When I was in college, my younger sister took a year abroad with a host family in Nantes, France. She got on well with them, and my parents and I were invited to join them for the Christmas holidays. We, never having visited France before, decided to junk the usual holiday traditions and go. And so began what proved to be a coming of age experience such as I had never imagined.
It was not that I was completely naΓ―ve (those few relevant experiences comprised at the time of two rather forgettable groanings in the back seat of an '88 Chevette and a few drunken mutual gropings in darkened dormitory beds). It is simply that I had not encountered a woman like Etoile before.
She caught my eye directly when I stepped onto the train platform in Nantes and I had that catch-breath feeling of connection and desire, a bolt from the blue. Her hair was a shining black, blowing about her face and the high collar of her dark overcoat. Her hand clasped her coat closed, but there was an alluring triangle of pearly-white skin visible below her neckscarf and between the V of her collars, revealing the first rise of her firm, swelling breasts. But it was the eyes that did it, dark and sparkling. Imagine my surprise when I saw my sister next to her and realized that this was the mother in the family we were visiting!
Her name means star in French, and while we fussed with bags and made our greetings, my mind kept recalling a line of verse from a long-lost French author
La nuit est noire, mais la lune et les etoiles brillent (The night is black, but the moon and the stars shine through)
She kissed me on both cheeks, and her breath was warm. She smelled wonderful, like lavender in the evening, but not quite. It was more like a flower I had not discovered but now desperately needed to search out. I was enthralled, starry-eyed for a moment, and then I turned and her husband, according to his tradition, shook my hand and kissed me on both cheeks, causing me further befuddlement and feelings of weirdness. Cheeks or no, I'd never been kissed by a man before, and I wasn't feeling that European yet.
They were wonderful hosts. The husband was a local judge, much older that Etoile, and though his name was Jacques, I took to thinking of him as The Barrister, as that was the title on the door of his home office. He was a tall lanky man, and he cooked the Christmas dinner himself, bounding around their home in a chef's hat that nearly grazed the ceilings. Now Christmas dinner in France is something altogether different from the load-up-the-table-and-eat experience I was accustomed to. I lost track of the number of courses around seven. From the start of the hot hors d'oeuvres to the last glass of port, we were eating for more than five hours, and the sun had set. As the coffee and chocolates helped rouse us all from our slumberous states, the music began in the great room.
French folk music with a strong beat and vigorous men's voices boomed from the speakers in the room and the guests began to dance. I sat at the side, talking with one of the grandfathers, who had taken a shine to me because I was the only one of the family who spoke passable French, and he wanted to find out about the strange customs of the far-away city of San Francisco, among others.
I felt the touch on my shoulder and looked up, and there was Etoile, cheeks glowing and eyes shining, slightly out of breath from dancing with her daughter. She held my eye as she held out her hand, and when I hesitated, she glanced away, then back, and then she winked at me. C'mon. I stood, and put my hand at her back. She smelled still of some exotic midnight flower, and we began to jig around with the others to the rushing beat of the song. She was all eyes and smiles, glimmer and sparkle. I pretended not to notice.
The song finished and then began the first slow number of the night, and I had a moment of panic but she would not let go my hand, and so I pulled her closer and began to dance. I could feel the heat of her body through the light material of her blue print dress. Her skin was perfect, and the few lines at the corner of her eyes were all that belied her age.