Anne and Paul's relationship was unusual. Anne was seventeen going on eighteen and Paul was twenty-six. They had problems in bed from the start. In summer Paul was often impotent, in winter he was prone to premature ejaculation, and in spring and autumn he wasn't interested in sex. That's according to Anne; she also says that he was the most intelligent person she had ever met. Paul knew about everything: painting, art history, literature, music. Sometimes he was insufferable, but he could tell when it was coming on and knew to shut himself up in his studio and paint until he had stopped being insufferable and reverted to his normal self — charming, chatty, and loving — at which point he would stop painting and take Anne to the movies, or the theater, or one of the many talks and readings that were happening at Berkeley, as if to prepare people's minds for the decisive years to come. At first they lived off of Anne's cafй wages and a scholarship that Paul had. Then one day they decided to travel to Mexico and Anne quit her job.
They went to Tijuana, Hermosillo, Guaymas, Culiacбn, and Mazatlбn, where they rented a beach house. They went swimming every morning; in the afternoon Paul painted while Anne read, and at night they went to a North American bar, the only one in town, called The Frog, frequented by tourists and Californian students. They stayed there late into the night, drinking and talking to people they would normally have ignored. Outside The Frog they bought marijuana from a thin Mexican guy who always wore white and wasn't allowed into the bar. He waited for clients in his car, parked opposite, next to a dead tree.
The thin guy was called Rubйn, and sometimes he would exchange marijuana for cassettes, which he played straight away in the car. They soon made friends with him. One afternoon, while Paul was painting, Rubйn turned up at the beach house and Paul asked him to pose. From that day on, they never had to pay for their marijuana. But Rubйn would sometimes arrive in the morning and stay well into the night, which annoyed Anne, not just because she had to cook for an extra person, but also because, the way she saw it, the Mexican was intruding on the idyllic life they had planned to lead, just the two of them.
At first Rubйn talked only to Paul, as if he could tell that Anne resented his presence, but as the days went by they became friends. Rubйn spoke a little English and Paul and Anne practiced their rudimentary Spanish with him. One afternoon, while they were swimming, Anne felt Rubйn touching her legs under the water. Paul was on the beach, watching them. When Rubйn came up to the surface he looked her in the eyes and said he was in love with her. That day, as they later found out, someone drowned: a boy who used to go to The Frog; they had talked with him a couple times.
Shortly afterward they went back to San Francisco. It was a good time for Paul. He had a couple of exhibitions, sold some paintings, and his relationship with Anne was steadier than ever. At the end of the year they both traveled to Great Falls and spent Christmas with Anne's parents. Paul didn't like Anne's mother and father, but he got on well with Susan. One night Anne woke up alone in bed. She went looking for Paul and heard voices in the kitchen. When she went downstairs she found Paul and Susan talking about Fred. Paul was listening and asking questions, and Susan was telling him about the last day she had spent with Fred, driving around the poorest neighborhoods of Great Falls. She told the story over and over, from different points of view. Anne remembers that there was something oddly artificial about this conversation between her lover and her sister, as if they were assessing the plot of a film, not something that had happened in real life.
The following year Anne quit her studies and devoted herself to looking after Paul. She bought his canvases, stretchers, and paint; she cooked, washed, swept, mopped the floors, did the dishes, and generally tried to make their home a haven of peace and creativity. But their relationship was far from perfect. As a lover Paul kept getting worse. Sex with him did nothing for Anne and she began to wonder if she might be a lesbian. Around that time they met Linda and Marc. Linda sold drugs for a living, like Rubйn in Mazatlбn, and occasionally she wrote children's stories, which kept getting rejected by publishers. Marc was a poet, or at least that was what Linda said. At that stage he usually spent most of the day shut up in his apartment, listening to the radio or watching television. In the morning he would go out and buy three or four newspapers, and on rare occasions he went to the university, where he met up with old friends or attended the classes of some famous poet who was doing a stint as a visiting professor at Berkeley. But, according to Anne, the rest of the time, he stayed in his apartment, or in his room if Linda had visitors, listening to the radio, watching television, and waiting for the declaration of World War III.
It came as a surprise to Anne when Paul's career suddenly stalled. Everything happened too quickly. First he lost his scholarship, then the galleries in the Bay area stopped exhibiting his work, and in the end he gave up painting and started studying literature. In the afternoons, Paul and Anne would go to Linda and Marc's apartment and talk for hours about the Vietnam war and about travel. Although Paul and Marc were never really close, they could spend hours on end reading each other poems and drinking (around that time, Anne remembers, Paul began to write poems in the style of William Carlos Williams and Kenneth Rexroth, whom they had once heard give a reading in Palo Alto). Anne's friendship with Linda, on the other hand, deepened imperceptibly but surely, although it seemed to lack a firm base. Anne liked Linda's self-assurance, her independence, her eclectic way of life, the way she flouted certain social conventions while respecting others.
When Linda got pregnant, her relationship with Marc came to a sudden end. She went to live in an apartment on Donaldson Street and kept working until a few days or maybe (Anne can't remember) a few hours before the birth. Marc stayed on in the old apartment and became even more reclusive. At first Paul went on visiting Marc but he soon realized they had nothing to say to each other, so he stopped. The two women, however, grew closer, and Anne would sometimes sleep over at her friend's apartment, mainly on the weekends, to help look after Linda's baby when she was busy with her clients.
A year after their first trip to Mexico, Paul and Anne went back to Mazatlбn. This time it was different. Paul wanted to rent the beach house, but it was taken, so they had to make do with a sort of bungalow three blocks away. As soon as they arrived in Mazatlбn, Anne fell sick. She had diarrhea and a fever and couldn't get out of bed for three days. The first day Paul stayed in the bungalow and looked after her, but then he started disappearing for hours and once he stayed out all night. Rubйn, however, came to see her. Anne realized that Paul had been out on the town with Rubйn and at first she hated the Mexican. But on the third night, when she was starting to feel a bit better, Rubйn turned up at the bungalow at two in the morning to inquire about the state of her health. They talked until five and then made love. Anne was still feeling weak. The door was ajar, and at one point she was sure that Paul was behind it, watching them, or looking through the window, but Rubйn was so tender and it went on so long that she forgot about everything else, she says.