—

My father kept a real human skull high on our bookshelf. He used it to teach dental students, and my brother and I liked to play cannibals with it. We put it on a piano-stool altar. We were imitating a Looney Tunes cartoon of a toaster salesman who was sentenced to be a husband to the Queen of the Cannibals. My brother and I found this very funny, especially how the salesman jumped into the pot of boiling water so he would not have to get married. One day my father caught us and he came in and gently reached into the middle of our game and took the skull from us and said, That belonged to a living human being.

He was generally mild with us so when he took the skull that day it marked me. My brother does not remember the incident. What is powerful for one is not even remembered by another.

—

Kosmos had a motorcycle with a sidecar and every night we rode through the empty Paris streets. We made love. Went out again. Were ravenous. Ate cheap gyros on the street. In the daytime I worked at the print shop and wrote at lunch and he went to the library at Georges Pompidou and worked on his play about bridges. I sent an article about Parisian bookshops to Canadian Forum and the editor wrote back and asked me to send more stories. I was happy. Kosmos earned a little money in the late afternoons washing dishes in an Arab café and sometimes he brought us leftover couscous. We often went to look at the stained glass windows of La Sainte-Chapelle, dark zaffre and gold starred patterns, ruby and indigo. Under those windows when no priest was looking we embraced and he said, We will always be once-in-blue-moons.

I said, Why? We can be more.

He said, But I cannot.

Perhaps you could.

Hope is irrational but we endlessly hope.

Later, on my narrow single bed, he pulled me closer and said, Do not fall in love with me.

Too late.

Always he kept a little distance. Then blew on the ember. We drove out of town and explored the countryside, ate crêpes in Beaugency, drank coffee in Versailles, went to a medieval street fair with jugglers and spice merchants in Vincennes. He told me he would one day leave. But I did not listen. My love was uninvited fever, reason past care, consuming, and I was helpless in it. I knew I would never have this again and I wanted all of it, tinder and wild fire.

My room had no doorbell. He would park his motorbike under my window and honk for me. One night he must have been drunk because he wouldn’t stop honking when I did not wake up and someone from the second-floor apartment leaned out the window and dropped a bottle of milk on his helmet. I knew nothing of any of this until I left for work and saw broken glass on the sidewalk. In the afternoon I went to look for him at Shakespeare’s to tell him my news. He wasn’t downstairs so I ran up the Hafiz staircase, a few words on each step—I wish…I could show you…when you are…lonely or…in darkness…the astonishing…light…of your own…being—and there he was at the top, reading, I thought, waiting for me. I moved his book and sat on his lap and he told me about the milk bottle. He said he would have been killed if he had not been wearing a helmet.