At 550 meters, his rhythm strong and steady, his strokes powerful, at each turn of his head to breathe, he looked up to see the three replica dolphins suspended over the pool as if leaping from the water. The dorsal fin of the first one almost touched the ceiling. The other two followed in a slightly imperfect arc. It was beautifully done, realistic but with a touch of artfulness and impossibility. They were such admirable creatures and in their flight so wonderful that his strokes came in line with and were perfected by their inspiration.
As he caught their flawless rhythm, it came to him, a simple phrase of two bars, repeated with ascending and descending variations so as to make it forward sounding, rising, gathering, open, sunny, and optimistic. But for every two steps up it took a sad and commemorative step back – a look at what had been left behind, an acknowledgment of what had been sacrificed to lift the song into the present, and an expression of love for all that had been lost. As soon as the core of the piece was established, the accompaniment came to him, a string section playing elongated notes to shepherd forward the progress of the two bars in their alternating rise and fall.
At first he thought he should get out of the water lest he forget, but the music would not and could not leave him. It filled the echoing swimming hall as if the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande were playing at full volume in the bleachers. He knew that it would follow him through Saint-Germain-en-Laye to the obscure little café where he would have a scalding hot chocolate and a brioche. He knew that were music playing there it would not drive the piece from his head, for what had come to him in a moment of need was exquisite and good. At the very least, it was telephone hold music. He had it. It was beautiful. And now he might get money from Acorn, to give, along with his prayers, to Cathérine and Luc.
Jacqueline at Sparta
ON HIS TERRACE AT Saint-Germain-en-Laye, as summer rose from the grave to give Paris a last reminder of itself, mating with the autumn air until the offspring of the two seemed like the first days of spring, Jules was pleasantly exhausted from his run. In weak sun shining through white haze as cool and dry as smoke, he half-slept, half-dreamed. Sometimes trains tooted like toys as they crossed the Seine at Le Pecq, but other than that it was quiet enough to hear the passage of soft winds.
SUMMER, 1964. JULES LACOUR is twenty-four, looking forward to prestigious graduate studies in the fall. The reputation of the faculty where he will study is like a crown of invincibility, and, thus assured and to his everlasting shame, he behaves badly.
Trapped for days in a cheap, ancient hotel in Milan, the bleak hallways of which echo with the lost sounds of German soldiers quartered there twenty years before, he and his friends naively wait for the car they have shipped from Paris by rail to be offloaded at the freight yard. It takes them four days to understand that this will occur only with a bribe.
Jules, Serge, Alain, and Sandrine each have a single room much like a prison cell. On the wall above Jules’ bed, as if in the previous two decades there had been no such thing as paint, is a crude portrait of a German soldier, with a penis the size of the Hindenburg, facing a presumably Italian woman with legs spread and her dress held up above the waist. This is somehow appropriate, because the three young men, idled in heat and the incessant diesel fumes of Milanese traffic, are crazed with sex. Sandrine, pretty only from certain angles, is the subject of their lust. As in a French or Roman farce, they swift through the halls at all hours of night, thinking that the other two have not done the same, and knock at her door.
At first she is flattered, but this quickly wears thin and she begins rightly to detest them. “I hope you all had fun last night,” she says during breakfast the next day, “but from now on don’t knock on my door, or I’ll call the Italian Masturbation Police.”
Jules is mortified, Serge amused, Alain counterattacks, and it gets uglier and uglier as the days go on. By the time the car is ransomed and the four of them are stuffed into it riding through the heat and dust of Southern Italy, they want to kill each other. Sandrine abandons them at Bari for the boat to Greece, stating that they should all go fuck themselves: “literally,” she says. When they reach Brindisi, Jules, who wants no part of this, embarks on the boat to Patras prior to the one with reservations for the car.
On the short voyage across the Ionian Sea Jules sleeps at night on the cold, moist, sooty, rolling deck, and is almost dangerously sunburnt there during the day. Never in his life will he forget how as the ship rolls in the sea the stars seem to move back and forth across the sky, how brilliant they are, and how the black smoke from the funnel struggles to blot them out, but they emerge in untouched perfection. Before landing, two commanding German lesbians station themselves at the foot of stairs that everyone must use, and rate each man who passes. Jules is tall, slim, and blond. They give him the highest rating. Embarrassed and flustered, he has no idea why they are doing this so publicly and demonstratively, and never will he be enlightened as to their motives, but it is the first time in his life that a woman – two, actually – has told him that he is attractive. It will happen only twice more in seventy-five years: once when a sweet, mouse-like woman accidentally sees him naked in a beach cabana; and once, indirectly, when a woman on a bus comments to Jacqueline after he has kissed Jacqueline before she boards. Even once every twenty-five years on average it will shock and discomfit him, but this time, the first time, it’s lucky as well, in that it whittles away some of his shyness.