French Kiss
I'd been warned of Parisian "hot rabbits" after my virtue. No one mentioned the lustful rabbit within.
I was boarding the bus that would take me to the Paris-bound train when Betsy warned me for the last time: Watch out for chauds lapins. Hot rabbits, men with sex on the brain.
At 17, I’d never been kissed, except by a gay friend trying to be straight. Maybe only a Frenchman could see the fire in me. He’d have the loose-limbed grace of Jean-Paul Belmondo in Breathless, wearing his fedora and tie as a panther wears its pelt. All summer I’d been trapped minding Betsy’s brood of three, the job that paid for my trip to Provence but far exceeded my domestic talents. I burned off my lashes while lighting the ancient gas oven, never quite got the hang of boiling spaghetti, contemplated the passing scene while the children spilled out of the car and into the path of a cyclist. At least it wasn’t Belmondo at the wheel of a stolen car.
Betsy, an Englishwoman who deplored cheap wine and served exuberant Provençal fare at a picnic table in the garden, was a fine one to talk about chauds lapins. Her favorite child, the blond and beaming Jack, was all of nine and randy beyond his years, determined to pull down my panties and expose my privates to his gang of French playmates. I donned a girdle in self-defense, and that was that. Said Jack, recoiling as his paw made contact with my armor, “What horrid knickers you’ve got.”
Betsy laughed off my account of this affair. All boy, her Jack.
My tenure up at last, I was treating myself to the ultimate reward: my first sojourn in the City of Light. Betsy helped me book the cheapest room at the cheapest clean hotel on the Left Bank.
It was August, 1967, when Sergeant Pepper was new and shaggy-haired young Americans in altered states roamed Golden Gate Park. They could keep San Francisco; I had Paris. That first afternoon of freedom, I stepped onto a winding street where Hemingway might have walked on his way to Gertrude Stein’s salon. Lemon tarts shone like little suns in patisserie windows. Louche couples lingered in cafés over red wine and Le Figaro. The bouquinistes along the Seine, aflutter with vintage prints and brimful of books, resembled the photos that had charmed me in French class. I paged through a history of New Wave film and knew at a glance that the syntax alone was beyond me. Overcome by a wave of longing to be suave, sexy and French, I slipped the book into my purse and spent the money I had saved on my first Parisian meal, a croque monsieur that dripped Gruyère as I strolled.
The first chaud lapin proposed to buy me a gelato; the second offered dinner. “Non, merci” tripped off my tongue. Clever me, thriving alone in Paris. Next day at the Louvre, I felt the hot breath of an American with a paunch and a combover, hissing into my ear, “Ye-e-esss.” My mother used to say of my friend Anne, who exulted in her sexual escapades and was not entirely welcome in our home, “Men can smell that kind of girl. They know.” What did Mr. Combover know about me?
The gleaming white domes of Sacré-Cœur had left me cold when I descended into the Abbesses Métro station and spotted the curly-haired boy. His two pals, forgettable in every way, seemed only foils for his beauty. He was satyr and scamp, like Robbie Robertson in his Last Waltz days. Staring at boys offended my pride, but I couldn’t take my eyes off this one, who looked to be at most 16, without money in his pocket for my next gelato.
At home in New Hampshire, I had no clue how to flirt. With the three boys (a package deal), I took to it in French.
How do you make out in America?
Oh, I could never show you in the Métro.
I don’t recall where I meant to go, or to which remote station I followed the boys. In a gray, neglected neighborhood where tourists never go, we hotfooted it to a tabac where I bought them a pack of Gauloises. Outside a church with all the grace of an entry-level tombstone, they positioned me in the darkest alcove.
My sleeveless minidress, which I had made myself according to my slapdash custom, did not unzip. Why bother inserting a zipper when I could slip the dress on and off over my head? I didn’t plan for access by three boys lining up to cop a feel. Such determined puppies they were, reaching through the generous armholes. The boy who had seemed so entrancing, his luster gone, was giving me a vigorous knead when there came a shout from outside the alcove: “Dominic, you’re disgusting! You’ve taken her money!”
I can’t say much for the kissing. But the sleight of hand? A trio of magicians.
Dominic. The curly-haired scamp had been after my wallet. I had just cashed a traveler’s check. How many bowls of spaghetti had I served, how many childish fights mediated to earn 50 dollars’ worth of francs?
The best I can say about the fracas that ensued is that I got the gist—a rapid-fire French traffic jam of invention, prevarication and false hope. A beatnik, Jean-Jacques, had rifled my purse in Montmartre. (So why was the money still there when I bought you those Gauloises?) No, the money wasn’t gone: See? (This from Dominic, brandishing my wallet.) I could have sworn all those francs were back, or never filched at all. Then presto: an empty wallet. I can’t say much for the kissing. But the sleight of hand? A trio of magicians.
I’d heard of girls who took money to go all the way. I lost more than that being groped against the ugliest church in Paris. Shame flooded me.
“Trois garçons m’ont volé de tout!” Three boys robbed me of everything. My French had not deserted me along with my senses.
The priest looked up in distaste from his murmured conversation with a pale, wizened nun as I threw myself, sobbing, on their mercy. They considered my mussed hair, my bra strap hanging like a tendril of seaweed. The nun asked, with the honeyed gentleness of suspicion, which hospital I’d come from.
The priest stared down his nose, de Gaulle in a clerical collar. He muttered to the nun of my tale, “You see the tastes of this naïve girl, this beatnik.”
“But she’s from a good family.” I saw what the nun was thinking. Fallen female, soft in her drug-addled head. Back to the psych ward with her.
My mother would never know. Days later, she embraced me at the airport, all smiles, promising to cook me ratatouille like Betsy’s. She took pride in her cooking; God forbid that Betsy should eclipse her. I fell into her arms and kissed her on the lips—that open-mouthed kiss I had practiced with the three urchins.
The covers have fallen off my journal from that summer. On the evening of August 27, alone in my one-star hotel room, I filled 13 pages with self-disgust. “It’s not the loss of $50 that upsets me…. It’s the blow to my self-respect. What kind of person am I, anyway?”
A painfully repressed one, I concluded. Yet I didn’t dare admit, even to myself, what I was keeping under lock and key. The hottest rabbit on the scene was the one bouncing up and down inside me. Unable to say that Dominic mesmerized me, much less that I desired him, I cast the whole tawdry affair as “a good lesson.” Maybe I believed it was true. Following the wrong males into the wrong places, I kept getting into penny-ante trouble that would have dismayed my mother.
In François Truffaut’s effervescent Small Change, a celebration of childhood resilience, a toddler climbs out a high window in pursuit of an errant kitten. Adults gather in dismay as he teeters, then falls many storeys to chortle at his own bravado: “Grégory il a fait boum.” I went boom with three Parisian rascals, and $50 bought me a story that arrived with the utmost gravity. Now it makes me burst out laughing.
Did you ever go boom as a reckless young person? As if I had to ask—it’s your best yarn I’m after. Or any other thought this essay brings to mind.
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I'm glad that it was pickpocketing and not something more dangerous and traumatizing. The "good old" bad old days. Don't miss what I went through as a teen, but I do appreciate writing and reading stories of what it was like for us. xo
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