“Nero, René,” she said a little dreamily, “it’s almost like you have the same name, the same syllables, nearly the same, only the other way around. You see? It’s fate.”
It began to snow lightly. Falling faintly, faintly falling. Vasilisa turned up her coat collar and without another word thrust her hands deep into her pockets and walked purposefully into the west. Enfolded in whiteness your stunned narrator had what he would later describe as an out-of-body experience. It seemed to him that he heard ghostly music, as if the shuttered carousel were playing “Lara’s Theme” from Zhivago. It seemed to him that he was hovering over his right shoulder, watching himself as he followed her helplessly across the park and down to Columbus Circle, his body in that moment surrendering all agency and becoming hers to command, as if she were a Haitian bokor and he at lunch at Bergdorf Goodman had been administered the so-called zombie’s cucumber which confused his thought processes and made him her slave for life. (I am aware that by drifting into the third person and alleging the failure of my will I am making a bid to be exempted from moral judgment. I am further aware that “he couldn’t help it” is not a strong defense. Allow me this at least: that I am self-aware.)
His—my—Julie Christie fantasy faded and he—I—was thinking instead of the Polanski film Knife in the Water. The couple who invite a hitchhiker onto their boat. The woman ends up having sex with this interloper. Obviously I saw myself, uneasily, as the hitchhiker, the third point of a triangle. Maybe the couple in the movie had a bad marriage. The woman was clearly attracted to the hitchhiker and did not object to the sex. The hitchhiker was a blank slate on whom the married couple wrote their story. So also was I, following in Vasilisa’s footsteps so that she could write the story of her future in the manner in which she had decided it must be written. Here was West Sixtieth Street, and she swept through the doors of the five-star hotel there. I followed her into the elevator and we rose up to the fifty-third floor, bypassing the thirty-fifth-floor lobby. She already had the room key. Everything had been planned and, still in the grip of that curious languid passivity, I lacked the will to forestall what was to happen.
“Go inside quickly,” she said.
Later.
There’s a statement I’ve always attributed to Fran?ois Truffaut, although now that I look I can’t find any evidence that he said it. So, apocryphally, “The art of the cinema,” Truffaut allegedly said, “is to point the camera at a beautiful woman.” As I stared at Vasilisa Golden silhouetted against a window beyond which lay the winter waters of the Hudson she looked to me like one of the goddesses of the screen who had escaped from the movies I loved, stepping off the screen into the movie theater like Jeff Daniels in The Purple Rose of Cairo. I thought of Ornella Muti bewitching Swann in Schl?ndorff’s film of Proust; of Faye Dunaway as Bonnie Parker with her sensually twisting mouth captivating Warren Beatty’s Clyde Barrow; of Monica Vitti in Antonioni shrinking erotically against a corner and murmuring No lo so; of Emmanuelle Béart clothed in nothing but beauty in La belle noiseuse. I thought of the Godardettes, Seberg in Breathless and Karina in Pierrot le fou and Bardot in Le mépris, and then I tried to rebuke myself, reminding myself of the powerful feminist critiques of New Wave cinema, Laura Mulvey’s “male gaze” theory in which she proposed that audiences were obliged to see these films from the point of view of the heterosexual male, with women reduced to the status of objects, etc. And Mailer popped into my head too, the prisoner of sex himself, but I dismissed him almost at once. On the subject of my self-awareness: yes, I’m aware of the fact that I live too much in my head, too deeply immersed in films and books and art, and so the movements of my heart, the treacheries of my true nature, are sometimes obscure to me. In the events I must now describe I was obliged to face directly who I actually was and then rely on female mercy to see me through. And there she was, standing before me: my demon queen, my nemesis, the future mother of my child.
Later.
Her manner at first was no-nonsense, peremptory, verging on the brusque. “Do you want a drink? Will that help? Don’t be such a schoolboy, René. We are both adults here. Get yourself a drink. Get me one also. Vodka. Rocks. The ice bucket is full. So! Let’s drink to our enterprise, which is, in a way, majestic. The creation of life. Why else are we put on this earth? The species insists on propagating itself. Let’s get this over with.”
Also, after not one but two vodkas: “Today is just to break the ice. Today it is not the right time for baby making. After today I will inform you when I am ovulating and you will make yourself available. I always know precisely when it happens, I am on time, like the trains in the Italy of Mussolini. This suite will be available permanently. Here is your key. I will meet you here, three occasions in total during each cycle. At other times our relationship will be as it was. You accept, of course.”
It was the voice she used when speaking to the household staff, and it came close to waking me from my dream. “No, honey, don’t take a bad attitude,” she said in an entirely different voice, low, alluring. “We are both here, which means we have already made all the important decisions. Now is the time for pleasure, and from now on you are going to have much pleasure, I assure you of that.”
“Yes,” I said, but some note of doubt must have crept into my voice, because now she turned up the sexual volume. “Darling, of course yes, and so am I, because look at you, a gorgeous boy like you. Let’s go into the bedroom now. I can’t wait any longer.”
What a gambler she was! How swiftly she had recovered from being dealt an unexpectedly bad hand! For it must have been a dreadful blow to her, to receive the seminogram results, devastating for her plans for the future, yet in spite of the suddenness of the crisis she had moved instantly, intuitively, to conceal the information from her husband. And then, without any hesitation, she had bet the farm on me, backing her confidence in her judgment of my character and in her own powers of attraction (she saw in me both the seriousness which meant I could be trusted to keep her secret, and the weakness which meant I would be unable to resist her considerable charms). This in spite of her knowledge that if her stratagem failed and her husband learned the truth her position would become untenable and she might even be in danger. And so might I; she brought me into her conspiracy without any regard for my safety, my future. But I can’t blame her, for I found her irresistible, the offer of her body overwhelming, and I led myself willingly into her trap. And now I was in it: her co-conspirator, as morally compromised as she was, and no longer had any choice but to go through with it, and keep her confidences, which were also mine. I had as much to lose as she.
She drew me down to her on the bed. “Pleasure makes beautiful babies,” she said. “But is also pleasurable for its own sake.”