Parisian Promises Read Free

about maintaining their leisure time privileges, like traveling to Morocco or Tahiti to acquire objets d’art , fashionable objects that shocked their staid parents with their own conventional art collections. They asserted their rebelliousness by spending their inheritances in ways that they considered unorthodox.
    Other European women, whom Jean-Michel encountered at various Sorbonne events, were less than enthusiastic about Che’s past exploits thousands of miles away, and they ignored Jean-Michel—and vice versa. As for all the Latin American female students, they repelled Jean-Michel with their ostentatious modesty and religiosity. He’d realized that his ideal target would be a beautiful, naïve, over-optimistic American––perhaps someone not unlike the fragile creature sitting next to him this afternoon.
    â€œSo, Monica, have you seen the photograph of Che to which I’m referring?” Jean-Michel prompted, when Monica didn’t say anything.
    Monica looked back at him with the waif-like innocence he’d seen only in the kitschy paintings of wide-eyed children sold by street artists in Montmartre. She seemed so totally void of any geopolitical awareness, and Jean-Michel felt an unusual sense of excitement. He exhaled another swirl of smoke, his mind performing its own distinct algorithms. Step one: does she know anything about Che? If the answer is no, then proceed to the next step and ask her about the Cuban embargo. If the answer is again negative, then continue with the next step, and so on and so forth. If he got the answers he was expecting, this Monica could prove to be the ideal woman to facilitate his complex plan.
    â€œWould you like to smoke my cigar?” Jean-Michel asked, and Monica nodded like an eager filly. In fact, she realized, she was acting like her beloved quarter horse, Rocky, whose sorrel coat––not unlike her own hair color––glistened in the morning sun when she groomed him. Rocky was always too eager for a carrot or an apple, and Monica, her auburn hair fluttering in the breeze, was conscious of not being quite cool enough for the dashing Jean-Michel. He slipped the thick cigar between her small pale fingers, and watched as she inserted its moist tip into her mouth. She inhaled and instantly started hacking and coughing. Only a gulp of her Kir Royale could take away the awful taste––something like a bale of hay roasted on a barbecue.
    To her relief, Jean-Michel looked amused rather than contemptuous. He winked at her and said, “Ahh, a taste of the forbidden fruit can sometimes be too much, can’t it?”
    Monica didn’t want to appear like a total ingénue , so she tried to answer him in French.
    â€œ Je ne sais pas, mais …” she stammered. “Oh geez, that’s all the French I can muster today. And you speak English perfectly. Sorry. I feel like––I don’t know. A goofy American in Paris.”
    She bit her lower lip, and Jean-Michel brushed it gently with his pinkie. Even though the lighted cigar in his hand was perilously close to her feathery hair, Monica willed herself not to flinch.
    â€œWhy do you say it’s the forbidden fruit?” she asked him.
    Jean-Michel peered over her shoulder at his compañeros , who were gesturing to him; they were going to follow Monica’s friends down the Champs-Élysées, he realized.
    â€œI call it the forbidden fruit,” he told Monica, “because Cuban cigars are illegal in the States, are they not?”
    The only products Monica thought of as illegal back home were marijuana joints, and she’d always stayed away from any drugs. Matters of international conflict didn’t interest her whatsoever. She followed the rules at college, and at the ranch she was too busy working her fingers to the bone––though when she groomed her horses, Monica let her imagination run wild thinking about her upcoming year