When I first met Fix, he was already something of a mess – what with his empty pockets and his aimless navigation. He hadn't met Anne yet; he just spent his days wandering around Montmartre like the quiet ghost of a friendly neighborhood dog that everyone fed but that no one had bothered to name.

  The day I met him was magnificent. The blue sky seemed to reach all the way to the ground, and Montmartre was buzzing with life. I was at a small café near the Place des Abbesses, one of those Parisian establishments, which exist only because sidewalks also exist, and which seem to shrivel up every time it rains. This was the center of Montmartre, and therefore the center of a hell of a lot of universal goods. Montmartre used to be centered on Sacré Coeur and the Place du Tertre, but now the top of the hill belongs to the tourists and Montmartre – the real Montmartre, has slid down the martyr's mount a bit and gravitates around the Place des Abbesses. I gravitated around the Place des Abbesses as well.

  I had been sitting in a wicker chair at the bottom of the glorious sky discussing the meaning of art with a British expatriate, a painter or something named, if I remember correctly, Bartholomew. He was quite passionate about the subject – but then he was passionate and not a little verbose about everything.

  "Ah, look," he said, interrupting some train of thought or another, "The man walking down the street there, the tall one in black with the goatee, do you see him?"

  I looked in the direction in which he pointed with his cigarette and noticed someone approaching of that description.

  "I believe so."

  "That would be François-Xavier Lepoint. Everyone calls him `Fix'. Morbid type. A poet. French poets are all morbid, of course. Interesting enough fellow though, has a lot of ideas about art, since we're on the subject."

  Bartholomew (for the sake of convenience I'll assume that his name really was Bartholomew) waved his non-smoking hand at the tall morbid poet and after some effort managed to attract his attention. With a very slight movement of the left corner of his mouth François-Xavier Lepoint acknowledged the summons and changed his trajectory to approach our table.

  As I watched Fix walking towards us, I recognized that he was a walking stereotype. He was the very image of modern (post-May 1968) French poets. He was tall and thin, dressed entirely in black, and he walked with a narrowly swinging gait, looking only straight ahead.

  "Salut les mecs." he said softly as he pulled up a chair. Bartholomew returned his greeting and introduced me as an American who was trying to be an anthropologist.

  "He's studying hard so as to be insufferable. At the moment, he's only up to pretentious."

  Fix grunted and took a cigarette from the pack on the table – without asking.

  "Why come to France?" He asked, in English, with that very strange voice of his. When Fix spoke it seemed as though his entire mouth were on backwards. His voice somehow got directed back down his throat instead of being directed to his listener – as if he were conversing with his own uvula. It was charming and annoying at the same time.

  "Parce que la France est un pays important dans l'anthropologie et je voudrais...enlarge my horizons," I replied, not sure of the idiom in French.

  Fix grunted again and picked up my lighter as well, lighting the cigarette with a long slow drag.

  "Aren't you supposed to go and live in New Guinea, or in the Amazon basin, or someplace like that?"

  "It is kind of considered de rigeur, but personally I prefer magret de canard to roasted grubs."

  Fix smiled out of the same left side of his mouth and nodded very slightly.

  "Fix," said Bartholomew, "we were just discussing the inherent societal justification of art."

  Fix raised his right eyebrow and called the waiter over to ask for a coffee, bien serré.

  "Were you?"

  "Yes," replied Bartholomew, "you see, clearly there is no evolutionary basis for the existence of art in human society – excepting, of course, the actual communal benefit of shared experience, and, of course, the underlying spiritual benefit ...."

  I started tuning out Bartholomew's droning voice and instead studied Fix.

  He was listening to Bartholomew with the detached air of someone who wouldn't have been listening to Bartholomew if he had had anything better to do. That being said, his attention didn't seem to be wandering and he certainly didn't seem to be aware of the fact that I was studying him, or perhaps he just didn't care.

  He was a good-looking man, perhaps twenty-three or twenty four years old. He had soft, dark brown eyes, but the rest of him was essentially black and white – black clothes, pale white skin; black beard, white teeth; black hair...and so on. In fact, His eyes and the red tip of his cigarette were the only things about him that would have needed to be filmed in color. He also sported a well-trimmed moustache and goatee combination, so that the net effect was that he looked much like the image I had always had of Mephistopheles.

  Fix clearly lived nearby. A creature such as he could only respect itself if it lived in Montmartre, or at least in its shadow. You can always tell in Paris whether someone is a denizen of whatever particular quartier they are in, and with Fix there wasn't the shadow of a doubt. Being an anthropologist, or at least the larva of an anthropologist at the time, I considered it an exercise in observational prowess to study passers-by in a Holmesian attempt to draw conclusions about their living environment and about their circumstances. I therefore made a habit of taking extensive notes on irrelevant details in numerous little spiral notebooks (color-coded according to some esoteric scheme, which I have since forgotten). I spent long hours seated alone at sidewalk cafés in different parts of the city, guessing at the stories behind the people that walked by and determining whether or not they actually lived in the area.

  Take Jussieu. The quartier around the Place de Jussieu is a very heterogeneous one, the inhabitants include stuffy members of the bourgeoisie, uppity young professionals, ancient Russian immigrés and artists that simply like the area, perhaps for the thought that there is the skeleton of a diplodocus not too far off. This represents a group of people with such divergent tastes in everything from philosophy to fashion that it's almost impossible to imagine them having anything in common. nevertheless, as different as they are, if you saw any of these Jussieu-dwelling inhabitants in Jussieu then you would immediately be able to recognize that they were home.

  The same phenomenon occurs in London, and in Brussels for that matter (although, curiously, not in Frankfurt).

  Anyway, applying this particular type of analysis to Fix led me to the inescapable conclusion that he lived very near to the Place des Abbesses – probably closer to Pigalle than the café we were in. This turned out to be correct, he lived at 73, rue des Martyrs, almost directly above a fairly well-known transvestite night club.

  "...leading to the conclusion that art is a purely physiological phenomenon arising from reflexes inherent in our ancestry as social animals."

  It was Bartholomew's silence, after that closing sentence, which jarred me back to the present tense.

  Fix's face didn't change at all. He continued to look in Bartholomew's direction and for a moment I wondered if he hadn't realized that the Brit's monologue had finished. Finally, Fix sucked on his cigarette and tapped some ash onto the ground.

  "Art is life," he said.

  Bartholomew started warming up his vocal chords again, but Fix wiggled his cigarette at him in such a way that the motor wound down before emitting anything more than a weak squeak.

  "Art is life. Art can make inanimate things live. Paint, clay, words. These things don't live by themselves – artists make them live." Fix took another drag. "Summer days, orgasms, a field of sunflowers, les neiges d'antan...."

  We waited for him to say something else, but it seemed that he had finished, his eyes had lost their focus. Bartholomew licked his lips and cocked his head.

  " OK, I see your point." He looked for affirmation, but Fix's expression didn't change. "I mean, it's a very poetic point, of course."

  "Well," Fix replied, "what does your friend think? Isn't he supposed to be analyzing the human condition?"

  I shook a cigarette out of the box on the table.

  "I don't analyze the human condition, I just try to describe it. Anthropologists don't get to analyze the human condition until they have a doctorate."

  Fix chuckled.

  "I thought that you poets were the ones to analyze the human condition," I added.

  He tapped some more ash to the ground.

  "Did you think so? No, we just write poems." He finished his coffee and got up, taking another cigarette as he did so. "Thank you for the coffee," he said, and then walked away in the direction in which he had been heading before he sat down.

  I saw Fix again, but it is only now that I realize that I don't have the slightest idea what became of Bartholomew.

~

  Montmartre is a small place when all is said and done, and although I didn't quite live on the hill itself I was close enough and young enough to consider myself montmartrois. Certainly, I sought out the company of the artists and the musicians and the dancers who gravitate toward the area. It was therefore not surprising that I ran into Fix a number of times.

  We soon reached the point where we would stop and exchange banalities if we saw each other in the street and where we were glad enough to find each other at a party. Actually, Fix was good to have around at a party in case you got into one of those purplish intellectual moods. When I ingest any type of mind-altering chemicals (including alcohol) I tend to swing into one of two different moods: The first is a kind of "let's throw something squishy out the window and laugh our asses off" state-of-being, and the latter is more of a "tonight we can finally come to terms with the end-of-millenium volksgeist" disposition. There is a great problem, however, when I swing one way and everyone else swings the other. In the first case, I feel like a fool trying to heft a pot roast through the curtains while all of my impossibly stuffy friends sit around arguing about the genitalia of angels whereas in the second case I become highly annoyed at the sophomoric hijinks going on around me while I'm trying to really understand Kierkergard over on the sofa. Fix could always be counted on to join in the conversation on the sofa, uttering undecipherable, cryptic questions to his own larynx and then staring off into space in the middle of some unfinished sentence. Just the thing for mood number two. I guess both of us got used to having each other on the peripheries of our lives.

  That was a good time for me. I spent the better part of my days not going to graduate classes in Nanterre, instead engaging in activities, which I vaguely termed `field work' or `research', such as the aforementioned café-based observations.

  Although I knew it couldn't last forever I made the most of it. My weeks were filled with occasional appearances at Nanterre, passionate discussions about very academic themes, memorable love-making with a number of attractive and interesting women, late nights at parties or music clubs, and days sitting around in cafés taking notes in spiral notebooks, predominantly in Montmartre. Although I tried to live a relatively sparse existence I had no real financial worries since I came from a moderately wealthy family and had a very indulgent (though worrisome) mother who periodically cabled funds to me. In reality, I probably could have lived more opulently but I had enough good sense to realize that I would have had less fun doing so. Besides, I felt guilty about having financial backing and I didn't want it to become general knowledge. This is why, when I left to explore during the summer, I traveled by thumb.

  I spent the summer hitchhiking around France, expanding my experience in some areas and learning some things that I hadn't expected. In fact, I learned so much that I hadn't expected that I decided to take the fall semester off as well and do field research on the cote d'azure for a reason which is actually quite interesting in its own right, but doesn't really pertain to the story at hand. Anyway, once I hitchhiked back to Paris and settled into my dusty flat I soon learned the Fix had attached himself to a woman – a woman that none of the vast network of people whom we mutually knew had ever previously met. Her name was Anne. A dancer I knew described her as being the most real person she had ever known, but aside from that I had difficulty getting any kind of solid description of her. I was told, however, that in the space of a few short months, during my absence, she had transformed Fix.

  Needless to say, my curiosity was piqued. Unfortunately, as chance would have it, I ran across neither Fix nor her for some time after my return. Sporadic news of her wonderfulness was constant throughout this period, however.

  I finally met Anne on a starlit evening in May. It was one of many parties, but the flat it was in had the distinction of being a kind of a poor-man's penthouse in that it took up the top floor of a very narrow building. Although the flat itself was fairly small, it was possible (if one was willing to bend in a certain way) to squeeze through a quasi-skylight onto the roof, where there was a magnificent view of Sacré Coeur on one side, and the Eiffel tower on the other. Not to mention the exhilarating rush of being so high and floating on the distinctive sounds and the unmistakable smells of Paris.

  By the time I noticed that Fix and Anne had arrived, I was still earthbound inside the apartment sipping a whiskey and having a discussion with a short attractive man who was trying to seduce me. I had assured him several times that it was a lost cause, that I was steadfastly heterosexual, but he seemed to enjoy the flirting anyway and he was so damned witty, and I was so flattered, that I didn't want to end the conversation. Until I saw Anne.

  You must understand that Anne was a quantum physical phenomenon. It was as if she weren't a solid, fixed being but some kind of area – a region of "Anne-ness" that was simply denser at the center. She vibrated like a tuning fork. The air around her was charged with a vital energy, and as you approached her you felt her influence growing, bending the space around you. You became more and more affected by Anne until you got to the area of the greatest Anne-ness and once there, nothing else in the universe mattered but Anne, who was standing in front of you smiling and asking for a light.

  Anne was like a summer day; her breath was sweet, tinged with exuberance and she breathed life and wonder into everything around her. She smelled good. No one could be impervious to Anne - I was simply intrigued when I saw her across the room, but as I approached her and the emotional gravity sink that she produced, I felt like I was accelerating towards her on some weird dimension until I stood next to her and the rest of the room (and the rest of the universe) shrunk away, and she turned her eyes on me and spoke.

  "Bon soir," she said.

  But she said hello like no one else could – she hummed it. Fix, who had been talking to another tall, lanky French intellectual type turned and smiled slightly, touching her arm.

  "Anne, je te présente un ami anthropologue. Un américain."

  Clearly, he had never mentioned me. I introduced myself and she was very gracious in dismissing me so that she could continue the conversation that she had been having with another woman whose image is totally lost to my memory - filled as that occasion is with the meeting of Anne.

  Anne was like that. She had great poise, she never seemed rushed or hectic but she had the stationary inertia of a flywheel – if she was talking about something then she needed to finish the conversation before embarking on some new idea. I couldn't stop watching her as she spoke with her faceless companion.

  Her clear blue eyes sparkled, as if there were some tiny source of light inside of them. She had a pointed nose that moved slightly as she spoke and sculpted cheekbones that flushed or waned according to the weight of her words. Her eyebrows framed her speech, shifting from curiosity to surprise to conviction all in the space of a single sentence. Her mouth was small and her lips delicate, they moved even when she wasn't speaking; smiling with different intonations, breaking into a ray of delight or poking down at the corners when she was skeptical. Even when she was listening her face danced with emotion and her short blond hair swung about as she shook her head or rolled her eyes or shuddered with delight.

  Of course I fell in love with Anne, but then everyone fell in love with Anne; men, women, children, animals, I was just joining the silent army of Anne's unconfessed lovers. It wasn't a painful love, I didn't pine for her, I just admired her – loved her. I only ever saw her three or four times, but I remember each time I saw her, I remember each occasion in vivid color, in living detail.

  Fix had entered into an easy intimacy with her that was evident to anyone who saw them together. They were very different, he so dark and brooding, she so gay, but they shared the common traits of subtlety and intensity.

  It was clear that she had changed him and it was also clear that he hadn't changed at all. He was still as quiet, as concentrated, as serious, but he was somehow more alive. This became evident in the things that he did. She powered him and he began to focus this new energy – he became involved with an experimental theatre group, `Le Théâtre du Mappemonde Asymétrique" writing obtuse but compelling dialogue. He also did work with the homeless, created poetry workshops for junkies, and participated in the investiture of a local church by a group of Africans who were in danger of being deported (so did I, for that matter).

  I remember one evening when I ran into them at yet another party on the sixth floor of a bourgeois apartment building on the boulevard de Rochechouart. It was a very somber place, but the area around Anne seemed lighter. I swear there were a couple of moths that had forsaken the lamp to flutter desperately around her hair.

  A number of the party-goers had invented a game having something to do with artichokes, but six of us, including Fix and Anne, were discussing poetry while sitting on the carpet in a corner of the very small living room. We had made a circle around a clay ashtray from North Africa, which overflowed with ashes and cigarette butts.

  A tall, willowy woman, who was so tall and willowy that it was obvious that she was tall and willowy even while she was sitting on the floor, with very big green eyes but pitted skin was deriding the use of classical poetic structure. Fix listened to her with rapt attention.

  "Don't you appreciate the great poets of the past?" he asked, as he unwrapped the bright red scarf he had taken to wearing.

  "You mean the `classics?' I think there are modern poets who write in free verse and are just as good as Villon or Pope. I honestly do. It's just that it's easier to compare skills when everybody's using the same form. It's easier to say `that person is the best writer of sonnets' than `that person is the best poet'. "

  Fix smiled. "Have you read Shakespeare's sonnets?" He asked. "Maybe the best writer of sonnets is the best poet too." He nodded at me, as if some shiny iota of the bard's glory glittered on my cheek by the simple dint of my being an anglophone. Anne smiled at me, ostensibly for the same reason, and her smile warmed me to the core of my bones.

  A short dark man with very long and beautiful hair made a contemptuous puffing noise.

  "Think about it," continued Fix. "Sonnets are very difficult, particularly since you have to use such an ugly language as English. Still, even with all that against him, Shakespeare's sonnets speak not only about love but about art, about life, about everything. And written...." His voice trailed off and his eyes shifted focus, perhaps looking for the ghost of Yorik in the haze of the cigarette smoke.

  The small dark man snuffled (I digress to point out that this conversation took place in French. As such it is impossible to transcribe correctly, not only for the difficulties which arise with any translation, but also because when actually conversing, a Frenchman uses his entire face to speak. Just as it would be necessary to employ a sophisticated choreographic notation to record the flailing arms which punctuate any conversation between two Italians, so would it be necessary to invent some way of noting the various cheek-puffs, lip bends, eyebrow-wiggles and nose gymnastics which add nuance to French speech. Some Frenchmen, notably those from Burgundy, go so far as to employ their shoulders. Saying, therefore, that the small dark man snuffled is a vastly inadequate attempt to describe what was an intricate physiological audio-visual event), and said,

  "Rubbish."

  We all waited patiently for him to continue while he readjusted his mustache.

  "Shakespeare's sonnets are full of bloated sentimentalism."

  Fix shook his head slowly. "Do you know his eighteenth sonnet?" He asked. The short dark man with long beautiful hair didn't nod, which is the French signal for "I take that as a rhetorical question and no, I don't know his eighteenth sonnet nor can I be expected to know it."

  Fix continued, "In his eighteenth sonnet Shakespeare illuminates art, through love, with life. No one else could have done that in fourteen lines, no one else could have linked beauty, passion, immortality and poetry itself as he did in just the last two lines..." we lost him again to his reveries as the rest of us all nodded more or less. I desperately tried to remember which was the eighteenth sonnet. Was it the one about the valley of the shadow of death?

  "Do you write much love poetry, then?" The tall willowy woman asked. Fix's eyes refocused on the present tense. It was Anne who responded, though, as the vibration that she had been emanating all throughout the evening shifted into something softer, something throbbing and intense.

  "No, he doesn't write love poems." She said. "He expresses his love in gesture, in tactile rhyme."

  Personally, I thought that was about the best love poem I'd ever heard.

~

  I kept on living the comfortable little life that I had carved out, waiting for the inevitable change that must come, the day when I would have to decide what to do when I grow up. I grappled with my rich-leftist hypocritical paradox. Whenever it got too strong for me I would go outside and take refuge in the notes I was taking on the human fauna, applying myself with renewed vigor to my self-appointed mission to add to the field of anthropology. After all, if ever I turned out to have any real anthropological insight, then my years in Paris would turn out not to have been wasted (therefore not to have been wasteful) after all.

  So it was that the months went by, so it was that I spent so much time in cafés, so it was in a café that I learned of Anne's death.

  I had ended up having a very brief sexual relationship with the tall woman who didn't like structured verse. Her name was Véronique. We emerged from that relationship with the kind of easy post-coital friendship that I have only ever found possible with French women.

  I was scribbling in my purple notebook at a table in front of Le Sancerre one afternoon under a warm blue sky, when Véronique pulled up a chair and sat down across from me. Meeting her eyes, I could tell that it was bad.

  "What is it?" I asked.

  She reached across the table and took my hand in hers.

  "Anne is dead. She was hit by a motorcycle on the rue Blanche. She was crossing the street."

  I think my jaw actually dropped. "Oh my god." I said.

  "The mirror on the motorcycle severed an artery. She bled to death in minutes."

  "Oh shit."

  "It only happened two days ago. They're having a wake, but none of us are going. We want to remember her the way she was."

  "Fix?" I asked.

  "I don't know. He's shut himself up. Nobody seems to be able to get to him. He's alive, though."

  I nodded slowly. "I have to go." She said as she got up. She hesitated a moment and then leaned down and pressed her lips to my cheek.

  I watched her go. I put down my pen and sat back. My empty coffee cup looked extraordinarily dirty. I thought about Anne and I thought about how tenuous life is. Then I opened up my notebook and took some notes on my reflections.

~

  Back then, I considered myself to be far more enlightened than the common mortal and entirely devoid of senseless superstitious sentiment. Therefore, even though none of my friends were going, I decided to go to Anne's wake out of anthropological curiosity. I was sad that Anne was dead, and while she had certainly touched me somehow, she was gone – all that remained was an opportunity to observe. After all, mourning rituals are quite important as a topic of study if one wants to understand a culture – the relationship to death is a key element of cultural characterization. So I arrived, dressed in what I then considered to be good clothes: an old tweed jacket, a thin tie and corduroys without holes in them. I was, of course, armed with one of my little spiral notebooks and I had vaguely intended to sit in the back or something and take notes on those who had come to grieve.

  This was my intention – to wear my old clothes and my air of academic superiority to the wake of Anne Dulac.

  Of course, the French mourn as do most other western European Roman Catholics and when I arrived at the funeral home I immediately recognized the setting from the two or three funerals that I had attended of elderly family members in the past. There were the muted tones and colors, the nucleus of seriously distraught mourners and the larger crowd of simply uncomfortable attendees who didn't know quite what to say to whom. I had hidden my notebook under the left side of my jacket, having immediately realized that my little plan, of making notes in the back, was inappropriate in the extreme.

  I milled around. There were many young people there, but nobody that I knew. Fix wasn't there, but I hadn't expected him to come. The other mourners all wore the downcast expressions that could be expected. I listened to little snatches of conversation.

  "Elle était si belle." I heard someone say, more with a head-shaking voice than with a sob. "Que Dieu la garde – si jeune!", "So young, so beautiful!" a British voice said, as if in translation of the French, but then everyone was saying the same thing – that and discussing the morbid details of the accident. On the fringes, out in the hallway, a couple of unrelated conversations were going on, business or family matters perhaps. I made a mental note of the distinction in the topics of conversation between the men and the women, for this too is a distinguishing feature of culture. I wanted to be sure to remember the subtle clues that can be so telling for anthropologists even if I couldn't write in my little notebook.

  I decided to go and see the body. First, because it was expected of visitors and I realized with a certain unease that I had been remarked and second because I wanted to see if there were any particular ritualistic differences in the manner in which it was exposed. So I approached the casket, walking up the short aisle between the black folding chairs that held the sniffling, softly whispering crowd.

  In front of the open coffin was a kneeler of sorts and a little railing so that people could pray as they looked. The coffin itself was a large black thing with shiny metal handles, lined with white satin. I leaned over to look at how the body was attired, the expression that they had given to the face, these kinds of details.

  Looking into coffins is a dangerous thing. When you look into a coffin you may not find what you had expected to find. You may be surprised, you may see yourself, you may see something worse. I didn't have enough experience with coffins back then to know this. My experience has since widened enough to know that you never know what you'll see in a coffin – you never know.

  Even today I'm not exactly sure what I saw in that coffin. I looked in it and in the space of a few short seconds a part of my world collapsed; the rafters of my youth came crashing down around me. I looked in it and I saw that she was ugly. I saw that she had always been ugly. I had thought that she had been beautiful but I was wrong, she had always been ugly and this knowledge shattered me. Her nose was like a sharp beak, her cheeks were sunken and hollow, and her lips were thin – like stringy worms. I saw all of this for the first time. I had fallen victim to a hoax, I had been led to believe that Anne Dulac was a beautiful woman but she wasn't – it had been that unbearable spirit, that's what had enthralled me, not this.

  They had tried to hide it. They had slathered her face with life-colored make-up but life has no color and death does and the gray sheen of death shone through like a buried moon.

  She was dead.

  She was dead, the sweet juice of her life had drained away with her blood in the tiny gutters between the cobblestones of a Paris street and in that thin river was dissolved all the essence of Anne. Here, in this never-ending, all-ending coffin lay only a lump of gray flesh, stretched on a hideous white satin parody of rustling undergarments and promises unkept.

  I knew, I had known for years with the certitude of youth that men made God because they needed an omnipotent mercenary to fight the omnipotent reaper, but here I stared at death for the first real time in my life and I had no mercenary and no defenses. I was felled...felled! I dropped as though my legs had been cut out from under me by a swift swing of the scythe. I cried out softly and grasped the handrail in front of me with both hands as the notebook slipped out from my jacket and clattered to the floor under the coffin. Kneeling there, I prayed for the first time in years – cursing God for not existing.

  I became aware that I was weeping, so I left the funeral home and wandered into the street with the image of that ugly, gray thing lying on white satin etched into my brain. I was already drinking before I realized that I was in a bar.

~

  I had some trouble after that. I stayed in for several days, although I don't remember what I did – I only remember my dreams and I don't want to remember them. I took some drugs, and that helped for a while but it made my dreams even worse. I finally went out because I needed food, and walking around in the air helped more than the drugs. I was lucid enough to realize that I should go outside more.

  After a few days I started to study again. I went to a couple of classes in Nanterre and sat in the back, trying to make sense of what the people were saying but the sense they made wasn't the same as the sense I had previously understood.

  I saw Fix for the last time as I walked down the rue Lepic carrying a bag full of vegetables. It was a sunny afternoon, during the weekend, I think. The street was full of people: Loud Dutch tourists, local residents, unattractive rich women walking their dogs, people just strolling.

  Fix was walking toward me slowly. He was looking blankly in front of him and he hadn't seen me – I don't think he really saw anybody. He was dressed just as he had been the first time I ever saw him, all in black. The flow of the people on the street separated to pass him, like a stream flowing around a lazy black boat. I slowed my pace and watched him approach.

  When he got nearer he saw me and stopped. I walked up to him until I was a couple of feet away and then I stopped as well. We stood there facing each other, next to a cheese shop, I cradling my vegetables and he with his hands in his pockets and we looked into each other's eyes, saying nothing. The people on the street just walked around us and the cars just drove by and the clouds probably raced over our heads but we still didn't say anything, we just looked into each other's eyes.

  "Elle est morte," he said finally, "et moi avec."

  I nodded and I felt tears welling in my eyes. She was dead, and he had died with her. I understood – I could have loved her too.

  He slowly walked around me and continued on his way, leaving me standing there with peppers in my hands and tears flowing down my cheeks.

~

  Maybe I should have worried more about him, but he had never been what I would call a close friend. Maybe I should have realized that he was distraught enough to do something extreme. As it was, I wasn't really surprised when I heard that he had attempted suicide. He had drunk himself into a stupor and taken a lot of drugs that he shouldn't have – but the man who lived in the apartment below him somehow felt that something was wrong – god knows how, and saved him.

  By then, we had fallen out of touch. The months had passed – I was almost finished with the semblance of studies that I had put together and I was considering what to do with the rest of my life. I was quite wrapped up in all this and I hadn't even tried to find out what had happened to Fix. I assumed that he had fallen into disrepair, that he had shrunk into something that was beyond hope – at least for a while.

  It must have been about a year after his attempted suicide that I returned to the United States to visit, or maybe to live again – I hadn't decided. At a party I ran into a writer I knew. I had met him a couple of eternities before, when I was an undergraduate in New York and he was the editor of some small literary magazine. He had done some interesting things, and was currently writing both fiction and poetry. When he heard that I had lived in Paris for the last couple of years he smiled a knowing kind of smile.

  "Well, it seems like it did to you what it did to me."

  "Maybe it did," I said. "I didn't know that you had lived in Paris."

  "Yes, I went there when I was twenty and stayed until I was twenty two. I grew up there."

  I nodded. "So did I."

  We clinked our drinks together and smiled at each other. He then got around to asking me what I had done and where I had lived. When he heard that I had some contacts in Parisian literary circles he mentioned that he was in the process of translating a young poet. It was Fix. I was stunned.

  "I didn't realize he had been published." I said.

  "Yes, he has recently published a book of love poems."

  The shock on my face must have been evident, because my writer friend seemed perplexed.

  "They are quite beautiful, although sad."

  Who could have taken her place? Who could have convinced him to write beautiful, though sad love poems when he had never written any for Anne? I was indignant. I would have loved her better and longer than that. I would have mourned her for years. My friend continued to talk about the book, seemingly in defense of it.

  "It's had a certain success in poetry circles. It's very touching, very intense. Would you like to see it? I have the French edition here."

  I clenched my teeth and inhaled slowly. "Yes."

  He slipped through the crowd into another room and came back with a small black volume. It had something embossed in gold script on the front, but I couldn't see the words. When he reached me he smiled and held it out. "I'm translating the title as `She Lives.'"

  I faltered as I took the book. She lives. A vague understanding began to creep over me. I slipped my finger under the cover and pushed it open. The first page stuck to it, revealing the second page, which was in English and contained only two lines – from Shakespeare:

  "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."

  I uttered a soft sound and began to cry. I closed the book and ran a finger over the two delicate words on the title. In my mind's eye I saw Anne before me, beautiful once more, and in the air around me I heard Fix's muted voice reading the words as I touched them:

  `Elle vie.'

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