"You have these clubs in U.S., hein?" Jean-Claude asked. Jeff shook his head. The Caveau de la Huchette was a Parisian jazz cavern in the classic mold, a rock-walled dungeon full of music as smoky and pungent as the cigarettes everyone here seemed to exist on. Unlike the newer discothèques, it was a style that would never catch on in the States.
Mireille, Jean-Claude’s petite red-haired girlfriend, gave a wry and lazy smile. "C’est dommage," she said. "The blacks, no one likes them in their home country, so they must come here for to play their music."
Jeff made a noncommittal gesture, poured himself another glass of red wine. America’s present racial troubles were a major topic of conversation in France right now, but he had no interest in getting involved in that discussion. Nothing serious, nothing that would make him think or remember, held any interest for him now.
"You must to visit l’Afrique," Mireille said. "There is much of beauty there, much to understand."
She and Jean-Claude had recently returned from a month in Morocco. Jeff kindly didn’t mention France’s recent debacle in Algeria.
"Attention, attention, s’il vous plaît!" The owner of the club stood on its tiny stage, leaning close to the microphone. "Mesdames et messieurs, copains et copines … Le Caveau de la Huchette a le plaisir extraordinaire de vous présenter le blues hot … avec le maître du blues, personne d’autre que—Monsieur Sidney … Bechet!"
There was wild applause as the old expatriate musician took the stage, clarinet in hand. He kicked things off with a rouser, "Blues in the Cave," and followed that with a soulfully sexy version of "Frankie and Johnny." Sharla continued her solo dance in the corner, her body undulating with the visceral thrust of the music. Jeff emptied the wine bottle, signaled for another.
The old blues man grinned and nodded as the second number ended and the young crowd roared its appreciation of his alien art form. "Mercy, mercy, mercy!" Bechet exclaimed. "Mon français n’est pas très bon," he said with a thick black-American accent, "So I just gots to say in my own way that I can tell y’all knows the blues. You heah me?"
At least half the audience understood enough English to answer enthusiastically. "Mais oui!" they cheered, "Bien sûr!" Jeff gulped his fresh glass of wine, waited for the music to carry him away again, to wipe out all the memories.
"Well, all right!" Bechet said from the stage, wiping the mouthpiece of his clarinet. "Now, this next one is really what the blues is most about. You see, there’s some blues for folks ain’t never had a thing, and that’s a sad blues … but the saddest kind of blues is for them that’s had everything they ever wanted and has lost it, and knows it won’t come back no more. Ain’t no sufferin' in this world worse than that; and that’s the blues we call I Had It But It’s All Gone Now. "
The music began, deep-throated sounds of evanescence and regret in a minor key. Irresistible, unendurable. Jeff slumped in his chair, trying to blot out the sound of it. He reached for his glass, spilled the wine.
"Something?" Mireille said, touching his shoulder.
Jeff tried to answer, couldn’t.
"Allons-y," she said, pulling him to his feet in the smoke-filled nightclub. "We go outside, to breathe some air."
A light drizzle was falling as they stepped out onto the rue de la Huchette. Jeff raised his face to the cool rain, let it trickle across his forehead. Mireille reached up, put a slender hand on his cheek.
"Music can hurt," she said softly.
"Mm."
"No good. Better to … comment dit-on oublier?"
"Forget. "
"Oui, c’est ça. Better to forget."
"Yeah."
"For a while."
"For a while," he agreed, and they set off toward the boul’Mich to find a taxi.
Back in the living room of Jeff s apartment on the avenue Foch, Mireille filled a small pipe with crumbly brown hashish and an equal measure of opium. She sat beside him on an Oriental rug, lit the potent mixture, and passed the pipe to him. He inhaled deeply, relit it when it went out.
Jeff had smoked a joint now and then, mainly in his first existence, but he’d never felt such a deep rush of blissful calm as this. It was, as Malraux had described the opium experience, "like being carried away on great motionless wings," yet the hashish kept his mind active and open, kept him from drifting off entirely into dreams.
Mireille lay back on the carpet, her green silk dress rising to her thighs. The rain against the window beat an insistent cadence, and she lolled her head in a rhythmic circle to the sound, her lustrous russet hair falling now across her face, now upon her naked shoulders. Jeff stroked her calf, then her inner thigh, and she made a soft murmur of acquiescence and desire. He leaned forward, undid the front of her dress, slid the smooth fabric away from her girlish breasts.
There on the floor they used each other’s bodies wordlessly, almost furiously. When they were done, Mireille filled another pipe with the opiated hash, and they smoked it in the bedroom. This time they came together languorously beneath the down-filled blanket, their legs and arms entwining with newly familiar ease; and later, as the bells of Saint-Honoré d’Eylau called early Mass, Mireille climbed atop him once again, her slim hips riding his in playful joy.
Sharla let herself back into the apartment with the drab dawn. "Morning," she said as she opened the bedroom door, looking spent. "You guys want coffee?"
Mireille sat up in bed, shaking her tousled hair. "With perhaps a little Cognac?"
Sharla pulled off her wrinkled dress, fished in the closet for a robe. "That sounds good," she said. "Same for you, Jeff?"
He blinked, rubbed the drug haze from his eyes. "Yeah, I guess."
Mireille got up and padded casually to the bathroom for a shower. When Sharla came back with the breakfast tray, the little redhead was sitting on the edge of the bed, still nude, drying her hair. As they sipped their coffee laced with brandy, the two women talked pleasantly about a new lingerie shop on the rue de Rivoli.
A little after nine Mireille said she had to go home and change; she was meeting another friend for brunch, and didn’t want to show up at the café wearing last night’s silk. She kissed Jeff goodbye, gave Sharla a quick hug, and was gone.
As soon as Mireille had left, Sharla cleared the coffee cups from the bed, pulled back the sheets, and moved her warm tongue down Jeff’s belly. He was limp when she took him in her mouth, but soon grew hard again.
Jeff never asked where Sharla had been all night; it didn’t really matter.
The Mediterranean lapped gently against the pebbly beach, its quiet waves a whisper of eternity, of changelessness. The scent of a fresh pot of bouillabaise drifted from one of the cafés nearby. Jeff was getting hungry; as soon as the girls finished swimming, he’d suggest lunch.
The weather had broken for a week or so in early July, and they’d taken Le Mistral south with Jean-Claude and Mireille and the rest of the crowd. They’d all been drunk by the time the train got to Toulon, where the eight of them boisterously crammed themselves into two taxis for the forty-three-mile ride to St. Tropez.
The little fishing village had undergone a major upheaval in the past six years, since Vadim and Bardot had discovered and popularized it as a youthful alternative to the more sedate, old-money Côte d’Azur resorts of Antibes and Menton; but, lively as it already was, the town was still free of the suffocating hordes of tourists who would make it all but unlivable in the decades to come.