Tell me what would please you… those words, spoken with such yearning, pushed Lawrence A. from mere arousal to an unprecedented state of frantic need and transcendent joy. They began repeating themselves in him like a mantra: Tell me what would please you, tell me what would please you. In his mind he saw his grey-suited inquisitress, his icy lilac, his spiritual mother, his actual mother, God, Goddess. He begged them all to tell him what would please them.
Judging by his subsequent actions, their answer was that he should sneak into his ruined pants (the zipper only stuck a little), take out his cock, and cradle it so lightly as to only increase its heavenly agony.
‘… into me,’ the lady of the moonlit legs was saying.
‘Yes, ma’am. Yes, ma’am.’ Tremblingly, Antoine took the staff of bread and laid it between the soft, dimpled thighs of his female master. He twisted it, and, with a gentleness born only of true force, he fitted the head of it in her.
‘Ahhh. Now tear it off, Antoine, so that only a bit is left. And eat your way up into it. Eat your way up into me.’
‘Ma’am!’ groaned Antoine. ‘Thank you, ma’am, thank you, ma’am, my lady, my wonderful lady, thank you, thank you. But, ma’am, I beg you for one favour. I need this, I need it in order to do what you’ve told me, I need it not to die. Ma’am, I beg you for permission to touch my cock, ma’am.’
‘Yes, Antoine; in fact, take it out for me.’
Antoine began to weep with joy. Lawrence A. Pinney heard– he had eyes only for those thighs and the very strange intruder between them– a zipper.
‘Very good, Antoine. Oh, look how hard it is. Look how it’s straining and silently crying out for release. Look at that. It’s so beautiful. Beautiful in lovely ways, but beautiful in terrible ways too. Yes, beautiful as death and dark and hell. All the hells. There are so many hells. Hells of fire and hells of snow and hells in the blackness between. That’s where we forge ourselves, Antoine, in the hells between.’
Lawrence A. Pinney’s whole body jerked the way it sometimes does in sleep. He’d forgotten, again, where he was. He’d forgotten that he was in this city where words like that seemed to grow up through the cracks. Yes, like weeds, stubborn and tough. Poetry was fragile everywhere else. But not here. Here, in Paris, poetry was strong.
‘And this poetry, out of all poetry,’ he said to himself, ‘is the poetry of Pigalle.’
‘… hear something, ma’am?’
‘Yes, Antoine, I did hear something. Would you please look? Then come back and eat the bread from me. It’s soaked up my juices by now.’
Lawrence A. Pinney dearly wanted to watch that happen, but he retreated before the advance of Antoine and slipped around another corner like a ghost.
And walked right into a faceful of baguettes.
A bicyclist– the bicyclist, Lawrence A. realized; there had only been one– turned. From under his regulation helmet, he looked Lawrence A. up and down.
‘Here you are at last. It certainly took you long enough.’
Baguettes rustling in his shoulder bags, the bicyclist came right up to Lawrence A., violating every rule of personal space without even so much as a smirk.
‘Now let’s get that cock stored away properly,’ he continued. ‘We don’t want to try Madame Maman’s patience.’ With wind-chilled fingers he seized hold of Lawrence A.’s swollen cock (Lawrence A. stifled a yell) and stuffed it back in Lawrence A.’s briefs. His impersonal, commanding roughness almost made Lawrence A. pee with shame.
The bicyclist acted like grabbing a man’s cock and manhandling it with such force was nothing out of the ordinary, and therefore any shock Lawrence A. might be feeling was entirely Lawrence A.’s fault. He simply said ‘Zip up. Come with me.’ Off he trudged in his strange bicycle shoes.
Lawrence A. Pinney, still shocked at having been handled so, wandered after him like a forlorn duck. ‘Where are we going? What’s going to happen to me? What does it all mean? If this is my destiny, how come I feel so confused? Can I have some of the bread? Were you hitting me with it on purpose?’
The bicyclist approached a particularly shabby door and, with an oddly courtly gesture, waved Lawrence A. inside. (His two loads of baguettes shifted as he moved.)
Lawrence A. knew, of course, what awaited him in this room: the cinnamon-voiced woman, and the third man. The other one who had been discussing Lawrence A. at that back table.
What would the seasoned goddess be doing to this man? Making him lick her floor clean with his tongue? Might Lawrence A. get to help? Would the man be assigned to treat Lawrence A.’s cock with the same familiarity and disrespect as the bicyclist just had? Would it stop there? Or would it go further?
He went inside and…
‘You’re alone,’ he told the woman. (She was draped in russet pashmina.)
‘Of course I am.’
Behind Lawrence A., he heard the bicycle messenger clop away in his strange bicycle shoes. The woman’s eyes softened as he went. ‘Ah, Pierrot,’ she said. ‘Such a nice boy.’
Lawrence A. protested, ‘But there should be a man with you!’
‘Nonsense! How could there be? I’ve been waiting for you.’
‘Me? But I displeased you! I failed you!’
‘Yes! Of course! That’s why you’re here. You could never belong to Agnès or Cerise, because you passed their tests.’
‘Tests?’
‘But of course. They were testing you. And you passed! You passed naturally. What more did you need from them? What could they teach you? But I, I have much to instill in you.’
Lawrence A. Pinney felt absurdly proud and hopeful– then, afraid. ‘Ma’am, I… I’ve never… I’ve never had to work like that. I’m not sure I can.’
She arched her brow. ‘You will,’ she said, and her voice both terrified and heartened him.
Then he thought of something. ‘But, ma’am,’ he objected. ‘Watching the others… I was so hard. Here, with you, I… look, I’ve gotten soft.’
‘Yes, exactly,’ she said.
He waited for her to say more, but she did not. She merely sat there in turn, waiting for him to understand.
He did, then, or thought he did.
There was one last question. ‘Ma’am?’
‘Speak.’
‘Ma’am, tell me, please– who was the third man? The one who’s not here.’
She tapped her fingers. ‘Explain.’
‘Well– the waiter at the café downstairs– it is downstairs, isn’t it, Ma’am.’
‘Yes… my son.’
At that word, Lawrence A. Pinney felt his toes curl in a pre-arousal fear and finality unlike any he had known. At the moment, he was still soft, but slowly, slowly that would change, and when the hardness reached him this time, it would never leave.
There was nothing to do but go on. He took a breath.
‘Ma’am. The waiter, Michaud… I saw him down there, and I saw him up here. He was the first man.’
She smiled to her feet. Her soft, sensible shoes hushed past Lawrence A. Pinney to the door.
‘And Antoine,’ Lawrence A. Pinney continued, ‘was the second. I saw him up here, but I heard him downstairs. Didn’t I. Well, didn’t I? He must have been one of the ones sitting behind me in the café.’
‘You can begin to undress now,’ mentioned the woman.
Lawrence A. Pinney, fingers shaking, slipped off his loosened tie. ‘So I wondered– who was the third man? The other one who was talking about me with Antoine?’
His grown-up, second-chance, pretend-Maman held out her hand for the blue Ungaro.
‘Ma’am?’ faltered Lawrence A. Pinney. ‘Ma’am, are you going to tell me who he was? And… and where he is now? What awaits me from him?’
Madame-Maman pulled the tie menacingly straight between her hands. ‘Do you think stories are like that here? So simple? So easily resolved?’
Too late, he remembered that he was in Paris.
She closed the door.
About the
Story
Ah, Paris, as they say. So many memories. Sidling up to my sister-lover in the bloody dark and murmuring ‘Solange?’, my ecstasy and terror only assuaged when she replies, euphonically, ‘Mon ange.’ (‘Les Bonnes’)
Struggling down the street with my basket of linge sale only to feel that beautiful blond man’s lips against my ear: ‘Ecoute, Gervaise.’ Or is my mind playing tricks on me, and it’s my brutish but compelling husband trying to pull me back from my already-late work? (‘L’Assommoir’).
Speaking of brutish but compelling mates, how can I forget gasping out ‘Crois-tu que cela est sage?’- you have to admire my composure– as yet another one penetrates me a few inches up (since I’m on my stomach) from where I’d been expecting. No consent, no prior discussion of mutual fantasies, not even any warning, none of those choses americaines, just lui voila, because this is Paris: where de Musset triumphed in his tears and where Desnos still follows us in shadows. Where orgasm is death, pleasure an executioner, and regret is a smile. (Baudelaire, bien sur.)
I have never been to Paris. But of course, I have also never left. Not since the moment in 1985 when I first had enough French to pick up Voltaire– which I must say I managed quite capably, quoique je ne puisse me tenir que sur une fesse.
That’s from ‘Candide,’ and the sang-froid in the face of unexpected anal sex is from, I think, Malraux. Search as I might for it, it refuses to answer me; it refuses to be simple.
If Sartre and Camus were dramatically wrong and Therese de Lisieux right, and we really are bound for a heaven, then these things will be among my treasures there. And more: Courbet, Redon, Toulouse-Lautrec and Brassai, showing me the present all the more clearly through the lens of the past, showing me what does not change by way of marking what does: these things will be among my treasures.
There’s a distinctive feeling to the French and specifically the Parisian consciousness. A flavour. It demands first your respect, then your tender protection, and finally everything. What else could I write for this anthology but what I wrote?
An Unreliable Guide to Paris Hotel Rooms
by Maxim Jakubowski
It was in Paris that he first slept with a woman.
No wonder that, for the rest of his life, he would entertain a love and hate relationship with the Paris capital. Often, when asked in social circumstances why his view of Paris was so ambiguous, he would mostly answer in jest that he loved Paris, but wasn’t actually too enamoured of the French.
He once lived there, but it had now been many years ago. He still returned on two or three occasions every year. Usually because of a woman. Seldom the same one. And, unsurprisingly, they weren’t always French.
Hotel de L’Odeon, rue de l’Odeon, Paris 6
She was German and had red hair. They had agreed to meet at the Gare du Nord, co-ordinating their respective arrivals from London and Hannover on separate trains a quarter of an hour apart.
She was taller than he expected and the buttons of her tapered white blouse strained against the opulent swell of her heavy breasts below the thin cotton fabric. Her brown boots reached all the way up to her knees.
They embraced.
Smiled at each other.
Maybe this would work, they both thought.
They made their way to the taxi rank, and exchanged small talk while they waited for the queue to shrink ahead of them. Neither had much luggage. It was just going to be a couple of nights. Their fingers touched fleetingly.
The first floor room was small and cramped and at the end of a long and dark corridor. The adjoining bathroom, though, was of a decent size.
As soon as she had set her case down on the bed, Claudia said she needed to take a shower. Her train journey had been much longer than his.
‘No problem.’
She slipped out of her loose skirt first, then her knickers. He noted how big her thighs were, the luscious roundness of her arse and then the unnatural, artificial tan she sported. She turned her head towards him.
‘You looking?’
‘Of course.’
‘You like?’
He smiled. ‘I like’.
She quickly unbuttoned the shirt, unclasped her bra and briefly swivelled so he had a full view of her naked body. As she had written to him, she was fully shaven. Her mound looked plump, like a warm fruit intersected by the darker line of her opening.
‘I still like,’ he said. She took a few steps into the bathroom and closed the door.
Later, they fucked.
She was a hungry lover. Sucked him with an eager appetite and once she had fitted him inside her, her cunt had the raging warmth of a furnace. Noisy too, demanding, pliable.
Still embedded within her, both relaxing for a while, he distractedly began pulling out the hairpins from her raised hair, allowing the blur of long flowing flames to pour down over her hard breasts. He had already extracted more than a dozen, and there were still as many left. Her eyes looked mischievous. He took one of the liberated hairpins and implacably tightened it around one of her dark nipples. She sighed loudly, and he felt her cunt muscles contract and surround his cock like a vice. He pressed the hair pin branches together harder and watched as tears formed in the corner of her eyes.
‘Yes,’ she said.
Encouraged, he fished another pin from the jungle of red-hued branches now surrounding her face and took hold of the other nipple. Her whole body shivered with pleasure, as he squeezed the pain out of her.
Still, she did not ask him to cease the torture. He thrust hard into her, the tip of his penis reaching new depths, hitting her inside walls, scraping fiercely inside her. She shuddered and screamed.
‘That was good,’ she would later say.
‘Did I hurt you?’ he asked.
‘No,’ Claudia answered. ‘I like it hard. It’s the way I am.’
And suggested he take a digital photo of her right then and there.
‘Naked?’
‘Of course,’ she delved into her bag and took out her small camera.
They took a bath together after their first fuck, and, after she had dried herself, she asked him to rub some cocoa butter creme all over her body. Now he knew why her pale brown tan was so even. But he hated the smell. Then Claudia dressed and informed him she had made arrangements to meet up for drinks with a friend, to take advantage of the fact she was in Paris again. He asked whether he could join them, but she was against it.
‘I’ll be back in the room in two hours at most. Jean-Claude is just a friend, you know.’
While she was out, he read in bed and dozed off. He woke in the middle of the night and Claudia still hadn’t returned. He rang her on her mobile. She sounded drunk when she picked up the call, loud café noises in the background.
‘I won’t be long,’ she said. ‘Oh, I’m having so much fun…’
By the time she crept back into the room, he was asleep again.
They fucked three times the next day, but he felt used and was no longer attracted to her. Between the sex, they had a couscous on the Boulevard St Germain and saw a movie on the Place Saint Michel. Seeing her off at the Gare du Nord the following morning, he had little to say to her.
Hotel Henri IV, rue Saint-Sulpice, Paris 6
The Italian woman came from Padova. Her name was Annarita.
She had written him a fan letter following an exhibition of his paintings in a Venice gallery, and they had flirted amiably for several months through letters and e-mails, until he suggested they finally meet. She was a lawyer. They agreed on Paris. He took the Eurostar and arrived on a Thursday, with some business to be dealt with on his first afternoon. Annarita was due to fly in the following day.
He took the RER train from Luxembourg and arrived at Roissy to greet her arrival.
He didn’t have to wait long, as she only carried hand luggage.
She had jet black hair and brown eyes and looked exactly like her photo, which was a relief. Her English was as tentative as his Italian, so communi
cation was halting and hesitant. He was never sure if Annarita fully understood what he was saying– she just kept on nodding, smiling, acquiescing in an emotionless manner– or even caught the gust of his feeble jokes or his possibly hopeless hints at the sensual nature of their burgeoning relationship.
She had left her shoulder bag in the hotel room he had booked for the tryst. The window looked out on a flower stall. She wanted a coffee. They walked down the road to the Café des Editeurs, an habitual haunt of his. He always felt comfortable in any bar with bookshelves full of volumes across its walls. And they did a great citron pressé, he had to admit.
The afternoon lingered on as they sipped their drinks, and then ordered again.
Finally, he suggested they leave. It was too early for supper.
‘What do you want to do?’ he asked her.
‘I don’t know,’ Annarita said.
He suggested they return to the hotel.
‘It will be easier to talk,’ he said. ‘It’s getting a little noisy here.’
‘OK.’
The room was too small, and there was little space on either side of the bed. Just a small shelf en lieu of desk and a metal chair facing it and then the door to the bathroom.
They both sat on the edge of the bed.
He didn’t know what to say.
He slowly put his arm on her shoulder. Annarita shuddered. Drew back. His hand retreated. He looked her in the eyes. ‘No?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. Her new refrain.
‘I’d like to kiss you,’ he said.
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know,’ again.
‘We’ve both come a long way,’ he added, hoping his face reflected kindness. ‘You look lovely.’
She didn’t reply for a while. Standing there, her back straight, her features a welter of simmering emotions he couldn’t fathom.
Then, suddenly, she stood up and said: ‘I don’t want to be another fuck, some anonymous scopatta. I don’t know you…’
Sex in the City Paris Page 18