Chapter 3

I think it is possible that even then, even when I was sitting across from her and drawing her out about her life, I was falling in love with her. Certainly there must have been something unusual in our companionship. We hardly knew one another, except through the limited medium of the bed, and yet my entire life has changed because of her. My life has changed, and it could only have been those two short hours which changed it. Now, I do not recall much of what actually transpired between us. I am too aware of the vast emotional distances which we have traveled since then to remember just what were the details of any single occurrence. I learned about her in the ordinary way, of course, what she did for a living, what her personal history had been like, etc. But all I really retain from those hours is an impression of her dark, translucent beauty framed by alpine scenery. Clouding this though-and here is a distinct feeling and perhaps a key to my later actions-there grew a sense of tension. I was hard pressed to draw any information from her about the situation in which she worked. Her reticence was unnatural, I felt, in one who about everything else was as effusive as she was. Something was slightly wrong, something which kept her preoccupied and ill at ease whenever the talk turned toward the area of her life which was outside of this train and outside of her Parisian vacationing. My curiosity was piqued, and I was surprised to recognize in myself a rush of protectiveness. It was a small one, and undirected, to be sure, but it did exist.

I say that my life was changed because of the events of those two hours. That is not entirely true. It would be romantically attractive to maintain such a belief, but it would be philosophically inaccurate. I don't believe that the course of anyone's life can be altered in such a short space of time. Oh, perhaps in the event of a cataclysm, yes, but I am speaking of changes in one's personal life, not changes in the nature of human, life as a whole. I must have been prepared for a Marianne to enter my life for some time before she actually did. Perhaps I was ready for as long as a year before the event. I recall what seems now to have been an ancient sensation: as much as a year ago, if not earlier than that, I discovered a fatalism in myself which I had never expected to find there. I had always struck myself as an optimistic fellow: I always thought that the glass was half full. But, and this occurred without any great event having transpired to cause the change, that glass seemed always to be half empty instead. I was past thirty, and what had I done? I thought of Alexander, dead at twenty three, having conquered the entire known world. I thought of Jesus, dead at thirty-three-just my own age--having conquered ... what? Well, let's not get into a theological discussion. Having conquered something anyway. The demonic in man perhaps (to take the stance of an ethical humanist), or death itself (to take a more Christological stance). Anyway, I wondered what had become of the last ten years of my life. When I was twenty-four, I was fond of saying glibly, "If I were Keats, I'd be immortal now. But I'd also be dead." Such sophistry was fine when I was but a callow fellow, but at thirty-three it was beginning to wear thin. Accounting had become a job, that most banal of all things, and what had begun as a perfectly logical way of life had become a bore. For years I had been looking to fine wines and chic women to fill the gap which was yawning between my expectations of life and that which I truly received. But the wines were less spirited than they had been. There had once been a time when a bottle of California cabernet had been enough to make an Evening of an evening; often now a Premier Cru Bordeau-there was a 1961 Chateau Margaux I remember-fell flat. And the women seemed to fall just as flat. To be honest, I was not as active as I had been in college, nor as I had been led to expect to be as a swinging young bachelor about town. But I had maintained a more-or-less steady series of relationships (as they are called today in the mealy mouthed argot of trendy psychology), and these were beginning to pall. The last one of these sorts was with a modern dancer named Arlene. She was, well, comfortable would be the word. She was available to me when I wanted, usually, and I was available to her when she wanted, again usually. We made no demands upon one another. We were ... comfortable. She wore a wrist watch while she made love, and with a cynical, bitter little twist of the mouth I thought this symbolism beautiful. But it was all getting stale. Arlene's harping on non-involvement was a symptom of that, I think, in a reverse sort of way. Since we both wanted to bury ourselves in another person so badly, I suspect that we paid more niggling attention to the process of doing just the opposite even than was needed to keep us going along and just being ... comfortable. A massive boredom overcame me.

I recall a girl who was pleased to inform me almost upon our meeting that she possessed thirty nine inch breasts and that she liked to fuck from behind and would I be interested? Well no thank you very much. But I did take her home, and I did fuck her from behind, and she did have gorgeous breasts, and she would have been a wonderful woman to be in love with if I had been a man who wanted to be in love with her. But even that wouldn't have worked in the end for she, I am sure, had no interest in being in love with me. There was an emptiness behind her eyes somewhere. She found two pornographic magazines beside my bed, one of which featured a long picture essay of the afternoon assignation of two statuesque lesbians. My friend (?) grew excited looking at the pictures and lay at my side masturbating while she crooned over the details of this lesbian lovemaking. For myself, I got up, and put on a record, and made some coffee. She was still beating herself off, again and again, when I walked back to the bedroom. Her orgasms were repetitious, and small, and I saw that she wasn't even paying much attention to them. She wanted to blow me then, but I kicked her out into the night. Actually, I drove her home to her apartment, but the effect was the same. I never saw her again, and I saw Arlene only once more, and two months later I came to Paris.

So Marianne didn't change my life as though she had been an unwanted bolt from the blue. On the contrary. If there had ever been a time in my life when I was looking for a Marianne, that Parisian vacation was the time. I find it symbolically appropriate that I did not find my love until I had extended myself even farther from my old life in Boston than Paris. Here we were, eating delightful food in the elegant dining car of a train winding its way through the lower Alps on its way to Geneva. My body ached with the exertion of her, my face and mouth smelled of her effluvium, and I had only known her for something under twenty hours!

Certainly, also, our lovemaking had not been particularly significant in itself. She was not the first one-night stand I had stood. It had been her energy and her abandon last night and this morning which characterized her own brand of lovemaking as something entirely different from anything I had encountered before. That tit-girl had masturbated before me with a casual air, but there had been a lethargy about her which was offensive and which penetrated through any of the sorry little masks I had been used to keeping up in the face of the endless glare of the lonely eye. Poor little tit-girl, trying so hard to play with her grown-up toys. Somewhere or other she had lost her way in the great morass of the world, and the life force was dead in her. That great, Lawrencian power of life, that lust, that awe, that blaze of the sun shone no more in her. Already, her skin was turning grey, and, pathetically, she knew it. She was one of the already dead ones, the ones who stumble blindly through their unwanted lives, petulant, resigned, useless. But Marianne! Through her translucent skin shone a warm and soothing glow. Here was a woman who was not satisfied with the marginal in life. Here was a woman who went to the heart of the matter, who grasped that heart, who dragged it out, and who ate it raw on the top of a pyramid, hot blood dripping down her chin.

Not that she looked like such a blood-thirsty young women as she sat across from me and tore at a roll. Her fingers were too delicate for that. But she was alive. That was the thing. She was alive. Lord knew what sort of complicated situation she had gotten herself into in her work that which made her reticent-but it didn't matter to me. She was a breath of cool wind on a hot and dusty day, and that was enough.

What I did learn about her was this: she taught history at an all-girl finishing school near Chateau d'Oex called Chateau Diableret. The odd name for the school is explained by the fact that one can see the Diableret itself rising its ten thousand foot head above the surrounding ridges and peaks when one climbs the slope behind the school. She had been there for two years, and she was in the process of rethinking her choice of place. She mentioned that it was isolated, and that she sometimes felt in philosophical conflict with the powers that were, but I felt-as I have indicated-that there was more to the disenchantment than these factors explained. Her Greek background, and her self-imposed exile from her homeland by way of political protest, made her, from the school's point of view, an excellent history teacher. Everything comes from Greece-at least, everything in the rational dimension comes from there. The irrational (or perhaps it would be better to say "the emotional," in order to avoid any pejorative connotations) comes across the Bosphorous from Asia, from Palestine, from Egypt, from Syria, from India. Marianne had grown up in intellectual environs in a country which is steeped in a history so ancient by comparison with our own that we in the New World are but babes to her. Events from five hundred years before Christ impinge upon her everyday consciousness as do events from 1850 impinge upon ours. Talking with her these last few months has been an eye-opening experience for me. If I make a comment about some event in the news she is apt to draw a comparison between it and something which transpired between the Athenians and the Spartans. She does not do this as an academic exercise. It is by this method that she discovers for herself what is the true significance of what has occurred. And sailing with her among these time-heavy islands! At this moment we are anchored off a small beach on the southwestern coast of Amorgos. We have been here for three days rerigging, sail stitching, and repairing a sprung plank in the dingy which came from her getting loose of her moorings and riding up on the rocks. Moth is shaking down well, as, I think, am I. But my experience has been made far richer than it would anyway have been by Marianne's commentary on the history of the places we have touched or sailed past.

(The other half of the experience, of course, has been living on the sea these past ten days. Moth travels slowly the prevailing winds being contrary and light. Neither of us are in any hurry however, and that is good. It has occurred to us that, if we can't miss the hurricane season in the Caribbean this year, we may just lie along the Moroccan coast for a year and then proceed, or perhaps we'll go down to South Africa work a while, and approach the Pacific by the old clipper route. In any case, we are free as birds, and we live like birds, and we love it. Now and again we have been passed by the magnificent toys of the rich, great two-hundred-foot yachts, and have seen them on their foredecks with their peaked caps and their blazers, and it has occurred to us that their surroundings can be no more compelling to them than they would be on a postcard. They steam along in a vibrating, smelly, noisy ship at twenty knots or more, and they see very little. They hear almost nothing. And they smell even less than that. Unless one of us climbs the mast, neither of us are more than three feet from the surface of the sea. At all times, we are aware of the slightest motion, the slightest breeze, the very tiniest activities of the fish and the birds. The sun, the wind, the rains, the flicker of a moon-path across black water, Orion just over the bow and Sirius peeping from behind the jib luff, hiding, and then peeping again: these things make us remember who we are, and where we are, and they begin to show us why we are as well.)

But back to Arthur on the train. Or Alex. She calls me Alex. There is something rather nice in the fact that she has made up a new name for me. It's almost as though she were creating me anew, but then, that's what she has done. I am Alex in the light of my new experiences, not Arthur. That boob Arthur was too silly for words.

I say I felt something unusual when I was' sitting there. I have the feeling that knowing her as intimately as I did in a physical sense made me all the more aware of the strength of her personality in other dimensions. It was as though the physical between us were done with. We both knew what had happened and where it could go in the future, if it ever did. It was the non-physical, the perhaps more important elements of the woman, which occupied us during that breakfast. I had grown too used to having little to say with a woman on the morning after the night before. Here, I talked little, I think, but I listened much. I was very disconsolate when the train came down out of the mountains and chugged its busy way into the Geneva station. Amidst the throning skiers I kissed her. It was like a hello. I kissed her, and she kissed me back, and then she went away.

And then, to make a long story short, the next time you looked around for Arthur Alexander, you would have found him hugging both his rucksack and his memories to his chest as he sat in a slow train making its way along the feet of the mountains to Lausanne and Montreux, and then, finally, by a smaller gauge, to Chateau d'Oex. A day and a half had passed. r had seen the cathedral, the museum, the shops. I had walked through the Old City. I had fed the seagulls. (How do gulls get all the way up into the Alps? Do they follow the Rhone? Enterprising birds.) I had spoken only once or twice, and then it was to the concierge of my hotel. I could stand it no longer. I had taken the next step in my escape.

Chateau d'Oex isn't much of a town in terms of size, but its situation at the base of the long valley gives it a spectacular view. The skiing is good, if not as swish as it is in nearby Gstaad, and I had the pleasant sensation that most of the people crowding the small streets and the road out to the lifts were long-time residents. The sensation seekers had gone on to Gstaad in hopes of catching a glimpse of Brigette Bardot, or perhaps of the Burtons. Generally speaking, the town was clustered around two main streets and two cross streets. Residential roads fanned out and up the slopes, and the farms were strung mostly along the valley side of the railway line. Chateau Diableret, I was told, was six kilometers out along one of the main cross streets. I managed to thumb part of the way-it was the road to the lifts-but then I had to walk the last few kilometers.

When I saw the place, I was impressed. There was shoulder of the mountain sticking out over the valley at this point. The road I was following ducked inside of it, topped it, and continued on along the base of the mountain. However, on the right of the road there was perhaps fifteen acres of attractive hilltop before the land dropped sharply all around. The Chateau was situated on this piece. I could barely see the roofs from the road, the evergreens were so carefully spaced and tended that they obscured the view. I had an impression of hugeness, though, and this was not dispelled when I had walked far enough along the drive to see the building itself. The Chateau was in the shape of a U, with its open end facing me. The wing on the left was a later addition to the whole, and architecturally speaking it was an unfortunate one, but the snow frosting over all, the well-kept look of the place, the prosperousness of several Mercedes sedans parked in the front, and the late afternoon light bathing the Bernese landscape behind were enough to overpower any slight misjudgment on the part of the remodelers. The air was very clear. The wind blew gently. There was no sound at all.

"Marianne? Of course. If you will just follow me."

The young woman, wearing what r took to be the school uniform of white silk blouse, pleated navy blue shirt, and navy blue knee socks, led me into an imposing foyer, furnished with an eye both for the hardships imposed by gangs of adolescent girls and a tasteful appearance, and up a flight of curving stair to the right. r had the opportunity to admire the turn of her calves as she climbed before me, and r realized that she must be about eighteen and was likely to be chaffing against the indignity of having to wear such clothes as these. One could easily imagine her gracing the high balconies and the salons in the latest of fashions: her slenderness was just the body those people seem to design their things for. My sympathy went out to her as my imagination pictured long battles with stern parents who desired their daughter to be brought up in the old style. Touched with a finger of age, I felt for the instant as though I knew everything. How impatient was youth, how humorless! But then my mind turned to the more immediate problem of Marianne. How would she react when she saw me? She had had no warning of my visit. What would she say to the resurrection of thoughts about an experience which she might just as well be happy to forget? And the fact that she had not mentioned him did not preclude the possibility of her being involved with some man on the staff here. How would he react to the tail-wagging stranger? Knowing her as I did, as little as I did, still I realized that any man would be a fool not to have put his attention on her the moment she have into sight.

My guide knocked on a door, and I was told to enter.

I expected to see Marianne, and I was wearing a disarming smile, but the woman who rose from behind a wide desk to greet me was a stranger. She was tall, and blonde, and beautiful, and ordinary. I immediately grew ill at ease. My clothes were baggy. I carried an old rucksack over one shoulder. I was unshaven. I supposed I must smell. The woman's calm exacerbated my condition. She remained standing behind the desk. Floor to ceiling windows dominated the wall behind her, and late light backlit her. A small desk lamp threw a yellow spot across some papers she had been examining, but it did not reach her face. r found it hard to focus on her.

"I am Agnes Meyer," she said, her voice controlled and low.

"How do you do!"

"May I help you?" Her English was accentless.

"I'd like to see Marianne."

"Marianne?"

"Yes."

We stood in silence for a moment while I felt as though I were being examined with none too favorable an eye.

"And who are you, if I may ask?"

"Oh! Sorry. My name's Alexander. Arthur Alexander. I've just come up from Geneva, you see ... "

"From Geneva."

"Yes. I'm a friend of Marianne's. I met her on the train, and-"

"-and you followed her here." The woman's voice was flat. Now that she believed she understood the nature of the relationship, she had lost interest in me.

"Well, yes, actually. I thought I'd look her up, you know, just to say hello."

"You thought you'd look her up."

"Yes. To see how she's doing, don't you know."

"What is the nature of your business, Mr., ah, I beg your pardon ... "

"Alexander."

"Mr. Alexander?"

"I'm on vacation, you see. I'm an accountant, from America. I am vacationing in Switzerland, and I met Marianne on the train, and I just thought ... Look here, is there some reason why I can't see her?"

"We attempt to discourage visitors during term."

"But I ... But that's absurd."

The woman, who had begun to sit down, straightened again. Her voice contained great dignity as she replied, "I am not accustomed to listening to such claims."

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean that. But all I want is to speak with her for a few minutes."

Now she did sit. "I have told you the school policy."

"But, Mrs. Meyer, I-"

"Ms. Meyer."

"I beg your pardon. Ms. Meyer. But I don't see why. Look, I simply want to say hello to her. If she has a class or something now, I can just wait."

"I'm sorry, we don't allow that sort of thing."

"What sort of thing?"

"You know what sort of thing, Mr., um, and now I think you had better go."

"I've never heard of such a thing. I'm a visitor to your school. I'm ... "

The woman's attention had returned to her papers, and she spoke without looking up. "One of the girls will show you through the public portions of the building if you like, but then, I am sorry to say, you will have to go. Term is in session. We do not allow any variance from our rules. I will tell Marianne that you stopped in and asked after her."

I was feeling stunned. I had been concentrating so hard on what I would say to Marianne when finally I saw her that I didn't quite know how to counter this situation. "But," I began stupidly.

"That will be all"

"Damn it, I've come all the way from Geneva just to see her, and I will-"

The door behind me opened and the same girl who had brought me upstairs entered. She stood beside me, and her presence broke my train.

"Josephine, show Mr ... this gentleman out."

"Yes, miss."

"I will mention your concern to Marianne," she said, looking at me for the last time.

"You can't do this. I don't believe this is happening. I'm just here on a visit. Ms. Meyer, damn it, I think-"

"Josephine."

"Yes, miss. Come along now, sir."

"God damn it--"

"Sir!" Her voice was sharp, and took my arm. I wrenched it away, but she took it again, and somehow or other she made the grip burn all the way up my arm and into my shoulder. "Come along."

"But, I-"

"Come."

I came. It must have been one of those oriental things, for she certainly could make me move when I didn't want to. I followed her down the stairs and through the foyer. When we reached the door, she pushed me politely, but most firmly, through it.

And that was that.