Paris L'hiver. Part 3: Sophia

When I awoke, she was draped across my body, one leg over mine, bathed by a single blade of sunlight that cut through the crack in the drapes that I remember her drawing before we fell into the pillowed folds of the bedding.

She was awake, watching me with sleep-soft eyes, her fingers tracing slow figure-eights on my chest. I remember how she had let down her hair the night before as she undressed; how the click of the door of closing behind us suddenly transformed her crystalline remoteness into something vulnerable, desirous, and hungering for closeness: all the things that had I had come to Paris to escape and still found on every boulevard and behind every brasserie window. 

"You're thinking again," she said, drawing me closer with her leg. "Stop thinking."

She had said the same thing a few hours earlier. 

Stop thinking. Just be mine. 

She had come to my small table the night before and stopped, waiting for me to stand. I had seen her double-kiss the woman with whom she had entered and who then left, and when she stood up with her glass, I assumed she was leaving. I had already started thinking about what I would write about her when she appeared, offering me her gloved hand. 

Although I recognized the gesture, I suddenly felt like an American Eugene Rastignac: provincial and stupid, sorely underdressed, and likely to make a fool of himself. 

Somehow I didn't. I stood up, gently took her hand, and leaning forward in a slight bow, kissed the top of her fingers. She smiled. 

"Mademoiselle. S'il vous plait." I gestured to the chair in front of me. She sat down, placing her drink on the table. A waiter, who had been watching her the whole time, slid in, refilled her glass, and then evaporated at her nod.  

"It's stupid, I know," she said. "but appearances and everything." 

"No, it's... fine." 

The bouquet of her perfume – violets, ambergris, sandalwood, vanilla – lingered over us as I tried to sort out who, exactly, she thought I was... or who she was. 

She registered my hesitation and looked amused. "Do you know who I am?"

I had absolutely no idea. 

"No, I'm sorry, I don't."

She smiled that perfect smile again, lips like garnets or the bruised flesh of a peach. 

"Good." 

At least Rastignac would've had someone – a Madame de Beauséant, a Vautrin – to point her out and whisper her name and station when she walked in. 

"I'm K.S. Anthony. Enchanté." 

"Hello, K.S. Anthony. I'm Sophia."

Her name was not Sophia, but at some point between that moment and when she left two days later for Monaco, I promised that I would never name her, that no one would ever believe me, and that I would probably never be able to write about her anyway. 

We talked. We drank. We talked. Somewhere in the pauses that were filled with my staring at her, she said "I want you to stay with me tonight." 

Now here I was. 

"Stop thinking." She kissed me, her mouth as wet as mine was dry, and I could taste her lipstick and the toast and lemon of the night's champagne, an open bottle of which was still sitting in an ice bucket on the desk near the bed. "Just enjoy this."

We spent the morning in bed, making love and drinking. Her phone never once beeped or rang and I remember being amazed at her total lack of interest in it, at how wealth and power can afford one the greatest luxury of all: time. It was completely foreign to me. 

"You don't have to be anywhere?" I asked. 

"Only here. With you. With my writer." 

"I like that."

"Me too. I wish we could stay here, together, in this room." As soon as those words left her mouth, something changed. She suddenly began to recrystallize as the impossibility of that descended on us. 

"Why can't we?" I sat up, pulling her closer, trying to chip away at the forming ice.

Her station came with its own set of rules, obligations, and expectations – burdens, all – that followed social lines that had been in place long before either of us were born. Even if I were to suddenly become  wealthy, I would have little access: new money does not grant one anything but new privilege. While capital can buy many things, including the appearance - and some forms – of social capital, it doesn't buy a new birthright. Unlike Rastignac, Jay Gatsby's greatest sin wasn't the obviousness of his ambition: it was the fact that he never realized that he was little more than a novelty for Daisy Buchanan. Rastignac succeeded with contempt and the aid of a criminal, not flattery. Those social lines conceal a part of wealth and power that most people never fully see: a different kind of desperate striving that aims to eliminate despair and a lack of real agency and self-determination. In trying to escape, the rich self-destruct just as stupidly as the poor: they just do it with better drugs, including marriage. 

"You know why," she said, softening against me, her breathing matching mine. "This is all we're allowed." 

Late that evening, we walked along the Seine. She traded her gown for jeans and a coat, her hair concealed under a cashmere knit cap, and still held my hand despite people occasionally seeming to recognize her in the night. At one point we stopped to stare at the Eiffel Tower and the lights on the water.

"You know," she said, not looking at me, "if I were anyone else, I would fall in love with you. Like all the women you write about. And then I would just be one more of them."

"That assumes a point of view that we don't have. There's just too much there, too many possibilities. Maybe we would have never met. Maybe you would have hated me. Besides, you've known me for a day: what makes you think you would fall in love with me?"

"What makes you think I'm not already?" 

"Because I'm a novelty. I'm a crush, at best. You've already said this is all we're allowed. It's easy to say that you're in love when you know it's impossible. Maybe that's when it's easiest, because there's nothing really at risk."

"You're wrong. I will always love you. You make me want to risk everything."

I didn't know what to do with any of that, but I especially didn't know what to do with the second sentence, which left me unguarded and threatened by the specter of loving her back and suffering for it more than I knew that I would. I opted for a half-assed attempt at reason: ironic, given my usual disdain for reason in the face of passion. 

"I don't think you'd be very happy with me."

"What do you know about what I would be happy with?" There was anger there - frustration - but I couldn't tell if she was angry at me or the world. 

"I don't. That's just it." 

"I hate that someone else will eventually have you, that you'll forget me, or that I'll just be some other girl in your fucking writing. You don't want me to love you. You want to be loved by strangers." 

Experience has taught me that it is pointless to try to argue that point in Paris, New York, London, or anywhere else on the planet once anyone has read anything I've written. The evidence doesn't do me any favors, though I maintain that everything is far more complicated than what can be captured in a few hundred words. 

It's senseless to read anyone's writing and conflate it with intimacy; with knowing the writer, and yet perhaps that's what she was getting at: the thesis that I use my writing as a wall to separate myself from the absolute terror of being vulnerable enough to be known. 

Maybe that analysis worked for her. 

Still, she was wrong. I wanted her to love me. I just knew that even if she could and even if she did, a dearth of affection wasn't the problem that separated us. Unlike every other woman in my life, the obstacles were not primarily psychological or temporal: they were social monoliths that neither of us were positioned to surmount. If she had lived on the other side of Central Park, we might have had a chance, but hers was a world so far removed from American conventions of wealth and class that it didn't even sneer at the Upper East Side: it just didn't think about it at all. There was no invitation past that night that she could extend that would not have to be rescinded. 

"I hate that eventually I'm going to see your marriage as a trending topic on fucking Twitter one of these days. At least I'll be out of sight, out of mind for you."

"More like my divorce," she laughed. 

"That too." 

"Maybe that will be what you write about me: 'Divorced.'"

"'Disengaged' would be a better title."

"I'm not engaged."

No, not yet, I thought. 

"I know," I said. "I'm glad." 

"You'll never be out of mind for me. Even when you belong to someone else." It was the kind of thing someone would say to a writer if they wanted them to write it down later. Of course, I did.

She kissed me and we began the walk back to Place Vendôme in silence.

"Stay again tonight," she said when we got to her suite. "I want to fall asleep with you inside me."

I don't think that staying was a mistake or that I regret it, but I sometimes wonder if it wouldn't have been better if I had just left her outside the Ritz that night, if that by trying to capture what we both knew would have to be released, we may have set in motion some patterns that would echo for both of us. 

I started writing about her shortly after I got back to America, then stopped, afraid to continue, afraid to write her back into my reality, afraid that writing about her might put an end to our story, even though I never heard from her again. I never told anyone about Sophia and I never intended to. 

I have realized that – and if you are reading this, J, I hope you'll understand – what has echoed and continues to echo in the years since I met her is that throughout my life I've released too many chances at love and at being loved back into the wild, opting instead to be loved by strangers, cutting myself off from the world with seas of gin and walls of words, carefully arranged to give those who leave the illusion that they are the ones who are leaving. 

That analysis works for me, at least for now. 

As she rested on me that night, I could feel my heart start to race, panicked by the realization that she'd be leaving the next day and that I would never see her again, never touch her again, never hear her voice again. She shifted to kiss me again, dulling my thoughts and walling our tangled bodies off from the world that lay just outside in the sodium glow of the square with a single phrase that has haunted me in every place it has echoed ever since.

I will always love you. 

When I awoke, she was draped across my body, one leg over mine, bathed by a single blade of sunlight that cut through my life and has never faded. 

And that – always – was all we were allowed. 

Part 1

Part 2

Lost and Found

(Originally written May 2010)

Je ne peut pas dormir. 

I laid awake, despite my burning eyes and aching muscles, and listened to the wash of traffic outside, hoping to smell the sea carried in over salt-thick screens on soft wind. For a moment, I did. 

I realized that my bed is positioned in my bedroom in nearly the exact way it was when I was a child--feet towards the closet, door to my right, window to my left--so for a moment, I felt like I was in a place that hasn't existed for the last 10 years or so. 

I don't remember the last time I slept in what I thought of as my room. Even my memories of the time I spent in the house that was rebuilt on that property are beginning to fade. I wonder what is already lost to memory. I wonder what I have forgotten. I wonder what will be the next to go. Faces. Names. Old phone numbers. Bits of poems. Voices. First kisses. Last kisses. 

These are things that matter to me: not the faceless voices of spouting rhetoric, not the saviors that I never asked for, not the salvation I don't want, and not the revolution or the bumper sticker that goes with it. 

Give me the feeling of wet sand and cool water and the windward breeze that makes the jungle whisper. 

Give me the smell of a gas stove and honeysuckle and roses in the Oakland hills. 

Give me the things that fade; the things that we pretend will last forever: friendships, loved ones, lost ones. 

Give me the things that slip into the vacuum of time. 

When I was about 3 years old, my mother gave me a coffee can filled with cats-eye marbles for Christmas. I was less interested in the marbles than the can, which she had decorated with contact paper and a ribbon. I liked the sound that the marbles made: it sounded uniform, neat, resonant: not at all chaotic or disorderly. It reminded me of people walking or of gravel. 

I have not seen marbles like that in at least twenty years. They are somewhere out there. Buried in a yard. Lost in a landfill. Somewhere with a thousand other lost things taken for granted and snuck away by time: letters, pillowcases, paperbacks, wrapping paper. 

School pictures and the day that you were sent off with freshly brushed hair and an order form for 8x10s and wallet sizes. The shirt you wore the first time you fell in love and the day she said she just wanted to be friends. Pieces of jewelry and all the awkward ways that it was given to you. Napkins with traces of lipstick. Phone numbers you wished you had called. Potential lovers, forgotten friends, strangers who stayed strangers. 

Things you are glad to have forgotten. Things you promised you never would forget. 

They are all out there somewhere. And sometimes, as you lie awake at 2am, they find their way back to you in the soft glow of a streetlight and the faintest scent of the perfume of the sea, as perfect as a marble, as perfect as memory: happy to be home again; happy to bring you home again.

Sweet (2002)

Note: I wrote this in 2002. I finally threw a soft edit at it this year when it resurfaced: I had asked the site that carried this and some other early pieces to delete them about ten years ago, but they asked to republish, which I reluctantly agreed to. I'm still ambivalent about it, but I don't think it's a bad piece of writing: just green... as I was when I was 17. 

I was 17 when I first dreamt of Elke.

I dreamt I was alone on a train but acutely aware of a girl I could not see sitting behind me: try as I might to turn to face her, I could not force myself to turn around. I woke with a feeling of vague uneasiness that lingered for the rest of the day and haunted me before I went to bed that night. Two more restless nights passed with the same dream, and the same strange feeling that unsteadied me the next day. As much as I tried to put her out of my head, I could not.

The fourth night was different. As soon as I felt her, I turned as easily in my dream as I might turn to you if you were sitting beside me, to face her.

She was a girl about my age and beautiful. Her skin, as I would later write in my journal, was like porcelain and her eyes pale blue. Her face was framed with golden hair, fine as silk, and I remember thinking that there was something about her that reminded me of pictures I had seen of wheat fields in Europe. I managed to say hello and she replied in kind, seemingly as curious about me as I was about her. I cannot remember if we said anything or conversed as the train sped on, but I do know that I asked her name, to which she replied, in a voice that I still remember, “Sweet.”

I woke the next morning longing for someone that I knew existed only in my dreams, but for whom I felt this inarticulable desire. I missed her: this girl I did not know, this girl that I had seen in the simultaneously closest and furthest place imaginable: in a dream. I went to bed early the next night, hoping to see her. Instead, I dreamt of nothing. I moped through the next few days, telling no one, and hoping to dream of her again.

I did not. As the spring dragged on that year, I eventually stopped missing her, though her face was never far from my mind.

I spent that summer with my brother and his then-wife in San Francisco. The temperature was much milder than my home climate, and I took advantage of its graces. I spent most of my time alone in cafes, happy to read voraciously and drink coffee with similar zeal. My sister-in-law was teaching ESL at Notre Dame de Namur University in Belmont, a small town south of the city. Growing bored with my routine of solitary caffeine consumption and dollar matinee films at the Strand, I decided, one day, to go with her. The drive was pleasant, usually about 45 minutes, and the campus was much smaller than its name suggested. It sat, as far as I can remember, on a hill covered with pines, adolescent redwoods, and other trees. That summer, the air was crisp and cool, fragrant with honeyed eucalyptus and the tang of evergreens. There was a tiny cafe down a winding road, and several small gardens lined with various flowers in the brilliant reds, purples, and yellows of July, as well as cast iron and stone benches. It was a nice bit of relief from the city to walk this area with my thoughts uninterrupted, save for the chirping sparrows or the flurried of leaves and dirt from squirrels – still a novelty to me – gathering food. I'd walk around observing the world and then meet my sister-in-law in time to sit in on her class.

I first saw her during the second class.

The sounds of the other students laughing and talking in a variety of European tongues dulled to an almost inaudible mumble, and I felt my heart begin to race, then suddenly slow and ache with a familiar longing.

Sitting there was Sweet.

She wasn't joined in conversation with any of the other students, though she sat with the small faction of German students. She sat quietly, reading a book, hair slightly covering her eyes, which were indeed the same soft, pale blue as the cloudless skies. I did not think it was her: I knew it was her.

What would you say if you met someone in real life that you had known in a dream? Would you feel some assurance that they, too, must've known you in their nocturnal life? I felt no such assurance. I knew only that I had to say something and that the sooner I did, the sooner I might be able to make some sense out of all of it.

At 17, I had no talent for talking to girls that I didn’t know. So, I said nothing at all to her that day. The next day didn’t really leave me any openings, either. Neither did the day after that. While dream me had the courage that I did not, she spoke so little – to anyone – that I wasn’t at all sure she even wanted to be spoken to. I didn’t even know her name.

I still remember how badly I wanted to talk to her, how it felt as though my heart could burst. Anyone who has ever had a crush knows the mixture of apprehension and fascination, the longing and reticence, and the fevered restlessness that accompanies these pangs of adolescent love. I can still feel those traces of that longing some 30 years later, faint creases on my heart's palimpsest.

I don't recall exactly how I came to talk to her. I had tried to coolly watch her on the previous days as she walked, sat, and read, always by herself, always with a soft smile whenever she caught me looking, which, to my mortification, was often. I was walking along a trail on the campus one afternoon, plotting my next move (or lack thereof) when she crossed my path. Some awkward teenage small talk took place, and I’m sure I desperately tried to sound collected and casual, though I can't see how I managed to say anything with my tongue tied in knots. Pleasantries aside, we ended up walking together in relative silence, though not the silence of people not knowing what to say next, nor the pained silence of two people who want badly to find a reason to part company. Instead, it was the perfect silence of two people simply enjoying each other's company, the warmth of summer and the electric glow that comes when a human circuit is finally completed.

As we exited the trail, I managed to introduce myself and ask her name. Her answer was humbling.

Elke Bitter.

It was serendipitous that what was Sweet in one world should be Bitter in another. That day was perfect. She was two years older than I, from West Germany, and was studying in California before entering university in her homeland in the fall. We discussed Hesse's Demian, German authors, and everything else I could think of to extend our conversation. We bought coffee and sat for an hour in one of the gardens, surrounded by violets on an emerald carpet of grass, talking and exploring the connection that had been, perhaps divinely, made. I don't recall going home or anything else about that day. The only things I can remember are her eyes and those hours.

I spent the next few days with Elke on campus, drinking coffee and stealing more time over conversation and walks. I never so much as kissed her, felt the touch of her hand only once, but I was content. Ours was a perfect world unto itself.

She left a few weeks later. The last day we spent was much like the first. A comfortable silence only mildly burdened by her imminent departure. When the day ended and we said goodbye, I knew that the dream was breaking anew; that it would be the last time I saw her. I was thankful for having seen her at all. She wrote me once when she got home and I wrote back, but that was after the end.

I thought about Elke long after that summer ended, but never dreamt of her or heard from her again. I still think of her from time to time, especially on days with clear, pale skies when the air is thin and perfumed with eucalyptus and pine, soft, aching, and sweet.