Now, even the touching was tentative. It could be unsure, or ill timed, or fumbled, or overassertive; all its former immediacies seemed to have been lost. For weeks Pascal felt watched. True intimacy was impossible, for he felt that a third person shared these rooms with them; his presence intruded into their conversations and interrupted their attempts at making love. Pascal tried to exorcise this man, then, realizing Gini was also attempting to do the same, felt the jealousy come surging back. Did she compare kisses? Had he touched her there, and in this way—and when he did so, if he did so, what had been her response?

He longed to know, and loathed himself for this. He would permit himself to ask no such vulgar questions, and he would not allude to his feelings, he was too proud to do that. He knew they affected what he came to think of as his performance—and how he loathed that term, though it was apt—and he could see the pained efforts Gini made to reassure him. The loving embraces, the strokings, the soothing words, her apparent fear that he no longer desired her—how he hated all that. She kissed him now as if she doubted her right to do so. Pascal, wanting her desperately but fearful of failure and comparison, would jerk away from her touch. This was torture to him. Pascal, an absolutist, hated all lies; until then he had never understood just how much the body could lie. He had assumed, naively, that untruth and evasion required speech.

It was six weeks before he could bring himself to make love to her. When he finally did, it was after a violent argument, during the course of which they had both drunk too much wine, perhaps because they had both begun to believe that antagonism might succeed where care and patience had failed. A short-circuit device; fucking her, Pascal thought—we both intended to incite precisely this.

The act had not been the reunion he had planned; it had been angry, unsatisfactory, and brief. Afterward, Gini wept—and for the first time in his life he turned away from those tears with a cold repugnance he had never expected to possess.

“You did this,” he said to her. “It was you who brought us to this.” He slammed out, and walked furiously and mindlessly through the dark Paris streets.

The next day, a reconciliation; both were contrite. Then more arguments, and reconciliations again. Pascal began to grow desperate: this cycle was only too familiar to him. He could not believe that with a woman he so loved, he was experiencing again the remorseless downward spiral of disaffection he had been through with his ex-wife.

Perhaps, he thought, as the ugly month of February became March, perhaps if he could only act love better, he would be released, and would be able to express the love he knew was there, locked somewhere inside himself. It had sprung to his lips unaided facing Star in Madame Duval’s apartment; looking at death fifteen feet away, it had been impossible to disguise: it had simply been there, and he had sensed in Gini its unhesitating and immediate response.