Between the Bridge and the River Read online

  By the time she was sixteen, she had become aware of the power of her beauty and no amount of threatening about lakes of fire and eternal damnation was enough to quell her growing desire for a man. A real, big, solid man to get her hands on. To feel the sex of herself and the shuddering excitement she imagined bringing to a creature much more physically powerful than her. She ached for sex. Not love. Sex.

  She didn’t need love because she was already in love with a man she could never have sex with, even with her magnificent body. She had loved him even before she had come to the convent. He had worked as a carpenter and rabbi two thousand years before she was born and had died tragically at an early age. The picture she had of him was from the stained-glass window in the convent chapel, nailed up on the cross, naked but for some kind of miraculous gravity-defying hankie covering his penis. He looked athletic, if you avoided the blood, and she thought he must have enjoyed sport or yoga. She liked his legs; they were long and brown, and as a teenager, she imagined him going for a swim with his girlfriend Mary in the Sea of Galilee, maybe having a picnic after, no problem if they forgot to bring wine.

  She loved Jesus but she had needs that he just couldn’t satisfy, so at the age of nineteen, she chose not to take her final vows and enter the cloisters but left the Catholic Church and headed for the civilization of Paris. Her first dead lover, nailed to the cross, was left behind. Before she went, she knelt quietly in the little chapel and whispered that she would always love him alone.

  Her second lover was an actor, and like many of his profession, he was pathologically self-obsessed. He thought about himself constantly, about his hair and if it was falling out, his weight, the bags under his eyes. His wrinkles, his career, his performance. He thought about himself so much, the only relief he ever felt was pretending to be someone else, which he did for a living and also in his private life, which wasn’t particularly private.

  His name was Guillame Maupassant, and when Claudette met him he was about to star in a musical version of Dante’s Inferno that had been written by the horribly bourgeois but wildly popular English composer Anthony Boyd-Webster.

  Guillame was to play the part of the poet Virgil, and during the show he would guide Dante (played by the great Parisian acting genius Gerard Reno before he got fat and crazy) through the different levels of hell by singing him catchy, middle-of-the-road pop songs.

  In preparation for the role, Guillame had taken to walking the streets of Paris alone at night. He loved the feeling of being alone in the crowd. It made him feel like Virgil, above it all, a watcher without judgment.

  From his apartment in the Sixth Arrondissement he would walk past St. Sulpice, through St. Germain and Opera and into the Latin Quarter, where the tourists sat shivering and eating crappy kebabs at the pavement tables. In truth, he liked to walk around at night anyway, preparing for a role or not, because he got recognized and laid from time to time, as he was still reasonably famous from his role as the brain surgeon Dr. François Villiers in the long-running television soap opera L’Amour et Famille.

  On one autumn night, around midnight, as a light misty rain was smirring the air, putting the city into soft focus, Guillame was out walking. He had just had dinner with his friend Alain Pantelic, a doctor he had gone to school with. Alain told him he was getting engaged to a girl he had met working in the hospital and wanted to hear what Guillame thought. It turned out all Alain really wanted to do was talk about how great his fiancée was, which was also fine with Guillame, who was happy for his old pal. Alain had recently been promoted to head of cancer research at the university hospital and Guillame had teased him about that, saying he was too sentimental to be a scientist, he should be a country practitioner, delivering little fat babies somewhere like Normandy or the Loire Valley.

  Alain had protested loudly but he suspected it was true. He felt he might be too emotional for the job. He hated cancer. Guillame walked alone along Rue de Vaugirard from the restaurant on Boulevard Saint Michel but he felt fat after the big dinner and thought a stroll might help him sleep. He walked past the big green doors at the entrance to his building and turned right up Rue de Rennes to Montparnasse. The rain got heavier suddenly and began to waterfall, so he sought sanctuary. He stumbled out of it into a giant empty bras-serie for a brandy and a coffee. He sat down at a window table, took off his hat and scarf, joked politely about the weather to the aged waiter who, coincidentally, was called Virgil, and lit a cigarette. Then he looked across and saw Claudette, sitting alone at a table with a coffee and a book in front of her.

  Her hair was wet and sticking to the side of her head and he almost gasped aloud at her beauty. She looked over at him and smiled. He smiled back. She looked away and then looked back at him and he was smitten. Claudette had been in town for only a few weeks and, after getting a job as an assistant in the bedding department at Bon Marché and finding a tiny room, had set out in pursuit of her lover. She had scores of offers from drooling youths and desperate older men but she just hadn’t met anybody who made her want to be sinful. That changed when Guillame walked into the brasserie that she liked to read in. He was tall and strong looking with sandy-colored hair that was a little too long. He was slightly overweight and had kind eyes that were deep and blue. His clothes looked crumpled, as if he had been busy tickling someone or taking a nap on the floor. At fortysomething he was in his prime; he seemed confident and sexy and experienced and independent.

  She put her hand inside her shirt and adjusted her bra strap.

  Guillame looked over. He was already hard and his heart thumped in his chest. Boom boom.

  Claudette knew what she wanted. She picked up her book and her cigarettes and walked over to his table. He looked up at her.

  “May I sit?”

  He nodded, afraid that he would squeak if he tried to talk.

  They lived together for nine years in Guillame’s large apartment at 66 Rue de Vaugirard, just next to the Luxembourg Gardens. She was his consolation in his career failures and his glamorous companion in his successes. When he won the Palm d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his portrayal of Hiendrich Schmidtennacht, the conflicted Nazi poetry teacher, in Le Pamplemousse du L’ Horreur, she was by his side on the red carpet, drawing greedy snapping flashes from the ratty entertainment paparazzi. When his next film, Big Friendly American Wedding Celebrity, a ludicrous, formulaic American studio picture starring the lounge singer Leon Martini, was panned by critics and ignored by audiences, she took him on holiday to Corfu and eventually got him laughing about it.

  It really was a stupid movie, as most of them are.

  She learned social graces from him, how to be polite to The Evil in civilized society. He taught her how to dress and apply makeup, he bought her clothes, and she in turn loved him with her body and soul. She loved him because he was funny and sweet and other women desired him. She loved him because he was vulnerable and afraid of failure and she loved him because he was so grateful and indulgent of her sexual curiosity, which was boundless.

  In their apartment they experimented with lotions and oils and devices and manuals and stimulants and aphrodisiacs. They laughed out loud at their efforts. Sometimes they brought in an extra participant, always female, but they only used this woman to enhance the lovemaking between themselves, like a tool. This would sometimes make the third party feel like a prostitute, which they occasionally were.

  Claudette insisted that they never include a second man. She said that would be different. Guillame was relieved and delighted. They also celebrated the mundane in the way only the French and Italians truly can. Each meal was a delight, a walk in the park was a work of art, sitting in a café was a memorable experience. They truly lived and were blessed with unlimited happiness, which, of course, is limited.

  One warm night as they fucked enthusiastically in their little kitchen, Guillame broke a little vial of amyl nitrate under his nose at the moment of orgasm and suffered a massive heart attack just as he ejaculated. Boom Boom.
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  He was dead before he lost his erection. He died inside her.

  France mourned as it does when an artist dies.

  She had to be heavily sedated the night of his funeral. She had a vivid dream.

  She was walking in the garden of Gethsemane, dressed in the habit of her schooldays. She could hear music, and looked off to her left. Sitting under an olive tree at a harpsichord was a hideously ugly dwarf playing “The Girl from Ipanema.” She recognized him as the composer Anthony Boyd-Webster. She smiled at him and he stopped playing and waved over at her and smiled back through a set of joke teeth, the type that can be bought at a party store. She walked on and then stopped as Lord Jesus stood in front of her, wearing a beautiful pinstripe suit by Hugo Boss.

  “Hello,” said Jesus.

  “I’m angry with you,” she said defiantly. “You took my man.”

  Jesus smiled patiently. “He wasn’t yours.”

  “I loved him.”

  “I still do.”

  “Well, so do I, obviously, but he’s dead.”

  “And what does that mean?” inquired Jesus, who was really beginning to irritate Claudette with his holier-than-thou manner although she was respectful of the fact that he actually was.

  “Look,” explained Christ, “I wanted to let you know, to perhaps lighten your load a little, that you are extremely important in God’s plan.”

  “So He has a plan, then?”

  “Oh yes, and your part in it is—you are His consolation to those about to fall, your beauty, charm, and sex are salve for the pain of passing. Claudette Bruchard is God’s Gift to dying men.”

  “I don’t want to be that.”

  “We all have our crosses to bear,” said Jesus sadly.

  Then she was awake. It took only a couple of seconds for her to completely forget the dream and remember that her heart was broken and she was in hell.

  A string of lovers followed, all with the same horrifying results. Nigel, a dashing English Formula One Racing driver who hit a pillar in Monte Carlo at 170 miles an hour. The last thing to go through his mind was “Shi—” He didn’t even have time for t.

  Then there was Don, her American, who was electrocuted while changing a lightbulb in his office; Mikael, a Russian mobster who was assassinated as he left Kievskya Station on a business trip home to Moscow; and most recently, Bruce, an Australian diplomat at the embassy in Paris who had drunkenly stepped in front of a Metro train only six months previously.

  Bruce had finally sent Claudette over the edge. She had told him that she was cursed, that men dropped like flies around her. He had laughed and said he was Australian and that flies didn’t die over there, they just went to Brisbane. She didn’t know what he meant but she felt comforted. She had been with him for a year and had started to believe that everything was going to be okay until that horrible night. She had hardly spoken since, shunning male company at all times, which was difficult for someone as beautiful and with such a large sexual appetite.

  She walked from café to café. Drinking coffee, brooding, and trying to make herself feel better by reading infantile, optimistic pop-culture psychology books with titles like Chicken Soup for the Newly Bereaved and Why Am I Afraid to Love? She was rereading a book an American acquaintance had given her years ago, Men Are Asteroids, Women Are Meteorites, by Some Idiot, when she first made eye contact with George.

  “Excuse me, do you have a light?” he asked.

  She saw the desire in his eyes as he looked at her.

  “Stay away from me, I am Death,” she told him in perfect English.

  George thought for a moment. “Then I’d expect you’d be more than happy to help me light a cigarette, Oh Dark One.”

  “I mean it,” she snapped.

  “So do I,” said George. “If you are Death you could take me now and save me a lot of pain.”

  George was rapidly losing the ability to give a crap what anyone thought of him, even beautiful women.

  Claudette felt terribly sorry for him because she sensed his sincerity and wildness, which had aroused her interest, and therefore she knew that his days were numbered. She lit his cigarette, allowing her hand to touch his.

  THE ROAD TO GOD: TWO

  SAUL SWEATED FOR A NIGHT OR TWO, anxiety/thinky sweat, not the normal fatty adolescent kind that he usually had going, although he was still pouring out that stuff too. In fact, his bedsheets were soaked in the morning with double the sweat output of a fat teenager combined with his nocturnal semen emissions, caused by dreams in which he imagined himself the Emperor Tiberius sitting in baths of tepid sea water as small carp nibbled at the savory bread crumbs he had sprinkled over his scrotum.

  Mrs. Wolf never complained or embarrassed him but she was quietly astonished that the boy had any fluids left in him by morning.

  Saul had to work fast. If Leon became popular in high school, he would never want to leave. He would want to stay in Duluth and be happy, have kids, vote. Saul couldn’t allow this; he knew they were destined for greatness and huge cash rewards.

  So Saul sweated over how to keep Leon from the damnation of high-school popularity until he remembered his dear mother and her Munchausen by Proxy. It was this that inspired him to embark on a short course of therapeutic poisoning.

  Bad acid is like a taxi. You can never find it when you need it. For Saul to work his magic on his brother he needed some nasty, powerful, and dirty LSD. Not the kind of thing that you fall over at the Astronomy Club, although the Astronomy Club did have a resource that Saul knew would prove invaluable.

  Science geeks.

  Anyone who seeks true power needs science geeks. Guys who can drum up weird and noxious stuff that can scare the crap out of people. Stalin had the brilliant and troublesome Sakharov when the U.S. had Oppenheimer and his band of guilt-ridden geniuses. You need science geeks if you want control. This is, incidentally, where Hitler really messed up. He applied his ludicrous racial agenda to the universities before he even invaded Poland. He didn’t want Jews running things in the places of learning. Too dangerous. He exiled Jewish academics. The trouble with this policy, however, is that whether you are anti-Semitic or not, you have to acknowledge that Jews tend to be clever, academic, and temporal successes. Success is not reviled in Jewish culture, there is no anti-intellectualism in mainstream Judaism like there is in the breakaway Jewish cults of Christianity and Islam. Therefore, Hitler lost some of his best geeks before the war started. Geeks who would later develop weapons for an enemy that would leave his nasty little dream a burned corpse in a Berlin bunker.

  It should be said that Carl Jung accepted an academic post in Germany in the thirties, a post vacated by an exiled Jew. Freud saw this as proof of his anti-Semitism, although Jung hotly denied it. After his death he conceded to Freud that it had in fact been an error and he apologized unreservedly. The courtly Freud took the apology in good humor and nearly said, “No harm done,” but then changed his mind, as that would, of course, have been wildly inaccurate.

  Saul needed some bad acid. He needed to change his brother’s mind, make him more malleable. He didn’t know any drug dealers, nor was he likely to go unnoticed if he attempted to buy drugs anyway. This was before drugs became almost curricular in American high schools.

  The preparation of the extremely powerful hallucinogen LSD (lysergic acid) is not a hugely demanding piece of lab work but it was beyond Saul’s capability at that time. It was, however, a piece of cake to a compadre of his, Benny Alderton—or Nota Benny, as he was nicknamed by his fellow geeks, who prided themselves on their witty use of pidgin Latin.

  He bribed Benny, a chemistry nut (who would go on to develop a topical cream that, when applied to the penis, acted as a stimulant, producing a thrilling erection, and a contraceptive, and made him five billion dollars before he died at the age of thirty-two in a micro-lite accident off the coast of Santa Barbara), with three back issues of the pornographic magazine Hustler.

  Hustler should not be confused with Playboy.
Hustler showed graphic pictures of women pulling their labial lips apart to show their red, fruity inner workings while pretending to be in ecstasy, whereas Playboy showed pictures of women pretending to be in ecstasy for no apparent reason whatsoever—perhaps they were excited sexually by being near a fake fur rug or a tennis racket. No fleshy, baboony hangings in the Playboy pictures. All the unpleasant nature of sex organs viewed at too close proximity was airbrushed away to make things neat. Nicely coiffured good-girl, All-American Vulvas—sanitized for your convenience.

  Saul managed to get his hands on the goods. He had to feign interest when he took delivery from Benny.

  “Be careful with this stuff, Saul, it’s highly potent. Blah blah no alcohol blah blah induced psychosis blah blah.”

  Leon had a massive dose in his Cheerios the following morning. Saul waited as they boarded the Bastard bus to school. Leon didn’t feel strange at all for about forty-five minutes and Saul was angry, contemplating his revenge on Benny, whom he feared had ripped him off, when the fun began.

  Deborah Thornhill had taken to waiting for Leon in the school-yard as the Bastard bus arrived. She loved him as only a teenage girl can love a singer. This had a startling effect on the rest of The Bastards.

  Deborah’s high-school kudos combined with her obsession with Leon made them much more acceptable. Deborah said she thought it was romantic that Leon lived in an orphanage, and Deborah’s word had real weight with the other girls; therefore The Bastards became romantic. It became fashionable to be a Bastard. They were the outcasts. The awkward walking wounded. The personification of what all teenagers feel like. Punk rockers.

  The Bastards loved this, of course, and were very grateful to Leon, who had become as a god among them.