She's at his window, smoking. Her hair up. Wearing a simple dress, green, tight-fitting, showing a figure that would be the envy of many women half her age. Black combat boots, black glasses.
Abruptly: "Putain!" She's trembling with outrage, looking down at the street. She releases a torrent of curses in French out the window.
"What's up?" he says. He goes to her.
She points with the hand holding her cigarette. "That man. With the dog. He just kicked it. It does nothing!" More cursing in French. Below, walking down the middle of the street, a man with a leashed dog, small, white, at his heel – of course he can hear her. But he doesn't look up. "It's helpless," she says, "and he does that. It can do nothing!"
He touches her hair, her back. She's shaking.
"I don't like it," she says. "It's terrible."
~
Stories require beginnings. For him, this story begins with how she walks. Because, he thinks, she doesn't really walk. He can't come up with the word for it. Glides? No, because there's weight to it. Sashays? No, it's not ostentatious. Flows? No, it's mindful, joyous, playful.
He gives up. He sums it up for himself: She walks like a woman.
~
Close to his age – more than once she's told him: "I am not your age" – they share a belief in privacy's sacredness. So: much he'll never share. Death, after all, gives life meaning; and some moments matter by belonging only to those who lived them.
~
It doesn't occur to him that at every moment she's seducing him and wants to be seduced by him, that for her all of this is a bore if it's just about fucking or love. It has to be playful, a game. He thinks it's a foregone conclusion that they'll end up in bed, this being New York, at their ages; he sits on his couch, having another drink, as if waiting for the hour to strike when on cue from a stage director simultaneously they stand up, walk to the bedroom, and act out the sex scene.
On the couch across from him she asks herself, What is he doing? Another drink? Sitting there? Does he see me? Why is he talking about buying a bicycle? Is he going to touch me before we go to the bedroom? Is he going to look at me in a manner that shows desire? Will he soon move next to me, kiss my neck?
The next morning she tells him, "If I ever have to take my dress off myself in this apartment again, I will never come back."
Probably she's decided she'll never come back anyway. But she leaves curious about the creature – he appears to be a man – she'd just told goodbye. Maybe patience is in order, she thinks. I don't know what just happened. Does he?
~
She says, "Just tell me what you want, and I'll say 'yes' or 'no'. That's it."
He sits there silently.
She asks, "Do you know what you want?"
More silence.
She says, "You don't know what you want."
~
There is between them, he soon senses, a basic incompatibility. The experience of being with her, a French woman, nothing girl-ish about her, comfortable in her body, her freedom no longer arising from rebellion, is new to him: This is not at all like being with S. or N., he thinks, who both felt to him like – were – soulmates. This woman is otherness. He's almost painfully uncomfortable around her. Often he doesn't feel like an adult, talking with her, holding her.
So the question quickly presents itself: Do I flee?
When she tells him for the first time – there will be other times, weeks and months later – that they are not going to be a romantic couple, he says, "We're something new to each other. Incompatible in some way. So we can decide to run from that newness, that incompatibility, or we can find it interesting. Explore it. Maybe with a sense of humor. I find being with you interesting because I've never known anyone like you. I don't want to run away from this because I don't understand it. I want to check it out. Give it a chance."
She contemplates him with bemusement – maybe, too, with curiosity. He reads her expression as saying, What a strange creature, this guy. He doesn't get it. He has no idea what I'll do to him.
He later wonders: That inability to get it, to get them, was that innocence, stupidity, desperation? Or was he onto something – the idea that their disconnect as a couple made spending time together fascinating?
~
Monday morning: by text she asks him how his day is going. He replies: A difficult email from my ex last night. I'm low today, to be honest.
I'll be over this afternoon, she answers. I'm in the West Village having lunch with a friend. I'll see you after.
When she arrives, she says, "Time for a party." She's brought everything they'll need.
They don't go to sleep that night. Hours of conversation, some of it intense: family, childhood, past loves, New York. The disappointments and recklessness of youth. The sense that something was lost along the way, something irrecoverable, that they never expected their lives to turn out like this.
They take turns picking songs for the stereo, sometimes they dance; often they sit at the window sharing a cigarette. She'd arrived in a dress; now she wears his pajamas.
After two days together, on Wednesday afternoon, she goes home. She'd missed the morning's work meeting. They are both exhausted.
At the door he says, "Thank you."
"It's no good to stay sad," she says. "You have to enjoy your life."
~
The woman had told him from the beginning that she was seeing other men. Her dog, the love of her life, had recently passed away; she was working less: it was for her a time of freedom. Liberté as if emblazoned across her heart.
Finally, after more than three months, after spending most of those three months with him, she tells him, "I'm going away for the weekend. To Milwaukee."
"With B___?" he asks.
"Yes."
"What about me? Do you still want to see me?"
"Not romantically, no. Not anymore. But as friends."
"You're making a mistake," he says. "I'm a good thing in your life."
She says nothing.
Walking home, he wonders that he ever thought he'd hold on to her. He sees now that he had failed, despite every effort, to make his desperation hers.
~
With the woman's blessing, M., the woman's best friend, contacts him. They agree to meet for coffee. M. tells him, "Watch French films from the '60s and '70s. I'll send you a list. The Lovers. Jules and Jim. Love in the Afternoon. The Soft Skin – movies like those. Watch the body language. The way the man looks at the woman, touches her, communicates desire. This is the culture we grew up in. This is what we expect – what we need – from a man. It's very hard for a French woman to date in this country. Maybe if you study the films, you'll understand."
~
Before dinner, a drink at Sugar Monk. As usual, he drinks quickly, finishing a second glass of wine; her second glass, when H. arrives, has barely been touched.
Their dinner reservation – two blocks away – is in five minutes. He says to H., "Do you want to help her finish her drink?"
"Sure," H. says, and he reaches over, picks up the glass of wine, and empties it into his mouth.
Five seconds of stunned silence. H. realizes he's made a mistake.
She says, "Oh. My. God."
H. says, "Ah-oh."
She says, "That was a glass of Bordeaux."
"I'm sorry," H. says.
She says, "This is not a shot of tequila."
H. looks at him. H. says, "I sinned."
"No," he says, "you just became an enemy of France."
~
Of course they remain friends. Now and then they laugh together, share a drink, perhaps hold each other. They are adults, after all. A woman and a man. Whose paths – lives – have crossed in this sleepless city, summer over, fall descending: now they discover each other's autumnal selves, sweatered, scarved, seeking and sometimes finding warmth beneath Harlem's cooling sky.
