22

The appetite grows by eating.

—Rabelais

ROXY WAS DISTRAUGHT, but I was happy. I realized it in the course of my yearly soul-searching, which for me isn’t New Year’s but occupies about five minutes on October twenty-third, my birthday. I came home late from hearing Edgar at a meeting in the fourteenth Arrondissement. It was not cold, not particularly, but it was frosty, and the moon was out, silvering the scene with a rimy mist, a glowing, promising light, and there were as many people in the street as at noon, and it made me happy.

If ever you dare say you are happy. Not that you say yes, this is happiness; it is more that looking back on the previous months, I could see I had changed in a way consistent with a person who was happy, thoughts taken up with events and subjects external to myself. Reviewing my character, I was smugly self-congratulatory about my fidelity to my jobs with Ames Everett, the Randolphs, and others, jobs I no longer needed and wanted to dump as they intruded on the afternoons. Especially I wanted to dump my dog-walking of Scamp. Though I had grown fond of Scamp, and Gennie liked Scamp too—so sometimes I would walk him over to the crèche when I picked her up, thus fulfilling two of my routine duties at once—I felt I could do more important things. I only kept on because I had agreed to, and I suspected I was only wanted so Ames could have this guy in in the afternoon, his gym instructor, for sex.

I was happy. I had sex, mystery, romance, and instructional topics. The probably unhappy denouement of a preoccupying affair—for how could it end otherwise?—was still I hoped far off. I had challenges: the French language, new reading, little nudges of cultural improvement from Mrs. Pace, even my new fondness for little Gennie. I was surrounded by beauty (Paris) and art, and had begun to experience, for the first time in an authorized way, a life of the mind. However rudimentary my life of the mind, it was definitely more evolved than what had been encouraged (or rather, subtly discouraged) in high school in Santa Barbara, and at the University of Southern California, at least in the film school, at least for women.

You can be anything you want to be, Isabel, people had always said to me. Everyone—Chester, Margeeve, my teachers. They were always saying that, and I always knew it wasn’t true. It was a conspiracy of delusion. “A healthy, pretty American girl—you can be anything you want to be.” But what did I want to be? I didn’t want to be anything. That is, each reasonable possibility, given that I was not to be a ballerina, pianist, doctor, or movie star, was too disgusting: personnel manager? psychologist? What horrors were suggested to me.

Roxy always wanted to be a poet, so it was easy for her. But I had never wanted to confine myself to anything. No role was adequate to a big curiosity I had, not about anything in particular, just a huge sense of curiosity. Not that anyone would have believed me if I had tried to describe it. “You could find out about a lot of things if you’d get up before noon,” they would have said.

So I am trying to characterize the magic, satisfaction, and slight vainglory of my mood at the time of my birthday. Things were interesting almost for the first time I could remember. I had suddenly come to feel that California was not interesting, not because there were not books and lovers and jobs, concerts and Frederick’s of Hollywood, but someone had to show you where to find and how to consume these cultural advantages. If you didn’t know where to look, you could pass your whole life with no sense of what you were missing. I was conscious that if I tried to explain this to Chester and Margeeve, they would turn on me in a fury and point out how they had tried to take me since childhood to improving cultural events and I had preferred to sulk at home and smoke dope.

Not that I was not still a loyal Californian, but I knew that in California, though I might have been able to find, say, this book I was reading by a Turk named Bilge Karasu, at home I would not have read a book by someone named Bilge.

I could now say, in a conversation with someone Edgar knew, provided they spoke English, “Well, I’m reading the Turkish modernist Bilge Karasu, Calvino, the Dutchman Cees Nooteboom.” And so I was, in translation, of course. Once or twice I detected a faint lift of the eyebrow of l’oncle Edgar, and cooled it on talking like that.

Once or twice Mrs. Pace said, “Isabel, you have good sense about books, would you say the Nooteboom works?” or some other such question, and we would have an interesting literary discussion. She was not patronizing, she seemed to enjoy it, and she would tell me if my ideas were too wide of the mark.

I sensed that my cultural progress, or at least my improved disposition, was being viewed with great relief by Roxy and communicated in furtive asides to Margeeve and Chester. For instance: I am sitting with my friend Yves and a thousand other people in an auditorium in the Centre Pompidou. From audio speakers mounted high on the four walls come a variety of singing children’s voices, burbling brook sounds, a cacophony of long organ chords, like the music of the spheres clashing—catastrophic astral sounds. The voices come now from the left, now from the right, now behind me, as if they were popping out from behind trees. The music is in some ways disturbing and reminds me of the lost cat being there stuck inside the speakers. In other ways it is watery, soothing music. I think of Charlotte’s cat, of poor Roxy’s ankles, of Edgar, of how unlikely I would have been in Santa Barbara to hear the music of Stockhausen. It seems, this scene, to epitomize my new Paris life.

The music of Stockhausen, who is I suppose German, is replaced by that of an Englishman that is much nicer. Yves’s eyes have rolled back in his head with the effort of listening to this new music. Yves resembles all the other members of the audience, slightly rumpled, intense—an audience indistinguishable from such an audience at USC, I suppose. The difference is that this audience includes Isabel Walker, who before would never have consented to be seen with the nerds.

I mention Frederick’s of Hollywood for I now wear expensive French underwear, the tartiest I could find. Their bras are fine for me because I am not as big on top as Roxy. I toyed with the idea of a garter belt and stockings (framing the V of the crotch, the French expression for setting off being mettre en valeur) but thought that might be going too far. I wore slips brasiliens, curaçaos, culottes de soie, pointus. . . .

I think some people know subliminally about me and Edgar. Mrs. Pace, Roxy, Ames Everett. They know I’m involved with someone, but no one suspects who. I think Ames finds it disgusting. As I leave him, as I move along on my rounds, late for my job at Olivia Pace’s, I imagine him thinking: She’s not at all virtuous like Roxeanne. Isabel is a little tart, actually, you can smell it sometimes, smell it on her, mindless sex, despite her airs of intellectual precocity.

I imagine this is how he thinks of me, because he seems to know if I’ve been in bed with someone, and his manner becomes distant, even though he isn’t the least interested in women. He might be Herod, I Salome. He seems both repelled by and drawn to what he perceives as my propensity for vice but is really just an afternoon toss with my secret lover.

Edgar was a focused lover, passionate and funny, though it’s hard to say why funny. He made me laugh in bed, and gave me pleasure. Neither by itself is enough to make you fall in love. Even together, there must have been something else. It pleased me that he was known, that people spoke to him. France is a small country, and they all watch the same televised roundtable discussions and read the same three newspapers. I know the newspapers had something to do with my eagerness for his arms on Tuesdays. I liked the way he looked at all the parts of me. He said he remembered every mole on every woman he had ever slept with (did not say how many this was), that he just happened to have this kind of explicit visual memory.

Sometimes I was afraid I was too easily pleased in bed to remain interesting to Edgar, assuming men enjoy the challenge of awakening frosty ice princesses, as I have heard they do. Making me come can’t be much of a challenge, I am not frosty. I find I can’t pretend not to come, though I could, by putting my mind to other things, keep from actually coming. But that is too great a sacrifice, even with the goal of becoming a great courtesan, if frigidity is what is required of them. Am I impeded by my crude, direct sexuality from interesting a sophisticated, nuanced lover?

I tried once to discuss this with Edgar, though he was lacking some crucial vocabulary in English. It did at least make him laugh.

Sometimes it makes me laugh to think of the God’s-eye view of us, me with my legs wrapped around the neck of an elderly man, sweaty hair spread on pillow, or, alternatively, me on my elbows and knees, being taken from behind, bracing myself with my forearms, his body covering mine in such a way that he can caress my clit as well as fuck me, a double stimulation, rather like being fucked by two men at once, say two Turkish soldiers, like the ones in the book by Bilge Karasu, Turkish modernist recommended by Mrs. Pace, where the dark city is a metaphor of the soul.

That book is about torture and political repression, germane to Edgar’s interests. I tried to find it for him in French. In it, nameless torturers nightly choose, arbitrarily, a delightful young man in the street, and set upon him to kill him, and when they are finished, he is nothing but a mound of pulverized flesh. Others come and put sawdust over the bloody mess. The sight of his carcass inspires fear, terror, and submission in the people. Of course, Gorazde must be like that, the images Roxy watched mesmerized on the television news. Roxy watched reality on TV, but refused to read a literary account of torture, saying it was “too horrible.”