Matt rolled his eyes. "Another set of prudes heard from," he said. He turned to Coop and Charlie. "What about you two? You wanna come to Pampelonne and bag some bitches with me?"
"I'm in," Coop said, already drooling over the idea. "Do they let you fuck on the beach?"
"I don't know about this whole thing," Charlie said nervously. "Having all those naked people around sounds like the perfect breeding environment for bacteria."
"Uh... yeah," Matt said, rolling his eyes. "Good point there, freak boy. We'll count you out then."
Their suites at the resort were nothing short of magnificent. On the top floor of a nine story building, they overlooked the main beach at Saint-Tropez and were equipped with ever conceivable luxury. It was a lifestyle that all of them were becoming quite used to.
Over the two week period they were there, only Charlie spent any significant time in his suite. He enjoyed staying inside most of every day, cleaning things with disinfectant wipes in case the maids had contaminated them, talking long distance to the manager of his Birmingham restaurant to make sure things were running smoothly in his absence, and staring for hours out of the window with a pair of binoculars to the beach below, looking at the bare breasts of the beachgoers and masturbating. Once every three days or so he would speak to the resort's concierge and arrange for a high end prostitute to visit his room. Once she arrived, he would make her shower with antibacterial soap, scrub her crotch with baby wipes, and then he would mount her from behind while wearing two condoms on his penis and two pairs of latex gloves on his hands. He was, however, a very generous tipper and all of the prostitutes went away with a good opinion of him.
Coop and Matt spent most of the first three days on the nude beach of Pampelonne, letting it all hang out, as it were. At the end of the third day, however, local law enforcement became involved after a small orgy between Matt, Coop, and five young women on holiday from Iceland developed just below the high tide mark. The musicians were not arrested or taken down to the police station, but they were banned from returning to the beach, pretty much for "the rest of your natural lives" as one outraged policemen termed it.
"Oh well," said Matt in response. "At least I finally managed to get me some Icelandic gash. That's kind of hard to come by outside of Iceland, you know."
"If it were up to me, sir," the Saint-Tropez police officer responded, "you would be banned not just from this beach, but from the country of France and the entire European mainland as well."
"Wow," said Coop as he heard this. "That's pretty harsh just for getting a little trim on the beach, isn't it?"
"What about England?" Matt asked. "Could we still go there?"
The policeman's face turned an interesting shade of red. "Get out of my sight," he hissed at them. "Right now, or I'll find something to arrest you for."
Matt, in a rare display of wisdom, did as he was asked with only one snide, under-the-breath remark about how these frogs were a bunch of fuckin' prudes.
For the rest of their stay on the Riviera, Matt and Coop contented themselves with fishing trips. They chartered boats on the Mediterranean and at several port towns along the Atlantic coast as well, catching over three hundred pounds of exotic saltwater fish that Matt arranged to have frozen and shipped back to his home in San Juan Capistrano.
Jake, Nerdly, Helen, and Sharon stayed the least amount of time in their suites. Basically, they spent the first night of their break there, and their last. All of the days in between, they spent visiting the various sights of Europe that the tour would not eventually be taking them to during its natural course. They financed all aspects of this trip themselves and stayed together through most of it, getting adjoining hotel suites, going on tours together, and dining together every night.
They visited Corsica for a day and then flew to Bordeaux for a two day wine-tasting tour in which Jake bought sixteen thousand dollars worth of rare wines and had them shipped home. Next, they flew to Cherbourg and visited the D-day landing beaches of Normandy and the United States military cemetery where Helen's grandfather, who had been blown to pieces by a German machine gunner while exiting a landing craft on June 6, 1944, had been buried. It was the first time she had ever visited his grave and, even though she had never met the man, even though her father only had vague recollections of the man, the experience was enough to bring tears to her eyes as she read his name on the white cross. She snapped pictures of it and made a paper engraving to give to her father.
From the rainy Normandy coast, they went on to cheerier things, flying to Spain, where Intemperance had been forbidden to perform but where they were more than happy to accept Jake Kingsley and Bill Archer's money. They spent two days in Valencia, two days in Barcelona, and another in Gibraltar, where they stood upon the famous rock and looked across the straight to the landmass of Africa. They then flew to Italy, where Intemperance had also been forbidden to perform, and spent two days seeing the sights of Rome, including the ancient coliseum and the Vatican. This left them with only two days remaining until the band was scheduled to fly to London for their first European performance. Nerdly and Sharon flew back to Saint-Tropez, their intent to stay those two days in their room, resting up and recuperating from the trip. Jake and Helen weren't quite ready to go back yet. Instead, they flew to Monaco where they lost a combined total of twenty-three thousand dollars at the gaming tables.
This portion of the international tour was, by far, the best part for Helen and Jake. It was almost like they were normal people on a normal vacation. While it was true that they were still recognized everywhere they went, that dozens of people at each destination accosted them whenever they were in public, asked them for autographs, asked inane questions of them, asked Jake to sign various portions of their anatomy, and propositioned Jake in full view and earshot of Helen, these concerns were almost secondary. They visited places like normal (although wealthy) tourists and did all the normal tourist things like snapping pictures, having passers-by snap pictures of the two of them, and goggling at the ancient architecture they encountered. There was no pressure to get ready for a show that night, no record stores to visit, no radio interviews to give. Helen seemed to learn to live with the fact that her boyfriend was a celebrity and that whenever she was with him in a public place they were in the spotlight. They fought very little and when they did, it was mostly about trivial things. As each day went by, Jake felt closer and closer to her.
It was in Monaco, the night before they flew back to Saint-Tropez, that the immortal and irrevocable words were spoken. They were eating dinner in the restaurant of the Royal Rivera Hotel, looking out over the lights of the city. They had just enjoyed a meal of Blanquette de veau — a French veal dish — and a two thousand franc bottle of 1978 Bordeaux cabernet sauvignon. Jake was dressed in a custom tailored three-piece suit he'd brought with him and Helen was adorned in a champagne cocktail dress he'd bought her in Rome two days before. While waiting for their after-dinner cognac and their crème brulee, Helen suddenly gazed at him with starry eyes.
"I love you, Jake," she said.
Her words did not surprise him. "I know," he said, reaching out and taking her hand. "And I love you too."
He was not lying to her when he said these words, not telling her what she wanted to hear. Though their relationship had started off a casual one, based initially on a student/teacher bond and then working its way to a strictly sexual arrangement, it had undergone a major progression over the past two months. And now, now that they had spent two full weeks in each other's presence, basically living together, the feelings of affection and friendship he had felt for her had deepened into romantic love. He had never intended for it to happen, nor had Helen, he was sure, but there it was all the same. He had known this for more than a week but it had taken Helen's declaration for him to put it into words.