Wise Virgin

WISE VIRGIN / D. E. Steward THE LYCÉE GIRL WAITS. There is only one at once, I guess they must take turns. Her level, level stare. Is this a joke? Some sort of ethnology or psychology laboratory they are running for a project they must do in school? No, she means it when she stares like that, she means it just as clearly as if she walked over to me and took my hand. It is blatant. But what is going on? Do they have backup boyfriends waiting nearby to extract them if someone they attract insists, or are they for real? Are they agents of a sort too, like the Senegalese peddlers over there in front of the cathedral? What is this all about? That European stare, lock on and the first one to break it is sexually the weakest, and when someone begins it then she will not demur. School girls but with that level, measured stare. In France when a woman looks at you that way, going off with her to enjoy intimacies is as easy as finding somewhere to park a car, but is this really France in the usual way? Just what is this anyway? This is January and dusk comes already at four o'clock, it is now four thirty-five with the train at five-fifteen. I come out of the Musée de l'Oeuvre Notre-Dame heading for the cathedral front for one more look before walking to the station, and here is this young woman who locks me in this stare. She looks alert, sympathetic, she looks as though, for whatever reason she really has in mind, that she badly wants me to go over to her. She glows. Standing there leaning lightly on the wall, knees locked, swayed forward, her feet dancing-class together, two green notebooks and a textbook of some sort demurely held in front of herself under curled hands. She wears a dove-gray anorak and brown jeans, her shoes are ankle boots not pixie punk but brown and broad-toed. She is a healthy-looking school girl, perhaps seventeen, scrubbed face, simple hair, full-blown pucelage, and she glows. She looks direct and not neurotic, looks uncomplicated and intelligent. I've walked by her corner three times and then stood aside and stared back and still she stares me down. And I am on my way to Amsterdam and only stopped here in Strasbourg to see the cathedral and the Konrad Witz. I am much too set and too preoccupied, to become involved with anything preposterous like this. As it is I am passing through with a train to catch in less than an hour now. Besides, what exactly would I say to her? Would she drop her eyes if I did walk over to talk with her? The Missouri Review · 233 Does she entice others too? Are there other men standing nearby like me, aware of her? Has she done this before or is this her first afternoon at it? What is it that she is up to? Did she walk out here when her school let out, place herself here, and expect to go off and have sex with a stranger? Would she charge? How much would she charge and where would we go? I saw this girl walk out of the courtyard of the school with another girl, come along the square to the corner, saw the other girl walk away. There was no smirking, no giggling, and when she was alone she turned and looked at me. It is easy to imagine that she is one of a group from this school who do this professionally or for thrills, that she is doing this alone for one of the same reasons, that she is not playing at being a professional but merely stares at me this way on a whim, that she has fixed on me to initiate her sexually, that she wants to take me home to an apartment where her parents will not be home. Is it me, is it anybody at aU, is she disturbed? What is this about? When I walk over to speak with her what...