Travels Through Love and Time

by Christine Hall Volkoff

  So I learned bits of trivia about her, and she learned some about me. Indeed, the information seemed superficial and useless. It did not matter whose family had money, where they came from, where we went to school, and all that. I appreciated hearing that her father was of Greek origin, third generation American, and her last name was Christoforos.

  “You know what that means? It means the one who carries Christ, as in St. Christopher, patron saint of transportation, who is supposed to have carried the infant Jesus across the water … ”

  She looked at me with great suspicion …

  “Are you religious? Like Catholic or something?”

  “No, oh no, not at all. I just like all these legends and stories, and religions are full of them. That’s the fun part. There’s also Catholic school and all the stories about nuns, but I didn’t go, so I have none to tell. Sorry.”

  On we went … The drinks were giving us a nice buzz and we decided it was time to go to dinner. We agreed on the Brasserie at La Closerie des Lilas, an old traditional Montparnasse restaurant. We paid and got up, and she asked me about my parents. The story of my family had never sounded so special and interesting. Both her parents were still alive. I only had my mother, my father had passed away a few years earlier.

  We kept on comparing what we had in common and what was different, as if anything we shared contributed to bringing us closer.

  Getting to the car, starting it and driving away happened without either of us noticing. Happily, I let go of my once in a lifetime parking place.

  The level of our conversation was quite basic, as if we were saving ourselves for later, and the best was yet to come. We had the evening ahead of us. We were laughing at everything. Life was suddenly simple and thrilling.

  My expectations were at the same time high and non-existent. The thought of Alison came to my mind again. I shall love who loves me, Alison, and if it is not you it won’t be you. Could it be this woman risking her life with me, jaywalking across the Boulevard Saint Michel where I had parked over a pedestrian crossing?

  We made it safely to the other side, and walked into the Closerie. We asked for a table and waited in the soft embrace of the piano bar, the mahogany and green, the presence of dead poets and soon to be executed lobsters.

  Linda was standing by the bar and I was secretly admiring her. Her beauty came from inside, it was beyond looks, history, convention, age or status, and it was attracting me like a magnet. It seemed to me that something very basic had already been worked out for us. Can you read it too? Or are you like Alison - blind and confined in your preordained definition of what life is supposed to bring you?

  Chapter Five

  We were lucky, and were given a very nice table on the verandah, far enough from the lobster tank that we did not have to feel like Nazis on a rampage looking into the faces of the soon-to-be-eaten.

  Linda was looking at the menu. The piano in the background was playing Patsy Cline’s 'Crazy', a song I could definitely identify with.

  The Closerie des Lilas is what the French used to call an American Bar, which means that they serve cocktails and somebody plays 'As Time Goes By' on a grand piano at least twice a night. That night, the pianist was playing 'Crazy', and he was talking directly to me. Next thing I knew, he was going to play 'Is That All There Is'?, and the night would be wrapped up after discussing Paris traffic, a few aging Hollywood stars and the political career of Shirley Temple.

  Alison used to lapse into small talk diatribes in order to avoid reality, and I had developed an aversion to it. Trivial conversations are only acceptable when both participants are madly in love with each other. Romance was designed by God to give life to the ordinary, for all of us who can’t afford to watch the sunset on the Canal Grande from a gondola in Venice every evening.

  We decided on oysters on the half shell, salads, champagne to “celebrate” as we both said, even though we had nothing to celebrate. Linda looked gorgeous and suave as she turned around to greet someone.

  “Pierre! I didn’t know they allowed you in here!”

  “Lindy! Where the hell have you been?”

  Pierre looked like a typical French businessman on a drunken night out. I was trying to overhear their conversation, but it was not easy as Linda (Lindy?) was facing the other way. Finally, he kissed her on both cheeks and left. Linda turned back to me half smiling, but with a desperate sigh, as if things were getting a little hard to handle.

  “What’s happening?” I asked, made bold by the waiter opening our bottle of champagne, a great luxury in California, but a regular, if expensive, commodity here.

  “Oh, that’s Pierre. He is a friend of Julien’s. I haven’t seen either of them in a long time.”

  “He calls you Lindy?”

  “Yes, that’s how friends call me. I like it better than Linda Louise.”

  “So what’s going on?”

  I was not giving up, remembering how hard it was to keep conversations going with Alison.

  “Well, nothing, that’s just it.”

  “What do you mean Lindy?

  I accentuated the nickname humorously and with a trace of irritation. I was upset that in the first place she had said “My friends call me Lindy”. Was I to be excluded from this very special group? She had been secretive about what had just gone on with Pierre, and had not even introduced me to him.

  Her dialogue with Pierre was none of my business. My curiosity was betraying ulterior motives that I was ashamed of. It was all coming out with sarcasm, designed to get what I wanted without being honest about it. Usually, this approach is doomed to achieve the exact opposite results.

  Linda looked at me with a puzzled look, which included a little bit of anxiety. Sighing, I got a grip on myself. Come clean, come clean, it's the only way out.

  “You know, it’s funny, but when you said ‘that’s how my friends call me’, it hurt my feelings, even though you and I can hardly call each other friends at this point in time. Also, I’m afraid your conversation with Pierre has upset you. I hope you will talk to me about it …”

  Linda started laughing and her eyes filled up with tears as she raised her glass of champagne. “Here’s to the weirdness of life. I don’t happen to know you very well, and I don’t usually introduce myself as Lindy to strangers, you know.”

  She kept looking at me as she was drinking, and that look set everything back on track for me. Weirdness of life indeed. She went on without any further prompting. “The strange part is that Pierre said nothing. He sees Julien all the time, and he mentioned that he had talked about me with him yesterday. But that was it. He acted like there was no connection between me and Julien. Even worse, I think he was being careful. He did not want to open that can of worms with me. He just talked about himself, as usual, his own problems with his girlfriend, et cetera … I guess I would have appreciated some acknowledgement of my predicament involving his best friend. It gives me a strange feeling of wandering around the Twilight Zone.”

  It all sounded so familiar, like Alison’s glassy-eyed forays into a counterfeit void. It always seemed to me that they were designed to avoid any kind of truth that might require genuine tact, care, or delicate handling. I shared some of this with Linda, as well as some anecdotes involving the cult of unreality, a common pastime in the lesbian community. Linda seemed to detect some homophobia in my discourse.

  “You seem to have little respect for all this lesbian drama.”

  “I guess I am still angry at them. I feel that we all need each other’s help, encouragement and commitment to truth in order to create something good, whether it is romantic or not. I feel that they betrayed me by being crude, manipulative, superficial and boring.”

  “But Alison was not always boring, was she?”

  “She was when she would start saying that she had no free will and that Marie was somehow pulling her strings. That made everything worse for me.”

  “But were there ever times when things were good?”

  A
s she said that, the food arrived, and the conversation and the evening took on a different turn. Everything became magical and exhilarating as if nothing could possibly ever go wrong in any of our lives ever.

  For some reason, and maybe this is why wine was invented after all, I felt very free to tell Linda about Alison in very intimate terms. I told her about Yosemite, about Alison’s good sides from our past. She did have a gift for happiness, she could be a hedonist, and was interested in everything. I described my joy at seeing her, the strength that I felt from our connection when it was there, the way her face would light up with youthful energy.

  Alison was often languid and always mysterious. Sexually, she had a tendency to indulge in artificial stimulants, mainly marijuana. However, when she was sober and connected, she became soft, vulnerable, emotionally unleashed and daring. I guess love between women has the capacity to open doors that some people think should have been kept shut. Alison, before Marie, was sometimes willing to go part of the way through those doors, and came out of it all sweet, generous and seemingly invincible.

  I stopped talking.

  “You know, I’ve slept with women before … ” Linda smiled as she said it.

  “How was it?”

  Time had suspended itself beyond surprise, beyond conventions, in whole, pure, wonderful madness.

  “It was not like what you are describing … ”

  She was shaking her head softly, and her voice was getting so low I was terrified that I was not going to be able to hear what she had to say. “It was hurried, unemotional, and full of questions. I can’t say I did not like it, though … ”

  “Does it worry you that you liked it?”

  “A little bit, I guess … It’s almost as if it was very powerful, but we were both trying to ignore that power, and we kept talking about men we liked and what we did with them, and all that. Somehow, we were afraid to cross a certain threshold.”

  “How many women did you sleep with?” I tried to maintain a matter of fact, detached tone. After all, it was in her past and not in her present.

  “Oh, two. The first one only once, but I was more involved with the other one. Her name was Lisa. I met her at a seminar in communication I was taking in Los Angeles. I guess we did our best to communicate in a meaningful way! We stayed together at a friend’s apartment in Santa Monica for a full week. It was wild.”

  “What happened after that?”

  “I went back to New York, and started working for a TV station there. I ran into her at a party. She was with some guy … I was not with anyone at the time, and I was kind of happy to see her. She talked to me as if we were mere acquaintances. You know, this and that, movies, plays, with a very loud laugh. She told me that she hoped I was happy, because she was getting married the next week. I tried to agitate some memories, but she seemed to have forgotten them all, and I just went on my merry way. It was a little sad, especially since she made it seem like it had been only a weird, disturbing dream which was better forgotten.”

  We had finished our food. The champagne was almost gone. There was no music playing. I was treading on thin ice, but I decided that being honest and straightforward was the only way I was going to make the evening end well one way or the other. The question came out easily. “Have you ever thought of doing it again?”

  She took her time to answer. The piano started playing again, a song I did not recognize. A bad sign. I tried to undo any possible hex by discreetly tapping the underside of our table. Knock on wood.

  “Well not really. I have been very absorbed with Julien for the past two years, you know.”

  OK, I got it, loud and clear. Back off, back off.

  “I am sorry it ended like it did. It must have been rough on you.”

  Hiding my disappointment that Linda had not taken advantage of the subject at hand to make a significant move, I retreated into momentary silence.

  Maybe if I was Marie, I could look at her in a deep meaningful way, loaded with sexual vibes, and say: “Hey”, and plant my face in front of hers, until she finally gave in and kissed me. The tamer and the tamed. But I wanted my wild horses free, and in the prairie. Not in the circus, where all the glitter masks captivity and pain.

  Linda’s eyes were filling up. This says it all, I thought.

  She went on talking about herself and Julien. He was a journalist of some kind, and he was always talking to her about movie stars he had met, and how attractive they were. She wanted a commitment from him but never could get it. He admitted to her that he was always tempted by the greener grass on the other side. Finally, he had decided to cross over once and for all, and ended up with this oh so very cool and glamorous fashion model named Sonja. He did not seem to have had any problem making a commitment to Sonja.

  “Would you want to get back with him?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I can’t really honestly say that I was deliriously happy when I was with him. We had a good life that fit in perfectly with the lives of everyone around us. I guess I would like him to come back so I could say no. But I am probably kidding myself. The truth is I don’t know what love feels like anymore … ”

  “Well, maybe I don’t either,” I said, and we dedicated the rest of the champagne to our common bewilderment.

  I was never sure that I wanted to get back with Alison. I knew I wanted to get out of the hell I had been in when she was with Marie, and I wanted to make something good out of our relationship, one way or the other. Sometimes, when we connected, usually for a short time, it was comfortable, and I thought it was worth all the suffering and tomorrow’s probable reversal. When the reversal finally came, however, I felt betrayed and cheated, incredibly alone and rejected. I would have done anything to make the pain stop.

  Linda and I paid and shared our bill, and we were ready to go outside. I looked around the Closerie while she went downstairs to the restroom. Never had it looked so glamorous and rich, like a good antique. People at the tables were laughing, cheerfully eating and drinking. I regretted that Linda had not given me more hope, and wished our evening had been more on the side of danger and flirtation. But we had indeed established some kind of intimacy, and she did not seem too scared of it. In fact she seemed to enjoy it. It could be that she did not get too much of a chance to talk to anyone about personal things. Maybe this was why she had picked up a stranger at the Babylone.

  She came back upstairs, smiling and taking in the decor and the diners. We both had the same impression it seemed. The old café was suddenly transfigured by some yet to be understood meaning.

  We were silent on the way to the car, and to the Rue de Nevers where I was to drop her off. I drove straight into the narrow passage.

  “Here, this is where I live!”

  The building looked very old, sagging a little, with an old doorway and a code keypad to keep the burglars out.

  “It is very nice. You have to come see it some time. I’d give anything to own it, but my friend refuses to give it to me …”

  I was sitting at the wheel, anxious about the way the evening would end. Don’t let it be entirely anticlimactic. Goodbyes are all important when the situation is not clear, and you have to live with your last impression. What could I get away with? How forward could I be?? It was harrowing to decide what to do, and I felt paralyzed by fear of rejection or shame, or both. It would be very safe to at least ask for her phone number. That I could do.

  “Will you give me your phone number, so I can get in touch with you without hanging out at the Babylone every day?”

  “Oh yes, and give me yours too. I like the Babylone, but not all that much … ”

  We exchanged phone numbers. I wrote hers on a loose piece of paper. A treasure I was never going to lose.

  She suddenly got out of the car. In a panic, I did too.

  “Well, good night,” she said. “This was a lot of fun. We have to do it again.”

  “Yes, let’s!” I said, walking around the car to find myself next to her in the fina
l moment.

  She looked at me intensely or maybe I imagined that she did, and then gave me a good, honest, normal California style hug. I held her tight for a few seconds, and it felt good. I don’t know who let go first … Maybe I did. She went to the door and fished the key out of her giant purse. As the door opened, she turned to me and said “Talk to you soon, OK?”

  “Yes, take care …”

  Her voice became very soft. “You too … ”

  She was gone. I got back to the car and stared until I knew which windows would light up on the face of the building. None did. The apartment must be facing the back … I reversed out of the alley, and headed for home.

  I felt empty and incomplete, as if I had cheated myself on something. Was there anything I could have done to make this better and clearer? Was I cautious because of a correct instinct that I had to be very careful because of the lack of obvious invitation in her manner? Was I only prudent because of my natural cowardice and homophobia? After all, she had given me enough indication that she was open to the idea …

  Chapter Six

  It is always surprising how in Paris, the City of Light and Glamour, freedom, intellectual adventure, you-name-it, one can observe the most backward and creepy customs. In my mother’s building, I had a nice little room in the servants’ quarters, with a common toilet for the whole floor. It could have been great. My mother’s apartment gave at all times an impression of solid comfort and silence. You could hardly hear the neighbors, unless they were playing basketball in their living room. The architect had thought it all out very well. But in the servants’ area, he had designed walls and floors that were paper thin. Domestic employees were supposed to be up at dawn anyway, so who cared if he cut the soundproofing budget to a minimum. Everything that happened in the hallway, hurried steps, screams, gossip on a background of vacuum cleaning, sounded like it was all happening inside my pillow, right next to my ear.

  This particular problem was not helping me deal with the extreme confusion that was taking place in my head. After my dinner with Lindy, (I now took the liberty of calling her Lindy to myself and it felt quite good) I had found it very hard to make any sense of the whole adventure. This interest in another person had softened me up, and I doubted that it was a good thing. The brick wall had a breach and let in a lot of thoughts about Alison which were not very constructive. I could not see any exits from the cramped corner that my life in California had become.