Like Some French Girls That He Knew-With The Musee D’ Orsay In Mind

By Zack James

He didn’t know exactly when he first noticed her in her short mini-skirt showing well-turned legs, her slender body always a plus with him, those eyes which from that distance he was not sure of but he would have predicted (giving hope to the answer) blue and that long ravishing hair, black and shiny sheen. It might have been as he left the Metro stop at the Musee D’ Orsay and headed toward the museum entrance and he had noticed that by the swish of her hips that she was that kind of sexy girl that if he had been America, his homeland, he would have gone up to and began some kind of half-clumsy school-boyish conversation and hoped for the best but that on foreign territory, sweet beloved Paris, he found that he wanted to be more circumspect.

That notice business might have been when she turned around and looked across the street toward the Seine wistfully to notice that storm clouds were forming that warm September day and that she probably rued the fact that she had not brought her umbrella (at least from hi vantage point then no umbrella against the day’s storms as noticed by him. Probably the first real connection though it was at the ticket counter when he, a couple of lines over from her as she turned to get her wallet out of her pocket book to get her Euros for admission, noticed that she looked in his direction and gave him a semi-Mona Lisa smile which he took for an interest of some sort. Of course under the influence of museum Paris and the Mona Lisa home across the river Louvre he very well could have imagined that smile designation. In any case that last quizzical smile was all he needed to make his plans for that afternoon. He would “stalk” her, discreetly of course until he could find some obvious reason to make a comment to her about some painting and see what played out.

An old trick, that sublime “what does that painting do for you” line that  he had learned long ago when somebody in Cambridge after he had suffered through his first divorce told him that spicy, spunky, sexy, intellectual young women, and older women too in that same category but then he was like now hung on the younger female set, would “troll” the bookstores then plentiful in the Square looking to be “picked up” to use a term of art of the times by guy who were looking for fetching intelligent company. One of those bookstore “pick-ups” had after a few dates told him that his friend’s intelligence was right but that the “real” pick up locale was the museums because while most guys would be willing to troll the bookshops that would probably balk at hanging around museums so anybody willing to go through that ordeal to meet interesting women must have something going for him.

So he had his game plan ready. He noticed that after paying her admission fee she went directly to the mezzanine to view the Gauguins and Van Goghs which then had a special section. Along her way around that section though he noticed that she had stopped at a painting of a secondary Expressionist painter who had been grouped with the “boys,” you know the “school of” artists, the subject matter which was of the fallen revolutionaries of the Paris Commune from May 1871 when the Thiers government unleased a bloodbath on working-class Paris. She stood before that painting for several minutes before he realized that this event was his was his big chance. Big chance on the off-chance that she might have some knowledge or connection with the events of the Commune which if she was French, and he was not sure if that was the case although everything about her “spoke” French to him, a lot of people he had met had some connection with even over hundred years later. In any case he had plenty of knowledge about the Paris Commune because when he was younger he had been devoted to that event as an example of working class solidarity and the possibilities of left-wing rule in those heady Commune days when if a couple of things had gone right they might have survived longer (he was not sure the thing could have survived in Paris alone then over the long haul)

He boldly, boldly for him seeing that he was probably twice her age and not sure of her nationality just then, slide up beside her and commented that those fallen brethren deserved all the pictorial commemoration any true artist could have given them. Back then when choosing sides counted-and could cost you your head. She turns around and after a confused moment gave that same semi-Mona Lisa smile that she had thrown his way earlier. Then she said, “My great-grandfather Dubois on my mother’s side suffered transportation to Tasmania for his devotion to the “cause.” Bingo. Then he went into a short spiel about how when he was younger he was devoted to the memory of the Communards, used to commemorate March 18^th every year with fellow radicals and reds in Cambridge when after the failure of bourgeois politics to change anything, to stop the Vietnam War particularly, everybody headed to start reading Marx and the others and in that pursuit came across the Marxist defense of the Communards.                       

Second bingo-the male model for one of the fallen Communards represented in the painting was great-grandfather Dubois’ son, her great- grand uncle who had passed away when she was very young but who was always spoken of in hushed terms both for the modeling job and for surviving the bloodbath of 1871 when he was only fourteen and on the barricades. They found that conversation required more attention and so sat down on the marble seats that are scattered around that great big train station of a museum. After talking about the Communards and those sorrowful beautiful memories of such heroic action for the benefit of working people they got around to their respective professions. He told her that while he tried for a very long time, longer than most of his friends, that he had eventually broken from his active radical past and gone back to law school and so had practiced law for a number of years (he, and probably every older guy trying to relate to younger women was vague of dates and number of year issues to avoid the generation whipsaw of non-recognition of events, personalities, and fads by the later).

She startled him when she told him, making him laugh when she said it must run in the family, referring to that long ago relative used as a model for the painting that drew them together, that she was a cam model. A cam model being then the new Internet come hither sex site novelty where a woman, presumably a young woman although nothing would have precluded an older woman from doing the same thing  then, maybe now too on a sex site catered to a taste for older women, acted provocatively on camera and “lured” guys in with texted sex talk…and more. For a price she laughed. Meaning she told him to get to see or hear anything of real sexual interest required the usual joining the site at so much a month on the credit card (with small print telling you that unless you opted out you would continue to be charged monthly even if you signed up only for say a month and didn’t expect to go further with the pursuit). She made him laugh at that last part since he had on occasion pursued such sex sites. 

Now that cam model stuff then was pretty tame, almost a public service for shy or inhibited men with big sex dreams and appetites (and credit cards0, compared to the anything goes stuff today but it still kind of made him a little fearful to go forward. But she had that winning smile and those nice bodily features that got his thinking up a bit of bedrooms and wild sex. Moreover she seemed to have no particular desire to leave his company when he asked her if she would join him for lunch. She smiled and said yes that she was hungry and that she liked the way the conversation was going. 

At the Café Blanc up on Saint Germaine Boulevard toward Notre Dame after they had ordered some wine and a light lunch she told him more of the details of how she got into her profession as a sex worker (a term of art that he appreciated when she first mentioned that was really what a cam model was as he had in the back of his mind whore, prostitute, and call girl from his own upbringing none of those terms deemed by him to be offensive as he had in the early days of his legal career represented many streetwalkers and call girls from the “Combat Zone ” in Boston when the city authorities made their periodic raids to show they were doing something about crime but his religious upbringing was a hard thing to shake). She had come from a very pious family background of good Catholic radicals and had been a very good student at Saint Clare’s when she was in high school. Had dreamed of college maybe being a doctor, something like that. Still had the edges of those dreams in the back of her mind. But then her father, a well-known marine biologist, died when she was fourteen leaving her and three younger siblings, all boys, along with their mother to fend for themselves.                           

Initially there had been some family help, the mother worked and she juggled school and playing “mother” to the three younger boys while the mother was at work. Then her mother developed lots of unclear to her health issues and from there circumstances spiraled downward. She admitted that by the age of fourteen she had already had very quietly in another part of the town she had grown up in had sex with a boy a little older. She blushed when she said that saying that even now if anybody knew it would have been quite a family scandal. She also said that she had liked it, still did (which he noted with a wink at her when she said that), and that the boy had taught her a few things about what turned a guy on, and what a guy liked.    

Sometime when she was sixteen she decided on her own to take her interest in sex to another level. To help with the family financial stresses and help the younger boys in their studies toward entering college. Even now the priority in poor French families was toward making sure that the boys, or at least one boy got ahead. So she would come to Paris from her suburban home and on weekends “work the streets.” Not literally but she would go to places, hotels, swanky bars, always well made-up and with a set of nice clothes on after a while, and allow herself to be picked up by guys who were looking for a “good time.” (Her expression). By hook or by crook she made some serious money because she was good at her job (he thinking job, good blow job, and she probably was good at that from a look at those big ruby red lips, when she said that) and because she always acted like a sullen mistress who needed to be sexually satisfied she had built up a good clientage after.

After a while the weekend night life turned into four or five nights a week and so she quit school nobody then much minding that action since she was bringing in many Euros. As a cover she told her family she had made the money working as a waitperson at one of Paris’ finest hotels. She laughed at that thought since she had been taken there a number of times, mostly by American men, and so knew everything about the place, had stories to tell so nobody suspected her real “career.” At eighteen though she left her home after she got into trouble for “soliciting” (which was fixed by a client, a Paris judge) and knew that she had to leave home before anything else got exposed about her real life. So she worked the streets for a while, had been a short term mistress to an Englishman until his wife shut off the funds after finding out about the affair (she laughed about those stuffy English women and their cheap ways where a rich French woman would write the whole thing off and have an affair of her own), had worked in a couple of brothels and then tiring of being on her back some much (and “playing the flute,” which she told him later was just her term for a blow job that she had learned from that first boy lover who said for her to “play the flute for me” and she didn’t know what he meant until he pulled her head toward his cock and took her to put it in her mouth she would figure it out from there) made a connection which landed her the cam modelling job. She laughed when she said it was easier on the back-and the mouth too.

That story told as they sipped their after meal small wine as they went through the banter of what to do next. He suggested they go to his hotel. She asked where. He mentioned that same famous hotel that she knew so well which made her laugh as she accepted. They left the Café, stopped for a couple of bottles of wine and headed to the hotel. After a hard afternoon of love-making, including her “playing the flute,” which as he suspected she played well she told him she had to go. But before going she said she was still supporting that threesome of younger brothers these days through college. Could he give her, besides the taxi fare home, a “donation.” Now it was his turn to laugh as he unfolded a one hundred Euro note. Every time he was in Paris for the next couple of years he would call her up when he was in town. She would come and “play the flute” for him and other delights. And always ask for a “donation” with the cab fare. He would smile a wise smile as he unfolded the one hundred Euro note as he had that first time. Then one time he called her number and got no answer, got no forwarding message either. He figured, wanted to figure, that the last of the brothers had finished up school and so she had moved on too. But he would always remember some French girl that he knew.