beforehand, so that I could throw it off lightly.
At that stage, every laugh counts double, every smile is a reason for sweaty self-congratulation.
We flâned (we really did) our way to a bar, knocked off a couple of drinks, and I walked her to a bus stop. We’d chatted a fair amount and, during the permitted portions of silence, I’d been worrying about etiquette. We’d managed to cross the vous/tu barrier almost without noticing it, though as much in acknowledgment of student conventions as anything. But what, I wondered, about the first kiss? And anyway, would it, could it come so soon? I hadn’t a clue about French customs, though I knew not to ask: baiser , after all, meant fuck as well as kiss in French. Quite what was expected or permitted, I had no idea. Toni and I once had a rhyme
A kiss on the first,
You can do your worst;
A kiss on the second,
No more than you reckoned!
While a kiss on the third –
You slow fucking turd!
– but this was written with the confidence of inexperience, andanyway, probably didn’t apply outside the Home Counties. Then I realised – of course, use the local customs. Take advantage of the ubiquity of le shake-hand . Give her your paw, hold hers longer than necessary and then, with a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you while gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary . Good thinking.
Her bus drew up, I reached out an uncertain hand, she seized it quickly, dabbed her lips against my cheek before I saw what she was up to, released my slackened grasp, dug out her carnet , shouted ‘ A bientôt ’, and was gone.
I’d kissed her! Hey, I’d kissed a French girl! She liked me! What’s more, I hadn’t even gone around for weeks beforehand finding out about her.
I watched as her bus drove off. If it had been one of the old-style buses, Annick could have been standing on the open platform, one hand clutching the rail, the other, palely lit by a solitary street lamp, raised in a fragile salute; she would have looked like some tearful emigrant at the stern of a departing ship. As it was, the pneumatic doors had shut her off from me with a clump of rubber, and she stayed invisible as the bus growled and throbbed off.
I walked to the Palais Royal feeling impressed with myself. I sat on a bench in the courtyard and inhaled the warm night. It felt as if everything was coming together, all at once. The past was all around; I was the present; art was here, and history, and now the promise of something much like love or sex. Over there in that corner was where Molière worked; across there, Cocteau, then Colette; there Blücher lost six million at roulette and for the rest of his life flew into a rage when the name of Paris was mentioned; there the first café mécanique was opened; and there, over there, at a little cutler’s in the Galerie de Valois, Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she killed Marat. And bringing it all together, ingesting it, making it mine, was me – fusing all the art and the history with what I might soon, with luck, be calling the life. The Gautier which Toni and I quoted to each other at school sidled into my head –‘ Tout passe ’, it murmured. Maybe, I replied, but not for quite a bloody long time; not if I have anything to do with it.
I must write to Toni.
I did; but he hid any avuncular pleasure he might have felt.
Dear Chris,
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair . Get past the next set of lips and you might stir my interest. What have you been reading, what have you seen, and what, not who, have you been doing? You do realise, I hope, that Spring is not officially over yet, that you are in Paris, and that if I catch you anywhere near completing the cliché you can count on my lasting contempt. What about the strikes?
Toni.
I suppose he was right; in any case, the sickly gushiness of my own letter can readily be inferred from
At that stage, every laugh counts double, every smile is a reason for sweaty self-congratulation.
We flâned (we really did) our way to a bar, knocked off a couple of drinks, and I walked her to a bus stop. We’d chatted a fair amount and, during the permitted portions of silence, I’d been worrying about etiquette. We’d managed to cross the vous/tu barrier almost without noticing it, though as much in acknowledgment of student conventions as anything. But what, I wondered, about the first kiss? And anyway, would it, could it come so soon? I hadn’t a clue about French customs, though I knew not to ask: baiser , after all, meant fuck as well as kiss in French. Quite what was expected or permitted, I had no idea. Toni and I once had a rhyme
A kiss on the first,
You can do your worst;
A kiss on the second,
No more than you reckoned!
While a kiss on the third –
You slow fucking turd!
– but this was written with the confidence of inexperience, andanyway, probably didn’t apply outside the Home Counties. Then I realised – of course, use the local customs. Take advantage of the ubiquity of le shake-hand . Give her your paw, hold hers longer than necessary and then, with a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you while gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary . Good thinking.
Her bus drew up, I reached out an uncertain hand, she seized it quickly, dabbed her lips against my cheek before I saw what she was up to, released my slackened grasp, dug out her carnet , shouted ‘ A bientôt ’, and was gone.
I’d kissed her! Hey, I’d kissed a French girl! She liked me! What’s more, I hadn’t even gone around for weeks beforehand finding out about her.
I watched as her bus drove off. If it had been one of the old-style buses, Annick could have been standing on the open platform, one hand clutching the rail, the other, palely lit by a solitary street lamp, raised in a fragile salute; she would have looked like some tearful emigrant at the stern of a departing ship. As it was, the pneumatic doors had shut her off from me with a clump of rubber, and she stayed invisible as the bus growled and throbbed off.
I walked to the Palais Royal feeling impressed with myself. I sat on a bench in the courtyard and inhaled the warm night. It felt as if everything was coming together, all at once. The past was all around; I was the present; art was here, and history, and now the promise of something much like love or sex. Over there in that corner was where Molière worked; across there, Cocteau, then Colette; there Blücher lost six million at roulette and for the rest of his life flew into a rage when the name of Paris was mentioned; there the first café mécanique was opened; and there, over there, at a little cutler’s in the Galerie de Valois, Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she killed Marat. And bringing it all together, ingesting it, making it mine, was me – fusing all the art and the history with what I might soon, with luck, be calling the life. The Gautier which Toni and I quoted to each other at school sidled into my head –‘ Tout passe ’, it murmured. Maybe, I replied, but not for quite a bloody long time; not if I have anything to do with it.
I must write to Toni.
I did; but he hid any avuncular pleasure he might have felt.
Dear Chris,
C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair . Get past the next set of lips and you might stir my interest. What have you been reading, what have you seen, and what, not who, have you been doing? You do realise, I hope, that Spring is not officially over yet, that you are in Paris, and that if I catch you anywhere near completing the cliché you can count on my lasting contempt. What about the strikes?
Toni.
I suppose he was right; in any case, the sickly gushiness of my own letter can readily be inferred from
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