Mademoiselle was out of town a lot during the past few months, goddamn it! I couldn’t get anything else done because I spent my days combing Paris for the bitch! Do you know how many lousy little hotels there are here where a silly American model can hide out? How many dirty family pensions? I tell you, it’s just like the stars in the sky: God alone has counted them. I’d like to have His problems. He didn’t have to comb through each and every one of them for a lunatic girl who might have snuck in to spend an entire week in a darkened room, consuming nothing but raw eggs from a plastic box, instant coffee from little packets, chain-smoking, pill-popping, afflicted by unnameable terrors, shaken by ineffable fears, in constant danger of falling asleep with the cigarette in her pretty kisser and burning up in bed. He didn’t hang on the telephone for nights on end, waiting to get through because the night clerk had deserted his post and was screwing madame la patronne two flights up . . .

be that as it may, in that very spot, the sleazy, sordid hotel on the place des Ternes—which our friend Schwab knew well enough, didn’t he?—she had found refuge with the handsome Pole and the breathtaking French madame. In the same room where the scene with the Indian doll had taken place two years earlier (S. blushes even now at the mere mention of it). Our first love nest. The setting for an unspeakably arduous, unspeakably joyless deflowering (at the mere thought of it, I blush). I don’t understand why it didn’t occur to me right away to look for her there (probably for that very reason).

In the end, that’s where I found her. With great delight, I can report (relishing Schwab’s round-eyed interest) on how I had to construct a whole set of fictions, a real house of cards, to lure her out of her hole: the past was snuffed out. Our relationship had never existed—that is to say, never reached a higher degree of intimacy than that of casual acquaintance. (“Oh, how nice to see you!”) I called to ask if she would go out with me. (Her date for tonight.) Needless to say, I brought flowers, two dozen white roses. With scrupulous narrative precision I describe how she had once again kept me waiting for hours before she descended the stairs in a black Pola Negri gown, parodying herself with symptoms of daffy insanity: prancing toward me with the marionette gait of a mindless mannequin; her hands, in black elbow-length widow’s gloves, dangling affectedly from bent arms; her head sporting a gigantic black mushroom-shaped stump of a hat, which cast its shadow over soup-plate-sized dark glasses sparkling with green and violet reflections, so that all one could see underneath was the mouth and chin and throat—very red, very white, perfectly beautiful: the tragic lips of Garbo, the tender and resolute chin of Ava Gardner, the stem-like throat of Audrey Hepburn, all the clichés of standardized female beauty in a halved head, as in a Vogue fashion photo.