September 1979, over fifteen years ago, at the height of my bachelor days.

I was at a party given for the German directors in the New York Film Festival; the Goethe House was filled with press agents, cultural attachés, distributors, and freeloaders (like myself) – and I was talking to this bald-headed acquaintance of mine, Bruce, when a stunning blonde sauntered up and saucily hailed us, with Marlene Dietrich camaraderie: "Junge, sind Sie Deutsche?"

When we admitted we didn't speak the language, she translated, "Boys, are you German men?" – an odd, shivery question, in that we were both actually Jewish men. She had a model-chiseled face with an ambiguous, slightly cruel smile, the face of a beautiful betrayer, Marthe Keller in Marathon Man (I adore Marthe Keller), and her hips rotated boldly in a swishy black-purple skirt of pleated silk. So I strung together some chatter and she turned, more toward me than my friend, and asked (impertinently or flirtatiously, I was not sure which), "What are you doing here?"

"I'm here to celebrate the great German filmmaker, Rainer Werner Fassbinder."

"Ah, yes, Fassbinder," she said with vague bitterness, as if she had completely forgotten that the party was being given largely in his honor. "I know him..." she said, even more vaguely. I wondered if she was an actress who had tried out unsuccessfully for a part in his film.

"Has he arrived yet?" I asked.

"Ya, sure," she said with the same air of contempt. And she pointed to a thicket of male backs surrounding the black leather-jacketed, lardy figure, well-known from his photographs, with scraggly beard and porcupine hair: his provokingly unwashed appearance a seeming incitement to those with a knack for turning frogs into princes.

I was tempted to go over there and pay my respects; but a fumbled blurting of sycophantic homage, met very possibly by rudeness on his part, would only muck up the pristine Fassbinder cosmos that existed in my head. Besides, I was more interested just then in my alluring conversant. "Forget Fassbinder; I just want to see his new film, Despair."

"Ya, Despair," she said, disappointedly.

"You're not interested in seeing it? It's supposed to be very good."

"I am but ... I have not a bill. It was too late by the time I tried." Bruce wandered off, leaving the field to me. "Also, I hear they are very expensive."

Not so, but I allowed the error to stand. "I happen to have an extra ticket. Would you like to go with me?"

"Certainly!" Now she is all attention: she trains her green, huntress eyes on me. "You have an extra ticket? Perhaps you have two extra tickets."

"No, I'm sorry. Just one."

"I ask only because of my roommate. But – that doesn't matter. I would like very much to see it."

"Fine. When shall I pick you up? The film starts at nine o'clock."

"Eight-fifteen? Here is my address," she said, writing down on a cocktail napkin Gudrun something (I read upside down). Our names and phone numbers exchanged, we laughed, and suddenly had nothing further to say; each began to scan the room.

*

I now had a beautiful date for Saturday night. My bachelor strategy of buying pairs of tickets to the film festival was working. Fassbinder had always brought me romantic good luck: ever since his films had started appearing in the New York Film Festival, one or two each Fall (taking over the position of fecund house-genius from Godard), they seemed to generate erotic as well as aesthetic rewards. Making out passionately in a taxicab after Merchant of Four Seasons; sleeping for the first time with someone new, after Fear Eats the Soul: Ali; being taken back temporaily into an ex-girlfriend's good graces, as a coda to Fox and His Friends.

It is a curious fact that, in the New York of the '70's, the films of this quintessentially gay director functioned as hot dates for straight couples. (I realize that Ingrid Caven has insisted, in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma, that Fassbinder was bi-sexual, but I still maintain that his was largely a gay aesthetic: the camp treatment of melodrama, the stylization of women's romantic emotion, the emphasis placed on cruising and tricks, etc.) Their aphrodisiac effect came, I suspect, from the coldness with which he portrayed sex. Especially sex between men and women. Think of the nude, adulterous Irm Hermann riding her prone lover in Merchant of Four Seasons, like a self-righteous hausfrau performing with Lutheran grimness her duty to the sexual revolution. Fassbinder's couplings displayed none of the mistiness found in commercial movies' sex scenes, but rather a bold, brutal pleasure-taking, less sentimental even than pornography, because pornography has its own sentimentality (the achievement of orgasm), whereas Fassbinder disdained to record this final tenderness. One of his early titles, Love Is Colder Than Death, expressed his (peculiarly liberating) denial of the humanistic pretensions of love. I cherished his intransigent pessimism and his ruthless division between love and sexual appetite. He was like Bresson: one of the strict ones.

*

I had already suspected on our first meeting that Gudrun was false, cold-hearted and probably unable to appreciate my best qualities. I expected little to come of our date, yet I was excited enough for the chance to pursue her. Was this longing for beautiful women to be explained by simple immaturity, insecurity, or unimaginative consumerism on my part? Ought I to chalk it up to a film aesthete's saturation with the impossible dreams and erotic ideals the screen insidiously provided? Or perhaps this desire for beautiful women requires no excuse at all.

At the time, I kept picturing Gudrun's roommate as a redhead – seeing them as two sexy continental actresses sharing a New York apartment. Fantasies, fantasies, and more fantasies. Yet I also had my doubts; I even imagined arriving and finding nobody home. Maybe that was why I got to her posh address – she lived in a thin, tasty townhouse on the Upper East Side – ten minutes early.

The door opened on several people scurrying and shifting their chairs. A small dinner party of Europeans, at the grapes, cheese, and espresso stage. My evening date was clearing off the dishes from the table: it looked like the bones of a pork roast.

"So sorry, we have nothing to offer you!" said Gudrun with a dazzling smile. "It is all gone." She introduced me quickly to her company as they headed out the door, and to her roommate, Emil, a curly-haired, handsome fellow in a turtleneck. He shook my hand affably, thinking nothing of lending his woman to me for the evening. Such savoir-faire.

Gudrun had gone to fetch a jacket, leaving me alone with her beau.

"So you like modern German cinema?" he asked me with feigned astonishment.

"Some of it, yes."

"But Fassbinder you like? I think I prefer Geistermacher and Schlöndorff, The Tin Drum."

"Schlöndorff has made some good films," I agreed.

"What do all you Americans see in Fassbinder? In Germany the public hates him."

Just then, Gudrun returned and stared at us both suspiciously. There was something strained, older-looking about her tonight. I began to justify my liking for Fassbinder: first, formally (his economy of means, his rigorous camera style, his expressive framing and color sense, his sly, deliberate tempo), then thematically. All Fassbinder movies, I said, no matter where they start, end up illustrating that life is cruel, humiliating, and disappointing. In this way, they were like Ozu or Naruse films; they gave no false consolation. And they were "religious" in the Buñuelian sense that every scene conveyed an underlying sense of sin.

I might as well have been speaking Chinese, as far as Emil was concerned. Meanwhile, Gudrun pounced, "Say why you think that!" like a Prussian schoolmaster demanding, "Define your terms," and when I did, then, "Ya, I see," reluctantly impressed, but as though sniffing out potentially stale, coffeehouse ideologies with her sharp nose.

"Are you a film critic?" Emil asked, as though only this could explain my taking movies so seriously.

"No, but I am a writer. What do you do?" I asked, shifting the spotlight off myself.

He pretended not to hear the question, and said something in German to Gudrun. She replied curtly. The second time I asked (I was curious!), he told me with disinclination that he ran a business in New Jersey. What kind of business? I inquired. Repairing stock cars, he muttered. I saw nothing shameful in that: it helped pay for this duplex, which, with a white staircase connecting one floor to the other, had the kind of charm that a New Yorker would kill for, and that a foreigner of a certain class seemed to luck into effortlessly. I congratulated him on the find. He said it was not as expensive as it looked: the landlord was an eccentric who liked them, so he gave them a bargain. "We even get to use his roof garden, which has Astro-turf." Though he said the word with the annoyingly slumming affection which hip Germans (like Wim Wenders) have for American kitsch, there was something about this Emil I could not help liking: a square-jawed, basic innocence, perhaps.

He saw us to the door, and they again exchanged a few sentences in German. I imagined her saying, "I'll ditch this sucker by 11:30 and return to you, luv, so keep the bed warm," because his face lit up at the end.