The Tawdry Masks of Women

Every bus ride is theater, giddy schoolgirls trying on the tawdry masks of women, flirting with my nephew, red and green lights, shop windows piled high, gold glistered skeletal mannequins in slips of iridescent silk. At night in the wind blowing over the Pont Marie I hear Camille Claudel crying from the walls of her studio, and two days before Christmas Elliot and I stand miraculously alone before La Gioconde, follow her eyes, cracked surface of her skin like softest sand before the deep water of her mouth, and later standing in the cold our Buddhist gardienne Nadine tells me in rapid-fire French that in all things she tries to remain neutral,neutre,neutre, neutre, the only word finally I understand in the barrage tumbling out of her mouth like a waterfall, but I can’t be neutral, passion welling up in my heart for the exhausted maids, dapper men in berets, the madwoman on the PC bus, screaming,Salope,salope, as she descends at the Pont d’Ivry and everyone on the bus looking at each other,Whore? Who’s the whore here? or the chic older woman, leather pants baggy on her skinny shanks, reading a battered paperback Rimbaud as we take the bus to see Pasolini’s Canterbury Tales, the master himself as Chaucer, spinning his ribald stories of human folly, each one a mirror, and when I see myself in bus windows or store glass, the shock never wears off, for I recognize myself and see a stranger at the same time, because the minutes are racing by at the speed of light, and I am saying goodbye to Paris, to everyone, myself most of all, watching her disappear down the rue Jeanne d’Arc, and what can she possibly be thinking as she walks to the movies in the middle of this afternoon of her life?