Right around this time in the late sixties, I was living in an apartment in New York. One day I answered the phone, and there was a French girl on the line. It was a wrong number, but we began to chat. She told me she was a young actress recently arrived from Paris to screen test for the role of a sexy young woman in a movie. She was charming and somewhat flirtatious. After a while, I asked for her number. I was, of course, single. She wouldn’t give it to me but took mine and said she’d call again.
About a week later she did, and again we had a flirtatious conversation, and again she wouldn’t give me her number but said she’d call again. These weekly calls went on for about a month, until she finally gave me her number. That would prove to be an unconsciously self-destructive move on her part. She said she’d still prefer to call me. I didn’t ask why, but I chose to respect her wishes and didn’t call her.
After about a half-dozen phone calls, she started to ask me about my dating life. I told her I was seeing a girl, and she began to ask about her. After the second call, when she continued to ask about my new girlfriend, I began to feel suspicious. I wasn’t sure what I was suspicious about, just suspicious.
I called my girlfriend and asked her if she had any girlfriends from France. She said she didn’t. I then gave her the French girl’s number and asked her to look through her phone book to see if that number belonged to anyone she knew. It didn’t.
As weeks went by, the French girl continued to call and continued to want to know what the latest was with the girl I was seeing. So I asked my girlfriend to again carefully go through her phone book to see if the girl’s number corresponded to any in her book. This time she found it. It didn’t belong to a French girl but to a chubby friend of hers who was very good at doing accents.
I asked my friend to put together a small group of people, including the friend who did accents so well, and we’d all go to Central Park and have a picnic. The next Sunday about five of us sat on the side of a hill in Central Park and had our picnic. The chubby girl who was good at accents sat a few feet from me.
The next day the “French girl” called me again to ask me what I had done over the weekend. I told her I’d gone to the park with some friends and had a picnic. She asked me if it was fun. I said, “Well, you were there, what did you think?” There was a long, uncomfortable silence, and she finally said goodbye, without the French accent.
A couple of years went by, of course without any calls from the “French girl.” My girlfriend and I had gone our separate ways. She had moved to California. One day the phone rang, and it was the “French girl” using her own voice. She asked me if I had heard from my former girlfriend. I said I hadn’t. She then said she had driven off a cliff in California and was dead.
Given my past experience with this girl, I was dubious. Incredibly, she wanted to chat some more about this and that, but I quickly got off the phone and called my former girlfriend’s brother. He confirmed she had driven off a cliff and felt it was an accident. But, in fact, she had died. Sheila was in her twenties.