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her. She was, believe it or not, very happy tomeet me. At a closer look, she no longerresembled Carol. Their common blondness andfragility were striking, but Beatrice had aclosed face, voluntarily so, and not very like-able. Whereas Carol tried hard to please, andto please precisely through her vulnerability,Beatrice was nothing but defensiveness andaggressively good manners. Finally, she pickedup a second guitar and began to play as shechecked us out.

When Gilles and I left, they were still playing,but Gilles had arranged to meet Carol the nextafternoon.

It’s nice, when you’re tired and a bit drunk,to find a big white bed and to sleep there witha boy you love. Besides, this was one of thethings the girl in question had been singing tous about. We were happy and in love. In lovewith us, in love with Carol, in love in a vagueway, and it was late.

“Are you happy?” I asked Gilles.

He said yes with his head and put an armaround my neck. Me too, I was happy.

9

I

This medley of blue sashes,ladies, cuirasses, violins inthe hall, and trumpets in thesquare was a spectacle youonly see in novels.

Cardinal DE RETZ.

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wine bottle by tapping it gently, over andover again against a wall. We were drink-ing again. Carol was good on the guitar.All of the sudden – modestly – she changedfrom her pleated skirt into jeans. “I buythem in the young boys department,” shewas saying. She sat cross-legged on hernarrow bed, facing us. She sang well, andclassic songs: girls who are beautiful at fif-teen, their boyfriends gone to war. Girlswho lose a gold ring by the riverside, cryingabout the seasons passing, who never giveup on love. Girls who go into the woods,who are still dreamed about on ships thatnever return from sea.

I told myself she was no idiot, congratu-lating myself for discovering such a charm-ing creature. Anyway, Gilles was into her.He’d bought her all those pickles and wasspeaking to her in his seductive, seriousvoice. I was into her too. My feelingsrarely went further than this.

She drank correctly, this girl, for a twen-ty-year-old. Sometimes straight from thebottle to show she was a liberated woman.

us a lot. Our youth confirmed his own, I guess.

And me, I was trapped in a conversation withhis wife.

“You must meet my daughter,” she was say-ing, “She’s almost your age, but still sounformed. Your company would do her aworld of good.”

Indulgence and boredom don’t usually mix. Iweighed the lady’s dull friendliness. A girl likethat – and so out of it too – it was hard for meto picture. But you have to be interested inpeople. I asked what the little girl was up to.

“Painting. I guess she has talent, but hasn’tfound it yet.”

“Like her dad,” I said rudely. This was whenI learned she wasn’t the daughter of Francois-Joseph, but the product of a previous mar-riage… I ended my sentence by warmly assur-ing her I’d love to meet Carol. Was my will-ingness faked? I wished Gilles was in my place.He seems naturally nicer than me.

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managerial capacity, or by stupidly offeringadvice.

Nothing works better than a trap avoided.

The detachment I’m capable of when mak-ing water run or finding cups would slyly dis-tance me from the group discussing obscureeditions. Together we served a dark liquidthat provoked friendly indignation. Objectsof their general reproach, we inevitably feltlike accomplices. To exploit this advantage,I turned the conversation to Carol, a littleironically, speaking of the offspring of greatpeople. Francois-Joseph, happy to busy him-self with her again, wouldn’t shut up.Disconcerted, she kept quiet. I gatheredthat she lived far from here, in the 16tharrondissement, and that she played guitar.Gilles was quiet too and watched us with aninterest I recognized.

But I was the one who offered to take the

girl in our taxi. And when Gilles caught up

with me in the hallway and asked what we

were going to do next, I answered:

“Score, of course.”

Joseph,” she answered and undulated grace-fully in her chair.

Francois-Joseph was so sensitized to hershyness that I couldn’t help getting behind hisawkward attempts to pry her out of it. He hadprobably been stuck for a long time in thisfalse position. Maybe it was because she wasthe object of such annoying attentions that Ibegan to watch Carol.

A twenty-year-old girl easily makes it clearto fifty-year-old men that they’re out of thepicture, and this one better than anybody. Itook advantage of the moment she went intothe kitchen to make coffee. I helped.

I was submitting half-heartedly.

Standing up, she was so small and amazing-ly slim. The mussed bangs, the short blondhair, and dressed in a white, child-size shirtwith an open collar under a blue sweater, shelooked half her age. Her clumsiness was stud-ied: Carol wasn’t making coffee but chaos,ostensibly. This was to give me a chance tofail, either by exposing the slightest manage-

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“Do you like her?” I added.

I got the same yes. That was normal.Because, in fact, if Gilles ever stopped likingthe same girls I did, it would have introducedan element of separation between us.

For Guy

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10

I don’t know how I realized so quickly that weliked Carol. I’d never heard anything about heruntil the day before, in a little gallery packedwith those people who always show up at theopenings of painters destined to be unknown.The few ex-friends I met there were preciselythe ones I would have liked never to see again.In a voice that was too loud and wantedintensely to sound worldly, the gallerist wastalking about her shoes, so that an importantvisitor would understand she was already dis-tancing herself from the failure she felt com-ing. Contrary to custom, this opening was notdoubling as a cocktail party: there was nothingto drink.

When I scanned the room for Gilles, I saw thepainter talking to him animatedly. A littlegroup was already forming around them. Thiswas a bad painter and a charming old man, theproduct of an obsolete modernism. Gilles wasanswering him without seeming bored, and Iadmired his ease. The old painter had alreadybeen forgotten a generation before ours, butthis didn’t discourage him. He liked

And she watched me from the corner of hereye, no doubt waiting for the moment I would-n’t be able to hide some sign of jealousy. Shesang in a slightly lower voice now, a little morechild-like. The tobacco, she said. But I knewit was to please. And, also to please us, sheremembered some touching anecdotes toshow us how young she still was, how naïve,how she still put her faith in the good, poeticpeople. Her guitar was a faithful animal thatfollowed her everywhere. She didn’t under-stand or like anything besides painting and thesea. And, of course, a stuffed bear.

At three in the morning someone knocked atthe door. The racket we were making shouldhave brought out the neighbors an hour ago.But it wasn’t the neighbors. Another Carolappeared. Same height, same age, same skin-ny, not very innocent, teenage allure. Sameclose-cropped blond hair.

The double entered, looked at us unsmiling-ly, and changed in a flick of the wrist from askirt to jeans, probably bought in the sameyoung boys department. So this was Beatrice.I assured her I’d already heard so much about

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place. He seems naturally nicer than me.

Finally, after mentioning Beatrice, her daugh-ter’s best friend who wrote really good poemsfor her age, and to whom she was planning togive the Rimbaud book she’d just bought, sheinvited us over for dinner the next day.

***

The dinner was fun. Francois-Joseph, nolonger worried about the fate of his canvases,was living it up. His friends paraded out - inthe usual order - all the ideas from thirty yearsago, which was nice. People from those timesgive such a big place to dark humor that eventheir stupidity can come off as ambiguous.When the charms of the woman who sold thepaintings but didn’t serve us any dessert weresarcastically evoked, Francois-Joseph praisedher big hips.

“Not like you, Carol,” he said. “You stilldon’t have much to distract the gentlemen.”

“But style is catching up to me, Francois-Joseph,” she answered and undulated grace-

I don’t remember talking in the taxi. I felt good,I was tired. Gilles would naturally take over now,if only out of politeness. The story was easy tofollow. We passed the Pigalle, where there wasan all-night deli. We got some wine and somesalted almonds. We had to give this night aparty feeling. Carol asked us to buy her pickles,as a favor, observing our surprise. Gilles orderedan extravagant quantity, plus some onions invinegar, some capers – who knows what else -and offered them ceremoniously to her. I addedmy contribution in the form of red and greenpimentos, not ugly to look at and, for no extracost, uneatable.

Each in our role, charming, charmed, weclimbed eight flights, turned a lot of corners. Wearrived in an attic. As she should have, Carollived in a maid’s room which she payed for bygiving lessons to friends’ kids. So she enjoyedher total freedom, she said. Her parents would-n’t have refused her staying with them, but inthat case she wouldn’t have been able - for her-self or for others – to boast such a fiery claim.

We were sitting on the floor, like Indians in thelittle room. Gilles showed Carol how to open a

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Reena Spaulings Fine Art371 GRAND STREET