AT SEVEN O’CLOCK IN the evening Ames Rutherford sat in a chair in his club, staring at his friend and classmate Dill Switt. Mustachioed, impressively overweight, Dill was drunk. Not drunk drunk, but wisely drunk: a Harvard senior and former Crimson editor who had just been handed the world rolled up in a diploma.
“It’s all bullshit,” Dill said. “Law school and business school and being part of the ruling caste—what good’s all that?”
“As long as there are laws, there’ll be lawyers,” Ames said.
“But why you? Why the hell do you have to join the power brokers? Can’t you see what they’re doing to this country?”
Ames and Dill were alone by the fireplace. The clubhouse was a litter of glasses and bottles and cigarette ashes.
“Maybe once some of us get a little power we can do something a little different for our country,” Ames said. He was thinking of Ariana Kavalaris, who had given her voice to the world and who had made the power brokers bow down to beauty.
Ariana Kavalaris, who had stepped out of a crowd and kissed him.
That kiss still felt warm on his cheek. And it filled him with a glowing hope like none he had ever felt before. For the first time in his life, he could almost believe that the world belonged to him too, that his dreams had a place in it.
“Of all the people I never expected to sell out…you, my best friend.” Dill was shaking his head, slurring his words now.
“I’ll always be your best friend,” Ames said. “And I’m not selling out. Some lawyers are decent people, you know.”
Dill’s eyes fixed Ames’s with sudden shrewdness. “Name one.”
“Me.”
That summer, for graduation, Ames’s parents sent him abroad.
“You’ll never be this free again,” his father said, shaking Ames’s hand at the airport. “Enjoy yourself, son.”
There was a remembering in Mark Rutherford’s eyes that was so sad and loving that Ames grabbed him and hugged him.
“I’ll enjoy myself, Dad. Don’t you worry.”
“Be careful.” Ames’s mother, immaculate in her bishop’s wife blue cotton suit and trying very hard not to look too maternal or too concerned, embraced him tightly.
“I’ll be careful.” Ames smiled, kissing her.
But he wasn’t careful. He had the time of his life. He loved the Old World with its countryside that exuded the smell of time, its ancient buildings that looked like paintings, the unfamiliar music of foreign languages, the taste of the food and the unbelievably clean sunlight.
He loved the people. He had affairs with girls he hardly knew—French girls, Belgian girls, English girls. He drank too much wine. He ate at some of the best restaurants and some of the worst, slept in good hotels and rotten hotels and five of the most beautiful parks in Europe. He didn’t budget. He loaned a hundred dollars to an Australian painter he met in front of Chartres Cathedral who had the best hard-luck story he’d ever heard. He wasn’t exactly surprised when he ran out of money two weeks ahead of schedule.
It was at the end of an overactive night at the end of that wonderfully overactive summer that he found himself, broke and contented, stretched on the lawn in the palace gardens of Fontainebleau, an hour’s train ride southeast of Paris. A silvery sound kept butting into his hangover.
He rolled over and opened his eyes, and saw a girl crouched between the marble paws of a chinoiserie lion, playing a flute. She had long dark hair and she was wearing a long skirt and a Victorian lace blouse. He propped himself up on his elbows and watched and for five minutes she did a good job of not noticing him.
“Qu’est-ce que c’est la musique?” he called, realizing it was not quite the right way of asking, “What’s that music?”
Her eyes were on him a moment, and in that early morning light they were pure undersea green. She seemed not particularly surprised to see a young man in jeans and Brooks Brothers shirt lolling on the palace grounds at sunrise, and not particularly interested either.
She lowered the instrument and answered in perfect patrician American English—why did he think it was Delaware?—“Badinerie from Bach’s third French Suite.”
The flute went back to her lips, and out came another silvery piping note.
“It’s pretty,” he said.
She sighed. “You obviously aren’t a musician. The music is beautiful and the performance stinks. My lesson with Mademoiselle Boulanger is in two hours, so would you mind if I practice?”
“Go right ahead. Would you mind if I listen?”
He stretched out on the grass. Silvery Bach drifted over him. When he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved up to the jonquil beds and the girl was gone and an old peasant type was steering an electric mower across the lawn.
He took his queasy headache and fierce stomach to a sidewalk cafe. He was nursing a thick little coffee when two students sat at the next table and ordered omelettes fines herbes. They were chattering in American English.
Eavesdropping, he gathered there was an American school at the chateau where college graduates studied architecture and music. The café appeared to be their meeting place, and it occurred to him he might see the flute player again if he could just stretch his coffee long enough.
For four hours he endured the waitress’s stares. It was noon rush hour when he saw the girl standing on the sidewalk waiting for a traffic light. He slapped his last coins down on the table and rushed into the square. She was still carrying that flute case.
“Say, are you an ambassador’s daughter?”
She looked at him with undisguised skepticism and he remembered he hadn’t shaved since Torremolinos, where he and three thousand other tipsy young Americans had gone to see if the locals were still running the bulls as they had in Hemingway’s Farewell to Arms. They were.
“You’re not from the school,” she said.
“No, I’m not from any school.”
“What are you doing here then?”
“Here Fontainebleau or here France?”
“Here anywhere.”
“Chasing you.”
She gave him that look again, longer and more probing this time. “Would you like to have some coffee?”
More coffee was the last thing on earth his stomach wanted, but it was a way to be with her. “I’d love to, but I’m broke.”
“So am I till Friday.”
That seemed to settle that. They walked past hedges and gardens.
“We could have coffee in my room,” she said.
It was a lovable little room, for all the music manuscripts scattered about and the drying undies that she quickly snatched off the backs of chairs. Coffee was American instant, made on a hotplate, served in unmatching tin cups that looked as though they were meant to measure laundry detergent. She assumed a lotus position, told him about the American summer school of music and fine arts, about Nadia Boulanger, who she said was the world’s greatest teacher of music, about her own talent, which Mademoiselle Boulanger had said was decidedly not virtuoso calibre.
“Mademoiselle says with a lot of hard work I may be good enough to teach children.”
“Is that what you want to do?”
“I have a keyboard harmony lesson in ten minutes, and what I want to do is meet you here afterward.”
He grinned, not believing his luck, and there was a little anticipatory surge of sexuality in his groin. “What do you know. That’s exactly what I want too.”
That evening he explored her, awakening nerves under her arm, beneath her nipples, finding hidden vibrations that linked breasts to labia. She moaned with happiness, taking his swollen cock as it lay pressed between them and massaging it.
Then he twisted around to kiss her between the legs and, pressing her more firmly against him, began to penetrate her.
“That’s nice,” she said. “So nice.”
Love with her was rich, abandoned, inventive. Almost musical. Themes and variations.
They got into astonishing positions. She threw her legs up around his neck and he took her on the rug and then he took her on the bed with her head hanging back over the edge, her dark hair brushing the floor.
And then he took her in the shower.
That evening he found out everything about her. Her name was Fran, she read Henry James and identified with Fleda Vetch in The Spoils of Poynton, and she could cook astonishingly tasty veal cutlets on her little hotplate.
He spent the weekend with her. He began to notice a look in her eyes. He realized she was falling in love with him. And he realized he hadn’t fallen in love that summer. Not once. Right now, here, in this sweetly messy little room with her, was the closest he’d come.
He wanted to fall in love. Not falling in love under these circumstances was like driving a car with the handbrake on.
He asked about spending the week and a light seemed to come on in her face.
“That would be wonderful,” she said. “Just act like one of the students if Mademoiselle sees you.”
For two weeks he knew the greatest satisfaction he’d ever known with another human being, and yet there was always that damned handbrake holding him back.
Why don’t I love her? he wondered. Why can’t I love her?
And then he looked at his fourteen-day beard in the mirror and realized he had a return ticket to America and seven days to get his ass to Harvard Law School. “I have to go home,” he told her.
She turned, flute in hand. “When?”
“This week.” He saw whole cities crashing in her eyes. He crossed the room and threw his arms around her and pulled her bone-crunchingly hard against him.
I’ll love her, he thought. I will. It’s going to happen.
“Come with me, Fran.”
After much juggling of reservations, trading-in of tickets, and excuses to Mademoiselle Boulanger, Fran and Ames tipped the porter 1,200 francs and took occupancy of a cabin in what amounted to steerage on the France. Fran’s eyes took in the walls—white and smooth and shining like the insides of a hospital—and then she peered out of the tiny porthole.
“Ames, what in the world are we doing here?”
He put his head next to hers and stared at the bright blue sky and industrial-green waters of Le Havre. “Fran Winthrop, flautist extraordinaire of Chestnut Hill, Delaware, is having an affair with Ames Rutherford of New York, a promising young student whom she met in Fontainebleau, France. They are moving their headquarters to Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Mr. Rutherford will pursue his legal studies and Miss Winthrop will be very, very happy and that’s a promise.”
“Oh, Ames, I am happy, but…”
He kissed her on the nose. “But what?”
“This isn’t me. I’m a good Episcopalian girl. I had a scholarship to study with Nadia Boulanger.”
“And I’m a good Episcopalian boy and my father’s a good Episcopalian bishop and that makes it okay.”
“I’m having a guilt attack.”
He kissed her on the forehead. “Then let’s go find the dining room and drown our guilt in pâté campagne. The rooms may stink on a French ship, but the cuisine jamais.”