City of Love my Arse
Only stone and steel accept my love
When Ella Fitzgerald sang about loving Paris in the spring, she probably wasn’t thinking of the Gare De L’Est’s left luggage facility on a rain-sodden April Tuesday. It was here, nonetheless, that I found myself last week, using a texted combination to retrieve the key to an absent friend’s nearby flat from a locker. I’d agreed to cat-sit while my friend was on holiday – it had seemed a great idea, but the grim weather, absence of mates and my surfeit of unfinished work to do pooped things somewhat. My friend’s shaky broadband connection meant I could only get internet access by sitting on the loo and using the neighbour’s network, while the cat had only 4 settings: eat, sleep, moult and hiss. I soon started feeling like a marginally butcher version of Carrie Bradshaw, in that bit of SATC when she moved to Paris and got instantly mournful upon realising that everyone spoke French.
But wait a moment – isn’t Paris the city of love, or something? I decided to try out its romantic possibilities by setting up an Internet date. After hours on the bog, I got chatting to a certain Laurent, a wry-looking sort with a nice beaky nose and smart line in chat room banter (I speak French – so eat me).
Laurent ended up taking me to dinner somewhere with arty customers and rude staff, and proved quietly charming despite a disconcerting preoccupation with Jade Goody and Susan Boyle. As things turned slightly smoochy, I persuaded myself we might live out some dreamy tourist fantasy where we’d end up tango-ing around a bar room, then go up rickety stairs to his garret to find that, like La Boheme’s Mimi, his tiny hand was frozen.
Not likely. After coffee, Laurent abruptly steered us towards a seedy club around the corner, hoping to fiddle me in one of its dingy recesses. Now seedy clubs for gentlemen are worthy institutions in their way – they’ve enabled many a hungry man to find satisfying company without missing the last tube. But as Laurent and I had been chatting with polite warmth and gone no further than sub-table footsie, the sudden shift seemed a bit wham, bam, thank you madame. His grappling with my belt buckle and yanking the buttons on my shirt with nimble fingers in some damp-floored catacomb hadn’t been the ending I was hoping for. Wouldn’t he at least try taking me home? No – he lived far out, had an early start and a cat allergy, so had chosen what he thought was the least worst option. In two minds, I let him grapple my belt open and rummage a bit, but he gave up in disappointment when he found that, as I found the situation a turn-off, not much was going on in there.
Laurent was non-plussed and a little surprised. While I’d shoe-horned him into the role of holiday fantasy, to him I was essentially a passer-by intended as a fleeting distraction from a hectic schedule. I was piqued to realise this, but was it really fair to blame him for my ruffled feathers? If you treat any place as a vending machine for lazy romantic clichés, you sometimes end up with a metaphorical slap in the face
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Finally somebody who dared bust this deeply-rooted myth. Paris may be the city of love for shopping, expensive tasteless food, good pastry and enchanting cologne, but it definitely is not the city of love.
The city of love is within us all. That blood pump, ya know.
Of course, Paris is the city of love when you’re already IN love. Like London, Berlin, Vienna, you name it. Now to find love in Paris is as hard as anywhere else. I’ve been living in this town for many a year now and know what I’m talking about. As for the seedy club, I think I know where that Laurent-character took you (sounds like ‘Le Dépôt’). Been there once, albeit only in the dance-floor section; found it louche, pathetic and somwhat sick. I admit, it was two in the morning and only some drugged-up, half-naked leftovers were solitarily moving around to House music. I think I could see the back-sections were much more busy but alright, call me old-fashioned, I do prefer to shag in a bed or a bathtub. So I understand perfectly what you’re writing about, I understand your feelings and above all, I would have shared that tell-tale absence of palpable results in the boxer-brief-section you’ve experienced. All this to say that I really enjoyed your post; or, as my fellow Austrian had stated with that gruesome accent of his: ‘I’ll be back!’
I agree with Dieter, Paris is the city of love when you’re already in love. I sometimes wonder too, where the typical latin romantism has been lately. Most guys are interested in quickies and leave your life the same way they entered into. But anyway, there’s still romantic guys in France like anywhere else… try L.A. for instance