INTERNATIONAL LOVE
395
to arrest me for my thoughts about Jacqueline: he held open
menacingly at his waist a thick black book that was chained to his
trousers' belt. "Perhaps we can walk upstairs to your apartment?"
"Please, not at all," Madame Dijour insisted. "Stay right here."
Jacqueline said nothing, absorbed in her schoolwork. "You can discuss
your affairs here."
I thought of objecting. But the police officer had already begun
writing my answers before he began asking me questions. "Very good,
you are a student? You are American? Age, please." He had been
oiled: a half-empty bottle and a couple of glasses rested on the table.
There were two animals asleep in the apartment. The pregnant
cat I had often seen on the stairs lay curled in a basket; on the chair
alongside Jacqueline slept the little dog. "And you have occupied the
premises above, renting from Madame Dijour, for three months?"
Seated at the smaller table, Jacqueline dipped her drying sunflower
face from book to book - evidently translation.
Twice a week for the last three months now I had been giving her
lessons in English composition. In fact, when I had first tried to come
to terms with her mother about the rent, Madame Dijour had insisted
on English lessons for her little girl. These were not a favor, she had
explained, not a voluntary matter; they were something I would owe
above and beyond my rent. But I didn't regret the arrangement, on
account of the little girl's doglike pathos, and something else. I was
nineteen, she was fifteen. And when she'd sit at my kitchen table
and lean forward to look into my big dictionary, I'd lean too as
her skirt rode up, and I'd study the cursive script her blue veins
traced on the shaded dry yellow scrolls of her inner thighs. When
she'd catch me by glancing up unexpectedly, I always thought I was
going to discover from the look in her eyes what went on downstairs
at her mother's. I kept thinking about her father. Jacqueline had eyes
like faintly tarnished medals earned for unknown acts of heroism,
and I looked at their large dry surfaces to discover what willpower,
what hand-to-hand combat, what sacrifice, and I learned nothing–
or rather something else - that I'd been leaning too far, and that she
regarded me with suspicion. After a while she'd go back to work, and
while she scribbled, always with many little elegant curls of her
penmanship, I schemed to take and gently guide the stamen of her
pen and the little cluster of her hand over the page so that her ink
