an army nurse in Korea, and after that they settled near Las Vegas, where she was born. Her father was a physicist, Rising Sun expatriate among a half-dozen Third Reich expatriates now working for the victorious Americans in the Nevada desert, and in the afternoons her pregnant mother went out on the patio and lay on the chaise lounge sunbathing in the nuclear light of the tests her husband worked on just beyond the backyard fence. … This was as much of Angie’s past as I was going to find out right away, drinking my vodka tonic and wondering if I said something wrong trying to make conversation: “Four thousand people,” I read out loud from the Herald Tribune, though my voice was still such a hoarse whisper I wasn’t sure anyone could hear me, “married in New York by a crazy Korean who picked their husbands and wives for them,” and then thinking, Shit (as I said it), maybe she’s Korean.
“Maybe,” she said instead, “he would have picked us.”
That answer alone probably got us through the next three years. For that answer alone I avoided certain magazines at the newsstands, certain movies in dark moviehouses full of men, from which your doomed eyes and sorry smile and all the naked rest of you would have stared back at me, if I had gone looking for trouble. … I don’t know whether not looking for trouble was a sign of maturity or cowardice—whatever, Angie had left something behind in New York, and whatever New York had done to her, it was lousy enough that Paris seemed liberating in comparison, for all the ways the city was so ragged around the edges that ’82 summer, hot and overrun with beggars and trash piling up on the streets and people getting pushed in front of oncoming Métro trains. After buying her dinner at the Lipp, I got her to come back with me to my hotel and we climbed the five flights to my room and in one hand she held her stuffed bear and in one hand I still had a white rose some old woman had given me in the Luxembourg Gardens that afternoon. … At the Lipp I kept trying to give you the rose and you kept pushing it back. So it lay on the table, next to the profiteroles. …
Back at my hotel, five flights up, the room was stifling. I opened the window that looked out on the street, worked on the cork of a Côtes du Rhône, and turned to find a naked girl on my bed, in nothing but knee-high boots as black as her hair. She lay on her stomach reading the Herald Tribune, spread out on the bed before her, her elbows getting black from newsprint, legs swaying back and forth in the air behind her, stuffed bear on the pillow at the head of the bed and the white rose I thought I’d finally gotten her to take tossed on the table next to the bathroom door.
All right, I was stunned. I admit it. I stood there with the bottle in my hand staring at her, till she looked up. “So if he’d married us,” she said, “how long do you suppose it would be before you left me?”
“How do you know I would leave you? Maybe you would leave me.” I sat next to her on the bed. She was very casual about the way she read the newspaper naked, lazily swaying her legs back and forth behind her, and I’d almost say there was no sexual suggestion about it at all except for the boots—such a hackneyed and effective male fantasy, for her to be wearing nothing but those boots, like she just neglected to remove them, though of course she couldn’t have taken her jeans off without also taking off the boots. In the few seconds that I’d turned my back to open the window and uncork the bottle of wine, she’d taken off her boots and then all her clothes—and then put the boots back on. …
“No,” she assured me with utmost seriousness, “you would leave me, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. I wouldn’t assume,” she added, now obliquely addressing the subject of her nakedness, though it took me a moment to catch up with the shift in conversation, “I wouldn’t assume, if I were you,
“Maybe,” she said instead, “he would have picked us.”
That answer alone probably got us through the next three years. For that answer alone I avoided certain magazines at the newsstands, certain movies in dark moviehouses full of men, from which your doomed eyes and sorry smile and all the naked rest of you would have stared back at me, if I had gone looking for trouble. … I don’t know whether not looking for trouble was a sign of maturity or cowardice—whatever, Angie had left something behind in New York, and whatever New York had done to her, it was lousy enough that Paris seemed liberating in comparison, for all the ways the city was so ragged around the edges that ’82 summer, hot and overrun with beggars and trash piling up on the streets and people getting pushed in front of oncoming Métro trains. After buying her dinner at the Lipp, I got her to come back with me to my hotel and we climbed the five flights to my room and in one hand she held her stuffed bear and in one hand I still had a white rose some old woman had given me in the Luxembourg Gardens that afternoon. … At the Lipp I kept trying to give you the rose and you kept pushing it back. So it lay on the table, next to the profiteroles. …
Back at my hotel, five flights up, the room was stifling. I opened the window that looked out on the street, worked on the cork of a Côtes du Rhône, and turned to find a naked girl on my bed, in nothing but knee-high boots as black as her hair. She lay on her stomach reading the Herald Tribune, spread out on the bed before her, her elbows getting black from newsprint, legs swaying back and forth in the air behind her, stuffed bear on the pillow at the head of the bed and the white rose I thought I’d finally gotten her to take tossed on the table next to the bathroom door.
All right, I was stunned. I admit it. I stood there with the bottle in my hand staring at her, till she looked up. “So if he’d married us,” she said, “how long do you suppose it would be before you left me?”
“How do you know I would leave you? Maybe you would leave me.” I sat next to her on the bed. She was very casual about the way she read the newspaper naked, lazily swaying her legs back and forth behind her, and I’d almost say there was no sexual suggestion about it at all except for the boots—such a hackneyed and effective male fantasy, for her to be wearing nothing but those boots, like she just neglected to remove them, though of course she couldn’t have taken her jeans off without also taking off the boots. In the few seconds that I’d turned my back to open the window and uncork the bottle of wine, she’d taken off her boots and then all her clothes—and then put the boots back on. …
“No,” she assured me with utmost seriousness, “you would leave me, I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. I wouldn’t assume,” she added, now obliquely addressing the subject of her nakedness, though it took me a moment to catch up with the shift in conversation, “I wouldn’t assume, if I were you,
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