Like we blacks have to be white or brown before we can be worth anything, but owing to some stroke of ill luck, we ended up turning color. Man, that is outrageous prejudice!” Julene averred.
“Now, Sugar, let’s not be so emphatic. There are frescoes on the palace walls in Crete, depicting brown girls frolicking on the backs of great fish and graceful green sea monsters, totally without any inkling of racial overtones. It’s your festering Alabama past, with all its lash-whipping frenzy, and torrid oral history that’s been your ambrosia too long.”
“Oh, Dr. Clarke, have you ever heard such a beguiling and devilish tongue!” chortled Julene. “‘Lash-whipping frenzy’ my ass! Blacks are the true children of Phoebus, the descendants of that abominable, but life-giving Sun. Every anthropologist knows that.”
“The poor child never sees it,” Sullivan grimaced with a feigned scowl. “‘Heaven and earth,’ ouranos kai gaés, are a unity, interdependent. Neither can strive to be the other; neither can substitute for the other, neither can take the other’s place. Zeus is lord of both. Even lord of the underworld and all its chthonic creatures. We have to peel back those mythic layers, if we’re ever going to recover our own ousia, the truth about our own beingness.”
“Ah, mon vieux! Now you are espousing existentialism,” complained Gibert. “Please, let’s not spoil the evening.”
About that time, the maitre d’ returned with two bottles of champagne, glasses, and a large white china dish arrayed with cheese, crispy thin French tea biscuits, and six petite lemon tarts. After a flourish with his towel and the uncorking of the bottles, he poured our drinks and placed the half-filled remaining bottle in front of Gibert.
“A toast to our new American friends! Salut to all!” Mme. offered.
We raised our glasses and touched each other’s. “Salut! A tout le monde, salut.”
For a brief moment, Mme.’s eyes met mine. Her subliminal message was unmistakable. Julene didn’t miss it either. Julene smiled as I clinked my glass a second time against hers. “To Mme. and Miss Alabama!” I said, with a celebratory gesture.
“Yes! I’ll drink to that,” affirmed Gibert. “C’est magnifique.”
“You romantics are all alike,” groaned Sullivan. “To the gods, those restless and fate-bound immortals, enchained in their own jealousies and limited powers—to them I lift my mortal cup, and bid, ‘live on.’”
“Hear, hear!” we agreed, as the soft night enfolded us in its restful ambience.
I don’t remember how much longer we talked, but after a third round of champagne, Gibert said: “Ah, Professor Sullivan” (only he pronounced it ‘Sue-lee-von’), “would you care to see our own archives, or let me run a special article on you. If you could come by my office tomorrow, say around eleven, we could have coffee, and talk and the like. I should love for all France, or at least Paris, to know how an American scholar views his country’s war through the lens of the grand classics. If only we had done the same before Dien Bien Phu, or relinquished North Africa decades before we did! Alors! Please, don’t say Non.”
“Well, I write every morning, but, I suppose I could forego that ritual, just once. Une fois. I accept.”
“And you, Mademoiselle? You are invited, too.”
“Merci, but no thanks. I’ll just sleep in, or wander about les Tuileries.”
“Please be my guest,” I volunteered. “We can wander together. I’d like to know more about Alabama and your own project, or dissertation, no doubt?”
“Watch him,” warned Sullivan, with a trusting smile, this time. “You can never be sure about a Virginia Cavalier.”
“Nonsense,” interjected Mme. Gibert. “I’d invite myself to go with you, but I’ve several deadlines,” she yawned sleepily.
“Why don’t I meet you near the entrance to the gardens, say around ten a.m.?” Julene suggested.
“Fine.”
“May I send a cab for you? Our own limousine?” Gibert asked the professor.
“No, I can take the metro.”
“Then here is my card,” said Gibert. “5, Rue de Forbage. The sixth arrondissement.”
“Very well.”
Mme. rose, smiled, and shook everyone’s hand, in typical French style. She presented her perfumed cheek for me to kiss. It was very soft and tender. I brushed against it gently with my lips.
“We must meet again,” she whispered.
“Yes. I agree.”
It was hard not to look into her eyes, but she was deliberately glancing away, as if to ignore any freshness on my part, which she had intentionally awakened. I thought of Goethe’s line:
I gazed into your eyes and lost my soul.
“I’ll see you in the morning,” I said to Julene. “Good night, to all.”
2
Morning came noisily through the thin fog of the French capitol. In spite of the closed windows, I could hear the claxons’ wails and the murmur of the traffic in the streets below. I rolled to my side, sat on the edge of the bed, then walked to the curtains. I opened them and the double windows and stared out across the city.
I was staying in a pension near the Garden of Luxembourg, about a thirty-minute walk from the metro stop where I promised Julene I would meet her later in the morning. An overcast sky added a somberness to the dull gray scene, appropriate to the slight headache that throbbed in my frontal lobes. I could see the numerous chimney pots on the tin roofs opposite the pension, as well as the iron grillwork and narrow balconies that protected the windows on the building opposite mine.
Two weeks ago, the major topic at the dinner tables on the second floor had been the bizarre murder of an elderly woman who lived on the third floor in a neighboring building beside ours. I couldn’t help but listen with interest to the conversation of the two patrons who sat at the table next to mine.
“Oui. The killer must have gone mad, slipped out of his room, crept across the balconies to hers, entered through the windows, and slit her throat! Alors! Stabbed her body nineteen times. Nineteen!”
“Why did he do that? Could that happen here?”
“Ah! Who is to say! I don’t know. Perhaps it was a foreigner.”
“Do we have any here?”
“Oui! The American,” he smiled, pointing his fork toward me. “The Belgian, three Japanese, and that quiet British girl.”
“Ah, yes! But I hardly think of them as les estrangers any more.”
In my case, I think that was because I frequently shared my bottle of wine with them.
“Ah, Monsieur, you are too kind,” the shorter, black-haired man of the two would respond.
“Do they have any clues?” I asked.
