Heartburn

The restaurant is still there. Restaurants in Paris seem to last forever or vanish in a couple of years, sometimes a couple of months. It was still there last week, unchanged except for the prices, higher and now in euros, not francs. It had been that long since I had been there. The menu was the same cuisine, one that foreigners don’t expect in Paris: heavy, Germanic, but France has always had a long border with Germany and, besides, Charlemagne spoke German, so history was on its side. Sausages and sauerkraut, when they are good, can coexist with coq au vin and haricots in Paris, and they were good.

They probably still are, but I was not in the mood the other day when I went by the restaurant. The last time I ate there was the last time I will ever eat there. No indigestion, but heartburn nonetheless.

The last time, I was nearly finished with my dinner when I looked across the terrace, which was not busy, and saw a woman. She was looking at me. Whether she had been looking before or just looked at me as I happened to look up and at her I can’t tell, and never will. She was not beautiful, but sexy in a way that women who know how to subdue their clothes and makeup are sexy: no distractions from the feminine projection, no blockading the pheromones, no pretense that sex is about anything but sex. Her hair was pale, nearly white, pinned up. She wore a blue jacket over a white blouse with a high neck and a black velvet choker. She smiled again and returned to her dinner.

When she got up to leave, she looked at me, smiled, and I want to say she raised her wineglass (she and I were the only ones not drinking beer), and left. Instead of choking down the rest of my food or just calling for my bill and the hell with les restes, I polished off everything, paid, and left, walking in the direction Madame had taken fifteen minutes before. A couple of streets later, I saw her, maybe fifteen metres ahead of me and easy to spot because of her height, her elegant carriage, and her pale hair. She looked back and maybe she saw me: her expression did not change. She crossed the street. Instead of accelerating and catching up to her, I slowed down, which I realize is what she must have done to cover so little ground in at least fifteen minutes. How much of an invitation, idiot, do you need?

It was easy to pick up girls when I first came to Paris as a kid. That’s why the girls came. An American girl who went to bed with me on about two hours’ acquaintance and never figured I was also Amerloque gave me her virginity (not much you can do with it, though) and, afterwards, told me she had refused to sleep with the boy she had been dating at home for three years. She’d been waiting for Paris for that. I may have told her I was Polish. Those were the days.

These were not. I’ve grow shyer with age, less forthright with strangers—perhaps it’s the emotional equivalent of losing hair and hearing—and did not know if I could figure out exactly how to pick up a grown woman, an elegant parisienne, and pitch her en français. Fluency in the meat-market or the hardware store does not translate into fluency in the art of love, however uncourtly. It didn’t help to remember at the moment that French has no picturesque equivalent of “tongue-tied,” no doubt because no parisien, given the circumstances, would have been at a loss for words. Any way you want to take it, I was not making it in Paris this evening.

I did not know that yet. I started walking again, crossed the same street she had crossed, and passed a very large café. There she was, seated in the middle measured north to south and east to west with no one close to her. How much of an invitation, idiot? I stopped on the sidewalk and looked at her. She looked back, with a smaller smile than before, but steadily, composed, right at me, expectant. I stood there. If I had caught myself with my mouth hanging open, it couldn’t have been any worse. I walked off.

It would have been better to keep going, but I turned around, went back, and looked at her again. She looked too, but she did not smile. How long we looked at one another I don’t remember, but finally she made a face and shook her head. Had she said, “Idiot, tu pauvre con, you miserable jerk, what do I have to do? Here I am, making it obvious, demeaning myself, me, a sexy treat you don’t deserve, telling you to come and get it, and what do you do? Stare like a monkey? Maybe you should go swing by your tail. You embarrass me, pauvre con,” it would not have been any clearer than the look of absolute pity and disgust—the farce version of tragedy’s pity and fear—that she gave me.

But she didn’t have to say a word. A man who had been observing this graceless mating two-step did it for her, saying to his wife, “Pauvre con! Did you see him, about to wet his pants? And the woman?” She laughed and said, “Maybe he’s German… American?” That seemed to explain it for them.

All the way back to my hotel, I was sure everyone was saying the same thing and laughing at me. When I passed the restaurant the other day, the thought of a choucroute garnie didn’t give me a tummy ache, but the memory of Madame gave me heartburn, which in my case is not the same thing at all and no laughing matter. Isn’t it? 

© Joseph Lestrange