The French Lesson

"This Frenchman is a terrible person, Gene," Chen said. He rocked back and forth in the bamboo rocker.

I remember Chen clearly, even though it was 20 years ago. I thought of him as a puppet, a small Chinese puppet. I assumed he was at least 50, possibly older. He was bald and full-faced, and he wore steel-rimmed glasses that complemented his rumpled linen suit and vest.

Like the country of Laos itself, Chen was full of contradictions. He fancied himself a banker, and he tried to dress like one, but he wore shower clogs instead of regular shoes and a red bandanna around his throat rather than a tie. Chen had a habit of fingering black worry beads while he talked. Listening to his English, his London School of Economics English, only deepened the conflicting presence of the man.

I sat on my bed drinking Beefeater gin without ice. I drank a lot in those days, and while I preferred my gin with ice, I took it any way I could get it. The hotel refrigerator had broken down the day before the monsoon began. I was, by definition, left with warm gin and a trapped feeling: tropical claustrophobia; something like being stuck in an elevator that is also a steam bath.

Chen had taken to coming in and talking with me whenever he found me in my room. He gossiped idly while the rain poured down on Vientiane, on the muddy Mekong River and the tin roofs of the storage sheds, through palm fronds and flame trees, a rain so hard that sometimes it obscured everything except the vines that framed my windows.

It was a violent rain and it drove the gecko on my ceiling crazy: He darted from corner to corner and talked to the rain in his lizard language.

"Let's go smoke some dope," I said to Chen.

"The den's probably flooded," he said, waving my suggestion aside. It was clear that he wanted to talk to me at some length about something. He was busy setting me up, and he did not want his train of thought to be interrupted. Of course, I did not understand that at the time.

"This Frenchman takes ears when he kills," Chen said.

"He doesn't sound nice," I said.

"Simply not to be trusted," Chen sighed. "He's a madman, I'm sure of it." He sighed again, and it struck me that he might have been speaking of a failed marriage or a bankruptcy.

Chen was a money-changer who used his tailor shop as a front for a black market in currencies. He tended to speak sadly about many things. He was particularly morose about people who did not honor deals. I had seen him come to tears, for example, about a minister of finance who could not pay the interest Chen had charged him on a personal loan. To that extent, Chen had a tragic sense of life. Coincidentally, the person in question was found drowned on the bank of the Mekong a week later. People said it was the work of the Pathet Lao, and Chen did not disabuse them of that notion.

"Simply not to be trusted, those French," Chen said.

"That's what Gunny Nadeau used to say," I said, "and look what it got him."

Gunny Nadeau had been my second-in-command. He and I had brought a special team out from Camp Pendleton. We hooked up with Sergeant Sutton at Tachikawa and Tony Allard at Kadena. On paper, we were attached to Task Force 116. In fact, we spent a lot of time around the Plain of Jars.

Until everybody got snuffed except me.

While Chen and I watched the rain outside my windows, I drank as much gin as I could to forget that Gunny Nadeau's charred body was lying in my poncho, brown side out, on line to be shipped back to Travis Air Force Base. The bodies of Sutton and Allard had made it out before the rains hit, but Gunny Nadeau was waiting for me.

I knew that all three men would be listed as killed in training exercises in California. That is what happens when you die in a nonwar.

"Your Sergeant Nadeau was French, wasn't he?" Chen asked.

"Cajun," I said. "Louisiana French. Same as Allard. Sutton was Canadian. There wasn't a real frog among us, Chenny. Isn't that something?" I asked.

"I'm sorry about your friends, Gene," Chen said. "Perhaps they paid the price for freedom."

I did not reply to that. The rain had a hypnotic effect on me. I did not want to analyze history or talk politics or listen to a chubby Chinese tailor define life and death. I was sorely pissed at the war I saw shaping up, and I wanted to get out of Vientiane as fast as I could. I had resigned my commission and was waiting for the rains to lift long enough to catch the next transport to Bangkok. Things had not turned out the way I had hoped.

"I was talking to the Indian air attaché yesterday," Chen said. "He says he thinks this Frenchman may have brought in a surface-to-air missile." He dropped that into the conversation like a marble into a water bucket. "This Frenchman amazes me," he went on. "You cannot believe the stories I've heard recently. Last month, this Frenchman supposedly came into town dressed as a woman. A woman, of all things. He walked into the w.c. downstairs and shot one of your cultural-affairs people right in the face. And then, to make matters worse, he took one of her ears, too." Chen clucked his tongue. "Leaving his mark, do you suppose?"

"They take ears all the time incountry," I said.

"Yes, I know, but here in Vientiane? And a woman, to boot? I think that's going a bit far, don't you?" Chen asked.

"Yes," I said.

"The French are your allies, after all."

"Listen, Chenny," I said, "the French are on their own side. Period. Just like everybody else out here. The French figure this is their territory. They were here before us, and some of them think they'll be here after us. Maybe they will; I don't know." I paused. "Sometimes they have advisors down to patrol level with the Pathet Lao, I can tell you that," I said.

"How terribly confusing," Chen sighed again. "I don't understand any of it at all. Perhaps I'd better leave while I can."

"Be my guest," I said. "Take your money and split. Go back to Hong Kong and start a real bank."

Chen tried to light a cigarette. His matches were too damp, so I threw him my lighter.

"Someone should take care of this Frenchman, Gene," he said.

I rubbed my jaw. I hadn't shaved for a week. "Does he have a name?" I asked.

"I think it's LeGault."

"LeGault," I repeated. The gin burned in my throat.

"Yes. His father owned a string of rubber plantations. Large ones, too. LeGault was brought up near Luangprabang. He went to the Sorbonne for a few years. His older brother was killed at Dien Bien Phu, and LeGault came back to run the family business. You'd think he'd be angry with General Giap for his brother's death, but evidently not. I hear he hates Americans."

"Some people never get it right," I said.

"Yes, but what I don't understand is, why is he allowed to wander all around the countryside, doing terrible things, shooting people in the face, setting up missile sites, just generally mucking about, while you Americans act as if there's a picnic going on instead of a war? It doesn't make sense. Why doesn't someone take care of the rotten apple?"

I laughed. "Who are you working for, Chenny?" I asked.

"Absolutely no one," he protested, "except myself."

Nothing was said for a time. I was fighting with a vision I kept having in my days and nights: a chopper spinning down, out of control, a bright magnesium star burning into the earth.

It was as if Chen could read my mind. "You know, Gene," he said, "LeGault might have been responsible for that accident your people were in."

"Accident my ass," I said quietly.

"You know what I mean."

"I was there, Chenny. I was talking to them on the radio. I had the panels out and they had us spotted. It wasn't rotation problems. Don't buy the press release. They were hit by the first SAM in Laos. You think I don't know a hit when I see one? Somebody upped the ante. Maybe it was your boy LeGault."

"He's not my boy," Chen bristled like a terrier.

I remember how hot my body felt at that moment, almost feverish. "Maybe somebody should take him out," I said.

"Now, now," Chen pretended to warn, "you'd have to play your cards very carefully if you decided to do that."

"So?" I asked. "You think I can't do that?"

"LeGault has lived here all his life," Chen said.

Looking back on it, I see how obvious this all was: the pattern, the hints, the coy preparation, the construction of argument and evidence. But I was angry at the time, or I let myself be wooed into anger, and I heard only what I wanted to hear. I understood at that moment that LeGault was mine if I wanted him and if I could get him. He was being handed to me on an unofficial platter without one incriminating thing being said.

I was 25 years old, three years out of college, a Marine officer who was one month past the disappearance of his buddies in a bright ball of fire. I thought about that as I vaguely took in my hotel room: chipped plaster walls and rusted plumbing and old editions of Le Figaro torn up for toilet paper and my seabag stowed in the corner and the mosquito netting rolled up like a royal canopy above the rickety wooden bed.

"May I buy you a pipe?" Chen asked after a long silence.

"You sure can," I said.

(continued on page 108) French Lesson(continued from page 100)

"Whatever you are thinking about, forget it," Chen said casually.

"OK," I said. I snapped my fingers. "Gone."

Chen laughed. "Very good," he said.

Chen drove me through the rain in his small Citroen down to the opium den near the river. He went in with me and I watched the young girl heat the brown ball of goo on the end of a long needle. When the opium was ready, she placed it in the bowl of the pipe and clicked the needle on the pipestem. She handed the pipe to me without smiling. Chen paid her, but he did not stay to take a pipe with me.

I am not sure how long I stayed there, but I do remember that later in the evening, after my second pipe, I thought Gunny Nadeau was in the lower bunk. He was telling me war stories again about how he had been captured on Wake Island at the beginning of World War Two and how he'd lost a toe to frostbite at the Chosan Reservoir in Korea.

"Lieutenant O'Hair," the Gunny laughed at me in my opium dream, "they can take this next war and shove it."

"Happy new year, Gunny," I said. "Happy 1961."

I went into a deeper sleep, and when I woke up, the Gunny wasn't there anymore. I could taste earth, violets, autumn leaves. My lungs were burning and my head ached, but my body felt light, almost immaterial. It was wonderful opium.

"A bientôt," I said to the girl as I left. "Ca va mieux." I did not know if she spoke French, but I had been sent to Laos because, among other things, I spoke French, and I was damned if I was going to speak English to the people.

•

There was a light under Chen's door, but I felt too peaceful to see him. I went into my room and sat down in the rocker and sipped some gin. I was almost relaxed. That lasted for less than five minutes. There was a knock on my door and I knew it was Chen.

"Gene." He rushed into the room, "I just got a call. LeGault is over at Tiger's."

I took another swig of gin. Nothing settled in my mind and I eyed Chen coldly.

"He's there, don't you see?" Chen clapped his hands and turned in a circle.

I belched. I was not feeling warlike.

Chen moved around my room like a moth. "What luck!" he smiled. "What marvelous luck."

"The luck of the Irish," I laughed. "Eugene O'Hair, at your service, Mr. Chen, sir."

"Gene," Chen said, "I don't think you understand. LeGault is over at the baths."

"You think so, huh?" I asked. I thought I saw the face of Gunny Nadeau nodding at me from nowhere in particular, from my mind's eye. "Maybe it's not LeGault. Maybe it's somebody else."

"It's him!" Chen protested. "Tiger called me. She knows him. Tiger knows everybody."

Reading this as I have just written it, I have to laugh. I was being steered like a boat in a channel, and I took direction willingly, because I wanted to kill, I wanted to even things up, and I carried in the jumbled baggage of my consciousness the idea that vengeance was mine, that I had earned it through my contact with drill sergeants and football coaches and politicians and professors and all the other men I had tried to mold myself after. Vengeance was manly and clean, sharp as a whalebone, and I was God.

"Maybe I should just take a look-see," I said slowly.

"Absolutely," Chen said in a low voice. "You should at least know what this man looks like. He's quite dangerous. He might decide to come after you."

"That would definitely not be nice," I grunted as I kneeled down and unzipped my Val-a-Pak. I took my .45 out of its plastic wrapper. As I loaded the magazine, pushing the fat cartridges down on the magazine spring, I could smell oil and metal and brass casings. I checked the slide, admiring the precision of the machining, the beauty of the grooves. I could feel myself start to salivate. That may sound insane, but it is a fact: I was in love with small tolerances, colors of metal, gunpowder, the fit of the pistol butt in my hand, the weight of the weapon, my knowledge of it.

"Let's us go take a look at this frog," I said to Chen. I tucked the .45 into the belt of my slacks. I was in civilian clothes. There were no white men in uniform in Laos at that time.

Chen did not go with me, of course. People like that never do. He ducked out from under my arm and went into his room. "I'll be with you in a minute," he said, but I knew he was lying. It did not matter. My pulse was racing and I felt alive for the first time in weeks. The thick air did not tire me and the rain was no hindrance. I gave one last yell for Chen and then took off for the bathhouse, Tiger's Place. It was a few blocks past the American mission house.

Tiger was one of those Oriental women of indeterminate age who carry a tough beauty with them all their lives. She wore silk dresses with high collars and slit skirts. It was hard not to watch her legs while you talked with her. She wore gold rings and pearl necklaces and expensive perfume, and I suspect she was on the payroll of every secret service in Laos.

"Gene, I can't let you in," Tiger said when she saw me standing at her desk. "We're full."

"Where's LeGault?" I asked. I had the gin bottle in one hand and the .45 in the other. I took a last long hit of gin and put the bottle down on a table. "Chen told me he was here."

"You're drunk, Gene," Tiger said calmly.

"I just want to see him, OK? I got to know what he looks like. He took out some of my buddies."

Tiger said a very strange thing. In a wooden and noncaring voice, she asked me, "You are forcing me to tell you where LeGault is?"

"Yeah," I laughed. I pulled the slide back and let it slam forward. "There's a round in the chamber now."

"In that case, he's in number five. With Valerie."

"Thanks, Mama-san," I smiled. I slipped through the beaded curtain and crept down the long corridor, down the dim hall in a crouch that I thought was professional as hell.

It was all very stupid, of course, because I was just being used without my knowing it. There were any number of governments that wanted to be rid of LeGault. I did not recognize it at the time, but I was in a ballet, being choreographed by unseen forces, and I was too dumb to know it.

I listened at the door of number five. I heard water running and a woman's low, happy voice. Steam floated out of the half-open transom. I cannot explain it, but I felt as if I were standing in a dingy hotel hallway in a small town in Illinois. I expected, for the moment, to see my grandmother behind that door.

I opened the door a crack without being heard. Valerie was scooping bowls of water from the tub and pouring them over a man's head as he lay back in the water. She was cooing like a pigeon, the way she always did with me. She held a red washcloth in her other hand and she rubbed it across the man's chest.

They probably felt the breeze from the door at the same time, because they turned toward me together. I was standing in the firing position, arms extended, legs apart, both hands holding the .45 and pointing it straight toward them.

"Allez-vous-en," I said to Valerie. She (continued on page 202) French Lesson (continued from page 108) was wearing bathing-suit bottoms but no top. Her hands went to her mouth in fear. I gestured with the pistol and told her to get out again. She did, running past me like a slim spirit.

I was watching LeGault's eyes. They moved once toward the mattress on the massage table. So it was there that I sat, and I thought I could feel the bulge of a pistol under my thigh.

It was a strange conversation, because I spoke only French and he replied in English. We were each insulting the other that way.

LeGault was a thin man. He wore the scraggly beard of a professor and he had a narrow face, middle-aged, with a certain Gallic disdain in the pitch of his mouth. He spoke as if nothing meant much to him, nothing at all.

"It goes well?" I asked him in French.

"It goes," he said in English.

"Marvelous," I said.

"What do you want?" he asked casually after a silence.

"I'm not sure," I said.

He toyed with the red washcloth. "Valerie?" he asked. "You are jealous or something?"

"No," I laughed. "I'm not jealous, believe me."

"Good," he said with finality. He splashed water lightly across his shoulders.

I kept the pistol leveled at his forehead. I was only a few feet from him. "I adjusted the spring on this yesterday," I said. "Very light trigger pull. Less than a kilo."

LeGault's mouth formed an ironic grin. "I hope you aren't nervous," he smiled.

"Don't worry," I said.

We sat there for a time: no conversation, each waiting the other out, conscious of water dripping and rain on the corrugated roof and occasional voices from other rooms.

"You are LeGault, aren't you?" I asked with a laugh.

He spread his hands. "I am whoever you wish me to be," he said.

"They say you French are everywhere."

He looked at me, then the ceiling. "How can that be?"

"I ask myself that," I said. I leaned against the tile wall. "I ask myself what in the hell the French are doing in a secret war against the Americans."

LeGault was inching his way up out of the water. I let him do it. I knew what was going to happen. I saw the whole thing before it actually happened.

"Well, life is very confusing, isn't it?" he smiled. He had crooked teeth.

"I agree," I said.

"Your French is quite good," he said. "Where did you learn it?"

"I lived in Paris for a couple of years," I said.

"Yes, it's a Parisian accent."

"Yes," I said, "and where did you learn your English?"

"Here and there," he said. There was another silence. "Did you like France?" he asked.

"Most of the time."

"Good."

"But the French can be very cold, very snotty," I said.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he said.

"Oh, yes," I said. "The French can be the most selfish people in the world. They always assume that they know more than anybody else. About everything."

"I don't think you met the right people," he said.

"Probably not."

"I have only been to Paris a few times myself," LeGault said. He was playing for time, thinking that someone would come and save him. He did not realize that he had taken too many things into his own hands, become too uncontrollable, and that he was off everybody's white list.

Something told me I did not have to rush. I was enjoying the power I felt, enjoying it immensely. "Tell me about yourself," I said. I laughed at the politeness of my query.

"There's nothing to tell," LeGault offered.

"You grew up in France?"

"No. Here. Indochina."

"The son of a plantation owner?" I asked.

"My father was a farmer."

"You went to the Sorbonne?"

"You know all about me?" LeGault grimaced.

"I'm learning," I said. "What's your full name?"

"Jean-Claude LeGault," he said quietly. He sat up in the water, pulled the washcloth around his neck, made a production of splashing and smiling. "You already know that."

"I didn't know your first name," I said.

"Well, then, I am sorry I gave it to you."

"No, no," I smiled falsely. "I appreciate it."

"Merde," he said. It was the only French he would speak to me.

"You're down here from the north?" I asked.

"No," he said. "Saigon. I'm sure you know it."

"I know Xam Nua," I said.

"Ah, then you are not a tourist." He laughed. "So you have to be what? CIA?"

"Not exactly," I said.

"Well, you're not the Red Cross," he said.

"No, not the Red Cross," I said.

"You won't tell me?"

"Marines," I said.

"No," he said in that French fashion of dropping the jaw in disbelief. Faked disbelief.

"Yes!" I said brightly.

"But look at you. You are not in uniform."

"No. Neither are you."

We both laughed at that one.

"I think of you Marines as, you know, very fancy," he said.

"Bellboys?" I smiled.

LeGault looked at the ceiling again. "Marines are good fighters," he said.

"Yes, when they have a chance," I said. "When they aren't shot down by your SAMs."

"SAMs?" LeGault asked. He perverted the word, drew it out with a jutted jaw, made it sound unfamiliar.

"Surface-to-air missiles," I said.

"I do not know these SAMs," LeGault said.

"Nobody else did, either. Not around here. Not until a month ago. But somebody brought some SAMs in. They happen to be very effective against helicopters," I said.

"I wouldn't know," LeGault said.

"Really?" I said. I pulled the hammer of the .45 back with my thumb. The small sound reverberated in the room. That noise was chilling, even to me, and I was on the right side of the weapon. "Yes, you do. You know."

LeGault talked more rapidly. He tried to seem angry. "You're going to shoot me?" he asked. "For what? I don't know what you think I've done, but I can hardly defend myself this way."

"It's funny that you never heard of SAMs," I said. "I heard you and your crew were unloading the launchers at the airport and trucking them right up the Royal Road." I was amused at my own improvisation on Chen's brief story. I thought it was brilliant.

"That's absurd," LeGault said. He moved to a kneeling position. I let him do that, too.

"I heard you take ears when you kill," I said.

"Don't be ridiculous," LeGault said. "Who is telling you such things?"

"A little bird," I laughed.

"Well, none of this is true," he protested. He sank back on his haunches, but I could tell he was still ready to spring. Hereminded me of a tiger, a tired tiger.

"Tell me more about yourself," I said.

"Me?" he laughed. "I have an export-import business in Saigon. I play tennis. I swim at the club. I waste my life. Really, you must believe me. The business pays my bills and I don't have to lift a finger. I fly to Bangkok and Hong Kong and Pnompenh and here, and I might take some opium with me sometimes, but can you blame me? Do you know what I can sell a block of it for in Paris?" He assumed he had struck a rich vein of autobiography and he built on it. "I thought you were a narcotics man at first. I've had some trouble here. I buy from the tribes. Other people are interested in the same territory. It's a risky business."

I let him wind down. I listened to him with my eyes half-closed. Then I laughed.

"It doesn't check out, frog," I said. "You don't play tennis--you're pale. Look at you. You've got bites on your neck. You don't eat well. You've got that three-thousand-yard stare. You're a jungle bunny, LeGault. Just like me. You think I can't figure that out? We've been snooping and pooping in the same places, my friend. But you raised the stakes. You broke the rules. You brought in a little toy that we didn't expect. And you blew up three of my buddies. Three guys just doing a job. Coming in on resupply. And you blew them out of the sky. Poof. Just like that. Place your bets; nothing more goes; poof." I was conscious that my anger made me a better linguist. My French was impeccable, filled with argot, and I spoke rapidly, like an angry waiter.

"That's absurd, what you have just said," LeGault objected. Still in English, of course.

"Right near a hill called Phu San," I said. "Near the Plain of Jars."

"Don't talk nonsense," he said. "I have never been near the Plain of Jars."

I spoke my first English. "Yes, you have," I said. "You grew up there. It was your back yard."

There are moments when time slows down for me. It loses momentum. I can see myself watching myself. Indeed, I am a little bit outside myself, and I know what's going to happen, what each person will do. And it is done. It is a powerful, addictive perception, as good as opium or gin.

LeGault pushed off in a swan dive toward me, but he didn't do it very well and his feet slipped on the bottom of the bathtub. He rose in an awkward arch, his arms flailing like a scarecrow's.

I pumped one round into his chest. I did it very coldly, without thought. It was as if an invisible hand had slammed against him and tackled him in mid-air. His dive was broken and he crumpled outside the tub. Only then did I realize that my ears hurt from the explosion.

There was a lot of blood. LeGault's face was pale as alabaster and his eyes were empty. I knelt by him, patted his cheek with my pistol. "That's for Gunny Nadeau," I said, "and Sutton and Allard." I paused, trying to think clearly. "From Lieutenant O'Hair, 075718." I stood up. "I don't take ears," I said.

It was all very manly and brave and dramatic, or so I thought at the time. I had just made the world safer and myself stronger: justice, vengeance, all that good shit.

I walked back to the hotel in a daze.

•

No one can kill without thinking about it.

I sat in my room until dawn, playing solitaire and wishing that Chen were around to talk to. He seemed to have disappeared.

I drank more gin, but it made me nauseated, so I smoked a couple of pipes of hash. It was not opium, but it would do. The gecko liked the smoke and he moved where it drifted. The rain had eased and the gecko had less to worry about, so he got stoned with me.

By the time the AID station wagon came to get me, with orders so recently cut that the mimeo ink smeared on my hands and trousers, I was too wasted to appreciate the irony of my leaving. The mission house had commandeered a special Caravelle with MATS markings from Bangkok; a French crew and a French steward who asked me idly if I'd heard about the murder of a Frenchman in Vientiane the night before.

I tried to answer the steward in his language, but I found that I could not speak French anymore. The words stuck in my throat. I simply never spoke French again. Not ever.

"I hope they get the bastard who did that," I said finally in English.

The steward stared at me as if I were an epileptic. "Bien sÛr," he said to me with a contemptuous salute. "Moi aussi."

"What was that?" I asked with a stupid smile. I watched the steward's eyes glaze over with that disrespect the French have for people who do not speak their language. I was not in the best of moods, because I had just supervised the loading of Gunny Nadeau's coffin into the hold of the Caravelle. That had been my only demand when the consul came to tell me that I had to leave Vientiane immediately. So my tolerance was low and I made a production of leaning on the steward as I climbed the steps into the aircraft, acting like an American country bumpkin.

"Looks like the monsoon's lifted long enough to get us out of here," I said to no one in particular. The passenger cabin was empty. The flight was for me alone.

"Would you like a drink?" the steward asked me.

"You got any American beer?" I asked.

"We have wine," he said. "It is not American, but it is decent enough." His English was fluent.

"You got any German wine?"

"No," he said, turning his back on me.

"I sure like German wine," I called to him. He did not answer me.

Gunny Nadeau and I flew back to Bangkok and Saigon and Kadena and Tachikawa. We changed planes in Japan and then flew on to Wake Island and then Hickam and then Travis. We were on Priority One orders, the same way we'd gone out, and the Pacific Ocean was as dull as ever. The Gunny's coffin was offloaded at Travis, but I didn't get to see it, because I was being hustled onto a DC-3 that was waiting on the runway to take me down to El Toro.

Although I had resigned my commission, I spent another few weeks back with the First Marine Division. Most of the time I was being debriefed, talking into a tape recorder in a barracks in Camp Pendleton. I knew it was a polite version of custody and that they were wondering what to do with me. Sometimes they let me jog the firebreaks, and once they let me go into Oceanside to swim and shop. But there was always someone with me, and I felt very trapped.

They gave me tests and asked me to write up reports, but I could tell that they were waiting for something, some signal that said it was all right to release me and let me back into civilian life. That signal eventually came, though I have no idea what it was.

I can only testify that the scars are there in strange patterns.

If you met me, you would never guess that I killed so coldly. I seem like a nice person, if somewhat tense, and I put on a good act of being civilized. The disability lies deeper, in a place not charted, and it surfaces in private forms that only people like me can recognize.

For example: I don't read Ronsard's sonnet about age and beauty and sleep, the one that inspired Yeats, and Villon's Middle French written in frozen ink is not mine anymore, and Proust is out, as are Camus and Simenon and Sartre.

And if I were in your home, and if you were to play the songs of Brel or the recordings of Piaf, or if you were to brag about your best Château Lafite-Rothschild or your richest Beaujolais, you might not notice any change in me, but I would be thinking, very briefly, about killing you.

"I had the gin bottle in one hand and the .45 in the other. I took a last long hit of gin."

"He was playing for time, thinking that someone would come and save him."