Catherine is a dancer

Catherine is a dancer. She also works in a framing shop in the 15th District, but that is just temporary, until her dancing career takes off. She has been working in the framing shop for three years, and is now the assistant manager, second in charge after the owner. She looks after the place when the manager goes away, which occurs for a few days every three weeks or so.

I support her notion that she is a dancer. Her training is deep and long, and she has been on the stage in various musical entertainments that seem to be more common in Paris than other cities. But that is happening less now. The last time she danced was a short run in a cabaret where the story was something about Napoleon III. Just an excuse for girls to kick their legs and pose while the patrons drank and slobbered. We didn’t talk about it afterward, but I know Catherine was thinking that this was far from the ideal she originally sought, looking distant and beautiful on stage and perpetuating the thoughts that Keats writes about on his grecian urn – art perfecting something and making it endure.

So she goes to the framing shop, and fulfills her responsibilities with diligence and without irony, without letting anyone think that she views this job as temporary.

We met at the framing shop, actually. Some old prints had come into the bookstore – they were old art deco posters, originals, girls in diaphanous clothes posing on three-wheeled bicycles, that sort of thing - and the owner wanted them framed. I don’t know what it is about the chemistry between people, but you just sort of feel when someone is at loose ends, and wants you to make the first move, start a conversation outside the rigid form that your immediate business dictates. She looked self-possessed, and almost deliberately dressed and coiffed to appear less pretty than she actually is. Classically slim, with a fine face, fine cheeks and nose and brow and lips. So tidy.

By now my French had improved, despite the fact that nearly everyone who came into the English bookstore spoke English. Outside that bookstore, Parisians don’t accept English.

As our evening moved from a coffee, to a drink, to the suggestion that we have dinner together, I became very aware of her curiosity, which was hungry. Her eyes were unrelenting, her conversation softly probing. Once the decision had been made to have dinner, she insisted on going home and changing, which more or less forced me to do the same. We met over the bridge to the Latin quarter, which added a bit of a frisson to the evening, bustling amid all that energy.

Going to bed, having sex, was so natural and automatic. After dinner, she simply smiled confidently and said, “So, you are going to show me your place?” Her place was a bit further away, inconvenient, in a way.

I should do the scene justice, and describe it elaborately - the undressing, the scents and little nuances of our fucking, but I will save that for another time, when I can beautify it.

Her body was so alive, and she was dramatically pretty, with modest breasts whose nipples were very sensitive. In fact her entire body was sensitive. Her first orgasm happened about a minute after I slid my fingers along her cunt; as soon as I touched her clit I could feel her urgency and hunger. I think she must have cum about fifteen times that night, which to my mind was a sort of paradise, something you imagine happening in the Koran’s afterlife - coupling with an endlessly sexual woman. We fucked so many different ways, licking each other, sucking, I came in her mouth, her cunt and over her ass. Anal sex would come later.

She was only slightly moody. She was good-natured. Once after a period of desultory and unsatisfying liaisons a friend had asked me what I looked for in a woman. It was clear, to me: “an intelligent, attractive, good-natured sex maniac.” Catherine was her.