer in New England and I smiled at that memory, but not for long.
A powerful detonation knocked me off my feet before a subsonic thud rattled my body. I remained on my knees for at least a half-minute, then checked my limbs. There was no blood. I had been untouched by the shrapnel.
As I stood slowly, the loud ringing in my ears was replaced by the screams. Several men and I ran to the nearby post office to wrestle the wounded from the debris. The firemen arrived within minutes. The police ordered us to leave. This was a job for professionals and Paris was a city for the French.
I arrived home and said to Candia, "We should go to America."
"What changed your mind?" She seemed hesitant, as if she didn't want to go anywhere with me.
"There was a bomb attack at Hotel de Ville." I didn't say that I had been there. "We can go to New York."
"You think I can work there?"
"They love girls like you In New York." A mulatto stood a better chance in America, plus a friend was the photo editor for Details and another comrade shot photos for Elle.
"Fantastique. I want to see Disneyworld," she squealed with breathless delight. The French loved Mickey Mouse as much as Jerry Lewis.
"Yes, we can go see Mickey." I didn't have the heart to explain that 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. At noon Radio Nova announced that the Chirac government had freed the Lebanese prisoners. Hearing the news, Maria hugged a Mickey Mouse doll.
"Is it over?"
"Yes."
"What about Disneyworld?"
"Let me see what Serge says."
"You promise we see Mickey." Her feet stamped on the floor. This was not just about Mickey Mouse.
"I have to check on the nightclub."
I dressed quickly in the same clothes as yesterday. They still smelled of barbecue.
"You can sleep at the club tonight, if you love that place so much." Candia flung a bottle at my head and I ducked in time.
"I'll be back." Flowers and a nice dinner worked wonders.
"Why bother?" Her cold green eyes revealed that we never had been more than two people sharing a bed.
"Why bother?" I blinked in disbelief. I though we had something, but there was a lot about Candia I liked and but I wasn't giving up without a fight. "I'll be back later."
"Suit yourself." She turned her back on me. I was no longer there even before I left the atelier.
I arrived at Rue Faux, expecting no progress on the club, however a new wall had been erected in my absence. The entrance had been restored to its gaudy glory, liquor bottles had been arranged over the bar, and the dance floor had been shined to the brilliance of a lacquered mirror. Serge stood at the newly refurbished disc jockey booth. Several milk crates filled with records lay at his feet.
"Surprised?" Serge was dressed in a 40s Zoot suit and dropped Willie Bobo's SPANISH GREASE on the new turntable. The new speakers favored Latino Swing.
"Shocked." When a French worker says, "Two weeks", he usually meant six weeks.
"A phone call here. A phone call there." His brother held office in the government, the club's liquor came tax-free from a military base, two of our bouncers were off-duty marines. None of these favors were deemed 'inappropriate'.
Serge’s head bopped to the flute hitting a high note.
"Opening date is in five days according to them."
"Damn, I promised Candia a trip to Disneyworld." I rolled my eyes. "Now we're opening I'll have to cancel."
"Ah, quais, Mssr. Mickey has a way with les filles."
Having known Candia since she was 14, the suave Parisian was surprised that I had lasted longer than her other boyfriends and cued up Maurice Chevalier's THANK HEAVEN FOR LITTLE GIRLS.
"If you want to go, go. The workers will take another week at least. Maybe a month, if they go on strike."
"Thanks." I went to the bar 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. Something must have changed her mind.
"Oh." I hung up and went over to Serge, telling him that I would see him tomorrow.
"Embrace your chouchette for me."
"Better from you than me."
I exited from the nightclub.
The carless street resembled a scene out of the 1870s. A tent had been erected under a balcony and a young clochard was cutting vegetables into a pot. The thin bum was better dressed than the 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. ADDICTED TO LOVE plavedon the stereo. A stubbed cigarette lay in the ashtray. The filter was unstained by lipstick. A man had been here. Candia threw the butt in the trash and packed her bag for Italy. Her good-bye kiss was a peck on the cheek.
The next five days Serge and I worked twenty-hour days. I called the hotel in Milan every evening. The desk clerk explained in bad English that Candia wasn't in her room. I left a message about the opening with the number of Le Reve.
The contractor had performed a miracle inspired by money, but five minutes before the doors opened, an electrical surge blew the fuses. Serge found the breakers and switched on the lights. We were ready for business.
Fun-loving Parisians swarmed before Le Reve. Jacques and the two marines held back the horde. I picked and chose old faces to mingle with the young. The crowd at bar piled up three-deep. Serge's DJing drove the teenagers onto the dance floor and Paris' elite drank with a thirst spurred by surviving the bomb campaign.
Candia showed up unexpectedly at the club with her Puerto Rican father. Johnny ran a small boite de nuit in St. Germain. She looked like an angel on the run in her tight white dress. I offered them a bottle of champagne. Candia's kiss was warm, but before I could hold her in my arms, Jacques tapped my shoulder.
"I need you at the door." The handsome Martiniquean was quiet-spoken for his size. The young ex-con had already spent too much of his youth avoiding the walls of La Sante Prison and he liked to avoid trouble.
"Someone?" I accompanied Jacques to the door and the black giant pulled apart the curtains.
The young clouchard from down the street was struggling with a lighter.
"He wants to see with you."
"He say why?"
"No," Jacques was loyal. He had been looking for work forever before my hiring him to be a bouncer. "You want I make him go away?"
"No." All I had to do was say the word for him to prove his gratitude, but a bum was no threat to anyone. I reached into my pocket. Twenty francs would buy the clouchard a bottle of wine and good luck for Le Reve. "I'll see what he wants."
Jacques unlatched the ropes for the quartet of golden youths from the 16th Arrondisement and I pulled out a few spare coins. The bum raised a smiling face and said in English "Hey, you don't recognize me?"
Squinting I scrapped away the filth.
"Danny?" I hadn't seen Danny Wall since leaving New York three years ago.
"It's me."
I hugged the lanky DJ.
Our embrace was a short-lived, because he stunk of zombie dirt.
"When was the last time you bathed?"
"I didn't think the French cared about personal hygiene."
The tale about French men using only one bar of soap a year was no urban myth.
"Well, I'm not French, I'm an American." I opened the ropes to the amazement of several waiting customers. "We have a shower in the basement."
"Do I smell that bad?"
"Like you crawled from a grave. Once you're cleaned up, I'll cuff you a couple of drinks."
"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 New York right after Viktor Malenski got killed at the Continental?"
"A week later." An absence of almost four years hadn't erased my involvement in that deadly night. "I've been working in Paris since. I get paid to act rude to the French. Can it get better than that, can it?"
"You're my new hero." He nodded to the buxom cashier, who held her nose, as I led the trumpeter to the basement changing room. I opened the taps of the washing room.
"It's all yours."
"I'll be a new man after that." Danny stripped off his clothes and climbed into the steam-filled shower stall.
"You know I saw you grl, Lisa, in New York. She was still with Vadim. Neither of them looked happy."
"She ask about me?"
"Not a word."
"Okay." I hadn't thought about Lisa in a month.
Now she was back from the past ghosting into the now.
I left the washroom with his tattered clothes, dumped them in the trash bin, and then rummaged through a backstage closet. I found a musty suit from the 1950s, which I hung on the shower room and went upstairs with two cases of champagne.
Serge was waiting at the bar.
"So who is your guest?"
"A friend from New York." I put down the champagne box and ordered a whiskey.
"So now the Americans are exporting bums to France," Serge scoffed with the immense pleasure of hearing that an Amerlot had plunged to the bottom of the barrel. 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.
"You're 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 from the paratroopers. Johnny was famous in his unit. 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 drunk."
"Everyone else is pretty."
"Fool."
"I Love you."
"You say those words so easy," she spoke with an even sharpness.
"I mean it." I escorted her to a taxi.
"Then what is love?"
The answer should have been on my lips, but she shut the door before I could think of a good one.
I drank the rest of the night with Danny. As the night drew to a close, I asked the New Yorker. "You have anything in your 'room' you want to keep here?"
"No, I ain't got nothing worth stealing."
"I hocked it in Spain."
"Pawn it? You lived for your music." If he wasn't playing his horn than he was spinning records.
"Like you used to live for your poetry." Danny chugged his whiskey.
"I couldn't write in meter." My grammar school nuns had beaten a respect for classical cadence and proper grammar into our knuckles. I had rebelled against the teachings and stopped writing to prove them wrong.
"Your stopping poetry 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, 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 still lurked in my skull as half-built ships in dry docks.
"Or Chet Baker." The lean New Yorker 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 into le Havre." The ex-trumpeter nearly swooned off the stool. "Sorry, the whiskey kinda went to my head. I'll be fine once I'm out at sea."
"Your parents bought you a boat?" His family had money. A fifty-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 a la 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 was possessed by a convert's devotion for his new profession.
"If you love fishing so much, what are you doing in Paris?"
"Like I said a long-line boat from Gloucester is supposed to dock in Le Havre and I'll sign onto fish the Georges Bank. Free ride to the USA too." Danny picked at a front tooth. It was a little brown with decay.
"Lucky man. When is that?" I had lived in Gloucester. Fishing was a tough both on and off shore.
"Maybe a week. Maybe two. Depends on the fish 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, but 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. A crazy girl. Young like your girlfriend. Her mother was a flamenco dancer. Elana 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 in our apartment across the street from the Lost and found Bureau a Super 8 mm porno movie flickered in the shadows of my mind. Candia noticed my distraction and asked, "What are you thinking?"
"About how much I want you."
"Ouais?" She rolled out of bed to vainly examine my clothes for the telltale signs of infidelity, however the only traces of another woman were in my mind. Unsatisfied by her search the teenager lay on the bed, fiercely clutching a Mickey Mouse doll. I reached over to her. She wasn't having any of me and I slept on my side of the bed.
I thought that first night was an aberration, but whenever models, dancers from the Paris Ballet, French actresses, artistes, and svelte students from the Sorbonne tried to seduce the ex-trumpeter, he told them, "I'm saving myself for Elana."
One night Danny didn't appear at his usual hour and I checked his shack. The canvas sea bag was gone. Paris was as tough a town as New York and two days later I reported his disappearance to the prefecture. The gendarme at the desk joked that people frequently vanished in Paris.
"Sometimes on purpose. Sometimes by mistake."
I didn't laugh, but should have, for the next night Danny approached Le Reve, newly shaven with his hair cut. 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 shipwrecked sailor on his first leave.
"I was beginning to believe she was a fragment of your imagination."
"No, Elana's the real thing." Danny looked over his shoulder.
A slender female in a cotton shift crossed Rue Faux. Her black hair was disheveled by the rough touch of a man. 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." I envisioned two bodies atop the art-deco palace. One of them was not Danny's.
"We didn't go there for the view." Danny introduced us.
"He talks about you." Elana's serpentine arm encircled his waist.
"What he say?" I led them inside Le Reve.
"That you're a genius for not wanting to be a genius." The two clung together to form one body.
"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 in the basement. 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 Serge. She deftly popped a flimsy bra to bare cupcake breasts and her fingers salaciously beckoned the men to join her dance.
My attempt to break through the mob came too late, because Danny leapt into the circle and yanked at Elana's hair. The club-goers were enthralled by the impromptu Apache dance and when the song stopped, the crowd applauded the two dancers.
Serge put on Gainsbourg's LOVE ON THE BEAT and Elana bowed her head, so 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 before leaving the nightclub to clear my head in the cold night air, however a voice said with a Castilian lisp, "I saw your look."
"What look was that?" I turned to Elana.
"Like devil was out to buy your soul." Her face glowed with energy.
"What do I get for succumbing to the temptation?"
"You and me naked in warm weather so sweat will form on my belly and___"
"You're Danny's girl."
"Relationships don't prevent the work of the Devil." Her hand grasped mine. "I'll tell you a story. I was born in Madrid. My mother she worked as a flamenco dancer and she also took men home. She came from a family of putas. One night she didn't come back. Where she went, I never found out. My aunt and I 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. 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 you look a little like him."
I was helpless prey within her spell.
"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, 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 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. Seeing me with Elana 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 to Rue Danzig 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 mean more to me than a warm bed."
These words granted me 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, because Maria 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. One from 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 meet his ship in Brest.
Elana was accompanying him to the sea.
Neither of them came back to Paris.
At the end of September Candia left for a photo shoot in the Alps. She phoned the first night to say her boss had invited the fashion team for a weekend hiking trip. I bit my tongue and drank heavier than normal that weekend.
On Sunday Candia called to say they were stranded by a snowstorm.
When 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.
The day of her return I cleaned the apartment, bought flowers, chilled a bottle of champagne, and sprayed a perfume on the bed.
Candia arrived late. A 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 Maria announced, "I have to meet a client at the Hotel Crillion for dinner."
"Go ahead."
She departed 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 had drunk myself partially deaf and dumb.
"What's wrong?" Serge 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 Serge 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?" A bottle of champagne was waiting in a bucket of melted ice back at the atelier.
"Where is unimportant." She whispered an obscene proposal. Her idea of a nightcap differed from mine. "So?"
"Another night." My girlfriend was probably making love to another man, however I preferred to hold the high moral ground.
"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 and trudged toward the Seine. The river lay between the two banks like a spill of octopus ink and I lifted my leg onto the parapet. I was in no condition to swim.
"Eh, vous." A fat policeman appeared out of the gloom and I ran off the bridge, as the flic yelled, "Arrete, arrete."
I outran the fat cop and 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 Danzig I lifted my eyes. The lights in the atelier were off. I imagined Candia waiting in bed for me. 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 closed bedroom door and I charged 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 Maria 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. A ghost of a woman that does not exist."
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. The man's suit and shoes followed it out the broken window as a petty act of vengeance, after which I scourged the couple from the apartment with the frayed wire.
Candia's mother lived next door and I heard the two women yelling about the police. I packed my clothes, journals, tape deck, camera, and photos.
Five minutes later I fled the apartment 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 morning sky was fettered by glowering gray clouds offering 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. An old woman was asleep at the desk. Waking her seemed a sin, except tewenty minutes earlier I had nearly broken the 5th Commandment. I tapped 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. "Maybe more time."
"Chambre 312." She passed over a brass key and indicated the stairs.
Candia and I had first slept together in this room. She was becoming a ghost like Lisa and so many others who found someone else.
I climbed the three flights and entered the room to sit on the soft bed and weigh my options.
Downing the whole pill bottle was only one route. The window was another choice. 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 Candia's neck, except I was only a murderer in my most grievous thoughts.
I spent the next few minutes tearing up the photos of Maria 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, and left the hotel for a drink.
The October 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 regarded passing couples with hatred. Two more Calvados numbed my senses to the grisly weather and diminished the bite of Candia's words. 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 Serge 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." Serge signaled to the waiter for another round.
"More like my girlfiend." Dropping an 'r' from friend was lost on the Frenchman.
"What the bitch have to say for herself?"
"She is worried about you." Serge's eyes pursued two schoolgirls.
"If she cared about me, why she bring home that man?" I blew into my hands, envying his freedom.
"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." Serge waved to a model heading to a casting call. "You allowed her to have affairs and she concluded you did not care about her."
"I almost killed her."
"C'est vrai, 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. "Yeei-hah."
"You've been watching too many cowboy movies." My parents had reared me to not hit a woman and it was their one rule that I had obeyed without question up to last night.
"The caveman drags a woman by the hair to the cave." Serge 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." Serge 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 a man." My passivity ignited his machismo. "I have seen you throw Brigitte Bardot out of a nightclub. Your friend Danny talked about your fights with the Russian mafia. About your girlfriend Lisa. I knew something was haunting you and if I knew so did Candia, but 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 Serge stalked a fashionably-attired woman in her thirties.
Within a few paces she rewarded his boldness with a smile and they linked arms.
Serge was right and I sung I'M A MAN after paying my bill.
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 Maria was humbled by the wait. My problem with Candia had nothing to do with her infidelity and I returned to the hotel not wanting to leave my room.
Two nights later Candia came to the club and asked for a second chance. It was more like the fifth. I said yes. 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.
That November I moved back into the Hotel Marais 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. Serge 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.
One evening I sat on the bed in the pills in my hand. Twenty would wrap me in an eternal blanket. My head fell into my hands and I spotted a photo on the night table.
It had been taken almost twenty years ago.
My grandmother sat on the porch of her house in Westbrook, Maine. A simple string of pearl circled her neck. A cameo was pinned to her black dress. The stacks of the SD Warren paper mill rose over the neighbor's roof. I could smell the sulfurous stench from the mill with my eyes closed.
Maine was calling. People from that state spoke with my accent. My grandmother made the world's best beef stew.
I called the nightclub and told Serge I was leaving town for a few days, then bought a one-way ticket to America from a travel agency on the Boulevard St. Germain. A taxi got me to Charles de Gaulle Aeroport with an hour to spare. The change in my pocket weighed a ton and I fought the urge to phone Maria. We had nothing to say. Finally the ground staff called for the passengers to board and I left Paris, knowing I was headed for the USA.
The 747 fought the winter headwinds across the Atlantic and made landfall over the coastline of Maine. I peered through the plane's porthole. Watchic Pond was an icy white dot beneath the wing and I followed the white snake of the Presumpscot River to the SD Warren Mill in Westbrook. I took out the picture of my grandmother and turned over the yellowing photo to check the date.
The picture had been taken on the 4th of July of 1965.
I remembered the day minute for minute.
My brother and I were vacationing with my grandmother. We went to the lake for the weekend and came back to Westbrook on the 4th. I went into the drugstore to buy a comic book. The counter girl asked me to walk her home. I almost lost my virginity along the Presumpscot River. The girl laughed at my fear and I ran back to my grandmother's house. She had explained the birds and bees as she might to a grown man and we watched THE SEVEN SAMURAI that night. Neither of us said anything to my older brother.
I landed at JFK and stepped out of the terminal. People wore snow parkas, hats, and scarves for survival. I hadn't crossed the Atlantic to appreciate the Tri-State weather and boarded the A-train to Penn Station, where I rode the Northeast Unlimited to Boston, arriving at Route 128 near Eleven O'clock.
A taxi drove to my parents' house. They both asked if everything was all right. I lied about Maria and said I wanted to see my grandmother. They exchanged a secretive glance and my father announced, "Your grandmother is in a nursing home on the North Shore near your aunt."
"Why didn't anyone tell me?"
"Your grandmother didn't want you to worry being so far away." My father was clearly worried about his mother. This was more than a cold or flu.
"Can I visit her?" I planned to free her from this old age prison.
"We'll go tomorrow. She's weak, so we can only stay for a short time."
"That's all right. I still want to see her." I spoke with my parents for a few minutes. We were tired and bid each other goodnight. I went upstairs to my bedroom. The airplane models, books, pictures, and trophies belonged to a stranger. I slept in the musty cellar. In the morning my father and I went to breakfast. He had divined the state of affairs in Paris.
"You should come back to Boston and settle down with a nice Catholic girl."
It was easy for him to say. My father had married the woman he loved, raised six children, and worked for the same company thirty years.
"I'll keep that in mind."
"How many more years you intend on messing around?"
"I don't know." I was on the verge of tears.
"I'd expect 'I don't know from a kid, not a thirty-two year-old man. Life goes fast. I'd hate for you to find yourself ten years from now, thinking it was a waste." My father wasn't the type of man to witness his son's breakdown and paid the bill at the cash register.
As we walked to his car, I asked, "How's grandmother?"
"She has cancer."
"How bad?"
"She had a lump and let it go."
“She must have known it would kill her.” My grandmother had been a nurse since World War I.
"Probably." He didn't understand her neglect either.
The full extent of my grandmother's condition had to wait until we visited the nursing home.
She was resting on a bed facing a window with a morphine tube attached to her vein. While she had lost weight, her face was a mirror of the woman in the photo sitting on the porch. She smiled with a drugged gentleness.
"There’s a sight for sore eyes."
My father bent to kiss his mother and I held her frail hand. They spoke for several minutes and he said, "I have to speak with the nurses."
Once he left the room, my grandmother patted my face. "How's Paris?"
Her time was measured in days, not months. "Paris is Paris."
"You forget I met your grandfather in Paris during the Great War. We were young and in love, so don’t tell me Paris is Paris." Her opiated eyes delved deeper into me. “You can tell me your problem. It might be one of your last chances for my help.
"Don't say that."
"It's the truth, of course the doctors say I'll live to ninety."
"They did?"
"They lied to me. The end is closer than anyone says." She brushed her hand against my face, the skin smelling of lavender. "Let me guess. Your romance in Paris has ended."
"Romeo has lost his Juliette." I blurted out the entire story. At the end my grandmother said, "Hitting a woman is wrong no matter if she did something wrong."
"I didn’t hit her."
"You came close."
"It's not the same thing." The madness in my blood was only defensible in a French court and my grandmother frowned through a mask of pain.
"What did you expect from such a young girl anyway?"
"She said she loved me."
"Maybe she did in her own way." My grandmother coughed and I stood to fetch the nurse. She said, "Not yet. Please give me a glass of water."
I gave her a few sips and she closed her eyes. I worried she might not wake up, but after several seconds the agate green orbs flashed with life. "It's been thirty years, since your grandfather passed away, but I can remember the first days we met and our years together as man and wife."
“Maybe I’ll never have that.”
“Let me tell you a story. You remember my friend, Marie."
"She's still alive?" Marie chain-smoked and drank two bottle of rose wine daily. She was hard to forget.
"Marie will outlive me. Guess her drinking was her fountain of youth."
"You're not gone yet." I wished my caresses might cure her.
"It's only a matter of time, anyway Marie had been a beautiful woman. She married young, acceding to her father's wishes. Her husband wasn't capable of giving her romantic love, but people stayed together those days because it was the thing to do. After the Great War Marie accompanied her husband to Germany. One trip she met a sea captain and fell in love. This time for real. Of course it was unrealistic. She was married and the war came. He served as a U-boat commander. When Marie heard he was missing in the Atlantic, she went to pieces and began drinking. Her husband tolerated her behavior. Guess he loved her in his own way. Anyway he passed away a year ago, making Marie a free woman."
Fearing she was ranting from the drugs, I fidgeted on the chair and she admonished me, "That is the problem with you young people. Always in a hurry for the ending, so you miss the good parts."
"Sorry, grandmother."
"You should be. Anyway Marie was sitting in her house and the doorbell rang. She opened the door to this old gentleman. Marie mistook him for a friend of her husband. He had a German accent. Only one man in her life did. It was her sea captain. He hadn't died during the war. He had married his childhood sweetheart. After her death he sought out Marie to tell her that his only desire was to spend the rest of his life with her. And they are living happily ever after. So as sad as you are, one day you'll love again. Now give me a kiss and fetch that nurse."
I kissed her forehead and brought a nurse to the room. My father said it was time to go and in the parking lot he read the sadness piled atop whatever had happened in Paris. I hadn't told him anything, but fathers can read their sons and he said, "You be careful. Your grandmother wouldn't like you hurt."
"I know." She would want me to live in order for her to exist in the future.
"She loves you very much."
Marblehead Harbor was mirror flat. I had sailed it with my grandmother in my uncle’s little Sunfish. Soon she would only exist in memories of Maine.
"She loved you too."
"How about a plate of fried clams?" He opened his door.
"Sounds good to me." Winter wasn't the best season for fried clams and my father's offer wasn't a soothing hand on my brow, however fried clams were a good remedy to the sight of another man's shoes, especially if the Barnacle in Marblehead was open for lunch.
My grandmother was right.
One day I was going to love again and until that day I would have to live like that moment might be the next or else it would pass me by and I was too young to wait as long as Marie to find love again.
When was only a question of time.
I celebrated Christmas with my family. 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 five 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.
At the end of January I instructed Serge to sell my share of the club. He warned that this was an imprudent business move. I told him I needed the cash and 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 never made it to film.
My grandmother passed away in March. We buried her on the bluff overlooking Watchic Pond. Her friend Dora came with the German sea captain. They looked happy.
I returned to New York. A doorman job at a nightclub paid my rent. I worked five days a week. My days and nights were a habit of routine. I saw them lasting forever.
In late April I was rolling on the Triumph along 3rd Avenue after a rainstorm. Not many people were on the streets; a trio of addicts on 14th Street, two junkie whores working the car traffic of 13th Street, and at 12th Street a raven-haired girl in a long leather trench coat struggling with a bald man in denim.
When he slapped her, I jammed on the brakes and the bike skidded on the wet pavement to halt a foot from the couple. Her assailant unbuttoned his jacket. A gun was tucked into his waistband. Any sane man would have roared away like an A-4 jet slingshot off an aircraft carrier deck, instead I warned, “Don’t touch the girl again.”
“You want a piece?” He wrenched apart her coat. She wasn’t wearing any clothes underneath. A vee of pubic hair fluffed below the pouting belly. The pimp forced her forward by a shank of hair. “Sometimes we have force them into what they like?”
The streetlight hit the face.
“Elana.”
"You two've met before?” The bald man relaxed his grip.
"In Paris."
"Such a small world. You really do get around."
"Fuck you." Elana dug a high heel into his foot and she jumped on my bike. “Go, go, go.”
We burned a red light at St. Mark’s and she snuggled against my spine.
“You happy to see me?”
“Yeah.”
"Take me someplace."
I drove to a bar far from 3rd Avenue. The three old drunks on the stools straightened their postures for Elana. I ordered two beers from the bartender and led her into a dark corner. Lifting the tail of her coat, Elana sat on my lap and her rounded ass settled into my crotch.
“I liked your lips in Paris.”
“I haven’t forgotten yours.”
“We weren’t so lucky that night.”
“Where’s Danny?” I had to ask. He was a friend.
“Danny and me go to Le Havre. His boat comes in. He says to meet him in two months. I wave good-bye and cry. I work in a dance bar in Amsterdam.” The intonation on ‘dance bar’ meant a strip club. “I make money. You like my dancing?”
“Who can I forget?” Her dance at the Reve was acid-etched onto my retinas.
“Never I hope.” Elana wriggled sinuously, as her reptile tongue slithered into my mouth and I fell without any safety ropes to haul me from the chasm. Finally she released her hold. “Many men love me in Amsterdam. I meet this bald man and he buys me a ticket to New York, so I can find Danny. We arrive this afternoon and this night two friends visit his place. They want a ménage a quatre. I refuse and he beats me.”
Elana pressed my fingers to the raised welts on her belly. The story was simple and they always are with the worst parts are left out. My muscles tensed into knots. She opened my fingers and guided my hand underneath her coat.
“That doesn’t matter any more. I need you. You tell me where first.”
No man can retain his sanity after hearing such an offer, but I only had time to lose half my mind, because the bald man shouted from three feet away, “You bitch.”
How he found us was unimportant and I shoved Elana at him.
She scratched his face. Her attack opened his defenses for a hard-swung beer bottle. Blood spurted from a gash in his forehead and he fell to his knees, pistol in hand. One kick to the skull and he flopped to the floor. The bald man had paid more for the sins of others as well as his own.
Elana deftly rifled the man’s pockets. The bartender shouted he was calling the police. Brandishing a wallet and keys, she jumped to her feet and grabbed my hand. We ran to my Triumph.
The bike started with a backfire and we roared away from the bar. My temples pounded faster than the pistons of the 650cc engine and I wondered if the entire episode had been a cheap thrill. A glimpse over my shoulder revealed the bald man wasn’t a joke.
“We go to his place, get my clothes, and then you can have me any way you desire.” Elana directed me along the empty streets to a decrepit three-story building in Chinatown, where she slipped off the bike.
“I’ll be a minute.”
The door slammed shut and my hand revved the gas. Leaving was the smartest thing to do. I waited. Two minutes later Elana emerged with one bag.
"I half-expected you to be gone."
"I'm not going anywhere this time."
"So this is a raincheck?"
"Yes."
"Good." Her arms curled around my chest and she nipped at my ear. "Let's go to your place. Fast."
We reached East 10th Street in less than two minutes and climbed three flights to my apartment in thirty seconds. I opened the door and she scampered into the unlit bedroom. Shucking her leather coat she fell on the mattress to become a carbon-black shadow on the white sheets.
"Come to me."
I knelt between her legs and she locked her ankles around my hips to guide me deep inside her, saying, "Oh, yeah."
With each orgasm Elana shape-shifted from vivid temple whore to virginal lover to hardened streetwalker to an aging courtesan, and finally an old lover telling a dirty bedtime story. There was no bald man, no Danny, no Lisa, No Candia, no third-grade crush, no New York, no Paris, no anything. When I tried to roll off, she held on. “Stay in me longer."
She aroused me once more with her fingernails feathering my flesh. She hadn't learned this technique at dance school.
"You bitch." I grabbed a shank of hair.
"I'm whoever you want me to be." Her hands peeled her ass cheeks and I followed her darkest wish, this time for an hour and the next time to dawn and sleep.
I woke in bed alone, but Elana was no Cinderella. The water was running in the kitchen tub. Elana rested under a steaming surface with her black hair fanned on the curved edge, so she resembled a fairy-tale princess in slumber. With closed eyes Elana asked, "Do you have a girlfriend?"
"Would it matter, if I did?"
“I not like when love ghost of broke-heart more than me, but like you I have nothing to lose."She lolled her head and I pressed my thumbs into the taut muscles of her neck.
Her sibilant moan verified if I didn’t have a girlfriend, I did now and she stood up in the bath.
"Are you scared?" Elana was five foot-four and weighed a hundred pounds.
"I can deal with you." I wrapped her in a towel.
“You know that story I tell you about that man. I go look for him everywhere last year. In the end I not find him. I find you. You are real. He is a dream. WE are here now.""She let the towel fall to the floor. "I will kiss your skin and kiss your heart. I will kiss your body."
I let her fulfill this promise during our next three days in bed. The number of times we spoke could be counted on one hand, because words would have rotted the bonds of flesh. On the fourth evening Elana dressed in a black plastic dress and a matching coat.
"We're going for a ride. I'll tell you where, when we get there."
The night air was warm and the trees were budding bright green leaves. My bike sped us downtown to under the Brooklyn Bridge. Elana tapped my shoulder and pointed to the concrete bumper encircling the Manhattan support tower. Upon reaching the concrete causeway to the bridge tower, she ordered me to stop.
"I have a special place to show you. It was in this movie WOLFEN."
"WOLFEN had a scene on top of the bridge." I had seen the urban tale of werewolves several times. It held a lot of truth. "There's nothing here."
“Only you and me.” She crawled through a breach in the chain link fence and walked out on the corroding concrete bumper. A tug hauling a barge blew its horn and its wake lapped at the pier. Traffic hummed overhead on the bridge's steel gratings.
"I saw this pier in the background of the movie." Elana placed her hands against the tower’s base. "You can feel the power of the city in the stones. Vibrating with a hum. Feel it through me now."
"Here?" No one was in sight.
"Now." Now had one meaning and afterwards she said breathlessly, "I have some more places to visit too."
Elana was wild and I had no intention of taming her.
Out on a fire-twisted Hudson pier we coupled with total rejection of self-preservation.
Inside an elevator stopped between floors with the alarm blaring I brought her to orgasm with my tongue.
During a downpour we fucked against a post office wall, her skirt pushed above her hips and shirt opened to the waist.
Neither of us ever noticed the passers-by. Once we were joined together, nothing and nobody was pulling us part. After a handful of such episodes I understood that Elana’s insatiability was destined to break me and I was beyond caring whether the wreckage was my body or soul.
I took her to see my favorite film, Billy Wilder's THE APARTMENT with Jack Lemmon and Shirley McClaine, who was Warren Beatty's brother.
"Why do you like that film? The man gets hurt by the woman. He gets hurt by everyone. Is that what you want?"
"I liked it as a boy." I liked it as a man too.
"You're not a boy anymore."
The word ‘love’ was forming on my lips and other people loved Elana too. The homeless people on Avenue A called out her name. She always had a spare change. The police cars whooped in passing. She flashed her ass. The kids in the park loved to see her dance. She befriended the old Puerto Rican lady across the hall. They would sit in Mrs. Adorno's kitchen and laugh at the Latin DJ’s jokes. Whenever I asked what was so funny, they laughed harder.
Elana attended the dance classes at the community center opposite my apartment. From my fire escape I observed her lewd spinning around a pole. This move offended the modernists, until a lascivious gesture dissipated their resistance and they gathered around the heretic like moths in a fiery maelstrom for a reward of raw abandonment to which I was no stranger.
Elana returned from these classes to perform Salome to the music from the movie, VAMPYROS LESBOS, an earth nymph to Joni Mitchell or a jazzy waif to John Coltrane. Sapped of her reserves, she would collapse on the sofa and softly beckon me to take her.
One night as we lazed in the sexual afterglow, she said, "You not love me for me."
"It's not that I don't love you."
"You are scared I can hurt you."
"Sorry."
“Not be sorry. You wanting my body is fine. I want you the same way. One girl in the dance class has seen you spying us. I told her you were my boyfriend. She wants to meet you. Can you do two women at one time?”
“I can satisfy you, can’t I?” I dragged her into the bedroom and my heart nearly burst through my ribcage to prove my ardor.
She was ready for more and said, “I win.”
She was right.
I wanted more from her. Walks in the rain and fireside chats were becoming more appealing than sex.
That evening I returned to the apartment with flowers and found Elana was underneath a heavy-bodied female. She reached out with a rehearsed lethargy. Walks in the rain were put on hold. I dropped the flowers on the kitchen table and went out for a drink at The Village Idiot.
Powerless days elapsed with the decreasing need for what she was more than willing to give without my telling her that I wanted something else. We were locked in the language of sex. My fingers entered secret passages, my tongue explored caves, and my penis was swallowed to the root, then one morning the phone rang at dawn.
The ringing continued throughout her free-fall of orgasms and I tried to knock the phone off the hook. She blocked my hand and held the receiver to her ear. Hearing the voice on the other end she squealed with an unbridled joy.
"I'll come to you."
The caller was Danny and I smiled to hide my heart crumbling to dust.
"Where is he?"
"Gloucester." She stroked my side. "Is it far?"
"Far enough? When are you leaving?"
"Today, if you give me the money for a bus."
I swallowed hard.
"Not tomorrow?"
"No, I have to leave today.Danny stay ashore five days, then back to sea."
"Get packed and I'll drive you to the Bus Terminal."
She collected her few belongings and informed my neighbor about her departure.
The old bruja kissed her forehead.
"Buena Suerta."
Driving to Port Authority I contemplated leaving her on the street, except too many women had vanished from the bus station and I bought a round-trip ticket to Gloucester, thinking one day she might use the return half.
At the gate for Boston, she said, “You knew one day he will call.”
"But not this soon." I got no explanation how Danny knew she was at my place.
"I had fun." Elana motioned for the driver to wait a second.
"Laughs too." I was deaf to my heart begging her to stay. “You better hurry.”
She kissed my cheek and boarded the bus, which pulled away in a choking cloud of exhaust. I panicked and ran to my bike. The bus route was straight up 8th Avenue. I arrived outside to find a Midtown cop writing a parking ticket and he wasn't buying any love story.
Back on East 10th Street I purged my apartment of scent-saturated sheets, soiled panties, stray stockings, lipstick tubes, make-up, nail polish remover, combs, brushes, and hairpins.
Within two hours my place was as devoid of female accoutrements as a Trappist monk’s cell.
Not the way I liked it, simply the way it was.
The spring rains washed the dirt from the streets. Thunder echoed across the city and lightning slashed jagged bolts through the sky like a celestial film crew was remaking THE LEGEND OF SLEEPY HOLLOW. Every song had been written about Elana and I was tossed out of several bars for punching out the jukebox.
Other women had lips too thin and their eyes dead from too many boyfriends.
I begged the old Puerto Rican lady to exorcise Elana from my soul.
“You tell her stay?” Mrs. Adorno asked in broken English.
"No, she wanted to go, so she went."
"Stupido, you no say no go, she go. You say stay, she stay."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I am a witch. Not a love counselor." The old lady slammed her door.
May plowed relentlessly into June. Couples strolled hand in hand and I woke day after day alone in my bed. Summer promised much more of the same, then one morning someone jiggled my front door. The East Village was overrun by thieves. I grabbed my baseball bat and ripped open the door.
"Don’t hit me." Elana cringed in the hallway.
"I won't hit you." It took a couple of seconds to lower the bat.
"You mad?" She leaned against the door.
"No, surprised." She had a black eye and wore a thin cotton shift.
All her possessions were in a paper bag.
"And Danny?"
Heart-rending sobs racked her body and the old señora leaned out her door, her left eye armed for a hex. Elana rattled off an explanation in English and added, "He's not bad man."
“You take care of her or else." The wizened witch warned with a wavering finger.
"I will." As a superstitious Irish-American I feared her ‘or else’ worse than any hell promised by the nuns and priests.
Elana was sitting on my living room couch.
I joined her and she laid her head on my lap. Her tears dried on my jeans and she regained her breath. The window was open and music played from the dance studio. It was Isaac Hayes' version of BY THE TIME I GET TO PHOENIX.
"I get to Gloucester and Danny is very happy." Elana wiped her nose with the back of her hand and then continued, "We move to an old boat in the harbor and make love for many days. After two months I ask him to marry me."
Her confession chipped at my heart.
"Danny goes crazy. He throws me out of the boat. He beats me, telling me I am trying to steal his freedom. I stay on his boat and cry myself to sleep. I wake up, Danny is gone to sea. I wait one week. He stays at sea. Where can I go? Not home. I come here. You are my only friend. Can I stay with you?"
"As long as you want." Maybe forever.
“It has been so long.” She stripped off her clothes to reveal the fading belt marks and bruises, but she sighed, “They will leave. I will not.”
The door remained shut for days. She was my slave and I hers. We told no stories. I forgot Candia, Lisa, and every women in my life. Heartbreaks and sorrows were gone. Somehow the sex was different and I put my finger on this change one afternoon, as we lay naked on my bed.
Elana's lips were moving in what I thought was a slattern incantation, but then I deciphered two repeated syllables. With her eyes closed I was Danny. This substituted identity sobered my lust and I rolled off her.
"What’s wrong?"
"I’m tired."
Like that the end began.
Each time she tried to seduce me with her hands or mouth or body, I said I wasn't in the mood. Frustrated she would storm off to the old senora. I quelled my discontent with drink and drugs, a deadly combination on a motorcycle. One night I fell through the door in a near-stupor.
"You should not drive in that condition." Elana helped me to bed.
"Why not?"
"I was waiting for you."
"Why? Couldn't you find one of your little dancers or another version of Danny?"
Her face went white and she ran into the bedroom.
Comforting her was a small price to pay. Perhaps one day she might have called my name. My pride argued I didn't need her. It didn't take long to discover the penalty of my self-deceit.
When I crawled into bed around dawn, ready to repent, she showed her back.
That afternoon I told her, "Elana, my sister is coming to the city."
"I have to leave?" Her feet slowed across the floor.
"Do you have anyplace to go?"
"Yes, I will stay with friends." She stood without mentioning who those friends might be and I left before I regretted my lie.
When I returned, she was gone. A quick check of my apartment revealed that she had stolen a couple hundred dollars. It seemed a small price to pay for her leaving, only I was hiding the real cost.
The old lady across the hall asked about Elana.
"No se." There was no note.
Wicked Spanish hissed from her lips and I fled inside my apartment too late. Chicken bones were scattered on my door step and Mrs. Adorno's cackling curse filled the hallway.
"No more mujeres."
And I didn't have any women.
Some women sought to be friends and others thought I was gay.
Mrs. Adorno seemed to shrink every week of this curse and I searched the streets of the East Village for Elana. No one would say where she was, even though I could tell they knew.
In early autumn I ran into Danny at a gallery opening for his friend, Jean-Michel. His face was weathered by the sea. I lunged at him and people had to hold us apart, but finally I calmed down and he asked, "What did Elana say to you?"
"That you had beaten her."
"I never touched her." Danny grabbed at a passing glass of wine. I took another.
Like me he wasn't a woman-beater.
"I wasn't pissed at you for taking care of Elana. When she came up to Gloucester I could tell it was over between us. We only had sex that first night and the rest of the time she would look out the window at the harbor."
"You lived in a house?"
"On a wharf really."
I knew Gloucester and bet the wharf was on Rocky Neck. "She lied about that?"
"She tell you a story about her mother abandoning her?” Danny’s eyes went sad. "I met her mother and father in Madrid. They had a dance school. Nice people."
"What about the mystery man?"
"She tells that story, because she thinks that's what men want to hear."
"Why?"
"Because she thought she wasn't enough to be who she wanted to be?"
"I didn't see her that way."
"Neither did I, but she did."
"So now what?" The belt marks and bruises had come from somewhere, but that somewhere was not Danny.
"Let's get drunk." We drank whiskey at the Odeon. He slept over my apartment and in the morning left for Gloucester. I wished him luck.
Leaves fell from the trees. The air grew cold. I saw my friends, drank at bars, and told stories about Paris. Their laughter proved that tragedies could become comedies with time.
The night before Halloween I was sitting on my Triumph before Madame Rosa's near the Holland Tunnel. A yellow taxi pulled into the alley and stopped a foot from my bike. A blonde in a black leather cuirass and steel-strapped girdle emerged from the Checker. The Devil would have been proud of how this sadistic apparition paralyzed every man on the street and her unworldly eyes trawled for prey to settle on me.
"Elana." I revved the engine.
"I'm happy you have not forgotten me." She threw a leg over my bike. "Let's go. Anywhere."
My heart thumped through five gears. Within minutes we were on 10th Street. Twenty seconds after my apartment slammed shut, we were naked. It was like our first night. Neither of us held anything in reserve and the pleasure became a pain, which I quelled with a stuttered ejaculation.
As I strained to regain my breath, Elana explained, “You throw me out. These punks from the park live in a squat. We live as animals and are animals with each other. Not washing and eating food we find in the trash, fucking like savages. Soon the men only want me. The other women hate me. One day I meet this woman. She and I perform dominatrix shows for businessmen. They love us. We are the best. This girl and I start a business. I have a loft and a beautiful girlfriend. I thank you for throwing me out.”
“You didn’t come to tell me that.”
“No, the old senorita told me she had placed a curse on you and the only way for it to come off was for me to make love to you.”
“Thank you.”
"You fucked me, but didn't deserve that."
"Why the stories? About Danny? About the man in Madrid. About everything? Did you really love Danny?"
"Yes, and you too. You both only wanted me for sex and I gave myself freely, but not anymore. Men pay me $500 for an hour. There is no way even a thousand free orgasms can add up to an hour, but life is way too long not to fall in love and I have that with this woman. The sex is good. Everything else is so much better. Maybe you helped me to understand that. Maybe you didn’t, but I’m almost happy now. Happy to be me and not a fairy tale for someone else like your stupid movie THE APARTMENT. You told me to watch it, but it was just a movie. Nothing else and you’re not either man in the movie. You’re not bad and you’re not good. You’re just you and no one else.”
She re-attached the leather and buckles and clips with the care of a samurai suiting for battle and slowly counted out $400.
"I owe you that."
"Where are you going?" I felt more like me than I had in a long time.
"Uptown. A priest has requested a succubus for a ritual crucifixion." She offered a full view of her body, as her gloved hand reached for the door. "Do I look like a goddess ready to die for her sins?"
"Yes, and one who will have a million worshippers." I was one of them. Saying I love her might change everything. I said nothing instead. She already had someone to love.
"I'll be seeing you." She went to the door.
"I hope so." This was a good an ending as I could hope for the both of us, although for weeks afterwards I searched the Daily News' police reports without reading about the discovery of a crucified woman matching her description.
No one saw her again.
Not me.
Not Danny.
Not the old lady across the hallway.
At least the chicken bones vanished from my doorstep and this said Elana was fine.
I was too, but I had been a fool to love a woman who didn’t love me and an even greater fool to not love someone who loved me, but I was happy to know in the future I would be a fool again. Any sinner will be as long as they’re willing forget the past, forgive the present, and live for the future.
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