Free First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey

wish I were more like you.”
    “But you’re not,” I said, candid at any cost. “You mustn’t worry about it,” I went on quickly, “because I like you very much the way you are now…”
    We were free from college and observation; we were molding each other, protecting each other from being ordinary. Duncan put his hand on my shoulder briefly and smiled, and then we paced each other around the deck of the ship to get our exercise in before dinner. The statured figure had to be physically attractive, too.
    We stayed in England just long enough to see the Tower of London, the National Gallery, and Scott’s, and to decide the food was inedible, and then we took the channel steamer from Newhaven. Standing at the rail, we saw the shores of France rise from the waves, green and promising.
    When we landed in Dieppe, my delight—let me say that my delight rose like a flock of startled birds. Everything I saw or heard—the whole pastel city, the buildings as serene and placid as the green water of the harbor—touched off another flutter of the white wings. At one wharf, a group of fishing boats huddled in a confusion of masts, the hulls green and black and purple, arched like slices of melon. Along the waterfront was a row of buildings, with here and there a gap and a pile of rubble or a portion of a wall. But these were the colors of the buildings: pale green and mauve, light yellow like wispy sunlight, faded pink, gentle bluish gray. And then, perched on a hillside, the immemorial hulk of a castle.
    Duncan’s gaze moved lovingly around the scene. “Every town should have a castle,” he said.
    Our hotel room was old, with a sloping floor and a single, huge brass bed. There were no rugs on the wooden floor and no curtains on the high French windows, which wouldn’t quite close, because of their crooked frames. Outside our window, three streets converged and formed a triangular island, planted with plane trees and patterned beds of yellow flowers. Workmen in gray clothes and thick boots were sitting on stone benches and drinking wine. The fronts of the houses along the street were decorated with heavy lintels and occasionally with stringy caryatids, at once frivolous and orderly. In the distance an elegant spire rose, and the sound of bells floated down to us. We washed our faces and brushed our teeth and changed our clothes, singing the entire time—and then, since we were in France, we set out to find some women.
    First, we walked along the beach and saw the collection of Grand and Univers and Windsor hotels; they were shattered, and workmen scurried in and out of their rubbled interiors carrying bricks. Other workmen were fitting dumpy concrete columns into the balustrade that ran along the street, separating it from the rocky beach; as the workmen finished one section, another crew of workmen, with large pneumatic machines, came along and drilled holes in the columns, chipped the edges, and scarred the fluting. Duncan and I stared, fascinated, and then realized that they were making the balustrade look old. Within a few years, people would forget that the balustrade had been repaired after the war; they would see it ancient-looking and indestructible and a tie to an earlier time.
    Duncan and I picked our way over the upper beach, which was mostly rock, and down to the narrow ridge of sand that bordered the ocean. The beach was almost empty, but a few groups of people sat or lay on blankets. The people seemed strangely solid and fleshy. The only sound was that of the pneumatic machines busily restoring time.
    The channel was gray and empty of ships; it was rather like a border of sky in a faded tapestry. Duncan said that as soon as we shipped our trunk to Paris we ought to set out on our bicycles to see Mont-Saint-Michel. “It’s quite a small island,” he said. “They’ve been working on it for a long time. It must be quite perfect by now.”
    On our way back to the hotel, we passed many women. Only one girl