“My . . . uh . . . companion . . . ?” he stammered, dropping down into the nearest chair so as to conceal what was threatening to poke right through the cloth of his robe.
“I’m arranging a tour of our facilities for you,” André said, “but it will take a couple of days to organize, and besides, it is best that you have some time to enjoy Paris before we get serious, and of course, you can do this better with Nicole than with the likes of me, n’est-ce pas?”
Jerry sat there blinking. Nicole Lafage gave him a little smile that flashed a quick pink tongue tip. “Pleased to meet you, Jerry,” she said in a husky voice, in perfect English lightly flavored with a certain Gallic syncopation. She perched lightly on the edge of the chair across from him, and leaned forward just far enough for her jacket to hang open, displaying her free-swinging breasts.
“Well, I have much work to do before lunch, so I will leave you in the capable hands of Nicole,” André said with a sly little grin, and with that, he left, leaving Jerry naked beneath his bathrobe and alone with this incredible creature.
“Uh . . . you work for ESA, Miss Lafage . . . ?”
“Occasionally. . . .”
“Occasionally?” Jerry said. “What kind of aerospace work can you do occasionally? Are you a consultant? An independent contractor?”
Nicole Lafage stared at him incredulously. “This is not an American joke?” she said. “You are serious?”
“Joke? I said something funny?”
Apparently he had, for she burst out laughing. “I do not work in the aerospace industry,” she managed to say. “I am, of course, a prostitute.”
Jerry’s mouth fell open.
“You do not believe me?” Nicole Lafage said. “Voilà, I demonstrate!”
And so saying, she sprang forward onto her hands and knees, crawled across the few feet of floor between them, parted his bathrobe, and without further ado proceeded to give him the most incredible teasing, lingering, and ultimately explosive blowjob of his entire life.
Afterward, he slumped back in his chair in a daze, while Nicole sat there at his feet, gazing around the incredibly luxurious hotel room, at the canopied brass bed, and the paintings on the walls, at the antique furniture, and finally back up at Jerry with the silliest grin on her face.
“I am hired for your pleasure, Jerry,” she said, “but nevertheless I would ask a favor. . . .”
“Anything. . . ,” Jerry said dreamily.
Nicole giggled. “I have never been in the Ritz before, so you must say something for me,” she said. “You must say, ‘Why is a nice girl like you in a place like this?’ ”
“Aw come on!”
“Please, please, you must say it for me!” she begged, like a little girl for a candy.
“All right, all right, ‘Why is a nice girl like you in a place like this?’ ”
Nicole ran her eyes slowly around the hotel room again, then looked back at Jerry with an expression of utmost avidity. “Why else?” she said with a stage Gallic shrug. “For the money!”
And they both broke up laughing.
“To fuck for money is really not such a bad job, Jerry,” Nicole told him after she had done just that for the second time in his hotel room that night. “I am young, I am beautiful, I am well educated, I speak good English, passable German, and some Russian, and I know Paris well, so this puts me at the top of my profession. I only accept corporate assignments, I am paid very well, I can choose who I will and who I will not accept as a client, and I demand good use of the expense account.”
She snuggled up against him in a friendly fashion and poured herself another glass of room-service champagne as if to demonstrate, sipped at it, gave him a sly little grin. “You have enjoyed today, no?” she said.
Jerry sighed contentedly. “It’s been wonderful . . . ,” he said.
And indeed it had been. Nicole had taken him on the grand tour of Paris during the day, by taxi, by bus, on foot, even by Métro, shifting from one to the other according to whim and convenience.
They spent a mere hour wandering around the Louvre, strolled through the Tuileries garden and across the Seine to the Musée d’Orsay, where they meandered about for another hour, went down into a convenient Métro station, caught a train, changed once, and came out through a station beneath a gigantic enclosed shopping mall close by the Centre Pompidou, yet another museum, a truly garish structure—all naked piping and scaffolding and industrial bric-a-brac painted in weird primary colors—that reminded Jerry of a cross between an oil refinery, a nuclear power plant, and the Beverly Center.
Here they did not even bother to go inside. Instead, they just wandered around the amazing monstrosity, through the crowded streets of rather tacky bars, restaurants, and souvenir shops surrounding it, and paused for a bit to take in part of a fire-eating street act that was going on in the plaza it fronted on.
“The Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Pompidou, these are the most famous museums in Paris, and now you can say that you have seen them all,” Nicole said. “Later, if you wish, you can view favorite individual works of art, you let me know, and I will find them for you, I am well versed in the Flemish Realists, and the Impressionists and the Surrealists and Cubists, also Japanese and Pop, but the Renaissance I do not so much care for, and the French Romantic period, this is kitsch, no . . . ?”
“Oh, I couldn’t agree more. . . ,” Jerry said, and since he had almost no idea of what she was talking about and even less interest in painting, this was technically the truth.
“You have been to the top of the Eiffel Tower, yes, you have taken the boat ride down the Seine, you have seen Nôtre-Dame, okay, we will go to Montmartre for lunch, it is very touristic, but a fine view, after which we will have taken care of the obvious, and then I will show you the real Paris. . . .”
A long taxi ride north to the foot of the Butte Montmartre, quite a hideously congested tacky tourist area, narrow streets clogged with people and sleazy greasy spoons and souvenir shops. Then up a funicular running beside a kind of terraced vertical park with endless flights of stairs and up to the top of the big hill or small mountain to Sacré-Coeur, a big whitish domed church that looked more Moslem than Catholic even to Jerry’s untutored eye. And, as promised, a magnificent view from the terrace in front of it out over the entire city.
They wandered off into the maze of ancient streets around Sacré-Coeur, and ended up in a dark and tiny Moroccan restaurant, where they sat Arab-style on floor cushions around a low brass table, and ate a truly incredible couscous with fingers and dabs of flat bread, feeding each other morsels of fish and lobster and shrimp and spicy sausage, drinking heavy red wine, Nicole stroking Jerry’s crotch all the while with her free hand, until he was so inflamed that he feared he would lose it then and there.
But she was indeed professional, and it never happened, though by the time the meal was over and the bill paid from a huge wad of ESA money that Nicole pulled out of her purse, he was quite dizzy from the exquisite torture.
“You poor boy,” Nicole said with a giggle, when they were back out in the street, running a fingernail slowly up the bulge beneath his fly. “We must take care of this at once. . . .”
And she took him by the hand and led him up a dank and secluded alley between two ancient patinaed walls of old stone blocks, slightly redolent of must and decayed organic matter and time. She pressed herself up against him, unzipped his fly, lifted her skirt, pulled down her panties, and guided him into her.
Then she cupped his buttocks with both hands, thrust forward with her pelvis, and ground him back against the wall, fucking him with gentle roughness as she teased his ear with her tongue, an unexpected and delicious role reversal that drove him quite wild, that shortly brought him to a tremendous orgasm that left him gasping for breath and leaning languidly against the cool stone for support.
“And now we resume our guided tour of quaint old Paris,” Nicole said dryly. And they did.
They wound their way down the steep
little streets of Montmartre and came out into the entirely unexpected sleaze and sex-show neon of the Place Pigalle, which Jerry recognized as the area where André had taken him to see the hologram show less than twenty-four hours and what now seemed half a lifetime ago.
They took a cab back to the Seine, and spent the long afternoon mostly out-of-doors in the warm sunlight, walking along the stone quays looking at all the houseboats and jackpotting about what it might be like to live on one.
They had a few kirs at a sidewalk café, then took the Métro to the Trocadéro, a huge semicircle of concrete and statuary on the Right Bank just across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower with a grand view out over the city, then Métroed to the Place de la Concorde and walked the full length of the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, pausing in the middle for yet another kir at yet another sidewalk café.
They took in sunset atop the Arc de Triomphe, and then it was time to wander off to a dinner of roast duck with olives at the Tour d’Argent, a stiff, haughty, formal, and rather touristy place on the Seine that made Jerry feel somewhat nervous, but which Nicole told him with no little pleasure was about the most expensive restaurant in town as she gleefully ran up the ESA expense account.
After dinner, Nicole took him on a tour of a few of the most famous cafés, and by the time they got back to the Ritz, it was well past 1:00 A.M., and Jerry was quite wiped and ready to crash.
Or so he thought.
But when they got back up to his hotel room, Nicole produced a vial of white powder which she assured him was pure cocaine of the highest quality. Jerry, who had had to cope with the piss police all his working life, had never even thought of trying cocaine before and had to be talked into it. After all, this was Paris, this was his vacation, she told him as she did a long slow striptease. After all, the last traces would be out of his system long before he returned to Los Angeles, he told himself, as he realized how willing was his spirit and how exhausted his flesh.
And indeed, after one line, he was actually able to make love again. And after another, to do it one more time.
Enjoyed today?
“It’s been the best day of my life, Nicole,” he told her quite truthfully as he wrapped his arm around her. “And you, did you enjoy it?”
“Of course I have enjoyed it. This is the whole point of being a prostitute, at least on my professional level where one can pick and choose, to spend one’s time enjoying oneself with pleasant company, and make huge amounts of money doing so. . . .”
She laughed. “Alors, Jerry, if you could make 5,000 ECU a day by fucking reasonably attractive women and showing them and yourself an expensive good time on a corporate expense account, would you not prefer to be a whore?”
You could say I already am, Jerry thought somberly, a whore for the Pentagon, only I don’t get to enjoy it.
“You are sad, Jerry?” Nicole said, touching a hand to his cheek. “I have said something that bothers you?”
“No, no,” Jerry told her, “it’s nothing, this is the happiest day of my life.” And to show her it was true, as after all it was, he leaned over to kiss her.
Nicole stopped him by laying an admonitory finger to his lips. “No, no, mon cher,” she told him gently. “You must not kiss a prostitute. I am beautiful, yes, and I am expert at sex, and expert as well at showing you a good time, so you must not kiss me, else you forget I am a professional, and start to fall in love with me. And this would be a disaster for you, yes, for I like my life as it is, Jerry. . . .”
She laughed, and gave his flaccid prick a friendly tug to destroy the somber moment. “A disaster for me too,” she said. “They would throw me out of the prostitutes’ union!”
“I wouldn’t want that to happen,” Jerry said, and found to his peculiar delight that he was able to laugh back and mean it.
“That is much better,” Nicole said, snuggling back against him. “I am not for falling in love with, I am for enjoying like the great work of art I am. But I am a work of performance art, mon cher, to be experienced like a play or a dance or a symphony, not possessed and collected like a painting or a piece of sculpture. Do you understand?”
“I do believe I do,” Jerry said truthfully.
“And it does not make you sad?”
Jerry thought about it. “No, it doesn’t,” he said. “Why should it?”
“Et voilà, you see, you have become a man of the world,” Nicole said. “Bienvenue à Paris!”
Ah yes, my son, he thought as he drifted off to sleep, it is indeed a long way from Downey!
They slept late the next morning, made love, had a petit déjeuner of croissants, coffee, and champagne with orange juice, then strolled down to the Seine through the Tuileries, crossed the river to the Quai d’Orsay just in front of the museum, where they boarded a strange little catamaran riverboat with a flat deck and a funky wooden deckhouse.
They took seats in the sun up at the front of the boat, which warped away from the dock, sailed eastward past Île de la Cité and Île St.-Louis, up a lock and through the Bastille boat basin, and then the boat entered a long tunnel beneath the city, ancient vaulted stonework punctuated at regular intervals by big round gridwork manholes through which circles of sunshine filtered like Victorian arc lights, transforming the tunnel into a magic reality of dusky twilight and cool misty shadows.
The boat finally emerged from the tunnel and moved slowly up the Canal St.-Martin, a channel rimmed by a long thin park and running straight through a residential part of the city, through a series of ancient locks that took forever to negotiate. It was more like spending the early afternoon sitting on a park bench than a boat ride, watching the gray stone buildings, the shops and cafés, the traffic circles and the pedestrians while slowly moving by at the pace of a walking man.
And if Jerry Reed had indeed become enough of a man of the world to understand the foolishness of allowing himself to fall in love with someone like Nicole, by the time the boat had docked at the Parc de la Villette, he certainly had allowed his feelings to generalize themselves, which was to say he saw no reason not to fall in love a little with Paris, with a city at once timeless and energetically modern, a city happily rooted in its own past while it boogied forward into the future.
And that was the Parc de la Villette in spades, a vast and sprawling collection of museums of science, industry, music, and cinema, of amusement rides and slick restaurants, surrounded by a futuristic quarter of hotels, restaurants, and fancy condo buildings that looked like downtown Mars—a kind of Disneyland of the future done right, and with a French accent.
They ate lunch at a sleekly modern Chinese restaurant and then spent a long afternoon taking in the exhibitions. This was Jerry’s kind of place, and he would have felt entirely at home if only it hadn’t all been in French, or even if Nicole had had the technical background to translate it all properly for him. Instead, she did her best to translate the words into English, and Jerry tried to make all the technological wonders comprehensible to her, and in the end quite enjoyed it, for here, at least, she was the innocent, and he got to be the tour guide, and he suspected that, professional that she was, Nicole had planned it just that way to please him.
By unstated mutual agreement, they left the European Space Agency exhibit for last, for somehow Jerry knew that it would signify the last act of their time together, and the first act of something else, the something else that had brought them together, that had brought him to Europe in the first place, and something he had not given a thought to these past two days, nor cared to.
But finally, fortified by Cognac at the museum bar, they went inside.
There was a short history of space travel told with models and holograms. There was a whole Ariane booster rocket and a mock-up of a Hermes space shuttle you could crawl around inside. There were satellites and deep-space probes and space suits and an EVA maneuvering system you could play with yourself. The usual stuff.
But then they went into the Géode, the 360-degree surround the
ater, where an ESA promotional film shot in full-circle high-definition Dynamax video was being shown, and that wasn’t the usual stuff at all, that took Jerry’s breath away, and, in the end, almost made him want to cry.
The full-surround HD Dynamax video process warped him immediately into the reality the moment the film started as no color hologram could, for while the image might not be truly three-dimensional, you weren’t looking at it, you were inside of it, it filled your entire field of vision no matter how much you craned your neck around like a spectator at a tennis match, and the sound had been disced from a central point in each setup, giving the sound track quite perfect 3-D reproduction of reality.
He stood at a departure gate looking out on a busy airport which Nicole told him was Charles de Gaulle. And taxiing slowly past him, decked out in conventional red, white, and blue Air France livery like an ordinary commercial airliner, was the Daedalus, the European spaceplane that was about to enter prototype production.
It had the sleek proportions of the old Concorde or the American B-l bomber, but it was twice the size, with a payload of a hundred passengers in this configuration. Like the B-l, it had swing wings, extended now for takeoff and atmospheric flight. There was a huge intake under the nose aft of the cockpit for the main engine and two much smaller ones where the wings joined the fuselage for the auxiliary turbojets, and a weirdly recurved exhaust bell at the rear.
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