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Louisa herself made me so aware of it. Not that she ever mentioned it openly in words. She didn’t. But there was about Louisa a kind of quasi-Puritanical quality which seemed to make her always aware of herself as a sexual object, in a sort of guilty and uncomfortable way. Dear Louisa. For instance, she was always very meticulous, even prissy, about her person—always carefully adjusting her skirt when she pulled her lovely long legs up under her; always feeling almost guiltily at her skirt to make sure it was properly adjusted whenever some man looked admiringly at her legs; always sitting primly with her knees pressed tight together when she was in a chair. Even with me, whom I believe she liked more than any other friend they had, there was often this look of guilty start on her face, as if it had again occurred to her that I might find her attractive, and that this was her fault.
    I always supposed this was part of her New England heritage. Her New England heritage was evident also in her lanky, almost rawboned build, and in her long, sharply sculptured horse-face. When she grinned, two deep lines would appear beneath her high cheekbones. And yet she was extremely beautiful as a woman, with her lovely long legs and vague, eager eyes. An extremely reserved person about herself, she was by fits and starts almost hysterically talkative about just about everything else, especially politics. Even back then Louisa was already violently and volubly anti-de Gaulle, saying he had only saved France from the militant Rightists of the OAS to impose upon it a gentler Rightism of his own, which would make it that much harder to fight for any truly modern economic reforms. But it was not about de Gaulle that she was coming to my apartment alone to see me that September.
    Naturally, I was curious and puzzled. To call me for a rendezvous alone in my apartment was certainly not the usual Louisa. When she came in, I offered her a seat and suggested a drink.
    Well, for a moment that startled, wild-deer look came into her eye and I seriously thought she was going to bolt out the door.
    “Oh, no! No, no! No drink!” she stammered—as if to accept a drink was the first step along a path that must end in her seduction there in my own apartment. For a few moments I thought she was actually going to refuse to sit down on my Second Empire couch.
    There was always about Louisa the feeling of tension as of a tightly drawn wire, but now the drawing was so tautened you actually felt you might hear the wire snap singing in the air.
    It was about Harry that she had come to see me. “I’m leaving him, Jack,” she said without preamble. “I’m taking Hill and I’m going back home to America to my family.”
    “You’re what!” I exclaimed.
    “That’s it. That’s what I’m going to do.”
    “You must be out of your mind!” I said. “Harry loves you! He adores you!” The thought of their marriage foundering, too, made me actually physically sick at my stomach.
    “If he does, he does not show it in any way which I can any longer tolerate,” she said firmly.
    I had heard some pretty explicit gossip about Harry Gallagher’s sexual flings with young actresses and such. When people find out you know someone, they hasten to tell you everything scandalous they have heard about them. After his first successes in France in the mid-’50s, Harry apparently had gone through quite a list of young actresses and would-be actresses, of just about every nationality—a number of whom both European and American are today world-worshipped sex symbols.
    At first I was shocked by this talk. I still thought of Harry and Louisa as my perfect happy-American-family—something I had perhaps failed to achieve, but was glad nevertheless to know did exist. But then I decided if Louisa did not care, why should I? And obviously Louisa didn’t. And after all what could be more truly American, than that the man of the family should have his peccadilloes and that