Arianna’s upbringing as the child of two expatriated families was neither French nor Persian, neither secular nor religious, neither liberal nor conservative, neither political nor apolitical. It was all of those. She soaked up the cultural bouillabaisse of Paris, finding some meaning in every tangy drop. She painted, and drew, and sculpted, but only imitating. She knew she was not an artist.
As a student at the Sorbonne, she became a skilled interpreter of art and literature, moving into critique and analysis and away from creative effort. There were a couple of college semesters abroad in Italy and Japan, and then a summer in Santa Fe, absorbing the desert and its influence on ancient and modern artists. She was courted aggressively—and to no effect—by alpha males of all ages. In her fourth year, she became an assistant to Nicolas Poussin scholar Jacques Thuillier, in whose private library were found handwritten margin notes about ‘levée du voile,’ and other apparent references to how her fresh eyes opened even his experienced ones to the wonders of the Corpus Pussinianum. She became first a copy editor and then a contributing editor to the influential Revue de l’Art, a plum position facilitated by Prof. Thuillier’s status as one of its founding members. The world-renowned professor and collector then anointed her Assistant Conseil for what has become recognized as his seminal catalog of the master’s early work exhibited at the Feigen Gallery in New York.
She had no room in her life for men who were not as earnest about their own work as she was about hers. The social climbers, family-made men, older men looking for a pretty protégé, and boys on a quest; they bored her. Her parents were worried that she was too serious.
The Sorbonne was located a few minutes walk to the north of Max’s lab at the ENS. But as she was an art history major, most of her classes were at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie located by the Rue Michelet entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg, equally close, but to the west of the ENS. All of which is to say, they spent much of their days, for years, only moments away from each other, and they had seen each other, but had never spoken or met eyes.
On one of those days—it was a gray fall afternoon, she told me—in her fifth and final year, she left her father’s shop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain not far from her daytime haunts, stepped out onto the street without looking at what was coming, and almost collided with Max. He was returning to his lab after attending a seminar at the UFR Biomédicale, walking fast with his head down and buried in a book. Without appearing to take any notice of her at all, he got out of her way and kept on going, not only in the same direction, but headed for nearly the same place, she knew, because she’d seen him so many times in her neighborhood. And when she had seen him, he had always been absorbed in conversation with old men whom she was pretty certain were as distinguished in their fields as Prof. Thuillier was in his. (She was right about that, and found out later that his companions on the boulevards had been Abragam, de Gennes, Monod, and others.)
On the day of the collision, so engrossed was he that she took it as an affront and bumped into him accidentally on purpose. When he said, “Pardon” without so much as making eye contact and then continued on, she struck up a conversation he could not escape.
Max was startled. She wasn’t coming on to him, but she wasn’t treating him like an untouchable either. His clothes didn’t put her off. Incroyable! What he didn’t know was that his apparent intense involvement with his own work turned her on, reflecting as it did a male image of her own self, someone she already loved. Merveilleuse! And she didn’t know it then, but she’d disrupted a pattern of prejudice and behavior in him, and room was being made in his life for a real woman.
Max was cautious, reluctant to get entangled in a relationship with someone whose opinions and feelings he’d have to endure, and maybe even respond to. He had so much to hide from her, too, or to abandon. A fervid trip to Marseille did not achieve its mission of burning out desire for those crazy, delicious couplings with boys who looked like the androgynous ancient goddess he had been in the years before his beard. So he went slowly with her, a ridiculous pace for two experienced twenty-somethings in Paris. So many afternoon meals at the Café Aix on Rue Mouffetard, and no afternoon meals at Arianna’s Temple of Y. There was no precedent for such a progression.
As far as she knew, he worked when he wasn’t with her, gambling trips aside. And from what she overheard about him, his work was leading to stardom. The slower he went, the more reserve he showed, the longer he held off giving even the slightest hint of sexual interest, the stronger was her own sense that this man was not only her spiritual soul brother, but her life’s partner.
She was naïve, but she wasn’t bluffing. He read her hand down to the suits, and it only restrained him more. He wouldn’t seduce her. She itched with heat as winter descended on the city. She plotted her own seductions, wearing fabrics so sheer he could see, well, everything—her dark raspberry nipples, the divot of her navel, and even the outline of a curly hair belonging to what he later learned was an espresso delta. And when seeing didn’t push him over the edge, she found occasions to brush her sweetest parts against him. The smell of her should have been enough to overwhelm him, but he didn’t succumb to, or even nip at temptation. She had never been so forward with a man. Her friends said they had never been so forward either, nor so unsuccessful. “Is he really worth it?” they ridiculed.
Going home to her parents’ house after her often-late-into-the-evening but platonic visits with him, she’d bathe, scratching that itch with the spray head of the hand shower, turning up the water pressure to the max, or if she couldn’t find the petite mort that way, kneeling under the bath’s faucet so the full force of its flow ran down onto her pubic bone and over her clitoris and between her lower lips, helping nature along if necessary with a nubbly rubber toy she’d bought at la vibroutique on Rue Gay-Lussac, rasping herself with fury till she almost fainted, then recovered, gasping, surprised at herself, and in need of another shower.
Meanwhile, Max took covert trips to one beloved casino alleyway after another, each time making futile resolutions that it would be the last. He was human and had no disease, just desire, and as Turing taught us in yet another important lesson of his life, there’s very little explaining, much less controlling that. The trips were an irritation to Arianna even before their first kiss. She didn’t know what to call this “thing” of theirs. Max didn’t want to call it anything, although she had gotten under his skin, the way she said his name, “Maax,” and he did want to peel her clothes off, or rather, for her to peel her own clothes off and drop herself on him so he could absolve himself of any responsibility. He hoped she would seduce him, and take the blame if the “thing” failed. About the trips; she dreamt of beach resorts, a romantic cinematic scarf holding her hair in place and flying free behind her, and a perfect setting for la séduction. Max said simply, “I go gambling alone,” and she didn’t have any traction to pull herself into the adventure.
In recognition of the special demands of her contributions to his catalog and journal, Dr. Thuillier arranged for her to have a private office near his own in the great Mesopotamia-invoking Institut. Of the Art Nouveau period and designed by Paul Bigot, it was all red brick in bas-relief, friezes from Sèvres freezing gryphons flying, horses in battle, chalices worthy of Napoleon, and topped with a fortress-like parapet on the roof. Though her window was not on Rue Michelet and did not look up towards the Jardin du Luxembourg—she was only a student after all—she could see the Fontaine de l’Observatoire, surrounded by affectionate couples and small children when the weather was fine. There was also a ground-glass window in the door. Of all this she was very proud and optimistic. She envisioned after-hours abandonment on a desk in the little room, and she asked Max to visit her there, but it wasn’t until much later that he first came by. And when he did, all doors had been thrown open to officials, architects, engineers, and surveyors examining and measuring every square centimetre of the building about to be named a national historic monument. In other words, there was no privacy.
Instead, they would rendezvous instead at Café Juliette, Café Les Ursulines, Café Les Arts, Café La Méthode, and every other Chez Quelque Choses nearby. Occasionally she showed up unannounced at the ENS lab.
In mid-February, months after their first encounter, after a late lunch at Café Delmas—too late for him he said, but intoxicating for her, not only because of the three inches of freshly fallen snow and the quiet, but also because of the litre carafe of Médoc that had accompanied the meal, she taking more than her share—they stopped to part in the Cour aux Ernests, the courtyard of the ENS. Its centerpiece was a round pool, maybe twenty, twenty-five feet across, in which for more than a century have swum red carp—they were the Ernests. A pump sprayed water skyward to make a little fountain. Set back a few feet were four arcs of short trees and low hedges, with gaps between them so visitors could reach the pool from any of four directions. And set back further were benches and chairs and tables, summoning images of Jean Paul Sartre sitting with Simone de Beauvoir. And a few feet further back, more hedges, and trees reaching to the rooftops of the four-story rectangle of buildings that framed the quad. And all of it was painted in fragile flakes of white cold. Only the pool, which melted the falling crystals, appeared as before.
The frosty coating was thin, covering only the branch tops. Their brown barky bottoms remained as they always were. And so each elongated feature became a pair of stripes. One was white, flat, and ghostly, but brighter than the sky. The other, below it, locked onto the first by the physicality of the limb itself, was shadowy, and darker than the gloaming. Branches branching like alveoli, they were visible in the finest detail in the barrenness of winter. Under the gray light of dusk, Paris’ winter sounds were deadened in frozen fluffy softness. The spot’s romantic associations mixed with the wine and the moment, and Arianna kissed Max without warning. Her breathing became slow and shallow, and she could sense the same within him, the arrival of awareness and opportunity, and of tentatively adjusting to delicious intimacy with a new lover. At such a moment, she could continue with a hunger that might scare him off, or pull back and wait.
She pulled back, bit her lower lip, embarrassed, fearful that maybe she’d offended him, and said only, “Maax.” He was biting his lip, too, saying nothing, until he took her hand.
“Let me show you something, something special to me,” he said.