Well, if he could no longer taste passion, he could at least remember it.
She had been nineteen when they'd met in August of 1950. A university student majoring in political philosophy, sex, and revolution. Danelle had been eager to comfort the shattered victim of a capitalist witch-hunt: the new darling of the French intellectual left. She took pride in his sufferings. As if the mystique of his martyrdom could rub off with bodily contact.
She had used him. But by the Ideal he had used her. As a shroud, a buffer against pain and memory. Drowned himself in cunt and wine. Nursing a bottle in Lena Goldoni's Champs-Elysees penthouse listening to the impassioned rhetoric of revolution. Caring far less for the rhetoric than the passion. Red-tipped nails meeting a slash of red for a mouth as Dani puffed inexpertly at larynx-stripping Gauloises. Black hair as smooth as an ebony helmet over her small head. Lush bosoms straining at a too tight sweater, and short skirts that occasionally gave him tantalizing glimpses of pale inner thigh.
God, how they had screwed! Had there ever been any emotion past mutual using? Yes, perhaps, for she had been one of the last to condemn and reject him. She had even seen him off on that frigid January day. That was when he'd still had luggage and a semblance of dignity. There on the platform of the Montparnasse railway station, she had pressed money and a bottle of cognac onto him. He hadn't refused. The cognac had been too welcome, and the money meant that another bottle would follow.
In 1953 he had called Dani when another fruitless visa battle with the German authorities had sent him careening back into France. Called her hoping for one more bottle of cognac, one more handout, one more round of desperate fornication. But a man had answered, and in the background he had heard a child crying, and when she had finally come to the phone, the message was clear. Get fucked, Tachyon. Tittering, he had suggested that was why he'd called. The unpleasant buzz of a disconnected phone.
Later in that cold park in Neuilly he'd read of Blythe's death, and nothing had seemed to matter anymore.
And yet when the delegation arrived in Paris, Dani had reached out. A note in his box at the Ritz. A meeting on the Left Bank as the silver-gray Parisian sky was turning to rose, and the Eiffel Tower became a web of diamond light. So maybe she had cared. And maybe, to his shame, he hadn't Dome was a typical working-class Parisian cafe. Tiny tables squeezed onto the sidewalk, gay, blue, and white umbrellas, harried, frowning waiters in none-too-clean white smocks. The smell of coffee and grillade. Tach surveyed the handful of patrons. It was early yet for Paris. He hoped she hadn't chosen to sit inside. All that smoke. His glance kept flicking across a thickset figure in a rusty black coat. There was a watchful intensity about the raddled face, and-
Dear God, could it… NO! "Bon soir, Tachyon."
"Danelle," he managed faintly, and groped for the back of a chair.
She smiled an enigmatic smile, sucked down some coffee, ground out a cigarette in the dirty ashtray, lit another, leaned back in a horrible parody of her old sexy manner, and eyed him through the rising smoke. "You haven't changed." His mouth worked, and she laughed sadly. "The platitude a little hard to force out? Of course I've changed-it's been thirty-six years."
Thirty-six years. Blythe would be seventy-five. Intellectually he had accepted the reality of their pitifully short lifespans. But it had not come home to him before. Blythe had died. Braun remained unchanged. David was lost, so like Blythe remained a memory of youth and charm. And of his new friends, Tommy, Angelface, and Hiram were just entering that uncomfortable stage of middle age. Mark was the merest child. Yet forty-one years ago it had been Mark's father who had impounded Tach's ship. And Mark hadn't even been born yet!
Soon (or at least as his people measured time), he would be forced to watch them pass from youth into inevitable decay and thence into death. The chair was a welcome support as his rump hit the cold wrought-iron.
"Danelle," he said again.
"A kiss, Tachy, for old times' sake?"
Heavy yellowish pouches hung beneath faded eyes. Gray brittle hair thrust into a careless bun, the deep gouges beside her mouth into which the scarlet lipstick had bled like a wound. She leaned in close, hitting him with a wave of foul breath. Strong tobacco, cheap wine, coffee, and rotting teeth combining in a stomach-twisting effluvium.
He recoiled, and this time when the laughter came it seemed forced. As if she hadn't expected this reaction and was covering the hurt. The harsh laugh ended in a long coughing jag that brought him out of his chair and to her side. Irritably she shrugged off his soothing hand. "Emphysema. And don't you start, le petit docteur. I'm too damn old to give up my cigarettes, and too damn poor to get medical attention when the time comes to die. So I smoke faster hoping I'll die faster, and then it won't cost so much at the end."
"Danelle-"
"Bon Dieu, Tachyon! You are dull. No kiss for old times' sake, and apparently no conversation either. Though as I recall, you weren't much of a talker all those years ago."
"I was finding all the communication I needed in the bottom of a cognac bottle."
"It doesn't seem to have inconvenienced you any. Behold! A great man."
She saw the world-renowned figure, a slim figure dressed in brocade and lace, but he, gazing back at the reflections of a thousand memories, saw a cavalcade of lost years. Cheap rooms stinking of sweat, vomit, urine, and despair. Groaning in an alley in Hamburg, beaten almost to death. Accepting a devil's pact with a gently smiling man, and for what? Another bottle. Waking hallucinations in a cell in the Tombs.
"What are you doing, Danelle?"
"I'm a maid at the Hotel Intercontinental." She seemed to sense his thought. "Yes, an unglamorous end to all that revolutionary fervor. The revolution never came, Tachy."
"No."
"Which doesn't leave you brokenhearted."
"No. I never accepted your-all of your-versions of utopia."
"But you stayed with us. Until finally we threw you out."
"Yes, I needed you, and I used you.".
"My God, such a soul-deep confession? At meetings like these it's supposed to be all `bonjour' and `Comment allezvous,' and `My, you haven't changed.' But we've already done that, haven't we?" The bitter mocking tone added a razor's edge to the words.
"What do you want, Danelle? Why did you ask to see me?"
"Because I knew it would bother you." The butt of the Gauloise followed its predecessor into a squashed and ashy death. "No, that's not true. I saw your little motorcade pull in. All flags and limousines. It made me think of other years and other banners. I suppose I wanted to remember, and alas as one grows older, the memories of youth become fainter, less real."
"I unfortunately do not share that kindly blurring. My kind do not forget."
"Poor little prince." She, coughed again, a wet sound. Tachyon reached into his breast pocket, pulled out his wallet, stripped off bills.
"What's that for?"
"The money you gave me and the cognac and thirty-six years interest."
She flinched away, eyes bright with unshed tears. "I didn't call you for charity or pity"
"No, you called to rip at me, hurt me."
She looked away. "No, I called you so I could remember another time."
"They weren't very good times."
"For you maybe. I loved them. I was happy. And don't flatter yourself. You weren't the reason."
"I know. Revolution was your first and final love. I find it hard to accept that you've given it up."