Between the Bridge and the River (10 page)

Fraser realized he was still muttering “please” when the turbulence had subsided and the seat-belt sign had been switched off. He hardly dared feel relieved but he couldn’t help it.

“Thank you, God,” he said. Friendly again with the Universal Bully.

The plane touched down on time at Miami International and Fraser quietly sent up another “Thank you” but it wasn’t injected with anything like the energy of his earlier prayer. He was already looking forward to some fun in the big city.

AT THE POINT AT WHICH SHE MET GEORGE
, Claudette Bruchard had already had six Great Loves in her life. Six men she had adored, worshipped, and given her heart to, and all of them had died tragically, although very few people die any other way in Claudette’s opinion.

Death had broken her heart six times and she felt she could never love again. This made her feel very French, which, of course, she was.

She was born in rural Normandy and her mother died of a brain hemorrhage before she was one year old, which was the beginning of the terrible relationship between Claudette and Death. Understandably, she grew into a gloomy child, and when she was ten years old her father, an apple farmer who drank consistently to overcome his chronic grief for the one true love he had lost, put her into a convent school where he said that the nuns would take better care of her, which was true.

What he didn’t tell her was that she had become unbearably sexually attractive to him. Her eyes the color of polished chestnut and her skin milky white, her lips in a Gallic fellatio pout, and her long, dark, shining hair. He wanted to devour her, fuck her, split her open. He was disgusted by his desire but knew that if she stayed around and he was drinking he would eventually molest her and he wouldn’t be
able to live with himself if he did that. His choice was either to give up drinking a liter of Calvados every day or send his daughter away. He chose to abandon Petite Clau-Clau to the Brides of Christ.

It would have been too painful to stop drinking.

She entered the convent as a boarding apprentice. She wore an itchy novice gown that irritated her delicate skin, and as she got older she was punished more and more by the nuns for being too loud or impertinent or wicked. Truth is, she was none of these things but she did exude a smoldering sexuality that some of the holy virgins found threatening. She was one of God’s greatest masterpieces and obviously built for sex. By the time she was fourteen she had to strap down her breasts, wrapping them in linen strips ripped from her bedsheet, so that they didn’t annoy the sisters by their all-too-obvious struggle to escape the confines of the ill-fitting black habit.

By the time she was sixteen, she had become aware of the power of her beauty and no amount of threatening about lakes of fire and eternal damnation was enough to quell her growing desire for a man. A real, big, solid man to get her hands on. To feel the sex of herself and the shuddering excitement she imagined bringing to a creature much more physically powerful than her. She ached for sex. Not love. Sex.

She didn’t need love because she was already in love with a man she could never have sex with, even with her magnificent body. She had loved him even before she had come to the convent. He had worked as a carpenter and rabbi two thousand years before she was born and had died tragically at an early age. The picture she had of him was from the stained-glass window in the convent chapel, nailed up on the cross, naked but for some kind of miraculous gravity-defying hankie covering his penis. He looked athletic, if you avoided the blood, and she thought he must have enjoyed sport or yoga. She liked his legs; they were long and brown, and as a teenager, she imagined him going for a swim with his girlfriend Mary in the Sea of Galilee, maybe having a picnic after, no problem if they forgot to bring wine.

She loved Jesus but she had needs that he just couldn’t satisfy, so at the age of nineteen, she chose not to take her final vows and enter the cloisters but left the Catholic Church and headed for the civilization of
Paris. Her first dead lover, nailed to the cross, was left behind. Before she went, she knelt quietly in the little chapel and whispered that she would always love him alone.

Her second lover was an actor, and like many of his profession, he was pathologically self-obsessed. He thought about himself constantly, about his hair and if it was falling out, his weight, the bags under his eyes. His wrinkles, his career, his performance. He thought about himself so much, the only relief he ever felt was pretending to be someone else, which he did for a living and also in his private life, which wasn’t particularly private.

His name was Guillame Maupassant, and when Claudette met him he was about to star in a musical version of Dante’s
Inferno
that had been written by the horribly bourgeois but wildly popular English composer Anthony Boyd-Webster.

Guillame was to play the part of the poet Virgil, and during the show he would guide Dante (played by the great Parisian acting genius Gerard Reno before he got fat and crazy) through the different levels of hell by singing him catchy, middle-of-the-road pop songs.

In preparation for the role, Guillame had taken to walking the streets of Paris alone at night. He loved the feeling of being alone in the crowd. It made him feel like Virgil, above it all, a watcher without judgment.

From his apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement he would walk past St. Sulpice, through St. Germain and Opera and into the Latin Quarter, where the tourists sat shivering and eating crappy kebabs at the pavement tables. In truth, he liked to walk around at night anyway, preparing for a role or not, because he got recognized and laid from time to time, as he was still reasonably famous from his role as the brain surgeon Dr. François Villiers in the long-running television soap opera
L’Amour et Famille
.

On one autumn night, around midnight, as a light misty rain was smirring the air, putting the city into soft focus, Guillame was out walking. He had just had dinner with his friend Alain Pantelic, a doctor he had gone to school with. Alain told him he was getting engaged to a girl he had met working in the hospital and wanted to
hear what Guillame thought. It turned out all Alain really wanted to do was talk about how great his fiancée was, which was also fine with Guillame, who was happy for his old pal. Alain had recently been promoted to head of cancer research at the university hospital and Guillame had teased him about that, saying he was too sentimental to be a scientist, he should be a country practitioner, delivering little fat babies somewhere like Normandy or the Loire Valley.

Alain had protested loudly but he suspected it was true. He felt he might be too emotional for the job. He hated cancer. Guillame walked alone along Rue de Vaugirard from the restaurant on Boulevard Saint Michel but he felt fat after the big dinner and thought a stroll might help him sleep. He walked past the big green doors at the entrance to his building and turned right up Rue de Rennes to Montparnasse. The rain got heavier suddenly and began to waterfall, so he sought sanctuary. He stumbled out of it into a giant empty bras-serie for a brandy and a coffee. He sat down at a window table, took off his hat and scarf, joked politely about the weather to the aged waiter who, coincidentally, was called Virgil, and lit a cigarette. Then he looked across and saw Claudette, sitting alone at a table with a coffee and a book in front of her.

Her hair was wet and sticking to the side of her head and he almost gasped aloud at her beauty. She looked over at him and smiled. He smiled back. She looked away and then looked back at him and he was smitten. Claudette had been in town for only a few weeks and, after getting a job as an assistant in the bedding department at Bon Marché and finding a tiny room, had set out in pursuit of her lover. She had scores of offers from drooling youths and desperate older men but she just hadn’t met anybody who made her want to be sinful. That changed when Guillame walked into the brasserie that she liked to read in. He was tall and strong looking with sandy-colored hair that was a little too long. He was slightly overweight and had kind eyes that were deep and blue. His clothes looked crumpled, as if he had been busy tickling someone or taking a nap on the floor. At fortysomething he was in his prime; he seemed confident and sexy and experienced and independent.

She put her hand inside her shirt and adjusted her bra strap.

Guillame looked over. He was already hard and his heart thumped in his chest. Boom boom.

Claudette knew what she wanted. She picked up her book and her cigarettes and walked over to his table. He looked up at her.

“May I sit?”

He nodded, afraid that he would squeak if he tried to talk.

They lived together for nine years in Guillame’s large apartment at 66 Rue de Vaugirard, just next to the Luxembourg Gardens. She was his consolation in his career failures and his glamorous companion in his successes. When he won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Hiendrich Schmidtennacht, the conflicted Nazi poetry teacher, in
Le Pamplemousse du L’ Horreur,
she was by his side on the red carpet, drawing greedy snapping flashes from the ratty entertainment paparazzi. When his next film,
Big Friendly American Wedding Celebrity,
a ludicrous, formulaic American studio picture starring the lounge singer Leon Martini, was panned by critics and ignored by audiences, she took him on holiday to Corfu and eventually got him laughing about it.

It really was a stupid movie, as most of them are.

She learned social graces from him, how to be polite to The Evil in civilized society. He taught her how to dress and apply makeup, he bought her clothes, and she in turn loved him with her body and soul. She loved him because he was funny and sweet and other women desired him. She loved him because he was vulnerable and afraid of failure and she loved him because he was so grateful and indulgent of her sexual curiosity, which was boundless.

In their apartment they experimented with lotions and oils and devices and manuals and stimulants and aphrodisiacs. They laughed out loud at their efforts. Sometimes they brought in an extra participant, always female, but they only used this woman to enhance the lovemaking between themselves, like a tool. This would sometimes make the third party feel like a prostitute, which they occasionally were.

Claudette insisted that they never include a second man. She said that would be different. Guillame was relieved and delighted. They also celebrated the mundane in the way only the French and Italians truly can. Each meal was a delight, a walk in the park was a work of art, sitting in a café was a memorable experience. They truly lived and were blessed with unlimited happiness, which, of course, is limited.

One warm night as they fucked enthusiastically in their little kitchen, Guillame broke a little vial of amyl nitrate under his nose at the moment of orgasm and suffered a massive heart attack just as he ejaculated. Boom Boom.

He was dead before he lost his erection. He died inside her.

France mourned as it does when an artist dies.

She had to be heavily sedated the night of his funeral. She had a vivid dream.

She was walking in the garden of Gethsemane, dressed in the habit of her schooldays. She could hear music, and looked off to her left. Sitting under an olive tree at a harpsichord was a hideously ugly dwarf playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” She recognized him as the composer Anthony Boyd-Webster. She smiled at him and he stopped playing and waved over at her and smiled back through a set of joke teeth, the type that can be bought at a party store. She walked on and then stopped as Lord Jesus stood in front of her, wearing a beautiful pinstripe suit by Hugo Boss.

“Hello,” said Jesus.

“I’m angry with you,” she said defiantly. “You took my man.”

Jesus smiled patiently. “He wasn’t yours.”

“I loved him.”

“I still do.”

“Well, so do I, obviously, but he’s dead.”

“And what does that mean?” inquired Jesus, who was really beginning to irritate Claudette with his holier-than-thou manner although she was respectful of the fact that he actually was.

“Look,” explained Christ, “I wanted to let you know, to perhaps lighten your load a little, that you are extremely important in God’s plan.”

“So He has a plan, then?”

“Oh yes, and your part in it is—you are His consolation to those about to fall, your beauty, charm, and sex are salve for the pain of passing. Claudette Bruchard is God’s Gift to dying men.”

“I don’t want to be that.”

“We all have our crosses to bear,” said Jesus sadly.

Then she was awake. It took only a couple of seconds for her to completely forget the dream and remember that her heart was broken and she was in hell.

A string of lovers followed, all with the same horrifying results. Nigel, a dashing English Formula One Racing driver who hit a pillar in Monte Carlo at 170 miles an hour. The last thing to go through his mind was “Shi—” He didn’t even have time for
t
.

Then there was Don, her American, who was electrocuted while changing a lightbulb in his office; Mikael, a Russian mobster who was assassinated as he left Kievskya Station on a business trip home to Moscow; and most recently, Bruce, an Australian diplomat at the embassy in Paris who had drunkenly stepped in front of a Metro train only six months previously.

Bruce had finally sent Claudette over the edge. She had told him that she was cursed, that men dropped like flies around her. He had laughed and said he was Australian and that flies didn’t die over there, they just went to Brisbane. She didn’t know what he meant but she felt comforted. She had been with him for a year and had started to believe that everything was going to be okay until that horrible night. She had hardly spoken since, shunning male company at all times, which was difficult for someone as beautiful and with such a large sexual appetite.

She walked from café to café. Drinking coffee, brooding, and trying to make herself feel better by reading infantile, optimistic pop-culture psychology books with titles like
Chicken Soup for the Newly Bereaved
and
Why Am I Afraid to Love?
She was rereading a book an American acquaintance had given her years ago,
Men Are Asteroids, Women Are Meteorites,
by Some Idiot, when she first made eye contact with George.