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unlined by suffering or complex thought. She was about four years older than me, just a little younger than Charlie, and I actually went out with her a couple of times myself, which is really weird, even for chez Wilmot. He wasn’t painting much then, although he was anticipating a big commission to do a fresco in a seminary dining hall out on Long Island. He wanted me to help, part of his fantasy that I was his student and artistic heir.
    You’ll want to know why the fuck I came home.
    Yeah, a long pause there; but basically, it was Suzanne. When I said good-bye to her at the station in Paris before she got on the airport bus, and right, it was rainy and gray, and we were hugging and kissing there and she was crying, she said I was the love of her life and she’d never forget me and she just knew she’d never see me again, it was too good for her. What I was thinking, I’m ashamed to say, was, Whew, I’m glad to have a break from this consuming girl, and so long, darlin’, see you around.
    So she left, and there I was with plenty of time on my hands, and it turned out all the movies and the popular song lyrics were true. Whatever sensible-Chaz thought—that she was too much to take on at this stage of my life, that I didn’t need the aggravation and grandopera that were part of the Suzanne package, that I had work to do, you know, defining myself as a painter and all that crap—whatever, there was a part of me that just ached for her. I would pass a street corner where she used to sing sometimes with a group of scruffy French kids, American folk songs and standards, for tossed coins, and I’d see them singing with some other girl and I’d feel my heart clench up.
    I kept her room, which was probably a mistake; I should’ve packed up and gone to Berlin or something, but I stayed on there, not doing much, while her smell gradually faded from the room. I found a miniature bottle of shampoo she’d left behind, with only a little smear of it left, and I kept it and opened it every night and sniffed it and remembered what her hair smelled like. Did I try other girls? Oh, yeah. It’s not hard to get laid on the Left Bank when you’re twenty-one and you can draw. Everyone wants to be immortal, and maybe I’ll be famous someday, I could practically hear them thinking.
    But, God, you know? I couldn’t figure it out, why none of that was any good. I mean, I’m out with my pad, doing tourist sketches on the boul, just for something to do, and then the girl sits down and you make her look a little prettier than she is, and she’s blown away by it—these are not French girls, oh, no, they’re Americans, Brits, Danes—we’re speaking English here, and then some smooth talk, a date for a drink, and yeah, you have a terrific body, I can tell, and then up to the apartment where they take off their clothes and there you have it, a fling with a genuine Paris artist, and as far as I’m concerned I might as well be using someone else’s dick.
    And then my work started to go downhill, I mean it was like there was a scrim over everything, my eye had no penetration, and the paint wouldn’t behave itself, it wanted to go to mud; it’s hard to describe, but there was no doubt about it. I’d rented a piece of a studio after Suzanne left, going to do some serious work now that I had moretime, and I thought I’d try to work on the kind of psychological portraits that I’d seen in the Orangerie, with a little Eakins precision thrown in, but even though I worked like fury, everything I did was garbage. I got frenzied, I broke brushes, I threw fucking canvases against the wall, but nothing came. And after a couple of weeks of this, the word “muse” started to float up through my mind, something I always thought was complete bullshit, but now I thought, Well, there was Rembrandt and Saskia, and van Gogh and his whore with the earlobe, and Picasso always had a short stack of girls on hand, and I thought, Okay, I found Suzanne