I studied French at university. As part of the deal they sent us all to France and so, at the age of twenty-one, I found myself living in Paris for a year. Some people were teachers. I was a student, though, and I had a great time. But, being a student in Paris, I was anything but rich. Money was always a problem and one way that I tried to make some was by giving private lessons in English. There were often messages on the notice board at the university asking for people to teach somebody or other and, after I'd tried a couple of other things that were pretty hopeless, I decided to give it a go.
My first effort was disastrous, a creepy middle-aged so-called businessman who I went to see in his office and who wasted no time at all in making it horribly clear that there was rather more on his mind than just a bit of grammar and conversation. I managed to get out with my dignity pretty much intact, but it put me off trying that particular line of work for a while!
Meanwhile I went and found the man of my dreams, a gorgeous guy called Luc - tall, long dark hair, blue eyes, sensitive, intelligent, funny, everything you could wish for - and of course he turned out to be totally one hundred per cent gay and although we really got on well together he just wasn't interested at all in anything physical, so that was another disappointment.
My Parisian hat-trick of crap experiences with men came with the lover of my next private student. This one (the student) was a woman called Danielle, who lived in a lovely flat in a wealthy part of town. Her husband was a businessman with a talent for making money that was bettered only by his talent for never being at home. She was tall, thirty-something, and very, very, attractive. Her talents were mostly for blowing his money as fast as he could make it. My job was to give her an hour's conversation twice a week, for a payment that was no doubt small change to her but made quite a bit of difference to an impoverished student like me.
It didn't take me long to figure out why Danielle wanted English lessons. She was bored to tears. No kids, no job, no money worries, and a husband who was either away on business or came home so late he might just as well still have been away on business. Not that I minded. She wasn't the world's most exciting person but she was nice enough and I suppose that for her our part-English part-French conversations were a break from her constant round of beauty salons, fitness clubs, shopping, lunches, galleries, and all the rest of it. Which, of course, included a lover. She loved talking about him, but he turned out to be a bit of a parody, actually, a hairy-chested macho imbecile with no buttons on his shirt and a mobile phone that kept going off at the most ridiculous moments. The first time we met he propositioned me the minute she was out of the door, and he wasn't exactly subtle about it. I wasn't very subtle in my reply, either, and from then on we would no doubt have been at daggers drawn if we'd met again, but I think Danielle probably knew him pretty well and made sure our paths didn't cross.
I'm not sure why, but for some reason she took quite a shine to me and took it upon herself to introduce me to various aspects of Paris life that I wouldn't have come across otherwise. Some of them were pretty interesting, such as one or two wonderful restaurants she took me to and some out-of-the-way places I'd never have stumbled across in a million years otherwise, but one of the real low points was the afternoon parties her group of female friends used to have, which were basically just rampant with bitchiness, jealousy, gossip and boredom. The format was pretty much the same at all of these, about a dozen of these very glamorous but generally nasty women being civilly unpleasant to and about each other but scared not to turn up for fear of what might go on during their absence, and after I'd been to two or three of them I was fed up to the back teeth and was all set to stop going, but Danielle was hosting the next one and I didn't want to insult her and so I let her persuade me. And I'm glad I did, too, because that's where I met Natalie.
Our eyes just met across a crowded room. It's a terrible cliché, isn't it? In this case, though, it was absolutely true. I was just sitting quietly in a corner, drinking a cup of tea and minding my own business while trying hard not to focus too much on what the women closest to me were saying, something about who was fucking who at the sauna and how that showed that her taste in men was as bad as her taste in clothes, when I got the sensation I was being looked at. Know that feeling? I glanced up and there she was. "Stunning" isn't a word I'd use very often, but it fitted her. Early 'thirties, straight shoulder-length ash-blonde hair parted at the side, skin glowing with health and a deep tan the colour of caramel, and wearing a simple sleeveless knee-length white dress that showed off to perfection a nice slender figure and shapely arms and calves. Just beautiful. My eyes met hers. She saw me look at her and calmly looked straight back, her lips slightly parted in a smile.
It was a weird moment. It was as if all of a sudden there were just the two of us in the room. All the chattering women, all the gossip, all the clattering of cutlery and china, it all seemed to vanish, and in its place there was a wonderfully calm silence and just the two of us, me and this glorious blonde woman, our eyes locked together and communing on some abstract plane that lay way, way beyond words or anything like that. Of course, it only lasted a moment. Somebody said something to her and the spell was broken, but there seemed to be a kind of inevitability about the way that a while later we found ourselves side by side at a table laden with cakes. My arm brushed against hers as we both reached for something at the same time, and we both laughed and apologised at the same time.
"I'm Natalie," she said in a soft musical voice, holding her hand out and leveling those grey eyes of her at me once more. They were very penetrating. It cost me an effort but I met her stare and took her hand without my gaze wavering for an instant.
"I'm Sarah," I answered. "I noticed you across the room. You were looking at me."
"Yes. I like to look." She cocked her head and thrust her chin out in a determined way as she said this, and her eyes, still fixed on me, seemed to widen as she spoke, as if she was trying to force her words deep inside me. I could literally feel the electricity between us. I felt that if I touched her dress there would be great flashes of lightning, but when I glanced around the room nobody was paying any attention at all to us, so it was obviously not something everybody could notice. They were all wrapped up in their own concerns. I decided to play along with her. I was in the mood to play chicken a bit and wanted to show I could give as good as I got.
"It's nice to be looked at," I said, "especially by someone as beautiful as you."
"Do you know what I am thinking when I look at you?"
"Yes, I think so," I answered, trying, not very successfully, to keep the tremor out of my voice. "I think it's the same as I am thinking when I look at you. Isn't it?"
"And what's that?"
"You tell me."
"Oh no," she smiled. "That is not the sort of thing to be talking about at a nice gathering of ladies - she curled her lip as she said the word ladies - like this. And anyway, this week I am, so to say, hors de combat. You are a woman too. You understand these things." And with this she pressed her hands to her abdomen and shrugged in what I had come to recognise as a very French way. It didn't matter, though. What we had to say had already been said. The rest would keep. We allowed the conversation to drift to other matters.
Sooner or later it touched on tennis.
"Do you play?" Natalie asked.
"Badly. And you?"
"So-so. Would you like to play with me?"
I resisted, for once, the temptation to say the obvious, but let her know it had crossed my mind with what I hoped was a comic expression. She smirked, so I guess it succeeded.
