He called on a Sunday afternoon in early August, assuming that I’d drop everything I was doing to meet “the renowned poet” for a drink. But I couldn’t meet him that particular afternoon, and when he asked why, I recklessly divulged that I had a date with a married man. Ed kept pressing for details until I described how Michel’s wife sprinkled Chanel into the washing machine when she did his laundry and how the faintest whiff of Faubourg Saint-Honoré boutiques and haute couture came off his neck when I climbed aboard his black BMW and we rode the arrondissements, leaning into the corners, rocketing our way out of the city toward the Périphérique, and beyond that, a rush of woodlands on the way to Versailles. Frenchmen tend to be compact and slight; Michel, however, was half German, tall and broad with wide shoulders and a lean, taut belly that I clutched as we rode. When the weather is so hot and blistering, two guys in tank tops on a black BMW motorcycle is probably not so abnormal a sight in Paris.
