Whereupon she spun on her high-heeled toes and parted the tiny crowd around her as if she really were made of steel to their flesh.
In her wake, they all pushed and shoved to make it through the needle. Lawrence A. Pinney was hit with baguettes again.
As he knocked the crumbs off himself, he seemed to hear people behind him. Two voices. Murmurs. ‘Mildly interesting.’ ‘That combination of qualities…’ ‘Not much, but worth spending some time on, perhaps.’ He wondered what it was all about. Maybe they were businessmen discussing prospective hires. He wondered what it would be like to have a job. A real one.
The most astonishing pale scent distracted him, a bouquet of orchids and thin ice.
It heralded the approach of a blur of white and blonde. In her hands he saw the plate from which he had taken his stolen croque-monsieur.
‘Is this yours?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he said.
She set the plate down on his table regardless and seated herself across from him. ‘I hope you don’t mind,’ she whispered. ‘I’d like to pretend we’re together. Women alone can be harassed sometimes.’
Lawrence A. looked around in case any potential harassers had followed her here. He didn’t see any. ‘Are you all right?’ he asked her, just to make sure.
‘You’re so kind,’ she said, looking right in his eyes. ‘Thank you.’
That extraordinary scent took over his senses again, beguiling and almost frightening him. Silver violets– had he thought they were orchids?– silver violets trembling.
The grateful lady’s eyes were dark as secrets.
It seemed like he ought to say something now.
‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I spoke to a woman a few minutes ago. Or she spoke to me. And…’
The lady raised her eyebrows. ‘Yes?’
‘Well, she was very rude… shocking, really… but I didn’t lose my head. Or not very much. Yet here, with you, I… I don’t know what to say.’
At that point something odd happened. He could have sworn that the lady replied, ‘I have an idea. Why don’t you tell me exactly how you would possess me if you had the chance.’
Obviously it was his imagination. She wouldn’t have really said such a thing.
Nonetheless, Lawrence A., previously too flummoxed to talk, now became too flummoxed not to. ‘That woman, you know, I’m realizing that I never did get a good look at her eyes. I wonder now what they were like. I do remember her suit. It was custom-fitted or I’ll eat my poor old tie (it is an Ungaro but I did not throw it in a washing machine, I jumped in a pool)… anyhow, her suit… Dior from the look of it… English woollen, a menswear feel… gunmetal gray.’
‘I see you have an eye,’ mentioned the lady, ‘as well as a heart.’
Lawrence A. waved the compliment away, as was his habit, then continued, ‘Her hair was auburn. It was piled on her head in curls that looked like metal shavings. They matched the rest of her, which was all steel. Poured steel. I can remember all that, as clear as day. But I can’t remember the colour of her– Watch out! Baguettes!’ It was another bicyclist, and bearing down hard. Lawrence A. lunged across the little table to shield the lady and took three fresh-baked, extra-crusty tips full across the face.
‘My goodness!’ cried the lady. ‘Thank you so much! Oh dear. Look at you. Scrapes like that would have broken my own skin, it’s so much softer than yours.’
‘Well, yes, I, I was worried about that,’ admitted Lawrence A.
‘So you took the blow in my place! You sacrificed yourself for me.’
‘Well, I…’ blushed Lawrence A.
‘You’re not just kind, you’re chivalrous! And here you are in the birthplace of chivalry. It is perfect.’
Lawrence A. developed a sudden problem with his shirt collar. He fumbled and tugged at it. ‘Does it seem hot to you?’ he asked.
‘So now,’ the lady announced with great satisfaction, ‘I can tell you how you would possess me. Exactly how. I’ve learned what I need to know. And,’ she whispered, ‘I like it.’
Lawrence A. Pinney’s mouth unhinged itself to a degree that would have provoked violence in Madame Steel. His eyes went full goldfish.
The lady stood. She took a moment to write his helpless look onto her heart for safekeeping, then floated away like dreams.
He heard the voices again.
‘A romantic, then.’ ‘But of the stern, old-fashioned kind.’
How strange; what would romance have to do with job qualifications? Were they perhaps computer professionals dreaming of the mainframe days?
‘… Colour of that tie is perhaps a bit tragic.’ ‘Yes, that will have to go. At least it’s linen rather than silk.’ ‘Either way, pale blue is pale blue. Well, then. Are we going to proceed?’
Lawrence A.’s veins turned colder than the lady’s flowers.
His ruined Ungaro retained a poignantly optimistic cerulean hue. In other words, you could call it ‘pale blue’.
As the implications of this began to unfold in his mind, a hand fell on his shoulder.
‘No!’ he shouted.
But instead of male attackers, he heard the voice of a woman, deep as earth and warm as cinnamon. ‘You’re all right, dear,’ it reassured him. ‘Now how can I help you?’
She sat down across from him and he looked in her face. It was a triumphantly middle-aged face, one which came right up into the strong lines and grooves of its years. In this way, it was masculine, since men are the ones who wear the scars of time with pride. But the effect was lovely.
Lawrence A. Pinney immediately confessed all to her. ‘Ma’am, I’ve been having some truly strange experiences. Women have come up to me… people have been talking about me… I ate a sandwich from an empty table… and the baguettes…’
‘Not to worry, not to worry,’ said the woman, patting his hand. ‘You are far from home. That’s all. Now, tell me about yourself.’
This was certainly a pleasant change from what had gone before, seeming to put him in control at last. But having been granted control, he found he didn’t know what to do with it. So he asked, ‘What do you want to know?’
‘Suppose you tell me why you came here.’
‘There really isn’t a reason.’
The woman shifted in her chair and her eyes became a bit more grey and searching. ‘I see. Was it just a vacation, then? Or were you perhaps trying to find something?’
‘That would be nice, wouldn’t it?’ he smiled. ‘But I think life is going to have to find me.’
The grey of her eyes now sparkled like a winter evening. ‘You may be right about that.’
‘Not so far. Life hasn’t gotten the memo. I’ve been drifting,’ he confessed, ‘for an awfully long time.’
The woman– he suddenly thought of her as ‘mother’– tilted her head. ‘What do you think being found by life would be like? How would it unfold? How would it feel?’
To his own utter shock, Lawrence A. blurted out, ‘It would feel like sex. From the other side. Like being penetrated. More than that– like being taken and entered, deeply, totally… Pardon me,’ he apologized. ‘I’m so sorry. I don’t even know you…’
‘Do I look uncomfortable?’ asked the woman with some amusement. Indeed, she didn’t. There was nary a blush on her. It was as if random men unburdened themselves to her about fucking all the time.
Lawrence A. thought, ‘She must not be very motherly after all, to be so calm through all this,’ and then he thought, ‘No, it means she’s the perfect mother. A mother for grown-ups, a mother who really can hear anything you need to say.’
And this made him ask the woman something even more embarrassing than talk of penetration: ‘Do you believe in goddess?’
‘The one or the many?’ she replied. ‘Western or eastern? Historical or conceptual? Avatar or essence?’
‘My god, you’re an intellectual!’ cried Lawrence A.
The woman heaved a great sigh. ‘Too late, you remember you are in Paris. So sad. I’d hoped for better
from you.’ She stood up.
‘No, wait! Don’t go!’ Lawrence A. at last felt like he was being tested– and like he was failing. Worse, he already felt lost at the idea of not having this woman near him. He needed her. ‘Give me another chance,’ he pleaded.
But she was gone.
For the first time in his life, Lawrence A. felt a sense of consequence.
He leaped to his feet. ‘Come back! Come back! I need you! I want another chance!’
The wide-eyed, silent waiter appeared and clapped a surprisingly large, heavy hand on Lawrence A.’s shoulder. With immense but invisible force, he shoved Lawrence A. back down in his chair, then held him there as if to make sure that Lawrence A. got the point. In all this he remained silent and his eyes refused to divulge their many secrets.
When the fight at last went out of Lawrence A., the waiter let go of him, took the plate off the table and disappeared.
‘Well,’ said Lawrence A., to no one in particular. ‘Does it get any worse?’
He shouldn’t have asked. Here came the voices again.
‘… Michaud just do what I thought he did?’ ‘Looks like… but we haven’t… decision yet!’ ‘… Take it up with him later. Meanwhile, let’s…’ ‘Yes, let’s.’
Let’s what, exactly?
It was right at that moment when Lawrence A. remembered the Louvre.
He kicked over his chair and started towards it like a rocket with an onboard guidance system.
The Louvre! The Louvre! Symbol of all that was right and good and normal and ordinary and totally clichéd! If he hurried– he checked his watch– he could get in line in time for the last group to see the Mona Lisa.
Several times he looked back to make sure the sinister café was not following him. Clearly it had been a mistake to come into Pigalle. Why had he done it? He didn’t remember now. A sense of wanting to go someplace without pretensions, without false charm, yet recognizably Parisian in a way which perhaps some of the other arrondissements no longer were, not because of globalization but because so many other places in the western world had become unashamed. The sidewalks had stopped peeking up skirts and storing up scandals to whisper in the night. With the way things were these days, there was no point to that anymore.
But still no place was quite, quite, like Pigalle. (What had she said? There was no poetry here?)
So he had come here, but now he regretted it. Maybe Paris itself had been a mistake. Maybe he should go back to the apartment in Massachusetts, or that retreat on Puget Sound. There were a thousand non-things he could do to keep himself not-quite-busy. He knew how to live his life. He knew how to find women. Well, not women like Madame Steel with her small frame and large breasts and slightly mis-cut suit, or women like the lady of the icy lilacs… or… or women like the sacred mother, proud of her years and thus untouched by them.
No. Not women like them. Women, but… not women like them.
Lawrence A. Pinney stopped dead in the street in total despair.
Madame Steel had been right. When she said his battered tie was his self-hatred, when she said that it was everything he couldn’t do to the long strip of flesh between his legs which was its analog, she’d been right. He wished he’d listened.
Damn cock. Damn self. Damn tie. He was going to throw it in the gutter. Throw it in the gutter, that’s what he was going to do. Jerk and yank it off his -
His exertions knocked something out of his suit. It fluttered to the ground.
Lawrence A. Pinney went after it to see what it was. From the dirty speckled asphalt he picked up a business card. Odd; he didn’t remember anyone handing him anything like this. Odder still, it was engraved, ‘‘Mistress,’ ‘Damsel,’ and ‘Mother’: The Three Graces Severes.’
English words but French grammar and construction.
Lawrence A. now saw that, underneath the engraving, there were lines of precise and tiny handwriting. He had to squint to read them: ‘The school of the Graces– deuxième étage– back of the building which you will see on your left if you first exit Café de la Chance heading…’
Café de la Chance, that was where he’d just been.
The waiter. The waiter must have slipped it to him while holding his shoulder. The waiter was telling him how to find those women again: the Mistress, the Damsel, and… and the Mother.
He remembered the Louvre. The safety. The reassurance. If he didn’t go now, he’d never get in. He’d never be able to keep hiding from… from what had found him.
Legs shaking, Lawrence A. Pinney set out to follow the hand-written directions on the card. He turned left, he turned right, he cut through this alley and over to that one, he walked through this sex shop and that dirty movie theatre, he found the fountain sticking oddly out of the side of a building on a tiny un-named sliver of street and ritually washed himself in it (ruining his poor tie even more), and at last he came to the fire escape on the back of the promised building.
Struggling inside through a window, Lawrence A. Pinney found himself in a hot and stuffy hallway which smelled like damp woollens and French pride.
There was a half-open door. Lawrence A. Pinney heard odd, leathery creaking sounds coming from inside. He crept closer and peeked in.
It was the waiter, stark naked and secured by heavy straps at his elbows and knees (leaving his hands almost ominously free). The straps affixed him to a rough wooden slab. Currently the slab was cranked into an upright position, but there was plenty of machinery to enable this to change if the waiter’s diabolical dominants should wish.
Lawrence A. Pinney now understood the appearance of the waiter’s mouth and eyes back in the cafe, because here the waiter was wearing a tight muzzle. This was obviously his natural state; his face, in retrospect, had looked more naked back at the café than his cock did now. Many sessions like this must have formed him, made his eyes so huge and full of unexpressed words, made his mouth so flat and useless-looking.
A stern woman’s voice, familiar-sounding, interrupted.
‘Yes, Michaud. You will.’
‘Mmmm, mmmmm,’ protested Michaud, neck turning red and eyes rolling up in his head.
‘You have only produced for me three times today,’ objected the strict speaker, ‘and your output has furthermore been pathetic.’ A well-manicured hand thrust a ceramic bowl into Lawrence A. Pinney’s sightline and the direct vicinity of Michaud’s cock. ‘Get to work. I want some fresh, and I want it now.’
There was a clink of knives and china beyond Lawrence A. Pinney’s line of sight. A lighter, gentler voice said, ‘It may not be much, Agnès, but you must admit it’s tasty.’
Lawrence A. Pinney was insatiably curious to know what they were talking about. He slipped past the doorway and hid against the opposite wall. He peeked into the room from this new angle.
There, he saw the belligerent 32E (holding the bowl) and two of her friends sitting at a tiny table, balancing their demitasses and their plates.
On their plates were slices of baguette, with some sort of white jelly or jam spread upon them.
… Oh.
Lawrence A. Pinney zipped back across the doorway so he could see Michaud again. The poor waiter had now taken his red, tired cock in his hands and was working it to hardness over the bowl so he would soon be able to come and give the ladies more special jam.
Lawrence A. Pinney immediately forgave Michaud his seeming laziness at the café. This was a hardworking man!
One of the friends said, ‘Oh, Agnès, look at him, he’s struggling. Let us help him.’
‘Oh, very well. Hold the bowl, Minette. Come with me, Chloe.’
Heels tapped. Lawrence A. Pinney watched Michaud follow the sound with his huge, and at the moment rather nervous, eyes.
Heels tapped again. Agnès and Chloe returned with two wide-end riding crops.
Michaud’s eyes had quite a lot to say about that. He added some very meaningful vocalizations: ‘Mmm! Mmm-mmm-mmm!’
While Minette knelt with the bowl, A
gnès and Chloe stationed themselves on either side of the wooden slab and began patting Michaud smartly on the thighs and stomach with their crops.
‘Mmm!’ shouted Michaud, but this time neither his voice nor his eyes needed to say anything; his formerly tired cock, now shiny and full, did all the talking needed.
Lawrence A. Pinney’s own cock decided to have some words of its own with the seam of his pants. He reached down… closed his eyes for one brief -
‘Mmm!’ sounded Michaud in a new and alarmingly different tone of voice.
Lawrence A. Pinney opened his eyes and saw to his considerable alarm that Michaud, in his struggles, had turned his head. As a result, Michaud’s huge, expressive eyes were now focused right on him.
He didn’t wait to see what would happen, but fled down the hall. Around the corner he hoped to find some sort of safety, but he only found another door.
Inside he saw a man kneeling on the hard floor.
Lawrence A. knew he shouldn’t look any further; he knew he should keep running. But he couldn’t help himself. He drew nearer.
The man kneeling in the room had a shiny bald head and enormous meat-cleaver hands. Like Lawrence A. Pinney, he was dressed in a custom suit (Gieves and Hawkes as a matter of fact), but unlike Lawrence A.’s, his was sharp and proud– lending his humility a poignant air.
He also had a pained expression on his face. Lawrence A. quickly saw why. With the way the man was kneeling, his suit pants functioned as a chastity harness, restraining his cock. And as Lawrence A. could clearly see, the man’s cock was in no position to tolerate such repression without considerable suffering. Yet the man bore it with an air of patience, even thankfulness, as if he considered it a tribute to the beautiful legs at which he knelt.
Lawrence A. realized now that he’d always believed that this was how it should be. Men should, maybe not serve, but certainly suffer for women. What was the point of all that strength otherwise? And women, when they commanded, commanded with pity and love, turning their words into nectar and wine.
‘Now take the bread, Antoine,’ came a sweet voice as case in point.
‘Yes, my lady,’ said Antoine with fervent devotion. He reached out of Lawrence A.’s sight line and came back with a scarred baguette. ‘What shall I do with it, ma’am? Take it as far into my mouth as I can for you? Rape myself with it? Tell me what would please you.’
Sex in the City Paris Page 17
