The shuttered apartment was so warm I didn't want to leave. The food was good, the conversation lively. The host was an American film critic, and I was young and ambitious and I wanted to get him onside so that maybe he would give me some freelance work writing about the movies. I was the last to leave, and we talked into the small hours. He was gay, but I knew he wouldn't make a move on me. He offered to call me a cab, but I told him the streets around his apartment in the Faubourg Montmartre were always full of them: I would have no problems.
Neither of us was aware, cocooned in that warm flat, that while we coffeehoused 6 inches of snow had suddenly fallen on Paris. As the outside door slapped shut behind me, I took in a sight I had never seen before: Paris, empty. There was no sign that a human being had ever visited this outlandish white place. There were no people, no cars, certainly no taxis. There wasn't even any sound. I pondered whether I should ring the bell again and explain my predicament: but then the enchantment of what was before me took over. I had a long walk ahead of me, right across the ancient heart of Paris to my tiny garret on the Left Bank, but it was a walk I knew I would never have a chance to experience again.
So suddenly there was noise in this silent city: the grainy crunch of rather too-thin shoes on fresh snow; the warm laboured breath of the determined pedestrian; the soft expletives of wonder as each turn revealed something new, something refreshed and redefined. Thankfully it is always warmer when it snows, and my spirited walking made up for my lack of a hat or scarf, though I was glad of the lined leather gloves my girlfriend had given me when last I saw her in London.
The wonders of the newly naked city took me out of my direct route home. The distant green and gold and now white of the Opèra drew me down the Boulevard des Italiens, way off my southerly course, and then the prospect of the severe Madeleine softened by snow kept me tramping and crepitating on my south-westerly route. A good hour, perhaps, I had been walking, and staring at the church where Bel-Ami had prospered made me think of the warmth of my bed. Not being a fan of the desolation of Place de la Concorde, I wound my way through the side streets onto the rue des Pyramides, passing without a glance the gilt statue of the ancestor of my future, as yet unmet, wife and crossed the deserted rue de Rivoli into the Jardins des Tuileries.
My thoughts had been full of the growing dampness of my feet and the ache of limbs unused to the effort of walking through snow. But as I crossed the Tuileries a realisation grew that now, finally, I could have my moment of consummation with my favourite Parisienne, and the prospect warmed me and quickened my steps.
From the courtyard of the Louvre down to Place de la Concorde ran the formal gardens of the Kings and Queens of France, the Tuileries. I am not fond of formal gardens and usually the Tuileries are packed with tourists waiting to visit the Louvre or recovering from said visit. But scattered about the gardens are the wonderful statues by Aristide Maillol: life-size bronzes of nude women in arresting and unusual poses. One in particular I adored: a naked girl, resting on her right hip which was the only contact statue made with pedestal, her strong, shapely legs straight, toes pointed; her torso cocked upwards, her left arm held straight out along her line of sight, the fingers cupped strangely so that she might be sighting something through them, or holding (and contemplating) something invisible held within them.
She lay, as though roughly thrown, just above a sunken part of the gardens, and my steps grew more hurried as I got nearer, realising that I could now, in this hivernal emptiness, finally touch those strident out-thrust legs, those tempting nates, that deliciously carved back without anyone officiously telling me not to.
She was delicately iced with snow along her length, but even so she looked both serious and coquettish at the same time. I slowly approached her, pulling off one glove to reach a bare hand to her no doubt frigid bronze flesh.
"Elle est belle, n'est-ce pas?"
I must have choked some recognisable expletive as I turned to see the figure behind me.
"I'm so sorry, I startled you," she said, in heavily accented English. A woman, in a long black coat over boots, a fur hat on her head and a heavy scarf draped around her.
"You are American?"
"English," I managed to say, trying to recover from my hour-long solitude, so instantly ruptured.
"And you also like l'oeuvre de M. Maillol?"
"I admire his work, yes, but I have always loved this statue."
The woman came closer to me.
"She looks cold lying naked in the snow, doesn't she?"
I had recovered enough from my shock to think that perhaps I ought to hold an end up in this conversation.
"She looks, as ever, impervious I think."
She turned to look at me. I saw that she was much older than my 25, perhaps twice that, but handsome still. She looked down at my bare hand and smiled.
"I think I interrupted you. You wanted this chance to touch her, non? Sans les gardiens et les touristes?"
I felt embarrassed that she had read my mind so easily, and she must have read that easily too.
"Allons-y." She took my arm in her gloved hand and led me closer to the statue. "Dina won't mind."
I looked at her, wondering what she meant.
"Dina is the model for this statue you love so much. She's an art dealer now. We say hello now and then. Of course, she was very young when she sat for this. Can't you tell...."
She startled me anew by taking my ungloved hand and placing it square on one of the statues high, pert breasts.
"...these are the tits of a young woman."
And they were. And they were icy cold.
"They were warmer then."
The nipples, though sculpted in detumescence, were nevertheless hard against my palm.
