Russian Spring by Norman Spinrad

and San Francisco, the Left Bank was like a city on some exotic alien planet, though somehow it also managed to seem like a place familiar to him from half-remembered dreams.
    Or more likely from endless TV shows and movies, for so much of this part of Paris had been used as locale for so many shows down through the decades that it was familiar to Jerry in the same way that Hollywood Boulevard or Mulholland Drive or the Ventura Freeway was to people throughout the world who had never been within six thousand miles of LA .
    However, seeing a movie set in Paris was one thing, and
being
in one quite another. Paris had its own characteristic aroma, something too subtle to quite register as a smell, but something that sank into the backbrain and told Jerry on a level that vision never could that he
really was
in a foreign land.
    And the girl-watching was something else!
    Not that the women on these Parisian streets were any more physically stunning than the fabulous starlets and surfer girls and hookers of Los Angeles, where feminine pulchritude was a major item of commerce at every level.
    But all these tantalizing creatures were
right out there on the street
, displaying themselves at sidewalk tables, promenading by when Jerry and André sat down for a drink, dozens of them, hundreds of them at every turn; the unfamiliar density of it all was overwhelming, creating the impression that meeting them would be so easy, given the sheer law of averages, given the compacted human environment of the St.-Germain streets.
    On the other hand, everyone
was
speaking French.
    Not that Jerry hadn’t expected it, of course, but he had always associated the sound of tongues other than English with people on the outside looking in, immigrants, foreigners, and street-sleaze.
    Here, however,
he
was the one on the outside looking in. There they were, all these French guys making easy conversation with all these beautiful girls, leaning from one café table to the next, walking down the street, making it all seem so easy, as for them it probably was, as it could be for him too, if only it wasn’t all going on in
French
.
    Before Jerry had too much time to reflect on his linguistically frustratedhorniness, André had walked him to the banks of the Seine, where they descended an old stone ramp to the quay, and boarded a tour boat a good deal smaller than most of the angularly glassy behemoths plying the river, though just as crowded.
    “Hopelessly touristic, oui,” André said with a shrug as the boat warped out into the river, “but one must get these things out of the way nevertheless, no?”
    And so they did. They cruised around the St.-Louis, back into the main channel under the Pont Louis behind Nôtre-Dame, westward down the Seine under ornate bridges and past the Tuileries and the Louvre and the Musée d’Orsay, to the Trocadéro, across from the foot of the Eiffel Tower, where the boat made a one-eighty back upriver to the dock at Pont-Neuf.
    After that, André took him on another crazy ride, this time to the Eiffel Tower to watch the sun go down and the lights come out from on high, sipping another kir that began to turn Jerry’s knees a wee bit rubbery.
    “I think I’m beginning to fade, André,” Jerry said when they got back to the car. “Maybe I should just go back to the hotel and crash, after all, I’ve only had about three hours’ sleep. . . .”
    “No, no, no,” André insisted, “it is not even eight o’clock, you must stay awake till midnight, or you will take days to get unzoned, trust me! It is a bit early, but we can proceed to dinner.”
    “I’m not really all that hungry. . . .”
    “Something light, peut-être. . . . Ah, of course, bouillabaisse at Le Dôme, it is still the best in Paris, and at this hour, we should be able to get in without reservations!”
    Another drive through the streets of the Left Bank, five minutes of driving around back streets looking for a place to park, and then a