The Bidet

Last year I spent four months noisily remodeling our house: so noisily that I felt I owed it to our neighbors to show them the results. One result was that we acquired something my wife had been hankering after for some decades: namely, a bidet. And apart from the walk-in closet, it was the hit of the open house: an object of many an ooh and ah from the women of the neighborhood.


I don't really understand what the fuss is all about. As far as I can tell there isn't anything you can do with a bidet that you can't do with a shower, a sink, a tub, or a garden hose. 


But I have my own curious history with the contraption. I first encountered one in Paris en route to the States on our first home leave from India. I was about ten at the time, and I remember checking out our bathroom and asking my mother what the extra bowl was for. "Oh, that?" she replied hastily. "That's just something French women need."


As a consequence of all those boyhood hoppings around the globe,  I have always tended to arrive at premature conclusions. "They seem a happy, contented people," I am wont to declare as I first step onto foreign soil. My wife and children try to call me on this, but jumping to conclusions is about all the jumping I'm fit for these days. And admitting the truth, which is that half the time I don't know where I am or who I'm with, is conversationally dead-ended. That and something my daughter calls M.A.S., or Male Answering Syndrome,  has condemned me to spend my life presiding over my own private kangaroo court. 


I sensed from the way my mother bustled around the hotel room afterward that she was not going to tell me anything more about the mysterious fauceted bowl in the bathroom. So I was left to my own devices. I had not yet entirely worked out in my own mind the Facts of Life, which seemed to me too incredible to be factual. "They put what where?" my friends and I would ask one another, and then shake our heads with doubt and disgust. 


I knew from the way my father and older brother ogled the young women seated at cafés along the Champs-Élysées, that French women were different, somehow. They did not resemble the American memsahibs of my acquaintance, who had modeled themselves after such bovine icons of Hollywood domesticity as June Allyson and Rosemary Clooney. French women were elegant, racy, slinky, held themselves with a certain sensuous hauteur. They sipped wine, walked in heels, double-crossed their legs when they sat, pouted adorably when they spoke. 


I suppose there are all kinds of stories about people who first encounter a bidet and employ it for some mistaken purpose. I know one person who assumed it was designed to facilitate the washing of feet, and another who concluded it was intended as a laundry basin. And no doubt others have put it to far more unfortunate uses. 


But all I did back then was think long and hard about it, and to conclude from my mother's hasty reply and what evidence I had thus far assembled, that French women, unique among their species, boasted an extra appendage which had to be kept particularly clean for some reason, and which they could lower at will, like landing gear.


I'm not going to say how long I clung to this conclusion. I just very much hope I was mistaken.