He was ruminating that love was not an actuality, but merely humans finding no exterior meaning and seeking solace and artificial meaning in each others company, when he was suddenly accosted by a Caucasian woman. She was middle aged, had sinuous black hair, and seemed attractive as best he could tell, as she was wearing a round brimmed white hat and dark sunglasses that covered some of her face.
"Pardonnez_moi pours vous faire savent le Francais?" she asked.
"J'ai étudié là pendant un certain temps. C'a été il y a des années," he said, "but you are safer in the international language. I was only in Paris for six months."
"Oh, then you are fluent, as French is the international language," she said with a laugh.
"No, the language of fucking is," he thought, startled by how close the words were to his lips. Had he spoken them he would have been truthful. His brief time under a scholarship grant had been more of sexual rendezvous than anything more substantive. It had been his language of choice as no one there seemed to want to speak in English. And had he spoken those words he would have released a belligerent inner burst of misogyny from a long dormant maternal source aggravated nowadays by his wife having beaten him with a skillet.
"What did you study there? French?"
"No, fucking," he thought but he held tightly to the reins of the tongue, his restive beast. He did not want to disparage another person for his own proclivities toward freeing himself of any female captors. He vented a sigh of relief for having managed to stay quiet and thought how close the words were to his lips before dissipating like everything else, and in this case leaving him defenseless against his good looks.
"Painting."
"Painting?"
"A grant…. It was a grant from your country—a cultural exchange with accomplished artists… I was one of the applicants who won." His words were slow and laborious as he wished not to divulge anything.