Telling Him

Austin invited his friend Joséphine, a children's book illustrator, to lunch. He wanted to know what she, as a woman, thought of Big Julien, though he realized she wasn't very typically female. Was any woman? Would he have felt right about speaking for all men? Gay men?

Joséphine was from Tours, reputed to be the home of the best French accent, and she did speak her own language clearly and elegantly, with not too much slang and no dropped syllables. She had the fully awakened, gently satiric response to the absurdities of her friends which is characteristic of someone from a big family, a family of talkers and observers rather than TV watchers. Her beauty was regal: her long neck lengthened still more by blonde hair swept up and stabbed haphazardly at the top by a comb or gathered into a ponytail by a red rubber band; a pointy chin and hollow cheeks, crowned by prominent cheekbones. She wasn't fussy at all or coy or full of feminine wiles. He'd read somewhere that women imagined men want to feel useful to women and that they delight in performing acts of gallantry; Joséphine was not labouring under any such misapprehension. She knew exactly how ungallant men could be.