“It is early. You must have more patience. Unless it is not your nature.”

“I just flew in this morning,” I explained.

“Do we bore you?” she asked impishly.

“Of course not,” I replied.

She twisted her mouth with distaste. “I see it all on your face. We were being rude, arguing about work. Do not lie.” She let her fingers slide across my wrist, and her touch spread across my skin with the lightness of morning over a familiar landscape, inspiring confidence and the feel of being seen. “Better not to say anything.”

I was embarrassed. She saw it. Davidson saw it. Florin saw it. Davidson smiled with bemusement, Florin with pique, and Genevieve unabashedly as my attraction to her began to show.

“Let’s talk about something else. I did not mean to say the wrong thing. I thought you knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Nothing. Tell me, what is your last name?”

“Roland,” I said.

“Do you know the poem?”

“Yes.”

“What poem?” Davidson asked.

I began to recite what little I could remember from the Song of Roland.

“Charles the king, our emperor and sovereign, for seven years has been in Spain, conquered the land and now no castle against him remains,” she translated. “I am impressed. How do you know this?”

“I was caught in a lie by my high school French teacher,” I confessed. “As punishment I was made to memorize the first ten stanzas.”

“What lie did you tell?” she asked.

“I do not remember,” I said. “That’s how I got caught.”

“I bet I can make you remember,” she turned serious. “But never lie to me. I will know.”

“You think you can always tell when people are lying?”

“Not everyone. But you, yes.” She laughed softly. Her bosom rocked, and her eyes flashed bright like coins from the depths of a fountain, spirits from the bottom of a lake. I wanted nothing more than to see them twinkle again.

“I’m bored,” Florin called from the edge of our flirtation. “Let’s go. There’s a new club nearby, one of my friends owns it.”

Davidson looked at Florin, and then at Genevieve’s hand, which had made its way back to my wrist, and he was my friend. He began talking to Florin, listening as though she were the most interesting woman he ever met, and the one he had intended to talk to all along. Florin was happy for the attention, and I was happy for the sympathy, and Genevieve was happy because of an irrepressible spirit. Davidson was even more bemused than before, which for him was close to happiness, and we set out for the club.

It was a fine summer night. The club was crowded with people celebrating the beginning of summer, and soon Genevieve and I were pressed against one another.

“I thought you liked my friend,” I said.

“No,” she replied with certainty. “You are my man.”

“When did you decide that?” I asked.

“You are so foolish, and impatient,” she said. “Since I saw you. That is why I made you jealous.”

“Why would you do that?”

“Why? Because you are my man.” She laughed.

I did not usually move fast, but it was a brief trip, and it was clear, so we left for my hotel where we stayed our first night together. In the morning when I woke, she was still curled languorously in my arms, where she remained, as I inhaled the perfume from the top of her head, and did not wake her, because I did not wish to break our embrace.

We went out eventually for a late brunch, then wandered the streets idly, people-watching and talking, before returning to the hotel, where we made love again in the high, perfect afternoon.

She was a beautiful, sensuous girl, with a bright spirit, and I knew it was not practical for us to be together — we did not live in the same city — but was struck by what the Parisians call a coup de foudré—stroke of lightning about which little can be said. Silver quick as a message between worlds. She was my girl. Even if we did not know what would happen when we parted, we had the expanse of the weekend like a summer meadow beyond the reach of time.

We did not leave the room again until late the next afternoon, when we bought lunch at Rose Bakery, and farmer’s wine from the Jura, to make a picnic in front of the cathedral. When we went for our bread, even the baker could see we were flush with love, and bid us wait a few minutes, then blessed our union with warm loaves of new bread. The wine was good, and the bread was good, and the lawn was filled with couples kissing, as Genevieve curled against my chest like an explosive new galaxy. I did not know what was happening, but I felt fortunate and full of her and thankful.

“You know you’re betting the long shot,” Davidson said, over dinner in St. Germain the following evening. “The improbable. Not to mention impractical. Love rarely works even in the best of cases. You know this, and yet will not help yourself. Either because you crave intensity of experience, a more and more potent drug, or else give privilege to the primal instinct for whom you can love, even when it does not withstand the scrutiny of what you yourself say you want. You wish for reason and desire to be the same, but sense they are at eternal war, Apollo and Dionysus, and know, or should know, misery is when you try but cannot reconcile them. Which will it be? The Romantics chose ardor and were undone. Ancient gods fell into the same divine snare. All perished.” Read the myths. Neither will you escape this unharmed.”

“None of us will,” I answered.

“Lover’s gamble. What Olympus would you challenge to palm the fire of gods?”

“It’s worth it.”

“She will cause you grief. Better to take up a hobby, or check into an ashram, than learn what you are going to learn the way you’re going about it.”

“I will take my chances.”

“Just remember, then, all things tend toward equilibrium. The ending may be as bitter as the beginning is sweet.”

“Why are you being a such a cynic?”

“Because I am your friend. Don’t get me wrong, I applaud your decision. It is the right way to be. The way things should be, so I’m jealous, and not for the reason you think. I wish I could still be that way too.”

He told me about his marriage, when he was twenty-eight, which had ended in divorce a year later. He had sworn afterward never to marry again, and, at forty-nine was good as his word, living from affair to affair, some of them longer, some shorter; neither, he claimed, expecting nor seeking more.

“That is the nature of modern life,” he argued. “You believe you will find someone who embodies all those things you want, all those things you have been told are appropriate for you, and think you should want. You believe when you find the perfect person your life will be happy. The truth is not that way. You feel a spark, then one day it’s gone, leaving you to decide whether to stay on and slog it out, for another kind of idealism you call practicality, but really it is you are hoping the spark might return, or making yourself a martyr to the secular religion of children and family, which is ridiculous on the level of the individual but keeps society whole. Or else you leave and find a new flame. You cannot do what the old gods did, see, under Zeus, which was both at once. So the answer to your future bind rests in whether you can incorporate the thousand tiny failures, or whether the thing for you is the fire itself.”

“I thought you were a cynic, now you sound like a romantic.”

“Are you an undertaker?”

“What?”

“Stop trying to put people in your boxes.”

“That is not what I’m doing.”

“No? You’re making things binary. They’re not. We are all cynics, and all romantics. Stop reducing people to fit little theories and ideas. It says more about the categories in your mind than it does about life. Creating the category is nothing but an attempt to control.”