As I walked down the stone stairs to meet Bill and get ready for another trip, I’d never been more confused by a woman. Talk about mixed messages!
Part 2
Berlin in August, 1961, was the most exciting city in the world. Just before the East Germans started building “The Wall,” we got a chance to visit the eastern sector. I was appalled at the mountains of rubble in that area that still existed from WWII after seventeen years of Communist rule.
West Berlin was entirely different. A modern city, it had benefited fully from the Marshall Plan. It was vibrant, almost electric, and we were fortunate to get a sixth-story hotel room fifty yards from where the east-west wall was being erected. Fortunate, that is, because we could watch Russian tanks and troops maneuver about, and be typical students while we partied with some newfound German friends. Americans were heroes that month, and horny, party-loving Berlin girls were plentiful in those frantic few days. But when the wall was up and politics were no longer grist for my political imagination, we decided to move southward. Before we left I picked up a card from Maureen at Berlin’s American Express office. Please call me, it said. I got a similar postcard from Lindy, asking when I’d be in Grenoble, but I decided first to call her mother.
“I’ve thought a lot about you, Nick, but I’ve lost perspective,” said Maureen over the phone. “I need to see you. Since you’re going to meet Lindy in Grenoble, could we meet in, say, Strasbourg? It’s only a few hours east of Paris by train and I know of a great hotel. We could…talk…and…please, Nick!” she begged, almost in a whine.
She sounded imbalanced, half-hysterical. Do I need this? I wondered. Then I remembered our pleasurable night together and relented.
“I’ll be there day-after-tomorrow…probably early evening,” I promised. “Just for a short while, though. I’ve gotta get south before the weather changes!” I was beginning to feel her tightening possessive shackles more than I liked as I wrote down the address of the hotel in Strasbourg. Then I called Lindy.
“Where have you been?” she screeched over the phone. “I got a card from Berlin, but heard they were detaining American civilians and I got worried!”
“I’ve got lots of stories,” I admitted, as I listened to her excited, over-the-shoulder chatter to her roommate, Carolyn, on the other end. “But I can’t be there for a few days.”
“Well, get here when you can,” she cautioned. “I don’t know when Mom’s leaving but when she does, I’ve gotta go to Paris and see her off! Oh, and Nick! There are a lotta people here who know you…or know of you, an’ it’s a non-stop party!”
I warmed to the thought of being an experienced traveler, describing the troubles in Berlin to Lindy’s friends, a gang of impressionable teenagers in their freshman year abroad. But I had first to deal with her beautiful, fortyish mother on a stopover in Strasbourg, which promised far more exciting moments. Both prospects would of course do wonders for my male ego.