Half an hour later, he hadn’t shown. My phone rang. He said he was running late and asked if I would please wait for him. Of course, I said I would wait, even though I was exhausted after working overtime at the factory.
The moment I hung up my phone though, I kicked off my shoes and peeled off the top layer of my twin set. My apartment was stifling hot and I felt as if I was going to expire any moment in these clothes. I closed my eyes for a moment, wondering if I should dig out my ancient electric fan, when I dozed off.
I had one of those dreams, the kind that had been haunting me ever since I had been dating Toby and I decided to take the high road away from my libido. It featured The Mechanic, of course, and I was doing terrible, horny, vivid things with him that would make a porn star blush.
Suddenly, I woke and looked disorientated around my apartment. What time was it? Where was Toby? My entire body seemed to be burning up. Slipping my pumps back on, I stepped outside my apartment to cool off.
The Mechanic was sitting in his lawn chair.
“So where is your boyfriend?” he asked me. “I thought you always went out with him on Saturday nights.”
Trying to push the recent images of my dream to the back of my mind, I glared at him.
“I’m really surprised that is the type you go for,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.
He shrugged.
“Why are you even speaking to me?” I asked.
He didn’t answer me. I couldn’t believe he was judging my choice in men when he didn’t even know me.
Teetering in my pumps on the driveway gravel, I walked over to him to give him a piece of my mind. Upon seeing him closer, I knew this was a mistake, because he was even sexier. There was a cleft in his chin I hadn’t noticed before.
“You know this is none of your business,” I said.
“I just thought you might go for a different type,” he said.
He was baiting me to argue with him, I thought. Why did I ever walk over here? I should just walk away.
I turned to go, but my pump slipped on the gravel. My foot twisted. I tried to right myself, but I lost my balance. I fell right into his lap.
For a moment, we were both so stunned that we just sat there staring at the other, but then he kissed me. It was a surprising kiss. It was nothing like kissing him in my dream or kissing Ben or kissing Big Mike. Of course, his mouth tasted like an ashtray, but he was an amazing kisser. There was hunger, but not a crushing need to make me submit. Quite simply, it was a kiss that could last an hour, and I found myself lost in it, drawn inside it, not knowing which way was up.
Suddenly, I heard car tires on the gravel. I opened my eyes to see Toby in his car slowly passing us, his stunned face in the window. I leapt off the mechanic’s lap, but Toby slammed his foot on the gas pedal and spun the car around. It fishtailed wildly as he tried to steer it out of the parking lot. He clipped the mailboxes and the car came to an immediate halt.
I ran over to his car and frantically opened the driver’s side door.
“Are you all right?” I cried.
He looked over at me, blinking in disbelief. Then his gaze stopped on my arm.
“What is that on your arm?” he asked.
I froze. I had never shown him my tattoo either.
“It’s Claude,” I said.
He shook his head.
“I can’t believe I’ve been dating a tattooed whore,” he said.
Closing his car door, he backed up his car and sped out of the driveway.
I stood there stunned. Once again, my libido had ruined everything. I would never have a normal life, a decent job, or a good home. I would never have a straight middle finger. I would never meet the man of my dreams.
With a start, I realized The Mechanic was standing behind me. I spun and faced him. Had he been there the entire time? Had he heard everything? I bit my lower lip, realizing my mouth was still tingling from his kiss.
“So that puts him out of the picture,” he said. “I never thought he was right for you anyway.”
I glared at him. He leaned in closer to me. I could smell his skin.
“Are you going to tell me why you have my name tattooed under a rabbit on your arm?” he asked.
I stared at him in shock and then glanced at bunny Claude. They had the same name! I was so angry at that moment that I really didn’t care what anyone thought. I was just going to tell the truth.
“I used to have this stuffed rabbit. I loved him to death, but my parents caught me humping him and they burned him in a pile of leaves,” I said. “His name was Claude.”
There was silence. I stared into his eyes, trying to read his reaction, but how could I read it when I hardly even knew him, and with a painful twist, I realized I desperately did want to know how to read it because of that freaking kiss.
“I don’t know what this says about me,” he said slowly. “But your little story just made incredibly horny.”
The Protocol of La Fère
Florence Dugas
“We met at the lycée,” she said. “In preparatory class, just before the bac.”
I looked at her. She hadn’t changed much, or so it seemed. If I was to believe her, she was now twenty-three years old, she’d just gained her teaching certificate, and would probably teach next year. But she had kept that very young look – it was undoubtedly not mere chance, she perpetuated her adolescence, faces talk as much as masks. Gray eyes and black hair, cut very short, with thick locks, and milky skin. Judith Salomon was rather beautiful. She beamed – though I detected signs of anxiety in that slight swelling of the veins at her temples, but that could also be a symptom of fatigue.
“We were living in Laon at the time.”
Laon, its cathedral, its ramparts, its tedium, all that history gathered in a few middle-class houses and the sky of the Aisne: even when the weather was fine, something gray hung in the air, like sheets damp and crumpled in the morning.
“Doctor,” she said, “can you help me?”
She half stood up from the sofa. The effect of her grey eyes suddenly full of tears was not lost.
“We had an essay to write, I had to meet him. We were attending the course, sitting next to each other, the chances of the beginning of the year, when one finds oneself in an unfamiliar milieu. The weather was still nice, in September, I was wearing a T-shirt. He took hold of my left arm and wrote his phone number on my skin, just before the bend of the elbow. ‘So you won’t forget it.’ He had a strange way of speaking, as if he always had a second meaning in the most innocuous words. I looked at my arm and blushed.”
She hesitated. Her voice had a different tone now.
“My grandmother survived Treblinka,” she said. “She was thirteen in 1944, but she looked older, and the SS commandant spared her – he was obviously up to something. Three months after she entered the camp, the Russians arrived and liberated them. She was one of the very few who didn’t go hungry.
“She got married, ten years later, to a French soldier stationed in Germany, who brought her here. They had a daughter – my mother – who married a young engineer from Saint Gobain in 1976, a Jew, but I always thought that was pure chance.”
I refrained from telling her that there is no such thing as pure chance, and that the daughter of a deported Pole marrying a Mr Salomon is a way to recover a filiation, to go back to the tree.
“She died the following year, giving birth. One thinks that doesn’t happen any longer.
“My father literally gave me away – abandoned me to my grandmother. I saw him more and more rarely. I don’t look anything like my mother, but I think I am a kind of remorse for him, a suffering anyway. To make a long story short, my grandmother was still very pretty, she could even pass for my mother. Did I say I look a lot like her?
“I called him one evening. We arranged to meet at his place. Then I rubbed my arm clean. I had a lot of trouble erasing those ten absurd numbers. A trace remained. It’s my gr
andmother who noticed: ‘You’ve been marked with a number, too?’ she smiled. Everything that reminded her of the camps made her smile. She has made a remarkable system of self-defence out of it. Sometimes there is just that smile – and I know she thinks of Treblinka, and that her thoughts are not joyful.
“She never told me anything. I examined all the photo books, the survivors’ stories; I knew all the barracks, the watchtowers, the striped pajamas, the hollowed faces, the dormitories and showers. I saw all those photos. When my grandmother smiled, automatically, the pictures come back to my mind – but they are images, aren’t they? Not life . . . On her arm she also has five numbers – now that she’s getting old, the skin is withering a bit, and only a trace remains, exactly like that phone number badly erased on my arm that evening.
“I went to his place, no longer thinking about it. He opened the door. ‘You are late,’ he said. I blushed like the day before – I remembered all the more for I don’t make a habit of it, and I didn’t understand why his every word made me feel uneasy. He helped me take off my raincoat – it was raining, for a change, my hair was wet, he ruffled it as if to dry it. He grabbed it with his hands and pulled me toward him. I felt all weak, helpless.
“He didn’t kiss me – and during those five years he never did, actually. That would be . . . how to say . . . inappropriate.
“We were in a kind of living room, cluttered with military memorabilia – his father is a colonel, today, and he collects objects, weapons, and uniforms. In his house there is even a room entirely devoted to models and armies of tin soldiers to play kriegspiel. A maniac.
“He was holding me by my hair, my legs were shaking. He made me kneel down. Then he removed my sweater and bra.
“He stepped back a little, to judge the effect. I was on my knees, in jeans, bare breasted, a bit cold. When I think about our meetings, there has always been that sensation of cold. He is very good at bringing me into damp and badly heated places. I will tell you about my weekend later on. That’s why I’m here. Because it continues and it can no longer go on.
“I stared at him – his blond hair, against the light slightly, gave him a kind of halo. And those limpid eyes appeared lit from within.
“He ordered me not to look at him, to keep my head down. ‘Open the zipper of your jeans,’ he said. ‘Yes, that’s good: just open, not pull down.’
“He came back to me. He undid his belt, caressed my cheek with its leather. It was only at that moment that I realized I was literally drenched – it was pouring out of me, my belly was at melting point and I was terrorized.
“He finished undoing his trousers and slapped me across the face several times with his cock before forcing it in my mouth.
“He went in so far that I felt nauseous. He had a robust cock, rectilinear, wide at its base – thicker than my wrist. I started to go back and forth the best I could. I told myself I deserved to suck that big uncircumcised penis. It was like desired rape. I was suffocating slightly.
“It was the first time. For everything, by the way, it was the first time. Like when he went behind me and pulled my jeans down to mid-thigh. When he ordered me to lean forward, head in hands, buttocks offered. When he penetrated me with the tip of his fingers, testing the solidity of my hymen before plunging his fingers into my ass – three fingers, right away. It was just before he sodomized me – not for one moment, at that time, did I think he could take me any other way.
“And then words. When he told me to wrap my tongue tight around it, to go back up to the glans before plunging again, my nose in his pubic hair. When he came out of my mouth, he said that I was useless, incapable of making him come. He said it again when he came out of my ass: ‘Incapable of making me come – what are you good at?’ I crawled at his feet, told him I was sorry, I was going to make him come, I would be able to do it. He came back into my mouth – his penis had a bitter taste I learned to recognize, but again, he didn’t come. He was doing it on purpose, of course.
“He finished undressing me, he made me walk up and down. We went into the kitchen, he made me lie down on the very cold white varnished wooden table. There were neon tubes on the ceiling and he ordered me to touch myself there, in front of him, spreading my legs wide. The idea that he was watching me made me come almost immediately.
“He told me off; obviously, that was the purpose of the game. I was panting, I had come so intensely that my thighs were soaked. He inserted himself between my legs, lifted them to place my heels on his shoulders. I wanted to look at him but I closed my eyes, because of the neon, and he deflowered me.
“Since I’ve known him, he has always liked to fuck me in harsh and at the same time gloomy lights, neon, bare lightbulbs, hanging on a wire. Stage spotlights. And on cold surfaces – lacquered woods, paving stones. Only once did we do it in his bedroom, but he had thrown some white sheets on the floor, which he’d carefully sprinkled with water, before stretching me on the damp material. He rolled me in it, only letting the part of my body he wanted to use show.
“I felt a brief, sharp pain, then my blood flowed, at least I thought it was blood. He pinched my breasts hard, and I came again. When he pulled out of me, he still hadn’t ejaculated, and he said I was useless, I was good for nothing. He removed the belt from his trousers and hit me several times on the breasts and belly.
“I fell on my knees and took him in my mouth again. He didn’t stop hitting me, on the back and buttocks, harder and harder, and I stopped sucking because I had come again.”
I look at her carefully, straight into her face. She is not embarrassed, neither by recalling her memories nor by her use of the most precise words – it is plain that she takes delight in it. As if such a graphic confession was part of a protocol imposed by the master, and that, far from saying something on neurosis, it was part of its manifestation – its complacency, I should say. Surely not. Judith uses those words because she thinks they are adequate – and I have a very brief flash, imagining her in class, in front of her bewildered students, with those same words, spoken in that calm, balanced voice.
“That’s how our relationship started.
“He told me to get dressed, immediately, without having a wash, my panties sticky, the jeans stained with the blood, which still dripped. And the rest.
“I asked him where the toilets were. He took me there, left the door open, watching me with interest – delighted, without showing it, because of my confusion when the gush of piss hit the water in the bowl, like a heavy fountain.
“He gave me, in detail, the protocol of our meetings. The exact time. The way I had to always kneel down as soon as I entered. The underwear I had to wear from now on – or rather, not wear. He ordered me to go to a saddler to buy a crop for breaking in horses – specifying that the handle had to be metallic. ‘What are you?’ he asked me. ‘I’m nothing.’ ‘No,’ he specified, ‘you’re less than nothing, you’re my slave.’ ‘I’m your slave, yes . . .’
“The next day, seeing him in class – I had sat alone instinctively, far away from him – gave me a shock. I had spent the night thinking it all over, trying to understand why, and my nerves were on edge, as if after insomnia. I looked for a long time at my skin, covered in red patches, the exact demarcation of the belt with which he had chastised me – that’s the word I used spontaneously. Chastised for some fault – and each time I reached that point, I caressed myself and came, and the question disappeared – or rather, the eventual answer – but the question remained, burning, and I caressed myself again.
“Five days later, another meeting – just after class. I had brought the crop, spotted several days before and bought just prior to going to see him. The door was ajar, I entered and looked for him. He didn’t seem to be home. I took my clothes off and knelt down in the middle of the living room, in front of a heavy, low table where I had laid the crop. He made me wait an extremely long time. He was there, of course, scrutinizing my submission.
“That day he just hit me on the loins, buttoc
ks, and thighs, in neat parallel stripes. ‘Count the blows,’ was all he said.
“At ten I thought it had to stop, he was doing it just to draw lines, I was not going to be able to refrain from screaming much longer. At thirty, I said to myself he will be fed up soon, the stripes are probably overlapping, forming a mesh, and it was no longer of interest, from an aesthetic point of view. I almost tried to get up, but he had stretched me over the lacquered wood, and bound my wrists to the legs of the table.
“He stopped at sixty, and I was nothing but pain – no, I was beyond pain. I had screamed of course, pleaded, cried, and still the leather rained down. I don’t know when I thought, strongly thought, that I deserved what was happening to me.
“He stopped, caressed me with the metallic knob of the crop, which he pushed inside, in one orifice, then the other. ‘You want it, don’t you?’ No point specifying what I wanted. ‘Please, please . . .’ ‘Please what?’ ‘Take me, please . . .’ ‘Take me how, little slut?’ I realized he wanted to hear the words, and I begged him to sodomize me, as deep as he could, to tear me apart. That pleased him, but he put his cock first in my mouth. My nose was stuffy with tears, and I was half suffocating while sucking him.
“That’s it. It’s been going on for five years.”
She looked at me. Obviously, it could all be fake – all the more so for it sounded true. Psychopaths are good actors, when acting is part of their delirium. But at worst (was it then something worse than the suspicion that it could be true?), the narrative was there, and was telling something. And I felt something inside me, quivering.
“Other rituals were organized, over time. The uniforms he wore. That so-special sensation of rough material which grated against my buttocks when he fucked me in the ass. The weapons he made me lick, after having pushed them in certain orifices. The fiction of his ‘army comrades’ to whom he sometimes loaned me. But above all, that way to make me an enemy, the prisoner tortured to confess some unspeakable secret . . .”
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