The Swiss Girl

I met Claudia through Chet. He invited me to come with him and two of his friends from the Groton School to meet this man named Pablo who was from Brazil in medical school, but was spending time in Boston to learn English, taking time off from his medical studies. Pablo was living in Chet's family's house. Through Pablo I met Claudia in the bar downstairs below the Pizzeria Uno in Harvard Square and a number of other international people.

“Dude, we’re leaving. Are you coming or not?”

Chet and his prep school friends left me with the international crowd. For a few seconds I felt great. I was hanging with the right people like I was back in Paris or Berlin. Then all eyes were turned on my person, as if to say explain your self, thought you were leaving with the American Apple Pie Boys.

“So you’re an old friend of Chet’s. What do you do in life? Play baseball?" Pablo was leading the inquisition. I didn’t feel welcome anymore. But I knew I wasn’t like Chet or his friends. I was a francophone, yet I hadn’t realized it until now.

“I’m taking time off from college to travel around the world and write my novel.”
“You’re writing a novel you say. Sure you are, kid. I can understand why you would lie to impress these beautiful young ladies.”

I didn’t have a comeback. But I wrote my name, number and address down on my napkin. I pushed my napkin into the middle of the table for everyone to see.
“If you don’t believe me and are curious to find out if I was lying or not, why don’t you all come over for brunch tomorrow at my parent’s house.”

And I left. Feeling great.

It had been about two weeks since that had happened. The weekend before I went to Quebec. Then I invited Claudia over for brunch the next day. She was a bit of fresh air when I brought her into the house. She was a charming, intelligent, polite—an extremely charismatic young woman capable of being relaxed, showing her enjoyment of being in another person's house.
Claudia immediately hit it off with my parents. She came over with Frank who was from the Ivory Coast. My father spoke a little German with her. Of course she could speak some French. Frank's first language was French. It was a pleasant feeling.
They were the only ones to show up at my parent’s house. Frank was nice. I wanted him to go. We were getting along well, but I had eyes only for Claudia. Frank was trilingual, smart and witty, and he was a man. He understood the situation. Pablo was right about one thing. There were beautiful women sitting at that table in Pizzeria Uno. I wasn’t lying about writing a novel, yet I was using that information to show off. And when I wrote my address on that napkin she knew it was for her.
I didn't realize how attractive she was until she was in my room lying on the bed reading my book. She was reading my book lying on her stomach with her legs up in the air.

She giggled.

“What is it?”

“Is this faux-postmodern thing necessary? Does the novel exist for any reason except for the sake of its own existence?”

I laughed. “I don’t know where I’m going with it.”

I was enjoying the whole thing. I was thinking I was carried away. Only because I liked her more than she liked me.

I showed more affection than she showed me, which intensified my feelings toward her. But she was also responsive to me. She seemed to like me too, yet in subtle ways, she rejected me. She was withholding herself. I didn't understand. I didn't think I understood why she was doing that.

Whether she was just being coquettish or I knew I had to go a little slow with her. I didn't know anything. Honestly I had many theories, but she was so good. She had a lot of tact. I had no grounds for a real theory.

It was only superficial. First of all I didn't think she knew what she was doing. But my theory was this: it was at that point two and a half weeks away from a boyfriend of hers coming to visit. She never said boyfriend (they never do). She said a friend. When a girl said a friend it meant a male, yet a friend could mean many things. He was not only a friend, but also a young man. I didn't know how young.

The friend had arrived that past Monday. Coming from Switzerland where she was from. I would have been willing to say that the notion that she became cooler the closer it was getting to his arrival, in a certain sense meant, she was encouraging my advances, in a way that showed she maybe was more interested in me than she was willing to admit. On that score I would have had to say maybe she was tempted by me and she was trying to hold herself back. She was reminding herself of some commitment she had made.

I didn't know what was going on in her head. She first mentioned that the friend was going to visit about one and a half weeks before. She told me that her male friend was coming to visit her from Zurich, Switzerland in Boston, and next week her mother was coming to visit. Following the coming weekend the two of them, mother and daughter would have gone to New York City.

It was interesting to me that the second time I saw her, a week ago last on Saturday night, Claudia spent the night with me. One might have thought that a girl, who would spend the night with somebody, and in the same bed, might have been saying something by doing that. Possibly trust. A lot of trust and an affectionate sweetness, but might have also been misleading and upsetting, especially for somebody who was dying to have her or who fell in love with her. It was intense, but I wouldn't say misleading, not completely misleading because it was comfortable.

I had a great time, even though we didn't sleep together. We didn't have sex. We cuddled. It was nice people could do that. And didn't have to do anything more than that. And didn't get the wrong idea or get angry.
I felt angry. I couldn’t deny that. I could have been suppressed. Or rather I suppressed the feelings of anger about being rejected. Frustration.

I remembered when I invited her to an opera last Friday night. The Magic Flute, which was a reading of an opera by some rather good singers, neat costumes. It was a lot of fun. Of course it was in German, so Claudia was hearing something in her own language and seemed delighted by the whole thing. It was nice to have her there.

There were a bunch of my Parents' friends there, Don and Elizabeth, Diane Abeille and other people were there and Emily and Charles and so on, a party thrown together. Anne and Leo were there. They all dispersed afterwards, in different directions. It was nice to see Claudia. She was getting to know my parents by that time. This was the third time I'd seen her. She must have felt more at home, but I wasn't sure. She spent the night with me that night too, after the opera. That was Friday night.
We slid into bed and cuddled and fell asleep. Saturday morning we woke up. Caressing. I pulled up her shirt and I put my head on her breasts, playing. I put my head under her shirt, she was wearing a tank top, one of my tank tops, and I looked at her. I had my head on her breasts.

Definitely sexual but restrained. Playing around and not actually forcing the issue. She wasn’t distant. No. She was a little distant Friday night. Every time she slept over and we woke up in the morning in my room we were close, and she would leave the house, I felt she was almost my lover.
She always came over as a friend and, in a way left as a lover, even though nothing profound had happened. Nothing. Her ability to trust me was profound. Maybe girls that didn't let me have sex with them made me respect them more and that I was more interested in them because they didn't. The opposite would be when a girl was willing to have sex with me when I didn't know her.

I didn't know them long enough to give any real commitment, as far as knowing that I was going to be there for them, and that there was going to be some consistency in my behavior; that by not having waited through that kind of period when one could get to know each other, and just being willing to have sex with somebody who was a stranger, in a certain way, it seemed that that destroyed respect, making it hard for respect to develop, because it was too easy.
I needed innocence. Claudia’s needs were unknown. In one sense innocence meant not knowing, not knowing something was wrong. By not knowing the other person intimately, not taking my clothes off in front of the other person, by in a way hiding something or covering something, that innocence was retained. I didn’t know whether Claudia had been doing this consciously or unconsciously, and if she had been doing this at all.

I liked her more than she liked me and she had detected this. Claudia may have been obsessed with innocence. She was not Catholic. She was Protestant. Sex for her might have been something that was reserved for long term commitment, which only was something permissible when people had gotten to know each other well, and had made a very serious commitment, such as wanting to get married. For some people, that was the way it was. Could she be one of them?

Some people would not have considered having sex with another person unless they were married, and that that was part of the whole expression of that commitment. It was very different from most people of my generation. There was the possibility that both of us could be over-intellectualizing about this, and she just didn't feel like having sex with me for no reason, but she also liked being with me and didn't want to alienate me by just saying no, just making a rule.

Our need for innocence and therefore the need to put off having sex to keep the innocence thing going was in stark contrast by the fact that too many people who were being overly quick about it. It wasn’t clear what the American value system was in relation to innocence if these people had no compunctions about having sex with somebody that they had just met. Maybe it had ceased to be operative. Or maybe if it was operative hypocrisy, it had a role to play.

I wanted to see Claudia. I doubted whether she was going to call me while this man was here. What if this person who was visiting turned out to be somebody who was fifty years old? She said nothing. I didn't ask.


Claudia just called. Claudia called my parents in Boston for my number here in Paris. She was to finish school in three weeks. Her birthday was in three weeks. She would be turning twenty-four. I had been on the phone with my parents. First I spoke to my mother. Alice was feeling nervous. She handed Jacob the telephone. I gave Jacob a positive sketch of the goings on in my life. I kept returning to this news about Claudia. She had said that she had no school on Thursday and Friday. She proposed that I come to Zurich on Wednesday, that I leave between two and three in the afternoon, arriving around 9:00 PM. I said I would call her Wednesday morning to let her know of my arrival time. She giggled as we said goodbye.

She was a hard nut to crack. I arrived on a Wednesday night. Not last week but the week before. About a week before I arrived in Zurich, Claudia called me. I had a suspicion before she had called, that I'd never speak to her again, because I had lost her number...One time when I was staying at Bruno and Phillip’s apartment—with their parents—my wallet had been washed in the washing machine, and her number had been smeared.

Then I rescued the little piece of paper, when it dried, and took the number down again, called her on her cell phone. And then I lost her number again. But she tracked me down. She called my father in Boston. Jacob gave her my number in Paris at my new apartment. I was so happy she called. The first thing I said after asking her how she was doing was, "so when can I come and see you?" We were back in touch.

I called her, wrote down her number, and I wrote it down in several places, so I wouldn't lose it and called her back. She said the best time would be to come on that Wednesday night.

I arrived there and she picked me up. She was alone. She picked me up in her car at the train station in Zurich. I was speechless. I had a big smile on my face. We drove to her house. Her family lived on a hill above Zurich, a five-minute drive into town. I met her mother and her brother. Her father had not come home from work yet. We went up to her room. We talked and lay on her bed. Eventually, some mnemonic device in the conversation reminded me.
Somehow I was talking to Claudia about how she had Pooh Bear, stuffed animal, she had Pooh Bear on her bed. The other was a teddy bear, but he was not very interesting. So she had Pooh Bear on her bed. I started explaining that Pooh Bear was a perfect Zen person.

I tried to explain Zen. I didn't really know what Zen was. I couldn't give a dictionary definition. I did know that Pooh Bear could have the best fun doing absolutely nothing. Like me he did absolutely nothing well.

That was not all he did. He did something as well as nothing. He ate honey and helped his friends out. She didn't know what Zen was, and I had to call my father and ask what Zen was. My father started telling me, and then I gave the phone to Claudia, but before that, I told him to start speaking in German, because we had been looking in her dictionaries and we couldn't find it. On the phone Jacob started telling Claudia about Zen, the Japanese philosophy.

It was originally Chan. A form of Buddhism in China and then migrated to Korea and to Japan. It was called Zen. My father thought, when she first asked the meaning of Zen, that she was asking the meaning in English of a German translation of the word 'then.' He misheard me. Jacob was trying to explain in German for 'then,' but we finally straightened that out.
She took me out with her friends. We went to a club. And I was talking to this tall lanky kid. He said that Claudia had never been in a relationship with a guy. He explained how she had many guy friends and she slept in their beds. She had affectionate relationships with them. Affectionate, meaning holding, kisses, but not passionate kisses, implied sexual affection, maybe.

It never went farther. He said, he thought she was a virgin. I told him I thought otherwise. Her idea of men or relationships was that the perfect man for her would one day show up and she'd get married. I was getting along well with him even though he was a complete loser. Her friends were nice, but I didn’t like them.

There were times when I would wake up in the middle of the night and I'd look at her and I'd want so much to hold her. Or, in an animal way, kiss her and make out with her. Maybe I loved her. No, that was more an expression of my desire to be even closer to her, but it also involved a lot of things for her: commitments. I was sure she'd marry somebody in her culture in a structured and secure way, which was traditional.

The next day we went into town, and she had to go get a few bumps on her chin removed by a doctor, and she dropped me off, and I walked around Zurich and sat on a bench and looked out at Lake Zurich and watched the boats rock, and the swans go bob in and out of the boats and look for food, and I looked at people. I walked around Zurich and looked at people. Then we met up again.

The whole while during this trip I was thinking, what was I going to get her for her birthday, because her birthday was coming up. It was July 6. I said I was going to go back to Boston, and I was going to come back for her birthday. I was thinking about what I was going to get her for her birthday. I was feeling frustrated about this.

Feeling trapped by the inevitable, or the fact that we would never get closer, meaning we'd never be true lovers. And I was thinking about her birthday present, about giving her this painting I had done last summer, which I had actually given to the Boncoeurs. But every time I had visited the Boncoeurs, it was still sitting on their floor and not on their walls.
I felt angry. I stole their painting. Stole my painting back from them, putting it on my wall in my apartment, telling them that I was going to work on it again. I had no intention of working on it. It was finished.

I was thinking of giving her this painting. Now there was some significance to this. It was as if every time I gave a painting to a female, that was the day before I never saw them again.

When I was still in high school, three years ago, for Linda’s birthday party, she had a big ball at her parents’ house in Brookline, Massachusetts. I showed up with a beautiful watercolor, framed and a bouquet. I went to meet her in Bermuda, and had a big argument with her, and that was shortly after her birthday party where I gave her my best painting at the time, which I went to great trouble to have matted and put together behind glass, and clips, wire to hang it on, and wrapped it up, and presented it beautifully to her.

Then this beautiful girl I met in Berlin. Christina. I brought an even greater painting, my best oil painting. I took it down from the stretcher, and then I remounted it when I arrived there, and presented it to her.

These were important pieces of work that I had done. There was no reason to think that if I brought Claudia this painting that I did in Normandy last summer, that it would mean that at all. She was a person I might be friends with a long time, whatever happened to her, whether she would get married to somebody else or not. She was somebody who obviously cared about me, and had a real affection for me.

And, the fact that we had not been lovers may have had something to do with the friendship going on, because sometimes things happen when one had been intimate with somebody, that it made it very difficult for them after the romance had ended to continue any form of contact.

Being there with the family was pleasant. In fact I was honest. I was in good humor with their parents. And I was maybe too uninhibited. To her parents I would say things right off top of my head, exactly what I was thinking.

For some reason I was comfortable with her parents. They made me feel at home there, and welcome. They treated me like an adult. They treated me with the respect of an equal. I had never experienced that before.

I had a girl friend when I did my last year of high school in Paris. This girl was from Banbury, England. I would go and visit her. The last weekend I spent with this girl was at her father's house. I had been spending the weekends at her mother's house. I spent a weekend at her father's house, had never met her father before, the father gave me a hard handshake, made me feel like a little twerp, and separated us, and made us sleep in separate rooms. It was one of the worst experiences of my life, and I was trying to lose my virginity with this English girl, but it couldn’t happen.

And other fathers of girls were cold to me. There was always an undertone of hatred and the Oedipus complex or something like that. I was getting along well with Claudia's father. He didn't speak any English or French. But somehow we were talking. The father was speaking in Swiss German, and I was speaking in English and French.

Somehow we understood each other. That was great. I should write that family a good thank you letter. The mother was stylish, and had charm. The brother was a handsome guy. He was an electrician, but a real big athlete. He played soccer, and many other sports, like me. And he boxed.

The last morning I was there the brother set the garage up for me, which had a heavy bag and had gloves and hand raps and jump rope ready for me. So I worked out with his stuff. And, we had a lot in common, although he didn't speak much French or English, but he understood everything I said. What the brother couldn't say, he was somehow getting across to me, although maybe they thought I was another kid that was crazy about their daughter, doomed to fail in getting her heart, like the others.

One night I cooked for Claudia. She had never tasted my cooking. I cut up some peppers, onions, garlic, and carrots. A bunch of vegetables. And I put beer in it, while the vegetables were cooking, tomatoes, and broccoli. Then I put some boneless chicken in small pieces. I mixed crème fraiche in and whipped it up and put a little more tomatoes in and stirred it up. And it was great. She liked it.

The brother came in, as we were finishing up. And he had a plate of it. He liked it too. He mopped up the sauce with bread. It was all right.

I was going to go to Lausanne and, telling her that I was going to get a ticket to come back to Boston, and she said how are you going to do all that? She didn't think I could make it to her birthday. Go to Lausanne and buy the ticket at the last minute. Claudia was organized, but she thought she was disorganized. I must have been crazy compared to her, with my disorganization. Switzerland was an organized place. Claudia didn't think she was organized but she was.

We had gone to a nightclub the night before. And we woke up late Saturday afternoon. She drove me to the station, and I went to Lausanne, just as simple as that.

She was an unforgettable person, easy to be with, to be comfortable with. There was a goodness that shined out of her, a great spirit. It was really nice having her in Boston. Having her at home. This made a great story. It was a story that didn't necessarily point in any direction in the future.

Except that I felt that she was somebody I'd always keep up with, because she had a real affection for me. And, I made a strong impression on her. I was privileged to have had her at home, staying several nights at my parents’ house in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Canada

Amazing how beautiful she was. But what I didn't understand was... something about her smell, the smell of the pine forest. I couldn't describe it.
Smells were impossible to describe. I didn’t know where the smell came from. It could have been her breath or her body odor. I didn't know—whether it was the smell of a forest when I was in Quebec. It triggered a free association of an image, but I could have argued about that forever.
The smell reminded me of a forest. No, no, no. It didn't remind me of a forest. It made me feel repulsed. Repulsed. The only thing I could think of because I had to give an answer—was the forest: This forest smell. No it was just pure negativity. Forests represented pure negativity. I asked myself if it was a class thing. I hit something there.
I ran into this girl in Charles de Gaulle airport. I was in Charles de Gaulle for about eight hours waiting for the airplane. Five minutes before my plane was supposed to take off, I get in line, and there was an announcement made. The plane would be delayed eight hours. The pilot was ill.
They directed the passengers to go to a restaurant to get free food, and information about the flight would be presented to them later. So everybody started walking in the direction of the restaurant, out of the terminal into the main part of the airport. I turned to the first girl I saw. It was pure impulsive behavior. I started talking to her.
I asked: “Do you want to walk with me?” Of course we're talking in French. She said, sure, I'll walk with you. And we started talking. We went to the restaurant together for the free food that the airport had promised us.
I told her of my adventures, my travels. She told me things about her self, that she was a hairdresser, lived in Quebec, owned a horse. She lived at home with her parents. Then we went to a bar. She bought me a beer.
Then I bought her a glass of champagne. She made a call to her parents. I called my parents. Next we were lying on top of each other trying to keep warm. The body heat, something happened.
On the plane I changed my seat to sit next to Maxine. Maxine had the window seat. I had the aisle seat. Two isles over was a beautiful girl much better looking than Maxine. Maxine was pretty.
Maxine was ugly compared to this girl. Maxine was very pretty in the pictures I took of her, but the girl two aisles over, was absolutely stunning. She could have been on a cover of a magazine.
And the whole plane ride I was tempted to go over and talk to her, and ditch Maxine, and take the empty seat next to this beautiful girl. During the whole trip I was eyeing her. She was eyeing me. Every time Maxine was looking out the window I'd wink at this beautiful girl, and she'd wink back. We were smiling the whole time.
The beautiful girl I was looking at was giggling every once and while. I should have ditched Maxine! I regretted not being able to become two people at once. I tried taking a little walk, but she was in plain view. I would have been spotted immediately.
No. My designs would have been known, wrecked everything, because of guilt and fear. I didn't follow my gut, which was to ditch Maxine. Take up with the other girl. Maxine's smell made me have a doubt.
I arrived in Montreal so late that I couldn't come to Boston. Maxine’s parents immediately picked her up. I had to go to a hotel, wait till the next morning, and get up real early with an alarm clock. I had to wake up at 5:00 AM. I woke up without an alarm clock. I slept about two hours.
I left at 6:30 AM and arrived in Boston around 7:30. I get a call from Maxine. I didn't remember much. I had a terrible memory. She called about a day later. This was around the end of January. Back in Boston.
Then I made a reservation to go up four days later to Quebec City. I didn't make a reservation. I was trying to look into plane fares and they were so expensive. I took the bus to Montreal. Nine hours. Thirteen hours in all.
To get there! To Quebec City. Because I had to go from Boston to Albany New York...I forgot. I blocked it out. Thirteen hours of bus ride. On the way back it was only 4 or 5 hours. I didn’t get a direct bus ride. I might have asked. But there were none that day. I arrived in Quebec City at 1:30 AM.
She picked me up at the bus station. She knew I was coming in. I had called her. We went to her house. But she took me for a drive around town first.
She drove me quickly around the town. The streetlights were glowing. I would have liked to stay in the center of town, but instead we went to the country, the suburbs, housing developments, boring. Except it was hilly. There were forests.
I couldn’t remember whether they were two story or one-story houses. Barely two-story. Ranch style. And so the whole idea of her being out in the country was exploded. It was the beauty of Quebec and the wilds of Canada and everything—it turned out—she lived in this housing development. And her horse was not down the road.
I didn’t see the horse. I didn't get what I wanted. I imagined that it would be in the pure countryside...Forests. And behind her house would be this horse running around with a fence around it...Mountains in the distance.
Instead it looked like disgusting suburbia, which I hated! I traveled thirteen hours to get to this ugly little suburb outside of Quebec. And the horse was not behind the house.
I arrived there. And her parents were asleep. She picked me up in her own car. And so I walked into the house—a sleeping house—in the basement. That was where she lived. She had moved down to the basement where her brother used to live. Her brother didn’t live in the house anymore.
We crawled into bed. I was only in my underwear. She put on these thick cotton pajamas, with these cows, cartoon cows all over the pajamas. And I didn't understand why she was wearing these pajamas. I was in my underwear. Maybe she was cold.
She started kissing me, and holding me and getting me really horny and I tried to take off her pants and she had these big cow—cartoon—pajamas on, and I couldn't get her pajamas off. Finally I realized she didn't want to take them off. But she was giggling the whole time. And this went on, I trying to take off her pants, and her giggling, for about three hours, making out. I barely slept a wink.
We finally woke up at around 11:30 AM. Her father had gone to work. Her mother was a housewife. And the father worked in Insurance. I was not sure.
I couldn’t take it in. Some boring suburban job...conventional, conservative, but barely middle class. Yes, I had a sense of class superiority.
When I woke up I was still horny. She finally took her pants off. I just put it in and I, it was, pre-ejaculation. It was premature ejaculation.
Not again. It was terrible. In Mexico I had great sex, sustained. There had been too much titillation the night before. She didn’t seem to resent that. No, she said she thought it was funny. This was a great girl.
We went and had this big American breakfast, which made me feel better, but then I wanted to have a nap. Actually I wanted to get her back in bed to try again. We didn’t even go into the center of town. We didn’t go to Quebec City. We were still in the suburbs, Suburbia, the land of nothing: Lots of snow though.
There was tons of snow. It was frigid. It was absolutely freezing out. I didn’t bring long underwear. No, I didn't.
We bought some film and I took some photographs of her. I promised her that I wouldn’t post the photographs on the Internet. Then we get back in bed. That was when we did it! It was good, fast, animal sex. And we fell asleep.
We woke up at 4:45 PM. She had to go to work at 5:00 PM. I went back to bed. Before I went back to bed, before she left, she said: "you can wake up any time and go upstairs and my parents will make you dinner. Don't worry. They're nice."
I hadn't even met her parents yet and somehow she knew how afraid I felt. It was the look on my face that must have tipped her off. I was terrified of the idea of meeting them. Guilty. No, anxious the father would be protective of his daughter. I went back to bed.
I woke up at around 6:30 PM, and I lay in the pitch dark, feeling a little confused, and I couldn’t decide whether or not to go upstairs. Finally, after an hour, at 7:30 PM I went up and there they were. The parents: Just as I had imagined. I had found the courage. Though it took an hour to decide.
I must have felt something climbing those stairs. I became hungry. I was apathetic. I didn’t remember what I felt. I introduced myself. "How are you?" In French.
I went upstairs. It was exactly what I had been imagining for the past hour when I was in the pitch dark in her bed. What a let down. I imagined her parents watching TV, like any suburban, boring, conservative family. Glued to the TV: Hard to get their attention; very hard.
Immediately they gave me a plate of food out of the microwave, as I had imagined it, two hamburgers, with French fries, gravy and green peas. They must have heard me scrambling up the basement stairs in the pitch dark like some refugee seeking asylum. No ketchup for the Hamburger, none, only gravy. And the bread was soggy, and the French fries were wet and tasted of plastic. As I swallowed the fries, they felt like wax.
Not hot but warm. I had to admit it. It was food.
The food had a gray look to it. When I looked up from my chewing experience, the parents sitting on their overstuffed couch, which had no distinguishable color like the pallor of their skin, I had to admit that, everything was gray. With a sweeping look, holding my fork poised above my lips, I noticed warms and cools in the open kitchen-dining room area, connected to the TV den, were different shades of gray, as if I were in a generic model of the perfect quotidian suburban home. I felt a small unwelcome chill ascending my spine. It was fear. Fear was telling me something. I had to get away from here.
And I was hungry. I ate it but slowly. Their heads turned back to the TV. In between bites, I told them a little bit of what I was doing as if they really cared. Taking a year off from college and writing a book.
Tried to explain the book, but every time I explained the book to anybody I felt like I was eating my words. I felt like I wasn’t getting through to them. So I gave up trying to talk about my book, and ate my food.
Then I decided to call my father at 9:00 PM, as Maxine was coming back from work. My father told me that the cancer was worse. He was scared of dying. But Maxine was back. I told them what happened.
My father was fairing worse and I had to leave the next day. I was glad that I had talked to my father, and heard it was worse, because I didn't want to stay anymore. I didn't like Quebec. Forest smells. But it was more than that.
It was the smell of the country that began to bother me. But I had a good time. After having told them I was going to leave, Maxine brought this girl over called Veronique. The three of us went out to a gas station and bought some cheap wine, some beer, cigarettes and junk food, and the three of us went to Veronique's house.
But Veronique was really named Sophie, yet there were another two Sophies at the hairdressing salon. So, Sophie had to change her name to Veronique when she moved to the small suburban town.
Now, all her friends were connected with the salon. She was called Veronique by almost everybody in town except for her boyfriend who called her Sophie. We went over to Sophie/Veronique's place, met her boyfriend who was cool, and the four of us smoked hashish, and drank beer and wine. During this pleasant evening Veronique or Sophie called a gay hairdresser, one of their coworkers named Marko on speakerphone. Marko joined the evening.
He was in the bathtub having a bubble bath.
Marko was my favorite. Better than Maxine. He was witty. He was funny and full of life...in the bathtub. And he wasn’t there.
He stayed with us on speakerphone for about two and half-hours. They were all talking and at one point, I had my arm around Maxine, holding the phone up, representing Marko in effigy, Veronique/Sophie took a photograph of the three of us or two of us.
And then we came back home. To Maxine's home. Maxine and I drove back to her place, and I was stoned and drunk. And I was trying to go to sleep. I had my eyes closed, but she took off my pants and started to fuck me, and I was really not able to function properly, but my cock was hard.
She was riding me like a horse, but I succeeded in pulling her close to me, because she had been sitting on me while having sex with me, and I was able to pull her down, and holding her neck so she couldn't move, even though I couldn't move.
I had to get out of this. But I just tried to go to sleep and close my eyes, until she stopped fucking me. And she was having orgasms. She had two orgasms, with the tremors. And the cries, some sounds. Some moans. I tried not to listen.
I left the next morning. She took me to the bus. She drove me to the bus station. And she was being affectionate and I was being distant like it was too much for me. This thing about the country that bothered me, it was simply an annoyance. The smell of the country had begun to bother me.

Obama and Clinton

Obama may choose Clinton for Secretary of State: Pretty smart move. Maybe. The Clintons have long-lasting contacts. She is extremely articulate. So what? Two terms in the Senate have made her very experienced for a junior. Right. New conflict with Russia is on the horizon. Europe is building a pipeline to side-step Putin. Will it work? OPEC?, Iran?, Afghanistan? (Black Water...?), Pakistan? (How much more money do we have to give them?!) Israel?, Venezuela?, Resources: In Congo, pirates, minerals, water, gas, oil, trees, R&D, IMF, Latin America...Obama should focus on putting his people and the right people inside and running the CIA. This time let the 'company' do their job which is to protect America's economic interests abroad.

Art Show at Photo 4

Title: J'habite Budapest
Location: 4 Rue Bonaparte, Paris 75006
Artist: Bruno Bourel
Terrific pictures of Budapest. Wish there had been more of them.

From Miro to Andy Warhol

An exhibit seen at le Palais Luxembourg which is in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, if I've mistaken the name of the museum. There was a painting by Robert Indiana which was OK. When I was six years old with my mother we went to Old Harbor Hill on Vinal Haven, the largest of the Fox islands, there was no plumbing, so my mother's friend Robert Indiana whom we happened to be visiting offered to receive us over night. We slept on couches in one of his great rooms where we had been chatting in the course of the night. I wet the couch that night and in the morning my mother and I turned over the cushion thereby concealing the deed. Nor was it the first time my mother was put in such a position. When she flew to Paris to make a deal with Grasset Fesquel. We were the guests of the writer Marie Cardinal whose book Les Mots Pour le Dire which mother had already begun to translate. Cardinal insisted that my mother sleep in her bed so that she would know what it was like to be her, while Cardinal withdrew to the guest room. In that great bed in the Faubourg Saint Germaine I routinely peed. Anyway. At the end of our stay a month later my mother turned the mattress to disguise the deed. But the rest of it...for ten or eleven euros... Maybe ten out of fifty interesting paintings.

Woody Allen makes a try

Christina...Something (Jessica?) Barcelona! Well it's really stupid. Sort of fun, amusing, though basically...I liked it at the time, thinking about it now...nothing. Some people thought it was a laugh a minute.

Collective shame and guilt:

In the grip of fear that is all too grounded in real events that are happening at a rapid pace, reported by the media as generalities and corroborated by our own experiences and those of people we talk to every day.

What has happened in the last eight years has so depressed the American people because of two wars, beginning with the stealing of a presidential election (and the out-performance in the second election of the Republicans, which demonstrated their superior understanding of the electoral process) and ending with our economic decline. I am at a loss for words, but something should be said about the affect on the American collective psyche as we witness the stealing of our basic rights as citizens, including habeas corpus and the protection of our privacy and then the collective guilt that some Americans have felt upon learning that our nation was practicing torture, rendition flights and atrocities against foriegn civilians in the name of military action or maintenance of our 764 military bases that we admit to having. Our national mood has changed from one of hope, a kind of joyful sense of being the richest and most powerful nation in the history of the world, backed up by extraordinary achievements in every field of human activity including the Fine Arts which we have every right to be proud of to one of shame and fear, because everybody is either personally affected or knows somebody who is affected by the threat of the loss of their home, the loss of their job, forty-to-fifty percent drop in the value of their assets or their salaries and the possibility of even greater losses. Europeans don't seem to have taken on the full gravity of this catastrophe, at least those we have the privilege of knowing. They are lighthearted, full of whimsy and imagination, playful as ever and retain their sense of identity and uniqueness, whereas I feel Americans are being swallowed up in some group panic and with many signs of the loss of identity and their self-confidence. The collective American psyche is sick and will get sicker. It makes me think of that idea of victor's justice: No leaders of countries will ever be punished no matter what atrocities they have committed unless their countries have been defeated. Remember the hanging of German and Japanese generals after WW2. In the case of America we have not been defeated by an enemy but by ourselves. Self-incrimination and the form of self-punishment complicated by a paralyzing fear of what the future holds which creates this sick collective psyche is much harder to put behind us and find a cure for than the result of a military defeat which requires massive rebuilding of cities and a series war crimes tribunals and summary executions which mark a punctuation from which the nation can move on. In a certain sense, the election of Obama has served as a distraction from the collective guilt and perhaps can promise a new beginning, mainly because by electing an African American the American people have implicitly acknowledged our oldest source of shame, the enslavement of our African brothers and sisters and their subjection and mistreatment which still continues today, not to mention the genocide of the indigenous population. How much or whether or not the election of an African American whose ancestors were not slaves can in any way deal with our collective guilt in a way that contributes to our healing remains to be seen. I doubt that the capacity to believe in a brighter future in short, to be hopeful, is something a nation as sick as ours can muster, given the fact that we have not even seen the full consequences of our economic decline and collective suffering. Hope just doesn't come with this kind of illness.

The Recent Election

Q: What's an interesting, recent article to read?

A: Read this week's New Yorker in which there are any number of fine articles to do with the recent election, among them "The New Liberalism," by George Packer, "Battle Plans," by Ryan Lizza, "The Fall," by David Grann. The defining moment in the campaign, the speech on race, delivered in Philadelphia focused his way in to leadership, making the Black experience central to the American experience, unifying all Americans in his history making campaign.