by Ken Grimwood
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 Shrim
pton 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."
He complied, though he wanted only to lie back and give his mind up to these recurring waves of quietude and acceptance. In the small bedroom downstairs Sylla undressed him, ran her red-tipped fingers over his body, leaving a trail of cool fire wherever they touched. She stepped out of her mini-skirt and stockings, pulled her thin blouse over her head, drew his mouth to her right nipple. He sucked it with more curiosity than desire, like an infant suddenly aware of its place in the chain of existence, an omniscient child seeing its own birth, death, rebirth.
Sylla guided him inside her, and he grew hard automatically. Her wet inner flesh was like something ancient, something protohuman; receptive yang to his vital yin, together the creators of these endlessly regenerating cycles, these—
Jeff opened his eyes and the girl’s face changed shape again. It had become Gretchen’s face. He was fucking Gretchen, fucking his daughter: she to whom he had given life, yet who had never been.
He withdrew from her with instant revulsion.
"Awwrr!" the girl cried in frustration and reached for his limp penis, stroking it. "C’mon, luv, c’mon!"
The waves within his mind no longer soothed; they battered his emotions with a vicious impact. Cycles, wheels … within that universal chain there was no place for him, no pattern that would fit his mutant existence out of time.
The girl parted her blood-red lips and bent to suck him. He pushed her face away toward the pulsing wall, tried to shut out what he had seen in her.
"Mind if we join the party?" Sharla stood in the open doorway, naked. Behind her was a skinny young man with long, straggly hair and a pitted face. Sylla frowned uncertainly at the newcomers, then relaxed and let fall the sheet she had pulled up to cover her breasts.
"Might’s well," Sylla said. "Acid didn’t seem to agree with your mate, here."
"Acid?" the young man said excitedly. "You got some with you?"
Sylla nodded, reached for the purse she’d brought downstairs.
"Here, give us a couple hits, willya?" he said. Then, to Sharla: "You ever fuck on acid? It’s tremendous!"
They were on the bed, all of them, Sharla stroking Sylla’s hair, Gretchen’s hair—or was it Linda doing that?—and then the stranger became Martin Bailey, blood from the self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head spewing across the sheets, soaking the naked bodies of Jeff’s wife and daughter, they were dead all of them dead except for him and he couldn’t die no matter how many times he died. He was the wheel; he was the cycle.
Sharla tapped her foot impatiently as they waited in the first class lounge at San Francisco International. Her face was ghostly pale, after the latest mode, framed in the sleek straightness of her black hair. Her eyebrows were bleached to near-invisibility, her lipstick like a streak of chalk. The crazily zebra-patterned op-art print dress and white tights she wore completed the utter lack of color.
"How much longer now?" she asked curtly.
Jeff glanced at his watch. "Should be boarding any minute."
"And then how long till we get there?"
"It’s a four-and-a-half hour flight." He sighed. "We’ve been through this before."
"I don’t know why we’re doing this, anyway. I thought you were sick of the goddamned tropics. That’s exactly what you said before we left Brazil. Why do we have to go to Hawaii all of a sudden?"
"I want some quiet time in the sun, nobody else around for a change. I want some time to think, O.K.? And we’ve been through this before, too."
She shot him a cynical look. "Yeah, well, you just think you’ve been through everything before, don’t you?"
He stared back at her, incredulous. "What do you mean by that?"
"All that crap about living your life over again, all that reincarnation shit or whatever."
Jeff turned in the uncomfortable seat, grasped her tightly by the wrist. "Where did you hear anything like that? I never—"
"Let go of me," she said, shaking her hand loose from his. "Jesus Christ, you can’t get it up for one little dolly bird, you freak out on acid, and all of a sudden you want to run away, you start grabbing at me—"
"Shut up, Sharla. Just tell me what you heard, and where."
"Mireille told me all about it last year. Said you tried to lay some kind of mystical trip on her, told her you’d died and come back again. What a crock!"
The revelation struck Jeff with almost physical force. Of all the people he had known in any of his lives, there’d been some sense of empathy and understanding in Mireille alone that had led him to share his secret with her. He’d thought she wouldn’t make judgments about what he told her, would keep it as private as it must be kept …
&nbs
p; "Why—" His voice cracked. "Why did she tell you?"
"'Cause she thought it was funny. We all did; everybody we knew in Paris was laughing behind your back for months."
He put his head in his hands, trying to absorb the implication of what she was telling him. "I trusted Mireille," he said softly.
Sharla snorted with derision. "Right, your special little girlfriend, uh-huh. I made it with her first, you know; who do you think told her to go hop in bed with you, get you out of that stupid moody funk you were in half the time? I was getting sick of you. I just wanted to have a good time and get laid. Mireille would have fucked a goddamn monkey if Jean-Claude and I told her to, so we did. Weren’t you the lucky one?"
A woman’s disembodied voice called their flight. Jeff made his way to the gate in a stupor of disbelief, Sharla beside him, a tight, satisfied smile on her face. They found their seats on the right side of the still-new Boeing 707, just behind the wing. Neither spoke as they stowed their carry-on luggage and fastened their seat belts. A stewardess came by, offering candy and gum; Jeff mutely declined. Sharla took a piece of orange hard candy, sucked at it with relish.
"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome aboard Pan American World Airways Flight 843 from San Francisco to Honolulu. Your pilot today is Captain Charles Kimes, and with him in the cockpit are First Officer Fred Miller, Second Officer Max Webb, and Flight Engineer Fitch Robertson. We’ll be flying at an altitude of approximately…"
Jeff stared out the window at the drab gray tarmac rolling slowly past.
In truth, he had no one to blame but himself. He had set the tone for this heedless, sybaritic replay when he’d gone to Las Vegas with the express purpose of seeking out Sharla.
"… be serving lunch about thirty minutes after we take off. Please observe the No Smoking and the Fasten Seat Belts signs when they are lit, and for your comfort…"