There’s sex, and there’s intimacy

Silent Bird by Reina Lisa Menasche, © 2014, ISBN978-14944-08831, 251 pages.

By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—Back when I was an undergraduate at UCLA—has it already been more than 50 years?—college men talked hopefully about the mythic “Yale date,” which supposedly had been agreed upon by male and female students at that august institution across the country.

By common consent, Yale students supposedly had sex on their first date, so as to get that out of the way, to eliminate the sexual tension that otherwise might come between them. Then, having had sex, the Yale students would go on, unfettered, to learn about each other completely, without ulterior motives.  Their interest in each other would be real and not feigned.

As you might imagine, the whole idea was a con hatched in the otherwise unoccupied brains of some horny undergraduate men.  As far as I know, no UCLA undergraduate woman ever thought the idea had any merit at all.  I doubt any Yale co-ed did either.

Now, in Silent Bird, a novel by San Diego author Reina Lisa Menasche, we get an idea of what the aftermath of a “Yale date” might have been like, although the novel’s setting is not in New Haven or Los Angeles, but rather in the south of France.

Pilar Russell, daughter of a divorced British Christian father and a Sephardic Jewish American mother, comes to France, knowing very little French, but believing she can start her life and her art career anew.  A beautiful young woman, she attracts the interest of Jeannot Courbois, a handsome, and in many ways innocent, waiter who hopes to become a serious musician.  Although they can barely communicate verbally, these two creative souls have sex almost immediately, and within a short time span move in together. Neither is aware of the other’s baggage.

While Pilar welcomes Jeannot’s tenderness and comfort, and accommodates him sexually, she nevertheless feels like she is suffocating almost every time they make love.  This is not because of Jeannot.  It is because of the family secret with which she has been struggling her entire life.  You will guess it long before Pilar is ready to tell Jeannot about it. But meanwhile, Pilar, has night terrors.  She gets sick to her stomach, and Jeannot fears it is because of him.

Jeannot comes from a provincial family, “provincial” in every sense of the word.  They have lived in the south of France, where they make a table wine, for many generations.  His family expects Jeannot to go into the family business, and to stop dreaming about a career in music.  In the view of Jeannot’s father and uncle, everything in France would be fine, were it not for the “foreigners.” Currently, the “foreigners” are the Arabs, but previously they were the nazi Germans, and before that the Jews.

Perhaps Pilar could abide their xenophobia, but she is shaken by a succession of incidents in Jeannot’s home village. An Arab school girl is bullied by French playmates, who steal and stomp on her head scarf.   Later the same girl is kidnaped and, after days of searching, she is found half-clothed in a cemetery.  No one seems to have any sympathy for the girl—not the French, as typified by Jeannot’s family, who consider her an unwelcome foreigner, and not her own family, who send her away because she has “shamed” them. Pilar, on the other hand, identifies with the girl completely, which provokes a crisis between her and Jeannot’s family.

Readers will find it fascinating how this plot turns out.  And they, like Pilar and Jeannot, will come to understand that even “good sex” is not intimacy.

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Harrison is the editor of San Diego Jewish World.  He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com