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How diabolically ironic it was that I should have been summoned to the serious study of film by these French and Italian sirens. As I remember them now—Gina Lollobrigida, Simone Signoret, Martine Carol—they brim with the bright promise of love, the insurgent fertility of life. But the hunger of the flesh as I learned it from them was only the beginning of a darker adventure; though I could never have guessed it, beyond them lay the labyrinthine tunnel that led down and down into the world of Max Castle. There, among old
heresies and forgotten deities, I would learn that both life and love can be bait in a deadly trap.

Still I must be grateful, knowing that the awkward desire these few fleeting moments of cinematic seduction quickened in me was the first early-morning glimmer of adulthood. Through them, I was learning the difference between the sexual and the sensual. Sex, after all, is a spontaneous appetite; it bubbles up from the adolescent juices of the body without shape or style. We are born to it like all the simple animals that mindlessly rut and mate. But sensuality—raw instinct reworked by art into a thing of the mind that can be played with endlessly—
that
is grown-up human. It idealizes the flesh into a fleshless emblem.

Plato (so some scholars believe) had something like the movies in mind when he wrote his famous Allegory of the Cave. He imagines an audience—it is the whole sad human race—imprisoned in the darkness, chained by its own deceiving fascinations as it watches a parade of shadows on the wall. But I think the great man got it wrong. Or let us say he couldn't, at that distance, know that the illusions of film, when shaped by a deft hand, may become true raptures of the mind, diamond-bright images of undying delight. At any rate, that's what these beauties of the screen became for me—enticing creatures of light, always there, unchanging, incorruptible. Again and again, for solace or inspiration, I reach back to recapture their charm, the recollection of something more real than my own experience.

One exquisite memory embodies that far-off period of youthful fantasy more vividly than all others. I see it as a softly focused square of light, and see myself dazzled and aroused, seated in the embracing darkness, savoring the enticement. It was, so I remembered, a moment from Renoir's
Une Partie de Campagne.
Then some years later I discovered that I was mistaken. I saw the movie again; it contains no such scene. I searched in other likely places; I never found it. I turned to friends and colleagues for help. “Do you remember the movie where … ?”

But they didn't.

Where does it come from? Is it some form of benign hallucination? Perhaps it is, after all, a composite creation pieced together from all the naively romantic images I bring away from those years, the memory of a love story I never saw, and yet of all the love stories I once wanted the movies to tell me. A voluptuous peasant girl waits at the
edge of a wood for her lover. As naturally as she breathes, she removes her clothes and wades into the inviting river. The camera casually surveys her body, plump and rounded, not perfect but wholesome as fresh milk. The heat of an idyllic summer glows on her skin. She reaches up to tie back her unruly hair. The soft contour of her breast is revealed. Languidly, she stretches out over the bright water … she floats in the sunlight.

Which brings me to Clare, who turned my voyeuristic fantasies into flesh and blood and, in the process, taught me the art of film.

It was by way of my infatuation with foreign movies that I first took notice of Clare. That was surely the only way she could have caught my lusting adolescent eye, since she was nothing like the going standard of female beauty in late-fifties America, the era of the bouffant hairdo and the thrust brassiere. Plain and pockmarked at the cheeks, she nonetheless scorned the use of makeup and resolutely shielded her face behind heavy tortoiseshell glasses. Her hair, mousy-brown and coarse, was drawn back severely in a tight rubber-banded braid. She dressed on all occasions with an almost monastic austerity: a baggy black cardigan, long black skirt, black stockings, black flat-heeled shoes. Sometimes the cardigan was replaced by a baggy boatneck sweater that slid across her shoulders to left or right, revealing no trace of a bra strap in either direction. She was, in brief, everything I had grown up to regard as sexually disqualified. Moreover, she was old—certainly in her early thirties.

For months after I began attending The Classic, Clare was no more than a featureless fixture at the theater. She was simply the unsmiling, unwelcoming woman who sold tickets at the door, poured the espresso, and then stood morosely at the rear through every film, arms folded, smoking an illegal cigarette beneath The Classic's one, overworked
air vent. At most, I registered her presence with distinct unease. Her manner was chill and dismissive, as if we, the patrons, were a necessary inconvenience in running the theater.

At the time I was keeping close company with one Geoff Reuben, a consummate film buff. Geoff had been born into the world of movies. His parents, along with countless uncles and aunts, worked for all the studios at various low-level jobs that nonetheless bespoke glamour to me. He'd become my constant companion at The Classic. There was in fact no way to avoid his companionship, since he came every night—usually bringing Irene, a film-studies graduate three years his senior and five years mine. At the time, Geoff and Irene were living together in an off-campus apartment. This made them my model of bohemian daring; it also further cemented the connection between cinema and sex in my fevered imagination. Irene may not have been much to look at; she was on the dumpy side and woefully bucktoothed, but how I wished I had a girl like her in my life, someone who had studied in Paris, spoke French, and had been to the Cinémathèque. Astutely picking up on my secret longing, Geoff had—quite generously—offered to share Irene with me.

I was astonished by the proposition. And more so still by the shameless, even coquettish, ease with which Irene accepted the prospect. At the time I didn't even know arrangements like this had a name. But I'd recently learned about something very like it. Where else but at the movies? Anna Magnani in
The Golden Coach
plays an adventuress who takes many lovers to her bed in no particular legal or emotional order, simply as whim and opportunity dictate. Now here across the table from me was a real live woman willing to do the same. The idea alone was enough to make me dizzy. But then, as I recall, I began to wonder if the idea alone might not be enough. What if it all went wrong somehow? What if Irene decided Geoff was more desirable? What if Irene couldn't satisfy two men? What if I couldn't satisfy one woman? What if there were big scheduling problems about the bedroom or the bathroom? How did something like this work anyway? Worst of all, what if it just proved to be … nothing much? That would be one great sexual fantasy blown to bits. Some things, I began to think, ought never to leave the realm of imagination.

Well, we went ahead and tried it … or were in the process of trying it. I would spend the occasional weekend in their apartment, and the occasional night in Irene's bed. As I'd suspected, on closer
inspection Irene turned out to be built on the saggy-baggy side, rather too much the Earth Mother for my tastes. But then, couldn't the same be said about Anna Magnani herself? Yet, given the chance, she managed in role after role to come across with what the men in her life were after. I tried to think of Irene that way, and, at least with the lights out, it more or less worked—especially after I discovered how thrilling it was to hear the woman beside me in the dark whispering incomprehensible French endearments. And that wasn't Irene's only redeeming quality as a lover. She was quite the worldly young woman. She'd traveled, she'd moved in supremely brilliant intellectual circles, she had stories to tell. Once she'd sat behind Jean-Paul Sartre at the movies. A Jerry Lewis comedy.

“Jean-Paul Sartre went to see Jerry Lewis?”

“He goes to see every movie that plays in Paris. He's an absolute movie freak.”

“I never realized.”

“Oh yes. He has a whole philosophy about seeing things. He calls it ‘violation by sight.' He says, 'What is seen is possessed; to see is to
deflower.'
It's all very phenomenological.”

“Wow!”

“ ‘The unknown object is given as virgin. It has not delivered up its secret; man must snatch its secret away from it.' You see what he means?”

“Yes. Sort of. I guess … ”

“Going to the movies. It's a kind of visual rape.”

I'm sure what Jean-Paul Sartre had in mind as visual rape was very deep indeed. What I had in mind was Nylana the Jungle Girl hanging from the trees.

I can't say that the rest of my three-way relationship with Geoff and Irene was all that satisfying—except for the risqué air it allowed us to wear when we were out together in public. For, of course, we were doing nothing to keep our arrangement secret. Probably we just looked like three smug and giggly kids—but as it turned out, my daring little experiment with Geoff and Irene contributed just enough self-assurance to my otherwise unformed character to usher me into the great erotic adventure that lay at hand.

One night, after seeing
Hiroshima Mon Amour
at The Classic (as usual the movie was too deep for me; but, again as usual, I found the love scenes mesmerizing), Geoff, Irene, and I stopped off at Moishe's for strong coffee and film talk. This had become our almost nightly
ritual. Irene, who always did most of the talking, was doing her best to explain how brilliantly Alain Resnais had used “hermeneutic reconfiguration” to achieve “cathartic excitation” … or something like that. Though I had learned to squint and nod knowingly in all the right places, the analysis, as she could tell, was wasted on me. “Don't you see,” Irene insisted, “in the opening sequence we can't tell if that's sweat or atomic fallout covering the writhing naked bodies.” Maybe we couldn't, but a lot I cared. Plain old writhing naked bodies on the screen were enough to give me my money's worth. Poor Irene had just about given up trying to enlighten the barbarian when Don Sharkey and Clare came in accompanied by a man and woman.

The woman, I noticed at once, was a slightly older replica of Clare: the same dour clothes, the same unadorned face, the same skinned-back hair. Geoff, one of Sharkey's fans, at once invited the new arrivals to join us. They did. And for the next few hours, Clare sat at the far end of the table immersed in heavy French conversation with her friends, who, I learned, were visitors from Paris, the publishers of a highly regarded cinema journal. The two women guzzled black coffee and smoked nonstop, one pungent French cigarette after another (Disque Bleu was the name of the brand. Where could I buy them, I wondered). Though I didn't understand a word of what they said, I was spellbound by their flow of heady discourse. I can't say if that was the first night I looked closely at Clare, but I surely looked. My gaze wandered from her to her friend and back, carefully comparing their identically bored, impassive faces, noting the air of absolute, if casual, authority that colored all they said. From my friends at the table I learned that the two women were disputing the relative merits of montage as opposed to
mise-en-scène
in the work of the New Wave directors—an issue that meant precisely nothing to me.

Slowly, as I watched, a bold hypothesis formed in my mind. Here were two women who chose to look unwomanly in exactly the same way. Two obviously smart women. Smart? For all I knew, judging from the intensity of their talk,
brilliant.
Two brilliant women, speaking French, smoking French cigarettes, discussing French film. Conclusion: the way they looked was … a
look.
A deliberate, carefully devised look. It struck me that I'd seen this look not two weeks before. It was in a movie: Jean Cocteau's
Orpheé.
It was the look of the oh-so-sophisticated female students the hero meets at the café. And didn't the dark woman who played the figure of Death in the film affect much the same austere appearance?

What a dope I was! What I'd ignorantly mistaken for a drab and sexless absence of style was—so I decided that evening on the basis of no greater evidence than what I could see at the far end of the table—the look of French female intellect. These were women of ideas for whom life (and doubtless love) were far too serious, too
existentially
serious (I had lately learned the word in Philosophy 101) to allow them to waste time on frivolities like lipstick, nylons, underwear.

I was improvising wildly, for I knew nothing about Frenchwomen, or French intellect, or existential seriousness. Still, I relished the conjecture. Big ideas were careening through my head, colliding with conventional values and tastes. I was expanding the inherited standards of sexiness that had always governed my life. Right or wrong, here was a thought all my own, the first exploratory step I'd dared to take beyond the worldview of Modesto, California. Moreover, I was allowing this thought, along with my lascivious fascination for French cinema, to rub off on a woman—on Clare, who sold me the tickets of admission that opened this erotic rite of passage to me.

And then there came a moment that might have been among the least memorable in my life, a vapor of the mind that might have been quickly blown into forgetfulness. But before that could happen, events to come would reveal its importance, and the memory would be rescued from extinction: my first encounter with the name “Castle.”

It was the Frenchwoman who brought it up. Turning to Clare, she said something in French which, like all the rest that passed between them, sailed by me without meaning. I was, however, listening intently enough to know it was a question—which led Clare to question back with a single word, “Castle?” Then, after a quick puzzled look at Sharkey beside her, she asked,
“William
Castle?”