A little after nine Mireille said she had to go home and change; she was meeting another friend for brunch, and didn’t want to show up at the cafe wearing last night’s silk. She kissed Jeff goodbye, gave Sharla a quick hug, and was gone.
As soon as Mireille had left, Sharla cleared the coffee cups from the bed, pulled back the sheets, and moved her warm tongue down Jeff’s belly. He was limp when she took him in her mouth, but soon grew hard again.
Jeff never asked where Sharla had been all night; it didn’t really matter.
The Mediterranean lapped gently against the pebbly beach, its quiet waves a whisper of eternity, of changelessness. The scent of a fresh pot of bouillabaise drifted from one of the cafes nearby. Jeff was getting hungry; as soon as the girls finished swimming, he’d suggest lunch.
The weather had broken for a week or so in early July, and they’d taken Le Mistral south with Jean-Claude and Mireille and the rest of the crowd. They’d all been drunk by the time the train got to Toulon, where the eight of them boisterously crammed themselves into two taxis for the forty-three-mile ride to St. Tropez.
The little fishing village had undergone a major upheaval in the past six years, since Vadim and Bardot had discovered and popularized it as a youthful alternative to the more sedate, old-money Cote d’Azur resorts of Antibes and Menton; but, lively as it already was, the town was still free of the suffocating hordes of tourists who would make it all but unlivable in the decades to come.
A shadow crossed Jeff’s half-closed eyes, and he was pressed to the sand by a pair of smooth female thighs, someone sitting on his rump. Sharla? Mireille? Then the woman’s naked breasts brushed his back, caressing, nipples stiff from the sea breeze.
'Chicca?' he guessed, lifting one hand up toward the girl’s hair to feel how long it was, how thick. She shook her head away, giggled.
'T’es fou,' the girl teased, clamping his thighs more tightly with her own and pressing her breasts flush against him: smaller than Sharla’s, fuller than Chicca’s.
'Couldn’t be Mireille,' he said, reaching back to pat her taut little ass. 'Much too fat.'
Mireille let forth a stream of curses in French, and punctuated them by lifting the waistband of his brief trunks and emptying a cup of iced lemonade inside. He rolled her off him with a yelp and pinned her on her back in the sand, arms struggling playfully against his grip.
'Sadique.' She grinned. Jeff freed one hand long enough to shake the ice out of his trunks, and she grasped his cock through the thin cloth. 'See?' she said. 'You love it.'
He wanted to take her there and then, her hair loose and wild, her breasts and belly glistening in the sunlight, the slight swell of her crotch outlined through the white bikini bottom. She slid her fingers down the front of his trunks, squeezed him harder. He drew a sharp breath.
'People around,' he said, voice strained.
Mireille shrugged, her hand working steadily on his penis. He glanced up at the crowded beach, saw Sharla walking toward them, her own bare breasts swaying, her arm around Jean-Claude’s waist.
'Mireille,' he whispered urgently.
She ground her sandy hips against his, kneaded him harder, faster. He couldn’t stop it now. He shut his eyes and moaned, and there were lips touching his own, a tongue probing his mouth, one set of nipples against his chest and another pressed to his shoulder, hair and breasts and mouths and hands … He came, with Sharla kissing him as Mireille brought him to orgasm; or was it the other way around? And what was the difference, after all?
'Everybody work up an appetite, hein?' Jean-Claude said, laughing.
Jeff told Mireille that evening, in the garden of the hotel, after they’d all shared several pipes of opiated hash and Sharla had wandered up to one of the rooms with Jean-Claude and Chicca and another couple. The drugs helped to loosen his tongue, and the secret that had burned within him for so many years now burst forth of its own accord; Mireille just happened to be there when it did.
'I’ve lived this life before,' he said, staring at the late-setting sun through the pine trees of the Residence de la Pinede.
Mireille crossed her bare legs in a lotus position, her white cotton dress billowing on the grass around her. 'Deja vu. ' She smiled. 'Me, too, sometimes I feel that way.'
Jeff shook his head, frowned. 'I mean literally. I mean—not this exact life, here with you and Sharla and everything, but…'
And it spilled out, all of it, a tumble of words and memories he’d hidden for so long: the heart attack in his office, that first morning in the dorm room back at Emory, the fortunes made and lost, his wives, his children, the dying, and dying, and dying yet again.
Mireille listened without a word. The lowering sun backlit her hair, turning it the color of flame, and left her face in deepening shadow. At long last his voice trailed off, defeated by the incredibility of what he had tried to tell her.
It was dark by then, and Mireille’s face was impossible to read. Did she think he was mad, or recounting an opium dream? Her silence began to erode the cathartic relief he had felt in telling her.
'Mireille? I didn’t mean to shock you; I—'
She rose to her knees, put her slender arms around his neck. The tight curls of her copper hair pressed softly against his cheek.
'Many lives,' she whispered. 'Many pains.'
He held her slim young body tightly, breathed long and deep of the crisp, pine-scented air. Scattered laughter drifted toward them through the trees, and then the clear, sweet, buoyant sounds of the latest Sylvie Vartan record.
'Viens,' Mireille said, standing up and taking Jeff’s hand. 'Let’s go join the party. La vie nous attend.'
They all went back to Paris in August, when the rains started again. Mireille never said anything more to Jeff about what he’d told her that evening in the garden at St.Tropez; she must have attributed it all to the hash, and that was just as well. Nor did Jeff and Sharla talk openly about the group sex and the drugs that were now part of the normal routine of their lives. Those things had happened; they kept on happening. There was no reason to discuss them as long as everybody was having a good time.
One of the new couples who periodically drifted in and out of the scene introduced them to a partouze in the rue le Chatelier, a few blocks north of what would continue to be called Place de l’Etoile until De Gaulle died in 1970. The partouze, one of several that had flourished in the city since the twenties, was a well-run, sumptuously appointed establishment: glass-encased antique-doll collection in the parlor, thick maroon carpet to match the walls, which were hung with Jin de siecle prints … and three uniformed maids to serve the thirty or forty naked couples who wandered and frolicked through the place’s two floors of well-equipped, very large bedrooms.
The St. Tropez crowd began frequenting the partouze every weekend. One night Jeff and Sharla had a threesome with a coltish American starlet new to Paris, who would soon be known more for her radical feminism than for her acting; another night, Mireille and Sharla and Chicca held an impromptu contest to see which of them could be first to have sex with twenty men at one party. Sharla won.
Jeff was amazed at how quickly this unceasing roundelay of casual public sex with beautiful strangers had grown to seem perfectly normal; he was struck by the fact that such activities could go on without the slightest fear of those plagues from his own time, herpes and AIDS. That carefree sense of safety gave the decadent proceedings a retrospective air of innocence—naked children at play in the Garden before the Fall. He wondered what had happened to the partouzes, and their counterparts in America and the rest of Europe, in the eighties. If they’d survived at all, they must be rife with disease-inspired paranoia and guilt.
The eighties: a decade of loss, of broken hopes, of death. All of which would come again, he knew, and far too soon.
