I hope my readers will indulge me in a bit of self-indulgence this week as I use, or is it abuse, this space for what is a blatantly personal fixation…
Many, many years ago, although to me it seems not really that long back, almost as if it were just last week or last month, I crossed paths with this woman who with all of her earthly charms just outright caught my fancy, captured my imagination, indeed took prisoner of my heart and probably my soul, if the words of the poets are true. Because of some monumental stupidity on my part or perhaps some twist of fate or circumstance that is beyond my frame of reference or meager realm of understanding, we fell out of touch with one another. Rarely has a day or night passed when I have not had cause to think about her, what she had gotten herself up to, where she was, whether she as often as I of her or indeed ever thought of me and, if indeed she did, what it was that she thought…
There were some geographical and cultural points of commonality to our lives, and I would once have been too embarrassed to admit it, but there was a time that I, like the fool I am, found myself going solo at the opera, or the ballet, and on occasion at the cinema or other spot, places all where I hazarded a guess she might turn up. For four years I spent thousands of dollars on season tickets for an entire opera box. I would arrive well before show time, and there I would perch, using my opera glasses to scan the incoming crowd, searching high and low for a glimpse of her. I would continue to make a spectacle of myself once the performance began, using the glasses not to focalize upon the stage, but to pore over the audience despite the dimmed house lights, hoping to find her among the multitude. In my overly imaginative mind’s eye she would be there, and I, as if I were some gallant, would then rush to the foyer to meet her, by chance she would think, and I would resume what had once seemed for us irretrievably lost. Alas, but this played out only in the too fertile halls of my creative cortex, and never I ran across her using any of these stratagems…
Some years later, I hired a shamus, a private investigator, to see if she could be found. That too came up empty…
Well now, after all of these decades, and my having moved to and fro about the globe, back to Europe, to Hong Kong and again to this continent and now across it to my mountain redoubt, what are the chances that she is anywhere to be discovered? What are the chances that she has ever read the Sentinel, and if she has, will have picked up this edition? Not very likely, I should think, but as I am old and desperate, I will, as you Yanks are wont to say, throw up a Hail Mary…
If your eyes cross this, Christine Amélie Bettencourt, contact me, by means of this newspaper. After all of these years, I would think we should scarcely recognize one another. I will be the one with the monocle. And I will know it is you if you can answer these two riddles: What kind of birds had nested in hedge between the pond and the row of apricot trees? And what item was it that we absentmindedly left behind us in the Metro that caused us to be so damnably late to the performance of La Traviata? Send with your answers where you are, and I will come to you or make arrangements for you to come to me, as you prefer…