The Conversion Read Online Free Page A

known about it the whole time?”
    He nodded.
    “That’s … really lousy.” I began to stutter. “You at least could have told me first!”
    Michel’s expression was at once compassionate and, I couldn’t help noticing, slightly impatient. Later on, after replaying the scene thousands of times, I began wondering if that moment of slight irritation was actually the sign that, although my sexual power seemed to equal his, he was actually realizing that I was still a lot younger and greener than he was, in short a liability. An enormous leaf came feathering down from a tree and brushed his face and he closed his eyes self-protectively. At that moment he looked so vulnerable. Had I wanted to, I could’ve easily punched him and knocked him to the ground. When he spoke again, it was with more patience. “Would you really want to know, Russell?”
    Of course. Why wouldn’t I?
    He shook his head resolutely. “If you know, I doubt you will have gone with me. And if you know and still decide to go with me, you would never enjoy yourself.” He smiled forlornly. “At least we can say that we have these four wonderful days. Not true?”
    Now I think to myself: Who else but a Frenchman would be able to pull off a breakup with such disarming diplomacy? But of course, at the time I still felt monstrously mistreated.
    “Well then, if I have no say in this, then what
can
I say?”
    “Nothing but good-bye, Russell,” he replied with great courtesy, offering me a handshake instead of a kiss. Quite a contrast to perhaps six hours earlier when he was begging me for sex.
    I was so furious with Michel at that moment I couldn’t speak. Although the compulsion to attack him and hurt him openly grew stronger by the second, it ended up scaring me into a state of inertia. All I could do was watch him lope over to his BMW and mount it. With a flick of his wrist, the motor ignited and his motorcycle launched down my street, its chrome tailpipe transmitting a sad flash of acknowledgment in the dusk of a late-summer city.
    Watching him ride out of my life was so incredibly painful. There was no delayed reaction, no numbness or shock. The tearing sensation that is so clichéd was stunning. And somehow in the midst of it, I happened to notice an elderly woman, in a kimono, her thick mascaraed eyes staring down at me from her apartment window, a cigarette between her fingers. She observed the obvious signs of a
chagrin d’amour
with what I imagined to be the recognition of someone who’d perhaps lived through it many times herself. She reminded me of a wise old Colette peering down into the street like a patron saint.
    I sank into a fuguelike depression, the sort in which your appetite dries up and there is a perpetual coppery taste in your mouth. I slept very badly, my dreams frenzied and feverish and always of operatic length. I’d wake up in the middle of some outlandish scenario in which Michel was playing most of the parts—male and female—and marvel at the insane dimensions of my imagination and then, like a psychic prisoner, tumble back into the same nightmare.
    I will say, however, that Paris comforted me: the precise contours of its formal gardens à la française; the rapturous, musky scent of its towering linden trees; winding streets bulging with shops whose eclectic displays inspired fabrics with brilliant color and texture; fresh flowers that seemed to have been cut only moments before in some vast, sun-dappled field. All of it brought brief moments of solace.
    One week into this terrible interlude, Ed called me out of the blue. He sounded genuinely surprised to learn of my
chagrin d’amour
and immediately invited me to dinner. By our third engagement he’d already begun lobbying for me to stay on in Paris—with him at his apartment on the rue Birague. Until he’d mentioned the tantalizing idea I’d been consoling myself with the thought of getting far away from Michel and France, of returning to America. And now I can