Men of my generation raise their eyebrows when I insist that Olivia looked exactly like Jane Birkin.

     “Everyone agreed,” I say. “But maybe we were kidding ourselves.”

     “No doubt,” they say.

     “You get the idea, though.”

     “Sure. And you say that you dumped her?”

     If my wife were part of the conversation she would say, “You forget that Brad isn’t superficial like the rest of your gender.”

     Sarcasm. My wife was well acquainted with the depths of my superficiality.

     “And this Louise Bernard that you dumped Olivia for,” my male friend would say. “What did she look like?”

     I would shrug. Louise was nothing special to look at. Her appeal lay in her passion for revolution.  

     My acquaintance with her had begun with a proposal for a business transaction. I’d taken a break from my university studies in California because I wasn’t really studying. In fact, I was rarely attending class. I had gone to England during the summer, as a tourist without a plan. I had traveled randomly, my itinerary dictated by the people I bumped into and whatever they told me I should see. One day in a pretty little river town just east of Bath, where I’d visited the Roman baths that gave the city its name, I struck up a conversation with the owner of a pub. I mentioned that I was running low on money and he said he’d just had to fire somebody. He said there was no skill involved in working behind a bar, you only needed to be friendly to the customers. I said I’d give it a try. I found out that I liked it because of the easy and constant access to alcohol.

     By the end of summer, with my second university year approaching, I’d decided to take my break, not only from the university but from home. I wasn’t yet twenty, so finding similar work at home would have been out of the question. And returning home would have entailed many awkward confrontations with my parents concerning my plans for the future, or the lack thereof.  

     But my tourist visa had expired and I should never have been working. Even though the pub owner didn’t care, the police would care if they were to find out.

     “You need a wife,” a customer named Mike told me one afternoon. “That something your Olivia would consider?”  

     I shook my head.

     “We’re not that—”

     “I’m not talking about marrying for love,” he said.

     He finished his pint and nodded. I drew another pint.

     “I might have the perfect bird for you,” he said. “No question of love entering into it. Keep things clean that way.”

     A couple of nights later, Mike introduced me to Louise Bernard. I’d seen her around a few times without asking what her name was. I guessed she was in her mid-twenties. I hadn’t thought much of her, and the cool look in her eyes suggested that she’d thought just as little of me.  

     “I’ll leave you lovebirds to it,” he said, laughing as Louise said, “It’s your willy I’ll slice off if this Yank gives me any trouble, Mike.”  

     She turned toward me.

     “Heard you’ve been in England all summer. Pity you missed your country’s orgy of Bicentennial self-congratulation. What you drinking? I’ll get it.”

     I pointed at my half-pint glass, on the bar next to the lager tap.

     “Funny you call it the American ‘Revolution,’ though. How’s it a revolution if you kept the same system of exploitation and greed for profits? Capitalism with different accents is all: capitalists using elevators and flashlights instead of lifts and torches, driving cars with hoods and trunks instead of bonnets and boots.”

     I emptied my glass slowly, buying time to think of a reply.  

     “What the French were after back in May 68,” she said. “There’s revolution for you.”

     “I was eleven years old.”

     “Got to admit I wasn’t manning the barricades even though I was considerably older than that,” she laughed. “I’ll be marrying a child.”

     I refilled my glass.

     “But I don’t care if I marry you since I don’t believe in marriage anyway,” she said. “Outmoded, rubbish institution meant to enslave women. Got rid of corsets and the like, but still got marriage. I’m nobody’s slave, though.”

     She stopped talking. She removed her horn-rimmed glasses and started cleaning them with the hem of her shirt. Her eyes, disguised before by the thick lenses, were rather soft. Nothing else about her seemed that way. She was short and her body was compact and hard.

     “Believer in free love, are you?” I said.

     “Believer in a fair price for love, just like for everything else. That includes labor, which raises the question how much you get paid here.”  

     I started to answer.

     “Don’t bother: I know how much. Unfortunate fact is you can’t afford my love on those wages, so it’ll be excluded from our agreement. You all right with that?”

     Some of the men of my generation that I tell this story to understand right away.

     “So you fell in love just like that,” they say.

     “Just like that.”

     “Forget Jane Birkin,” they say.

     “Forget her.”

                                                                            #

     Technically, it’s not true that I dumped Olivia. I wasn’t about to do that since Louise had made it clear that she had no interest in me. But suddenly Olivia was the one who had to do all the work of maintaining our relationship, the one who had to come up with all the ideas and make all the plans. In truth, that required little work because the town was small and neither of us had a car. It was only a question of which pub we should meet up at and how long after the opening. But it was enough work so that once it was all left to her, she noticed the difference, even though I’d abruptly given no credit to her intelligence after meeting Louise. So Olivia dumped me as casually as I’d lost interest in her, never mind that when I tell the story the dumping is done by me. I tell the story that way because I think it will make an impression, even if whoever I tell it to secretly concludes that Olivia probably looked only a little like Jane Birkin.

     As for Louise, I’d never met anyone like her and I didn’t understand her, but I thought I understood that my only chance with her would lie in mimicking her cool indifference. During our first conversation, she’d named a price for marrying her that was far in excess of what I could have afforded without making a serious effort to save for. But I’d learned a few other things about her, too. For example, her favorite pub was the Duke of Earl, a far less traditional place than the King’s Arms, where I worked. Unlike the King’s Arms, on Friday and Saturday nights the Duke of Earl featured punk bands that you had to scream over to hold a conversation. I’d always worked at least one weekend night at the King’s Arms. Now, to increase my chances to “bump into” Louise, I started asking to have both Friday and Saturday night off. That would have made it harder to pay the weekly rent for my bedsit, never mind save up to pay Louise’s marriage price. I compensated by fiddling a bit more from the till at the King’s Arms.

     On Friday and Saturday nights I would elbow my way through the Duke of Earl’s crowd to stand next to Louise so that I could act mildly surprised to see her and then scream into her ear that the band was brilliant. She would offer me her joint and I would accept and hand it back and not speak again until spoken to. When the chance to speak came up, to underscore my indifference to her I would never ask how she was doing, but only elaborate on the brilliance of the music.  

     Except that I wasn’t elaborating. I was reiterating, and Louise wanted elaboration.

     “What’s so brilliant about it?” she might ask while the band took a break.

     When put on the spot I would invariably stammer out a reply that didn’t satisfy her.

     “Well. . . the singer really puts his heart into it. . . and the lead guitarist. . .”  

     She would smile. She wasn’t pretty, but she came a little closer to pretty when she smiled.

     “Plays the notes?”

     “Yeah, and—”  

     “Bloody hell, Bradley,” she would say. “Not ten thousand people in this town, but bet you could find twenty chaps to play the notes better than that wanker. I drive you over to Bath, might find hundreds.”  

     As I imagined being alone in her car with her, she continued her assault on my argument.

     “And singer puts his heart into it. Think Adolf Hitler didn’t put his heart into his speeches? Chap always looked on the verge of bursting a blood vessel.”

     “I didn’t mean—”  

     “Can only say, ‘singer puts his heart into it,’ might as well be sleepwalking like all the people that bloke’s screaming at, trying to wake up.”

     I recall every detail of this conversation so vividly that it seems impossible that it took place four decades ago. I recall that it happened to be a Friday rather than a Saturday. I recall that her smile had vanished and I was in a panic to figure out what that meant. I recall that the Duke of Earl’s lights had stayed dimmed even though the band was on its break, and that when the lights suddenly turned bright, I could see that Louise’s face was shiny with sweat. By then it would have been September, with the weather still warm, and everyone had been packed in close together to see the band. She hadn’t worn her horn-rimmed glasses while the band played. Now she put them on, but they fogged up. She took them off again.

     “Be cooler outside,” I said.  

     She nodded and I followed her and as soon as we were out the door she said, “The true somnambulists, all the masses of sleepwalkers controlled by society, they could push right up to the stage, that singer spraying his sweat on them and screaming in their faces, and they wouldn’t bat an eye.”

     She had on a long-sleeved shirt. She tried to mop her forehead with it but her arm was as wet as her face.

     “I’m coming across too rude,” she said, smiling again. “I’m only speaking in general, so don’t think it’s about you. Just because you don’t understand this music yet, that doesn’t make you one of the sleepwalkers.”

     She shook her head violently a couple of times to try to get rid of the sweat, the way dogs do after a bath. She laughed at herself, aware that she was incapable of shaking like dog.

     “You’re not one of them, are you?”

     “One of the sleepwalkers?”

     “You’re not controlled by society, are you, Bradley?”

     I told her I wasn’t, but I could see that she didn’t believe me.

     “Going to find my mates,” she said as she turned to go back inside.

     I put my hand on her shoulder to stop her. She looked at the hand and I removed it.

     “Sorry,” I said. “But you’re an assistant manager in a bank in a small town. And you’re bragging about not being controlled by society?”

     She took a step toward me.

     “Was a good girl from the start,” she said under her breath. “Good girl at school, A levels, good girl at uni. Good career in the making with Barclays. Been a sleepwalker myself.”

     She slapped herself on the cheek. The force of the blow shocked me.

     “But wide awake now,” she said. “And you’ve no idea what my plans are for this little branch.”  

     I blinked as she turned away again. I followed, this time not daring to touch her, but she held up her hand and I stopped.

     “You’re a waste of time,” she said.  

     So as not to appear defeated I went back inside. I had half a bitter and went home to my bedsit.

     The next morning, Saturday, I opened the King’s Arms. It was the closest pub to where Louise lived, and she came in not long afterward. But she made it plain that it wasn’t to see me.

     “Overdid it last night,” she said. “Need some hair of the dog.”

     Only the fact that she hardly looked at me and that after ordering a half of something she went to sit as far away from the bar as she could can explain what happened next. Her behavior the night before and that morning had put me in a foul mood.

     Louise was one of maybe three people in the place when an Indian or Pakistani came in—early thirties I’d say, nice shirt and tie and slacks, and shiny shoes—giving me the shock of my life. I hadn’t thought about it before, but he must have been the first person with dark skin that I’d ever seen in the little town. I could see he’d given Louise a shock, too.

     “I reckoned he’d got on a bus in London not knowing it was headed out of the city,” she would say later, when we knew he wouldn’t have had to take the bus. “Then the poor chap had fallen asleep.”

     “But why would someone like that have gotten off here?” I said.

     “To use the bog. Driver wouldn’t have waited, though. Happy to be rid of him.”

     In fact, he had used the bog. It was after he came back to the half I’d poured for him that the trouble began. While he was away two regulars had walked in. I knew them well enough and had never heard either breathe a word about color. But I suppose they’d never had the occasion in that little town, and now they had occasion. The two had started off talking about football. Then the stranger came back and suddenly their talk was all Paki-this and Paki-that, not to him but between themselves, and making no effort to keep their voices down and with frequent sidelong glances at their target, who avoided returning their looks.  

     I went over to them. I meant to ask them to be quiet. But before I could open my mouth one of them said, “Bit early for curry deliveries, isn’t it?”  

     “I’m not a delivery bloke,” the stranger said. “I’m a barrister, here to see a client.”

     Maybe by trying to sound strong the stranger had come across as too proud. But I wouldn’t want to blame him for that, as if by coming across differently he could have prevented what happened. Sounding weak would only have been an invitation to be picked on.  

     “A fancy Paki,” one of the locals said, and the other moved along the bar toward the stranger, raising his hand toward him like he was going to take hold of his tie.

     “That’s enough,” I said. “Not in here.”

     Richard—that was his name—took his eyes off the stranger long enough to look at me and sing, “I suppose I could collect my books and get on back to school,” his voice gravelly like in the Rod Stewart song.  

     I already disliked his name, along with all its variations, because of Richard Nixon, gone from the White House for two years.

     I said, “That’s enough, DICK,” and he looked back at me and with the hand he’d extended toward the stranger grabbed his crotch and said, “This what you like to think of when you think of me?”  

     Richard turned back to the stranger and said, “A fancy Paki able to afford fancy clothes,” and I snapped, his stupidity and that of his friend too much to bear along with the insult to me, given the vile mood I was in because of Louise. I don’t recall giving a thought to ramming the top third or so of my lager glass into the side of the bar. I simply did it. I was left holding the bottom two thirds, the top jagged edge of which I put inches from the face of the local who’d been reaching toward the stranger. The local backed away, looking at the sharp glass and my bloody hand, and I said, “It’ll be your blood next if you don’t both fuck off.”  

     As they did so, I noticed Louise. She was sitting so far away from the bar that for an instant I’d forgotten about her.  

                                                                                  #

     One after another, Louise blew smoke rings toward the ceiling. I massaged the bite mark she’d left on my shoulder. 

     “Sorry about the blood,” I said.

     She paused.

     “No worries, Omar. Soak it in cold water, it’ll come right out.”

     She’d taken to calling me Omar instead of Bradley because of the incident with the broken glass. Now she saw me as a soldier. She was thinking of General Omar Bradley, played by Karl Malden in the George C. Scott movie about Patton from a few years before.

     She went back to blowing. I looked over her, out the window of her second-story flat. She’d pulled the shade down enough so that no one could see in, but that through the crack we had a view of the Avon. I wondered how far we were from Stratford-upon-Avon and if she might want to drive there some time. If I’d really been studying at the university instead of only pretending, I would have been studying literature, so I thought I ought to care about Shakespeare.

     Louise stopped blowing.  

     “I’ve seen that in movies,” I said. “But I thought it was—”

     “A camera trick? Nothing to it.”

     She turned her face to me to demonstrate. I didn’t mind having smoke blown in my face. In those days you couldn’t get away from smoke in the pubs. Then she explained.

     “You see how I did it? Started by filling my mouth with smoke and rounding my lips into a little ‘ooh’ shape. Then used my tongue—”

     “Everything you’re saying makes me think of something else,” I said. “And I could fill your mouth with something besides smoke.”

     She turned her face back to the ceiling and blew a succession of smoke rings as she reached for the floor and fumbled for her glasses. She put them on and looked down at me.

     “Can’t see it even with these. Such a small object so far away, need a telescope.”

     She laughed and jabbed me in the ribs. I reached down to touch myself but her hand followed mine and stopped me.

     “Why so impatient?” she said. “Good four hours till the band go on at the Duke, got loads of time.”

     She filled her mouth with smoke and rounded her lips into an ‘ooh’ shape and used her tongue and mouth, with the assistance of light taps on her cheek, to blow out more smoke rings.  

     “You want to try?” she said.

     I wasn’t a smoker. But because Louise smoked, I’d been practicing in hopeful anticipation of such a moment, so I was ready.

     “Well played,” she said after I’d blown my last ring.

     She saw that my eyes were watering. She rolled onto her side toward me. With one hand she removed her glasses and with the other she reached down as she licked and sucked my tears. When my face was dry, she put her lips on my bite mark.  

     “Kissing makes everything better,” she said, and then, “But loads more blood where that came from.”

     A fraction of an inch above my bite, she bit me again.

                                                                              #

     From Louise’s flat to the Duke of Earl the drive was short, the walk on the long side. We chose exercise after our confinement all afternoon to the thirty-three square feet of her bed. The walk gave her time to explain her plans for the local Barclays branch.  

     “Got any idea how much cash a bank usually has on hand, Omar?”

     “No clue,” I said. “A million dollars?”

     “Not even close. Guess again.”

     I shrugged.

     “Well, not important how much a bank usually has. But this one. . .” 

     We were alone, yet she lowered her voice.

     “Thing is, Bath’s so packed with tourists that you’ve got merchants there on the near side of the city who drive three miles to do their banking here rather than fight the traffic to get to the Bath Barclays. And don’t know if you’ve strolled out of town along the river. . .”

     I shook my head. I strolled from my bedsit to the King’s Arms or from pub to pub.

     “Got lovely homes overlooking the river. Respectable families, old money.”

     “Kind of people you want to see burn,” I said.

     “Their old money’s with us.”

     “So. . .” 

     “So upwards of two hundred thousand quid certain times: Mondays after a busy weekend, merchants have made their deposits and we’ve had no chance to get the bulk of it hauled away.”

     Randomly, I’d guessed a million dollars. Two hundred thousand dollars from that time would have the buying power of close to a million dollars today. And Louise was talking about two hundred thousand pounds.

     “That’s a lot of money. But you’re not thinking of—”   

     “Course I am,” she said. “You think I want to spend my life helping the rich get richer?”

     My heart was thundering the way it had when I’d threatened Richard with the broken glass.

     “You want to spend your life as a criminal instead?”

     “A criminal?” she sneered.

     She took my hand and placed it on her buttocks.

     “Spent the last few hours doing things that are still crimes in most places,” she whispered.

     I took my hand away.

      “Some crimes are easier to get away with than others.”

     “Then it’s not about right and wrong, but what you’re afraid of? You afraid, Bradley?”

     I was afraid to say I was afraid.

   “What’s right about stealing rich people’s money so you can be rich?” I said.

   “Point wouldn’t be to be rich.”

    I stopped walking.

    “Then what would be the point?”

     She took my hand and placed it where she had before, pressing it firmly against her flesh.

     “Point would be to use their money to do this to them,” she said.

     As she drew closer, I became hard and she put her mouth up to mine. We’d reached the fringes of the commercial district and there were people around. One of them reprimanded us—“Not out here”—and Louise showed him her middle finger.

                                                                               #

     I was on board with Louise’s plan in all its vagueness. Mondays, when deposits were at their peak, were the days to target but also the days to avoid. Precisely because of the huge deposits the manager, the lone superior to Louise’s assistant manager’s position, was always there. But he had two weeks of holiday coming soon.  

     The way Louise explained it, the only hard part of executing her plan would be figuring out precisely what to do with enough money to make us rich when the point wasn’t to be rich.

     “Of course getting away with a crime this big will require leaving the country,” she said. “But even that’ll be easier than you think.”  

     Because of my shaky grasp of English geography, I had no strong opinion about how easy it would be to leave the country. I knew we were in the South, though.

     “You mean France,” I said.

     She explained in detail how, and how quickly, we would be able to get there.

     “We’ll be parlay-vooing before the money’s missed,” she concluded.

     We’d both had some high school French.

     “Perfect place to connect with like-minded sorts, help us put that two hundred thousand quid to proper use.”

     “Because of May 68,” I said, and she winked.

     That was as far as she’d thought through the post-getaway portion of her plan: we would connect with like-minded sorts. But I wasn’t sure about my own mind. And even though I never doubted her political convictions, it must have crossed my mind that, in case connecting with the like-minded were to prove harder than she suggested, we wouldn’t have any trouble thinking of other ways to spend two hundred thousand pounds.

     Either way, it was exciting. Once she’d finished laying out her plan as we remained locked in our embrace on the fringes of the little town’s commercial district, we were no longer in the mood for the Duke of Earl. We hurried back to her flat.   

                                                                               #

     Next morning, the first person in the King’s Arms after I’d opened wasn’t a customer, but a police officer. Richard and his friend had pressed charges and they had a witness. I’d forgotten that when I broke the glass, there had been at least one other customer present besides Richard and his friend and Louise and the Indian or Pakistani man.  

     But the officer didn’t get past mentioning the witness. He’d just opened his notebook when he looked up at me.

     “You’re American,” he said. “You entitled to work here legally?”

     He was happy to forget about the broken glass. At the station I was forced to contact my parents. They apologized for my misconduct and had me back in California before the end of the week. Fall semester classes at my university began the following week.

     The university library had a subscription for The Times of London. Every day that semester I stopped by the library in order to scour The Times. It was still September when I noticed the story about an after-hours robbery of a Barclays in a small town near Bath. Along with “a very considerable sum of money,” the assistant manager had gone missing. Pending a full investigation, law enforcement officials refused to speculate about whether the young woman had been the perpetrator or a victim. I found two more inconclusive reports in October, but after that nothing. I gave up looking through The Times in January or February.

     Toward the end of the decade it occurred to me that Louise might not have stayed put in France. I started watching news reports about groups like the Baader–Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades. That stopped when I realized that Louise would probably have changed her name.   

     My brush with the revolution had frightened me. I took up once again—I believed permanently—the habits of good behavior that Louise had mocked and from which I’d never thought to diverge during my school years, including high school. I began to look seriously at Shakespeare and a number of other literary figures that I’d known for some time I ought to care about. The predictable result has been a solid career.  

                                                                           #

     My wife left a couple of years ago, promising to return once I’d reconciled myself to growing old. After she was gone, I found plenty of Louise Bernards on Facebook. But in one way or another I was able to eliminate all of them except one. The last Louise Bernard seemed to have lost interest immediately after creating her account. She’d never posted a word, a photograph, a video—nothing. She’d posted no information about herself except that she lived in Juan-les-Pins. Of course, I thought: France. I googled the population and came away unsure of the result. But Juan-les-Pins was in the commune of Antibes, in southeastern France on the Côte d'Azur. The population of all of Antibes was about seventy-five thousand.  

     After my spring semester had ended and I’d turned in my grades and finished with the year-end meetings, I went to France. I knew who I was looking for but not what, and certainly not why. In Juan-les-Pins, I went from shop to shop to ask if anyone knew ma vieille amie, Louise Bernard. My old friend.

     Finally, in a butcher shop, someone said yes. The shop often delivered to her. I couldn’t remember the word for address, but I knew how to ask where.

     “Où?”

  The man crossed his arms. I thought he looked too young to be the owner. I showed him a fifty-euro note and he nodded. I gave him the note. He wiped his hands on his apron and found a scrap of paper and wrote on it with the pen I’d handed him: 7 Rue de l'église du Sacré-Cœur. 

     A road lined with palm trees sloping toward the sea. I parked the rented car because I wanted a walk, even though I hadn’t found number 7 yet. I walked toward the sea until I realized that the numbers were getting bigger. I turned around. Number 7 was set back far from the road and camouflaged by the spruce and cypress that studded a wide expanse of lawn.  

     I rang the bell and a woman answered. My age or a little older, and tall. Beneath the scarlet ribbon encircling the crown of her wide-brimmed straw hat she wore faded, baggy clothes. Pruning shears dangled from her left hand. The gardener, I thought.

     “Je cherche Louise Bernard,” I said.

     “Louise Bernard, c’est moi,” she said, pronouncing it in the French way: Bear-NARR.

     “I’m sorry,” I said, forgetting myself and speaking in English. “Wrong Louise Bernard.”

     She’d once been beautiful. She still had a dancer’s posture and she stood nearly a head taller than the young Englishwoman whose revolution I’d briefly joined.  

     I heard a man’s voice call her name from inside the house. He appeared and stood at her side.

     “I’m sorry that we can’t help you,” the woman said in English.