GISELLE

172. GISELLE (nyc, 1968):

Giselle was just a regular person a really nice girl and someone I'd grown accustomed to - she had money and a mother with whom she lived in the east 60's and her father was some sort of big-wig administrative type in the United Nations or the State Department or somewhere I never got straight (and I do think that story changed often) and he was never at home and whether they were all estranged or not I never knew - the mother liked the ballet and some old art but not much new stuff (we spoke somewhat haltingly of that a few times) and frankly for a 45-year old or whatever she really was not bad looking at all in fact a few times I lusted (I admit) and I think there was also an occasional boyfriend gentleman companion lover whatever around here and there - Giselle kept mum on that stuff and many were the times therefore that the apartment itself was empty but for the two of us while Mom was 'away' or whatever - Giselle was quite adept sexually and far more than I ever was then and having had what I assumed were many other partners and many other 'types' she'd take a look at me and see 'well let's bring that over here and see what we can do with it' which I of course always took as some form of diminutive put-down of the 'me' of me - if you know what I mean - but of course at that age one is not really so aware of all these issues which seemingly do consume people later on and I never minded - I took advantage of every opportunity I could for having a piece of her - wonderful breasts soft skin lovely breathing adorable noises and all the rest - she'd make little snacks and things to eat and we'd always have something to drink and a place to hang around - television phonograph photo albums and even a nice dog - she'd been attached for a while to the United Nations High School which was a place where the children of diplomats and others posted at the UN in Manhattan could go to school and it was rather nice and quite exclusive but at the same time I thought way too aware of itself and puffed up and often the caterwauling of all those different people and languages and national traits could just be too much - intermarriages and romances often bloomed and then had to be stopped or kept quiet or whatever - and we'd go a few times to any of the different programs they'd have a recital or an artshow or lecture or travel show and occasionally a 'mixer' or dance and they were always fun enough but weird too because there was always so much political turmoil going about that you'd worry about who could talk to whom and who could kiss whom and where and all that : Vietnam and Israel and Congo and South Africa and all those 'observer states' who couldn't really have missions at the UN but did anyway and all the weird Soviet communists and their agents - they all had people AND kids present in the vast commingling of New York City with cops and 'diplomatic immunity' and people coming and going and spies and double agents - all that really crazy stuff you'd read about and it was out in the open mostly like some political Mafia of international proportions with everyone exactly knowing who everyone else actually was - an odd scene but one fraught with both peril and pleasure and the pleasure for me was mostly Giselle : and then she was finished with that and trying to decide what she wanted to be doing she thought of a receptionist sort of job at a really nice upper eastside art gallery and tried it for a few weeks but soon got bored and decided that 'too much of the art shown there was blue or green and I really hate those colors' - which was the sort of sensibility she used - and then another time she decided she wished to be Edgar Allan Poe all over again and she set out to write Gothic stories - things about 'unexplained murders ambiguous deaths odd horrors caves castles dungeons and keeps' as she put it - and once she quoted Poe himself to me 'horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages' as her reason for castles and caves corpses and cauldrons subterranean labyrinths extinguished lamps and hollow groans all in some form of twisted reality in which a protagonist navigated the hazardous world of sensations in pursuit of and before being pursued by a murderer in ostensibly haunted houses set in darkness and in which troubled dreams and uncommon sensations and moral dilemmas were omnipresent - and I must say she often did quite a good job of it all and once or twice I took her down to the Village to visit either of the two Poe houses which still then stood there (both now gone) and the old Dispensary (still in place) where he was treated more than once and I could tell just by the looks in her eyes of the exquisite pleasure and perverse pride she took in seeing and knowing these places - as if she was partaking of some secret information from another world not of this modern age at all AND I found myself perfectly in tune and aware of that so that we shared these moments in fits of almost sublime passion and strange reverie.
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One day Giselle and I were talking and we were speculating and going on about about life and its meanings and possibilities and all that stuff and she said that it was all well and good for people to determine things about the lives they lived but what she didn't like was when their conclusions were expected then to apply to everyone else too and she said that 'we're all walking to the end of our own personal lines - no more no less - and when that string runs out no matter what it's over and that's the sum total of existence that 'running out' of one's own personal line and whether we call it destiny or fate or free will or reason that's all there is' and then she went on to try to explain why societies falter because people tend to try and mesh everything together and think one rule can apply to all and even if we ARE by society's rules all together in what we do one action in no way really affects another person's action except in an experiental sense but philosophically they remain completely separate and only have validity to that one person alone and I tried to speculate with her that if I had a gun and shot her or that 'guy over there' in the head that one action by me would most certainly have affected the other person - in this case by a bullet in the head - and she agreed that 'yes' it would perhaps appear to be so but that actually all appearances deceive - as they themselves are not philosophically pure once they are 'articulated into action' and I said I didn't really understand that and she said that was okay too (I really think this was all very indicative of the kinds of time we were then living in - all this idle time and idle speculation amidst new and sudden onrushes of ideas of 'freedom' and thought).
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Another time Giselle and I were walking along down around Hudson Street and Jane Street or Perry or nearby and I saw this girl in the short white summer dress with nothing on underneath showing a shot of ass as she reached up kissing her boyfriend at the light as they waited and then grabbing his crotch - a fistful of balls and dick apparently - twice while she stretched up some more while she clutched with some vigor at his privates and continued to show everything - she cared little and stayed like that until the light changed and as we watched I said to Giselle 'there's some articulated action I could really get into' and she laughed a bit and said 'I bet' and then she said 'you know the world is really a matter of indifference to me and that just exemplifies it' and I had no clue what she was trying to say but just let it go and only later I ferreted out another Camus comment that I tried to fit into this context : 'if the world is a matter of indifference to someone who feels that life itself borders on absurd it is because that person has an idea of something that is not or could not be indifferent to them.'
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My time with Giselle was near perfect and met all my criteria for both pleasure and attainment and it was comprised of many different things - shared interests shared likes and dislikes certain understandings sexuality and other things of the most accidental nature - she did things with me far downtown and with her I again re-entered the earlier uptown sphere I'd gotten easy with - the extreme east area of Yorktown and Carl Shurz Park and Gracie Mansion and all those strange and deeply tree'd hospitals and clinics the oddities of Sutton Place and that area and so much more : awkward meetings with friends of her family (those of course who did not know me in any way) here and there as we'd cross paths her old girlfriends and chums of childhood - people she'd mostly turned away from now - and mostly the sorts of people everyone knows who only 'know' you as they remember you - and allow nothing for development or change or alteration - the sorts who become simply and instantly critical of any different aspiration they suspect you've followed YET we got over all that and managed for quite some time to stay together and in pleasured company with each other and I prospered through her funny ways of talking and seeing things her odd points of view and her ways of just blurting out ideas and whims which otherwise and normally would have passed for deep philosophical commentary and yet the very REAL authenticity of anything she said or did was what amazed me the most - it caused me great pleasure and happiness for a time and then ONE DAY she was just gone ! like that ! leaving behind only a dense and obscure note to me about having been 'forced' to relocate to Belgium under the tutelage of her father and from which place she saw no way out nor any quick means of returning and to compound it all I could then find no trace of her mother either so that I was eventually and over time just erased as was she - her from me and me from her - and time passed ALAS and I got over it all : a certain sadness has no sisters or brothers nor any following and it left behind it nothing but a wistful and morose feeling of wishing Death itself had stepped in and taken one or both of us away instead - as 'Belgium' just wouldn't do.