Chapter 7
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f course, Constantin was much too short, but in his own way hewas handsome, with light brown hair and dark blue eyes and a lively,challenging expression. He could almost have been an American, hewas so tan and had such good teeth, but I could tell straight awaythat he wasn't. He had what no American man I’ve ever met has had,and that’s intuition. From the start Constantin guessed I wasn’t any protégée of MrsWillard’s. I raised an eyebrow here and dropped a dry little laughthere, and pretty soon we were both openly raking Mrs Willard overthe coals and I thought, “This Constantin won't mind if I’m too talland don't know enough languages and haven't been to Europe, he'llsee through all that stuff to what I really am” Constantin drove me to the UN in his old green convertible withcracked, comfortable brown leather seats and the top down. He toldme his tan came from playing tennis, and when we were sittingthere side by side flying down the streets in the open sun he tookmy hand and squeezed it, and | felt happier than I had been sinceI was about nine and running along the hot white beaches with myfather the summer before he died. And while Constantin and I sat in one of those hushed plushauditoriums in the UN, next to a stern muscular Russian girl withno make-up who was a simultaneous interpreter like Constantin, Ithought how strange it had never occurred to me before that I wasonly purely happy until I was nine years old. After that—in spite of the Girl Scouts and the piano lessons andthe water-colour lessons and the dancing lessons and the sailingcamp, all of which my mother scrimped to give me, and college, withcrewing in the mist before breakfast and black-bottom pies and thelittle new firecrackers of ideas going off every day—I had never beenreally happy again. I stared through the Russian girl in her double-breasted grey suit,
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