I WILL BEGIN WITH DIMENSIONS. As one should. I had a mathematician friend tell me once, perhaps twice, that dimension is concerned with the constituent structure of all space and its relation to time. I did not understand this statement and still I do not, in spite of its undeniable, obvious poetic charm. He also tried to tell me that the dimensions of an object are independent of the space in which that object is embedded. It’s not clear to me that even he understood what he was saying, though he seemed quite taken with the idea. What I do understand is that my canvas is twelve feet high and twenty-one feet and three inches across. I cannot explain the three inches, but can say that they are crucial to the work. It is nailed to a wall that is twenty feet tall and thirty-five feet across. The opposite wall is the same and the adjacent walls are but fifteen feet wide. And so the square footage of the space is five hundred twenty-five. The volume of the building space is ten thousand five hundred cubic feet. I am six feet tall and weigh one hundred and ninety-two pounds. I cannot explain the two pounds. I prefer that numbers be written out as words.

She was lying. I felt like an old fool just talking to her, though I had no designs. I would have been less of a cliché if I had had some designs. I would sound like less of one now if I admitted to having had designs, but I was what I was. As much as it pained me to admit, in a moment of reducing myself to an artistic expression, I resigned myself to a kind of Greenbergian complaint about surrealism, my present cliché being just that, surrealistic, that the picture fails because of an appeal to the anecdotal. An equally painful admission was that I believed, as much as I did not want to, that the medium was everything. Canvas and paint, that’s all there was, all there is. The medium there, in that museum, of my cliché, was two bodies. And sad as it made me, and excited as well, I knew that the two bodies would find each other. It wasn’t male fantasy; I was never confident enough for that. It was artistic prescience, if that makes any sense. Even if it doesn’t, that’s what it was.

The drinking too much was quiet in its way and yet, without causing physical disturbance, was violent enough. I would start around midday, innocuously, with a glass of wine and graduate pre-dinner to scotch or bourbon. It was a problem I didn’t know I had until I was nearing the bottom of a bottle and so to avoid that feeling I would buy several bottles at once. The new complexion-challenged boy at the corner liquor store asked if I was having a party. I got into my car and started crying. But I didn’t stop drinking. Instead I spread my purchases over a wider area, knowing the while how pathetic I was.

At that moment of seeing Victoire childlike on that bench I could have caught myself, freed myself with even the mildest allusion to Lolita, but the fact of the matter was that it was not her youth that attracted me. In fact, I am not even certain that what charmed me was all that genuine, that being her guiltlessness, her irreproachability, either of which were constructions of mine or hers. It really wasn’t that I wanted her, but that I wanted what she had, a kind of freedom, a purity of spirit. It was a sort of integrity, something that I strived for but had lost through so many years, maybe never had. I wanted what she had the way I wanted to draw the way my daughter drew when she was four, when that tangle of lines was an elephant, an elephant that I could not see, but an elephant. I recalled how brokenhearted I was when one day she crumpled up her picture and complained that it didn’t look like an elephant at all. Victoire allowed me to see that simple bench as it was, as more than what it was, and I was happy for it. I loved her for it. I sat on it beside her and felt the smoothness of it under my palms, attended to the coolness of it.

What was wonderful was that the sex was tender, that we kissed, that we were slow, that we were a little clumsy, a lot clumsy when it came to the condom, my clumsiness and the object itself making me self-aware, embarrassed, a bit ashamed. But that faded when she kissed me. I imagined in the middle of it all that I would be less ungainly, a bit more graceful in bed the next time. I loved being inside her and somehow felt I was not experiencing it fully, that the moment was getting away from me, that it was all rushed, but it was not, time was what time is, its own pace. She moved and she didn’t move, every sound was sweet to me. I didn’t know where her hands were most of the time, but I did know they pleased me. She might have had an orgasm, but I didn’t care.

I heard her move around the room, but I kept my eyes closed. She told me I could open them and I did. Against the wall pinned to a foam-core board that leaned against the wall was a watercolor. The paper was about twenty by thirty inches. The work was green, green leaning into blue in places, edged with blood in the southeast corner. It was abstract, stunning. It was so unlike the country scenes and cityscapes of hers that I had seen before. The painting was rich, dense, and deep. Too deep, I thought, for a work on paper, no matter how heavy the stock, too rich to be anything but oil colors, but it was surely watercolors. I was surprised by it, confused by it. I began to cry.

“Do you like it?”

“Did you make this?” I asked.

“You think a young, pretty French girl cannot paint this picture?”

“I don’t believe anyone could make this picture. How did you do it?” I wanted to get up and walk over to it, to get right up on it, but I also did not want to end the experience I was having with it. “I love it.”

“Why are you here with me?” I asked.

“Pardon?”

“Victoire, you are a beautiful young woman. Men are drawn to you. Men your age. I’m an old married man. I have two children. I live in another country. I can offer you nothing.”

“That’s not true,” she said.

“How is any of that not true?”

“First of all, I don’t want anything from you. Except you.”

“That’s my point. You can’t have me,” I said. “I’m not going to leave my wife and children.”

“But I do have you, don’t I? You are right here beside me, eating the same croissant, looking at the same overstated church. We lie in the same bed, breathe the same air.”

“Suppose,” I said, “we were together. Just for the sake of argument, imagine it. I will die long before you.”

“And then I will be sad before having a happy rest of my life. I will find another man. Maybe another old man like you. Maybe a younger one.”

Her answer was so clean, so perfect, so smart. “Of course,” I said. I reached over and held her hand.

“I told you. You do love me. Tu es mon beau ténébreux.” She leaned over and placed her head against my shoulder. It was an agreeable feeling, a nice weight. I would later confess to myself, sadly, that everything she had said I wanted to hear. I studied the top of her beautiful twenty-two-year-old head, peered through her hair, through her unblemished scalp, through her bone and into her brain, and loved her, wanted her to feel loved. More precisely, I wanted her to feel loved by me. It sounded as stupid then as it does now.

The women excused themselves and left us on the patio.

“You dog,” Richard said. “You’re not going to say that this isn’t what it looks like.”

“No, I’m afraid it’s exactly what it looks like. A goddamn train wreck.”

“The daughter? How old is she? Twenty-five?”

“Twenty-two.”

“What about the mother?” he asked.

“What about the mother?”

“She’s beautiful, in case you hadn’t noticed. And she knows?”

“Yes.”

Richard whistled. “To the French,” he toasted.

“I’m an idiot,” I said.

“Well, I don’t know.”

“Take my word,” I said.

“Victoire,” he said to the moon. “She’s a beauty.”

“There are lots of beauties out there,” I said.

“Right. Aren’t you above it all.”

“Yes, she’s beautiful,” I agreed. I stopped at the middle of the bridge and looked down at the Seine.

“Don’t do it,” Richard said.

“Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.” I looked at him. “So, my friend, am I crazy?”

“No, but you’re a carrier.”

“Am I?”

“Yep.”

“This can’t lead to anything,” I said.

“Nope.”

“I’ve got a beautiful family.”

“Yep.”

“Is this pretty much how this discussion’s going to go?”

“Yep.”

“I actually have feelings for this woman.”

“I’m sure you do,” Richard said. “I don’t even know her and I have feelings for her. And for her mother.” He laughed softly. “Don’t listen to me. I know you’ve done the math, but here it is again. She’s nearly twenty-five years younger than you. When she’s thirty-five, you will be fifty-nine. Not quite old, but you see where this is going. Your daughter will be nineteen and will hate your guts. Your son will be fifteen and he’ll excuse himself from the dinner table so he can go to his room and jack off to internet images of Catherine Deneuve.”

“I preferred the monosyllabic routine.”