Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 55th Installment

So in a way you could say they got a reprieve. Fritz allowed Pauline to stay, and the boys with Eva came home. There was not a sign of discord in the flat. It was all so artificial, and accommodation was the game they played. Fritz was more affectionate than he had ever been, but he overdid it. At one point Pauline caught him with Eva, and when she went into his study and found them in an embrace, she turned around and walked out. But it didn’t make her angry. It just made her think, “It’s what I deserve.” She pulled herself together, and before she went back into the study, she cleared her throat and waited a minute. He considered his study his sanctuary. Pauline was puzzled that he kept the door open, but it turned out that he wanted Pauline to know about his relationship with Eva. It actually increased his pleasure, though it made Eva feel uncomfortable. She wanted to resign but didn’t. She tried to talk to Pauline about it. They couldn’t avoid each other, and every day they looked at each other with envy. Pauline actually felt relieved. Fritz would already be at work, for he didn’t have the luxury of sleeping in. Eva took care of the boys. She’d feed them and make sure that they were clean and dressed for school. It was what she got paid for. She felt ashamed of herself for getting involved with her employer, but also enjoyed the attention and affection he gave her. She should’ve known better. Pauline thought she should’ve put a stop to it, but that was before she realized that it was what she wanted. She thought that she was free, free without the pretense, the make-believe, and with only a few complications. It was uncanny. It was unconventional and unbelievable, and it had gone too far for her to fix it.

She never wanted to know the explicit details of her husband’s relationship with Eva, and it worried her when she tried to imagine the consequences, and there was no denying that it hurt her whenever she allowed herself to accept the blame. So she wanted to keep as much of her for herself as possible for she knew who she was. And others around her never fooled her. She felt that she could take lovers or leave them. But she was unwilling to ditch any of them.

She had the closest relationship with Frederick. They were so close in nature that they could read each other’s faces. She wrote him notes in her lovely handwriting. He kept all of them and would reread them from time to time. He kept a passport and still hoped that one day that he could convince her to runaway with him. Money wouldn’t be a problem. They both had money, and they both teased each other about it. But Pauline wasn’t ready to give up everything. Still they talked about it, and if things ever got really unbearable at home for her she’d readily accept his offer. For insurance she kept a stash of money hidden where she knew that she could find it.

One day she came close to doing something foolhardy. She confronted Eva. Eva stood her ground. It was before Pauline had seen anything and confirmed her suspicions. What the boys might’ve seen worried her more than anything else. She thought that they shouldn’t be drawn into it. As far as she was concerned it was all right for Eva and her husband to have an affair, but they needed to be discreet about it. She believed in setting strict boundaries and had been very careful herself not to embarrass her boys in any way. That was what she confronted Eva about. She wanted to clear the air and make sure Eva understood where she stood. It was easy for her to re-create in her mind what was going on in Eva’s head, and she felt better after they had their little talk. Both of them felt better, though Pauline hadn’t exactly rolled over when she made it clear that the nanny’s principal duty was the care of her kids. Nothing else seemed to matter to her…while she knew that she was incapable of meeting Fritz’s needs. During the war she’d been robbed of so much. Since the war she’d felt that she didn’t have a claim on anyone. And she felt lost and stuck. The more she thought about it, the more stuck she felt. Sometimes she couldn’t think of anything else. She felt tormented, and that was when she was most likely to seek a sexual fix.

She told Frederick one day, “I’ve been talking to Fritz. He says that he’d like to meet you. I think that’s sick. Of course he knows about us. I don’t keep anything from him.”

Frederick said, “Do you think I’d want to talk to him?”

Pauline said, “I told him it wasn’t a good idea. I told him that I didn’t want to spoil it and that I didn’t know how you’d react. I don’t want to spoil it. I don’t want to spoil it with any rules except for one: no matter what my boys have to be protected. And I’m serious.”

She said the next day, “I’ve talked to Fritz again, and he agrees.”

That day Frederick and Pauline agreed to go away together for a weekend. She called Fritz and told him exactly what she was doing and when she’d be back. But there were other things going on.

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 52nd Installment

She used to worry about what people thought of her. She always wanted to make a good impression. But she knew that she couldn’t keep it up, and that was especially true after she went to work at the Obdachlosenhein. She also knew that members of her family would be the first to disapprove of her. She wouldn’t have gone to work there had Fritz not gone to war. She wouldn’t have had the freedom and wouldn’t have met the people responsible for her conversion to socialism. But this wasn’t the tipping point. She’d always had a rebellious streak, and no one could dispute it. Fritiz had seen it, and he later tried to put himself in her place. He tried to imagine what it was like to be abandoned for as long as she had been and quickly realized that he might’ve “strayed” too. He had his own indiscretions to contend with, his dark side. It gave him a different perspective than he would’ve had otherwise. Though it wasn’t something he was proud of, it was something that wouldn’t surprise anyone. To keep a mistress was pretty common, and it was known that many men had more than one household since there was a shortage of men. They however generally managed to juggle everything, with two women and in some cases two families; it was generally easier for them than what Pauline faced.

One day, when she went shopping with Eva, she began to talk about the men in her life. They were having lunch in a café, and no one could hear them because the place was packed. Eva expected to hear something about Fritz, about some things that were going wrong in the their marriage, or some juicy gossip…that sort of thing. She didn’t hear a thing about Fritz. It seemed as if Fritz didn’t exist. Eva was surprisingly supportive. In this regard Pauline thought she was blessed. Eva actually knew more about Pauline’s marriage than she did, and it was the first time that they had talked in this way. They’d had the opportunity before but simply hadn’t done it. If Eva had been in Pauline’s shoes she would’ve settled for a conventional marriage. The constraints wouldn’t have bothered her. She would’ve married Fritz in a heartbeat. Without thinking, she said, “We can’t have everything.” When Pauline asked why, she said, “It doesn’t work that way.” Pauline had just chronicled her various romantic relationships without naming names and wasn’t quite sure why she did it. Eva felt like saying, “You can’t do that when you’re married” but restrained herself. Normally an employer wouldn’t confide in an employee in this manner, and it felt awkward. Still Eva felt excited about it, as the two women picked their way through what could’ve been a very thorny conversation. And Pauline saw that Eva had greater insight than a household servant normally would, while she knew her husband and that he was attracted to Eva. She even suspected that they were having an affair and because of it she looked at Eva with new respect. It was even liberating, though she had grown tired of the complications.

She never liked to play charades. She knew that hard feelings would come along the way. She didn’t want any and was determined not to have any. But some things were inevitable, some things were better left unsaid, and she knew it. Sometimes people couldn’t help themselves. Unfortunately thorns hurt.

In the beginning the life she lived had been an adventure. Sometimes it was a struggle. Otherwise she didn’t see anything wrong with it. And for a while it seemed like her new destiny would work for her: the freedom, the chance to be a well-rounded human being, and not having to be either a lady or a tramp. She didn’t have to chose between a career and a life centered round her husband. At the same time it was still very new and wasn’t accepted by everybody. Conventional marriages hadn’t yet become an artifact of a bygone age. Perhaps it never would. Perhaps there would always be tradeoffs. Pauline knew one think: it was better to have an intellectual match than the constraints of a conventional marriage.

Like it or not, she was still a mother and like so many women she had difficulty reconciling that with who she wanted to be. She was nervous about leaving the boys with Eva at first. She didn’t want to get that look from other people that she knew she’d get. But if she was going to fulfil her destiny she didn’t have a choice. Like was said before, she had the most trouble with her family. There they didn’t want to accept the person that she’d become. They seemed to think that she was headed for ruin. They seemed to think that she should be ashamed of herself. So because of that “working all the time” liberated her. Of course, she didn’t work all the time.

Sometimes on Sundays she and Frederick went to the Vienna woods and hiked their favorite trails, and sometimes afterwards went to their favorite tavern in Grinzing where they would drink and sing.

She often thought back to the afternoon when she posed nude in the woods for Frederick…that picture of her sitting on a log with her hair hanging down over her breasts…and knew that she looked beautiful. Then why did Frederick say he liked ugly nudes? She wondered if Frederick would prefer it if she looked and acted like a whore and worried that that might be how he viewed her. Why did he prefer ugly nudes? She wondered, “Am I ugly?” How could he hate women when he loved her? Maybe he only hated some women.

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 50th Installment

On his first day home Fritz asked Pauline, “Was it as long for you as it was for me?” His fear had been heightened by his feelings of vulnerability during the war, and he seized on everything that he could…memories, possessions, and relationships…to recoup what he lost on the battlefield. He also tried to reject all the changes that had occurred, everything that was new to him…like all the changes Pauline made to their home while he was gone. She had picked out new furniture and had rearranged everything. Thus he felt like a stranger in his own home.

But somehow he survived without people knowing what he was going through. The battle scars were real enough; yet he did everything in his power to keep them from showing. Soon he found himself waiting all the time for her to come home. He didn’t know what was going on. And then he was confronted with Pauline’s infidelity. It threw him for a loop. He hadn’t anticipated it. It broke his heart, and he vented by cursing her. He intended to move out, but he didn’t know where he’d go. He didn’t have the stomach to do anything else. It would’ve helped had he been a drunk. There was no way that he could ease his way out, so he ended up staying.

He felt like a stranger, a stranger in a flat with only a few things that belonged to him, and he couldn’t sleep at night. The only comfort he found came from Eva, his boys’ nanny. And just as he began to notice her, he began to depend on her, and just as he was beginning to depend on her, she agreed to live in. He couldn’t believe his luck. It meant that he didn’t have to roam the streets any longer, but he knew that he had to be careful. Unlike his wife, he couldn’t afford a scandal. Unlike her, he didn’t run around with radicals. And there was no use arguing with her. He’d been through that. He knew that he couldn’t change her, and he wasn’t about to tell her why he’d given up trying. He still loved her and he couldn’t believe it when he started to love Eva too. He’d eventually love two women at the same time. And since he knew that Pauline had her own strange ideas about love he knew that he didn’t need to explain to her how he could love her and Eva at the same time. Pauline was important to him because she was the mother of his children and Eva was important because she anticipated his needs. So he loved both women.

How did it begin with Eva? One morning in his study she startled him when she came in there. Up until then he hadn’t really noticed her. She was very slim, tall for a woman, and wore a light, cotton dress. She said, as if she had known him all of her life, “So you’ve finally come home.” She then confidently sat on the arm of the sofa next to him and began to flirt. She said, “We’re glad you’re home, sir.”

“I’m glad to be home.”

“Frau Pauline has missed you, sir.”

“I missed her too.”

“I’m sure you did, sir.”

“You don’t have to call me ‘sir.’ He enjoyed the chatter and didn’t give a shit about depth in women.

“For some time now I’ve been studying you,” she said out of the blue.

“Oh, you have?”

“And I kind of know what you like in women.” And as they talked, Pauline came to mind. Having had a chance to see how women had changed while he was away, he wondered, “Why couldn’t Pauline be little like Eva?” He had been accessing women since he returned and to him the “ugliness of their nakedness” subverted his ideal. Now here was a woman who hadn’t cropped her hair. This made him admire her. Eva suddenly became serious, got up from the arm of the sofa and left the room. He said, “I hope I haven’t gotten off to a bad start.”

Around the same time he’d met his vamp. She was a woman of mixed race, and he went out with her for the purpose of killing all desire. He literally thought about consuming her and tried not to be frightened by the urge. “All men have urges, just as all men drink and all men smoke.” He however wasn’t a rapist. He had seen too many women raped during the war and had seen what happened to men if they didn’t keep their urges in check. This went on for more than a year. Then he made his move on Eva, and all of his urges calmed down. Pauline’s absences and Eva accessibility would further altered the aspect of the situation. It didn’t become a crisis as long as they made love in the dark. But there would continue be uneasiness that only passion could cure.

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 49th Installment

Lying there he thought that his life was over, but was it a portrayal of his true feelings? He had to admit that the years that he and Pauline had together were good. Then did he really feel that his life was over? She had given him more than five good years. Then war came along. Now he was confined to a hospital bed, and he wanted to take his life back.

But it was out of his control. What if he had control, what would he do differently? He didn’t know. But first things first.

He didn’t know what he’d find at home. He was afraid to write. He hoped that Pauline was still there waiting for him. He dictated a letter to a nurse and then had her tear it up. He was simply uncertain about himself, and that was understandable. The nurse was very understandable.

Any letter from Pauline would’ve been a godsend. Was the game over? The game went on. He didn’t know what he expected, but he never expected Vienna to have change as much as it had. In many ways it seemed like it had been neglected for many years and it made Fritz heart’s sink and wonder what he had fought for. During the war the city had become increasingly ungovernable. Now the Social Democrats were in charge, and to him no one seemed happy about it. The waltz had become outdated, since it consisted of turns and change steps, and many of the old buildings needed paint. But the city itself had been left largely untouched. Yet it wasn’t the same.

They still had their old flat, with the same old, heavy furniture in it. He could count on the flat, only now with a live-in nanny it was more crowded than ever before. It had the basics. And beds, chairs, lamps, and tables made him feel at home. Only he had to give up having Pauline around because she was into her social work and her extracurricular activities. And all of it tore him apart. None of it, he thought, would’ve happened had he not gone off to war. He felt sure that if he hadn’t gone he could’ve kept her home. He blamed the war. He however wasn’t given a choice. He’d have to adapt…change…something that seemed impossible to begin with…and gradually from things she said Fritz understood that she had had many lovers and still carried on several affairs.

Within days after returning to Vienna he began wandering around the city. After feeling impotent during the war, he felt shaky, even afraid, and he felt that he had to “prove” himself before he disappointed his wife. Up until then he avoided having sexual contact with her, and it bothered him that she didn’t seem to object. So he wandered around the city looking for a vamp. He told himself that he wasn’t interested in tramps and felt sure that he knew the difference between tramps and vamps. Sometimes he went into cafes, but never in one where he thought that he might run into someone he knew and where he thought he’d be recognized. He was on a mission. He never denied it. Yes, things had changed. Yet, in some ways things hadn’t. He had to admit that he liked looking at women with cropped hair. There were the short skirts to contend with. Corsets were gone. Even proper ladies had abandoned them. Then he thought, “But it’s too much. They’ve gone too far. I’m the man. Though the world has changed, and they’ve proclaimed who they are, they’re risking everything. Our children need their mother. They hardly see her. It isn’t fair.”

Sometimes in the evening he’d look for Pauline in cafes without knowing what he’d do if he were to see her in one with someone. He never went by the Obdachlosenhein to see if she was working like she claimed she was. For a while he tried to recoup what he lost during the war. And the carnage of combat had accustomed him to violence, so there was no telling what he would do. Fritz asked himself, “How long can this continue? What do they expect?”

He asked Pauline, “What’s happened to you? Do you expect me to be happy about this?”

Pauline said, “I have no expectations. You could take possession of me, but I’m not sure you’d want to because I’m not sure what would happen then. Maybe in time you’ll begin to see things differently. Unless you’re willing to… Please don’t hate me.”

“I could kill you. It would be easy for me now…easy for me to reach that point.”

“I’m sorry. I guess we’re both reaching for something.”

“We thought the Turks possibly raped and looted our city. We didn’t know that they never reached the outskirts. What I want to know is if they had captured the city would you have welcomed them with open arms? No, don’t tell me.”

“You’re thinking of the wrong war, Fritz.”

“It’s a waste of time. A waste of time.”

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 48th Installment

That was how he lived with Pauline’s infidelity, though he hated it, and was how he rationalized his own behavior, though it certainty didn’t carry the risks…at least not the risk of scandal like Pauline’s behavior did. The one thing, however, that he was most afraid of were the diseases that she could bring home.

And he wished that he had come home from the war sooner. If he had, he thought, maybe things would’ve been different and maybe he would’ve been part of the change. His wife’s promiscuousness certainly bothered him, just as the promiscuousness of any married woman would’ve, while he didn’t see anything wrong with men being promiscuous. This was the double standard or contradiction Pauline faced every day.

At last they got off by themselves, away from the flat, with the boys at school and he taking an afternoon off from work. Just an afternoon, no more than a few hours was all the time they had. Perhaps because they knew that was all the time they had Fritz and Eva moved quickly from flirtation to intimacy, but for now Fritz wasn’t about to take advantage of his own flat. Never far away were hotels where they could go and where no one cared who they were and where whatever they did was totally accepted. Eva was somewhat fleshier than Pauline, and she acted like creatures of the opposite sex were supposed to act: she pretended to be less intellectual than Fritz, a creature of passion, of desire rather than of the mind and in many ways the opposite of Pauline. They went into the hotel. At that hour the lobby wasn’t very busy, and the hallway they passed through was just as vacant. Her red lips were moist and welcoming, but Fritz didn’t spend much time there. He left foreplay almost immediately and began undressing her before she had a chance to say anything. The way from there was familiar to both of them, what they each did and how they each responded. There was a negative side to this for both of them too. He loved his wife very much, she wanted her boss to respect her, and here they were in bed together, and he felt as if his life was ruined.

The air inside the room was hot and stale. Looking out the window after opening it, he saw men and women walking down the street, and he checked the time on a clock on a lamppost. He thought, “I don’t know what I’m doing here, but I don’t think I can turn back. And I’m not sure I want to. I’m not sure of anything.”

He still took Eva to a hotel whenever he could.

Then he slipped one day and made love to her in his study. Pauline was out with Frederick…that was the story…or was it with Herr Lippert (he never knew for sure)…and remember this was back in 1920 when Frederick and Pauline took frequently hikes together in the Vienna Woods, and she allowed him to take a naked photograph of her. Thus Fritz’s dream was shattered, a dream he maintained while he recuperated in a military hospital far from his native city.

Fritz woke up in the military hospital without knowing how he got there. He was among the wounded that couldn’t immediately go home. His wounds were so horrific that he didn’t want his family to see him.

Later he wouldn’t talk about it, and would only refer to the events as a dream, and in the middle of the dream was a nurse who he swore looked like Pauline. She enchanted him, though he was suffering from what would later be called shell shock. “You’ve gone through hell. It’ll take time. We’ve not seen injuries like yours before. Especially with the changes in fighting. Foolish, really, since no one knew…”

“Am I going to make it?”

“You will, Fritz. It will just take time.”

“You’re telling me the truth, aren’t you?”

“You know I am. There’s no more war for you.”

“I’m not thinking about war. I’m thinking about going home.”

She said, “It’s too soon for you to be thinking about home. Instead you should be thinking about recovering. I’ll come back later.”

When she came back, he said, “This has been a bad day. Big shells started coming over as soon as the sun gave the enemy a target. One burst in our trench and killed the man next to me and knocked me out with a concussion. I knew by the crash we were done for, but I can’t explain the burns I have. I was one of the lucky ones because I didn’t die of dysentery.”

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 47th Installment

“I couldn’t do that.”

Later he asked her, “Remember when I wanted you to run off with me?” She frowned. He said, “I wouldn’t expect you to abandon your boys. I wouldn’t expect you to.” She looked confused. He dropped the subject. Later, after she had been thinking about it for a while, she said, “I would, you know…only…only I have my work with women.”

“And you love your husband.”

“Frederick, don’t! You know that there’s more to it than that.”

“I was thinking about us only going away for a week. My family has a hunting lodge near Mayerling.”

“A hunting lodge near Mayerling. Near but far enough. How convenient! Why haven’t you suggested this before?”

“You would’ve thought it sinister. After Crown Prince Rudolf…”

“How romantic! No, I wouldn’t consider it. Now…”

And then a few weeks later a letter came from Pauline.

“I’ve been thinking about your proposal, though I don’t know why I should trust you. Mayerling is close enough for an afternoon tryst, especially if we take the train, but I don’t think I’m in the mood for murder or suicide. But why did it have to be Mayerling? About other matters. Why don’t you find another woman, Frederick? You have no future with me, and you know it. I don’t understand why you hadn’t suggested going to Mayerling before now. I trust you, but Mayerling! You know that I love you, but you don’t know the half of it.”

Frederick thought, “I’ve made a mistake.”

But, as always, he was able to undo his mistake, but they stayed away from Mayerling. He couldn’t however stay away from Pauline or undo the mess they created. Undoing it would’ve been easy now. He knew that he could easily find another woman, and it bothered him that he brought up the murder/suicide at Mayerling.

So there was no way that he could get out of the intimate quadrangle that he found himself in. He and Pauline could share their most intimate thoughts, and that was important to him. Yet he wondered if he could hold onto her. He wondered how long he could stand sharing her with other men, though he would be the first to praise her for her rebellion against convention. Besides a lover, she became his idol, while she devalued herself. While the years went by, and he remained in the quadrangle, Frederick was trying to deal with the lies he told himself, that he fully accepted and supported the emancipation of women, he didn’t feel cheated, and he had his jealousy under control. To stay in the relationship, he had to misrepresent his true feelings. He never told her how he really felt. Everytime they talked about it he lied while she held nothing back. Wasn’t Pauline asking too much of him? Mayerling was spoilt for him, and he never went back there. (Remember he’d inherit the hunting lodge, and nearby it there was the much larger hunting lodge where the tragic deaths of Prince Rudolf and his lover occurred…was it simply a tragedy or a conspiracy?)

The three males would have gone on sharing her indefinitely had it not been for the matter-of-fact way Pauline handled the whole thing. Frederick and Herr Lippert would’ve preferred more discreetness, and Fritz had his suspicions but was too afraid to confront Pauline. He knew that she’d changed during the war. He had some idea of her infidelity. He would’ve liked for her to have been an obedient wife, but his worry about losing her kept him from pressing the issue. It was the same old unsatisfactory way that he dealt with so many things; like his duplicity with the Christian Democrats and later with the Nazis. And all this while he tried to act reasonably and hold onto his job with the court. No one there would’ve known that anything was wrong. And all this while Frederick and Herr Lippert were sexually involved with his wife.

Fritz wanted to put a stop to it, but he had too much to lose, though he felt that he’d already lost his wife. He didn’t think that he’d be able to start over again. He wasn’t in touch with the changes that had occurred and certainly didn’t believe in women’s emancipation, but he didn’t know what he could do about it. He thought, “I have my sons to think about. They need their mother. I can get my needs met somewhere else.”

Randy Ford

Randy Ford Author- Revised INFLATION, DEFLATION, WAR! 46th Installment

“I wanted to be a father at one point. And a good one. I wanted to be like my father. Successful. We were so much better off than many of the people around us. Everything may have changed except that.” And he knew that Pauline would never give him a child.

Later after they started seeing each other again Pauline said, “Here’s one for you. For centuries men have had the best of everything, and no one had it better than my father did. He grew up in a rich estate-owning family and inherited his share. He came to Vienna as a young man. He lived extravagantly and ran around with the likes of Herman Bahr and Adolf Loos. He was somewhat like you. He remained a Jew. I disappointed him when I converted, and the wonderful man told me everything that I did wrong. After he and my mother married he had the courage not to modify his sexual appetite. People didn’t expect him to change. He could get away with it then because he was a man. Mother didn’t seem to object. She just grew fat having babies, and I suppose they had a lustful relationship. Compared to him, she was solid, like a stone, hard, but without her my father would’ve squandered everything. So he and my mother lived happily until he died unhappily with much of his fortune still intact, and no one really knew my mother because she rarely went out. You can see then how I take after my father. Maybe I came along at an inconvenient time, and she had to stay home. Here was this dowdy, unhappy woman breast-feeding one child after another. No, that’s wrong. She wanted to breast-feed her children. Then maybe she wasn’t so unhappy. So then I have her as a model. With my father and my mother as models how could I go wrong? It’s remarkable how I take after my father. He knew that happiness doesn’t last long, so he grabbed every moment. The writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau became interesting to me, very interesting. There was a period in my life when I wanted to run away, cut my hair as short, and live in the woods. Dad and I would hike together in the Vienna Woods. You’d think that he wouldn’t like to hike.”

And Frederick could see where she got her wildness, her primitiveness, and became a free spirit. It both excited him and frightened him, and he liked to imagine her running naked through the woods. He thought it explained so much of her nature. It drew him closer to her.

One day he asked her if he could photograph her naked outdoors in the woods. He couldn’t bring himself to ask her directly, so he wrote:

“There’s this man who knows you. He is, in fact, in love with you and wouldn’t do anything to hurt or expose you. You know who he is. He also knows you well and loves you for who are. He would also go as far as bet that you would go even further than you have if you were given half a chance, and he has a proposition. He recently saw the work of Kokoschka and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and felt inspired. That’s where his heart is now and would like to make use of his camera and you as his model. And he promises not to show your face.”

In a black-and-white photograph, which was slightly out of focused, Pauline sat naked on a log with her back to the camera. He made a garland for her hair. Her hair was long and covered her front. He kept his word and didn’t show her face. Frederick thought she looked beautiful. She felt brave but not brave enough to keep a copy for herself.

“What are you going to do if I try to sell the photograph?” he teased. “Or put it up beside the Otto Mueller’s “Gypsies.” Isn’t it art? Or should I make only a copy for me?”

“I trust you.”

“We come and go, but art endures. Well, now that you’ve done this, what’s left for you to do?”

Frederick thought, “She always surprises me. She may also surprise herself. I don’t have to go anywhere now. I’ve seen everything. And when my time is up, I can say I’ve had it all. And when Pauline looks elsewhere, as I know she will, I’m prepared.”

He worried like this because he knew that he wasn’t prepared to lose her and then thought, “She’s playing me for a fool. She has led me by my nose. And all this time I’ve let her.”

When he next met her, he asked, “Pauline, will you run off with me?”

“For real?”

“For me it is.”

Randy Ford