Bonjour Tristesse

The first time she began reading the thin little paperback, she was fifteen and lying naked on a narrow bed upstairs from the bookstore on Wilmare Avenue. The book was written by a French author, Françoise Sagan, who was only eighteen when it appeared. The main character, Cécile, was seventeen. There was a quote from Oscar Wilde in the book that the main character claimed she hoped to live by: “Sin is the only note of vivid colour that persists in the modern world.” Clearly it was wonderfully adult, wicked, and romantic to be reading about Cécile and her summer with her father and his mistress on the French Riviera while she herself was in the nude, and Robert—he was thirty-four—was crouched at his desk and working with a pencil and paper on a novel of his own. He’d read her passages from it that were terminally descriptive and dull, but that wasn’t the point. It was Thursday and her parents believed she was staying after school for debate club. She had arrived at the bookstore earlier, the bells tinkling above her head as she came through the door, had seen Robert there behind the desk, sitting not before a cash register but before what always reminded her of the sort of tackle box her father used for fishing. She loved Robert, of course. It ached how much she loved him, how often she thought about his life at the bookstore, about his body, how glad she was that they were lovers. Always when she arrived, he would wait for any lingering customers to leave, would turn the sign on the door to “Closed,” would lead her past the rope and up the stairs to the rooms where he lived, would undress her and push her back on the bed, telling her they shouldn’t be doing this, she was too young, but she was beautiful, beautiful. She thought about him often while listening to her teachers blathering on at school, while talking to her classmates and friends. She felt older now than all of them, as old as the moon, as old as the snow coming down. She first began sleeping with Robert in October, and now, in January, she had begun to dream they would keep up their secret affair until she was eighteen. Then they would marry and move to France, where Robert would be a famous novelist and she would be his muse. Or maybe she would begin to write herself, the beauty of her creations eclipsing even Robert’s success, and he would be jealous and storm out, vowing never to return. But he would come back at once, of course, going down on his knees to press his face against her belly or