"The intense life"1 - condensed draft 2 flat

Madame de Thoux (pronounce just like "two") was a beauty, a past beauty queen, in fact, child or teenage, I forgot. A muscular, dark-skinned blonde, petite, with a magnetism radiating from her pale, milky eyes that could pierce through you like an ice floe slicing off of a glacier.
She had grace, yes, but maybe not class. She had brains, but knew her power over others, over men especially, and so she never fully cultivated her potential, and never had to use it to its fullest. Older, moneyed, with a light touch that denoted a life of certain ease. Not that she had not suffered, but things had been smoothed over with time.

She never went anywhere without being noticed. I worked with her, briefly. Kept my distance, but did notice the quickness of mind, the mind. She also was, surprisingly, not averse to a risque' comment --she did it on purpose, knowing full well that no one, especially the younger ones, ever expected the classy lady to go earthy or crass.
Her husband was an older man, a kind of stick in the mud, a traditional macho--and, I suspect, could be a mean son of a gun. I met him once, briefly, did not care for him, but did not really pay attention anyway. Not my world, nothing in common, a smooth, good-looking older guy, with a cold streak. Part French,-- hence the name--, the haughty type.

I worked with her on a project, acted as if I did not care about her (in a way, she was not of my world: different values, different wayof living, different upbringing, I was a newfie of sorts, too much of an outlaw,and she was, or they were, old, established types. We did good work together: it came naturally, without effort. Without knowing each other, we found ourselves working smoothly and efficiently together. The project went on, reached its maturity.

One day, she suggested we lunch together. Sure, why not?
She was stunning that day. A clear, spring day. She was dressed in bright,light colors, white pants, a light green sweater broadly open on the shoulders, nice shoulders, small though. Not an lounce of fat on the woman, hyper-exercised, no doubt,but not spastic as so many of those Spandex women are.
She had reserved, it seemed. We ended up at a table at the end of a cavernous secondary or side room, with a few patrons in the front part of it, along the windows-- blinded by the light, I did not really see them--, while we were in the far back, barely visible, I think, for anyone who would not make the effort to approach our table. I sat facing her and the back of the restaurant, she faced me with all the light of the fierce southern high noon splashing her face, in fact illuminating her like a stage actress up for her grand soliloquy.
Her eyes shone like diamonds; her tanned, smooth skin, and blond hair a perfect frame for her face. People had looked at her as we walked to our table. I could see why. Indeed, once a beauty queen, always a beauty queen; atleast, she was.

We ordered, ate this and that. She was lively, talked about our project, how well we worked together, how she enjoyed working--I was tempted to ask if she was working for fun, maybe to get out of the gilded cage her life seemed to be--, when she stopped, leaned forward, planted her eyes in me, rested her head on her hand, somewhat of a theater or almost rehearsed pose, I thought--but I knew it was not: she was a natural. I looked at her with some surprise. She took note of my reaction and started:
-- You are naturally charming. But that is not why.
--why what?
She ignored me. "What I like about you is the way your mind works. You think on a different plane, on different levels at the same time. I have never known anyone with a mind like yours.
-- What is this? Are we playing "The Genius and the Goddess?"
-- What is that?
-- A book by Aldous Huxley, not his best, by the way, by far.
-- I'll have to read that one day. But that is not it. Do you know?
-- Know what?

She paused, reclined back in her chair, away from the table, looked at me, looked around. She had indeed graceful movements. I do not know why I remembered at that point that she was part Mediterranean, part Scandinavavian. It showed, The skin versus the hair and eyes, or maybe, rather: the skin AND the hair and eyes, the South and the North, not a Civil War thing, (althouhg it also worked, she was a Northern transplant--visibly so--in a near-tropical climate) no, it was more a completeness. There was somethign about this woman. Over thirty-five, oh yes, clearly, a real woman, not a kid. Before thirty-five, they are not... "ripe", not finished, yet. A Septentrion girl in Meridion; she had it all.

She looked at me, leaned forward.
--You know I love you, don't you?

I was so stunned I don't remember the end of the meal or how we got back to work. I never responded, and she had, again, correctly anticipated that I would not be able to handle this, anyway. We never talked about it. Never.
But we wrote one another, or rather I wrote and she responded. It all started that way. In a sense, it only started years later, many years later, well after this false start in that restaurant confession, and well after her husband, the gun owner, found our letters (she had asked to have them all, I had known right there and then that that was a mistake).

[CUT]