Mimi

Strange, how the human mind sometimes works. Today, while sitting at a breakfast cafe on Columbus Avenue, I overheard an attractive young lady next to me filling the ears of her boyfriend with some rather shallow talk, while her unimpressed partner was patiently eating a large dish of scrambled eggs and hash brown in front of him. As the lady with whom I had a business appointment was running late, I couldn’t help noticing the changes in the face and body language of the boyfriend who had meanwhile finished his plate spotlessly clean and was nervously sipping the content of the water glass in front of him. In fifteen minutes he hadn’t spoken a single word other than an occasional “hm – hm”, but while his eyes had originally expressed pride and love for his blond girlfriend, his looks turned progressively inwards, and the uncontrollable movements of his fingers spoke a different language – a language of increased annoyance that silently screamed: “Let me get out of here, quick, quick!” That’s when the flash of a long forgotten story of a similar circumstance hit my mind - the story of Mimi. * Mimi was a gorgeous young French woman in her early thirties. Her long blond hair, her sensitive lips, plentiful breasts, in short: all her amazing female attributes, called to mind the image of an overflowing jar of honey and reminiscent of Martine Carol, the French equivalent of Marilyn Monroe, who –at the time- used to be the main porn star of my erotic dreams. The year was 1956. I was 19, and I had come the 600 kilometers from Schaffhausen to Paris in the unsynchronized, pre-war Volkswagen model of my friend who was then 24 and madly in love with a 40-year-old married woman. During our Parisian vacations, my friend was going to live in the smoke-filled ambiance of a dubious existentialistic commune in the attic of an old house in the “Les Halles” Quarters, where the famous ladies (those who are selling the rights to explore their most inner secrets) were swarming like bees all over the sidewalks of the shady neighborhood. When my friend and I first walked up that wooden staircase of the narrow 19th Century house to meet his suspicious friends, I felt like climbing the Leaning Tower of Pisa, where one would be amazed how it could escape the laws of gravity in such defiant ways. As to my friend, he was readily welcomed all right. But when the loosely dressed, filthy haired female and male characters noticed my bourgeois appearance, they instantly punished me with their disdaining looks, which unequivocally told me to get the hell lost. Whereupon I left my friend in a hurry among those animals and went searching for a boarding house that would be more hospitable to my naïve looks. By the end of the day I found what seemed to be a decent hotel right behind the Paris Opera, an area where people with overflowing libidos were able to rent a room by the hour and dwell in togetherness on a mattress that resembled a bath tub, with a mirror on the ceiling and a picture of the Virgin Mary on the wall. The friendly, middle-aged lady manager, who was conducting her shady hotel business, told me that she liked me and so she gave me a tiny walk-up room on the fifth floor, where the water line had just previously ended, and the toilet was at the other ending of the hallway. But the rate was so ridiculously cheap that it left me with more leisure money than I had anticipated. * My father had a weird way of trying to educate his son in money matters. The deal was that he would only give me my weekly allowance upon presentation of a small booklet in which I had to keep meticulous accounting records of every penny I spent, which I found all the more to be an intolerable invasion of my privacy, as my father himself was a rather chaotic man. Most of the time I got away without showing him my smeary record booklet that was falling apart and had become barely readable. And –of course- I always had my other sources of income, such as the sale of insurance policies and all kinds of small trades in antiques, small animals and weird looking objects. Whenever I was about to leave on a trip, however, I had to ask my father for vacation money. At those occasions he was merciless, leaving me with no other option but to lock myself up in my room and use all my fantasies to produce the accounting records that would bear testimony of how I also could have spent my pocket money over the course of the past two or three months. For vacation money, however, my father was usually rather generous, even though he gave it to me in a weird way: while the regular spending allowance for my trips was always quite meager and would not allow for any extravagant follies, my father regularly handed me an additional bundle of money to make sure I would not be without funds in case of an emergency. Of course, I always made sure that such an emergency situation would arise (at least in my post-vacation report) to justify the use of those handy additional resources. My father never really expected me to bring back the extra money, but I had to make sure that there was always at least one cultural event attached to the use the extra money. Invariably, I had to send a postcard from the most important cultural places in whatever country or city I was spending my vacation. In the case of Paris, according to my father, that place on top of his cultural agenda was definitely the ‘Jeu de Paume’, the museum where all the Impressionist masters were exhibited, before the government moved them over to the Gare d’Orsay. This is how the very next day after moving into my new headquarters behind the Paris Opera, I suppressed my barbaric instincts and walked across the Jardin de Luxembourg to the famous Jeu de Paume. It would be my alibi to tap into my father’s reserve fund. * That’s where I met Mimi. Unlike me, the beautiful lady was standing in awe in front of a peach-colored Renoir painting. As she moved to the next masterpiece, I was posting myself in her way so the art-loving blond lady inadvertently bumped into me and had to excuse herself. I then repeated the maneuver a few more times, until she got the idea and greeted me with a smile. About an hour later, when both of us coincidentally reached the end of the exhibition, it was almost a given that Mimi would accept my invitation to buy her a cup of coffee at one of the nearby street cafés. Mimi was at least 15 years older than me. I guess that being courted by such a young kid must have bemused her immensely. During coffee she told me that she was a schoolteacher, and that she was teaching French and Spanish at some high school at the outskirts of Paris. I carefully avoided the subject of my age and the fact that I could have been one of her students, hoping that she would rather think of me as a college boy whose appearance seemed younger than the reality. Whatever the case might have been, it did not take the gorgeous lady very long to find out that I was of a rather generous nature. She gladly accepted my charitable invitation to lunch, and during the following three days I became Mimi’s constant companion and financier to the movies, theatres and subsequent dinners. At the end of every evening, Mimi and I boarded a taxi, and I brought her home like a real gentleman. She would kiss me on the forehead, but never did the idea occur to her that I would have liked to be invited upstairs for a cup of coffee. On the third night, she allowed me to kiss her sensuous lips, but she didn’t prolong the act, as I had so desperately longed for. Still, I was able to extort Mimi’s promise that we would meet again the following evening. I was madly in love and couldn’t sleep the whole night, thinking of how to tell Mimi that my only thought was to take her to bed. The following evening, after my finances had reached a dangerous low point, due to an exuberant dinner and a healthy bottle of red wine, I took all my courage together and managed to get my message across the table. To my great surprise, Mimi seemed to have expected my words; at least she didn’t show much of a reaction. “Not tonight,” she replied, as if she had asked me to hand over the bred basket. “But tomorrow evening we are going to make love together.” I was full of excitement and joy, and that night again I was unable to close my eyes. The following day I wandered around Paris for many hours, like a sleepwalker. The only subject I had in mind was the dream of my upcoming night with Mimi. * At 7 p.m. I met Mimi at the Opera Café. She was so beautiful that I had to constantly admire her while acting and talked like a fool. All I was thinking of was my dream of going to bed with this most beautiful of all women who ever lived on the surface of the earth. After about an hour she asked me straight out if I wanted to go to the hotel now. Of course I wanted to go to the hotel. That’s all I had in mind. I was in Heaven. The managing lady at the hotel didn’t hide her surprise, when I asked for my key in the company of such a gorgeous woman. She even gave me a very eloquent twinkle of the eye, as Mimi and I started climbing up the stairs. After the third floor, when the staircase became ever more shabby, Mimi turned around and gave me a pretty gloomy look that seemed to say: “Is this where you think you can bring somebody like me?” And when we finally arrived on the fifth floor and I opened the door to my room that not even a maid would have slept in, she turned to me and exclaimed: “Are you kidding me, you don’t even have a bath, or a bidet, and not even current water in here? Do you think I am going to make love to you in this lousy room?” I was stunned. In my universe, neither the location nor the circumstances of the place where I was about to engage in the act of my ultimate erotic adventure could bear any relevance. All that counted was the act itself. But Mimi thought otherwise. She insisted I had to go down and ask the manager for a more suitable room for the occasion. Madame was obliging. Immediately, she handed me the keys to a spacious room on the first floor that included all the amenities required by a spoiled young lady. And when I brought Mimi down into that room, the manager stood guard on the threshold with a broad grin on her face and two large towels in her hands. By that time, my excitement was somehow tempered down, but I kept telling myself that it was entirely my fault, and that –after all- Mimi had a point. That changed in a hurry when Mimi opened her mouth. “I cannot make love,” she said, “unless I have had dinner first.” I was stunned and –although still a real greenhorn- I was at the point of almost sending her home right then and there. But then, I gave it a second thought and reluctantly agreed to take her out for dinner. In the past, Mimi had always been quite reasonable when selecting a dish, all the time paying attention to the price. That night though, things were different. She ordered two eggs and a steak, salad and french-fries, and finally a Coupe Melba for dessert. And all the time she was annoying me with one stupid story after the other about her classroom. She was eating and eating and paid no attention to the fact that I had barely touched my own plate of spaghetti. The ordeal went on for the better part of two full hours, during which I slowly begun to hate this woman. The more she talked, the less I listened and the more I got disgusted about her stupid blabbermouth. Finally, Mimi said “Great, that was a fine dinner, now I am really in the mood to make love." That was the icing on the cake. The check was outrageous. Moreover, I had lost my sexual appetite. I felt the urge of running away, but kept telling myself that after all the money I had invested in this venture, I’d better reap the fruits. Yet, that’s not how it worked out. Back in the hotel room, Mimi undressed all right, and so did I. Naked, she really looked every bit as beautiful as I had imagined, but I was standing in front of her like in front of a gorgeous, cold, white Roman marble statue, without even the slightest bit of testosterone excitement left in any of my veins. Mimi got dressed, without me ever touching her, and while she was insulting me as a wimp and a sexual looser, I had a strangely triumphant feeling crawling up my spine. And when she was done, she left the room, and -without a single word of goodbye- banged the door behind her. And that’s the last I ever saw of Mimi. * That night, I paid a visit to the ladies on the sidewalks of the Rue des Halles to prove to myself that I wasn’t such a looser after all… -----------

12/26/02