When I found a girl on the subway then lost my virginity.
Most writers draw on their own experiences but change the names and places to fit the circumstances of what they are writing about. I don't. This happened 48 years ago, and I remember it as if it was yesterday.
She was crying. She looked desolate. She looked like Maria Schneider in the Last Tango in Paris, a movie playing at the time which I didn't see until years later. People on the Metro car were trying their best to ignore her, but I couldn't. I was with my buddy Roman and we had been playing the silly game of guess if she is pretty by looking at her back; women play the same game wth men when they look at our butts surreptitiously. But when she appeared - I don't know if she was there already or if we got on first - it was a gut wrenching moment for me.
"What is wrong?" I asked in French. "Ce n'est rien, " she replied trying to hide her tear stained face. "Non, mais, il y a quelque chose qui ne marche pas." I insisted. “There is something wrong.” So began a long walk on the side of the Seine, in the gloaming of a Parisian autumn evening. It was her parents of course. Her father was a high flouting plastic surgeon with a Porsche, and her mother, was either unkind or didn't understanding her. Years later, I know now what young girls are like at that tender age. I think she was on the safe side of 18. The hormones, the desires and ups and downs; all the things a princess has to go through before they are real women and get their big girl pants on.
The night went on and on, like in the movie, and we stopped to eat. I imagine that it might at been at the "Rose de Tunis" but I am probably wrong. Eventually we walked from the Latin Quarter to my place in the 16th near Place Victor Hugo. (There was plan to my madness.) And she lived in the 17th. I don't remember her name. Sorry, I have blanked it out, or censored it from my memory. I just knew then that she was young and I was young, and there was a mutual hunger between us.
"Je suis vierge," she told me, and I must have said the same thing. Or maybe not. A young man who is virgin at 20 is a phenomena. It wasn't from lack of trying; there had been the English girl, then the Italian, and the cashier at Gilbert Jeune, but I flunked out the test that women put to men. 'Are you going to do it or not', they say with their eyes. And that night I also flunked the test, as she lay sleeping in my arms, like brother and sister. Safe and secure from all the ills of the world, she had nothing to fear from me. I had everything to fear from her.
She left, happier than when she had arrived. And that was that. I thought. Months went by, the weather turned cold and I began to wear my long John underwear at Art school because they didn't heat, except for a wooden stove near the model's stand. The shorter days, the grey days, the dark nights went by and I began to sink into depression. At the time I had no idea what that meant. I was in a funk.
On the day I celebrated my 21st birthday I decided to get a local hooker - she looked like the motherly type, not the ones nearer the Ave Foch who stepped into Ferraris and Rolls Royces - for a trick. She came up to my place, disrobed and demanded payment, which I didn't have. Not knowing the going rate. I offered her some of my art and she left huffing that she had lots of that at her place already. I think she was a "belle de jour". I guess my art wasn't worth a f...k?
Soon after my birthday I heard a knock on my tiny apartment door. It was her, she who I had secured in the Metro. She had moved out of her parent's apartment, she told me, and wanted to celebrate. I invited her to a Microbiotic place I had discovered, very cheap and cool. We talked like old lovers, without the love. I offered to walk her home, it was late, she invited me up, it got later and then she offered to sleep together like we had done before.
Well, my conscious self kept telling me I had to respect her, while my unconscious was on fire... During that long night, I had a dream that I was making love to her. I woke up, and it was true, I had lost my virginity while sleeping. Unbelievable as it may seem. She was washing her self off on a bidet as if it was the most normal thing in the world. She had told me during the evening that she had met a 'man' who had no problem taking her virginity, so not to worry. This was in the 70s when women were supposed to be on the pill. Or not. We went back to sleep.
Next morning, I heard a knock one the door. We were in a maid's room under the roof of a building. I hadn't grasped that it was the same building that her parents lived in. It was her mother. Oh God! I leapt out of bed, threw my clothes into the one piece of furniture in the room, the armoire. And closed the door. I was stark naked, by the way. I waited in the dark, and the conversation went like, "what are these clothes?" "Nothing mama." "What do you mean nothing, who is here?" "No one."
And then one of the doors is opened, then the other. I said the first thing in my mind, being a polite dude, “Bonjour Madame" while covering my privates.
All hell broke out. My mind blanks out at what was was said, rapidly and in French which I had not mastered. Finally I told her mother we should talk it over. (I should have told myself, My God, you fool, take your clothes and get the f...k out of there!) So we went down to their lavish and grandiose apartment and we sat in their elaborate and well equipped kitchen, where I met the Doctor and I tried to explain that their daughter was having problems. After a few 'paroles' the young girl said, "je m'en fiche" and left me with her parents. I thought it was time - to quote Fallstaff - to exercise "discretion is the better part of valour" and I left.
Back at my place I realized I have left my long jones back at her place, thinking it might not be wise to return to the scene of the crime, I sat there thinking 'this is going to be one hell of a story to tell one day!'
