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= Paris Affaire =

Love Story of a Young Poet and His Angel in the City of Light

Page 9.

Her footsteps, in half-heels, sounded muffled on the drenched and green-covered sidewalk above. Clad in a white dress that reached from her neck down to mid-thigh, she walked airily, innocently, in an elegant swish of slender limbs. She was blonde, and had that fresh, athletic, long face, blue eyes, and pink cheekbones of which advertisements are made. Her skin had a smooth, creamy tan like a flan pudding. She didn’t notice him, and perhaps was indeed not conscious of being watched. For this reason, her walk and her facial expression were plain and unassuming, but to Marc Fontbleu she was a goddess, and he frantically resumed his mowing.

Later, he went inside for a soda. Bending down in the wood-paneled darkness of the austere break room, to remove a cola he had just bought, he was startled by the whiteness of her dress as she came in.

“Oh, hi,” she said. It was the obligatory greeting between people working for a long time in the same office building, who never get to know each other but eventually learn the contents of one another’s clothes closets just from the daily variation among similar themes.

He backed away from the machine, removing the pop top from his cola can. She sidled past and inserted her quarter. He felt awkward, sweaty, and caught a whiff of some subtle perfume, some air of freshness about her.

Her coin slid easily down the innards of the machine, but her pressing of various buttons with a glossy fingernail produced no result. At last, seeing her blush of frustration, he excused himself. “Allow me…” Groaning with effort, he bent down on his knees, inserted a grubby hand into the machine’s cool guts, and fished about until he felt a ledge high up in its intestines. On that ledge, his stretching fingers just barely touched the convex, crimped bottom edge of an aluminum can. “I have it now…” he gasped, and with a final effort (his shoulder being in the way) he freed the can and brought it down, balancing in a juggling act on his fingertips.

She smiled at his effort.

He rose, leaving the can for her. It lay in the slot where it should have fallen in the first place. They faced each other briefly before the machine. She was nestled up against the machine, her slender body hunched in a motion of preparing to retrieve the can, and her eyes darted full of pent-in sentiments from a glance at his dirty hands to the dully gleaming can and back to the muscles of his legs.

He stood transfixed as she bent close past him to seize the can. He inhaled deeply the scent of her fresh skin, the disintegration of perfume atoms in the warmth between her roused breasts. He stood back, soaking in the gentle but enveloping ambience of her faint smile. His breath—rattling with heartbeats—caught in his throat.

Around her eyes were the earliest of faint wrinkles, as if caused by the intense and mysterious and subtle melting effect of her smile. She must be about thirty, seven years past his own age.

Rising, she appeared startled by his attentive stare. She seemed utterly surprised, and then a bit cool and disenchanted by his hard, hungry look.

“Excuse me,” he stammered, and the smile blossomed out again, crinkling the corners of her mouth and illuminating her skin pores.

They shared that dull, tea-green soaking glow in the gloomy basement room. Perhaps there is some springtime hormone that sets cells ablaze with new hope and yearning.

Their eyes met, engaged, and would not let loose. There arced between them a lightning of emotion. As she once said later, she could have turned away, and as he agreed, that would have been the end of it. He noticed the veiled, dull-faceted diamond, the glimmering platinum ring on her finger in that tea-soaked light—a green ambience flooding the dark wood-paneled basement room.

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