Coming To America--Some Personal Observations And A Strange Incident

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-1 Coming to America: Some Personal Observations and aStrange Incident

by Devon Pitlor

PART ONE

Having been asked the question far too many times about what I thought of the United States after my definitive arrival here in late 1987, I feel that myonly response can be that I was basically indifferent to America as whole. InFrance, we had been inundated with all sorts of projected Americanesque

visions: tall buildings, suburbs and the like, so nothing really surprised me.New York, where I began, looked like the New York that I expected it to be. Iwas neither happy nor sad to be in this country. It was simply a newexperience in a different venue. I was ready for that.

I should say up front that I came here because of my wife, who has given meher total permission to use her name and tell anything that I consider relevantto this essay.

And I think it will turn out to be an essay rather than just a straight memoir.Or at least I hope so.

I was given a great deal of opportunity in the US which I would not have hadin France, as I did not succeed on the baccalauréat, which is the one and onlycriterion for entry into university and the so-called higher professions in mycountry. I came to the US, immediately enrolled full time in a well-knownuniversity (which I prefer not to mention here) and achieved an MA ineconomics within three years, taking college as a business rather than adiversion and attending summers and mid-sessions as well. I worked as aManhattan bartender and waiter, had a few adventures, and achieved a goalthat I probably never would have been able to reach in France.

But what I really wanted to talk about is my wife. Her name was---then and



now---Meredith, which may surprise some readers who know that I hadmultiple affairs and was separated from Meredith for long periods of time, andthis by mutual consent, something that may appear to cheapen the relationshipin the eyes of some skeptics. I was a very shallow and, above all, independentperson who had many occasions to enjoy the company of other women. I havealluded to this before. My wife and I took trial separations from one anothermore than once. Today we are back together again, the kids have moved away,and we have more of an understanding and "alliance" than what is usuallythought of as a marriage. At least in the US sense.

To arrive at the story I want to tell, I do indeed need to make some cursoryobservations about changing both country and social class. My wife camefrom what we generally call here the upper middle class---very upper. Andthere is no doubt that both she and her family, which did not readily accept hermarrying a foreigner, gave me a lot of support and help which I probably didnot deserve. I feel no guilt for this because at the start Meredith and I were sotightly bonded together that nothing could separate us. I fell under her spellfrom the moment I met her, and I know that she will admit that she felt thesame with me. Such passion, such obsession is somewhat juvenile, I know that.But at age 22 going on 23, it is what we truly felt.

There is not a big transition going from a developed and prosperous countrylike France to an equally developed nation like the US, so the fervid emotionsthat some immigrants feel in arriving on these shores never affected me. Insome ways, I even considered the US primitive compared to France, especiallyin the areas of medical care and social services. But I don't want to getpolitical here. Because of Meredith, I decided to go for dual citizenship andmake the US my home. However, I never kissed the ground and thanked anysort of god that I had arrived.

Lots of my habits were crude, especially in New York City, where we settled. Ismoked and drank too much even then, and I cared nothing about clothes, carsor houses. Living in a tiny apartment in Brooklyn was fine with me. Itresembled somewhat the world that I had grown up in in La Rochelle, myhometown. I wondered why anyone would ask for more. I never became amaterialist, and even today, although I have substantial savings and a good



income, I still live in a crowded neighborhood in Brooklyn and like it just asmuch as I always did. I think that for Meredith it has been different, but Ihave always been insensitive to many things. I would rather die than live in asuburb or worse in the country. Only the activity of a lively neighborhoodinterests me. I hate driving, although I have a car, and the best environmentfor me is where one can walk everywhere to satisfy one's needs.

But I want to get back to the subject of love...or lust...or passion...or as we sayin French éblouissement --which translates roughly as the state of being totallyenraptured by another person.

That is how I felt for Meredith at the start.

I was raised not to be possessive or prideful, but it delighted me that all headsturned when Meredith walked into a room. And I mean that for real. Noexaggeration here---especially since the core of my story will involve an episodethat I consider rather recondite and which may appear either exaggerated orfanciful to some readers.

I guess you have to believe me completely (which is asking a lot, I know) tofully comprehend the story I want to tell.

Okay, back to my arrival here briefly. I was the odd man out when it came toMeredith's Long Island family. I had a strong accent and dressed terribly. Iate strange food and was totally unimpressed with the USA. That was enoughto alienate me from them. My lifelong Existentialism didn't make me anyfriends either. It took me a long time to ingratiate myself to Meredith's family,and to this day, I am not sure that any of them do more than just tolerate me.Upon entering university, I became determined to master the one tool that Ibelieve separates the successful from the non-successful: language. In short, Iovercompensated for my lack of English, and naturally that has formed thebasis of my ability to write today. I was also a very hard and determinedstudent and worker. I had just a couple of years before returned from nineteenmonths of obligatory military service in Africa, where I saw very unusualpeople, sights and events---all of which dwarfed any strangeness that the UScould possibly exert on me.



So what kind of "love," and I put that in quotes, existed between Meredith andme? I could romantically write a 'bottomless passion,' and that would not befar from the truth. I feel that those who have not experienced this depth of passion have missed something in life, despite the fact that, as we all know, itdoes not last, and quiet companionship and immense mutual toleration takethe place of those flaming cinders that once comprised what passes for ardentand all-consuming love in one's youth.

Meredith and I were never out of one another's sights, and we didn't want tobe. We joined up daily all over Manhattan when classes or jobs permitted andprobably never spent one night in the first two years of marriage withoutmaking love. It doubtlessly was overkill, but we were both gripped in theclutches of obsession. And no, it was not mere infatuation. I will nevercheapen what we felt for one another by calling it that. Even in maturity, Irespect the fiery and frenetic zeal of our early fervor, a crazed and driven senseof attachment to be sure. One who has never known this complete obsessionshould not disparage it. Adulthood and maturity do not require that we shedthe things that consumed our youth.

But what happened?

That is what I want to explore here, and that is the reason that I shall embark on what I can now honestly call the second part of my essay.

PART TWO

I met Meredith, an American student of haute couture and fashion, very closeto my hometown of La Rochelle, on the sometimes picturesque, sometimes uglyIle de Ré, a ferry ride across the Pertuis d'Antioche Strait from La Rochelle. Iwas already working in economics as a minor state analyst in the salt market,as the Ile de Ré is, prosaically, one of the largest sea salt producing areas onEarth. And a very dull job it was. My lack of university degree did not permitpromotion to more challenging levels of the business...and well, salt, importantas it is to our survival, is just nothing I can write about with any keennessunless this were an economics essay, in which case I could compose volumes on



the subject, volumes that would be read, naturally, only by the few.

Meredith was in a fashion photo shoot on the pretty side of the island, where Ioften went on my lunch breaks with friends to drink wine and sleep on thebeach before returning to a long afternoon of work. It was July. Tourists andphotographers were everywhere. In a crowd of girls, just outside of Saint-Martin en Ré, I spotted Meredith, and stereotypically, she was wearing a veryslight bikini. That was part of the fashion montage of the shoot she wasparticipating in.

I had no idea that Meredith was an American as I stared at here in thedistance. I was too far away to hear the voices of the girls who were involved,but Meredith stood out like a castaway goddess from some planet of unrealbeauty: Long, straight brown hair, a perfect torso, a totally symmetrical facewith full lips and huge dark eyes. She was a stunner from the start, and thatwas naturally the basis of my magnetism to her.

I have always been courageous when it comes to meeting girls, and I hadalways enjoyed a great deal of success therein. In fact, I was at the time livingwith another very beautiful young lady who was counter worker for the islandferry company. I jumped up and hustled my way through a crowd of

chattering photographers and make-up assistants and went up to Meredith'sside. I purposely stared at her in the eyes for longer than one usually does andblurted out in French "T'es trop belle, tu sais...pas réelle...hors de cetteplanète!!"

She stared back at me, dressed as I was in a drab black shirt and corduroypants, standing on a beach replete with fresh skin, youth and loveliness.

"I don't understand," she said.

I stammered out as much English as I then knew, which wasn't too terriblebecause I had spent time in Great Britain in the company of some verychaleureuse English girls.

It went on from there. I won't elaborate. I was foudroyé by Meredith, and



in the life of urban students, there in a makeshift screening room in a draftyuniversity hall converted into a temporary movie house. We sat on noisy metalchairs waiting for the film to start under the full lighting of the room. As ever,we were physically connected, arms around waists, necks or shoulders orwhatever. Meredith and I were like that. We could not resist touching oneanother. I guess I have already written this, but it may still contain somedescriptive value in what I am about to tell. Also, we were kissing. We alwaysdid that too, again and again and in public where it was not at the timefrowned on.

About three rows in front and to the side of where we were sitting was a youngman of about our age with his head turned away from us. In that era, boys stillwore their hair long, so that it covered his face until he heard someone he knewcall his name, which was Tony, and he turned around to look over his shoulderat whomever was calling.

So now I can drag out the French words again: foudroyés, abasourdis,stupéfiés, ahuris. Anyone who can read French will see that these adjectives,and I could use more, all end in the letter S, which means that they are plural.

Collectively, they mean staggered, stunned, dumbfounded, astonished,

incredulous, overwhelmed, flabbergasted and speechless---and all of these inthe plural because the shock was totally mutual between Meredith and myself.

Tony, a very masculine and not at all effeminate boy in any way, was themirror image of Meredith. I do not mean that Tony resembled Meredith. Imean that Tony WAS Meredith. The likeness was beyond uncanny. It wassupernatural. In his own boy's features he was the absolute doppelganger of Meredith, her exact male counterpart. Moreover, he was of her own size andshape.

I cannot stress the likeness enough because it was outrageous and disturbing inways that even today I am unable to adequately verbalize.

It is possible, therefore, for a male to remain a male and still parallel the literaland precise countenance of a female. A small curvature of the chin here, some



extra bone there. Not a big deal. No, Tony, was another Meredith, and he atonce knew it too.

So all of those adjectives of shock and alarm can be equally applied in theplural to Tony as well.

I say the plural because they could also be applied matter-of-fact to the cuteyoung girl seated next to him. Four people in their early twenties witnessed theeerie resemblance that day before a lame movie started in a university hallunder the unrelenting glare of the pre-screening lights.

We were, in effect, all four of us spellbound. Totalement envoûtés, as it were.Tony could not lift his eyes from Meredith and vice versa. It became sointense that the girl next to Tony took his arm and whispered something in hisear and seemed to lead him in like a trance out of the room, so anxious anddistressed was she.

And so they left...and rather hastily at that. And there were backward glances,and the girl had to do some very obvious tugging to extract Tony from the hall.

In all it was appalling and deeply disturbing---as they say today "on so many

levels."

Time passed, and Meredith and I skipped a class and went for a few drinks.We hardly remembered the movie at all. We had come face to face withMeredith's double, and while I was in awe and worried about losing mybeautiful wife, Meredith was suffering with something much greater inside.

I guess this is the essay part of this attempt to recapture an incident in the past.I never studied much psychology, but in all earnestness I ask myself thequestion now as I did then: What subliminal longings are stirred up in aperson who sees an exact double of themselves? I briefly touched on this in mystory "How I Met My Wife," which is pure fiction and somewhat based on anepisode of the French comic book hero Lone Sloane, created by the inimitablePhilippe Druillet, known to all French kids since the early sixties. But thequestion still remains.



The answer, of course, is not with me but with Meredith. There exists what shesaid and did then and what she says and does now. I will attempt to coverthese in summary fashion, and again, it is with her full consent.

Let me mention one more time in passing that, although obsessed with my wife,I was not jealous nor possessive. In fact, I admit to having had brief encounters with other girls, and don't hold that against me. The furor forMeredith still remained.

But this was not totally the case with Meredith. The university hall encounterwith her doppelganger had not left her unscathed, and Meredith beingMeredith, she acted on it. She contrived in her own way to meet Tony face toface and privately. She learned his last name, which is unimportant here, andthat he was an American student in engineering from somewhere in WestVirginia. They were the same age as well.

So the question emerges: what did she do? What would I have done? Whatwould Lone Sloane have done? Well, I can answer that first from Druillet'samazing comic book character. Lone Sloane cast himself upon thetransformed doppelganger and engaged in the most explosive and volatile sex

that anyone could imagine, except in a French comic book--which I shouldremind the reader were not "comic" at all, something which does not exist inAmerican publications to any great degree. French "comic" books were deadearnest in their depiction of sex and nubility.

As for me: I felt a distance swiftly interpose between my gorgeous wife andmyself, and I eventually acted in the most assholish way possible, which was totreat myself to numerous affairs which bear little recount. But none in shame.

And Meredith? The answer is yes. She and Tony were drawn together by anindestructible lash which caused her to ask me for what we then called a 'leaveof absence,' to which I resignedly assented. There was no use fighting thisattraction because it was mystical and tantric. The core of their essential eroticnarcissism had been tapped at its very primal roots, and there was no way thatI or anyone else could have prevented this union.



How long the physical and romantic affair lasted between Meredith and Tony Icannot say with exactitude. Meredith rejoined me in about six months when Iwas already in graduate school. She refused for years to talk about Tony, otherthan just the essentials. Sometimes she would break into tears. Sometimes shewould fall into the most turbulent rages of anxiety. Even after theirseparation, the memory of having conjoined with her double haunted her anddoes to this day.

Other than outright denial, there are all sorts of dirty little directions thereader or observer can take with this story, but none of them happened.

Also one can refute the notion that a boy can so closely resemble a girl and viceversa. But that is equally false. I give testimony that it can and did happen.

Lone Sloane, Druillet's space cowboy, had no compunctions about furious andfrenzied love-making with his shapechanging double. Meredith did.

And she still does, at age forty-seven, to this day.

In all, it shook her more than it did me. I was kind of a boy-whore, and I

actually enjoyed my "break" from the intensity I had with Meredith, andalthough we are still married to this day, things are much calmer anddrastically different. Some would say more realistic.

Somewhere in the USA, Tony must still live. Perhaps he has been married fora long time and has children. After all, he was very, very attractive---as was hisdouble.

But Meredith still wakes up in the night after having some nightmare aboutTony, and I presume he does the same. I imagine him with equally sleeplessnights.

Some things are immutable and beyond our ability to explain.

This is only one from my past.



________________________________

Devon Pitlor November, 2012*/*/*/

Coming To America--Some Personal Observations And A Strange Incident

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