Sex in the City Paris

by Maxim Jakubowski (ed)

  ‘Well, you agreed to come to Paris,’ he added pleadingly, ‘you knew we’d be sharing a hotel room…’

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘but this is now reality, not just words…’

  She lowered her eyes. Looked away from him.

  ‘You don’t like me?’ he asked.

  ‘Not enough,’ she replied.

  ‘Oh. I see that makes it awkward,’

  ‘Yes. But… there is another thing, you see… Since we began writing to each other, I’ve become friends with someone else back at home and, just last weekend, we… sort of happened… you understand?’

  He sighed. Bad timing. Oh well… Said nothing in response to her revelation.

  ‘It’s another woman,’ she then added, still avoiding his gaze and sitting upright on the far right end corner of the bed as if an invisible wall grew between them. ‘She works for the same legal office but in our other branch, some kilometres away in Mestre…’

  ‘I didn’t know that you…’ he enquired.

  ‘Neither did I. It’s the first time I have been with a woman,’ she indicated. ‘But I do like her a lot. Her name is Barbara.’

  He nodded.

  They had a meal nearby in a small, student-like, Japanese restaurant where most of the meal came on small skewers, even the cheese. And the silences between Annarita and he grew more strained as night fell and the prospect of sharing the room loomed. There was only one bed and no prospect of either of them sleeping on the floor due to a distinct lack of space in the small hotel room, a common feature to the majority of hotels in the Latin Quarter.

  ‘I’ll behave,’ he promised. ‘No need to place a cushion between us,’ he feebly jested. She changed into a long night gown in the bathroom while he slipped between the covers waiting for her. He hadn’t brought any pyjamas, and always slept in the nude anyway. In deference to the situation he kept his underpants on.

  ‘Can you switch the lights off,’ she called out.

  She made her way between the sheets and turned her back to him.

  They tried to sleep.

  It proved a difficult night. On occasions, almost out of primeval instinct he would regularly awaken and one or the other had moved closer to the other’s body, in search of warmth, like magnets drawn towards each other. On one occasion, he heard her quietly say ‘No’ when his hands, out of mere tenderness, drifted towards the hard flesh of her rump without him even being aware of the fact. He remained hard throughout the night. Wanting. Balls heavy. Hoping against hope. Trying to control his frustration.

  She woke up before him and made a beeline towards the bathroom to take a shower.

  She returned to the bedroom wrapped in a large blue towel, her hair still damp, her eyes surrounded by black shadows from the lack of sleep. He was sitting back with his arms behind his head, watching her.

  What could he say? What could he do?

  She interrupted the heavy silence.

  ‘I’ll just grab a hold of my clothes and go change in the bathroom,’ she said. ‘I think later I’ll go visit the Musée d’Orsay. There’s an exhibition there I’d like to see.’

  ‘I won’t be joining you,’ he told her.

  ‘I understand,’ Annarita said.

  ‘I’ll go out on my own,’ he added. ‘Probably will stay out until the evening.’

  ‘That’s fine.’

  She was now holding a set of clean clothes and was about to turn back towards the bathroom.

  ‘Annarita.’

  ‘Yes?’

  He hesitated.

  ‘I want something to remember you by,’ he said.

  ‘What?’ Thin rivulets of water were still snaking down from her hair onto her smooth forehead. A legal Medusa. His stomach tightened.

  ‘At least show me your breasts.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because.’

  She stood still. Outside the window he could hear the rubbish collectors orchestrating their early morning cacophony.

  Finally, she pulled the towel down to her waist. Just a few seconds before she turned silently and disappeared back into the bathroom where she changed into her day wear.

  For years, he would recall the spectacle of her exposed breasts with fondness and a gentle tremor in his cock. Small, high, untouchable, so close, so soft in his imagination. But would never remember Annarita’s face. That evening when, after catching a couple of movies and haunting bookshops and art galleries to kill time, he returned to the hotel, she had already checked out.

  Hotel du Parachute, Montparnasse, Paris 4

  Mimosa and he had once worked together in the same office, but their brief affair had only begun once they had both moved on to other companies. The sex was pleasant, convenient. They were not in love. Fuck buddies, long before the expression even became fashionable.

  She wore glasses and looked prim.

  He was accustomed to spending an evening or so a week at her South Clapham flat, and they both needed a change of scene, a different bed and, in his case, none of her bloody cats lurking around the room, slyly spying on them while they fucked. They decided to go to Paris. It felt more attractive than Birmingham and Brighton. Less sordid. The food at least would be better.

  At short notice, because of some fashion week or a trade fair or another event, his usual hotels in the familiar areas were all full, so they ended up in a small, unfamiliar joint south of Boulevard Raspail.

  Their window overlooked an avalanche of tile roofs, and in the far distance, the very top of the Eiffel Tower could be glimpsed on a clear day. Not that either of them had any wish to go visit. They’d both done the deed with previous partners on earlier occasions. This time, they’d just come here for sex.

  He loved her pubic hair; dark, thin, sparse, silky. She loved to let his tongue linger over it, brush it, travel and laze amongst this intimate vegetation while he splayed her open and licked her out or fingered her to orgasm, in between lengthy sessions of penetrative sex. He even liked that on regular occasions, in the throe of the moment, she kept her glasses on. Without her spectacles, Mimosa always appeared quite lost, like a tourist in a strange place, unable to understand the local language or the lay of the land. Even more so when she was naked. He even reckoned that she could not see him properly in that particular state of total nudity and might even mistake him for another. A doe in headlights, tall, pale-skinned, dark-tipped breasts at attention, standing legs apart, always impeccably scentless, he noted. Which somehow didn’t concord with the flower of her name. She also happened to be a botanist.

  On the second morning, their limbs still exhausted from the previous night’s over-exertions in the hotel room’s narrow bed, they took a walk across the Seine, through the enclosed courtyard of the Louvre (this was some years before the glass pyramid was built) and emerged onto the Rue de Rivoli, where Mimosa insisted on visiting a Prisunic store just a hundred yards or so south of Brentano’s, the now much-missed English language bookshop.

  She purchased a simple white tee-shirt, which she had changed into inside the store.

  ‘All the way to Paris and just a tee-shirt?’ he queried.

  ‘Oh, my dear,’ she said, ‘French tee-shirts fit me so much better, don’t you think?’

  It was tight and nicely emphasised her slim figure and pert breasts, but then he thought any old tee would have.

  ‘I suppose so,’ he concluded.

  Later that afternoon, she suffered the initial pains and within a few hours knew she was having another cystitis outburst. They never made love again in Paris on that trip and spent the next morning, their last in town, scouring the city for an open Pharmacie where he had to explain what the problem was as she spoke no French and ended up with a bottle of pills that would make her proudly pee blue for days.

  Paris, city of romance…

  Hotel St Thomas d’Aquin, rue du Pré-aux-Clercs, Paris 7

  Jeanne had taken the train from Arles in the South of France and they agreed to meet at la Rhumerie on the Boulevard St G
ermain.

  She had sent him a pleasing black and white photograph long beforehand but the moment he set eyes on her that morning as she gingerly walked up the bar’s raised steps he realised years had flown by since the photo had actually been taken. Not that she wasn’t attractive any more. Elfin-shaped, delicate, smiling lips, wild dark hair and all, but all he could think of watching her approach clutching her backpack under one arm, was that she now looked too much like his sister.

  ‘Fuck’, he swore under his breath.

  She swiftly apologised for her subterfuge, bombarding him with explanations: lack of self-confidence, the fact that she had three children and not the single one she had previously admitted to, errant past husbands and boyfriends, financial difficulties…

  ‘But you look exactly the same,’ she said and took hold of his hand. Her grin was quite disarming. For the next couple of hours, he truly believed that once they were together in the hotel bedroom and facing each other in the glare of their nudity he would prove incapable of having sex with her. Right body, absolutely, but wrong face, utterly. Would he even manage to get hard?

  When the time came, however, the chemistry of lust reasserted itself and they did make love. She proved both voracious and tender, hungry and demanding. But every time he raised his eyes to her face, he had to catch his breath and quickly banish images of his own sister. Mostly he rode her from the back, and her hourglass shape took his breath away when, following each fuck, she would raise herself from the bed and tip toe nude towards the bathroom to clean up; every curve almost perfect, every shadow on her skin like a target for his cock. ‘Don’t turn round. Ever,’ he felt like whispering. Half the ideal woman…

  Apart from the sex, they had little in common and, out of bed, they rapidly found they had little to say to each other, beyond tired and familiar tales of past sexual encounters with others, whether casual or serious. Silence quickly took root.

  For years after that brief encounter, he would always remember the unforgettable vision of her bare back, her arse in motion as she would step out of the crumpled bed sheets, poetry in motion, a ballet of bare flesh, soft geometry and would invariably feel his cock stiffen. But he quickly forced himself to forget Jeanne’s face.

  After two nights together as total strangers who indulged in sex with each other because the flesh was weak and there was little else to do in that damn hotel room, he summoned a taxi to take her to the Gare d’Austerlitz and her train to the south coast back to her children. They never corresponded again and carefully ignored each other when they crossed paths in the same Internet chat rooms.

  Hotel Bersolys, rue de Lille, Paris 6

  Tabby was half-Lebanese, half-English and lived back in Milton Keynes with an undertaker.

  The hotel was an equal stone’s throw from St Germain des Prés and the Seine, one street away from the Rue de Verneuil where Serge Gainsbourg had once lived.

  She had the wettest cunt he had ever encountered in a woman. Or would even come across later in his life. Maybe it was a Mediterranean characteristic? And he knew it had little to do with him. He wasn’t that good. She was permanently wet between the legs, even when sex was not involved. It didn’t cease to amaze him. He would slide into her so effortlessly, no friction, no resistance, as if gliding down a moist, waxy river towards her heart of dark lust.

  She would practice her yoga in the nude first in the morning and again in the evening before they went to bed. Her body had the suppleness of an animal, and he stroked himself idly while she stretched into unimaginable contortions; her cunt often gaping so wonderfully open and visibly humid as she forced her sinews into compromising positions and extended her legs in impossible directions, her small milk chocolate-nippled breasts jutting proudly ahead. The room had the barest of curtains and he was certain anyone living in the flat immediately facing their hotel could see everything. It tickled his pride.

  Sweating profusely, tangled in sheets and blankets, leaking, panting, his left hand distractedly travelling across her skin, as they caught their breath between fucks, he reached her arse crack on an aimless journey through her intimacy and Tabby shuddered.

  ‘You OK?’ he whispered in the midnight darkness of the Bersolys room.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘For a moment there, I thought you were going to slip a finger into my arse hole.’

  ‘No, I was just aimlessly touching your skin. I like it that you’re so soft.’

  ‘I’m very sensitive there,’ she advised him.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Hmm… my boyfriend likes to ride me there, back at home,’ she added.

  ‘Oh.’

  He had never had anal sex with a woman, back then.

  ‘Would you like to?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Come on. It’s fun, it’s good, it’s not dirty. Please.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m still quite tight.’

  She disentangled herself from the bed’s battleground and placed herself on all fours in readiness.

  But they had been having sex for several hours already and he couldn’t get hard again that night, even with the radiant pucker of her arse hole almost leering at him, at the heart of concentric circles of darker shades of skin, and the glaring humidity of her ever wet and fertile cunt just below, dominating his field of vision.

  The next morning, he had to leave Paris, but Tabby stayed on for 48 hours as planned when she moved to another hotel.

  Hotel du Paradis et de la Fiction, Faubourg St Antoine, Bastille, Paris 4

  The hotel’s annex was situated at the back of a courtyard.

  Christel was already in a bad mood because the hotel he had booked was not on the Left Bank or, failing that, near the Champs Elysées. She’d always wanted to stay at the Hotel Costes, as she’d always enjoyed their music compilations, but the Costes was too expensive, and all his familiar haunts around Saint Michel, Odeon or St Germain des Prés happened to be fully booked since this visit had been arranged somehow at short notice.

  They’d unpacked in silence. He’d given her a cuddle, but she was unresponsive, claimed that she was hungry and they found a Korean barbecue place just off the Place de la Bastille. She protested that the food was too spicy, although he judged it was nothing of the sort. He knew what spicy could be. By the time they returned to the room, her mood had settled into a permanent state of simmering disquiet.

  They were sitting together on the edge of the bed and he pulled her closer. Christel sniffed. His hand grazed over her breasts. They had always been magnificent and she was in the habit of wearing her tops too tight, buttons straining under the pressure of the opulent flesh beneath.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘We’re in Paris. It’s us. Relax a little.’

  Her green eyes softened.

  She extended an arm towards him.

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  She lowered herself onto the bed, pulling him down with her.

  Their lips met. He could still smell the cigarette she’d smoked back in the taxi queue at the airport.

  His tongue advanced, probed, circled hers. His free hand readied itself to slide inside her blouse, or her skirt.

  ‘Fuck!’ Christel cried out, disengaging from him in one swift movement. ‘Look at that shit!’

  He looked at the direction she was pointing towards.

  In the far corner of the room, where a tired wooden cupboard stood, small drops of water were falling from the ceiling onto the top of the cupboard.

  He tried to reach reception on the phone next to the bed, but there was no answer.

  ‘Tell them I just can’t stay in this room,’ Christel screamed at him.

  He made his way down the stairs, then down the length of the courtyard. The woman at the desk was busy dealing with a coach arrival of German tourists. When she finally had time for him, he reported the problem and she promised that the hotel’s handyman would be there to investigate within a quarter of an hour. It took him more than half an
hour to attend. By then, Christel, still furious, had left the room and walked over to the Faubourg to have a coffee. She couldn’t face that damn drip drip drip any longer, she said.

  The workman swore.

  They were given another room, further down the landing.

  When Christel returned, she gave the new room one look.

  ‘It smells,’ she said.

  No more than the ghostlike tobacco fumes that still surrounded her in an aura of nicotine, he reckoned.

  ‘I can’t stay here any longer,’ she complained. ‘It’s not working. You and me. This weekend. I want to leave. Give me some money for a taxi,’ she asked.

  One hour later, she’d taken the first train back home and left him in Paris on his own.

  That evening, he ate alone and treated himself to a seafood plateau at an expensive restaurant on the Place de la Bastille. Maybe food was sometimes better than sex, after all.

  Hotel des Ecoles, rue Monsieur le Prince, Paris 6

  The hotel lift was the smallest lift in the whole of Paris. Maybe in the whole world. Two people of average size could barely squeeze in, what with the metal ashtray digging into your stomach if you faced the wrong way. With two bodies fitted in, there was not even any space for a single piece of luggage, and it had to be expedited onwards before or after, on its own.

  The room itself was no ballroom either.

  She had no name but her hair was brown and she displayed a bird tattoo on her left shoulder. He didn’t quite recognise the species. She also wore a thin gold chain around her right ankle.

  Her eyes were mauve and her breasts felt thin and hollow to his touch.

  He thought she was Australian but he couldn’t be bothered asking her. Conversation was not an art they practised much.

  Their fingers did all the talking, as did their lips and bodies, the orifices probed and drilled, licked and forced, the skin caressed and slapped, the secretions poured in the give and take of lust.

  Between the sex he would watch her retreat to the bathroom where, behind the thin wall, he could hear her wipe her face and sniff cocaine from whichever flat surface she had found there. On his own visits to the toilet, he allowed the water from the sink’s unique tap to pour out loudly to cover the sound when he was taking a shit. Intimacy, after all, had its limits.