The Countess and the Schoolboy

In the early spring of 1985, after failing miserably at the first and only regular job that I have ever tried to hold, I left New York City to return to the Southern town where I'd gone to college, and was there rescued from depression, or worse, by a French lady I knew who used to party with liveried monkeys. I was barely twenty-five, and more or less a virgin--a nice Jewish boy from Long Island who still secretly thought that smoking Merits was pretty decadent. She was well into her seventh de...