Dirty Old Men

So: I’m not the only one in the park. That’s good, a relief, because I can’t help remembering that Vladimir Nabokov first felt the “little throb” that turned out to be Lolita in a Parisian park. Everyone is looking at the two young girls, not just me—on the sly, offhand, which means with a great show of not looking at all, so absorbed it is amazing no one collides with a tree. It’s a Wednesday afternoon, the weather is sunny and soft, and the boys and girls from the schools near the park are all out for their half day off—which they will have to make up on Saturday morning. The park is busy with walkers, almost all men, as if they knew this was a sight to see on sunny and soft Wednesday afternoons and they are keeping an appointment—a rendez-vous, which is ambiguous in French, implying equally a business meeting and a tryst. Impossible to know, but the absence of women and the presence of men evidently out for a stroll in the middle of the day are some kind of evidence, though I can’t be sure of what. I know only what I see. And what everyone else sees, which is two girls, maybe thirteen years old, walking through the park. Their clothing is pretty much standard issue—short skirts, sweaters, book bags, not a great deal of make-up, as far as I can see, or jewelry. They are not paying attention to the men or to anyone except one another, talking about whatever Parisian girls of that age talk about—and who would want to know that? Neither is especially pretty, there’s no come-on, no flirtation, no swing of the peripheral vision or the hips to make sure the men are checking them out. But there is something seizing all of our eyes, and it’s impossible not to see what it is. These two girls, maybe best friends, are very different. One is still a child, bony in the leg with a little girlish chub around the middle. The other is a young woman: she has breasts, her thighs are round, she has hips. It is, I guess, the sexual contrast between the two—otherwise, dressed about the same, neither taller than the other, not one or the other affecting a walk that is anything but straightforward—that makes everyone watch. Years ago when girls were married off young, the round one with the thighs would have been welcome on the marriage market while the other might have to wait through something like an engagement—which all in all might have been the better option for both of them. But they are not heading for the marriage broker as far as I can tell, and what is more interesting is that the men who watch them keep their distance. They show no desire to get near the girls. No one says Bonjour or even smiles and nods as they pass as if acknowledging them—and Parisians are even better than Americans from the South at recognizing a fellow human being who crosses their path—could be criminal. Perhaps it could be. It could be something else, a reminder of what it was like to be young and first getting interested in girls who were worth being interested in. None of the men in the park strikes me as a really nasty old man, the kind Balzac among others wrote about, with a taste for young virgins and an open pocketbook to buy them from destitute or cynical parents or kidnappers, keeping score of annual deflorations. They seem respectable, bourgeois, harmless—and above all frightened. Each of them knows that if he were to greet them, the girls would probably not notice him, perhaps throwing back a mechanical Bonjour out of habit and good manners without real sight or recognition. Even the sexual girl, if she knew she was sexual, would probably not see the man saying hello or find him repugnant. They understand the girls. They think, Ah, if I said hello, they would not see me as I splendidly am and they would think I am an old man even if I am only thirty-seven or fifty-two or…or…or. The problem is really simple. Without exception, all the men in the park today look like their fathers or—horror!—their grandfathers. I know the feeling. I owe it to a waitress in an ordinary café. Out of sheer boredom, I think, she was flirting with me. Out of sheer annoyance—flirting without a belief in a serious outcome is a waste of time and something akin to taking a shower with a raincoat on—I asked her her papa’s name. Jean-Paul (or André or something like that), she told me. Et quel âge a-t-il, Jean Paul (ou André)? She told me pop’s age, and I let her know that I was three years older, and that was that, and I went back to my mouton in peace. Perhaps that’s what we all want, peace. The men’s admiration of the mature and round girl, set off to an outlandish disproportion by her shanky companion, is counter-weighted by the fragility of the male ego: I am not old, a universal belief that comes basted with terror. It could happen anywhere, this comédie in a Parisian park on a Wednesday afternoon, and surely has. But it is more powerful, or poignant, in Paris because this is a city in which men do not think of age as a decline. It was Shakespeare, not Racine after all, who described old age as being “Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything,” even if he did use the French word for without. The aging parisien stands up straighter than ever, turns himself out in a more elegant wardrobe, scrupulously trims the hair on his ears—that giveaway of having passed fifty—enjoys his dinner more than ever, and lengthens his stride…