Ken Grimwood - Replay

Mireille listened without a word. The lowering sun backlit her hair, turning it the color of flame, and left her face in deepening shadow. At long last his voice trailed off, defeated by the incredibility of what he had tried to tell her.

It was dark by then, and Mireille’s face was impossible to read. Did she think he was mad, or recounting an opium dream? Her silence began to erode the cathartic relief he had felt in telling her.

"Mireille? I didn’t mean to shock you; I—"

She rose to her knees, put her slender arms around his neck. The tight curls of her copper hair pressed softly against his cheek.

"Many lives," she whispered. "Many pains."

He held her slim young body tightly, breathed long and deep of the crisp, pine-scented air. Scattered laughter drifted toward them through the trees, and then the clear, sweet, buoyant sounds of the latest Sylvie Vartan record.

"Viens," Mireille said, standing up and taking Jeff’s hand. "Let’s go join the party. La vie nous attend."

They all went back to Paris in August, when the rains started again. Mireille never said anything more to Jeff about what he’d told her that evening in the garden at St.Tropez; she must have attributed it all to the hash, and that was just as well. Nor did Jeff and Sharla talk openly about the group sex and the drugs that were now part of the normal routine of their lives. Those things had happened; they kept on happening. There was no reason to discuss them as long as everybody was having a good time.

One of the new couples who periodically drifted in and out of the scene introduced them to a partouze in the rue le Chatelier, a few blocks north of what would continue to be called Place de l’Etoile until De Gaulle died in 1970. The partouze, one of several that had flourished in the city since the twenties, was a well-run, sumptuously appointed establishment: glass-encased antique-doll collection in the parlor, thick maroon carpet to match the walls, which were hung with Jin de siècle prints … and three uniformed maids to serve the thirty or forty naked couples who wandered and frolicked through the place’s two floors of well-equipped, very large bedrooms.

The St. Tropez crowd began frequenting the partouze every weekend. One night Jeff and Sharla had a threesome with a coltish American starlet new to Paris, who would soon be known more for her radical feminism than for her acting; another night, Mireille and Sharla and Chicca held an impromptu contest to see which of them could be first to have sex with twenty men at one party. Sharla won.

Jeff was amazed at how quickly this unceasing roundelay of casual public sex with beautiful strangers had grown to seem perfectly normal; he was struck by the fact that such activities could go on without the slightest fear of those plagues from his own time, herpes and AIDS. That carefree sense of safety gave the decadent proceedings a retrospective air of innocence—naked children at play in the Garden before the Fall. He wondered what had happened to the partouzes, and their counterparts in America and the rest of Europe, in the eighties. If they’d survived at all, they must be rife with disease-inspired paranoia and guilt.

The eighties: a decade of loss, of broken hopes, of death. All of which would come again, he knew, and far too soon.

They’d been in London less than a month when he met the girl who offered him the LSD; met her as she was coming out of the Chelsea Drugstore, in fact. They had a good laugh about that as he chatted her up over Campari and soda. Jeff said he’d gone down to get his prescription filled and gotten exactly what he wanted. She thought that was funny, though of course she didn’t catch the reference; the Stones wouldn’t record that song for another year.

Her name was Sylvia, she confided to him, but everybody called her Sylla, "like the singer, Cilia Black, y’know?" Her mum and dad lived in Brighton (she made a face), but she was sharing a flat in South Kensington with two other birds, and had a job at Granny Takes a Trip, where she could get all her clothes at half price—like the blue vinyl mini-skirt and the yellow patterned stockings she was wearing now.

"We’ve got just the closest gear there, y’know; lots closer than Countdown or Top Gear. Cathy McGowan shops there all the time, and Jean Shrimpton was in just yesterday."

Jeff smiled and nodded, tuning out her mindless patter. It wasn’t her he was interested in, it was the drug; he had been for a long time, and hated to admit he’d always been afraid to try it. This girl seemed casual enough about it, hadn’t suffered any apparent ill effects (assuming she’d been born this vapid). He’d picked her up out of habit more than anything else, commenting on the new Animals album she had under her arm, and within five minutes she’d asked him if he wanted to drop some acid. Well, what the hell? Why not?

Back in the town house on Sloane Terrace, Sharla was asleep in bed with some guy she’d met last night at Dolly’s. Jeff closed the bedroom door, put on a Marianne Faithfull record at low volume in the living room, asked Sylla if she wanted another drink.

"Not if we’re gonna do the acid," she said. "They don’t mix well, y’know?"

Jeff shrugged, poured himself another Scotch anyway. He needed the alcohol to relax, to ease his nervousness over taking the psychedelic. What could it hurt?

"That your wife in the other room?" Sylla asked.

"No. Just a friend."

"She gonna mind me being here?"

Jeff shook his head and laughed. "Not a bit."

Sylla grinned, tossed her straight brown hair out of her eyes. "I never … did it, y’know, with another bird around. Except my flat-mates, of course, and that’s just 'cause we don’t have that much room."

"Well, she’s my flat-mate, and it’s O.K. There’s another bedroom downstairs. Would you feel more comfortable in there?"

She rummaged in the yellow vinyl purse whose material matched her skirt, its color her stockings. "Let’s do the acid first, wait for it to come on. Then we can go downstairs."

Jeff took the little purple-stained square of blotter paper she handed him, washed it down with the last of the whiskey. Sylla wanted some orange juice with hers, so he fetched a container from the fridge.

"How long does it take before you feel the effect?" he asked.

"Depends. D’you eat lunch today?"

"No."

"'Bout half an hour, then," she said. "More or less."

It was less. Within twenty minutes the walls had turned to rubber, had begun to recede and approach. Jeff waited for the visions he had expected to appear, but none did; instead, everything around him just seemed slightly twisted, indefinably askew, and sort of sparkly.

"Y’feel it, luv?" she asked.

"It’s … not what I’d thought it would be like." His words came out distinctly but felt thick in his mouth. Sylla’s face was changing, flowing like hot wax; her lipstick and rouge now seemed obscenely garish, layers of red paint covering her flesh.

"Fab, though, innit?"

Jeff closed his eyes and, yes, there were patterns there, circles within circles, interconnected by a complex, shimmering latticework. Wheels, mandalas: symbols of eternal cycles, of illusory change that merely led back to where the change had begun and would begin again …

"Feel my stocking; feel that." Sylla placed his hand on her thigh, and the yellow patterned panty hose became a landscape of textures and ridges, lit by an alien sun; that sun, too, a part of the endless cycles of being, the—

Sylla giggled, pressed his hand between her legs. "Take me downstairs now, O.K.? Wait’ll you see what this feels like on acid."

He complied, though he wanted only to lie back and give his mind up to these recurring waves of quietude and acceptance. In the small bedroom downstairs Sylla undressed him, ran her red-tipped fingers over his body, leaving a trail of cool fire wherever they touched. She stepped out of her mini-skirt and stockings, pulled her thin blouse over her head, drew his mouth to her right nipple. He sucked it with more curiosity than desire, like an infant suddenly aware of its place in the chain of existence, an omniscient child seeing its own birth, death, rebirth.