Free Winter Journal by Paul Auster

staircase to the third floor of the hotel, she announced that you were her last customer of the night, and consequently there would be no need to rush, you could take as much time as you liked. This was unprecedented, a violation of all professional standards and protocols, but it was already clear to you that Sandra was different from the other girls who worked that street, that she lacked the hardness and coldnessthat necessarily seemed to go with the job. Then you were in the room with her, and everything continued to be different from all your previous experiences in this part of the city. She was relaxed, in a warm and expansive mood, and even when you both took off your clothes, even when you discovered how uncommonly beautiful her body was ( majestic was the word that came to you, in the same way that the bodies of certain dancers can be called majestic), she was talkative and playful, in no hurry to get down to business, not at all put out by your desire to touch her and kiss her, and as she lolled on the bed with you, she began demonstrating the various lovemaking positions she and her friends used with their clients, the Kama Sutra of the rue Saint-Denis, twisting around and over and in on top of herself as she helped you contort your body into matching configurations, laughing softly at the absurdity of it all as she told you the name of each position. Unfortunately, you can remember only one of them now, which was probably the dullest one, but also the funniest because it was so dull: le paresseux , the lazy man, which was simply a matter of stretching out on your side and copulating with your partner face to face. You had never met a woman who was so at home in her body, so serene in the way she carried her naked self, and eventually, even though you wanted these demonstrations to go on until morning, you became too aroused to hold back any longer. You assumed that would be the end of it, jouissance had always been the end of it in the past, but even after you were finished, Sandra did not press you to leave, she wanted to lie on thebed with you and talk, and so you stayed with her for close to an hour more, happily encircled in her arms as your head rested on her shoulder, discussing things that have long since vanished from your mind, and when she finally asked what you did with yourself and you said that you wrote poems, you were expecting her to shrug with indifference or make some noncommittal remark, but no, no yet again, for once you started talking about poetry, Sandra closed her eyes and began to recite Baudelaire, long passages delivered with intense feeling and perfectly accurate recall, and you could only hope that Baudelaire had sat up in his grave and was listening.
Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses ,
O toi, tous mes plaisirs! ô toi, tous mes devoirs!
Tu te rappelleras la beauté des caresses ,
La douceur du foyer et le charme des soirs ,
Mère des souvenirs, maîtresse des maîtresses!
    It was one of the most extraordinary moments of your life, one of the happiest moments of your life, and even after you were back in New York and the next chapter of your story was being written, you kept thinking about Sandra and the hours you had spent with her that night, wondering if you shouldn’t jump on a plane, rush back to Paris, and ask her to marry you.
    Always lost, always striking out in the wrong direction, always going around in circles. You have suffered from a lifelonginability to orient yourself in space, and even in New York, the easiest of cities to negotiate, the city where you have spent the better part of your adulthood, you often run into trouble. Whenever you take the subway from Brooklyn to Manhattan (assuming you have boarded the correct train and are not traveling deeper into Brooklyn), you make a special point to stop for a moment to get your bearings once you have climbed the stairs to the street, and still you will head north instead of south, go east instead of west,