Sex in the City Paris

by Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

  Sunday

  by John Baxter

  Stepping into the Café Balzac, he was always out of breath. And each time, the same question crossed his mind: what part was due to the effort of walking five blocks from the Métro, and what to excitement?

  Was it still exciting? It must be– otherwise why continue? Infidelity demanded organisation; imaginary meetings at unsociable hours, and visits to remote brocantes beyond the péripherique. Did Bunbury have a French opposite number? More likely, such things fell under the ruling philosophy of most Gallic activities: don’t ask, don’t tell.

  But he did look forward to their Sundays; still felt residual shivers of the guilty thrill, so intense during their first hazardous, improvised couplings in hotels, her office after hours, even once at lunchtime in the toilet of their favourite restaurant– and, as she pointed out later, at precisely the appropriate point in the meal; that hiatus where, traditionally, the French get down to business, entre la poire et le fromage; between the pear and the cheese.

  Even so, what began as an adventure was now, he had to admit, almost a routine.

  Or a ritual?

  ‘Monsieur desire?’ The boy behind the counter was new, and didn’t know him, but the owner, turning from the espresso machine, smiled. ‘Deux expresses pour monsieur,’ he told the boy.‘Un pour emporter?’

  ‘Bonjour, m’sieur. Oui, c’est exact.’

  Three months of Sundays had won him the deference due a regular.

  As the machine hissed, he stepped outside to make his call. Reception in the café was bad.

  He almost collided with a West Indian woman, berating the small white boy whose hand she held. She stopped short, glared, then detoured around him. Judging from her handbag, low heels and hat, and the boy’s fresh-ironed white shirt, she was a gardienne headed for mass with her employers’ son while maman et papa enjoyed a lie-in, or a leisurely fuck. Confirming his guess, the bell of the church on the next street tinnily clanged ten.

  The boy could have been him at that age– calculating how long he could delay the trial of Sunday mass. Was it still true, he wondered, that, providing you didn’t miss the consecration and the sermon, your attendance counted, and you had no sin to admit at Thursday confession?

  ‘Hello!’

  Her voice startled him. He’d speed-dialed without thinking. Instinctively, he turned his back on the disappearing woman and her charge.

  ‘Ca va?’

  ‘Ca va très bien,’ she said. ‘They’ve just gone.’

  ‘Great. Ten minutes then?’

  ‘Mmm. With my coffee?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Through the window of the café, he saw the owner setting out two coffees on the counter; one with cup, saucer and paper spill of sugar, the other in take-away styrofoam.

  Abruptly, an image coalesced in his imagination, as precise as one of Helmut Newton’s tableaux.

  ‘Uh… what would be nice…’ he said tentatively.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Do you think… maybe… just the heels…?’

  ‘Oh.’ She let the thought marinate a moment. ‘Just…? Not…?’

  ‘Mmm.’

  Though two blocks away, he felt her as close as his shoulder. Was that her breath?

  ‘Well, we’ll see,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget my coffee.’

  At the counter, he gulped his express, laid down four Euros, and descended to the toilet, reminded by the rub against his half-hard dick that, as usual on their Sundays, he wore no underwear.

  After pissing, he didn’t zip up.

  What if he let it stay open?

  Would the café owner notice?

  Would anyone? Some femme de ménage, passing him on the street, trailing her wheeled caddy, glancing down, eyes widening, blushing…

  This time, the fantasy made him fully erect, and he stood facing the empty urinal for a few seconds, letting it subside, before returning upstairs.

  Leaving the small change on the counter, he took the styrofoam cup.

  ‘Bonne journée.’

  ‘Bonne journée, m’sieur.’ The owner smiled– conspiratorially? ‘Bon dimanche.’

  Her street was a canyon of six-floor apartments, dating back to the 1890s. The sun reached ground level only between eleven and two, so there were no trees. And no shops either, at least none that opened this early on Sunday, so nobody passed him in the two blocks. He wasn’t sorry. For every piquant outcome of his discreet experiment in flashing, he could think of a dozen that ranged from embarrassing to disastrous. But the vision persisted, fanned by the occasional puff of cold air that penetrated as he walked. In one of Kingsley Amis’s novels, the hero, to delay his orgasm, mentally conjugated Latin verbs. Would that work in this situation? He improvised, using a familiar succession of digits and letters: 76A34, 76A34, 76A34…

  As he reached her front door, he slowed. In his complicated moral geography, their Sundays, until he entered her building, existed only as a potentiality. As long as he stayed on the street, she remained just one of the thousands of women who’d occupied his imagination since he was old enough to be interested. And to imagine was no sin; or at least no mortal sin. Once, however, he crossed the cracked, uneven tiles of her lobby and set foot on the stairs, a different reality obtained.

  But the possibility of walking past didn’t survive more than a microsecond. Generations of fingers had almost effaced the figures and letters on the ancient keypad, but his didn’t hesitate.

  76A34.

  The latch clicked.

  She lived on the fourth floor, but he always paused on the third landing, to catch his breath, clear his mind.

  There were rules to their encounters; that much had been established from the beginning. He instigated the affair, but she controlled it. He could suggest, and she could acquiesce or refuse. Had she disliked what he’d proposed on the phone, she’d have told him instantly. As it was, he knew, as he pressed the bell, what to expect– and what was expected of him.

  Even through the door, the click of heels was enticingly audible.

  ‘Oui?’

  Her voice came muffled through the varnished wood.

  ‘Facteur.’ His breath was short, as if he’d run up the four flights.

  ‘Vous avez quelque chose pour moi, m’sieur?’

  Now he was fully erect, flagrantly excited. If someone should came down the stairs…

  He swallowed. ‘Oui, madame. Mais vous devez signer, s’il vous plait.’

  She opened the door just wide enough to admit him to the unlit hall, then stepped back as it shut behind him, the better for him to see her in the dim light from the doors that led to bedroom and salon.

  Long before she showed herself to him for the first time, he knew how she would look naked: legs– her best feature– slim and straight, breasts soft, larger than they seemed in clothes. Neat bottom, small, well-kept hands with long unvarnished nails. And always, he visualised as he saw her now, hands behind her back, eyes downcast, legs slightly apart– and nude in black patent leather sandals with three inch heels.

  He pulled her to him. The first kiss was always too urgent, too hungry. It was a fault he worked to correct. Years ago, in a different country, almost a different life, another woman– like her in many ways– had chided him as his fingers probed and pried the crevices of her body.

  ‘No, not yet,’ she had said. ‘When I’m more…’ She took a moment to find the perfect word. ‘… lustful.’

  He tried to apply the lesson now, forcing himself to enjoy the sensations that would exist in this moment alone: the sense of possession implicit in his spread palm on the small of her back, pressing her to him, and the surprise of her nudity against his body, clothed.

  Wait… wait… Lacking Latin verbs, he fell back on the words he’d parroted all those Sundays as an altar boy. Confiteor Deo omnipotenti, beatae Mariae semper Virgini, beato Michaeli Archangelo, beato Joanni Baptistae, sanctis Apostolis Petro et Paulo…

  It won him ten or fift
een seconds of gentle contact, lips to lips, before other thoughts engulfed it.

  ‘Touch me!’

  Her cool palm slid unhesitatingly through his open flies, encircling his hardness, but remaining thrillingly motionless; all touch, all promise.

  With the other hand, she rescued the coffee he still held, forgotten.

  ‘I hope it’s still hot,’ she said. Then she dug in her nails.

  From what had become, by habit, his end of the long black leather couch, he watched her move around the shadowy salon.

  He didn’t mind her not being young; preferred it, in fact. No teenager could walk nude in heels, except with a teeter and a giggle. He liked her stride, her indifference to effect, the unapologetic squat as she retrieved the foil capsule peeled from the half bottle of champagne. Today it was Veuve Clicquot– appropriate, since she, too, was a widow– but marques mattered less than effect. A jolt of express and two glasses of champagne on an empty stomach brought her quickest to the peak of arousal. And quick mattered.

  ‘No problems?’ he asked.

  ‘Nope. She still loves it.’

  She was the daughter, aged nine. It was attending Sunday mass with a family friend, followed by a pizza lunch; a luxurious two-hour holiday from parenthood. But though absent, the daughter, like his wife, remained a presence; the two embodied in the mobile phones always placed next to one another by the bed, ready to dispense the excuses that had, by now, become second nature. ‘Tell Uncle George he can take you to the park, But no ice cream; I’m having a coffee with X. I’ll be home in about an hour.’

  She popped the cork, poured two glasses, set them on the coffee table, and subsided, ankles crossed, onto the couch at the other end. He undid his belt and opened his trousers, easing them off his hips, letting his cock and balls loll out. They drank the wine and looked at one another, enjoying the inevitability of pleasure.

  ‘Doesn’t she notice?’ she asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘The hair.’

  Not long after they started, he began to shave his pubis. It excited him to do so, drawing his attention at unexpected moments during the day to smoothness or stubble.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Or if she does, she doesn’t mention it.’

  He liked bodies hairless; would have enjoyed shaving her: warm water, soap, steel, finishing with a shaver. But she refused. “She’d notice,” she’d said, meaning the daughter. Did they spend much time together nude? He visualised it as a canvas by Balthus; raised skirts, smooth pussies, a flagrant sideways light.

  As she leaned over to pour the second glass, he said ‘Show me.’

  Taking her time, she sank back into the cushions, sipped, uncrossed her ankles, pushed her hips forward and, letting one foot drop to the carpet, raised the other to hook her heel over the top of the couch.

  Her expression was polite? Obliging? Neither, exactly. More like the inscription on Man Ray’s memorial in the Cimitiere Montparnasse: unconcerned but not indifferent.

  The sight left him anything but indifferent. Rather, the pink slit of her pussy, pursed in its nest of almost invisible hair, moved him to a tenderness only partly due to wine and lust.

  ‘You’re perfect, you know.’

  Narrowing her eyes and making a small moue, the French phantom kiss, she said, ‘You are not so bad yourself.’

  The things one said when one couldn’t say ‘love’.

  They chatted, half listening to France Culture, almost inaudible. The sob of a quartet, one of his favourites. Listy Důvěrné. Intimate Letters. Janacek. At such moments, he saw life like a bowl filled to brimming; one movement, and it would ripple and spill.

  ‘Well…’ he said. Sometimes it was “Shall we…?” or occasionally “Want to play?”

  She tipped up her glass to finish the last drops, and placed it on the table.

  ‘Back in a minute.’

  While she was in the bathroom, he entered the dark bedroom and dragged the duvet from the low, queen-sized bed, leaving just the two pillows. Peeling off t-shirt and trousers, toeing out of his shoes, he lay on his back in the gloom, idly touching his cock. Awaiting her pleasure.

  He mostly knelt at the foot of the bed; at his devotions, he liked to think. The folded duvet cushioned his knees, while a pillow drawn under her hips raised her pussy; better for her, he insisted, but thinking as much of himself. Leaning forward too long with his neck at that angle became uncomfortable, and finally painful.

  It had taken about twenty minutes, as usual. From the moment he parted her thighs with his forearms, used his thumbs to spread the lips of her pussy, and lingeringly licked with the full length of his tongue from her anus to her clit, her moans of pleasure and encouragement never ceased; merely, after about ten minutes, rose to a crescendo, and expired.

  He never asked ‘Did you come?’ or ‘Was that nice?’ The kind ones lied. The unkind thought it was none of his business. ‘If I did, it was my orgasm,’ a righteous little minx had snapped at him in a Finnish bedroom, and after that he never enquired again.

  He wiped his mouth, smearing the wetness from his lips and cheeks with his palm before laying his cheek, still sticky with juice and spit, on her stomach. Was it polite to wipe? As a younger man, he’d debated this point of sexual etiquette, deciding that, if the woman noticed at all, she was as likely to take it for relish as distaste.

  He pulled himself up onto the bed, glad to lie straight after kneeling so long; the same relief he used to feel at mass when one stood for the Introit, then sat for the almost welcome tedium of the sermon. She wriggled up beside him, pulling the pillow with her. In the beginning, he’d assumed she’d want to cuddle, but though she nestled willingly enough within the curve of his arm, he sensed she did so out of politeness. After that, he didn’t bother, leaving her to drowse.

  At these moments, his mind always wandered to other women– and, more frequently than any other, to the one who’d cautioned him to wait till she felt “lustful”. He’d never seen orgasms like hers. Lathered in sweat, she buried her face in the pillow and shrieked her delight until nothing remained, and her exhausted voice petered out in a whimpered ‘no more no more no more’.

  ‘Shall I get the sticky stuff?’

  ‘Mmm?’

  Her question broke him out of his reverie. But of course it was time. He’d done her. Now she would do him. It was only fair.

  Unfortunately, his options were limited. Penetrative sex, though possible, was complicated. She demanded a condom, which further reduced his already depleted sensations. Then, too, her cunt was tiny– his thumb filled it easily. She loved cock, however, and would come repeatedly, but her body stiffened and reared the moment he entered her, and she signified her pleasure not with moans but a noise between grunt and shout, as if each thrust was a punch. It worked best when he wrestled her under him, trapping her wrists, subduing her with brute weight; something he, who loved compliance and surrender, found anything but erotic.

  The compromise was “sticky stuff”; lubricant gel, with the aid of which she administered an inexpert hand job, usually leaving him to finish himself while she assumed the obscene poses he liked. He had no reason to believe they aroused her, a fact that, perversely, excited him more. As he knelt over her belly, hand pumping, about to gush, his last thought was often, She’s whoring for me!

  But today the thought repelled him.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘Put something on. Or don’t we have time?’

  She peered at the big clock on the mantel over the never-used fireplace.

  ‘There’s time. What would you like?’

  He’d been surprised to find, on one of their first times together in her apartment, that she owned some expensive silk and lace lingerie; gifts, she explained, of a previous lover, or lovers– all, from the labels, Italian.

  ‘Stockings, heels, and a bra,’ he said. ‘The red one.’

  ‘With the suspenders?’

  ‘No. The stay-ups.’

  She assembled the outfit silently,
with the solemn care he’d seen when, as an altar boy, he’d watched the priest assume his vestments: surplice, chasuble, alb.

  Clipping the bra, she settled her breasts with both hands into the half cups of red lace, examined herself briefly and without expression in the full-length mirror, straightened the dark bands of the stocking tops across her thighs.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘More than OK.’ His voice was thick. ‘Beautiful.’

  It was no mere compliment. The moment he saw her in these things, he understood why men bought them for her. Her body welcomed lace; gloried in it, as a bird in air. Stockings, buckles, tapes and straps lay on her flesh as if it had been created for no other purpose. It was only half-naked that she looked fully dressed. How could she not see that? Or perhaps she did, but despised a truth she could not understand.

  ‘Now… the sticky stuff?’

  ‘No.’

  He stood up and put his hands on her shoulders. Did he expect her to flee from what he was about to suggest?

  ‘Something different.’

  ‘Whip you?’ He’d never seen her startled. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’d like it.’

  She accepted the statement without comment. That was how it worked. He suggested, and she acquiesced or refused. She did not negotiate.

  ‘Whip you with what?’

  He gestured to the wardrobe, the mirror of which reflected her nude back, banded by the red bra strap, and the dark stocking tops. ‘You must have belts.’

  ‘Yes,’ she conceded. She looked round the bedroom. ‘Where? How?’

  ‘Get one. I’ll show you.’

  He walked naked into the salon, scrotum contracted in expectation. Taking a dining chair, he placed it well away from the table, facing the curtained window.

  ‘Like this?’ she said from the doorway.

  The belt, narrow, plaited brown leather with a silver buckle, hung limp from her hand, like something she’d just killed.

  ‘It’ll do.’ He was short of breath. His heart thumped. ‘Bring it here.’

  She did as he ordered, heels clicking on the parquet. He straddled the seat, as if preparing to sit down backwards on the chair, then squatted, resting his forearms on the back. All sensation had contracted to the swing and dangle of his genitals.