The Restaurant On Rue Leon Blum

Their day started later than mine. The three of them would descend to the street from their apartment above.

First was Lois Bouchex, a handome older graying statesman, who looked pretty banal at 11 am, but in the dark of the evening looked practically British, with his smoking-jacket, silk ascot, and carefully waxed moustache.

After him was his mother. Her hair was in the ubiquitou white bun (just like Mme. M downstairs) but she was hard as nails, almost fearsome. She ran the kitchen; thus, functionally ran the restaurant. Later I would hear her voice raised in the kitchen even where I was all the way out front at the bar.

The third was a short, overweight dumpy looking sort of woman, with carefull bleached and curled blond hair. She had the unmistakeable gait of a woman who had survived a right hemibody stroke. Her speech and facial asymmetry confirmed the diagnosis on the few occasions when she actually spoke.

Loulou told me much later she had been very beautiful and they had not yet married when she had become pregnant by him. He did not want to father children so he paid for her abortion by “one of you guys” (a real doctor, allegedly top-of-the line) allegedly had caused her stroke by performing an abortion. Loulou described himself as the gentlest soft touch of all time, and married her anyway and pledged to take care of her for the rest of his life.

I mulled silently over the fact that there must not have been any physicians’ malpractice liability for an illegal operation.

Loulou quickly confessed he had not been a very good boy. I knew his mistress then, a dancer and dance teacher, was a real “hottie.”

Me. Loulou always said he should have known me in Paris in the 20’s when he wore a fedora and had a cigarette dangling from his lip, and pounded the table to the beat of Django Reinehart.

Although I have never felt romantic about a cigarette hanging from anybody’s lip, I had always felt that I hit Paris too late. The gay nineties the birth of the can-can would have been the very best time of all.

Soon after that, Mme. M. told me I should not hang around with Loulou too much or else people would take me for a “fille legere” — a “light girl. ”

I was nothing less than overjoyed, for nobody had ever called me ” a light girl” before.

She explained to me that it meant a girl whose body could be had for the price of a meal.