Moby Dx: A Novel of Silicon Valley - Volume 1 Max Ebb

Chapter 29 Le Cour aux Ernests

Arianna’s upbringing as the child of two expatriated families was neither French nor Persian, neither secular nor religious, neither liberal nor conservative, neither political nor apolitical. It was all of those. She soaked up the cultural bouillabaisse of Paris, finding some meaning in every tangy drop. She painted, and drew, and sculpted, but only imitating. She knew she was not an artist.

As a student at the Sorbonne, she became a skilled interpreter of art and literature, moving into critique and analysis and away from creative effort. There were a couple of college semesters abroad in Italy and Japan, and then a summer in Santa Fe, absorbing the desert and its influence on ancient and modern artists. She was courted aggressively—and to no effect—by alpha males of all ages. In her fourth year, she became an assistant to Nicolas Poussin scholar Jacques Thuillier, in whose private library were found handwritten margin notes about ‘levée du voile,’ and other apparent references to how her fresh eyes opened even his experienced ones to the wonders of the Corpus Pussinianum. She became first a copy editor and then a contributing editor to the influential Revue de l’Art, a plum position facilitated by Prof. Thuillier’s status as one of its founding members. The world-renowned professor and collector then anointed her Assistant Conseil for what has become recognized as his seminal catalog of the master’s early work exhibited at the Feigen Gallery in New York.

She had no room in her life for men who were not as earnest about their own work as she was about hers. The social climbers, family-made men, older men looking for a pretty protégé, and boys on a quest; they bored her. Her parents were worried that she was too serious.

The Sorbonne was located a few minutes walk to the north of Max’s lab at the ENS. But as she was an art history major, most of her classes were at the Institut d’Art et d’Archéologie located by the Rue Michelet entrance to the Jardin du Luxembourg, equally close, but to the west of the ENS. All of which is to say, they spent much of their days, for years, only moments away from each other, and they had seen each other, but had never spoken or met eyes.

On one of those days—it was a gray fall afternoon, she told me—in her fifth and final year, she left her father’s shop on the Boulevard Saint-Germain not far from her daytime haunts, stepped out onto the street without looking at what was coming, and almost collided with Max. He was returning to his lab after attending a seminar at the UFR Biomédicale, walking fast with his head down and buried in a book. Without appearing to take any notice of her at all, he got out of her way and kept on going, not only in the same direction, but headed for nearly the same place, she knew, because she’d seen him so many times in her neighborhood. And when she had seen him, he had always been absorbed in conversation with old men whom she was pretty certain were as distinguished in their fields as Prof. Thuillier was in his. (She was right about that, and found out later that his companions on the boulevards had been Abragam, de Gennes, Monod, and others.)

On the day of the collision, so engrossed was he that she took it as an affront and bumped into him accidentally on purpose. When he said, “Pardon” without so much as making eye contact and then continued on, she struck up a conversation he could not escape.

Max was startled. She wasn’t coming on to him, but she wasn’t treating him like an untouchable either. His clothes didn’t put her off. Incroyable! What he didn’t know was that his apparent intense involvement with his own work turned her on, reflecting as it did a male image of her own self, someone she already loved. Merveilleuse! And she didn’t know it then, but she’d disrupted a pattern of prejudice and behavior in him, and room was being made in his life for a real woman.

Max was cautious, reluctant to get entangled in a relationship with someone whose opinions and feelings he’d have to endure, and maybe even respond to. He had so much to hide from her, too, or to abandon. A fervid trip to Marseille did not achieve its mission of burning out desire for those crazy, delicious couplings with boys who looked like the androgynous ancient goddess he had been in the years before his beard. So he went slowly with her, a ridiculous pace for two experienced twenty-somethings in Paris. So many afternoon meals at the Café Aix on Rue Mouffetard, and no afternoon meals at Arianna’s Temple of Y. There was no precedent for such a progression.