Importuner : When an older man’s fantasy about a very young woman… drives him to make it happen… with or without consent.
At that time, there were patrols and stamps and lines and barriers… at every crossing, on each side of the borders of every country. Always grey. Always menacing. Always cold and abrupt. By then, usually though the guards on the roads just waved you through, if you were white anyway. Although the risk of being stopped was still real. Still palpable. So you still had to have your papers in order.
Americans could stay in France at the time for up to three months as tourists without a supplementary visa. Order therefore, meant a stamp certifying entry to France from another country which, more often than not, was no longer systematically given with any rigor within the EU since Schengen had begun. Of course, as a white woman, I rang no bells either, even before I’d taken out my gold embossed navy blue passport. No one ever stopped me, unless I insisted.
It was therefore only when The AdMan had asked me to confirm my last date of entry for our work contract that I realized my papers were not.
That was when he suggested we go together, across some border, as he was free that Sunday, to get the stamp I would need for the next phase of my administrative process.
I couldn’t believe how lucky I was. I’d interviewed for a job in advertising and the big boss, a friend of a friend, was not only hiring me, but going to help me with the necessary documentation to work at his company. And he was even willing to take time out of his own schedule to drive me across the frontier and back, just to get my passport stamped.
We probably chatted the whole way about my studies and how much I loved France and about his family trips to the USA and in just over two and a half hours, we were somewhere along the Belgium border. Surely Mons or Bouillon or Tournai? I didn’t know. I don’t believe I even noticed the frontier on our way… but the AdMan told me he knew a nice place to grab lunch before we went back.
It was Sunday so we went to an auberge and although crowded, there just happened to be a place for two without a reservation, in a corner near a fire place.
As we lunched, we continued our conversation about how I’d studied advertising in NYC and Paris, about the distinctions between the American and French markets, about The AdMan’s principal clients and we also surely brushed on his politics because, he assured me, he knew high ranking officials who could help us obtain my work papers more quickly. He must have dropped some names, which I surely didn’t recognize because it was complicated being proficient in current events and learning a new language at the same time. Certain details must have gone over my head. Some were too difficult to translate. Others didn’t even register perhaps. Foreigners don’t always know what to look out for or how to navigate all the newness in a new country.
I don’t remember his words now. But I can still picture his puffy pink face smiling as he steered the conversation here and there. He was driving the encounter. He was the adult in the room, the boss, the authority, the French national, the male. I was only twenty two or three, a young woman in a foreign country who shouldn’t have been expected to think three steps ahead, shouldn’t have had to be wary of where she was being led by her future employer. The AdMan had his papers in order and he had a job already, after all. But I didn’t. So I was just feeling grateful to have met someone like him who believed in me enough to hire me at his company and was nice enough to help me get mine together too.
At one point, as the lunch came to an end, he said something to me from across our table for two. Something I didn’t quite hear. Something I couldn’t comprehend in French. Something that didn’t correspond to what I thought he was going to say or to what I expected would come next, I guess.
And then, as I joined The AdMan at the reception, where he was already paying our lunch bill, he smiled through me to the aubergriste, apparently confirming a room, by nodding my assent as if I’d agreed already.
The music and the noise and the families and the passers by seem fuzzy now in my memory. But I can just barely remember how the colors seemed to suddenly become distorted and stretched out, like in a photograph of a moving carrousel when standing still watching it go by. The dining room voices and the music seemed to turn sour and slow painfully too as I forced my mind to recall him asking me a question like that while seated. I hadn’t heard the word « chambre » and didn’t remember agreeing to or even nodding anything for that matter.
But before I could answer, he had the key in his paws already and had whisked me up a flight. The door was flung open and he was kissing me strenuously as my body ploofed in slow motion onto the bed, where he was suddenly, then, between my legs.
What I was wearing and how he had somehow gotten my lower garments off so easily and so skillfully stymies me still. I could not have been wearing a skirt or a dress for such a long car ride, nothing flimsy he could have easily flipped up to pull the barrier of my panties aside in order to attain access to my body. I must have been wearing jeans or pants, something more difficult to pass or to penetrate, because it was late fall or almost winter. My clothes, at least, must have been in order that day, even if my papers were not.
From the top of the bed, I remember rotating my eyes, that were somehow still lodged in my head then, down toward my belly and his face as he clawed greedily at my body and my clothes… his desire precluding, excluding, ignoring any action or reaction by my own entity, like the stamp I needed was all his, like my visa was his right or my right to a visa was his too.
My lids clicked in slow motion like a slot machine as my brain searched for a solution in French to this strange predicament in which my body found itself… then, cha-ching, the only one I could come up with, landed on my tongue.
« Do you have a condom? »
I can still somehow see the messy, random hairs on his fleshy skull and his rosy face and his lolling tongue as he groaned and pivoted his cheek to one side of my vagina, a « non » dripping from the corner of his mouth and he licked his lips in disappointment. This was the one thing he had not entertained. He was old already and married. AIDS was still a homosexual disease and escorts surely didn’t get to demand protection back then.
I must have surprised him.
Trying to appear comprehensive, he stood up suavely disheveled and, as if we had shared in the same heat of the moment, he began to get himself in order. He brushed himself off, tucked his shirt back in and smoothed his hair, smiling at me the whole time like I should be happy he’d been gallant enough not to rape me anyway. As if I’d asked for this. As if I had enticed him and gotten him so excited… only to turn him away from the boarders of my body at the last minute.
I got up too. I don’t remember arranging myself. I didn’t care about trying to look in order for the aubergistes or the clients or the families or the hunters or the waiters. I just knew I wanted to leave. I didn’t know how this had happened, what I had said too much or too little of, what I’d done to get myself in this situation… because it was, of course, always the woman’s responsibility for being where she ended up in those days.
I only knew I had to get back to Paris. And we still had my passport to stamp. And he still held the key to both my employment and my work papers, at that moment.
So I guess we acted as if it were a mistake. Somehow.
I don’t remember the border on the way back either that day. Although I know we had to stop and ask the official for a stamp, otherwise we would have been waved through again like usual. Two white bodies in a big, fast car. Bodies that surely didn’t commit crimes. Bodies that were never suspected. Bodies that were not expected to cause trouble or get into any. White bodies that didn’t merit questioning. For what? Expressing desire?
Everyone knew there was a cultural exception for French men. Importuner* was a way of life. It was love à la français. It was the risk a female took when she moved in the world then. Especially, perhaps, a young, blond American woman.
I thought a month later, when I insisted to his secretary that I wanted separate hotel rooms for our first real business presentation together in the South of France, that he had understood. But he came clad in his room robe anyway, wanting to come in. Maybe even brandishing a package of rubbers this time.
« No, » I safely said from behind my chained door « I told your secretary that I wanted separate rooms because I am not interested in you and never have been. This a professional relationship only. Please respect that. »
He spat expletives back and stomped down the hall slamming his door, where I heard him shout that he’d get my papers for me anyway… as I slid down the wall on my side, sobbing.
After the next day’s presentation, we never spoke again about that or anything else. I was contacted by his office when my papers were ready to be picked up at the Préfecture de police, and I went alone to get them.
Until now, I’ve never written about this publicly, because I figured I had probably smiled or even made eye contact with The AdMan in his office during our first interview or that I was too expressive as we drove towards the Belgium boarder when I was talking to him about my professional ambition. Maybe my telling him how much I loved France was some secret code that made him feel I was dying to fuck a fat Frenchman twice my age. Perhaps knowing how much I needed his help was just the extra jolt he required to convince himself that any action he took in that regard was surely mutual, even without confirmation, without asking or wondering what I wanted.
I’ve told this story about my French border crossing many times and even if people shake their heads, even if they are disturbed by the situation or disgusted by his actions, their last question is always to me :
« How could you ever think that your future employer would take you across the Belgian border on a Sunday… for free? »
My papers are pending every 10 years and The AdMan is a publicly elected official now outside of Paris, who’s arms have surely only grown longer with age. So I wonder if I’ll have trouble renewing mine next time for any reason? If so, I’ll know why, and so will everyone else. #balancetonporc
*Importuner (qqn.) French verb which means : to inconvenience, to bother, to pester or to harass…
