396
ALAN IIRIEDMAN
would flow in flawless English and the angle of my elbow could
touch the bell of her breasts. And I did no such thing.
But at night I'd try to imagine what it was that Madame Dijour
was doing to her, what it was that left Jacqueline looking like a field
of crushed flowers. Over the months my night life in Paris had become
a lively and depressing burlesque. Sometimes I imagined Madame
Dijour asleep in her warm bed and Jacqueline naked and shivering
in a cage fixed into the wide-open window, and I wanted to slip
through my window and crawl down the wall and sneak through her
window and unlock the cage and cover her icy flesh with my body,
but I didn't, because in my fantasy my own window, when I reached
it, was stuck, warped and clotted with a luminous mold. Or some–
times as my wits wandered toward sleep I imagined that Madame
Dijour had been in the pay of the Nazis and ratted on her husband
for whose murder she'd had her own daughter deliberately framed
and condemned to serve in the galleys, and Jacqueline there became
a kind of Saint Jeanne Valjean, and she was rowing naked and
sweating, and I wanted ... but I didn't. So maybe you can imagine
what an ordeal it was for me when the gendarme in her mother's
parlor quietly asked to see my passport and began checking it against
a list he kept in his thick black book.
I had no idea what he was investigating, but I was young
enough so that it actually didn't occur to me to ask. I simply handed
over my passport, which I always carried, and said to Jacqueline in
slow English, as calm and gay as you please, "Jacqueline, what country
am I from?"
She didn't answer. She looked up - yellow skin and yellow-white
eyes - sucked her underlip in, then looked away ... immobile, sus–
picious features that would some day be jowled like her mother's
but were now just short of ripeness, pale plentiful hair pulled very
tight, and a thin throbbing throat. For all the yellow blossom of her
face and those breasts which were already swaying flowercups, she
was skinny everywhere else - sternlike, stalklike, her inflexible arms,
her in-folding shoulders, the hardly-any bumps of her hips. But in my
mind's eye an older Jacqueline, surprisingly honored at graduation for
her progress in English, had been chosen to deliver the valedictory
address (her theme, International Love ); and God! it was my own
tongue-tied Jacqueline, now speaking passionate English stark naked
before a thrilled auditorium; and afterwards I tried to rise with a
