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One week later, I vacated Geoff and Irene's apartment and moved in with Clare. My education had begun.

There are moments when a door opens in the mind's eye, and through it we see the path that lies before us in life. Our talent, our calling. Years later that first experience of vocation may still glow as vividly as the recollection of our sexual awakening. In my case, the two moments are intertwined, and at the center of both there is the memory of Clare, lover and teacher. We both knew our relationship was bound to be perishable. The years we spent together were an erotic holiday. Clare never made a secret of the fact that she was grooming me to satisfy her ego; she never asked me to pretend she was more to me than a young man's sexual fantasy come to life. Of course, she
was
more than that. But whatever more she may have been, I understood I mustn't speak of it as “love”—a word she had banished from her autobiographical vocabulary. There was a defensive cynicism about Clare that led her to prefer a tougher style—an emotional abrasiveness, an unsparing contention of minds. For her, honesty between a man and a woman was a sort of martial art, a dry-eyed giving and taking of wounds. I dutifully absorbed many such wounds—hard critical knocks, put-downs, temperamental jabs. They hurt. But nothing hurt more than her ban upon tenderness. I sometimes ached to confess my real affection. Nevertheless, though I wasn't permitted to speak of it (and if I had, it would have been with a clumsiness she despised) I wasn't too green to know there was
something rare and supremely precious between us—a marriage of mind and body.

There are two things movie fans around the world would one day come to know about Clarissa Swann. First, that she was a brilliant critic and stylist. Second, that she could be a pitiless butcher in an argument. The agility of her mind, the slashing acerbity of her wit are on public display in every line she ever wrote. But there was one thing I alone would know about the Clare who was, when I met her, a bitter and bitchy Nobody still years away from becoming the bitter and bitchy Somebody whose reviews would one day grace the pages of
The New York Times.
She could be generous to a fault, at least to someone who came to her, as I did, in submissive awe. Clare always needed an admiring audience, if only an audience of one. Adulation brought out the best in her, which was her honest passion to teach. That virtue was, however, mixed with a pugnacious need to flatten disagreement, to assail and destroy those who questioned her views. In the presence of resistance, she gave no quarter. Ridicule, sarcasm, insult became permissible weapons. But this was only because she
cared
about movies fanatically. In her life, the defense of cinematic excellence was a cause of supreme importance. She'd created her critical standards against fierce opposition and had suffered because of them.

When, in the mid-forties, she entered Barnard as a freshman, Clare precociously sought to merge her youthful love of film with the literary studies she chose as her major. In that period, the universities were adamantly closed to the vulgarity of mere movies. After all, what could Milton have in common with Mickey Mouse? Accordingly, Clare found herself penalized by hidebound academics whenever she dared to bring film into her classwork. The opposition of the day was unbudging; no one would admit the academic legitimacy of her interest. Before her sophomore year was finished, she quit college in an act of intellectual rebellion. The sting of that early rejection never healed. Years later, when her cause had been more than vindicated in the universities, part of her continued to live in those scorning classrooms, fighting old battles with smug professors for whom the printed word was the last word in culture.

When the war ended, she spent the remainder of the forties in Paris soaking up the lively appreciation of film that has characterized the French intelligentsia since the days of Louis Lumière. She worked (unpaid) as usher, ticket seller, concierge in the
ciné
clubs that began
to reappear after the war. After two or three years of drudgery, she managed to become a research assistant (again unpaid) at the Cinémathèque, the mecca of the Parisian film community. There she quickly attached herself to the circle of New Wave theorists then forming around the influential French critic André Bazin. Her own education in film unfolded amid the raucous debates she heard waged in the clubs by the likes of Godard, Truffaut, Resnais. Eventually, thanks to a boost from the admiring Bazin, she picked up still another unpaid position editing and then writing—in French—for the landmark journal
Cahiers du Cinema.
In this way, she acquired the distinctive Gallic intensity that would lend her work its peculiar appeal—though fortunately without the Gallic pomposity that frequently comes with it.

Somewhere along the line she met Sharkey, who, as Clare told it, was little more than an expatriate bum haunting the cafes of the Left Bank, and their always uneasy lust and disgust partnership began. With money from her parents, Clare bankrolled Sharkey's first film house in Paris. It did modestly well, showing mainly popular American movies—Walt Disney, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy. At one point, it ran
Horsefeathers
for nine months solid; Clare claimed she could recite the entire film word perfect, and one night, with the aid of enough booze, she did … in forty-three minutes flat. Had she been the least bit drunker, she assured me, she could have included Harpo's pantomime bits. By the early fifties, Sharkey, convinced that in Paris he would always be a small fish in a big pond, was anxious to return to the States. With what they'd earned and learned from the Paris venture, he and Clare relocated to Los Angeles, Sharkey's hometown. The Classic never became the success they expected; still, it had served to hold them together in love and struggle—though for the life of me, I couldn't see why. Sharkey seemed so hopelessly punched-out, so lacking in the sophistication I found in Clare … what did she see in him? I didn't have the nerve to ask outright, but once when I edged close enough to the subject, Clare volunteered a sad, wistful confession.

“You'd never guess it, but once upon a time—about a million years ago—Sharkey was a beautiful animal. That's really all there ever was between us. Brute sexuality. His taste has always been abysmal, you know. Stuck at that macho-obnoxious level that certain penis-anxious male types think will keep them youthful. But he was as close as I
would get to going to bed with Dana Andrews. Haven't you ever noticed the resemblance? It might still be there, if you restored the hair at the top and pared away the flab at the bottom. To tell you the truth, I haven't looked lately.”

Dana Andrews?
Lauras
Lieutenant Mark MacPherson? By God, she was right. I'd never studied Sharkey closely enough to notice. Now I did, and underneath the pouches and creases he did show the remnants of movie-star good looks. The flab in question, however, was more than a matter of physique. Whatever he might have been when Clare met him, he'd long since turned into an incorrigible floater. With The Classic as his base of operations, he seemed content to spend the rest of his years playing senior cinema guru to his own small circle of young, mainly pushover female admirers, spinning tales of his years among the New Wave directors. He'd developed a line of intellectualoid banter, liberally sprinkled with gutter French, which he'd haul out at parties. With luck, his act might just manage to get him into bed with the prettiest face in the crowd before he was too soused to carry on coherently.

Such pretentious dissipation might have satisfied Sharkey, but it was hardly what Clare was prepared to settle for. She wanted much more: success, acclaim, vindication. The occasional editing stints she picked up with students and professors were never going to bring her that. Her writing still appeared in esoteric French film journals—printed for no pay. That and her film notes, so assiduously researched and written, were all she had to show for herself at the age of thirty-two. It wasn't enough. For her, The Classic had become a drowning pool where she was sinking into obscurity.

From time to time, Clare took up with young men like myself, looking for the acquiescence and admiration that her undernourished ego craved. How often she found it, I can't say. But from me she received what she needed in abundance. An instinctive teacher, she quickly recognized me for the bright but unformed boy I was, and set to work fashioning me into both paramour and apprentice. At the time, a dismal interlude in her life, it may have been resignation that prompted her generosity. Seeing no future for herself, she labored to transplant her intellectual resources into my otherwise unoccupied young mind. All that was required of me was an unstinting willingness to be molded in her hands—to take over her knowledge, her values, above all her loyalties and antagonisms. For this, I was the ideal
choice. Deference and passivity have always been my strong suit. I confess that my intelligence is that of the attentive follower, the gifted mimic.

But there was one thing more that suited me to Clare's tutelage. I don't know what luck Clare had with other young men, but her methods of instruction meshed perfectly with my belated sexual development. How shall I put it? Very well—Clare was as kinky as she was brilliant. And she didn't keep these qualities in separate compartments. Rather, she mixed sex and intellect in ways that might have shocked others and driven them off in bewilderment. But for me, I almost blush to admit, the combination worked perfectly.

A major part of what Clare taught me about film I learned in bed—and I don't mean in relaxed, postcoital conversation, but in active process. At first, until I grasped that this was Clare's preferred style of instruction, I found myself dumbfounded. When, in the act of love, she began to murmur a stream-of-consciousness lecture on Russian Formalism in my ear, I felt certain I should pause and take respectful note. But no. With a pelvic shove and a slap to my buttocks, she bullied me on, almost angrily. I continued; I accelerated the rhythm of our intercourse; her words flowed more rapidly, her voice grew stronger. Spread luxuriantly beneath me, with eyes closed, sweat beaded across her upper lip, she became more articulate by the moment, even as her breath caught and raced. That was the first session in what would become a frenzied cerebral-genital curriculum. In the nights that followed, the theories of Arnheim, Munsterberg, Mitry lathered from her like prepared lectures. What was more surprising—I was taking it all in! The ideas were registering vividly. It was as if my body, totally preoccupied with pouring its libidinous energy into Clare, transformed my brain into a
tabula rasa
on which every word could be imprinted.

When we'd finished on that first occasion, we lay for a long while in silent exhaustion. Then, as she reached for the inevitable cigarette at the bedside, Clare turned to me with a slyly provocative look. “Of course, you have to take Balázs into account as the definitive statement of Formalism.” And when would I learn about Balazs, whoever he was? I knew it would be once again at Clare's quaint idea of the proper time.

I was an apt pupil and quickly adjusted to Clare's unique form of erotic pedagogy. Perhaps I was the only one of her lovers who ever had. In any case, my ready response to her eccentric ways cemented
our relationship beautifully. I was learning in exactly the way she wanted to teach. I absorbed Kracauer's Realist theory while Clare held me nuzzling to her breast, maneuvering a teasing nipple between my lips; I mastered Bazin's Myth of Total Cinema while she performed a playful striptease-lecture; I received a magisterial analysis of the contrast between iconic and indexical imagery while busied in prolonged cunnilingual service, the lush river of my mentor's thought rising and dipping with the tempo of her excitement. Only gradually did I come to see that Clare's teaching technique wasn't designed entirely for my benefit. A compulsively cerebral woman, she was able to use these intellectual distractions to build her orgasms to the point of maximum intensity.

As for me, this unique instructional method has indelibly stamped my study of film with a remarkable quality. No matter how seemingly abstruse the concept, if I learned it from Clare, it remains suffused with sexual heat. Perhaps I find myself lecturing on Astruc's theory of the
camera-stylo;
to my students, it is simply a piece of academic furniture—but remembering the wickedly inventive stimulus with which Clare once punctuated the idea, I am beset by subtle genital tremors. No one could understand the sensation. No doubt there's some Pavlovian principle involved.

The comic side of all this didn't escape us; that was part of the enjoyment. One night, after a particularly vigorous romp, I lay across Clare's body, my spent member still in place. Taking a bite of my ear, she announced, “Well, I think you're finally ready to learn about the possibilities of the deep shot.” For years afterward, I couldn't view a good piece of depth-of-field cinematography without reexperiencing that night, that moment, and thrilling with a secret shudder of delight.

I remember those early years with Clare as the earthly paradise of my youth. Ecstasies of the mind, pleasures of the flesh mingled in our days and nights. She turned my world upside down and inside out, beginning with my ideals of feminine beauty. I'd never have thought, until Clare took me to her bed, that I could find such stimulation in an unshaven female leg or armpit. In that era of sterilized Styrofoam femininity, Clare was all natural odors and organic textures, a Neorealist movie heroine come to life. Just as dramatically, she revolutionized my taste in manners, morals, art, politics, even cuisine. I adopted her as my model in all these. I tried especially to affect her elitist style of mind, though far too stiltedly—with the result that
from time to time Clare had to take me down a peg or two. As on the night I asked if she knew that Jean-Paul Sartre believed looking at movies was a kind of “violation by sight”—which was about all I knew about Jean-Paul Sartre, and that at secondhand.