bart plantenga
“When breasts are huge, you become very self-conscious … I’ve learned something though, through my years of pondering …
and that is: men love them, and I love that.”
Drew Barrymore
Didn’t we call them les temps enchantés back when Paris served our whims, bending deep to take us into her bosom? Didn’t we find respite in amnesia, orgiastic misrememberings, self-delusion, carrying liter bottles of sole-rotting vin du table under our coats as we wandered around in movies that we shot but never showed?
We met wanderers, disgruntologists, beautiful forgers, ruttish fantabulists, and plagiarist ex-pats who had learned to ennoble their aimlessness by calling it existentialism. Scenes of diving headless into glorious shadows cast by imposing buildings in the vacant 7th to kiss with such force that it turned us inside-out inside each other. At midnight we lifted paving stones on Rue Mouffetard to see if the beach was still there.
But never Rita Mitsuko*, some-time arm candy for George, an American “businessman” and apprentice gentleman who performed periodic odd jobs for a CIA subsidiary [it is said]. Mitsuko [we called her Mitsuko because it sounded more Japanese] told us he had evaded peace protesters with her to attend an audio trade show at the Porte de Versailles to survey the latest subliminal and subsonic crowd control technologies. She was surprised at how unrehearsed he seemed in the details of discretion. Kind of arrogant blunt. Like someone who had never had time for civility or dating tips. And suddenly he was 40-something.
For example: he asked the rep in Booth #66 – Flottantes d’Esprit Productions if he knew how sonic weapons produced those frequencies that make eyeballs vibrate and distort vision. No, he had not. And so George immediately answered his own question: “In 1993, ‘Ghostbuster’ Glasscock proved that a ghost haunting Anglesey, Wales was just a hoax. Et, bon ami, I’m in the market for NLW [ed: non-lethal weapons].”
“Je ne suis pas to sell to you directement, monsieur.”
“Ici le punchline: Turns out the ghostly moans terrorizing the village actually originated in an improperly installed extractor fan producing low frequency sound that skewed the sanity of all in attendance! Haha! I’m trés interested in your Mosquito Anti-Social Devices that induce states of walking narcolepsy. My boss has les poches profondes et I would like to pay for this display modèle avec my fist full of dollars.” Rep #66 wincing, uncomfortable.
Not long after after arriving in Paris I spotted Rita at a Bastille-quartier mixed-media performance by the art group Vivre Pour Voir or sometimes Voir Pour Vivre [Living to See or Seeing to Live]. She appeared to be a well-dressed, name-brand little stone gathering some moss. Like a flower in search of the right vase. People were quick to desire and then as quickly belittle her, but her determined superficiality may have betrayed a deeper soul, someone naive enough to be a pretty nothing, an authentic connivance.
Vivre Pour Voir exhibited tai chi elegance and precision that night utilizing their array of artist tools: wit, electric meat carving knife, a rewired electric pottery wheel used for their version of spin art, fat markers, reconstrued detritus, house paint, paint spray guns, a ladder on wheels, pulsating lights and more.
Rita was dazzled by it all. We struck up a conversation, she wondering whether there was something she [or rather her George] could buy of theirs and if buying would mean they got to talk to the artists in private.
In the coming weeks, I would observe her from afar, intrigued by her attempts to appear art-literate to overcome her silver-spoonish yuufuku family background by consulting her handwritten art trivia and French vocab cue cards. In cafes she was always ready for French street slang – cul, boules, zob, moule, le con, the whole filthy lexicon – amusing one and all with her other-worldly, high-pitched, and tentative pronunciations.
In galleries or a boîte de nuit [never accompanied by her George] you might see her competing with the artworks on display comparing her prettiness, striving for some level of beauty incarnate – whatever that entailed.**
Mitsuko, Japanese-American fashion-beauty exchange student, dark, glistening hair, open-toed shoes revealing sparkling emerald toenails, never afraid to admit she was spoiled, dependent on daddy’s generosity – and, for a time, aparently, George’s. Proper follow-through of entitlement obligations is a full-time affair while she negotiated the perils of being responsibly kept.
We, scrum of multinational hopeless dreamers, were at first astonished to be allowed to mingle with the Mitsukos, enablers and sycophants of the affluent. We marvelled at how well this subclass performed their pat little dramas of heroic hardship. “You’ve no idea,” they declared, pinching a stemmed glass, “what it takes to be me.”
They etched golden cages into their forearms in the minute it takes their café crème to cool for sipping. They effectively out-grandstanded one another with bespoke miseries: “I don’t even have enough for my dry cleaning this week.” They cast shade effortlessly and mythologized the oppressive expectations of disgustingly generous, absent parents. Mitsuko’s father, it seemed, had snuffed all ambition in his daughter, rendering her a compliant husk with generous stipends, funding her crippling shopping addictions. Imagine her as a porcelain cup whose sole purpose was to hold a liquor the sweetness of which effectively hides its bitter poison.
Anyway, being around her and her kind was like being invited to a game of Truth or Dare – their rules. But you also felt that they appreciated being invited to play along with us, especially if they could for a moment escape their prescribed roles, be bawdy, expose leg, skip a manicure, chug a glass of Chardonnay, swear like a sailor. And that we encouraged.
We suffered their suffering as they revealed cut marks or puncture wounds in the crux of their arms – it wasn’t all perfume and roses. They had learned to out-suffer us, sucking away any dignity remaining in purposeful poverty.
Mitsuko had studied these narratives firsthand at Parsons and later perfected them with George. She claimed he sent her on shopping sprees for “jobs well-done,” in effect ditching her in Le Bon Marché’s fitting rooms to go his own way.
“Carefree is not free, not everything.” She’d declared glumly, eyes glossed over – calm nocturnal inlets of dirty, poisonous, beautiful, still water ready for those thirsty enough to drink of them.
You wondered if she wasn’t just buying this stuff to satisfy male expectations. The garments serving as material evidence of fealty and sexual dysfunction.
All this was swirling around in my mind when I suggested we take Mitsuko to the movies. But first we allowed her the charade of checking her cramped appointment book. Whew, she could squeeze us in! There’s something inexplicably sad about a perp’s transparent charade. But also painfully charming when you realized that her deceptions were actually steering her.
“Do be so gallant and fetch me a cappu,” she commanded in her poshest London School For Girls English [2 years] as we waited for Motorpsycho, to let out. In the glass that held the poster for Europe in the Raw she tried to compose the illusion of what others were supposed to see of her.
“Men do, women be.” Cleverness was something only I seemed to notice.“The old doo bee doobedoo.”
“Men so busy doing, dreaming of becoming.” She rendered me in the painting that depicted what she would later call our “affair” as the wacked-out wolf in Tex Avery cartoons doing his wolf whistles.
“Nirvana’s a stilling of mind, evaporation of desires.” From what Nirvana perfume ad was she reading this? “You do, getting nowhere. Me be already there.” Mitsuko.
“They say …”
“Everyone’s talking about me?” With a giggle she’d learned in Japan, typical of a girl upon seeing her first Blue Long Island Iced Tea.
“… you’re arranged not how you want to be arranged on a couch but how you imagine a man will be pleased by your pose.”
“I’m composed to appeal to my own pleasure by how it turns you on. I take what you think you own of me and re-own it right there.” Mitsuko.
“Flattering me to flatter yourself.”
“Zactly.”
“Ingenious.”
“I lie semi-nude, lazy, do nothing, just being. You receive this nude memento and carry in fold of your mind.” Mitsuko.
Just then Musette returned from the toilettes des femmes and all became artificially quiet. Mitsuko sipped her cappu, smugly holding the saucer in her lefthand, knowing she had charitably accepted my offer to allow me to purchase it so I could feel as if I was making progress with her. All this goes unnoticed when you see her on the street. But Mitsuko and her kind had developed complex engagement mechanisms that involved manipulating the inherent weaknesses of the male gaze to their own ends.
Russ Meyer’s Supervixens turned out to be a perfect remedy: a birthday present for me and medicine for Mitsuko. I’d never heard anyone laugh so hard as Mitsuko at any movie in any theatre anywhere. Ever! We paused as our eyes adjusted to the harsh afternoon light as Parisians scurried blurry this way and that, headed home or wherever.
“There were some funny scenes.” We stood outside, along Rue des Écoles on that golden autumn après midi.
“Breasts falling into your lap – you were in heaven?”
“Um. Palms sweating.” I could hear what she was thinking about gendered power relations: You see how even the mere anticipation or threat of my body’s unveiling can distract you from whatever you thought you should be thinking about.
“Did they remind you of mine?” She asked, with her overweened sense of self that betrayed self-doubt, dabbing perspiration from her décolleté if she sensed waning interest. She had pet names for them, by the way, but I wasn’t going there.
She giggled at her own impertinences and that self she imagined others needed to manufacture of her. An equation of psycho-physics that involved her being convinced of her own beauty justifying self-absorption. As if there’s some gravitational pull that made it all inevitable. Beauty has gravity, magnetism; it is true, it is undeniable.
To deflect, I reminded them of how decadent it was to be going to the movies in the middle of an afternoon. Decadence was back! We all agreed – they showed the best retro films here. The French embrace and study these – deliciously obscure, criminally ignored – films so intensely that they actually acquire a new life as filtered through Parisian adulation.
Outside we spotted the typical film student-types – you know, hipster slouch, wan, wisps of hair in his face, his girlfriend, who has not been listening to his pronouncements for years, tagging along – offering some received insight. Today is no different: “Je pense que ce film est le merde comparer de son majeur Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (This film is shit compared to his superior Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!)
You think of responding, but don’t. Our debate in the 2 Bis 3 Baises Café later: Can someone be murdered by a stare if that person has not witnessed that stare?
Sure Mitsuko had “friends” but, if truth be told, they were mere bodies filling up gaping holes of silent condescension, inhabiting endless appointments at heard-about cafes, ordering read-about fizzy oblations; busy learning to manufacture a convincing sense of purpose with the wives of the Paris Anglo-American Club of Women of Distinction.
In the end, Mitsuko neglected to thank us for inviting her. She does not thank people ever, thought others should thank her for whatever it was they should be thanking her for.
- ••
She came over to borrow my electronic [ed.: pre-laptop] typewriter. Musette shook her head non; Mitsuko was always losing things, had thus far lost moral courage, Musette’s red purse, a 500-franc note, her apartment key, and any sense of modesty.
“We have 27 down: Fait attention!” Musette demanded. “‘A man whose partner is sexually unfaithful’ … Seven letters. Starts with ‘C’.” Musette was improving her English via crosswords.
“Uh. ‘Cuckold’.”
“‘Cock hold?’”
“With a ‘U’ – C-U-C-K-O-L-D.”
“Yes, ‘YOU’.”
TV on: Waco Siege … man waving white flag … advised over loudspeakers to come out … hands in the air … flames spread quickly …
“Four down, 7 letters: ‘annoyingly intriguing.’ Oh, ‘Mitsuko.’”
“Pas drôle.” Musette and her constrictive sense of humor.
Bottom line: Mitsuko departed with her “O revwaar,” shiny-smooth legs, having completed her drawn-out description of rubbing her legs with a shiny depilatory hot wax made from molasses and lemon – lugging my typewriter to a taxi to take her home only 4 streets over.
A week later I’m “allowed” to pass by her place near the Jardin des Plantes to pick it up.
“There’s workmen on the roof across the way.” The red clay shingled roof, the forest of bent TV antennas, the men in blue salopettes [overalls].
“They’ve been fixing that roof for weeks. They like to peek in. I do walk around déshabillé.” She acted out, cavorting not naked, but with the threat of it.
Les ouvriers stood there mesmerized, frozen smiles, holding their hats, balanced on the slanted roof. “One said: ‘il y a du beau monde’.” Mitsuko noted.
Musette: “It just means you have le big boobs.”
“Well, they’re right, aren’t they?! One boyfriend …”
He hadn’t ever really been a boyfriend, unless you call a married man who dragged you to a hotel once in a while to have sex “a boyfriend.”
“Call them ‘sublime orbs.’ Maybe my future is as artist muse.”
Mitsuko liked detailing her brave Ulysses tales of shopping glory.” I am fascinated by people unaware of how boring they are …
Her closets – even in the kitchen – are bloated with shiny, boutique tote bags … haute couture still bagged, tagged and never worn, silk scarves spilling from drawers. “The remnant ravages of addiction” is what the caption under the photo would have said. 5000 francs [$1000] in a 2-hour spree. She, without shame, estimated her shopping exploits at 3000 francs per week! Spending on clothes in one week what I spend in 5 years. She sometimes displayed hints of playful self-revulsion.
But now she is fatigué, plopping down on her shiny hardwood floor, running her hands through lush thick hair, flip-tossing it utilizing a calculated choreography to maximize exposure of nape, surrounded by shopping bags of unconsummated ecstasy, brands like mantras that prompt more shopping.
She called daddy every week to detail her latest adventures via a complex labyrinth of white lies, insisting all was well, glorious.
“I know how to buy but don’t know how to wear it.” I’m staring out the tall window, wondering if yearning could teleport me out of her midst.
Mitsuko, who often spoke in nonsequiturs, declared she preferred gay or older men, or older gay men.
“I’m older.” Not her kind of old – too young, too impoverished, she corrected. George appeared to want nothing more from her than ornamental accompaniment, a smile, small talk.
“No, I mean REAL old.”
“Like dead tomorrow?” I never knew whether she got my jokes or was playing dumb in attempts to “enhance” her attractiveness. You know, like beauty unsullied by cleverness. She portrayed herself unconvincingly as mere gold digger, angling for a guy waving around a will on his death bed, beyond any capacity to ever jab his icky penis inside her.
Mitsuko eventually hired a begrudging Musette as her personal stylist. Every Wednesday afternoon they’d spend 4 hours “doing style.” This is how Mitsuko hoped to purchase her way out of loneliness. Mitsuko, possibly unconsciously, planted certain festering doubts in Musette’s brain that I was flirting with her and that I had even contemplated leaving Musette. Musette just laughed it off. But doubt tends to stick. Mitsuko quickly added: “I tried to tell him he’s silly for even thinking it … And I don’t even want him.” Musette’s hearty laugh faded quickly.
One day M itsuko invited me back to her place – alone. Greeted me in something satin, amusing herself, believing she was provoking me: “I don’t read, don’t need to. I’m something you want to read.”
She didn’t drink; may sip a Sauvignon Blanc to go quickly silly. Like she’s acting drunk as a release from her own … primness or the suspicions that her staring-into-nothingness ennui was all there was. Only I heard Peggy Lee sing: “Is that all there is to this circus?” Watching her exhibitionism that seemed secondhand ironic, awkwardly sarcastic like she was denying the very temptations that her exhibitionism aroused.
“But remember, ne pas toucher.”
Flattery was her chosen arousal as she waltzed around, toes brushing the carpet, coyly embracing her assets to thrust them outward like a patisserie displaying its smooth vanilla crème religieuses, which are to the male gaze what a bird feeder is to a bird.
Will I paint her as a reclining muse on satin sheets like Ingres’ “Grande Odalisque” that she had pointed to in the Louvre and made me stand in front of to properly study it? “But then me wearing clothes.” I don’t know.
“I find it creepy that you can take home naughty pictures of me in your head whenever you want. And I’ll flash by whenever it pleases you.” Synchronized precisely with the flicker of the flip-card porn “movie” I viewed through a visored slot of the vintage Mutoscope Penny Arcade Machine along Boulevard de Clichy.
“Maybe reclining on a fur-covered divan,” I teased, squinting and tilting my head slightly as to properly visualize her for the portrait.
“And each time you remember me in that pose you be tempted to, um … abuse yourself.” Followed by faux revulsion – “Ehw!”
She stood before me, imitating an Ingres, hands over her head, the satin sleeves sliding down her arms, exposed elbows, shaved armpits, the sash threatening to come undone as she braked hard and handed me a neat stack of crisp 20-franc notes because, well, she doesn’t say anything but she too has moments of … tenderness, compassion, generosity.
“By the way, I’m not buying you.” She said. Besides, George was loaded, had no time to spend it, and would never miss these 20s. She held the stack of billets, daring me to rip them from her clutches. “If I wanted you – and let me be clear, I do not; I am quite satisfied with George – I just take you for free.”
“OK. Does George even exist?”
“Sure. He’s private, not your kind.”
“And this is not a bribe to make me the muse in your next painting. Generosity toward an artist isn’t a crime is it?”
“Although I don’t know French law, I don’t think so.”
I was destined to never meet George. I suppose he existed because if she had to make up a partner, as in a lie, he’d have been more cinematically … handsome. Truth be told, George sounded like an uninspired actor in a mediocre movie. As far as I could gather from Mitsuko’s convoluted storytelling, George was indeed the son of a CIA operative. Although I wonder if that was true would he be revealing that fact to someone like Mitsuko – and her to me?
Maybe an errandboy for his father, delivering packages of unknown contents to dubious addresses in the 16eme and 17eme, ringing a doorbell twice and with a quick upturned trenchcoat collar, a softshoe escape. That’s the picture I saw. Or was George an actual appraiser of estate-sale art objects?As cover? Anyway, status was status to her – no matter it’s source, be it some zaibatsu, the CIA, or auction house.
“No photos of him?”
“Hates photos.”
“I imagine the smile of someone farting near the wine tray.”
“You’re jealous,” as she shooes me out the door, late for a beauty appointment.
Down in her courtyard, I took out the wad, count the billets – 380 francs! Claude Debussy is on the 20-franc note. In my journal I write: “She’s building her sweet self out of luxurious, toothsome scoops of happy ice cream.” I rewrote it neatly on parchment stationery, folded it into a recycled envelope, walked to her building and stuffed it into her mailbox.
- ••
We met a week later in the 2 Bis 3 Baises Café, that inviting blue front, golden-lit café that sucks you in along Rue des Ecoles. She was early, had been there for an hour, leafing idly through the café’s tattered Vogue. She had barely touched her Chardonnay but seemed tipsy anyway, a slight smudge of lipstick on the rim.
By the way: I noticed she was very good at coaxing purchases out of people. Passive aggressive: “why don’t you get me another drink?” and would then act flattered and deserving when upon my return with a second chardonnay. This second glass later causing an out-of-body experience … at the Beaux Arts! Where we went to see the “ReFluxUs” Fluxus Happening.
“I finished that book about Kiki de Montparnasse,” Mitsuko declared proudly. “She met Man Ray – you know, the ….
“Yeayea, photographer, Surrealist …”
“They became lovers, went to movies, held hands. She’d lie around naked and he’d photograph her. The perfect relationship!” The chardonnay sending her brain into a warm smirking swoon, if only for a second.
“You’ll be a slutty lap cat in your next life.”
“I’d rather be naked photo than a naked prostitute in filthy rue Saint Denis cubicle – EEEWWW! Triple ICK!!” Was her disgust nothing more than disguised fascination? Silence. Mitsuko stared at nothing. What did she see there? … eventually she confessed that George had offered her a generous severance package: “His guilt was bigbig.”
I looked it up in the Centre Pompidou library: DSM-5 – narcissistic sycophancy is a relationship of mutually denied arousal that depends on a particular dynamic: the more an observer desires another, the more the “provoker” will be aroused by the observer’s being aroused by the provoker’s attempts to arouse and, in turn, the observer being aroused by the provoker’s very display of arousal …
I tried to understand: These are infinite reflections over human touch, admiration over coitus, being seen over seeing – unless it’s to see how being seen arouses the other … which allowed us to be both provocateurs and passive observers of our own provocations – while simultaneously being able to deny agency for all advances or signs of interest.
We walked to the “RefluxUs” show at the neoclassical Ecole des Beaux Arts, ambled into the courtyard of grass, weathered statuary and a gravel, half moon, pull-up drive. We were met there by 2 earnest art school coeds in self-made le Grand Bal cat costumes, hastily silver-spraypainted fake cowboy boots. They seemed inseparable, of equal height, and with bangs that dangled before their large eyes. They had whipped open an easel that held a giant canvas to which attendees were asked to contribute words, scribbles, drawings. I imagined them sharing intimate thoughts late at night, into bands no one else had ever heard of, looking great even at breakfast with only 3 hours sleep.
The hall buzzed like an anthill on fire; anyone who was anyone or imagined being someone was there. Artists, gallery owners, the hairdressers of gallery owners, girls with white lipstick, boys in eelskin cowboy boots, art society journalists, men with horned spectacles, paparazzi, scenemakers, Fluxus fans and authorities on the movement, green-hair punks wearing slouches and red grommeted g-strings over their grimy black jeans, women in feathers and little else, Aleana dressed as Batgirl, Liberation, Le Monde, le beau monde.
A cab pulled in along the arched gravel drive. The door flew open and Yoko Ono crawled out – short skirt, shiny knee-high boots, butterfly-wing sunglasses – the personification of a Black Hole into which all matter, adulation, intelligence, and fans seemed to collapse. She provoked an instant whacking-the-beehive buzz as “La Dolce Vita” paparazzi swarmed around the open car door …
Yoko tiptoed through white gravel toward us just ahead of the swarm. The two besmocked girls who’d coaxed me to join their action painting were leaping up and down, screaming, yelling “Yoko! Yoko! You must sign our canvas!” They grabbed my marker, handed it to Yoko.
So, suddenly there we were: me, Yoko and the girls surrounded by a swarm of paparazzi, fame groupies, and cognoscenti. Then suddenly, it was just me and Yoko, who added a swirling flourish that could have been anything, signing it “PEACE YOKO FOREVER.”
We all agreed it was art. I stood stock still, straight as a signpost offering directions to nowhere. I faced the swarm, nodded toward Yoko. She regal, me paralyzed as she handed back the marker with a slight smile and bow.
And – whoosh, like that – she was whisked away through a buzzing swarm of wellwishers, people reaching out to touch her clothes.
“Can I sign this maintenant?”
“Vas-y,” they enjoined without taking their eyes off of the disappearing Yoko. In the presence of a sole gate-crashing drunk, a tourist snapping photos, and Mitsuko, I finished my “artwork” with “ART’S NOTHIN BUT A SPIRITUAL F/ART” and signed my name.
If my eyes were cameras I’d have captured the catgirls mid-pogo, feet a full foot off the ground, now yelling with a French accent: “Fucking people! Fuck you! I Love You, Yoko. You Are A Genius! Long Live John!”
Inside the Grand Salle the crowd was surging, swirling, a mass of smoking, harangued, opinionated souls becoming increasingly inhospitable to the renowned – legendary even – performers who had once been heroes but time had eclipsed their accomplishments with newer, more extreme outrages. The legends, meekly fixed like deer caught in harsh headlights. The young artists smelled blood, capitulation, and chanted: “BORING BORING BORING” over and over…
Dick Higgins, with a bemused smile, stood stiff under a huge stovepipe tophat, as he twirled around on a motorized lazysusan while a young woman in satin held a roll of red ribbon, which slowly wrapped around Higgins from feet to forehead. Another legend impersonated a frozen pizza on a turntable. One artist painted a woman’s body with light. Larry Miller pushed an old electric piano mid-stage under a bare bulb, cranked a handle attached to a pulley that slooooooowly lowered a plaster hand with forefinger outstretched. The finger played one note, a note duly documented by many handheld tape recorders.
Alison Knowles, in a pleated red dress, played a cello with a saw blade as I observed Mitsuko’s anxious, delicate neck muscles tense up as she stood on tiptoes to see over and between the taller people. Yoko finally emerged with two pairs of scissors held aloft. She kneeled silently before Knowles. Some étudiants demanded an exact historical reenactment. Others demanded surprise. A guy next to me proposed “plastic explosives blowing off sections of the dress.”
Yoko began snipping away patches of Knowles’s dress as she sawed through the cello. The scissor cuts were amplified by a dangling microphone. Mitsuko nudged her way to the edge of the stage, me following. Yoko drifted to the edge of the stage where she handed out the patches to people in the audience. I reached out with great verve, lunging for a patch, snatching it from Yoko’s fingers, just as Yoko’s scissor scratched my arm, drawing blood. It was superficial but looked dramatic.
“I apologize very much,” Yoko said with a slight bow before me. I was attended to by the 2 catgirls who Mitsuko had by now taken a disliking for whatever reason the way she also despised babies and dogs. The kneeling girls opened a white box with a red cross on it, overreacting to my injury, which gave me great pleasure. The crowd gave us room as the 2 daubed my bleeding scratch with a gauze pad soaked in iodine. Sympathetic little noises emerged from their red flexed lips. Some attendees snapped photos or simply stared, believing I was an integral part of the event.
“I don’t get it. Je ne comprend nothing.” Mitsuko declared, holding a patch of dress triumphantly but bewilderedly over her head.
“So many people have nothing to wear in our world. So what’s the purpose?”
“That there IS no purpose.”
“There you go, Mr. Artsmart, speaking in riddles, hoping to confuse and take advantage of me.” She had said this often enough that I surmised she was actually fantasizing about it.
“Meanwhile, you could dress half of Paris’s homeless.”
“Tell me about it; it is shameful but I am also kind of proud. And now I’m proud of being able to be ashamed.”
I stared at my wound, I took my eye off her … and then, she was gone. Or had never been there.
When I got home, Musette was lying in bed, not raising her head to even acknowledge my return, asking: “What is 11-letter word for a man who carries on flirtations with women he will never marry.”
“Why?”
“It is just a mots croisés, a crossword so je ne deviens pas fou.” Studies show crosswords help us maintain our sanity.
“11 letters?”
“Yes, maybe you know. It begins with “PH,” an “R” at ze end.”
“Philanderer?”
“I knew it that you would know this word.”
The next day I went over to Mitsuko’s to frame and hang the rabbit-shaped patch of dress. Punctual I was.
“I have the perfect frame under my bed.”
As we together framed and hung the dress patch she confessed: “I have good news: a photographer saw me there and wants to photograph me.”
“Don’t they all.”
“Little jealous?” She strutted around the room like some model on the runway of our lives. She only ever became her full self when she could see how mesmerized I was by her face. An erotic shadow needs a warm sun. Is this what they mean by auto-erotic?
Maybe she did not mean it selfishly, but any interest she showed me always depended on how the attention boomeranged back to flatter her as she waited to be praised for this very act of generosity.
“See how they turn in toward one another?”
Her breasts perfect, perfectly preserved, perfectly moisturized, hoisted, venerated … the slightest giggle provoking oleaginous undulations …
“I heard turned-inward nipples means a person is a self-absorbed narcissist.”
I wobbled on her fake 18th-century settee like I was riding a bucking bronco. I reached to touch her cheek, finger wiping errant strands of hair from her eyes.
“You ARE a cheater, cheating with me on your own girlfriend.” If this was cheating then wasn’t she cheating on Musette, the closest to a woman friend she had, or at least someone who now tolerated her for more than 10 minutes. I touched her lips with my thumb.
“No, poppa don’t.” This gave me a start like touching a live wire. Was she breathing heavier, deeper? My knuckles inadvertently slid across the underside of her breast.
“Ne pas toucher.”
She observed me, observing her, me showing signs of arousal: fingertips perspiring, heart palpitations, her passive-aggressive immodesty floating on a legacy of puritanism informed by deep-rooted haphephobia.
“‘Poppa’!?”
“I never said ‘poppa’!” Mitsuko.
“Until now.”
“I know what I said cuz it’s coming out of my mouth.”
“You did.”
“If so, it doesn’t mean anything.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I’m getting a tattoo right here,” she pulled down a strap revealing so much cleavage that it must have another name by now, “The number 7 Metro from Maison Blanche to Gare de Lyon as an artery.”
That photographer she’d met at ReFluxUs used resources to get her number, called her, they met and within a month, 6 of her poses had been decided upon in his Bastille studio. They were printed and would be distributed to tourist, art shops and news kiosks throughout Paris.
“He must be connected.”
“He’s famous. Works for Marie Claire, Vogue, Citroën, Kenzo shooting runway fashion shows – and ME! I’ll soon be all over Paris and eventually France! People writing on my back, sending me to Australia and Asia.”
“His name’s Gilles Goude.”
“OK.”
“Will you come with me to visit kiosks so I can see for myself?”
“Sure.” She meant directly. Now. She wore sensible shoes and a diaphanous blouse.
“Décolletage premier étage.” Was I quoting Gainsbourg?
She smiled. Since this was all about her, she was happy. Her smile almost authentic, generous.
If this was a documentary a VoiceOver would try to explain why men were mesmerized by cleavage: “Homo habilis, the first true human, evolved in Africa 2 million years ago and it is habilis males who mated with women from behind and today the intermammary cleft signals ur memories of the intergluteal cleft …”
Gilles had printed out a list of chainshops and souvenir vendors that carried art postcards. She allowed me to mark a route on an old map because she had no understanding of maps, but, as she was quick to add: “I always find a man who knows where he’s going.”
Today’s route would take us past plenty of souvenir shops and news kiosks from her Rue Poissy to Rue Monge, Rue Mouffetard Market, Île St. Louis, Boulevard St. Germain, La Sorbonne, finishing off at Studio des Ursulines.
The first stops were disappointing but at the Rue Mouffetard Market we found several vendors carrying all six of her artsy black-&-white postcards. The trope: comely stares, glistening, pouty lips, hair flipped into face equals mystique, a slight lean into the camera highlighting her tactful décolleté presentation of unplucked fruits – a map of a Paris arrondisement as backdrop.
There we stood, she craning her neck, eyes scanning 360s, to see if anyone noticed that she was the model of those six postcards. Nope, not today.
The next day, we watched someone buy some of her cards in the Marx Ay Coca postcard store with its thousands of postcards. She was delighted even if the American man in baggy khaki shorts, and a tee shirt that proclaimed: DAD BOD, showing a Santa-like big-belly figure much like his own. But a sale was a sale and a fan was a fan.
“How much do you get?” We took a break in a café, with her even treating me to a glass of wine. She had already bought a set and pulled them from the small white paper bag and laid them out to study in such a way that anyone passing by our table could share in the delight of her.
“The postcard’s cost 9 francs.”
“A buck fifty.”
“I get 10 centimes.”
“That’s like under 7%.”
“It’s a start. I am a natural. Easy peasy.”
“If you sell 2 million cards a year, you earn a living wage.”
I watched her remove her sandals and massage her feet before we continued onward on our meanderings she described as “quests of purpose.”
By the end of the week we’d gone out in each cardinal direction on 4-hour quests. She snapped photos of the card racks displaying her cards outside souvenir shops. She eavesdropped, overhearing stories that delighted her immensely.
By the end of our 4th “quest,” we found ourselves in the Luxembourg Gardens where she felt invigorated, inspired that she, without thinking, traipsed la-la through the mazes, out of breath and suddenly out of nowhere … hugged me with awkward vigor at the Fontain des Quatres Parties du Monde, even entered the fountain waters – ref. Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain, dragging me in with her.
We sat in white wrought-iron chairs, legs glistening with chlorinated water, facing the fountain where she caught her breath, sighing deeply, so deep, that maybe this meant she had overcome her fear of being touched. I continued my lecture: “Sexual attraction to breasts is a male brain organization effect from puberty. The breasts function as secondary sex characteristics; cleavage represents a sexual signal imitating the cleft between the buttocks.”
“Whatev.” We stared at the hissing geyser and the glee of a child squatting, splashing in the water. I thought: grabbing numerous postcards of herself from a rack and then purchasing them was orgasm to her.
“There is no mystery to naked breasts cuz there’s nothing left to fantasize.” She observed, standing at an outdoor postcard rack at Obj’Ai Trouvé on Rue Mouffetard. She was counting the cards to send to people back in the States, NY, her father in Japan.
“Is there a top 10 for art photography postcards?” She wondered.
“I’d vote for you. Being famous means demands, though.” I said as if I had any experience in this realm, “more and more demanding demands. Eventually leading to softcore.”
“Softcore?”
“Porn.”
“It’s not porn. Softcore is sensual.”
“They’ll want more, hard and harder …”
I grabbed a stack of 3 each of her 6 postcards for her, shuffled them, tapped them on the counter then, with my thumb, flicked the stack to make of her a flip-card blue “movie” one might have seen through a visored viewing slot in the time of Kiki de Montparnasse.
We waited our turn in line, holding her 18 cards. I was suddenly struck by a charming earnestness as she attempted to engage life, figure out humanity. Somehow she meant well …
She gazed over her shoulder at me: “It’s not right, me buying my own cards. …”
So I bought all 18 for her.
“Congratulations.” Smile to smile. I leaned in to kiss her cheek but was met by only air.
“Here’s one of me for you.”
It was too early for her to start reaping the benefits of her ubiquity and call herself a star. But neither that nor the so-called “burden of glorious trappings” was going to stop her. Discussion: Is the belief in believing just hot thin air? Discount religion?
She turned to me, with her eyes looking past me, and very matter-of-factly said: “Oh, by the way, there is no George. Sorry.”
- ••
- Not to be confused with the famous French pop-rock band Les Rita Mitsouko, fronted by singer-ex-stripper Catherine Ringer.
** She may very well have been a trendsetter for the toxic narcissism promoted by too-real-beauty TikTok videos of the 2020s.
* This story will be included in the developing story collection The Laugh Track Fails