by Rozsa Gaston
The first stage of Hegel’s dialectic of existence was Being, followed by Nothingness. He then showed that the first stage actually was also the second stage, even though they seemed diametrically opposed. In other words, what was coming into being also was returning to nothingness. Finally, both concepts were united as Becoming. Wasn’t that what orgasm was all about? First, a total movement of will, then a complete smashing into oblivion of the ego, that sense of fission at the moment of climax, finally followed by bliss, or the moment of becoming.
A concept I’d wrestled with in my history of philosophy class had been the actual definition of dialectic itself, something we’d studied before moving on to various examples of the concept offered by Socrates, Plato, Goethe, Hegel, and others. The term ‘dialectic’ was based on the concept that change moves in spirals, not circles.
I jumped at the image of spirals leading to change. Hadn’t that been what had just happened to me? Wasn’t the process of orgasm a spiraling upward of pleasure, punctuated by periods of rest, then ultimately leading to climactic explosion? The clockwise stroking circles that led me up the pleasure path weren’t just two dimensional. They were three dimensional spirals or helixes that led to waves of pleasure after each interval of stroking and stopping, until finally the wave crested, and my being shattered into nothingness.
It was then that the Earth moved. That was the moment of change, of transformation. Something profoundly and permanently changed inside of me each time I had an orgasm. Nothing more exciting had ever happened to me before.
The concept of transformation had always stirred my Aquarian-with-Aries-rising nature. No wonder Jean-Michel hadn’t wanted me to experience earth-shattering bliss. If I had, it would have connoted change, a shifting of who I was. He would have perceived such a shift as moving away from him, escaping the vision of me he had locked me into.
Pascal didn’t seem to have a big problem with change. Perhaps he hadn’t pondered the fundamentals of dialectic, so wasn’t bothered when I changed before his eyes. Besides, how could he know I was changing if he hardly knew who I was in the first place?
As I lay beneath my lover’s sleeping form, I marveled at the insights to which my eyes were now opened. It was as if the physical, earthly side of my being had manifested the theoretical concepts I’d learned but hadn’t understood over the past four years. My education finally made sense. Metaphysical concepts weren’t just posited for no reason. They were grounded in natural law. I fell asleep, at one with nature, fully arrived at the third stage of anyone’s dialectic.
Three days later, I received a postcard from my mother letting me know their flight plans had been delayed by one week. My sister’s passport had not yet arrived, but would be ready by the end of the following week. Their reservation at the Hotel Étoile was pushed back to July fifth through eighth.
The plan change gave me additional time to play house with Pascal – as well as rack up more tally marks on the wall at the head of his bed. We were both happy to hear the news.
I planned to introduce Pascal to my mom and sister. My mother had been an aficionado of the school of international affairs from way back. On her own grand tour of Europe shortly after graduating from U Cal Berkeley, she left the United States as an engaged woman and returned to break her engagement to the nice boy from Georgia of whom her mother had highly approved.
In one of my infrequent visits to my mother in Manhattan, she had regaled my sister and me with a hilarious rendition of what happened on that trip. She began with a frank confession that no thought of her fiancé had crossed her mind for the entire flight over from New York to Brussels – one of my mother’s strong points is a complete absence of judgmental censure of anyone’s behavior, including her own. She could tell a straight story about herself up to a certain point.
When she arrived in Brussels, she was greeted by the group’s tour guide, a tall, strapping Austrian man in his mid-twenties. He wore a beret. My mother’s sigh while describing him told me he’d been very handsome. I envisioned someone like Liesl’s boyfriend-turned-Nazi, Rolf, from The Sound of Music. By the end of two weeks, touring the great monuments of Europe in the company of Rudi, my mother came to the realization that a whole world was out there for her to explore, with only her fiancé standing in the way. In her mind, the engagement was over.
Then, some sort of rupture occurred that incensed my grandmother, who had financed the trip. She’d sputtered and fumed about it whenever the subject came up during my childhood. I had never been able to piece together what actually happened, other than my mother had broken every rule in my grandmother’s rulebook as soon as she’d gotten out from under her thumb on the other side of the Atlantic. I could hardly blame her.
My mother left the tour in Vienna and struck out on her own for a few days. It was the summer of 1955. Vienna had just regained its sovereignty, after a decade of allied occupation post-World War II. My grandmother raged over her daughter’s astonishing naïveté and complete obliviousness to the dangers of being a virginal, twenty-two year old college co-ed wandering around Europe by herself.
I sensed there was more to the story. My mother was not a brash or foolhardy type, more a delicate English rose. She wouldn’t have left the tour unless there had been a good reason.
Over a bottle of rosé wine, shared by my mother and me, while my sister drank a Coke, the truth more or less leaked out. Something of a romantic nature had occurred between her and Rudi, the tour guide. Then, something else, along the lines of a spat, had taken place, and my mother left the group. From that point on, it got hazy. A great deal of mysterious alluding and half-recollecting from my mother’s mouth, punctuated by nervous giggles, led me to believe she wandered around completely defenseless and vulnerable for a day or two in Vienna, on her own, until, at some point, she sat on a park bench and some older guy tried to pick her up. The rest of the story blurred into laughter, along with the intake of a good deal more wine.
I didn’t know my mother well, but I’d spent enough time with her to know when she giggled nervously like that, it wasn’t because something was funny. It was her way of expressing hysteria. Something had taken place she couldn’t share with us.
She never did. The upshot was, she never reconnected with the tour but returned home on her scheduled flight. Shortly thereafter, she broke off her engagement with her fiancé, a Southern Baptist man studying to be a career diplomat, whom she’d met at college.
Whatever happened to her, I hoped it was good. At a minimum, it rearranged her worldview so that she couldn’t go back to being the same docile, affianced virgin she had left the United States as – precisely the point of an educational tour abroad, but not what my grandmother had in mind.
In a rare moment, I felt empathy for my mother. As the expression goes, “how you gonna keep ‘em down on the farm once they’ve seen Paree?”
Indeed.
Her epiphany occurred in Vienna, mine in Paris. We were alike in ways I could never have guessed until meeting Pascal.
I knew the moment I introduced him to my mother, she’d see what was going on, add it all up, and smile to herself. She’d been there herself, half a lifetime ago.
There was no way she would condemn me for having a mad fling with a Frenchman. What was the point of being in one’s early twenties, newly-graduated from college, if not to have a fling in a foreign country? It was basically an invisible bullet point on the European Grand Tour agenda, one American college grads had followed for over a century. Edith Wharton would have approved, with the proviso that such a connection have a firm beginning, middle, and end – especially an end.
Within seventy-two hours of my mother and sister’s arrival, we’d be on a train out of the Gare du Nord, Paris’s largest international train station, departing for Italy, where we planned to visit Florence, Rome, then Venice. It saddened me to think of leaving Pascal. He’d unlocked the door to my womanhood. He would always remain in my heart.
That weekend, we met Gera
rd at the neighborhood pool. The weather was warm, and the water swimmable. But as Pascal had predicted, almost no one swam. Clusters of young adults lounged everywhere, posing, checking each other out, smoking, and drinking coffee, mineral water, or citron pressé – lemonade, French style.
A few people were in the water, where they talked to each other, splashed a bit, leaned against the side of the pool while slowly kicking their legs – anything except actually swimming. I unloaded my beach bag, while Pascal and Gerard caught up with each other. I’d brought a Paris Match magazine, a notebook, and the latest slim Françoise Sagan novel which I hadn’t yet read. All of her novels were slim and smart, as I imagined Françoise herself to be. Anyone who could come up with a title like Bonjour Tristesse at age eighteen was a genius, in my opinion. The book had been pretty good, too.
The next few days melted together in warm, hazy sensation, punctuated by nightly moments of acute, sublime passion at the hands of Pascal. I was at a crossroads of sensation meeting intellectual awakening. My mind was on fire, racing to articulate the birth of my womanhood into a philosophical framework for the new world of existing in the present moment I now inhabited. Heloise must have wrestled similarly with a desire to intellectually understand the physical sensations her tutor Abelard had set alight in her.
I could imagine them in a garret room on a narrow side street near the cathedral of Notre Dame, only a few dozen miles and eight hundred centuries distant from my own awakening with Pascal. The power of Heloise’s intellect would have impelled her to articulate the sensations provoked by her tutor-turned-lover. I was mad to know what words she might have used to describe her physical awakening. On my next trip to the library at Beaubourg, I would research her. I hoped everything I really wanted to know wouldn’t be written between the lines.
Fully alive and on fire, I lived each day in the present moment while Pascal was at work. It was a new way of being for me. Whether I chose an apple in the marketplace or decided on a cheese at the fromagerie, I was grounded one hundred per cent in the present moment, without thought for past or future. For the first time, I was living the mantra of the sixties spiritual teacher, Ram Dass – be here now.
Finally, I was.
Was this what having an orgasm did to a person? I wondered why every post-orgasmic female didn’t dance barefoot in the streets with flowers in her hair like Brigitte Bardot had done in And God Created Woman. How could women walk around the next day concealing the wonder of what had happened to them the night before? As when I’d first been kissed at age twelve, I spent time looking in the mirror to see if anything in my face or expression had rearranged itself due to my newfound status. Nothing jumped out at me.
My mother and sister arrived on the appointed day, and I went to their hotel to meet them. My sister, technically half sister, was sixteen – a cute, Italian-American brunette, just beginning to turn male heads. Her obliviousness to such new attention was charming. I hoped she’d meet her own Frenchman or Italian one day who’d show her, as Pascal had shown me, how to step over the threshold of waiting to being.
“So what have you been up to?” Nina asked.
“Not much,” I improvised. “Just hanging out with a French guy I met a few weeks ago. Going to his local pool, reading, that kind of thing.” Was my poker face in place? My sister was still innocent. At her age, she didn’t need to know exactly what I’d been up to.
My mother smiled discreetly. Something told me she had an inkling of what had been going on. Despite our separation in my childhood years, DNA bound us together. I was a chip off the old block.
“What’s he like? Is he all suave and French like those French guys in the movies?” Nina probed.
I thought about it. Pascal was very French, but not exactly suave. It had been his lack of pretension in comparison to Gerard that had drawn me to him in the first place. My younger sister might not understand that one of my primary points of attraction to a man was a certain homespun sincerity or purity of spirit. Pascal had it. Thank God, he had other qualities, too, far less pure in scope and intent.
“How about if I have him meet us at a café, so you can check him out for yourself?”
“Oh yay,” Nina shouted, bouncing on the narrow hotel room bed she was lounging on, surrounded by French fashion magazines she had cajoled my mother into buying. After a few minutes of primping, grooming, and hair-gelling, my sister was ready to go out and see the sights.
We descended in a miniscule elevator that barely allowed the three of us to breathe and proceeded directly to my sister’s restaurant of choice, the Hard Rock Café on the Champs-Élysées, where she ordered a hamburger and fries and my mother and I ordered thin-crust pizzas. We would explore Europe, but within strict American guidelines, dictated by Nina’s penchant for dining at six and ordering nothing other than burgers, pizza or pasta.
That evening, I returned to Pascal’s place. He folded me into his arms the minute the door opened.
“How did it go with your maman and soeur-cadette?” he asked, using the French term for younger sister.
“Great. They want to meet you.” I breathed in the scent of balsam bain-douche on his neck. He had been thinking about me, getting ready for my return. A good man. Purity in a man warmed my heart, but an indication of impure forethought could set it on fire.
“Sure. Why not?” He slammed the door shut with his foot, then bit me on the neck. It was all I could do not to faint. Pascal had a certain je ne sais quoi, or “I don’t know what,” in spades. He wasn’t suave in a studied way, but the natural suavity of his moves in the heat of desire won me over every time. He was other-oriented. I was me-oriented. It was a match made in heaven.
Could lust like this last forever? I doubted it, but I was leaving town in a week. There would be no slow diminuendo to our red-hot tango. As Pascal lifted me into his arms I kicked off my shoes. We headed into the bedroom, where he tossed me onto the low bed. As he pulled his shirt over his head, I noted three new notches on the wall. He had been thinking about me, marking notches on his wall while waiting for my return. The thought of it turned me on astoundingly. Was it what he did that I loved or the way he did it? Before I could sort out my thoughts, we moved together toward oblivion.
The next morning, I pretended I was still asleep as I watched Pascal add three more marks on the wall. Idly, I wondered if my mother would detect anything in my face in Pascal’s presence that would give away what we’d been up to recently. I hadn’t been able to see it myself, but mothers were able to see things others couldn’t, weren’t they? If so, I knew she wouldn’t give away my secrets. She had secrets of her own to treasure and hide.
Three days later, my mother, Nina, and I rendezvoused with Pascal at Café de la Paix in Place de l’Opera, in the center of Paris’s Right Bank. I was irked that my little sister seemed under-impressed. I guessed it might take another decade before Nina figured out a standard issue cute guy is not always the guy who finds his way to your heart. Or your clitoris. She would learn.
My mother, on the other hand, took to Pascal right away.
“Ava told me you work in a hospital,” she said in careful high school French. I was sure Pascal found it charming. “How interesting. Do you enjoy your job?”
“Bahh. Someone has to do it, Madame.” The look of puzzlement on his face told me he either didn’t understand why she might think his job was interesting or why she would ask if he enjoyed it. Pascal was a working man, not an artist. The thought that someone might care if he enjoyed his job or not had never crossed his mind. For him, a job was something one did in order to pay the bills.
“What exactly do you do?” My mother wasn’t a social worker for nothing. Her sweet, unassuming tone disarmed her listeners and resulted in getting the full story of their lives out of them, in fine detail. I’d seen her do it before.
“Oh-h, bah! A bit of this, a bit of that.” Pascal’s shoulders went up in the classic Gallic shrug. No mention of washing the dead came up, to my great reli
ef.
While my mother and he chatted, Nina gave him less than ten seconds of a thorough glancing-over, then turned her attention to the ice cream sundae she was devouring. She was oblivious as well as cute. I wondered if we’d ever become close enough to share notes on the men in our lives. I hoped for her sake she’d let in ones like Pascal, whether they scored high on her cute-guy chart or not.
My mother seemed engrossed in whatever Pascal was saying to her. She appeared to bask in his attention. I knew that feeling. Pascal was good at giving his full attention. His conversation wasn’t scintillating, but he was fully present in it. It was something not unimportant.
Glancing his way from time to time, I tried to see him through my sister’s eyes. He wasn’t exactly standard issue attractive. His nose was bulbous at the end and tipped slightly to one side. His light brown hair frizzed and showed signs of receding at the forehead. But his eyes stood out. They were again a different color in the late afternoon sun on the outdoor terrace of the Café de la Paix – amber, like tiger’s eye.
And what a tiger he was. Truly. No one would ever know looking at such a modest, compact man.
“What an attractive scarf you’re wearing. Is it from some special region in France?” my mother was asking. How could she not recognize a keffiyeh? Didn’t she read the New York Times? Arab terrorists in keffiyehs were featured in the A section of the paper almost daily.
“No, Madame. It’s a keffiyeh, an Arab scarf.”
“How charming. Do you have some Arab in your background?”
My mother’s considerable investigative skills were warming up.
“No, Madame, I’m French,” Pascal responded, a tad quickly. “My family is from Alsace-Lorraine, near Strasbourg. The scarf is a gift –” He paused, turning to me, his face slightly red, either from embarrassment or irritation at being mistaken for an Arab. Then, he looked shyly at my mother, “from your daughter.”
“Oh. Isn’t that nice?” Something in my mother’s face told me she sensed the extent of our involvement. I wasn’t one to give men gifts, unless I was sleeping with them. If we were only at the courting stage, I’d limit myself strictly to receiving presents. It was some sort of unspoken rule.