He sensed her behind him.
‘Play with me.’
Hanging the belt over the back of the couch, she crouched beside him, and used both hands to stroke him as he had taught her, one in front, one behind. Her face was only a few inches away, and they kissed. He was aware, as he hadn’t been in the bedroom, of smells; the musk of his arousal, the sweetness of cunt juice on his face.
‘Use your nails.’
Instantly they dug into the root of his balls, raked down, while she jerked his cock so hard it almost threw him off balance.
Bitch.
‘Now the belt… and hard!’
Some women needed encouraging, teaching, but her first blow came fast and low, backhanded, cutting across the tops of his thighs and catching his balls, so that he grunted, bowed his head, and clutched the wood of the chair against the pain.
The second, higher, slashed across his cheeks.
Looking sideways, he caught her expression as she drew back her arm for the third.
He had never seen her like this. Eyes narrowed, teeth bared, she glowed. A flush lit her face, throat and the slopes of her breasts with a pink so intense that the skin matched the cups of her bra, making the lace seem an extension of her flesh.
As she slashed him again, he reached for her, and inserted his forefinger to the first joint. Ten men emptying themselves in her could not have made her wetter. Withdrawing the fingertip, he ran it between her dripping lips to her engorged clit.
She sobbed, and came.
Twice.
Three times.
Four.
And with each groan of pleasure, another cut of the belt, each more furious, until, untouched, he came himself, ejaculating in air.
Two weeks later, he invited her to lunch, and broke it off. There was no point in wrapping it up in words, nor did any come to mind. He just said ‘I think we should give the sex a rest.’
She didn’t protest, demand explanations, show emotion. All she said was ‘OK. If you like,’ and ordered her usual salade composée with a half bottle of Badoit.
As they ate, he speculated about what she wore under the plain grey skirt, the neat blouse and jacket. Did she sometimes leave the white bra and pants in their drawer, and slip on, just for one day, those wisps of La Perla?
As he counted out notes for the check, he asked, ‘The underwear. Would you have worn it if I hadn’t asked you?’
Without hesitation, she said, ‘No.’
‘And, the other?’
She stood up and wound her scarf round her neck.
‘Thanks for lunch.’
After she left, he lingered over a second coffee, watching the office crowd trickle away, back to their desks.
Precisely at 2.30, he speed-dialled a number.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked, keeping his voice low.
‘He’s got a meeting,’ she said. ‘Won’t be home till six at least.’
‘Perfect, then.’ He looked around the now nearly empty café. ‘What are you wearing?’
She had a soft, husky laugh. ‘What would you like me to be wearing?’
‘Well…’
Et introibo ad altare Dei: ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. And I will go into the altar of God, to God who giveth joy to my youth.
About the Story
Though France isn’t notably religious,the French regard the Catholic Church as important. One of the traditional three estates, with nobility and the commons, it’s woven into the national fabric. Even though, these days, its role, like that of the nobility, is more social and symbolic than real, the church flourishes as a repository of guilts and fantasies, often related to sex. In permissive times, bad behaviour becomes more piquant if one dignifies it as sin, and the regalia and ritual of Catholicism lend themselves to mischievous misuse. The Surrealists in particular found rich material there. Salvador Dali would attend mass, but only to sit in the back row and masturbate. Like the legendary young man of Kent, once he came, he went.
Most French men and women enjoy an element of formality and calculation in their sex life, particularly in Paris, where well-paid, attractive and bored men and women circulate restlessly in a culture that places a high value on appearances. An affair is more desirable if it has an element of chic. People dress up for sex as readily as they undress, and a lover may be flaunted as often as hidden. There is even a designated time for infidelity: entre cinq à sept; between five, when the businessman leaves his office, and seven, when he actually arrives home. If the Church of England is, as has been described, “the Tory Party at prayer”, sex in Paris might be called “the Catholic church on the job”.
Paris often seems, like Borges’ Aleph: “the only place on earth where all places are– seen from every angle, each standing clear, without any confusion or blending”. (He dismisses London as “a splintered labyrinth”– in sensuality, as in most things, uncertain and confused.). Sex becomes interesting to the metropolitan French when it ceases to be just sex, and becomes instead performance, fashion, even politics. This goes some way to explaining their lack ofinterest in US attempts,like the Kinsey and Hite reports, to demystify the erotic urge. Far from being works of scientific rationality, France’s two biggest post-war sexual best-sellers, Histoire d’O and La Vie Sexuelle de Catherine M, each written by a woman of impeccable intellectual credentials, celebrated closed quasi-religious communities of voluptuaries to which the passkey wasn’t desire but style and an understanding of ritual. However style and ritual can wear thin, which is what Sunday is about.
Hill of Martyrs
by Kelly Jameson
Aimé climbs to the highest point in Paris, the Sacré-Coeur Basilica, a multi-domed Romanesque church built on grounds traditionally associated with the beheading of the city’s patron, Saint Denis, in the 3rd century. He crushes out his cigarette with his torn sneaker, marvelling at the kids below riding the colourful, pumping carousel, the view of the city, the grids and blocks of people living out their tiny, spider-webbed lives.
Next he climbs to the top of the dome, more than 200 feet above Montmartre. It’s the second-highest viewpoint after the Eiffel Tower, and the sky is a bowl of brightness.
Once Aimé’s sneakers were as blue as the Parisian sky. Now they are so dirty and worn they are almost grey. Despite the fact that he’d rinsed his socks yesterday, they’re little oceans of filth. His stomach growls. He hasn’t had anything to eat, other than bread rolls and coffee, for a day and a half.
Somewhere below him, in the circling mass of humanity, is Cercle Clichy Montmartre, a place where his maman spends time when she isn’t in the sex joints. She sometimes plays pool or snooker at 2 a.m. in the place that had been a gentleman gamblers’ haunt in the 19th century and was used by the Nazis as a military barracks and horse stable during World War II. That was as upscale as his maman got. She preferred old cabarets and atrocious, tongue-tying wines. But it wasn’t always so.
Aimé likes to climb the Hill of the Martyrs and imagine he is far from his life, a simulacrum of reality. He’s only lived seventeen years, but some days he feels like an old deflated man. Here, he feels the world slow down; in this place with its sprawling stone, a frost-resistant travertine that bleaches with age to a gleaming white… this place with its Holy Joe words, its ripples of silent prayer sent up to the sky, the triple-arched portico surmounted by two bronze equestrian statues of France’s national saints, Joan of Arc and King Saint Louis IX, and the great bell, the Savoyarde, maybe the world’s heaviest bell at 19 tons.
What is it doing here, this church, at the top of the City of Light, in the middle of his murdered dreams? He doesn’t know who all these people are. Or why they come here. Week after week. Prayer after whispered prayer. They come. But what does it ever change? His maman still drinks too much. She still fucks strange men on the worn felt of pool tables in the spiritual harness of ill-lit bars. People still get sad and sick and murdered. And whenever he asks his maman about his father, whom he’s never known, sh
e always says, “The best thing he ever did was die.” And she will not talk about her own family, her own father. They are not French, his family. His mother, his brothers. It’s their dirty little secret. He is not allowed to call his mother “mom”. He must call her “maman”.
Why did Colleen, who now calls herself Colette, drag herself and her three small, red-faced boys to the streets of Paris, where painters and prostitutes still mix? In America, she’d tell the boys the same bedtime story over and over, her voice whispering the truth of what she was: a Kentaurian, a female centaur, half woman, half horse. Born of chaos and unbridled passions. And that, because of her nature, they all had to leave America for France, where with their openness, their love of chaos and passion and art, she would be accepted for who she was.
Later, when Aimé was no longer a child, if he imagined her in America, he could see that Colette was more like one of Picasso’s hidden harlequins; a shadowy misfit. A young woman with artistic talent, a sensual nature, and a wealthy, controlling father who wanted her to be an equestrian champion. A father’s wishes she denied and who disinherited her when she became pregnant with Aimé.
In France, for a time, Colette was famous, not as an artist as she dreamt, but as an actress in a winter circus of sorts. An equestrian theatre. A beautiful young woman with leaping dreams in her eyes. Who wore stunning costumes on her slender body; who acted in Macbeth, which was performed entirely on horseback.
Aimé liked to believe that somewhere in the sinews and ligaments of the tragedy/comedy of Colette’s body was a memory of the joie de vivre. Of that time when she stood in a long, black evening gown moulded to her curves, barefoot on the back of a regal horse, woman and beast perfectly balanced, her hair cascading in an elegant braid over her shoulder and down to her waist.
During one performance, a group of animal activists in the city, who believed it was cruel to make horses perform in shows, staged a protest. The protestors startled the horse, and Colette fell from her horse and broke her leg. A wounded female centaur. And then she was only half of herself.
And the circus, her circus, was gone like that. Snapped in two. The gemstone colours, the soft, silky costumes, the carpets, the artistry and magic of gigantic tents, the animals, the loud, rasping music, the scrap metal they used to build the trapeze apparatus. All gone for ever.
Her looks began to fold up too. She drank more then ever. Dabbled in art again but only long enough to complete one sculpture. Aimé doesn’t think she ever got back on a horse.
Sex had always been Colette’s first language, English her second. She got a part-time job at the Museum of Eroticism (Musee de l’Erotisme) at 72 Boulevard de Clichy. She got to exhibit the one sculpture she made, a six feet tall, moving giant vagina with six legs and feet spread in all directions that twirled and rotated when pushed. No arms, no upper torso, no head, no face. It sat right smack in the centre of a room like a merry-go-round, a room that also contained a chair with a red velvet cushion and a hard gold penis sticking up from the cushion; an old Japanese book about sex; a bunch of chastity belts; erotic snuff bottles; sexual pottery that was 2,000 years old; the bottom half of a naked female mannequin protruding from one wall; a selection of whips in rhino leather; crops for spanking; erotic door-knockers; and a large old-fashioned wooden box fitted with lenses known as a stereoscope that enabled patrons to view pictures of girls on offer.
Aimé was twelve years old the first time he saw the giant vagina, which was at about the same height as his head was. While Colette took tickets at the door and sipped coffee she let him roam and explore all seven floors.
The giant vagina and six legs were made of Plaster of Paris, and each leg wore a different type of stocking. The plastic toenails were painted electric colours. Aqua. Purple. Deep Rose. Tangerine. Plum. Silver. Aimé’s favourite stocking was the black fishnet. It felt nice when he ran his fingers along it.
“The French invented sex,” Colette would tell the patrons and they would laugh.
But the audience and dreams had galloped out of her life. Turns out she couldn’t live without them. Aimé and his brothers always begged her to tell the Kentaurian bedtime story again but she wouldn’t; said she couldn’t remember it any more. She told Aimé once, while working on the sculpture, that “an additional benefit of the ink wash I’m using is that it creates a pretty tough layer– the wax does, anyway; it helps to keep me from rubbing paint off as I work.”
“Do you hate love?” he finally asked her once while he helped her take tickets at the museum. She looked into his beautiful dark eyes. “Did you know in medieval times men actually believed that beavers who were being chased by hunters bit their testicles off? Right. Like any male thing would bite its own testicles off. That’d be the day.”
Colette doesn’t work at the museum any more. And Aimé is no longer a little boy roaming its floors like a detective delighting in each new fact and find. Now he roams the streets of Paris, its cafés and churches and monuments. Aimé’s current girlfriend Brigitte often tells him he is looking for something he’ll never find. She will join him soon on the Hill of Martyrs but for now, alone, he watches the city below, its lithe and sensual movements, its startling and abrupt grace, its fat shape like a shimmering body of water that will bubble over. A city of funicular railways, street artists, monuments, churches, hotels, vegetables, flowers, seafood… and sometimes people who think this is Paris.
Aimé stares at the sun’s reflection dripping red-mahogany shadows off one of the tall stained-glass windows. He realizes the blood-buzzing deep within his ears, the metallic pounding thunder in his young soul, is rage. Before he can change his mind, he climbs down the dome stairs, finds his way to the Chapelle de la Sainte Famille, and loses himself in thought. At least here he can pretend someone below prays for him.
Aimé is bombarded with ancient smells of stone and dust and perspiration, his eyes flooded with mustard- and wax-yellow light and he thinks of the waxy legs of the vagina sculpture. He takes a seat in one of the pews near the front.
“In the end, God’s son went home, Aimé. He went home. God doesn’t really care about shits like us.” That’s what his maman said whenever he asked her to take him to church.
From his first floor bedroom window, Aimé can look up and see the dome in the distance, glistening white, thrusting into the sky. Sometimes he imagines he hears church voices, raised in mad-for-God songs, floating and galloping on the thick grease of the early summer air, and he gets that strange, still feeling inside him. Then it disappears, and for a moment, it’s almost like he’s changed something in the thick, cruel marrow of his world just by thinking about it. Maman used to call him Andrew. But that was long ago.
He glances at his watch, rises from the pew. Goes outside to one of the neat gardens tucked behind the church, where it is silent as stone, and finds her waiting. The kiss is severe for both of them and neither wants it to ever end. Aimé’s fingers slide under her skirt, between her legs. She is hairy. ‘Good,’ he murmurs. ‘No panties, just like I told you.’ She makes a sound in her throat that causes his cock to grow even harder inside his jeans; she is so wet, and her musk floats in the air, shameless and demanding, helpless and sacred. She moves against his fingers, sucking his ear lobe with her little white teeth. He backs away and she looks at him with dazed, wanting eyes. He takes her hand and leads her to a deserted nook. ‘Get on your hands and knees.’ She obeys. ‘I want anyone who walks by to see that tight, dripping cunt of yours.’ Her ass is in the air, her legs spread. He doesn’t want to, but he thinks of the sculpture. All legs. He unbuttons his jeans and kneels behind her. What he likes about Brigitte is that she is not skinny. She is not overly pretty. She is big and warm and soft. There isn’t much about their relationship that makes sense except for the fucking. Brigitte smokes and she eats too many chocolate croissants and she is lazy, he thinks, as he pushes his hard cock inside her tight pink lips. Further in now, slippery wet, her belly a little fat, her tits bounce as he thrusts in
side her. She does no work, submissive slut, just lets him pound her while she groans and pretends to worry that they may be caught. She could’ve stepped from an old canvas. Her sad eyes are heavy and dark and she believes she looks best when someone is fucking her. A thin chain of white gold around her plump ankle shimmies as he comes on her bare backside.
Brigitte once had a boyfriend, a seventy-year-old Frenchman who told her she had a “bad” face. She was insulted until she realized he meant “naughty” face.
Aimé keeps her in that position for a while, kneading her buttocks, soft and firm as bread dough, slipping his fingers inside her, studying her cunt. He’s thought of himself as Aimé for a long time now.
After a while, he sits down, his back against the sturdy legs of a stone bench, and orders her to suck him. Her favourite fellatio position is on her knees, her wet, semen-spattered cunt in the air, throbbing for more (it takes a long time to make Brigitte come). The harder she sucks him, the less it feels like affection or adoration or permanence. The actual home of the martyr– across the pink fields and up the hill. Her lips suck and lick him. Brigitte never tries to make him fall in love with her. She is too lazy, he thinks, as she swallows the first wave of cum and then catches the rest on her face, her cheeks, her lips.
Afterward, she wipes off her face and they sit against the bench, smoking cigarettes; Brigitte’s legs open beneath her short skirt, her hand rubbing herself. Aimé likes to imagine she is descended from uncouth Tartans, who lived miserable lives walking around on stilts, raising sheep for their manure, necessary to grow their miserable crops of rye. It is a strange fantasy he doesn’t understand.
Eventually Brigitte leaves. She kisses him lightly. He knows she will not exert herself by walking the cobble-stoned streets; she will take the funicular. He continues to sit in the sun, his arm slung over the seat of the bench. This isn’t Paris. Paris is the room that’s dark, where you can’t see your hands in front of your face and it’s cold. And rainy. Things are broken and blue-rosed and cubed. That’s Paris. Van Gogh colours and Picasso dreams. Hidden harlequins.
Sex in the City Paris Page 10