Very Old Bones Read Free Page A

when he went for their coats I asked Giselle her name but she wouldn’t tell me. Then the Captain came and said, “All right, Giselle,
let’s go.”
    “Ah, Giselle,” I said.
    It took me only a few days to track her to the office where she worked as a translator for diplomats and army bureaucrats.
    “I’ve come to rescue you from old men,” I told her.
    “I knew you would,” she said with a foxy smile.
    But she resisted me, and professed fidelity to the Captain, who, though twice-and-a-half her age and going to fat, was flush with money from his black-market adventures in coffee and
cigarettes.
    “Can you take me to Paris for the weekend as he does?” she asked me. “Can you fly me to the Riviera?”
    “How direct the mercenary heart,” I said. “I understand your point. I suspect we are much alike.”
    But the truth was that I never valued money except when I had none. And Giselle’s hedonist remarks were a façade to keep me at bay. You see she was already starting to love me.
    Each day I sent her a yellow rose—yellow the color of age, cowardice, jaundice, jealousy, gold, and her own radiant hair. In a week the flowers softened her telephone voice, in two weeks
she agreed to dinner, and in three to a Heidelberg weekend, which was the first stop on my road to dementia.
    We stayed at a small pension and left it only for meals. Otherwise we inhabited the bed. She put all of her intimate arenas on display and let me do with them what I pleased, with a single
exception: I could enter none of them with my principal entering device.
    I had never been more excited by a woman’s body, though I know the relative fraudulence of memory in such matters. Denial of entry was of small consequence to a man of my imagination,
given the beatific pot of flesh to which I had access in every other way. Giselle said she was fearful of pregnancy, of disease, of sin, even of vice, can you imagine? But I know she was actually
testing my capacity to tolerate her tantalizing. I’ve known exhibitionistic women, several, but none with the raw, artistic talent for exposure that Giselle demonstrated in Heidelberg. This
was my initiation into the heavenly tortures of Giselle-love.
    In the days that followed, she and I moved together in a delirium, I sick with love. When I was away from her I fell into what I came to think of as the coma of the quotidian, my imagination
dead to everything except the vision of her face, her yellow hair, and the beige, angelical beauty of her sex, though that describes only the look of it, not the non-angelical uses to which she put
it.
    One understands addiction, obsession. It begins as the lunacy of whim, or desire, but ends as the madness of need, or essence. I could not be without her, and so all my waking movements were the
orchestration of our next meeting.
    I bought her gifts: Hummel dolls, a cuckoo clock, a Chanel suit, Italian shoes, cultured pearls (I could not afford diamonds). I bought her books. She’d never heard of Kafka, or
Christopher Marlowe, or Philip Marlowe, for she was a visual animal, fascinated by art and photography, the twin provinces of her mother, who ran an art gallery in Paris.
    I bought her a camera, took her to Versailles, Mont St. Michel, and other spectacles for the eye, took her to Omaha Beach and tried to explain to her some of the war and my puny part in it.
She’d lived in Paris the entire war and saw no fighting, only occupation, during which her father had been executed by the Nazis. Her mother, a paragon of independence and survival, raised
this very willful daughter.
    There was much more, but, to get to the point, Giselle-love broke me. I ran through my paychecks and small savings account, and got a bit of money from my mother. But I soon went through it all,
and it was out of the question to ask Peter for money. He never had any.
    Then I remembered Walt Popp, captain of Special Services, mentioning a game of poker. That was a month after I met