Going Through Old Notebooks Part 7: Mistaken Identity

Rue des Coutures Saint-Gervais. Digital sketch, iPad and Apple Pencil. c. 2024

Dear Reader,

Here is another something adapted from a five things exercise, now reduced to four things, which I posted from my very earliest days on Substack.

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1.

One day in December of 2020, I went to a medical lab near the rue Saint-Denis to get a Covid test. On my way there, I noticed an attractive older woman with white hair, standing on the sidewalk. She was wearing a fur coat, sheer black stockings, and stiletto high heels.

She looked very dressed up for 2pm, standing so resolutely there on the sidewalk, that I thought perhaps she was representing an art gallery, and was hoping to get people inside for an opening. I’m not sure why. It’s just where my brain went, unquestioning.

I noted that her black stiletto heels had a pattern of red laces and bows that ran up the back. Racy, I thought, hmmm.

With the shoes, and the coat, and her general bearing, I thought in passing that she might just be Russian. There was something about the way that her hair was styled; something in the way she carried herself.

I turned onto the street with the lab, and saw at least four other women who looked almost identical to this first woman. They were all older, all attractive, with white or silver hair twisted up into neat chignons. All had bangs (fringes, for you non-Americans), or a few artful tendrils that spiraled down the sides of their cheeks. All were wearing fur coats, black stockings, and stiletto high heels.

Was this some kind of an art project, I wondered? An installation? A…happening? I had published a book about high heels not that long before for Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series, and knew that such things occurred. It was possible.

I went into the lab for my Covid test, but it turned out that I had to go to another lab for a different kind of Covid test, blah blah blah.

I went back outside and the women were still there, standing at regular intervals, unmoving as palace guards. Why were they all standing there like that on the sidewalk, in matching coats and shoes? My curiosity getting the better of me, I felt that I simply had to know what was going on.

I approached the nearest woman.

“Are you part of some kind of a…a project?” I asked in my bad French. I couldn’t think of the French term for “art installation.”

She looked at me, her carefully made-up eyes glittering over the top of her blue surgical mask, perplexed but friendly.

“A project?” she said

“Yes,” I went on. “Like an…installation…of the…art? You know, for the doing of an exhibit? An art show?”

“What?” she said.

It was then that I noticed another woman who had come to stand in an open doorway across the street. She was dressed similarly to the other women, except that she didn’t have a coat on. She wore a very tight, very short black skirt, a sheer black top, and a plunging black bra underneath that displayed a remarkable profusion of cleavage.

Oh.

Of course.

I was an idiot.

We were a block from the rue Saint-Denis, and these women were sex workers. My husband, who was with me when this happened, had realized just a fraction of a second before I did, and was already backing away.

Embarrassed, I asked the woman to please excuse me.

The thing was, I had been to that lab before, many times, and yet had never seen these women before. Why were there so many now, and all of the same type? I had seen prostitutes on the Paris streets of course, but they were more like foot soldiers—weary Communards lined up against a wall at night. These women looked like four-star generals.

“I can’t believe I asked if she was part of an art show,” I said as we slunk away.

“Well, in a way, she is,” my husband replied.

2.

Years ago, I got an email sent to me by someone who had me confused for someone else. The message read: “I found this picture of your father’s grave.”

Naturally I opened it. It felt vaguely threatening, since my father was and remains very much alive.

Attached was a photograph of an Australian cemetery, thronged with kangaroos. There must have been at least thirty of them, almost all of them looking right at the camera.

“You have the wrong person,” I wrote back.

“No, I don’t,” the confused sender insisted.

I still don’t know whose grave that really was.

3.

Walking by the park behind the Picasso Museum, I saw a child’s balloon drifting up over the rooftops. It was metallic, in the shape of some cartoon character, I couldn’t tell which one.

Somewhere nearby, a child had just lost a balloon.

I turned a corner and continued along a narrow street. It was nearing dusk. People were coming home from work, bundled up in scarves and coats. The sky was clear of clouds, going a hazy pink-gold-purple near the horizon.

I turned another corner, and then there was the balloon again. It was drifting higher and higher.

I saw three seagulls diving around it, swooping and squawking, in the way that birds do when they’re ready to do battle.

I’ve always liked that there are seagulls in this city. Having grown up near the coast, I never feel quite right living somewhere where I never hear the cries of seabirds. But to these birds, this balloon was a threat. They were prepared to fight it.

The birds floated up above the balloon on drafts of air, and then shot down in a quick streak of feathers. I never saw them touch it, but they must have, for it started to drift down again, wounded.

4.

One day, not too long after seeing the women in fur coats near the rue Saint-Denis, I was outside the supermarket Monoprix when I noticed a young white man in dirty clothes, sitting on the sidewalk, next to a small dog and a little plastic cup. He looked the way that the hapless romantic lead in a Judd Apatow comedy might look, if he had been sleeping in a public park for the past six weeks. His demeanor was cheerful.

The carefully printed sign read: too ugly for prostitution.

I laughed, but didn’t have any change.

Adapted from notebook entries written in December of 2020.