by Emma Becker
Unsteady on my legs, my eyes heavy, I have the slow demeanour of a woman who’s just got out of bed. I feel as if I’ve made love to him all the time we’ve been together in the clinic.
‘Kiss me one last time,’ Monsieur whispers, his hands in his pockets, just like the student he must have been twenty years earlier, rakishly relaxed.
And there, within the neutral angle of that small sun-splashed street, where no onlooker can see us, I raise myself up, eyes closed, and Monsieur takes my face between his beautiful lover’s hands. The seconds tick by as if our rapture shields us from the rest of the world. His scent eclipses that of the flowering chestnut trees, his thumbs on my cheeks protect me from the cold breeze. Then he recalls that we are not quite as isolated as we were within our Tuesday-morning cocoon. The atmosphere changes: a sense of urgency returns, and Monsieur kisses me, or am I kissing him? At any rate, we’re kissing. For an instant our faces merge below the Paris windows.
‘It’s awful,’ I stammer, my lips puffy.
‘What is?’ Monsieur asks.
My smile is sad. ‘You know all too well what’s awful about this.’
His silent answer, his eyebrows conveying some mysterious empathy, an unreadable map of responses I am unable to decipher. You are you and I am me. We live undeniably incompatible lives, your wife, your children, my parents, Andrea. It’s awful that I can no longer think about them. Look at me. My boyfriend left for Brazil a week ago, and before I met you, all I did was pine for him. Now I dread the day he comes back because I don’t know how to negotiate that relationship alongside ours. I don’t know how I can juggle two men in my brain – right now you’re occupying all the available space in it – and I don’t want to. I can’t. That’s what’s so awful.
‘I’ll see how we can get organized for next Tuesday,’ I say, taking a few steps backwards.
‘You don’t know how much I’m looking forward to it,’ Monsieur answers, grazing my skin one last time with his fingers.
It’s the same for me. Lust cannot be tamed. Jogging towards the rue de Rivoli, all I can think of is the way my arse sways when I run. I don’t have to check, but I know that Monsieur will be watching me until I’m round the first corner.
‘You’re beautiful,’ he texts me, two minutes later.
MONSIEUR
Your letter . . . like a hand grenade with the pin pulled out.
ELLIE
I think you don’t fully understand the problem I have with the nerve in my leg. Let me explain it again, because I think it might be serious and you might have to operate on me. These are the symptoms: the moment you start speaking to me, my right leg goes limp and heavy, as if I was turning into a slug. The same thing happens every time I think of you, wherever I might be. At some critical stage, the numbness rises from my thigh to my arse and I lose all sense of decency. Every movement I make arouses me even more. Even walking becomes a form of foreplay. I’m not really that bothered, but if I’m not alone, it’s embarrassing. Almost as if I had an orgasm every time I yawned, a bit indecent.
I don’t know the name of this particular nerve, but I think you should shed some light on my problem. I have no wish to become a female oyster: they spend their days gobbling the sperm of male oysters as it floats in the sea. Filthy whores each and every one of them . . .
Still, let’s not worry too much about this as I’ve discovered there’s a seminar on Tuesday morning to discuss the nerves in my thigh. A rather short but useful seminar. I have no objection to being experimented on, as long as the right treatment is found and I’m provided with some relief. As I write, I’ve become almost incapable of moving my leg.
Also, as you don’t appear to have received my message about what I did between the sixteenth and seventeenth hour of yesterday, I must insist on the Titanic aspects of my evening orgasm. I’m lucky I’ve never been caught doing it by my parents, but it would have been humiliating had they rushed into my room that evening on some flimsy pretext. As it is, even with a normal, mediocre orgasm it’s difficult enough to keep a straight face and a clear conscience and tell Mum, ‘Noooooo, I don’t know where your Hermès wrap is. Just leave me alone!’ Anyway, I think I usually manage to look almost decent – my eyes don’t go white or my ears crimson. However, on this occasion, I almost swooned.
And there you go, talking about swoons at the clinic. I sure was red in the face after that.
I still haven’t solved the case of the strange scratch marks that appear on my back every time I see you. I was thinking about guilty stigmatas, but that’s not possible as I have no sense of guilt. I feel as if I’m untouchable. For the last two days I’ve been on fire.
All of this to say it’s imperative I see you on Tuesday. And when we speak on the phone, I have no wish to hear the word ‘maybe’ again.
So, I’m off to bed.
So, I’m going to touch myself.
So, I will think of you.
So, I hope I didn’t bother you this morning.
And that there was no camera in the lift.
And tell them they need an even more decrepit lift, so it takes even longer to climb through the floors.
See you tomorrow.
Ellie
MONSIEUR
I miss you.
Sweet nothings exchanged with Monsieur on the phone at eight in the morning while I’m still buried beneath my duvet.
‘Did you write a bit yesterday?’
‘Not really. Just thoughtless scribbling,’ I confessed, annoyed and ashamed.
‘You must write!’ Monsieur stormed.
‘I know, I know . . .’
‘Seriously, Ellie. You know what you should write about?’
‘No.’
‘Write about us. Our story.’
‘Eh? What could I write about us?’
‘I don’t know! You’re the writer! When I read all your old mails, it’s like reading a novel. Write a novel about us!’
I touch myself lazily as we speak, spurred on by the frustration of hearing his beautiful voice, his hard-on voice, singing songs of desire. Oh, the writing, the writing . . . These days, Monsieur is insistent that I should be writing. Come to think of it, it’s all a bit of a cliché, a story about a married man with the niece of a colleague. But I shouldn’t offend his literary pride.
‘Why not?’ I know all too well that yet another strike day will just see me faffing around.
‘Give it a try, at least,’ he answers. ‘I’ll call you tonight, or at some point during the day if I can manage it. OK, my love?’
‘OK.’
‘Where are you now?’
The conversation is changing direction.
‘In bed. I’ve just woken up.’
‘Completely naked?’
‘I’m always naked. Like the day I was born.’
Between clenched teeth, Monsieur releases a painful sigh. ‘You make me hard!’
I chuckle contentedly, stifle a protest. ‘But I said nothing to provoke it!’
‘You said enough. My imagination does the rest. How’s it going to look if I get to the clinic with an erection straining at my trousers?’
‘It’ll fade,’ I predict, stretching, even though I know that, given the chance, I’ll make sure it doesn’t. A fact Monsieur is quite aware of.
‘It’ll fade, and you’ll send me obscene text messages and I’ll get hard again. Do you think it feels comfortable when I’m operating?’
‘If you’d rather I didn’t . . .’ I smile.
‘Are you crazy? Send me photos of your arse. I’ll look at them between appointments.’
‘And then you’ll sport a mighty erection in the presence of your lady patients. Not very professional.’
‘To hell with them. It’ll relax me getting hard for you. You’ll send me pics?’
I rephrase a small anodyne promise, a witticism, the foundation stone of most of our telephone conversations. What makes me wet, my version of hard, is knowing it’s so easy to excite Monsieur. To think
of him in his expensive suit, or his surgical scrubs, clearly erect, concealing his embarrassment beneath his mask, and all because of me. My fat arse stirring up such feelings inside him.
‘We’ll speak tonight, darling,’ I warble, still stretching.
‘Your voice arouses me,’ he says, then brusquely ‘Till tonight.’
After an hour on Facebook, I summon the energy to open a new text folder, and stare at its emptiness like a chicken confronted with a knife. The problem of the white page is how full of emptiness and expectation it is. If you jot down a few words, the white void seems to shout, ‘Feed me!’ How can I plumb its depths? I, who, for the last year, have been sleeping on the laurels of my one and only publication. For more than six months I’ve felt like a dried-up well from which only drops of muddy water have been painfully drawn. So, yes, I write. In notebooks I lose after a few days, across the virgin pages of my diary. Stupid thoughts. All the nothings that are part of my comfortable student life. Am I capable of more today?
I think of Monsieur’s voice on the telephone as he expressed amazement that I knew so much about his private life over recent years, neglecting to mention that my mother had told me about that weekend in New Jersey long before we first met. So, with no thought of success, I improvise a few lines, like a compliant courtesan, to oblige him. I write:
He always seemed amazed that he had long been a part of my life, although before our first conversations he had been something of an abstraction. I was building a whole world with the facts I could glean, or plunder, about him. Monsieur enjoyed erotic literature; this was the detail that set me on my quest. For a long time, I had been alone in my appreciation of Calaferte, André Pieyre de Mandiargues and so many others that I had even come to think of myself as the sole reader of their masterpieces. To learn that a man who had a similar burning passion was so close to me seemed a miracle.
Men who read. There is a whole universe that revolves around men who read, who dive in and out and drown in this ever so feminine reverie, and, God, it makes them charming. The dazzling charm of their fingers turning pages, turning down the corner of a page, their eyes absorbing each letter, line, word. The abyss I can only dream of behind the wrinkled brows contemplating yellowing pages.
Knowing this, I reread Calaferte’s book and found it tasted different. For hours on end, I would lock myself in my room, rediscovering with delicious discomfort the crudest paragraphs, aroused by the thought that his grey eyes had also read them, providing a new freshness to the passages I knew by heart. How did he contemplate all these words – cunt, arse, cock, moistness, cum, buggery? What sort of impact could such words have on a forty-six-year-old man, who had lived enough to distinguish between the vocabulary and the reality? What does the word ‘cunt’ evoke for him? Whose cunt does he think of as his eyes glide across the four dark letters of the word? Which woman has corrupted his memory with her scent, her presence, scattered across every page of erotic writing?
Through all my readings, I was picturing him, considering the mystery of older men and the promises they make to us without even opening their mouths.
I sent Monsieur a copy of my musings.
‘It’s great. Go on with it!’ was his response.
The following day, for the first time in weeks, I got up early and rushed out to buy a notebook.
‘How did you spend your day, dearest?’
‘This afternoon I sunbathed on the deck-chair in the garden, with my legs wide open. I think the family next door now have an intimate acquaintance with my knickers.’
‘What sort of knickers were you wearing?’
‘Actually, I wasn’t wearing any. But I thought it would be in bad taste to let you know that from the off.’
‘You do make me laugh!’
‘Is it possible to make you laugh and give you a hard-on at the same time?’
‘It’s essential.’
‘I’m a knickerless clown.’
‘And most appetizing at that.’
‘That’s the nicest compliment.’
There are moments in the story I love recalling. Images that come to mind and make me smile, whatever the time of day, whatever my mood. The morning we spent in our small hotel on place de Clichy is in this exquisite garden of memories, every flower as precious as the next. Time can’t change them.
I was sleeping heavily – but restless because of the vodka Babette and I had consumed the previous evening. A room decked out in red, with a stucco fountain in one corner, and there I was, snoring like a drunkard wearing only my Agent Provocateur pants. You can just imagine what a vision of bad taste I was when my mobile woke me up on the stroke of ten.
‘Another ten minutes and I’ll be holding you against me,’ Monsieur said.
I jumped out of bed as if I was on springs. I had ten minutes to rediscover my young-girl freshness and jettison my bad breath. There was not even enough time to experience the pangs of waiting, the tightness in the pit of my stomach. I threw myself under the shower, toothbrush in my mouth, eyes distorted with panic. I kicked the empty bottle under the bed. I was a mess, my hair all over the place, my eyelids puffy, but I knew that after just a few words Monsieur would see none of this. He would see all of me.
I crept out onto the landing, wearing only knickers, half a joint in hand. Sat down, legs through the banister, swinging in the void, watching the ground floor. The vertigo I felt had nothing to do with the height. Next to me, my telephone vibrated with languid insistence.
‘Hello?’
‘What are you up to, sweetheart?’ Monsieur was smiling at the other end of the line, and I was about to coo when I realized I could hear his voice twice: in my ear and on the ground floor.
‘Not much.’
Quivering, I stood up, without losing sight of the stairs unfolding beneath me. I tiptoed back along the corridor to my room.
‘I’m in bed. You?’
‘Very close, darling. See you soon.’
Monsieur was testing the temperature. I buried myself inside the sheets, a flash of arousal coursing through me, almost as if I was playing hide and seek.
Have I ever told you about the sound of his steps on the stairs? Or, rather, as I think about it, an absence of sound, the magical way he moved from ground floor to second without making the slightest noise. Only a well-trained ear would have detected the subtle creak of a floorboard or the squeak of the carpet beneath his shoes. The ambient air changed texture, smell, density: a wave of goose pimples covered me from head to toe, while beneath my small breasts, my heart beat fast, its echo racing to my ears, eclipsing all other sound. With a whisper, the door handle swung from left to right. The ray of light now bathing the floor seemed to flow from Monsieur. As I was still in the embrace of the sheets and the curtains were drawn, he was making me a gift of the new day and doing his utmost to see it began well. After all, wasn’t he the master of everything he surveyed?
For a moment he was just a motionless shadow on the sunlit threshold. Lasciviousness, as I came to know it that morning, had black and golden hair. He was smiling, a childlike glee in his eyes, and staring at me, as if I added a touch of freshness to the room, the best possible accessory for the bed. He rushed to me, barely allowing me time to set my joint in the ashtray. I squeezed him between my legs with all the strength I could summon and Monsieur murmured into my ear, ‘A whole week without you!’ In his frantic kisses I recognized the power I held over him, and how weak he was becoming. I hadn’t known it, but I’d been yearning for him to say something like that to me. It was like a lullaby and, dear God, it shouldn’t have been. Monsieur’s big nose met mine, as he whispered, ‘You’re such a beautiful little whore . . .’ He frowned. ‘What do you smell of?’
I laughed, high on joy and smoke. ‘Grass?’
Monsieur grinned. ‘You’ve been smoking?’
There was half a joint in the ashtray.
‘I love that smell,’ he whispered, kissing me. ‘Such a pity I can’t smoke today. I have an operati
on lined up. One day, though, we’ll share a joint.’
‘You smoke too?’
‘Whenever I can.’ He rose, his back to me. ‘How the hell did I manage not to tear all your clothes off on Wednesday at the clinic?’
‘You almost did in the lift.’
‘You liked it,’ Monsieur stated.
I let out a strangled sound, confirming my guilt.
‘What an arse,’ he said then, his fingers kneading me carefully.
So, this was to be a morning when my arse would be the focus. My cunt was already complaining that it wasn’t to be the centre of attention. Monsieur delicately pulled my knickers down. This man ran a series of operating theatres, with crowds of uniformed women at his beck and call, but this morning his powerful fingers were caressing a young student in perfect health, all for the sake of beauty – or was it?
A crude detail: Monsieur’s thumbs wandered to the heart-shaped hollow separating my thighs, mapping my jewel case. I heard myself gurgle with wetness, a noise that could only have originated inside my thighs. But my idea of modesty was already twisted, and my only reaction was to place myself on all fours and arch my arse further towards him. I somehow expected him to remark on the innate vulgarity of my arousal. Not at all. Monsieur stood up and, in a flash, I remembered his text messages and realized what was about to happen. He moved into position and I was unable to escape his grip. I thrashed like an animal caught in quicksand, protesting wildly, but Monsieur ordered me to keep still. Instinctively, I curled up.
Not that, I silently implored, as if he might change his mind and proceed to make love to me politely.
In those circumstances, the grass no longer had any effect. I regained lucidity when Monsieur’s mouth came down on me, his hands firmly holding my arse cheeks open. This was followed by his tongue and I screamed with sheer embarrassment, praying he would stop – how could anyone want to do that? How could anyone like it?