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shrimps.”
    Today I wonder which was stronger in Julia—the longing for Renaud or for the shrimps. The shrimps, I suspect. For if she’d wanted a Frenchman, I really believe she could have found one. She might have had to wait a bit, but she could have found one. The trouble was, a Frenchman would have asked more of her and given less in return. He might have cheated on her. He might have interfered with the rapture of the shrimps. I do not want to suggest that Julia was venal; only that, like most youngest children, she was highly pragmatic. What she needed was a husband who was sufficiently in her thrall that he would do all he could to make her happy, but sufficiently lazy that he could be counted on for loyalty. And that bill I fitted perfectly.
    So we got engaged, and she sprang on me the idea of moving to Paris, and I was not at all averse to it. On the contrary, her passionate desire provoked an equally passionate desire in me—the desire to satisfy her desire. For I had never in my life encountered a will so tenacious or a longing so intense as Julia’s. Perhaps gurus inspirein their disciples a feeling similar to this, the feeling that a woman of determination can incite in a man whose capacity for ardor, though great, has no specific ambition or goal on which to spend itself. Accordingly, I wrote to Harry to ask if he might find me a job in the Paris office of General Motors, or in a Paris auto showroom. Quite reasonably, he responded with suspicion. Was a woman involved? he wanted to know. I replied that one was, at which he took the first train from Detroit to New York to investigate. The dinner the three of us had together was not, as you can imagine, a great success. Julia and Harry must have recognized the youngest child in each other, for they regarded each other with immediate suspicion. He asked her a lot of questions that I would never have been bold or rude enough to ask her myself, and, in the course of asking them, compelled her to divulge two facts that she had so far managed to keep from me. First, she was Jewish. Second, she was divorced. That she was Jewish came as no surprise. I had guessed as much. That she was divorced, I will admit, was a bit of a blow. After we sent Harry off in a taxi, we had a teary scene. She told me that she had not wanted to tell me that she was Jewish in case I should have religious qualms and that she had not wanted to tell me about her first husband in case I should think less of her for being a divorcée. It had all been long ago, when she was very young. His name was Valentine Breslau. They had not loved each other. The union had been imposed on them by their parents, who wished to solidify a business alliance between the families. Valentine had promised to take her to Paris for their honeymoon. Instead he took her to the Poconos. He made “loathsome” demands of her, and when she refused to satisfy them, he turned to prostitutes. For six months she put up with his brutishness, until finally she could take no more and left him, returning to her parents. He pleaded with her to come back. She refused. Her parents pleaded with her to go back.She turned a deaf ear. Her father was a “beast” about the matter, she said, worried more about the business partnership that the divorce threatened to capsize than his own daughter’s welfare. Shortly thereafter, he had a heart attack and died. Telling me this, Julia burst into a fit of weeping. I took her in my arms and promised that I would make everything all right, even with her mother. Her mother, Julia was convinced, had psychic powers. She could read Julia’s mind. By way of example, Julia told this story. One afternoon, shortly after the divorce, she and Mrs. Loewi had a fierce argument, at the end of which Julia left the parental apartment, vowing never to return. For a few hours she rode around town in a taxi. Then she decided to check in to a hotel. Now, the hotel in question, she assured me, was not a famous