Ken Grimwood (15 page)

Mireille lay back on the carpet, her green silk dress rising to her thighs. The rain against the window beat an insistent cadence, and she lolled her head in a rhythmic circle to the sound, her lustrous russet hair falling now across her face, now upon her naked shoulders. Jeff stroked her calf, then her inner thigh, and she made a soft murmur of acquiescence and desire. He leaned forward, undid the front of her dress, slid the smooth fabric away from her girlish breasts.

There on the floor they used each other's bodies wordlessly, almost furiously. When they were done, Mireille filled another pipe with the opiated hash, and they smoked it in the bedroom. This time they came together languorously beneath the down-filled blanket, their legs and arms entwining with newly familiar ease; and later, as the bells of Saint-Honoré d'Eylau called early Mass, Mireille climbed atop him once again, her slim hips riding his in playful joy.

Sharla let herself back into the apartment with the drab dawn. "Morning," she said as she opened the bedroom door, looking spent. "You guys want coffee?"

Mireille sat up in bed, shaking her tousled hair. "With perhaps a little Cognac?"

Sharla pulled off her wrinkled dress, fished in the closet for a robe. "That sounds good," she said.

"Same for you, Jeff?"

He blinked, rubbed the drug haze from his eyes. "Yeah, I guess."

Mireille got up and padded casually to the bathroom for a shower. When Sharla came back with the breakfast tray, the little redhead was sitting on the edge of the bed, still nude, drying her hair. As they sipped their coffee laced with brandy, the two women talked pleasantly about a new lingerie shop on the rue de Rivoli.

A little after nine Mireille said she had to go home and change; she was meeting another friend for brunch, and didn't want to show up at the café wearing last night's silk. She kissed Jeff goodbye, gave Sharla a quick hug, and was gone.

As soon as Mireille had left, Sharla cleared the coffee cups from the bed, pulled back the sheets, and moved her warm tongue down Jeff's belly. He was limp when she took him in her mouth, but soon grew hard again.

Jeff never asked where Sharla had been all night; it didn't really matter.

The Mediterranean lapped gently against the pebbly beach, its quiet waves a whisper of eternity, of changelessness. The scent of a fresh pot of bouillabaise drifted from one of the cafés nearby. Jeff was getting hungry; as soon as the girls finished swimming, he'd suggest lunch.

The weather had broken for a week or so in early July, and they'd taken Le Mistral south with Jean-Claude and Mireille and the rest of the crowd. They'd all been drunk by the time the train got to Toulon, where the eight of them boisterously crammed themselves into two taxis for the forty-three-mile ride to St. Tropez.

The little fishing village had undergone a major upheaval in the past six years, since Vadim and Bardot had discovered and popularized it as a youthful alternative to the more sedate, old-money Côte d'Azur resorts of Antibes and Menton; but, lively as it already was, the town was still free of the suffocating hordes of tourists who would make it all but unlivable in the decades to come.

A shadow crossed Jeff's half-closed eyes, and he was pressed to the sand by a pair of smooth female thighs, someone sitting on his rump. Sharla? Mireille? Then the woman's naked breasts brushed his back, caressing, nipples stiff from the sea breeze.

"Chicca?" he guessed, lifting one hand up toward the girl's hair to feel how long it was, how thick. She shook her head away, giggled.

"
T'es fou
," the girl teased, clamping his thighs more tightly with her own and pressing her breasts flush against him: smaller than Sharla's, fuller than Chicca's.

"Couldn't be Mireille," he said, reaching back to pat her taut little ass. "Much too fat."

Mireille let forth a stream of curses in French, and punctuated them by lifting the waistband of his brief trunks and emptying a cup of iced lemonade inside. He rolled her off him with a yelp and pinned her on her back in the sand, arms struggling playfully against his grip.

"
Sadique
." She grinned. Jeff freed one hand long enough to shake the ice out of his trunks, and she grasped his cock through the thin cloth. "See?" she said. "You love it."

He wanted to take her there and then, her hair loose and wild, her breasts and belly glistening in the sunlight, the slight swell of her crotch outlined through the white bikini bottom. She slid her fingers down the front of his trunks, squeezed him harder. He drew a sharp breath.

"People around," he said, voice strained.

Mireille shrugged, her hand working steadily on his penis. He glanced up at the crowded beach, saw Sharla walking toward them, her own bare breasts swaying, her arm around Jean-Claude's waist.

"Mireille," he whispered urgently.

She ground her sandy hips against his, kneaded him harder, faster. He couldn't stop it now. He shut his eyes and moaned, and there were lips touching his own, a tongue probing his mouth, one set of nipples against his chest and another pressed to his shoulder, hair and breasts and mouths and hands … He came, with Sharla kissing him as Mireille brought him to orgasm; or was it the other way around? And what was the difference, after all?

"Everybody work up an appetite,
hein?"
Jean-Claude said, laughing.

Jeff told Mireille that evening, in the garden of the hotel, after they'd all shared several pipes of opiated hash and Sharla had wandered up to one of the rooms with Jean-Claude and Chicca and another couple. The drugs helped to loosen his tongue, and the secret that had burned within him for so many years now burst forth of its own accord; Mireille just happened to be there when it did.

"I've lived this life before," he said, staring at the late-setting sun through the pine trees of the Résidence de la Pinède.

Mireille crossed her bare legs in a lotus position, her white cotton dress billowing on the grass around her.
"Déjà vu. "
She smiled. "Me, too, sometimes I feel that way."

Jeff shook his head, frowned. "I mean literally. I mean—not this exact life, here with you and Sharla and everything, but … "

And it spilled out, all of it, a tumble of words and memories he'd hidden for so long: the heart attack in his office, that first morning in the dorm room back at Emory, the fortunes made and lost, his wives, his children, the dying, and dying, and dying yet again.

Mireille listened without a word. The lowering sun backlit her hair, turning it the color of flame, and left her face in deepening shadow. At long last his voice trailed off, defeated by the incredibility of what he had tried to tell her.

It was dark by then, and Mireille's face was impossible to read. Did she think he was mad, or recounting an opium dream? Her silence began to erode the cathartic relief he had felt in telling her.

"Mireille? I didn't mean to shock you; I—"

She rose to her knees, put her slender arms around his neck. The tight curls of her copper hair pressed softly against his cheek.

"Many lives," she whispered. "Many pains."

He held her slim young body tightly, breathed long and deep of the crisp, pine-scented air. Scattered laughter drifted toward them through the trees, and then the clear, sweet, buoyant sounds of the latest Sylvie Vartan record.

"
Viens
," Mireille said, standing up and taking Jeff's hand. "Let's go join the party.
La vie nous attend

."

They all went back to Paris in August, when the rains started again. Mireille never said anything more to Jeff about what he'd told her that evening in the garden at St.Tropez; she must have attributed it all to the hash, and that was just as well. Nor did Jeff and Sharla talk openly about the group sex and the drugs that were now part of the normal routine of their lives. Those things had happened; they kept on happening. There was no reason to discuss them as long as everybody was having a good time.

One of the new couples who periodically drifted in and out of the scene introduced them to a
partouze
in the rue le Chatelier, a few blocks north of what would continue to be called Place de l'Etoile until De Gaulle died in 1970. The
partouze,
one of several that had flourished in the city since the twenties, was a well-run, sumptuously appointed establishment: glass-encased antique-doll collection in the parlor, thick maroon carpet to match the walls, which were hung with
Jin de siècle
prints … and three uniformed maids to serve the thirty or forty naked couples who wandered and frolicked through the place's two floors of well-equipped, very large bedrooms.

The St. Tropez crowd began frequenting the
partouze
every weekend. One night Jeff and Sharla had a threesome with a coltish American starlet new to Paris, who would soon be known more for her radical feminism than for her acting; another night, Mireille and Sharla and Chicca held an impromptu contest to
see
which of them could be first to have sex with twenty men at one party. Sharla won.

Jeff was amazed at how quickly this unceasing roundelay of casual public sex with beautiful strangers had grown to seem perfectly normal; he was struck by the fact that such activities could go on without the slightest fear of those plagues from his own time, herpes and AIDS. That carefree sense of safety gave the decadent proceedings a retrospective air of innocence—naked children at play in the Garden before the Fall. He wondered what had happened to the
partouzes,
and their counterparts in America and the rest of Europe, in the eighties. If they'd survived at all, they must be rife with disease-inspired paranoia and guilt.

The eighties: a decade of loss, of broken hopes, of death. All of which would come again, he knew, and far too soon.

NINE

They'd been in London less than a month when he met the girl who offered him the LSD; met her as she was coming out of the Chelsea Drugstore, in fact. They had a good laugh about that as he chatted her up over Campari and soda. Jeff said he'd gone down to get his prescription filled and gotten
exactly
what he wanted. She thought that was funny, though of course she didn't catch the reference; the Stones wouldn't record that song for another year.

Her name was Sylvia, she confided to him, but everybody called her Sylla, "like the singer, Cilia Black, y'know?" Her mum and dad lived in Brighton (she made a face), but she was sharing a flat in South Kensington with two other birds, and had a job at Granny Takes a Trip, where she could get all her clothes at half price—like the blue vinyl mini-skirt and the yellow patterned stockings she was wearing now.

"We've got just the closest gear there, y'know; lots closer than Countdown or Top Gear. Cathy McGowan shops there all the time, and Jean Shrimpton was in just yesterday."

Jeff smiled and nodded, tuning out her mindless patter. It wasn't her he was interested in, it was the drug; he had been for a long time, and hated to admit he'd always been afraid to try it. This girl seemed casual enough about it, hadn't suffered any apparent ill effects (assuming she'd been born this vapid).

He'd picked her up out of habit more than anything else, commenting on the new Animals album she had under her arm, and within five minutes she'd asked him if he wanted to drop some acid. Well, what the hell? Why not?

Back in the town house on Sloane Terrace, Sharla was asleep in bed with some guy she'd met last night at Dolly's. Jeff closed the bedroom door, put on a Marianne Faithfull record at low volume in the living room, asked Sylla if she wanted another drink.

"Not if we're gonna do the acid," she said. "They don't mix well, y'know?"

Jeff shrugged, poured himself another Scotch anyway. He needed the alcohol to relax, to ease his nervousness over taking the psychedelic. What could it hurt?

"That your wife in the other room?" Sylla asked.

"No. Just a friend."

"She gonna mind me being here?"

Jeff shook his head and laughed. "Not a bit."

Sylla grinned, tossed her straight brown hair out of her eyes. "I never … did it, y'know, with another bird around. Except my flat-mates, of course, and that's just 'cause we don't have that much room."

"Well, she's
my
flat-mate, and it's O.K. There's another bedroom downstairs. Would you feel more comfortable in there?"

She rummaged in the yellow vinyl purse whose material matched her skirt, its color her stockings.

"Let's do the acid first, wait for it to come on. Then we can go downstairs."

Jeff took the little purple-stained square of blotter paper she handed him, washed it down with the last of the whiskey. Sylla wanted some orange juice with hers, so he fetched a container from the fridge.

"How long does it take before you feel the effect?" he asked.

"Depends. D'you eat lunch today?"

"No."

" 'Bout half an hour, then," she said. "More or less."

It was less. Within twenty minutes the walls had turned to rubber, had begun to recede and approach.

Jeff waited for the visions he had expected to appear, but none did; instead, everything around him just seemed slightly twisted, indefinably askew, and sort of sparkly.

"Y'feel it, luv?" she asked.

"It's … not what I'd thought it would be like." His words came out distinctly but felt thick in his mouth.

Sylla's face was changing, flowing like hot wax; her lipstick and rouge now seemed obscenely garish, layers of red paint covering her flesh.

"Fab, though, innit?"

Jeff closed his eyes and, yes, there were patterns there, circles within circles, interconnected by a complex, shimmering latticework. Wheels, mandalas: symbols of eternal cycles, of illusory change that merely led back to where the change had begun and would begin again …

"Feel my stocking; feel that." Sylla placed his hand on her thigh, and the yellow patterned panty hose became a landscape of textures and ridges, lit by an alien sun; that sun, too, a part of the endless cycles of being, the—

Sylla giggled, pressed his hand between her legs. "Take me downstairs now, O.K.? Wait'll you see what
this
feels like on acid."