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.