Vaginal perplexity 1: trolling for a scientific method along the Coulée verte [by Tracy Danison]

From what I could gather from her pretty seamless but warm manner, Karine was pretty enthusiastic about my Theory of Vaginal Perplexity.

In any case, she kept me talking about it for nearly an hour when I broached the subject over dinner one evening not long ago. She never interrupted but to laugh and order a couple glasses of wine.

In sum, my theory got quite a gay reception – ‘though she doesn’t usually drink so much and she kept fidgeting, crossing and re-crossing her legs, which I thought, think, distracting, especially since she was wearing such a short skirt. Golly!

Also, at that point in the subject-broaching maneuver - for strategic reasons evident to anybody who always vainly attempts to manipulate rather than just ask - I hadn’t yet mentioned the Penis Envy Polling Project, my scientifically-oriented opinion poll idea.

After dinner, Karine and I went home, the both of us, not too-drinked-up, not too-stuffed with food, hand-in-hand, lightly swing-swaying to Hozier’s From Eden, playing in one ear each. Smiling to beat the bands.

So, after a perfectly successful subject-broaching, this morning I want to expect an enthusiastic reception for a Musée d’Orsay sortie assorted with the cheerful execution of my Penis Envy Polling Project.

I plunge down the steps of the Bel Air métro and into the boulevard de Picpus – Ugh! What an ugly name! Picpus! But there you are… I dash on...

I think suddenly that she might feel less enthusiasm, Karine, perhaps, for her utterly key role in the Penis Envy Polling Project than for the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity itself. She sometimes isn't easy to deal with before lunch.

But then what is it that Orwell quoted Talleyrand as saying about Napoléon? "L'audace! Toujours de l'audace!" Good advice when you're obliged to run up the boulevard de... Ugh... Picpus.

As I say, she had laughed, quite girlishly, I think, not just once, but several times when I was telling her about it. She had actually laughed at me more than once before she said, “Well, mon Tracy, I am pretty vaginally perplexed myself.” 

She was saying that, she said, in case I hadn’t noticed - meaning the vaginal perplexity. She drained her wine glass and called for another. She had said that quite dryly, when I came to think of it… I thought it all a very good sign, actually.

Perhaps, I am now thinking, she won’t identify with the crucial scientific step involved in the Penis Envy Polling Project…And this Project, I know, must be carried forward if the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity is to have any scientific legs at all.

But, then, I reflect, as the designated meeting-café hoves into view, Karine can be a real sport if you take her from the right side before breakfast. And so have I, more than once. So. Confidence.

Ever since I got my degree in the ephemeral arts and handless metaphysics, I’ve reckoned that, if I act at all, I can only act upon that which is firmly rooted in the scientific method. So it is and so it shall be for the Theory of Vaginal Perplexity.

Therefore, the Penis Envy Polling Project is designed to knock down one absurd theory in order to give more apparent credibility to my own.

Descartes and Newton operated in just this way, I am told. Also that guy they call the Father of The Bomb, and others.

Karine & my plan is to meet in the doubtful sunshine in this flat-iron shaped café, bordered on one side by boulevard de Picpus (!) and the narrow, sunless rue Sibuet.  I am a bit late and in a bit of a hurry, too. 

The idea is to stay in the café just the time to gulp a coffee and have a pre-walk pee-pee. From the Square Courteline – nice name: Put on your crinoline at Courteline, partner! – which is at the very end of rue Sibuet, you can climb right up onto the Coulée verte  –  whose name I find as ineffably lovely as I find Picpus plug-ugly.

The Coulée verte is a disaffected train-viaduct-turned-urban-garden that links the sublimely ridiculous to the depressingly quotidian, starting at the Opéra and ending at a filthy aluminum stairway that spirals helter-skelter onto the weary shoulders of the Périphérique ring road at the Porte de Montempoivre. But who ever goes there?

Coulée means not just a “flow” but implies “casting”, the heavy white-hot push-along of liquid iron, or quick-hardening lava.

So, the Coulée verte is a running slash of hardening earth tones, specked – in some dawns sparkling – with flaming reds, radiant yellows, and jarring whites, as it cuts across the brick & limestone, concrete & aluminum of the east’s dense urban space.

They call the Coulée verte a “jardin linéaire”.

If ever I have a garden of my own, it shall be a jardin linéaire, a lightning bolt of vegetal flow driving like tunneling love through the symmetries that make up a good life for ME.

I swear I shall accept no other. And neither should you.

I kissed Karine for the first time up on the Coulée verte.

I was so scared she’d indignantly push me away that I still tremble deliciously when I pass the spot where we did the deed that led here and now.

Our idea for today is to walk down the Coulée verte to near the Gare de Lyon and then to walk across the pont d’Austerlitz and take the RER C to the Musée d’Orsay, where, if Karine agrees and she must, the Penis Envy Polling Project will be carried out.

Karine is already sitting on the café terrace, on the Sibuet side, when I arrive. She waves cheerfully; she’s already drinking a tea.

Since Karine mostly has a life, she doesn’t necessarily know – faute du temps – the ins and outs of things I might take for granted. So, without further ado, as preamble to the Project, I sit down and blurt out the whole Penis Envy/Envie de pénis/Penisneid theory.

Before I have well finished, she laughs out loud.

I am puzzled and a little miffed. So I say so.

She takes rather an uppity tone, touches my cheek with the tips of her nice, cool fingers, saying of course she wants a penis; why would she bother herself like this, if not?

Then she bursts out, “Envie du pénis!” She laughs really, really hard.

People are looking around to stare at the big-haired crazy woman and her fawning bald man. I understand them. I am near to whispering calumny to the neighbor at my elbow, too.

“I haven’t heard talk of penis envy in years,” she says, trying, unsuccessfully, to muffle a spontaneous girlie squeal.

The problem, I realize, is translation.

In everyday French, “envie” means simply “want” or “desire” and has done since the middle of the 19^th century. At least.

Unless you’re one of the Psychologismo crowd or of those who think the first definition in the Robert dictionary is the current definition and the circumflex accent is important, envie in French doesn’t imply English “envy” - jealous desire or a lack of what somebody else has, as it does in English.

So I puff up a little, say, as an aroused cobra might stretch its hood just prior to striking dead an especially insolent mongoose.

I tell Karine that “penis envy” means “entertain a jealousy of the penis or of those who possess it.”

Feel jealous of the penis, Karine, I continue, just as I might feel jealous of your woman’s pleasure, Karine, which I cannot experience.

This seems to sober her a little. "Hhhmmm. Woman's pleasure."

She puts her cup carefully in the saucer, says, “How jealous are you of my pussy, exactly?”

She pauses.

I pause.

Stretching my cobra hood a bit tighter and sitting up a little straighter, I reply dignantly. 

“I am asking you, Karine, if you vainly want a penis, if you envy me my penis. Are you jealous of men in general because they have penises and you guys don’t? Do girls feel fundamentally castrated?”

I spread my hands. “How shall I be more clear?”

“You don’t answer,” Karine says. I am thinking, she says that a bit too evenly... I am suddenly afraid she'll leave me. Is there somebody else?

I swivel around to see who might be able to overhear.

I feel my whole body blush as I lean into the table and whisper hoarsely, “You know very well how much, Bébé.”

I try to wink, but can’t.

I say instead, “It’s not the subject.” Hors sujet !

“Well,” she says, smiling, “If it’s not the subject, it’s not the subject.”

“So, mon Tracy, what’s your project?”

To be continued...

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