When Jessica Burke died, the wound opened again. For her it remains open, and toward her the ache drifts for reasons known only to itself. In my dreams, the ache guides my hand toward her. It is through her solid form that my hand passes, ghostly and insubstantial. Sometimes in the dream she turns into Miriam. We are underwater, together at last, but in my embrace her body goes rigid and crumbles, a statue of salt. Galled, enraged, my longing convokes the body of another girl: an American girl in Paris who called herself Reggie. Her arms, her legs, wrap around me, hungry and muscular, my grip seeks purchase in her short-sheared hair, and it is into her body that my longing voids its smoke.
Have I not spoken of her? Reggie Short? Why should I have? She was nothing to me.
—
“Merde fuck merde fuck merde!” said the American girl behind the bookstore counter as the loop of harness bells jangled at my back. I had gone first to Shakespeare and Company on the rue de la Bûcherie, seeking a recent English edition of George Herbert’s poems. “Ah, yes, gentle Herbert,” said the bespectacled man as he tapped out the name on his computer. “I believe we have— No, we sold that copy. Shall I place the order for you?”
I said I would check the library first.
“Yes,” he said. “If there’s a used copy in Paris, it will be there.” I must have looked at him strangely because he said, “You mean the bookshop called ‘the Library,’ not the actual library, the bibliothèque?”
“In fact,” I said, “I was referring to the bibliothèque, the actual library.”
“Ah, my apologies! I thought you meant the bookshop! There’s one called the Library. Clever for an English bookshop in Paris, no? La Librairie. Ha.”
“Ha,” I said.
He said they specialized in translations from the French but had a good back-stock of English originals as well. “You should try them,” he said, sketching out a map on the back of a receipt.
Hearing the harness bell ring, the girl behind the counter of the Library interrupted her cursing with a cheery American “Hello!” then just as cheerily resumed, “Fuckadoodle donkeyschlong!” She appeared to be on the phone, the receiver held between her shoulder and cheek. “I’m on hold, don’t worry,” she said. “Of course I’m on hold. This is France.” With that she began whistling—was it “La Marseillaise”?—waving an imaginary flag or conducting baton. After a while she hung up and said, as though continuing a conversation, “Yes, I believe I hate them. I believe I hate them all. I divorce them, one and all….Don’t you just hate them?”
“Every last one,” I said. “Who are we talking about?”
“The French. You’ve probably seen them. They’re everywhere.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’d suspected as much.”
“You think I’m kidding. Have you ever tried dealing with the phone company? Ever tried to get your service restored? Because I am fucking ready to shoot myself in the face.” I said I had not. “Well, don’t start now,” she said. “Get out while you can, while you are still young”—she paused as though seeing me for the first time, then added—“ish….
“I don’t suppose you came in here to escape. Anyway, you’re not safe. The French are liable to come here too, especially the professors, especially the really disgusting professors. Are you secretly disgusting because if you are I’m divorcing you too.”
I asked if she had a copy of Herbert’s work.
“Herbert like Dune Herbert? Sand-for-breakfast, I-respectfully-spit-on-your-shoes Herbert?”
“Herbert the poet. English. Seventeenth century.”
“Whoa, recherché!” she said, dragging the word out in a campy drawl: ray-share-shay. “Did George Lucas steal all his ideas too?” She found a newish Penguin paperback copy. “Good thing you came in today,” she said, blowing off the dust that had collected on its upper edge. “These things go like hotcakes.
“Not,” she went on, ringing up the book, “that I’ve ever had a hotcake. But wouldn’t you kill for one? Wouldn’t you just kill for a hotcake?”
“Maim, maybe, but kill—”
“Or a Budweiser? Wouldn’t you kill for a Bud?”
I observed that you could in fact get a Budweiser in France. “En fait,” I said, aping a Parisian nonchalance, “c’est très branché.”
“That, Mister American Man, is exactly the problem. I want a Bud that is not très branché, not très cool. Fuck it, there’s no charge for the book.”
“No charge?”
“Not for the book.”
“Much obliged,” I said.
“Yes, you are, Professor,” she said. “I like mine tall and cold.” She ran her hand over her brush of pale hair.
—
The whole duration of Clementine’s childhood occupies what feels like a stilled instant. That span of years was (I now believe) a sort of monasticism in its own right, where the seasons, the years, turned around a single, motionless point.
This is not to say that my solitude weathered no assault. Sometimes it was an advance made by one or another of the mothers I’d met in the school yard, the divorcées lean and illusionless and, God knew, some of them beautiful. The fiercest battering, however, came from my own desire for another’s body, for the sheer banality of shared life, for a companion to wake beside at three in morning because she has turned on the light to read, glasses perched on her nose, because she wakes often at this time of night and cannot get back to sleep, because we both wake easily now, because neither of us is young any longer or even, as Reggie had said, youngish.
Such companionship, however, never seemed even remotely possible, though Clementine herself, by the time she was thirteen or fourteen, took to enumerating possible wives: Ms. Strang, the vice principal; or the mother of Clem’s friend Dylan, a woman who was, according to Clem, “not only smoking hot but an architect.” Not now, I would say to myself. Later. When Clementine is older, we will see. But now it is later, and the solitude has become a kind of hunger in its own right. Now it is not
