Why French Women Don’t Stay Single
Why is it, I wonder, that French women don’t stay single? Why are they are so keen on couplehood when the joys of the célibataire, particularly the Parisian variety, are so sweet? I’ve been asking myself such questions quite a lot lately. Our Fashion Week party at A La Mode Online is coming up, you see, and all the spoons – so I call my French co-workers as they are forever swooping upon my lunchtime treats with those oversized soup spoons, the kind that affords the largest possible helping in a single scoop – will be bringing their spouses and partners and have been talking about little else. Most of the spoons are not quite married; instead they live in concubinage which, despite being the norm in France still sounds somewhat racy to my foreign ears. I must commend the French upon their modern, egalitarian notions: how can you not admire a nation in which a man, as well as a woman, can be considered a concubine? If I were a French woman I think I too might enjoy having a male mistress, though certainly he would have to earn his keep. Of course, the spoons never openly refer to their live-ins as “concubines”. That term is reserved for insurance forms and taxes only. What they say is Mon mec à moi adding the extra possessive (“ my guy, just mine”) to make the glue stick I suppose. And yet, I have been observing the spoons quite closely and have concluded that their romantic adhesive is unusually elastic.
Take for example Isabelle, whose desk faces mine. Isabelle covers most of the fashion shows because she is quite queenly and tall and can easily see the catwalk, even over obstructing hats and heads. She looks a great deal like Catherine Deneuve in her Demoiselles de Rochefort days – icy fresh, the iconic blonde emerging from the freezer with an enigmatic smile (it is still defrosting, you see). She calls her concubine several times a day, perhaps to make sure he’s earning his points. Strangely I do not know the fellow’s name; she always addresses him as Mon Coeur in a caressing, breathy voice which sends me off to the ladies room blushing to have overheard. And oh, how in love they are! They bandy their boudoir affections unabashed; they make of their love an example; it is as though they give it like a gratuity, to tip me off to their secret for success. And indeed if I could endure the embarrassment of their eavesdropped endearments, and spent less time hiding in the ladies and more time taking notes ,perhaps my own success rate would be higher,,, But all this sweet-talk with her coeur makes the Club Med holidays Isabelle takes with her best girlfriend Marion (cosmetics and beauty spoon, also a confirmed concubine) even more confounding. For these outings, she leaves her heart at home and offers her monokini-ed body to the glorious elements and to the local lads so beautifully burnished by them. She makes a holiday acquisition every year and considers it as necessary to her health as rest and magnesium. Not that she is matter of fact about her illicit trysts; no, clearly they provide titillating moments which afterward live on in her memory alone. This is why, I believe, she tells me about them; we aren’t particularly close, at least not enough for her to divulge her concubine’s name, but we do often eat from the same lunch plate – her diet does not allow for the luxury of lunch, so the mouthfuls she borrows from mine are a passing pleasure that she must equate with her holiday romps, easing us into intimacy.
Just last week, having returned from Malaga looking splendidly tanned and still wearing her white Simone de Beauvoir après swim turban which made her appear more intelligent somehow (not that she isn’t clever but Simone accessories will do this for a girl), she set out to tell me her latest adventure – very discreetly it should be said - digging her spoon into my tiny tarte aux poires as she shoveled up the piquant memory. I listened ever so carefully. In my mind’s eye, I pictured her in a derrière-flattening Esther Williams style one-piece with a retro osprey swimming cap (best not to get the feather wet) strolling down the playa hand in hand with the blond, dreadlocked Paco; then as the sun set, sipping sangria, gazing at the pinkish horizon through oversized shades (Dior) beneath the aforementioned de Beauvoir turban (hers) and red, Jiffy popcorn rasta hat (his). Later, in the bedroom – to my dismay she revealed enough for my imagination to play the fly on the wall – their two pleasure-toasted bodies, cooled by a rotating fan (air con not working) made l’amour. Yes, I pictured it all vividly during the telling, but when she finished her account and scooped up the last morsel of pear, my mind returned to home – and heart. I suddenly gasped.
’But what about your coeur… your heart… your man?’ I blurted out, avoiding the word concubine, which is best left to taxmen.
’Oh yes,” she said sounding suddenly wistful, ‘he is my heart. He is the only man for me..’
‘Then why… why did you…’ The question lumped in my throat. Isabelle looked at me with an affected sweetness and gave me no alternative but to finish.
‘Then why cheat on him?’ I managed at last, lowering my voice. Immediately I felt ashamed at my bluntness, at using a word which Isabelle clearly felt beneath her. She sat up straight in her seat and pushed her lips into a pout (Chanel Hydrarouge in Pirate red).
‘Ma chère, he is the only man I can live with. We are perfectly compatible and deeply in love. But I cannot vacation with him. Ce n’est pas possible. It is quite simply impossible!’
‘I see.’ I said, though in truth I didn’t. Still, I was beginning to glean a possible explanation for my French sisters’ distaste for the single life and this, manifestly, was the double life, with its two-fold promise of both true love and fly-by-night fling. Apparently Isabelle believes she can have it all or that it is her duty at least to try.
‘Ma pauvre! You poor thing!’ she said, tsk-tsking me when I told her – not without some singleton pride - that I hadn’t quite decided whether I would bring Jean-Pierre, or Denis, or Marc to the Fashion Week party. But all these roving possibilities, quite exciting to me, were pitifully unsophisticated to Isabelle.
‘Il te faut un vrai amour, Remedy, you need to experience true love’ she lamented, shaking her head. ‘And then… afterwards…’ But she did not finish her thought. Her gaze grew unfocussed as if she were peering cross-eyed into the neat paradox of her love life.
‘And then… what???’ I almost enquired. But fearing what else might be revealed, I took myself off to the ladies’ room where a single girl best prepares herself for romance. If French women manage not to get fat by avoiding their own cake, and yet still eating it, perhaps I should follow their example in the bedroom as well as the dining room? Yes, it was time to double up on love, I suppose. Though would this make it truer? Doubting that it would, I shut and double locked the door.
