JACQUELINE 3

So here we were now in Chez Napoléon eating bifteck and pomme frits, right near the Etoile, the bar restaurant where 25 years back I had gone with a boozed up crew after we saw my girlfriend off on the France. We had stayed for hours drinking cheap wine and listening to the sad songs of Edith Piaf. These old places. The Etoile, and also the Brittany and the Brittany du Soir. And now years later, Chez Napoléon. And only now do I learn it is more cool to order bifteck and pommes frits than escargot.

Here in this French part of town where once I was hiding out with another man’s wife. I had chosen as our trysting place the last place I thought anyone would look for me or Marnie, the big Henry Hudson Hotel, way over on 57th almost by the river, a place used mainly by non-New Yorkers who were about to sail to Europe.

I think of that timeless time of sex in the Henry Hudson Hotel. I am picturing Marnie slipping out of her with-it no-bra and rolling about the hotel bed. The mere sight of her bare arm could get me aroused and now here she was, slippery and sliding and smelling like I had thought a woman could.

Here in Chez Napoléon, 1985, not 1963, Jacqueline talks of her old boyfriend, a somewhat known director, who had made a somewhat known small film from a big Henry Miller book. She says this guy would look at other women constantly while they were together, even when she was talking. Had she noticed I was looking at a dark girl two tables over?

While I try to give the impression I am listening, I am conjuring up an old scene. That night when Marnie was late coming to the hotel and I drank alone into oblivion. When I came to, my head was in her bare lap and she was bent down looking at me, amused, her hair tickling my chest. You were a sight last night, she said, using one of those southern expressions she often used. A sight, she repeated. I had to do my work, she said. I lapped you like a cat.

Jacqueline is asking me if I have ever had sex with a man, and when I say no, I don’t think I ever did though I cannot be sure about times in blackouts, she is telling me how she had sex with a woman just once to see what it was like. And she is telling me about how when she was vacationing alone on St. Bart’s last year there was this very young and very beautiful half-French island boy who worked at the hotel. A virgin. She had taken him to a deserted beach, undressed him, inducted him into manhood. Something of which she is intensely proud, she says.

We start to talk about this sudden life that she says we have together. She says we have this life together. She calls it a romance. Actually I have phoned a couple of people to tell them I have a new girlfriend but it didn’t come out sounding anything like the way it sounds when Jacqueline talks.