by Rozsa Gaston
As if to soothe, delicious smells began to waft through Jean-Michel’s apartment. I decided to go with the flow. If I wanted to continue eating couscous, I might as well have given the time that January day on the Boulevard St. Michel to a North African man instead of a French one. I’d gotten what I’d wished for, and now I was going to really experience a French home-cooked meal, bite by tripe-filled bite. I took a sip of wine to ease what lay ahead.
In another hour, dinner was over. The tripe had been bearable, disguised in a tasty stew. The petits pois had been delectable, and I’d washed it all down with several glasses of red wine. Jean-Michel looked pleased with my compliments on his cooking.
We were now on the smelly cheese course, the after-dinner offering in a traditional French meal, either in addition to or in place of dessert. Using a small, sharp knife with a curved wooden handle, he pared off pieces of cheese from three different wedges on the cheeseboard he’d brought out, to eat with either a piece of baguette or a section of a pear he’d cut-up. There was a sheep’s cheese, soft and almost white, a hard and golden yellow one, then a creamy and soft yellow Chaumes cheese. I liked the Chaumes best, paired with the juicy pear. It was ripe, runny, and sharply smelly. Something told me it was the most French of the three.
In another minute, we were sitting on the bed. How this transfer occurred I have no memory. But what happened next, I’ll never forget.
“Shall I brush your hair?” he asked, picking up a wide brush on the narrow counter that ran lengthwise between his bed and the wall.
I love having my hair brushed. How had he known?
“Yes, why not?” I said, tossing my longish mane over my shoulder. I answered as if men offered to brush my hair on a regular basis. Paris was beginning to rub off on me.
He proceeded to brush, which he did skillfully with gusto. It was as relaxing to my body as puzzling to my brain to ponder the idea of a man cooking dinner for me, then offering to brush my hair. Men like this one hadn’t entered my life thus far. I had a hunch that I wouldn’t find many of them back home.
The brush felt good not only on my hair, but also on the back of my neck. After several minutes, he gathered my locks into a ponytail, pulling it to one side. Then his mouth was on my neck. Another sensation crept over me, warm and tingling. Turning my head slightly, the soft, brown tendrils of Jean-Michel’s wavy hair tickle my nose as he kissed and nuzzled a section of my body I’d never paid any attention to. Now, it commanded center stage. Vampire movies suddenly made sense.
After a long moment, I turned to meet his face. We kissed. His mouth tasted fresh. Somehow the combination of tripe, smelly cheeses and wine had worked together to create a rich and delectable taste about as understandable as why drinking wine and eating liver paté, heavy cream sauces, and buttery patisseries combine to make French people trim and fit. By some special alchemy, all the wrong ingredients turn out to be the right ones in France.
Lengthwise, we stretched out on his twin-sized bed as he switched on the radio next to his head. Classical music spilled out. I forget which composer. Jean-Michel didn’t appear to be in any sort of rush. I was free to explore his well-muscled wiry arms, shoulders, and chest, something I wouldn’t have been able to do had I needed to spend time defending my upper torso from being mauled. Jean-Michel took his time getting to know my hair, neck, shoulders, arms, shoulder blades, back, waist, and hips. By the time he turned his attention to my breasts, I was ready to reveal them to him.
It was a whole new way of going about things, different from what I’d experienced before in the mad rush to round as many bases as possible on the way to a homerun. Only one man before Jean-Michel had hit a homerun with me, and the only way he’d accomplished that was by being in the right place at precisely the moment I decided I wanted to cast off my virginity. He’d been in a rush, sweating and making a lot of noise. It hadn’t been bad, but it hadn’t exactly been an art movie either.
With Jean-Michel, we were like two statues coming to life, exploring each other’s contours. At a point, he slipped the black and gold knit shirt over my head. Then, he traced the contours between my breasts up and down, then circling around each one. Finally, I put his hand on the modest mound of one of them.
Everything proceeded by mutual agreement that evening. It was a nice feeling to be in the co-pilot’s seat for once. When he took off his button-down shirt, I saw his chest was slender but rippled with muscle. He had some hair on it, not much.
It would be disingenuous to say Jean-Michel didn’t smell. He did, just like every other adult male in Paris. His room was small, there was no bath or shower in his tiny wash room, and he was a grown man. A strong male smell hung everywhere.
But I liked Jean-Michel’s dried sweat mingled with Denim aftershave. It worked for me. Funny how that adult male smell most often drives a woman away but every once in a while draws her closer until she’s surrounded by it in the right man’s arms.
Soon, the rest of our clothes were off. He was uncircumcised, so he more or less unwrapped himself to introduce himself to me. Jean-Michel did not use profoundly imaginative words for the hidden parts of the body. He referred to both my parts and his as le sexe. At least I knew what he was talking about.
I thought le sexe belonging to Jean-Michel more or less matched the rest of him. Knobby and wiry, with a taut, scrappy build, a boxer’s build.
The boxer’s build appealed to me. Within seconds, I realized width had it all over length – a very pleasant discovery indeed. Making love this time wasn’t rushed. It was deliberate and unhurried. After a time, Jean-Michel began to drive toward a goal. When he came, he was loud. My face buried in his neck after he collapsed on top of me, I had to smile. I was learning a great deal of noise, smell, and sweat surrounded some of life’s most important events, such as child-making and childbirth. In a while, Jean-Michel began to recover from the cataclysmic event that apparently had just happened to him. I wondered if anything like that might ever happen to me. His kisses on my neck gave me shivers, and the sensation of his sex filling me entirely and knocking against the sides of mine left me pleasantly stimulated. But these agreeable sensations were in no way comparable to the earthquake that seemed to have just occurred for Jean-Michel. Something told me there was more to discover, but I was in no rush.
Thankfully, Jean-Michel didn’t light a cigarette in our post-coital bliss (his) and pleasant feeling (mine). Instead, he leaned over me, propped up on one elbow, his hand cradling his sharp cheekbone.
“You have the apples,” he commented.
“I do?” What apples?
“Women have either apple breasts or pear breasts.” He traced the outlines of my breasts with his other hand.
“Apples or pears,” I murmured, thinking either sounded appealing. It pleased me he hadn’t said large breasts or small breasts.
“Which ones do you prefer?” I asked.
Sometimes, women can be predictable, too.
“Les pommes,” he answered with no hesitation. It was a good response, given the moment. He hadn’t said he liked small breasts, like mine. That would have fueled my insecurities. I wouldn’t have been able to hear the clear statement that he liked my breasts over the airfield-type roar in my brain telling me he thought my breasts were small. But he hadn’t said they were small, so the whole topic was neatly moot. This man liked my apple-shaped breasts. There was nothing to feel insecure about. How rare.
“Good.” I laid back and thought to myself how nice it was to receive a compliment. I could now think of my breasts as apple-shaped instead of small or inadequate, as I had up to that moment.
Walking past French pharmacy windows for the past five months had informed me the French standard for attractive breasts was far different from the American one. Every French pharmacy seemed to have at least one display of a topless Frenchwoman advertising some sort of breast cream product for soins de seins, care of the breasts – a marketing concept that received very little play in the U.S. outside of the
La Leche League. I hadn’t seen many ads featuring topless female models in France with breasts larger than mine.
Back in the land of Barbie and Playboy, I’d always thought I was practically flat-chested. After five months in France, I’d gathered I was not, but now I’d had an actual Frenchman pronounce me apple-breasted.
My world shifted as Jean-Michel lazily relaxed next to me on his narrow bed, tracing my outlines with his fingertips and letting me know with eyes and hands that my proportions were pleasing in every way.
CHAPTER THREE
Springtime in Paris
Back in my garret room, I reflected on the events of the past twenty-four hours. Everything that had just happened between Jean-Michel and me was significant, because I’d just turned twenty. I was on the verge of everything. No man could have entered my life at a more impressionable moment.
It was clear he enjoyed teaching me, but he wasn’t didactic about it. With everything yet to learn, I was an empty vessel waiting to be filled with French learning and culture. He provided every bit of education I’d come to France for that lectures at the Sorbonne did not. There were ways to combine certain foods with certain drinks; oysters went with Pinot Noir, paté with a good Burgundy. Every cheese had its complementary wine pairing; white wine, my favorite, was the wine of choice for alcoholics as far as Jean-Michel was concerned. There were ways to tie a scarf or to shine one’s shoes with spit if on the street, if far from a water source. The French were exigeant, strict or exacting, about just about everything. Something Americans mostly were not.
It was fun to discover the French way of doing things with Jean-Michel. While he showed me how to comport myself both privately and publicly, I was continuing down my checklist of what I wished to accomplish during my year abroad.
Have an affair with a Frenchman. Check.
Get into a good college. Working on it. I’d sent my applications in on time in early January to the four colleges I’d applied to. Sometime after April fifteenth, I’d hear back. Hopefully the glamour factor of living in Paris combined with a good academic record from high school would propel me into a four-year liberal arts college where young people with broad liberal arts focuses who were also interested in having sex were a dime a dozen. I would finally find my milieu.
About whether I was meant to be a musician or a writer, I was working on it.
My exploration into a new identity as a writer consisted of reading as many books by female authors as I could get my hands on. To this end, I spent afternoons at Centre George Pompidou, also known as Beaubourg, one of Paris’s largest libraries. A sizeable English-language collection located on one of its upper-level floors was available for borrowing. I devoured novels by Françoise Sagan, Simone de Beauvoir, Madame de Staël, Doris Lessing, Margaret Atwood, and Jane Austen. Then, I turned my attention to novels written by men about interesting women: Nana by Emile Zola and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina in particular.
The story of Anna Karenina puzzled me only slightly less than it had the first time I’d read it at age fourteen. I hadn’t understood Anna’s passion for Count Vronsky then and I still didn’t six years later. Why would any sane woman throw herself under a train because of a failed love affair? My New England sense of restraint recoiled at the thought of such excessive behavior. Didn’t she have a child to live for, after all? Or at least a bridge club at which she was counted on to make up a foursome?
Something inside me had not yet woken up. My instincts told me Anna’s passion was connected to Jean-Michel’s facial contortions and loud moans right before finishing off lovemaking with me. Instead of understanding he was at the climax, I thought of him as being at the end of what we were doing together. I knew there was something huge I didn’t yet understand, so I chalked up Anna’s passion to something I was in no position to judge and made a note to re-read Tolstoy’s novel in another half decade.
Jean-Michel and I usually met once a week. I would pick him up at the entrance to his workplace on Friday afternoons, and we would spend most of the weekend together. It was enough for me. Given that I had no telephone, it was perfect. I wasn’t ready for the intensity of nightly phone conversations, especially in French, and frankly, with someone whose horizons I had sensed were more limited than my own.
Jean-Michel was a master of his own domain, a precise and well-defined life he’d carved out for himself in Paris after running away from home at age nineteen. I too had more or less run away at the same age, but I had plenty to run back to. Apparently, he didn’t. He never spoke of his family, nor visited. He’d never traveled outside France and had no plans to do so.
My life-to-be was an open book. Soon, I’d hear from the colleges I’d applied to and vast new opportunities would open up for me over the next four years. There was no chance of something like that happening to Jean-Michel. He was thirty-two and had already arrived at his destination. He was not only a Frenchman, but now a Parisian. That was saying something. Once a Parisian, where else would you go? The struggle to carve out a life, not to mention a home, for oneself in Paris was comparable to what it took to be a true New Yorker. Once achieved, it wasn’t lightly thrown away.
My time together with Jean-Michel had nowhere to go but Paris, and Paris was only going to be part of my life for a few more months. It was a perfectly contained relationship with a clear-cut escape plan. Nothing could have pleased me more.
As grim, gray February slid into somewhat less grim March, Jean-Michel escorted me about Paris, introducing me to neighborhoods and monuments as if they were his own. We visited Montmartre, where we climbed the more than one hundred steps to the Basilica of Sacré-Coeur. The enormous white Romano-Byzantine church stood above a park where dubious transactions occurred after dark, he told me. As he began to explain what some of these might be, a man ran out of the woods holding his arm, which appeared to be dripping with blood. Sacre-bleu!
Jean-Michel had made his point better than if we had been watching a movie. I held his arm more tightly as we strolled around the sacred grounds of Sacré-Coeur then descended to the less sacred terrain of Pigalle, the red light district directly below the famous Basilica.
Many sparkling sites of beauty in Paris stood in counterpoint to dubious neighborhoods around them of equal interest for far different reasons. Sacré Coeur presided over the prostitute-strewn alleyways of Pigalle below. Bois de Boulogne looked delightful by day, mysterious at dusk, and ominous by night. One afternoon, we’d lingered there too long and were hurrying back to the metro stop as night fell. Suddenly large, garishly dressed, and made up women began to appear along the grand boulevard leading through one section of the park. There was no denying the excitement of viewing the trans-sexual prostitutes who’d begun to come out to exhibit their wares to the male drivers who slowly drove past every night. It was a sight to behold, something I’d never have had a chance to do without Jean-Michel by my side, safely guiding me through the dubious sections of both his city and my mind.
Time spent back at Jean-Michel’s flat consisted largely of cooking and lovemaking. There were no books in his home. But his conversation was rich in content as well as opinion. He weighed in on just about everything we discussed. If I brought up a topic he knew nothing about, he would indicate to me within seconds this was not a subject worth bothering about. Case closed.
His tastes were one hundred percent provincial, but the province that guided them was the Île-de-France with Paris at its center. This was an area of interest not just to me, but the entire world. I was captivated by just about every bit of information he shared with me.
There was one exception to Jean-Michel’s close-mindedness – his taste in women. He liked Americans. He also liked voluptuous ones, but not with enormous breasts. He was more focused on women’s hips or les hanches. I knew because he kept mentioning mine when we made love. I’d always thought of les hanches as the sections of jodhpurs pants that stuck out unattractively, but Jean-Michel let me know again and again my hanches were A-OK by him. His f
eelings of warmth toward my hips were confirmed by his frequent presents of pastry he’d bring back to his place for me to try after dinner. One of his favorites was called le petit cochon, little pig, made of marzipan, which I didn’t especially like. I’d take a bite to be polite then hide the rest under a napkin. Feeling reassured by his admiration of my body’s generous proportions, I didn’t mind when he began to tell me about some of his former girlfriends.
April was one of them. She was from Berkeley, California, and had spent time in Paris several years earlier. I wasn’t jealous, either because I was not in love or because he’d shown me her picture and she was undeniably plump, a good twenty pounds heftier than me. Perhaps I was too young to be jealous.
When I commented rather crassly that April seemed a bit chubby, Jean-Michel corrected me.
“Non. Pas du tout. Elle est une femme bien dans sa peau. No, not at all. She is a woman who is comfortable in her skin.”
I had heard the French expression several times already, never fully understanding it. Now was my chance. At the hands of my Pygmalion, I asked what he meant.
“A woman who is comfortable in her skin is never too fat or too thin. She is perfect,” he explained. “It’s because she is comfortable with herself that men find her attractive. She is like a magnet.”
“Come on,” I protested. “Even if she’s fat? I mean, doesn’t a man notice that? That she doesn’t have a perfect body?” What Jean-Michel was telling me seemed too good to be true, especially for an American male audience.
“Men don’t fall in love with a woman who is perfect. They fall in love with a woman who is specific. A woman who is comfortable with herself can be herself specifically. She is free to explore who she is, because she is not comparing herself to other women all the time, trying to be someone she’s not.”