9. The Heartbreak Thing

I admit I have an ugly fondness for generalizations, so perhaps I may be forgiven when I declare that there is always something weird about a girl who majors in French. She has entered into her course of study, first of all, knowing full well that it can only lead to her becoming a French teacher, a very grim affair, the least of whose evils is poor pay, and the prospect of which should have been sufficient to send her straight into business or public relations. She has been betrayed into the study of French, heedless of the terrible consequences, by her enchantment with this language, which has ruined more young American women than any other foreign tongue.

Second, if her studies were confined simply to grammar and vocabulary, then perhaps the French major would develop no differently from those who study Spanish or German, but the unlucky girl who pursues her studies past the second year comes inevitably and headlong into contact with French Literature, potentially one of the most destructive forces known to mankind; and she begins to relish such previously unglamorous elements of her vocabulary as Jan-gueur and funeste, and, speaking English, inverts her adjectives, to let one know that she sometimes even thinks in French. The writers she comes to appreciate-Breton, Baudelaire, Sartre, de Sade, Cocteau-have an alienating effect, especially on her attitude toward love, and her manner of expressing her emotions becomes difficult and theatrical; while those French writers whose influence might be healthy, such as Stendhal or Flaubert, she dislikes and takes to reading in translation, where their effect on her thought and speech is negligible; or she willfully misreads Madame Bovary and La Chartreuse , making dark romances of them. I gathered that Phlox, in particular, considered herself "linked by destiny" (liée par le destin) both to Nadja and to O. That is how a female French major thinks.

She lived in an apartment on the second floor of an old house, in a vague, quiet area between Squirrel Hill and Shadyside. As we climbed her bright stairway, I counted steps and watched the play of flowers on her broad, rather flat derrière. I knew what was about to happen, but I did not stop to think, except to think that I knew what was about to happen.

"We can talk loudly," she said, stepping into her apartment and turning on the light. "It's only ten o'clock, and my roommate is never home, anyway."

"Good!" I shouted.

The living room was small and plain, an ordinary student's living room, with secondhand furniture that had probably looked old the day it was made, a Renoir poster on one of the long walls, and a terrible, homemade painting of a cat on the other. On the coffee table there was a porcelain statuette of a white Persian cat like a huge scoop of whipped cream, with two lifelike and grotesque blue eyes. The table was strewn with issues of Paris-Match and Vogue.

"Whose cat idol is that?" I said.

"That's my Chloe," said Phlox. She stepped over to the ugly thing and began to tickle its porcelain chin. "Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe, Chloe," she said in a doll voice. "He lives at my mother's. I'm not allowed to keep a cat here. This is my little substitute Chloe. I made him in art in high school."

"It is beautiful. Isn't Chloe a girl's name?"

"Come and see my bedroom," she said, clasping my fingers and pulling me gently into the dark of the corridor.

I found her room apt and exciting: salmon-colored, neat, draped with white lace, in one corner a partially dismembered mannequin wearing a wedding dress and a nose ring. Huge posters covered the walls, of Diana Ross and the Supremes, of Arthur Rimbaud, and of the immense gibbous face of Garbo. Across the mirror of her dressing table hung a rosary; along the dressing table's surface was a vast collection of flacons and little bottles of womanly liquids. I sat on the edge of her bed, inhaling the remnants of her cologne, while she went to the toilet. Among the few books that she kept on her slender night table, her favorites, I supposed, were The Selfish Giant and The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde, and The Story of O and Mailer's Marilyn.

When she came back into the room, she wore nothing but a peach teddy, wide-hipped, her face coppery and new-washed, her hair pulled up by a white ribbon. She looked I940ish, the wife of some soldier off fighting the Germans, and briefly I felt the thrill of being an intruder in the house.

"You wear Opium," I said.

She sat beside me and put her face against my neck.

"Aren't you smooth. Even know your perfumes," she said, and she bit me.

"Here we go," I said. I brought her down on the chenille spread and breathed in the soap and the Opium at the base of her jaw, where her pulse was making itself known.

While Phlox, naked, broke eggs into a white bowl for French toast, I called the Duquesne and asked for my father's room. I stood in a corner of her lovely white kitchen, lazily cradling the phone with my shoulder, looking down at the sunny backyard and smelling my fingers.

"Bechstein," said my father, sounding chipper.

"Bechstein," I said. "This is your son."

"Ah, yes. My son. How are you, son? How's your summer thus far?"

Fine, Dad. I'm calling you from this girl's kitchen and she's standing here naked, and you know, Dad, I can see that some women do indeed look a little like guitars.

"Fine."

"Am I going to buy you yet another expensive lunch downtown?"

"I have to work, Pops."

"Then I propose an extremely expensive dinner on Mount Washington."

"Great. We can ride the Incline."

"Yes, the funicular," said my father. It was one of his favorite words.

"I'll come to the hotel around six," I said, and we hung up.

"That was quick," said Phlox.

"We always have that conversation when I call him at his hotel. It's my favorite conversation in the whole world."

I sat down at the kitchen table and watched her cook. She professed to love to cook; she did a lot of authoritative drawer opening, and laid the strips of bacon in the pan as though there were some science involved, but she didn't really seem to be enjoying herself. She tormented the French toast with her spatula, peering under each slice every five seconds, and she cursed irritably when the bacon fat spat. She left the kitchen to put on a robe and a Vivaldi record, and when she came back things were burning. I said that I rarely ate breakfast anyway and only needed a cup of coffee, which annoyed her. So I ate like a pig.

"Tell me about yourself," I said, chewing.

"I was born, grew tall and fair, knew both joy and tears, grew old, and died an abbess." Phlox, recognizing early that she lacked a strong sense of humor, or rather that she lacked the ability to make up jokes, had memorized thousands of bizarre passages from books and from here and there, and had developed, in place of humor, an ability to drop these bombs into a conversation, sometimes with incongruous, killer accuracy. She had, in fact, a number of unlikely conversational skills, or rather stunts. She knew and could explain with admirable clarity the secrets of machinery, how elevators tell the third floor from the fourth, why a spot is born and quickly burns away when a television is turned off; she could mentally alphabetize a fairly long and random list of words; and, most impressively, she remembered everything anyone had ever told her about himself, trivial things-the name of a childhood pet goldfish or of a distant cousin. This last ability made her the bane of a casual liar. Deceiving her demanded a great deal of care and attention.

"I understand that you've been born again?" I said.

She banged her juice down on the table and rolled her eyes, as though she had recently run out of patience with regard to Jesus. "No, that was just a thing. I'm not saying that I don't believe in God, because I do believe in God, even though it's more branché not to. But do you know what those Christians told me? They told me I would have to learn to live without sex. I can't live without sex, Art. It's ridiculous. If Jesus really loves me, then He wants me to sleep with boys."