“I’m not a Helen. I’m anything but.”
“No, you’re right. An empty compliment, that. I apologize. You’re real and living and interesting. Not a mannequin. A painter’s image. Anyway, Helen was a bit of a bitch, wasn’t she? I always thought so. Poor thing, it’s so hard for a truly beautiful woman to be otherwise, in this shallow human existence. When she’s petted and praised for her beauty since birth, so she naturally goes about thinking beauty’s the only thing that matters. The only thing people admire her for. So she imagines she’s terribly smart, a cut above the ordinary sort of humanity, just because she happened to have the good luck to be born symmetrical, with the right sort of hair and the right sort of eyes, whatever those may be at any particular point in history. And yet, at the same time, her self-regard is of that wobbly sort that requires constant propping up from the world around her. Because it does things to your head, you know, when your face’s the only thing people seem to care about. I suppose the psychologists have a word for it. In any case, in the end they’re a great deal of trouble, these professional beauties.” He kept my hand in his, and for an instant I thought of Lieutenant Green, clasping me clammily by the darkened Seine, except that Simon’s palm was dry and warm, and the sun shone, and the canal flowed glassily before us.
“It sounds as if you know a great many beautiful women.”
“I’ve known a few. Enough to know better.”
“But when you were twenty-one?”
He laughed and stroked the back of my hand with his thumb. “Yes. Hmm. I see what you’re getting at. But you shan’t have it, you know. You shan’t have the satisfaction of knowing all the details of my misspent youth. For one thing, I don’t regret a bit of it.”
I tried to pull my hand away, but he wouldn’t let me.
“Don’t be angry. I’m only being honest. I had the best of times. I’m not the sort of chap who’s going to grovel on about what a stupid, callow fool he was in his salad days, how it was all a great waste of time, nothing but ruination. It wasn’t. We had splendid times, those pretty girls and I. And it’s all done, and I’m a different fellow now, older and wiser, and I want different things. Finer things. Things I shouldn’t have properly appreciated, in those days. But I don’t regret a minute of it. From experience comes knowledge.” He kissed my hand again, the palm this time, and his lips lingered there for a moment.
“At least you’re honest about it,” I said.
“Have I shocked you terribly?”
“No, not really. I never expected you to be an innocent.”
“But you are. Innocent. Aren’t you?”
I hesitated. “Yes.”
“I suppose that’s unfair, really. These being modern times. An old sinner like me thinking he’s got a right to pluck the untouched flower. Mind you, it wouldn’t matter to me if you weren’t. I may be a sinner, but I won’t be some sort of damned middle-class hypocrite. Fair’s fair. Logically speaking, you’ve got the same right to an improper past as I have.” He kicked his legs out vigorously, splashing us both.
“That’s not true. My innocence is what attracted you in the first place.”
“No, it wasn’t. It was the opposite. The way you seemed to know everything, in those mysterious eyes of yours. The way the grief of the world had somehow gone in and made house inside you. And then, at the very same time, your utter resolution. Your astonishing capability. I thought, Here is a woman I can trust with my life. Here is a woman who won’t flinch at the dark corners of my soul.”
“Do you have that many? Dark corners?”
“Everywhere, my dear. Everywhere. Don’t we all?”
My God, how unspeakably luxurious it was, sitting there in the sultry French afternoon, talking like this while the sun beat on our necks and the water cooled our feet. I loved the shape of his legs, neither too beefy nor too slender, just exactly right, the trousers rolled to the knees and the shoes and stockings and puttees stacked military neat beside him. Luxurious to hear, from his own lips, how he had taken pleasure from many beautiful women, a man of tremendous carnal experience, and here he sat beside me, content with my company, wanting me above all.
“Tell me something,” he said, after a long and deeply comfortable silence, in which the sun lowered an inch or two and the breeze began to rustle the hair at the nape of my neck. “Was I right?”
“Right about what?”
“About your eyes. All the world’s sorrow?”
Across the canal, a pair of women walked briskly, as if taking exercise. They wore dark mourning dresses that whipped around their legs, and identical small hats that cast shadows across their cheekbones. One of them was much taller than the other, and I observed—as one tall woman to another—how she adjusted her stride to accommodate her shorter companion. A sort of vertical lurch at every step, wasting her forward momentum for the sake of unity.
I watched them cross before us and continue in the direction of the palace. Almost as a witness, I heard myself say, in a dead voice: “Yes. I lost my mother when I was eight.”
“My God. I’m sorry. What a grotesque blow. Was she ill?”
“No. She was murdered.”
The words came out, just like that. Shivered frightfully in the air before us, shocked by sudden exposure.
“My God,” he said again, in a whisper. “No wonder.”
“No wonder?”
“Why you wouldn’t tell me.”
“I’ve never told anyone else. We went into New York and started a whole new life because of it. The case was notorious. My father didn’t want us to be exposed to public notice. So we left.”
“I see.”
I thought, Nonsense, he doesn’t see, he can’t see. Nobody who didn’t live this thing could possibly imagine what it meant to a pair of girls, alone and motherless in the middle of Manhattan, like seedlings uprooted and transplanted into foreign soil and left to flourish or die by their own strength.
“My darling girl,” he said. “How brave you’ve had to be. How utterly lonely you must have been, the two of you. You and your sister. Tell me her name.”
“Sophie. Her name is Sophie,” I said, and I turned my head into his shoulder.
He held me for many minutes, and when I raised my head at last he kissed me for the first time. To the west, the sun grew old and golden, and I imagined the taste of his mouth was golden, too, because the sunshine seemed to absorb us as we sat there in our virginal caress. His lips were warm and sweetly gentle, and his tongue stroked mine, the way you might lick the juice running down the side of a ripe peach. I didn’t want him to stop. When he took my face between his palms and started to pull away, I yearned forward.
“Shh,” he said. “Darling girl. Ghost girl. My own dear phantom.”
“Not anymore.”
“Yes. You’re real now.” He drew his thumbs over my cheeks and mouth and chin, kissed me again, and swore. “What are we going to do? I’ve got to be back on duty by noon tomorrow.”