‘The worst? Yes, I could easily see that. I guess I should ask what Escobar was like to work with?’
‘Escobar? Oh, he was wonderful, darling. Absolutely fantastic. A genius, of course, and like all those kinds of people, completely focused on his work. Not that he was rude or anything. Not at all. Treated me like a princess– if not better, if you know what I mean. Always made sure I was comfortable, brought me drinks, rubbed my neck when it got sore. Posing takes some time, you know– that kind of thing.’
‘Um, yes. So you’d say he appeared to be conscientious?’
‘Oh, more than that. Much more than that. But then artists, especially great artists, are like that. Very sensual people. Guess it must have something to the way they look at the world, eh? Always trying to make love to everything with their art…’
‘So you and he were actually… intimate? Can I ask that?’
‘Well, you can ask it, certainly! But a lady would never tell, and I may be a lot of things but I always try to be discreet.’
‘Oh, I think I understand.’ Not great, just good, but Jacqueline could still hear through her French that she did understand what was being implied. ‘It also sort of agrees with what I’ve heard.’
‘Now, now,’ she tsked into the phone. ‘Mustn’t gossip.’
The journalist’s laugh was rough and loud. Very American. ‘So, Jacqueline, what was it like to have the privilege of being immortalized by a master?’
‘It… it was good, but while I know the painting’s been considered a masterpiece and all that– I’ve even heard talk of hanging it in the Louvre, if I remember correctly– it’s just something to hang on a wall. Being with Escobar, a man like that… to have that kind of experience… well, it can change… a waitress, say, into a princess.’
‘But what was it for you?’
‘It was magnificent. Truly magnificent.’
About the Story
A Seduction of Vanity is a chapter from Brushes, a novel I recently wrote. The book is about all the people around Escobar, a famous artist: his wife, his manager, the forger, his brother and many others, told through interconnected chapters.
There is just something about Paris– its history, flavour, atmosphere, a mix of the very old with cutting-edge contemporary– that lends itself perfectly for all kinds of stories, including erotica. That something for me is so strong I– even though I don’t speak a word of French (I have a hard enough time with English)– have often dreamed about living in that very special city. While that may never happen, the allure of Paris is still there: a magnificent snail’s-shell of culture, food, eroticism, romance, and laughter. A true city of dreams… all kinds of dreams.
Belleville Blue
by Carrie Williams
Mona hadn’t spoken to or even seen any of her neighbours in weeks. She’d been holed up in her garret, hooked up to the internet or knee-deep in box files, researching her Encyclopaedica Erotica. As the work absorbed her more and more, so the human contact diminished, until all she was left with were her occasional trips to the grocer’s and her brief calls to her editor, updating him on her progress.
Nights, after working to the point where she couldn’t think straight, she’d sit in her window with the shutters thrown open, listening to the Paris night. This area, Oberkampf spilling out of the 11th into the 20th, was one of the city’s hippest, and from every direction she could hear people calling to one another, music spilling from bars and clubs, animated chatter wafting up from the restaurant and café terraces. The place pulsated with life, while hers seemed to have become something stagnant and stale.
One morning, walking home from the local market with her string bag full of fruit, vegetables and little packets of meat bound up in greaseproof paper, she stopped, on a whim, outside the town hall of her arrondissement and studied the notices on the board. It was only then that she realised that it was the eve of the day people like her, lonely people, dreaded more than any other: Bastille Day, the city’s– indeed, the nation’s– biggest party. A day for celebrating with loved ones. A day for fireworks and fun. But what if there was no one to have fun with?
Just as she was turning away, a second notice snagged her attention: a ball at the local fire station, that evening. She smiled to herself. She’d heard about these bals pompiers some time ago. Fire stations across the capital held them every year, on the eve of Bastille Day. She studied the notice in more detail: there were to be ‘country fair style games’, a bar, traditional music, and a petite surprise. This time she almost laughed out loud. The French had some funny ideas about what constituted a good night out.
At home, she put away her shopping and made herself a cup of coffee, which she placed on her desk, by her mouse mat. Logging onto the ’net, she typed in the website address of the Louvre and, after a few minutes spent keying in various search words, leaned forward in her chair to get a better view of the erotic artworks and artefacts that flashed up before her– men and women, or women and women, carved into figurines, on Attic vases, on rings, or in paintings by Delacroix, Ingres and others. From time to time she would lean forward to make notes on a little lined pad beside her, highlighting ones that she particularly wanted to see in the flesh the next time she visited the museum.
Her favourite, and one she had already visited in person several times over, was Ingres’ Le bain turc, or Turkish Bath. She loved it both for its composition– a harem scene full of arabesques– and for its history. Ingres, aged eight-two at the time of the painting, had enjoyed the irony of creating an erotic work in old age, telling friends that he ‘retained all the fire of a man of thirty years’ and even going so far as to detail his age, AETATIS LXXXII, on the canvas itself.
Mona also loved the audacity of the painter in depicting one of the nude female bathers openly caressing the breast of another, and the fact that the bather in the right foreground, arms raised above her head, was based on a sketch that the painter had made of his wife, Madeleine Chapelle, almost half a century before. Another wife, Empress Eugenie, so disliked the work that she made her husband, Napoléon III, return it to the painter just days after receiving it. Before making its way to the Louvre, it had found a more welcome home with Khalil Bey, a former diplomat and art lover with a renowned collection of erotica that had also included Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, a close-up oil painting of the lower half of a woman’s body, legs spread, and his Les Dormeuses or The Sleepers, an overt depiction of naked lesbian lovers entwined, almost certainly post-coitally, on a bed.
The afternoon passed quickly, productively, and when Mona next glanced up, dusk had fallen outside her window. She stood up to look around, pulled her cardigan more closely around her. She didn’t mind the days, but the nights were hard.
She cooked herself a simple supper, but even the robust Toulouse sausage, oven-warmed bread and red wine failed to warm her. She sat in her armchair wrapped in a much-loved pashmina, re-reading a favourite work by Anaïs Nin, Spy in the House of Love. Lulled by the slow burn of the prose and the luxuriousness of the sensual experiences described, she soon fell into a rêverie from which only the sound of the bells chiming in the church beside her apartment block roused her. She counted down the hour: eight o’clock. Just eight. How was she to get through the rest of the night?
She held out until nine, when the words began to blur before her eyes. Then, folding the blanket and placing it on her work chair, she went upstairs and ran herself a bath, adding a few drops of aromatic oils– her own mix of jasmine, ylang ylang and mandarin. Then she stripped off and sunk into it as far as her chin, holding her hair up in a ponytail with one hand. With her other she played with her right nipple, almost unconsciously.
She stared down below the clear water, at the flat expanse of her stomach terminating in the gentle incline of her mound of Venus and the fluff of golden-brown hair, rather unkempt since she had been living here, since she had been alone. She let her ponytail tumble down and the freed hand glide over her body, move across t
he plump cushion of her mons, thread its way through the silken fronds and play around her lips. She closed her eyes, gave herself up to the delicious melting feeling. As it grew stronger, she hooked her thumb round and pressed it against her clit, massaged it from side to side. A jag of pleasure like an electric shock had her arch up, sloshing water over the side of the bath as she climaxed.
Afterwards, she dressed warmly before locking the apartment and heading out into the night.
She was surprised by the number of people heading into the fire station– the promise of traditional musical entertainment seemed to have brought the locals out in droves. She stood still in the road for a moment, looking at the building. She didn’t even know why she was here, besides the fact that she couldn’t be alone anymore. But who was she going to talk to? She knew no one. And no one knew her.
She breathed in deeply and pushed open the door. Inside, people were drinking and chatting in low voices. A few of them turned their eyes to her as she handed over a few euros to the woman collecting the entrance fees, and she nodded self-consciously in their direction as she made her way to the trestle table in front of them and bought a glass of red wine. She turned back to face the room, looking around every so often for a friendly face encouraging her to start a conversation. But the momentarily inquisitive adults had all turned back to their little groups, shouldering her out.
After twenty minutes or so, she was just thinking of creeping away and making her way home when a mike was set up on a makeshift little stage at the front of the room. Some men she hadn’t noticed until that point materialised from one corner of the room and took to the stage, one carrying a trumpet, another an acoustic guitar, and a third a piano accordion.
Mona watched as they assembled themselves, tuned up their instruments, psyched themselves up. The accordionist, in particular, drew her attention: tall and slightly built, he had almost white-blond hair and chestnut-brown eyes– a combination that had always intrigued her. She didn’t remove her gaze from him as he took the large, boxy instrument between his hands, ran his long slender fingers up and down the piano keyboard.
After a few minutes, the band struck up a waltz, and she was pushed back as a tide of people surged forward and the space in front of the stage was transformed into a dance floor by swaying couples. She felt another pang of loneliness as she counted out the coins for a second glass of wine, which she emptied rapidly. Over the dancers’ heads she could see the accordionist gently rocking on his parted legs as he compressed and released the bellows with one arm. One hand operated the button keyboard on the left of the bellows, the digits of the other caressed the piano keys. His mastery of the cumbersome-looking contraption was complete.
In her mind, as the wine infiltrated her bloodstream and her focus on the blond accordion player grew more intent, the sound of the other instruments almost wholly died away. She was fascinated by how the swirling sound of the accordion simultaneously evoked in her a sense of sprightly cheeriness and a kind of wistfulness, perhaps even melancholy. Utterly and unmistakeably French, it put her in mind of black berets and clouds of cigarette smoke– some of the clichés she thought she abhorred. She found herself swaying a little in time to the music, then tapping her feet, shimmying her shoulders a tad. No one could see her anyway, hidden away as she was at the back of the room.
As the evening advanced, the pace heightened, with the band working their way through an impressive repertoire of polkas, mazurkas, foxtrots, paso dobles and javas. The latter, in which the swaggering dancers wrapped their arms around their partners and clasped their buttocks, thrilled her with its loucheness. It put her in mind of the old bal-musettes she had read about. Almost against her will, she found herself moving forwards towards the dance floor, surrendering her body to the cadence. The couples, lost to each other, scarcely noticed as she slipped between them, eased herself into the centre. As another tune began, she threw her head back, closed her eyes, and let herself be carried away by the tempo.
She wasn’t sure how long she’d been dancing when she opened her eyes to see the accordionist’s fixed firmly on her, the corners of his mouth twisted up in a wry smile. He nodded at her when she saw him, winked. She smiled back, moved a little closer to the stage now that the crowd had thinned out a little. With her hips and shoulders she writhed like a serpent, enjoying the way her breasts swayed wantonly in her flimsy bra, the feel of the blond’s eyes on her as the band launched into a rousing finale.
The music stopped and the musicians stepped forward to take a bow. The rough wine coursing in her veins, combined with the intoxication of the dance, made her step forward to steady herself against the stage. She closed her eyes again. She was showing herself up in front of all these strangers, she reprimanded herself. She looked towards the door, wondered if she could make it that far without falling over.
As she straightened herself up, she felt a firm hand on her shoulder.
‘Ca va?’ she heard a voice say, and she looked up to see the accordion player lowering himself to sit on the edge of the stage beside her.
‘Oui, oui,’ she said rapidly.
‘Ah, you’re English?’
She nodded.
‘Are you on holiday?’
‘No, I just moved here, not long ago. I live just off Oberkampf, towards the Canal Saint-Martin.’
‘I don’t know it. I’m not from here. We travel around. We’re vagabonds.’ He smiled, held out a hand. ‘My name is Louis,’ he said, as she felt his warm palm against hers. ‘What’s yours?’
‘Mona.’
‘C’est joli. Listen, Mona, I need to pack up my accordion but I’d love to have a drink. How say we take a couple of glasses outside with us?’ He looked around him. ‘It’s getting a bit stale and sweaty in here.’
‘Sure,’ she said, losing herself in the soft brown eyes that regarded her, dark as pools of spilt ink. She followed him across the now-deserted space of the dance floor.
‘What did you think of the entertainment?’ he said, as she reached for two glasses. He headed towards the door, which she stood against to hold open as he manoeuvred his bulky instrument outside.
‘I loved it,’ she replied, a little embarrassed as she remembered how she had lost herself on the dance floor, how she had opened her eyes to find him staring right at her. Sensing her discomfiture, he added, ‘It’s nice to see someone with a bit of rhythm.’
She laughed.
‘Seriously,’ he said. ‘So what brought you to Paris?’
She frowned, looked past him. There had been nights, other nights, when, crazed and cracked by solitude, she had walked and walked, following the streets until she had to ask a stranger for directions back to Belleville.
‘I’m a writer,’ she said at last. ‘And Paris is a city of writers. For writers.’
He nodded thoughtfully, lit up a cigarette, offering her one. Fire danced in his eyes as he struck a match and brought it to the tip. He took a deep drag, blew smoke out around him.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he said. ‘I don’t know this part of Paris at all. Which is silly, since this is the territory of Piaf, my heroine.’
Mona gestured back down the Rue de Ménilmontant, and he nodded, placing the undrunk glasses of wine on the pavement before following her.
They walked in silence for a while, and then, feeling the need to break the silence, Mona said, ‘So why the accordion?’
‘The squeezebox, or ‘trembling box’– boîte à frissons– as the slang word has it?’ he said, then paused reflectively. ‘Well, why not?’ he continued after a moment, flashing her a smile that made her feel weak.
‘Why not indeed? But it’s quite a rare instrument. Why did you choose it over, say, a guitar?’
‘Oh, I play the guitar too. And a few other instruments besides. But I’m a romantic, and there is something so old-fashioned about the accordion. I’ve been in love with the idea of it ever since I first heard the Piaf song L’Accordeoniste.’
‘About an accor
dion player?’
He nodded, eyes fixed on the road ahead. ‘About a doomed love affair between a bal-musette accordionist and a prostitute. Cheery stuff. And what about you?’
‘What about me?’
‘What kind of thing do you write?’
She squirmed a little. Depending on who she was talking to, she was more or less evasive about her job as an historian of the erotic. Not that she was ashamed of it. But she had found that it gave people certain ideas about her, that it made them think, all too often, that she was some kind of nymphomaniac. Sadly, the converse was true. She would have loved to be a sexual tigress, but she had grown to accept that she just didn’t have it in her.
He had noticed her hesitation and was just about to open his mouth to coax her when she saw the Café Charbon up on their right and was happy to have the opportunity to deflect any further questioning, at least for the moment.
‘A drink?’ she said. ‘This is the best bar in the neighbourhood, so they say.’
He looked at the façade, then down it past the street. ‘How about a dance?’ he said, gesturing with his chin towards a different venue.
She looked. It was the Nouveau Casino, a famous club and live music venue. She’d never been.
She must have pulled a face, for he said, ‘We don’t have to.’ Then he linked his arms through hers. ‘But it might be quite fun if we do.’
She didn’t want any more to drink, she felt dehydrated from the cheap red wine at the bal. But on the dance floor with Louis, resting her head against his shoulder and feeling his pelvis grinding into her, feeling the coil of his dick straining at his trousers, seeking, of its own accord, what nested between her own legs, she felt light-headed, drunk with desire and longing. Around them people swayed in time to the electro tunes, sometimes moving other body parts too– arms, hands, fingers, shoulders, head or hips. Some of them whooped and bounced, showing off to the rest of their crowd. Others, falling into tune with the music, with the intensification of the beats and melody that the DJ was engineering at his turntables, looked to be falling into some kind of trance state.
Sex in the City Paris Page 4