“Then I strongly recommend you reconsider your decision not to go to Safe House.”
“I understand why you’re concerned about me, but I don’t think I can move out. I’m going to stay at home.” She gazed down at her hands and said, “Now do you think we can we talk about sex?”
Seven-twenty, and Gibbs looked like she’d been up for a couple of hours and had spent the time getting herself prepped for tea with some friends she was trying to impress. Her hair-perfect. Makeup-ditto. Outfit? A little too… something.
“Slutty,” Diane would say, of course. But Gibbs’s ensemble wasn’t really slutty, just a shadow or two sexier than almost any other woman would assemble for an early-morning meeting to discuss her sex life with her therapist.
“Sex,” she said, her voice suddenly crusty in a sultry Peggy Lee kind of way. “It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
Was it ever?Instantly, I was wide awake. Even at that hour I had the presence of mind to know that my sudden vigilance wasn’t entirely a good thing.
“ Sterling and I met in St. Tropez. Did we ever tell you that?”
I thought it was the kind of fact I’d have remembered from the earlier therapy. But I didn’t recall previously musing with Gibbs, or any other patient for that matter, about any of the playgrounds of the privileged in the South of France. It was one of those things that didn’t come up regularly in psychotherapy in Boulder, Colorado.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“ Sterling was working as crew on some rich guy’s yacht-a big boat-and I was doing a summer-in-France-learn-a-language thing with a girlfriend after my freshman year in college. We all met at this big Saturday morning market in town in St. Tropez-Oh, you should go! The market was so much fun!-and he and his friends invited us onto the boat for a party later that day. It started with everybody swimming in the afternoon. We were anchored within sight of the beach, and Sterling put on this diving exhibition off the bow. He was really good. Flips and pikes and God knows what else he was doing. He was the center of everybody’s attention. I admit that I couldn’t take my eyes off him.
“We hit it off; I mean, I really liked him right from the start. But you know, the party was going to be it as far as seeing him went; the yacht was sailing the next morning to Greece or Yugoslavia or somewhere. When my girlfriend and I left at the end of the evening-actually it was more like the middle of the night-I told Sterling where he could look me up in Palos Verdes if he wanted, but I never thought I’d see him again after that.
“Those summer things, they tug and tug, don’t they? Did you ever have one, Dr. Gregory?”
Gibbs’s breathing seemed to have grown deeper. Recalling her youthful memories had softened her persona just a little. My judgment was that she didn’t really care whether or not I’d ever had a summer thing, but nonetheless my focus wavered for half a heartbeat with lusty reminiscences of an ancient August week with Nancy Lind when our families were both-
“Have you ever been to St. Tropez?” she asked, yanking me back tohersummer thing.
I knew she didn’t really want to know that, either. It was merely a way of stressing thatshehad.
“No,” I said.
“It’s not what you think. As a town, I mean. Well, it is, but then, you know, it isn’t. It’s not just the stereotype.”
I was wondering why it was important what I thought of St. Tropez, a topic about which I never expected to have an opinion, let alone one firm enough to degrade into a stereotype. Asking her why it was important to her what I thought, I decided, would risk interfering with the direction of a journey I knew next to nothing about.
All I knew was that it was, directly or indirectly, about sex.
She didn’t wait long to learn what misconceptions I might harbor about St. Tropez. “We didn’t have sex that night,” Gibbs said. “Other people did, almost everybody did. You know, it was that kind of party, but Sterling and I didn’t do anything.”
“Sex. It’s not just for procreation anymore.”
I started thinking that I’d never been to that kind of party. The kind of party where young beautiful people gather on a rich guy’s yacht in St. Tropez and everybody has sex under the stars. A lost opportunity of my youth, perhaps. I didn’t even recall the fork in the road with the sign markedWANTON SEX IN ST. TROPEZ, THIS WAY.
“We wanted to-I did anyway. I was a prude, and I wanted to, so I’m sure he did. For me, it was the most romantic night of my life. And not just romantic, but… erotic, sensual, you know? The Mediterranean, the yacht, the sky, the music, the wine, and these gorgeous people from all over the world. Sex was in the air. When you breathed, you inhaled it. It filled your nose like the flowers at the market that morning. You sipped some wine, and you could taste it. The sex, I mean. It was everywhere. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
Hardly. But I didn’t say anything. I thought she had enough momentum to continue on her own.
“I’d never been to a party like that before. With people so… uninhibited. Brazen. I mean, bold. And with strangers… So many languages… So much…” The final thought drifted away.
I admit that I was curious how her sentence would end, but any words on my part would have been distracting. I waited some more.
When she started up again, it was as though she were answering a question that I had never asked. Silence does that sometimes.
“What was it like to be there? I wanted to fall in love that night. I wanted to fall in love that night, and Sterling was there. He was handsome. He was charming. Oh, Sterling’s not really tall enough to be my dream man, and I’d always fantasized that I’d end up with a guy with darker hair, but… that night he let me be there, but not be there. He let me dip a toe in the water-of, of that world-but he didn’t throw me in the pool. He stayed with me almost the entire night while I tried to find out exactly where I might fit.
“That’s not easy when you’re nineteen and you’re on a yacht in St. Tropez, right? Knowing where you fit?”
She found some affirmation somewhere in my impassive face, and she went on.
“There were other… you know, people for him on the boat. Plenty of them. Prettier than me. More adventurous than me, that’s for sure. But… he didn’t… go with them. He stayed with me. We danced. We kissed a little. Okay, we kissed a lot. And… you know. We watched a… little. But we didn’t… So I guess that’s why he was the one I…”
I was aware of the disconnect I was feeling. Despite the hour, despite my aversion to true sex adventures, the erotic escapade that Gibbs was spinning was actually interesting to me. I pushed myself hard against the cushion of my chair. It was a way of telling myself to take a step back. A way of reminding myself that whatever it was that was happening right then in my office, it was about Gibbs, not about her interlude in St. Tropez with Sterling.
My job was to ignore the fireworks and focus on the night sky.
To use my night vision. Not to be blinded.
“Anyway, he did call,” she went on. “He actually called my parents’ house the following Christmas Eve. I was home from school for the holidays. He came over, and we stayed out almost that whole night, just talking.”
Instinctively, I guessed what was next.No sex,I thought.He played it cool. It was just like St. Tropez, sans the yacht and the Mediterranean.
“We didn’t have sex then,” she confirmed. “We just talked. But the whole night I felt like I was back on that yacht with him. It was that sensuous, that romantic, you know? I felt an anticipation, a sense of I-can’t-wait, I-can’t-wait, that I hadn’t felt on Christmas Eve since I was eight years old. But of course it was different. And that’s the charge I feel-still feel-when I see Sterling.”