That summer the eternal trees of the Bois de Boulogne were diseased. First noticed: a yellowing of leaf. Then there was an outbreak of lemony nimbi that looked like so much cotton candy. By late August the woods seemed to be draped in urine-stained cheese-cloth.
This led Kit's thoughts to his current squeeze, Solange Benoit, and her vaginal yeast infection.
He sat at a wrought-iron table outside a Moorish cafe, his coffee cooling in clear thick glass. It was a cheap place with more flies than usual. Cats slumbered atop garbage lids. To most passersby Allah's Garden was invisible.
The cavalcade of mad comedians and bad mimes, whores in Prada and Gucci and beggars in horse-blanket overcoats flickered past him in jigsaw cinema. He thought upon the importance of this table and its innate strength of design. Molten sinew and flesh, fluid as a Giacometti, unbound and flowing forth: it trussed up the whole of Western Civilization.
Solange had given him an envelope of tablets her doctor had prescribed for her men. Just to be safe, you understand. Kit dutifully complied. He loved eating her fig.
Funny thing, though, last week at Gare Sud she shied from kissing good-bye, as if his mouth contained all the toxins of a Paris sewer.
"Two weeks?"
"Oui. Not long. A bien-tot."
"You'll be visiting Alec."
"It depends."
*
Alec Benoit was a badger-faced fifty-six-year-old impotent scoundrel. He made love in the French Style with an adept tongue, and an expensive array of dildos. Solange had told Kit this much.
This indiscretion occured during the afterglow of their first fuck. Supine upon a brass bed belonging in a gypsy museum, he began thinking, she is not one to keep a personal secret.
Her attic apartment had a skylight that always looked upon cloudy afternoons. The hideous wallpaper was the hue of spoiled brie.
Sitting in Allah's garden Kit recalled how during that first roll in the hay his arms, that could do endless pushups in the gym, began to spasm, and the iron bands of his lower back dissolved into a painful jelly. His cock had quivered like a drill bit in a collapsing oil derrick. Yet all the while, the woman absorbed him as greedily as the earth drinks rainwater.
After the gusher a breathy whisper, puffing through gunmetal gray hair: "That was the best time ever."
Really? She's forty if she's a day.
That was the morning Solange suggested Kit move in with her.
"You don't know anything about me."
"Mon cher, you are a dramatist of modest merit. Your successes were in college. And now you are a vagabond with hardly a sou in your pocket."
At that moment it was her breasts, magnificent in the alabaster light, that stirred him to accept her invitation.
To seal the bond they sipped her french-roast in blue floral teacups.
Before evening he was holding forth on Marlowe's "The Massacre At Paris." Solange he learned came from an old Huguenot family and was well versed on Queen Margot.
*
A Sorbonne brat wearing a vanilla straw cloche hat buzzed past his ear like one of Tesla's missing bumble-bees. Her hat had evidently come from a bohemian boutique specializing in assorted period styles. She had opted for the 1920s look. Her flapper coif reminded Kit of Fitzgerald's "Bernice Bobs Her Hair." Hanging from one shoulder was an army musette bag twinkling with political buttons. One was from Daniel Cohn-Bendit. Danny the Red.
She sat nearby and snapped her fingers for a waiter.
The young Arab, effete and unctuous, with the hip-swing of a jazz dancer, took her order and minced away.
She opened her bag and opted for a notebook and a textbook. Then a paperback on Freud by Lacan.
Before returning, the waiter had combed his black oily hair so that it covered his nape, leaving a gleeming high-forhead. Kit grinned, thinking of those young Japanese men, long ago, who shaved their heads to honor the male-pattern baldness of their elders.
With a sigh Kit placed his last sou on the table. In his dark heart he felt as if he were moving from one enormous room and into another. He emptied the envelope into his hand and flung the tablets like so much chicken seed into the gutter.
*
The chestnut tree spread its boughs, giving the two tables dappled shade. Kit considered the tree and the pert young woman as elements of the same mystery. He noted the crisp, robin's egg oxford shirt and the intensity of her owlish tortoise-shell horn-rims. Obsessively she clicked her Scripto ballpoint.
"Pardon me, ma'am'selle. I see you're reading Lacan. He influenced my own writing at Duke, en Amerique. Voulez-vous to exchange ideas on the subject?"
He felt her eyes gliding over his person like ball-bearings. From his battered Justins, up and down his faded Wranglers, to his rainstained Stetson.
"Sure thing, cowboy. Have a seat. Ass aye voo."
"American."
"You betcha. Cassandra. Cassandra Cruz."
He accepted her handshake. Felt like birch bark.
*
Someone released balloons over the Seine. A vendor's complete inventory. Kit pointed, "Look!"
A breathless Marilyn Monroe, Cassandra replied, "Oh wow. Far out."
They watched the balloons drift high over Notre Dame. Soon they were no more than a fistful of M&Ms thrown against the pointillist autumn sky.
"Let's go by the bookstalls," Kit suggested. "Maybe there will be a copy of Tel Quel."
"Who's buying?"
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