Beautiful Blanchisseuse of Bourbon Street  

Beautiful Blanchisseuse of Bourbon Street                              
                                
     I walk through the party feeling the brush of women’s evening gowns. Their perfume scents my passage. A woman stops me with her hand pressed to my chest. “Sir, this is a formal party. You can’t go around with your shirt collar stained. Here, let me wipe it for you” she says. “Oh goodness, the light here is so poor and I can’t see what I’m doing. Please, follow me to a well-lit room so I can properly remove the smear.”  
     She is wearing turquoise lingerie covered in a gossamer dress. Her gown ripples as she moves across the floor. She is a walking seduction. Then she ushers me into another room. The room is brightly illuminated.  
     She tries a stain remover pen on the mark but to no avail. She says, “Your stain is stubborn. We have a washing machine for just such an occasion with our hostesses. But your entire suit is wrinkled. Take it off. Fabric softener will take out the wrinkles. We don’t have a curtained off dressing area here since until now only hostesses change here.”
     I reply, “There may be certain changes in my physique that briefs cannot hide.”
     “You show just as much at the pool in your swim trunks.”
     I strip down to my underwear. She says, “Your underclothes are rumpled too. No one else will know but I will which is enough reason to wash them. Please take them off.”
     “But my boa is rigid.”
     “I had a pet boa once. His name was Charlie. When I petted him on his head he raised up like he was happy.”
     While she is loading the washer she says, “Once upon a time I lived in Paris and worked my way through the Sorbonne as a blanchisseuse which is French for laundress. When I got back to New Orleans I found being a hostess much more appealing than teaching French as I meet all kind interesting people at these parties.”  
     Until now I have been a business executive in charge and am surprised at how easily a woman can use her charm to divest me of my suit which is my armor.  
     Now that I am naked I ask her, “Would you like to play scrabble?”
     “Words are my profession. But of words, there is no end.”  
     She focuses her eyes downward with a wicked grin. She says, “The hostesses use that bed in the corner to take naps while on break. You may rest there if you like.”  
     When I lie down she keeps regal watch over my supine pose. “Do you mind if I join you? Keeping you properly attired has worn me out. And I’m all sweaty from the exertion. My clothes are wrinkled too. I’ll just throw them in with yours while I take a nap beside you. That is if you don’t mind?”  
     “Be my guest. Or I suppose I am yours.”  
     She says, “Don’t worry the door is locked no one will see us.” She forms herself into a crescent moon beside me.
     She says, “Mind if I scrunch closer? It is hard to get comfortable on this small bed.”
    I reply, “It is a tight squeeze. If it were any tighter we’d be on top of one another.”
     “Well, I’ll move down to give you some room.”  
     On her crawl, her derrière is poetry in motion like that of a concubine who vies with her sisters of the court to be the apple of the Sun King’s eye.
     She boomerangs back and gently kisses me on the lips. I open myself to ravishment by her ruby lips which form a baroque pout. The scent of her warm fragrant breath fills my lungs. She descends upon me like Cassiopeia come down from her celestial realm to teach a mere mortal the worship of the divine feminine. I float in the perfumed cloud of her essence of rose hips.
     Her scent follows me into my dreams as I fall fast asleep. When I awaken she says, “Do you like my bouquet? I bought it from a Parisian street vendor. He told me that the perfume was made from roses whose lineage traces back to the hanging gardens of Babylon. The seeds were gathered just before it was burned by the Persians.”
     “What an inventive sales pitch.”
     “I choose to believe.”
     I ask, “If my shirt hadn’t been stained would you have chosen me?”  
     Ariel says, “You were the only man at the party with rumpled slacks. Your wrinkles were a telltale sign that you weren’t a prisoner to fashion. Which meant you weren’t of the slave mentality. Tell me, what tide washed you up upon my shore?”
     “Since I’m a socialist with bourgeois tastes, I suppose a red tide.”   
     “You are a Bolshevik but a Bolshoi dancer in the ballet of counterpart. Would you like me to take you home with me?”
     “Do you have a TV?”
     “We don’t need a TV.”
      “Glad you don’t tune in to the latest episodes of the old and the bold to discover the true reason the Boss’s secretary told him, ‘Bring those bollocks out of retirement or I’ll spill the beans to your wife.’
     “Did she want him to get a reverse vasectomy to give her a baby?”
     “Yes because he had good genes.”
     “Of course I have only a passing curiosity about such stories.”
      “Should we get a big screen TV or would a smaller one do?”
     “Oh, I think a large screen just so we can laugh at how silly those shows are.”