JACQUELINE 1

I met her through Suzanne, still in that time I was living nowhere. My 50th birthday had passed and I was living nowhere.

Nowhere in this time was a slick co-op in a former no man’s land of loft storage and manufacturing places just off Union Square, an area that for real estate promotion purposes, had recently been given the name the Flat Iron District. This co-op, in this formerly dingy loft building, smelled new. It had new hard wood floors, a raised dining area, a raised work area, and a raised kitchen area, bright with sunlight. It had a long living room and two bedrooms, on with a big bed, one with a mattress on the floor. It was owned by one of my maybe friends from times abroad, Jonathan Camus, who still traveled for the London Observer and now wrote thrillers, fiction and near non-fiction, and spent part of each year on Majorca, where he had just gone for the winter with his new wife, who had stylish minority status, and his new preppy stepson. I had gotten a call from Suzanne Cartright , with whom I had once helped sea turtles lay eggs on the obscure east coast of the Malay Peninsula. She had said Camus, with whom I had once gone to the ancient Nabatean rock city of Petra, wanted to sublet the place and would I share it with her. Suzanne had been married to an old friend of mine from Athens and Bangkok days, and Suzanne herself was an old friend from Singapore and Beirut days. For a time in Beirut Camus and I had shared a place in an old Arab building on the water.

Now in this sublet it was as if I were living in a movie about past people and past places. They kept on coming through. Combat photographers, whom Suzanne knew since she had been married for a time to one of them and also because she now worked at the high toned photo agency Magnum. Journalists she had known, and sometimes I had too, in the Far East and Middle East. Suzanne was Vietnamese from the old days, for when she was a child her father, a Vietnamese NCO in the French army, had had to flee with to Paris. She had head-turning good looks. These people from her travels, and sometimes from mine too, kept coming through this stage set place in this fake Flat Iron District. War loving journalists. Famous photographers.

She had the room with the real bed. And she had suiters. I, just months out of my seven-year marriage, had no lovers, but Suzanne said she had just the right woman for me. Jacqueline, whose name came out Jackque-leen (note Jack-eh-lin). A pied noir, Suzanne said, the old term for colonial French people. A pied noir from Algeria who was so plugged into worlds I wanted that she was also Jewish. And moreover she had just started a photo agency that was right up there with the best.

The time in the Flat Iron building seemed to me to fit with descriptions I had heard about how just when people are about to die their whole lives flash before them. Like I was in a movie of my life – these people from the Middle East and Far East passing through. The two foreign correspondents who kept spending time with Suzanne had both won Pulitzer prizes.

Suzanne and I went over for dinner at pied noir Jacqueline’s, a wildly evocative place of pillars and high windows beneath a Mansard roof over near the Carlyle. She was 40ish, soft and curvy and gracious. And her French accent made me want her. She quickly cooked up a mysterious little meat and cheese dish that seemed like the real French food, and she was quick, like me, on many subjects. I was having almost as much fun as I might have had if I had met someone when I was still drinking, or still had hope, or both.

Jacqueline moved in a haunting combination of keyed up anxiety and slowed down languidness. When I got together with her again a month later, just after I moved from the Flat Iron building to a cold room in a brick building in Chelsea, a room that seemed the right stage set for my seemingly never ending depression, when I called her from the cold room she said to come right up to 78th Street and she said that after Suzanne and I left that night we came to dinner she had almost called asking me to come right back then.

I started out calling her Jack-eh-lin, but changed to Jackque-leen, for that was the way her name came out as I was coming inside her. The French pronunciation, which seemed to make all the difference. Jacqueline decided that I knew more French than I said I knew.

When I was with her I had a first time and last time feeling, filled with nostalgia and sweet despair. We went out most nights to restaurants way over west in the 50s, an area that I knew, but not many people seemed to know, was a French quarter, with all French names by the buzzers for tenement and brownstone buildings. Like so much else, wherever I went in these days, I had been there before.