Ava Fodor, a slightly plump, frizzy-haired nineteen-year-old American au pair in Paris struggles with being less than perfect. Jean-Michel is Ava's fussy, exacting first French boyfriend whose provincialism drives her up the wall yet who educates he...
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The next day, Pascal walked me to the train station on his way to work. On the platform, he kissed me on each cheek twice. We agreed to meet back on the platform of the 6:13 pm train arriving from Paris that evening.
On the train, I found myself surrounded by men in blue coveralls, their feet shod in work boots. Saint-Denis was evidently a working-class suburb, something I'd missed on Sunday when the working population was out of uniform enjoying their day off. At the train stop of Châtelet-les Halles, across the river from Saint-Michel, I got off. The day was beautiful. I decided to walk home.
For once, I took the route along the Right Bank of the Seine, not the Left where I lived. It seemed fitting to be on the opposite side of the river, now that I was on the far shore of womanhood. What had happened the day before had been far more momentous than the occasion of losing my virginity. Less than twenty four hours ago, my whole world had shifted from black and white to Technicolor.
Yet I didn't get the sense that there was any profound tie-in between my emotions for the person responsible for sending me to heaven and for the experience itself. Pascal had given me the most incredible, sensual experience of my life. But falling in love with him hadn't followed automatically.
Were sex and love only distant cousins? Or was I still too callow to have the capacity to fall in love? My adult education was only beginning. Perhaps getting down the mechanics of lovemaking preceded falling in love.
Putting aside theoretical speculation on whatever romantic love might be, I wandered back to considering what having an orgasm actually was: mind-blowing, earth-shattering, apocalyptic. The most profound spiritual experience of my life up to that moment.
I couldn't help mixing up the event with thoughts of God and eternity. How could the two not go hand in hand? Fusion and fission belonged together as much as love and death did. One was the ultimate creative act; the other, the ultimate annihilation. One necessitated the other. For the first time, I understood the connection.
All this had happened at the hands of an unassuming twenty-six year old nurse's aide who knew a thing or two about female anatomy. What had he said about his duties at the hospital? Now that I had experienced ecstasy, my thinking was clearer, sharper. The French phrases he'd used to describe his job the night we'd met came back to me, "Je rangent les patients, font leurs lits; je lave les morts et d'autres choses." What did that mean, anyways? I'd look up ranger when I got back to my room, but I could guess it meant to arrange or make comfortable. He made the patients comfortable, made up their beds, and washed the dead ones and other things.
What?
He washed the dead? Of course he did. He was an orderly, for God's sake. Who else did that sort of thing at a hospital?
Bordel de merde! The man whose hands had just introduced me to total sexual fulfillment used those same hands to wash dead bodies at his day job.
I thought about it long and hard. There was a lesson in there somewhere.
