Paris Adieu

by Rozsa Gaston

  Once we’d gotten through preliminary inspection, Jean-Michel suggested dinner, to which I agreed. We hopped on a bus and traversed the Seine back to the Left Bank, from whence I’d come.

  We went for couscous. Paris is similar to New York; all the low-budget restaurant choices are ethnic. If you want to eat out affordably you choose North African cuisine or Vietnamese. If you want to eat a French meal, you prepare it at home or else pay a small fortune.

  The Moroccan restaurant he led me to was in the neighborhood of Montparnasse, less than half an hour’s walk from the Griffith’s apartment. It would be an easy escape homeward if necessary.

  Dinner was a continued dance of assessment. At the end, after ordering a plate of sticky sweet North African pastries he insisted I try, he asked if I’d like to drop by his place for a cognac. It was right around the corner. I wanted to but I was scared. What if I wanted to leave, and he wouldn’t let me?

  Nothing about Jean-Michel up to now indicated he was that kind of guy. But I told him I wasn’t sure. He shrugged. We began to walk down Boulevard Montparnasse in the direction of my home. Nothing needed to be decided for the moment.

  He put my arm in his. The smell of his wool jacket pleased me. I was drowsy and warmed from dinner.

  At the corner of Boulevard Montparnasse and Avenue Le Clercy he stopped. “Shall we drop by my place for a digestif?” he asked again, using the French word for an after dinner drink meant to aid digestion.

  I choked, then cleared my throat. I wanted to, but I wasn’t ready yet. Of the myriad things I wished to say to him to explain why I wasn’t ready to visit his apartment, I could express none of them in French. This worked out fine, because the only thing I was capable of saying said it all.

  “Pas encore. Not yet.” I shook my head just the tiniest bit playfully, my mouth in a tight little New England line.

  “Shall I call you?” he asked in French.

  “I don’t have a phone.” This time my mouth twitched. I did so want him to call me.

  “Do you want to meet again?” he continued. This time, his eyes flicked over me like a man who could take a punch.

  “Yes.” I nodded.

  His radar was good, his pace unhurried.

  He looked down to hide his smile, pulling a packet of Gauloises from his inside jacket pocket and offering me one. I declined. He lit a cigarette carefully. Then, he loitered. I did too.

  After a few minutes, it seemed too cold for further loitering.

  “I should get home,” I said.

  “Come on, I’ll walk you to the bus stop.”

  “I think I’ll just walk back.” I had a lot to think about and as long as I was moving, it wasn’t too cold.

  “Come on then.”

  We fell into step beside each other, the cold February night stinging our cheeks and crystallizing our thoughts. We were both thinking about the same thing, of that I was sure.

  In a short half hour, we were at the corner of Avenue de la Bourdonnais and Rue de Belgrade, the street on which I lived. The way Jean-Michel looked over my building told me it was a very good address indeed, as if I hadn’t already known. The Griffith’s across the hall neighbor’s Porsche was parked curbside, it’s sleek frame low to the ground, like a tiger ready to pounce.

  “Here we are,” I said. “Thank you for a nice evening.” This time, I felt my eyelids half close, my body betraying my interest in this not being the end of the story.

  “Shall I come up?”

  I shook my head. Not ready yet. Need time to think. Too much of a thinker and not enough of a doer a voice inside taunted.

  “Shall I cook you dinner Sunday evening?”

  Before I’d probed the entirety of what I was agreeing to, my head nodded up and down. What was there to say no to? I like to eat dinner and the concept of a man cooking one for me was altogether novel. The fact that this was a French man I found attractive, offering to cook a French meal made it impossible to say no. Also, I’d rejected him enough for one evening. Wasn’t it time to say yes to something? I tucked the thought that the meal would be at his place into a dark corner of my brain.

  “How about if I pick you up around three? We’ll take a walk in the park then I’ll make a special dish from Normandy for you.”

  My head kept nodding, up and down. I had time between now and Sunday afternoon to think about how Sunday evening might go. It was just what I needed, time and space to digest the unspoken plan between us.

  “Bonne nuit,” I whispered.

  “Bon dodo,” he whispered back, the way parents said goodnight to their children in French.

  This time, the two kisses he gave me on either side of my face were slower, the velvetiness of his lips lingering on my skin. The smell of him was strong, fresh, male. Then he was gone, his back turned to me. I could see the movement of his arm as he reached into his jacket pocket for a cigarette.

  The first half of the weekend passed quickly. My conscience smacked me around nonstop – or maybe it was my id. Get with the plan, Ava. Stop living in your head, and start living your life.

  I went through my wardrobe and found a soft, stretchy black and gold top to wear over black jeans. I shaved my legs, propping up one at a time on the sink with the cold water tap. It wasn’t easy.

  Miraculously, I held off on my usual two pastries a day habit. Something bigger than the appeal of flaky croissants, melting pains au chocolat, or the numerous other works of edible art displayed in the windows of the boulangeries or bakeries had taken me over. The ancient call of the wild beckoned; a summons I’d only recently awoken to and didn’t really know how to answer. Jean-Michel’s dark blue gaze told me he would know how to fill in the considerable gaps in my sentimental education.

  At three on Sunday afternoon, I was on the sidewalk outside my building. Jean-Michel was prompt. This time, he wore a leather jacket. He stooped to kiss me twice, and we set off toward the Champ de Mars, the park next to which I lived. Its entrance lay twenty yards from my building. He had a sort of tough guy walk, no nonsense with a slight swagger. It appealed to me in a shivery sort of way.

  At the entrance to the park, as if on cue, he took my arm and slipped it under his. The rich leather of his jacket smelled good. Combined with the faint scent of Gaulois cigarettes and the less faint smell of male sweat, it all beckoned to me. Come on, Ava, cross over to the other side of the tracks. Stop standing on the sidelines and get on the train.

  I folded my fingers around Jean-Michel’s forearm. Underneath them, his muscles tightened. They whispered to me the tantalizing thought that similar muscles could be found all over his body, waiting to contract under my touch.

  We walked slowly down the Champs de Mars past the children in the playground, the Guignols puppet theater, finally stopping at one of the four enormous legs of the Eiffel Tower.

  “Have you been up to the first level yet?” he asked.

  “No, never.”

  “Shall we go?”

  “Yes.” Suddenly, I had license to explore the Eiffel Tower. For months, I had avoided it like the plague, although I lived less than a quarter mile away. I’d regarded it as the most obvious symbol of tourist attractions, so I’d deliberately disdained it. I didn’t want to be thought of as a tourist. I told myself I lived here – at least for the year.

  Something inside now gave me permission to visit the monument. I was on a date with a real Frenchman, an actual resident of the most beautiful city in the world. The Eiffel Tower was Paris’s ultimate symbol. There was no way I would visit it with another tourist. This was different. Saving myself for the right moment to visit with the right man, it had now arrived.

  We climbed the stairs to the first level. As we came out onto the platform, I caught my breath. Even on the lowest level, the view was extraordinary. Beside me, he seemed to sense my emotion. Taking my arm, he led me to the right to view the city’s northeastern quarters.

  “You can see so much,” I sputtered out, amazed at the beauty of the city laid out
before us.

  The dome of the Basilica of Sacré Coeur, Paris’s second most famous church after Notre Dame, shone gold in the setting sun behind our backs.

  “All the Queen’s jewels are on display here,” he said, surprising me with the poetry of his words.

  “How is it we see everything, or it seems like it?” I began.

  His other arm reached around my waist. This was a fast, new maneuver.

  I was ready for it.

  “You’re right. We can see every monument in the city from here. Because buildings in Paris cannot be more than twenty meters tall.”

  “So nothing obscures the view of something beautiful behind it.”

  “Only La Défense. Disgraceful.” His face puckered into a classic Gallic sneer, honed over centuries of French contemplation of what constitutes good taste.

  “What’s La Défense? Where?”

  He steered me back in the direction of the staircase. Pointing north by northwest his finger led my eye to a cluster of skyscrapers far in the distance to the west of Trocadéro. To an American, they were nothing unusual at all, but they seemed out of place against the harmony of the rest of the low cityscape.

  “How did such tall buildings get past the zoning laws?” I asked.

  “They’re outside the city limits. In Neuilly-sur-Seine. A mistake. It’s a business district, doesn’t belong here at all.”

  I silently approved, not yet having any sort of business district taking up real estate in my twenty-year old heart.

  “I don’t belong here at all either,” I commented, the thought escaping my mouth before I could stuff it back into my private thoughts collection where it belonged.

  He gave me a wry smile, something entirely outside the context of what was developing between us, then pushed a strand of my hair behind my right ear. As he smiled, the lines on either side of his mouth changed from ironic to something more wistful.

  “That’s for you to decide,” he said, after a moment.

  “Really?” I tilted my head to gaze at him. His eyes held mine playfully. Then, his arm once again snaked around to the small of my back. He pulled me closer, not too close for comfort, but in a way that offered support, as well as fueled my interest.

  “It’s for you to decide,” he said again, his voice lower.

  This time, we weren’t talking about La Défense.

  “I like that,” I told him. And I did. I liked the way Jean-Michel kept tossing the ball in my court. It wasn’t just him playing offense and me playing defense. It was a volley.

  Jean-Michel was eliciting some sort of huntress in myself I hadn’t known existed other than in my most basic urge to continue my new studies in the world of sex.

  I leaned back into his arm. He quickly brought his other one around to support me better. I leaned farther back, testing him. He held me well, not trying to pull me toward him, just watching my face and waiting. Maestro.

  After some moments, I turned around in his arms and surveyed the south of the city. Soon, he moved closer behind me. I leaned back against his chest.

  Then, the most extraordinary thing happened. An entire hidden section of my body, some secret area behind and below my stomach, kindled then burst into flame. It didn’t have anything to do with romance. I wasn’t looking soulfully into his eyes at the moment. I’d been searching the skyline for the tower of Montparnasse while the lower half of my body began an entirely different search. This was raw lust, a physical connection bypassing the brain altogether. It was the fire numerous erotic novels I devoured had described. I wasn’t forcing myself to experience something just to know what it felt like. I’d done that already and although it had been pleasant, I hadn’t particularly related it to being on fire.

  Now I was.

  Nothing could have come between Jean-Michel’s body and mine at that moment. The atomic bomb could have dropped nearby, and I would have scarcely noticed. All I could feel was an indescribable melting sensation, as if the core of my being was melting into the universe, becoming one with everything around it.

  Jean-Michel didn’t move. The late afternoon sun warmed us weakly. Nobody was about. It was the stillest, yet most electrifying moment of my life thus far. I was trapped in a painting, my own will holding me there. I knew enough about Jean-Michel already to know he would move away if I’d resisted in any way. So I didn’t.

  It crossed my mind that it was slightly strange to receive so much pleasure from a man standing behind me, not face-to-face. But there was no denying it. I found his presence behind me much more exciting than if he’d been staring into my face, eliciting my nervous lack of self-confidence. This was better. He was giving me the privacy to experience my own pleasure. At my own pace. Not to have to worry about his pleasure at all or how my hair looked or whether I had mascara smudges under my eyes. Privacy and intimacy whirled together in the face of the setting sun.

  For the first time, I understand what women meant when they said, “I didn’t love him, but I loved what he did to me.” Up to then, I’d thought you automatically had to be in love with the man who did things to you that you loved. In a flash I saw it wasn’t so. My relief was huge. I wanted so to experience sensations I might love from a man, but I wasn’t ready to be in love. I just wanted to know what the fuss was all about without getting permanently ensnared.

  When I finally turned back to Jean-Michel, we understood each other completely.

  “Shall we go?” he asked.

  I nodded, unwilling to break the spell. From the looks of his narrowed eyes and flushed face, he was under it too. I walked beside him to the staircase then down one hundred eighty-nine feet to the park below. An image played in my mind of us as an invisible, permanent statue left behind on the first level, his body behind mine as we looked out over the Seine. I decided that we would always be there, held in position by psychic forces so impressed by our ecstatic stillness that they decided to memorialize us forever.

  Forty-five minutes later, we arrived at his building. It was old and in need of a facelift, nestled in a quiet side street off Boulevard Montparnasse.

  Up five flights of stairs, trying to conceal my breathlessness, I understood one of the many reasons why Parisians were rarely fat. At least my own building had an elevator, albeit an ancient one.

  Jean-Michel unlocked the door to his apartment; it was exactly as I’d pictured it, miniscule with a sloped ceiling. It was one room, tucked under the eaves of the building. I took in a narrow bed, a table with two chairs, a desk, and a single lowly electric burner on top of a bar-sized refrigerator.

  On further inspection I noticed a bathroom with shower only. All in all, it was an upgrade on my own attic room with the Turkish toilet in the hallway outside and no running hot water.

  Jean-Michel’s student flat didn’t surprise me at all. The problem was figuring out where to look without looking at his bed, the largest piece of furniture in the room. Jean-Michel took my coat and scarf, hung them on a hook on the back of the door, then motioned to the table. I sat at it.

  Immediately, he busied himself with taking out various paper-wrapped parcels from the refrigerator, finding a pot then setting up the hot plate. In another minute, he had opened the bottle of red wine on the table and poured two glasses.

  I drank, taking in my surroundings. They were humble but tasteful. Prints I’d guess were from the Louvre museum shop affixed the walls along with posters of past exhibitions. One of my favorite pastimes in Paris was to go in the shops with my Polish au pair friend from Birmingham, England, who lived around the corner and ask for the posters in the windows of exhibitions that had just ended. The shopkeepers more often than not gave us them, since they would just take them down and throw them away anyway. Elzbieta, who went by Elizabeth, was stunning; a petite Polish beauty with platinum blonde hair and eyes the color of cornflowers. Her magic worked better on male shopkeepers than female ones, so we targeted the men, almost always successfully. Posters in Parisian shop windows constituted art work. We knew
how exotic and appealing they’d look to our friends and family back home. It was one of the few activities we could do on our days off that cost us absolutely nothing, perfect for our budgets.

  Jean-Michel had clearly had the same idea. His poster collection was better than mine, but it reminded me of the decor in my own room, giving me a measure of comfort. When he went out into the hallway to take out the trash, I took the opportunity to use his bathroom. Running the tap noisily, I opened the cabinet over the sink. No medications. Good. A bottle of Denim aftershave. So that was the scent I enjoyed smelling on him, mixed with leather, wool, and manly sweat. I made a note to remember it. The wrong scent on a man would stop me dead in my tracks. It was far more about scent than it was about looks in my book. The nose knows.

  Returning to the table I spotted something pinkish and serrated on the butcher’s shop paper on the counter. Glancing at it, I recognized tripe. Lord.

  For five months, I had firmly forced down my throat every exotic type of French food offered in my relentless quest to experience the real France. I was not in Paris for a year to eat hamburgers and pizza. I was here to try crêpes from sidewalk vendors, not a difficult assignment; escargot, delicious if one thought of them as snails rather than worms; and all manner of paté, also delicious in a smelly sort of way. Thank God, no one had offered me horsemeat. I’d heard it was a delicacy, but there was no way I’d eat the meat of an animal so beautiful.

  Tripe was different. Cows weren’t that good looking, and this was a particularly unattractive part of them, their stomachs. I’d heard tripe stew was a typical economy dish that the French prepared at home. I told myself tripe was nothing compared to say pig’s knuckles or frog’s legs. At least it wasn’t brains, sweet meat, or the Scottish haggis or English blood sausages that Elizabeth delighted in describing to me, accompanied by grotesque facial expressions.