Monsieur

by Emma Becker

  (Later, when I described the whole humiliating episode to Babette, she cleverly remarked: ‘In that position there is just no way you can ever forget he’s licking your arsehole. That’s the point of it.’)

  It was a sensation I didn’t want to find pleasurable, and Monsieur understood that, not even objecting to my body’s rigidity. Whenever I tried to move, he pressed my face into the mattress. As a last resort, I tried another ploy. Squirming, I rubbed my cheek against his cock, although it was still beneath his grey-flannel trousers. As he watched, I undid the few buttons separating me from his penis, and took him into my mouth. Monsieur remained motionless, his hands in my hair, pulling it. Eventually he threw me back with a regal gesture, signifying that I had no choice in what would happen.

  Monsieur was still fully clothed, his cock still wet with my saliva. He whispered: ‘No, I want to see your cunt first.’

  I shuddered and wriggled, vainly attempting to close my legs. Out of the question: his predatory hands held me open and, for an endless few minutes, he leafed through me as if I were pages in a rare edition of the Bible, all of his fingers journeying inside me with infinite care. Whimpering in shame, I raised my eyes and saw, with a shock, that the man who loved the same books as I did was gazing at my cunt with the same reverence he would read a rare Bataille vellum edition, with words like ‘labia’, ‘cunt’, ‘slit’, ‘clit’. Oh, Ellie, look at the delicate firmness of his hands, the precision of his fingers, the flame deep in his eyes. This is a man who appreciates cunt. This man must dream of a world where he floats in a sea of cunts of all races, all shapes and configurations, all day, all the time. Although instinct told me to protect myself against his curiosity, I didn’t feel as if Monsieur was judging me negatively. When I was younger, I had always been afraid that one day a man might find my cunt did not fit with my puppy fat; I worried about the dichotomy between my body and my face. But he seemed to approve, evidently understanding that my cunt was the perfect spokeswoman for the whore he knew I harboured deep within. Monsieur was all appreciation. In fact, just a little later, his voice cut across the churchly silence: ‘I really like your cunt, you know.’

  Right there and then, I would have liked to be a boy, so that I could make a girl get hard as he had just done. No one could have felt better than I did, facing Monsieur naked, wide open, wet, dribbling, numb and craving to be fucked. And how could it be possible to feel any better when the sharpness of freshly shaved bristle and thick lips touched me in a place I couldn’t quite locate but was so full of nerve endings that a 220-volt electrical discharge raced along my spine. I think I jumped, and his smile was that of Satan, telling me: ‘You know you love it. You’re depraved, and depraved women enjoy melting inside the mouths of men.’

  I am lost, I thought, and there was nothing scary about it.

  ‘And I very much enjoy the taste of your cunt,’ Monsieur added, his lips shining.

  He licked with the attentive precision of a man expert in caresses, like a pianist of genius, who allows himself artistic, unstructured improvisations while never quite losing the thread of the melody. I could feel myself getting hard, harder and wetter, like a river, all slack against his face. I was captivated: this kiss was the most venomous in the world. Because it was definitely a kiss. Monsieur certainly knew what he was doing.

  He rose above the bed, still pretty hard, and as he pulled my thighs apart, he licked his lips. ‘I don’t know where to fuck you first,’ he said, glancing from my cunt to my arsehole. Then, looking me in the face again: ‘Which would you prefer, darling?’

  God alone knows why I answered, ‘Behind.’

  Monsieur possibly misunderstood, accustomed as he was to using the word ‘sodomy’. He indicated that I should turn round.

  ‘Not like that, not on all fours.’

  Which was when I realized that the grass was affecting my speech. Undoing his buttons, I tried to explain to Monsieur: ‘I want you to . . .’

  ‘You want me to what?’

  ‘I want you to fuck me in the arse. But on my back,’ I added, as if I wanted him to ignore the initial clumsiness of my request.

  I don’t know if he grasped what a huge leap forward I had just made. I threw myself back and he moved towards me to fold my legs into position, and I knew he had been aware all along of what I had in mind, words had been unnecessary, and he fully approved. He understood that I enjoyed this position because he could see all of me, and he liked my willingness to reveal myself in such a crude way. He penetrated me very slowly, attentive to every sound he drew from me, firmly, never retreating from any territory once he had invaded it. Monsieur could feel from the way I was tightening around him when the pain was overtaken by pleasure.

  I sighed, and Monsieur plunged deeper inside me, his voice interrupting the sharp buzzing in my ears: ‘You love it, don’t you, darling?’

  Monsieur was fucking me in the arse. Incredible how noble it was when he was involved. The supreme way in which he respected me. Ironic in the circumstances: he knew that taking me in this way illustrated my submission to him. And he was entirely aware of my desire to submit. But there was something magical, too, in the way Monsieur behaved, something I had never come across with anyone else: somehow he could convince me that what he was doing and the crude words he spoke were for my own good. And every time he called me a tramp, a whore or mentioned my cunt, all I could hear were sweet endearments that broke down my defences. But I was incapable of speech. Monsieur cooed: ‘Tell me you love it, darling. Talk to me. Tell me you like it when I fuck you in the arse.’

  I shrivelled, my shoulders drawn in, red-faced, while Monsieur moved inside me with elastic ease and whispered: ‘Look at me.’ With one hand he gripped my chin. ‘Look at me.’ He spoke sternly. I couldn’t respond. When he continued, he was all sweetness: ‘Look at me, darling. Look at me.’

  Still overtaken by shame, I opened my eyes. ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Don’t you know you must always look straight into the eyes of a man who has his cock dug deep in your arse?’ Monsieur said. I was listening to him as if he were reading Lolita to me, with the same awe. ‘You have power over me. Even if I happen to be the one buggering you.’ I bit my lip until it began to bleed. ‘I am a prisoner of your arse, and you’re driving me crazy.’

  He pulled my thighs up slightly, to make the missionary position obscene. Then, in the same breath: ‘Don’t you feel like a real filthy tramp the way you are now? With my cock inside your arse? Tell me how you feel.’

  I half opened my eyes and saw my cunt raw and wide open and, below it, his cock slowly coming in and out of my arsehole: Monsieur was enjoying the same panorama. I shivered with delight. ‘I feel like a tramp.’

  Monsieur, that infamous corruptor, took advantage of the situation, grazing my ear lobes with his lips, inhaling the true scent of me. ‘Show me how you caress yourself.’

  I froze, reluctant to expose something so intimate to him. The prospect of making myself come in front of Monsieur, with his cock digging deep into me, was petrifying.

  ‘Do it, darling. Show me how you do it. I know you must be oh-so-beautiful when you touch yourself.’

  With the pretence of a courtesan, I took flight: ‘But I’ve never done that!’

  ‘Do it, my love. Caress your little cunt. You can feel how wet it is.’

  ‘No . . .’ I groaned, in an effort to move my fingers.

  Finally, I allowed my hand to approach my lower belly. It came to a halt. I cried out with frustration, like a small dog pulling on the end of a leash. But Monsieur was in no mood to take pity on me.

  ‘Wank. Do it, or I’ll stop fucking you.’

  If only he’d known how much I wanted to obey, how desperate I was to do it and please him. That I felt as much a victim of my unexpected wave of shame as he was.

  That word, however arousing it was coming from his mouth, had shocked me. I wasn’t sure I truly wanted to wank in Monsieur’s presence. If only I could make him understand. Then m
aybe he wouldn’t have to resort to blackmail. Monsieur ceased all movement. I threw myself back towards him, but with both his hands on my belly, he stopped me.

  ‘I swear I’ll stop fucking you. Wank for me. Didn’t you know you’ll have the strongest possible orgasm when you touch yourself while being buggered?’

  (‘Buggered’. He pronounced it with the nobility of the most beautiful pages in the world of erotica. It was no longer the insulting word that my girlfriends sometimes mutter. When he said it, I could almost feel the awe in which I held it when I first came across it in a libertine novel from the seventeenth century. Ah, the treasures of language.)

  Annoyed by his intransigence, I gave him a dark look. Which he ignored. Then, I yowled: ‘No, fuck me!’

  But Monsieur was cleverer than I. ‘Wank.’

  And, from his tone, I understood that he had meant what he’d said, that he was capable of retreating to the edge of the bed and masturbating in front of me, until sheer frustration obliged me to do likewise. I moved my fingers towards the stickiness of my yawning slit. It was awful: my whole body was on fire and I found it hard to sketch even a simulacrum of caress. When I was in motion, though, Monsieur’s gaze froze me and I shrank in shame between the damp sheets. But he began to move inside me again, taking me anew, sliding inside, whispering, Ellie Ellie Ellie oh Ellie, caress yourself, do it as if I wasn’t here and you were on your own, as if I could ever forget his presence. I was transported: his need to take sex to the ultimate shores of intimacy, this was a world to which I had never before been granted access. With Alexandre I had believed I had reached a new level of perversion, but now . . . There was undoubtedly a perverse beauty in what he was attempting to draw out of me.

  Tears overcame me, my hand still reluctant to perform the ballet I knew by heart. Every time I stopped, Monsieur would hold it in position. I no longer knew who I should hate more, him or myself. My eyes pleaded, and I think he realized from the way I kept wrinkling my brow that we were heading nowhere fast. He gave me a look that told me I was a bad pupil that morning, but also that he was willing to accept that I had reached my limit. With his two thumbs, he eloquently took over my travails, and I asked myself how much of a genius this man was to have sensed from my fingers’ movements the perfect way to drive me crazy. I was just seconds away from erupting, but I wanted to see Monsieur come before I did. So, with my cunt hoovering up his fingers, I squeezed his cock hard between my sphincter muscles and, my nails digging into his arse, I forced him to fuck me faster. So he could concentrate, he stopped talking, and his eyes closed. All of a sudden, he was no longer Monsieur, and it was no longer that particular room. It was more than an older guy mounting a slut of a girl who could have been his daughter in a rundown hotel in a rundown area of Paris, the two of them wallowing in filth. I wasn’t sure I liked it without him gazing at me: when he looked at me, I could almost forget that our affair was worse than immoral. His eyes gazing deep into mine reminded me that we were not only sleeping together but talking, from time to time, on the telephone or in writing, which felt good. It would have been a shame to waste it. For five minutes or so, making love with him seemed boring.

  Please, God, don’t let this go on for hours, I thought. (A stupid request: I would regret it a few weeks later when I was alone, with no news of the elusive Monsieur.)

  All of a sudden, the face above mine came back to life and Monsieur said: ‘I’m going to come inside your arse.’

  Breathless, I became attentive to the exquisite rise of pleasure as it coursed through his long, thin body, the final quivering in and out motions and then the ultimate thrust, hurling him deep inside me. He cried out, a single note, rough, raw, which affected me so strongly I almost came in unison. I fell into a deep concentration, trying to focus on his spurts, but all I could feel were the frantic spasms of his cock, then Monsieur modulating his breath as he buried his mouth in my neck, still hard inside me.

  ‘I’d been missing your arse,’ he said, withdrawing from me, and I was overcome by a sensation of physical loneliness. Even after I had come, I wanted more and more of him.

  Afterwards Monsieur was seized by frantic tenderness, pulling me across him, pleading and emotional. ‘Kiss me! Look at me! Don’t you want me to cuddle you?’

  ‘Of course I do,’ I protested, twisting in his arms, like a rattlesnake. ‘I’m looking at you all the time!’

  ‘You know very well that’s not true. You never let me cuddle you. You squirm away from me. I can fuck you in the arse but you won’t let me cuddle you.’

  ‘Of course you can,’ I answered, barely concealing my impatience.

  As I sighed, betraying my unwillingness, I allowed Monsieur to turn my chin towards him. Then I drew away from him. ‘I was smoking earlier. I don’t want to face you.’

  I stood up with as much grace as I could summon and picked up my laptop. As the screen lit up, Monsieur noticed the photo of Andrea. ‘Who is he?’

  ‘My boyfriend,’ I answered, reviving the half-joint in the ashtray.

  ‘Great.’ Monsieur leaned back against the bolster.

  ‘Must I apologize for having a life?’ I said, regretting the indifference of my tone.

  I put a Turtles album on and took a puff, then sat across Monsieur, legs wide open, providing him with a spectacle that no longer concerned me. For a moment, he stared at me, his fingers on my knees. Then he smiled. ‘I have something for you.’

  I jumped up and down on him, my eyelashes fluttering like a geisha’s. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You told me you hadn’t read Aragon’s Irene’s Cunt, didn’t you?’

  Another puff on the joint. A broad smile crossed my face. ‘You told me about it on the phone.’

  Monsieur held out a hand for his briefcase. He’d told me about it the night before while I was smoking a cigarette stark naked in the kitchen, shamelessly parading in front of the large window. Later I’d received some lines from the book in my in-box. They hadn’t inspired me. But when he set the book down beside me, with its gaudy mass-market cover and ridiculous author pseudonym (Albert de Routisie), my innate hunger resurfaced. How wonderful that Monsieur had bought me a paperback, perfect for the poverty-stricken student.

  ‘Oh, thanks!’ I cried, with too much spontaneity, and Monsieur smiled, visibly touched.

  I was about to nuzzle up to him, but Monsieur brusquely seized the book and opened it. ‘Read the first two pages.’

  If only I could explain the way I felt right then, sitting naked and cross-legged across the carpet of his body hair, in the warm darkness of that room. Never had I felt so high: I’d reached some stratospheric level where everything felt right. Just as I looked down at Aragon’s opening lines, the chorus of ‘Elenore’ burst into the moist silence like a whirlpool of love. At the same time, the opening lines spoke to me of sleep and pain, the voluptuousness of the black night. Transported, I threw myself back, smiling. ‘These lines, this music . . . It’s just amazing.’

  I think he understood. I began reading voraciously, every sigh escaping my lungs like a heavenly form of punctuation. How can I even describe such a moment of profound loneliness and total bliss? I felt as if I’d seen, touched, the Messiah, and I knew that Monsieur, in his sobriety, would never understand how close we were to the divine. Sure, the joint had helped lower my defences and allowed me to absorb the magic. But I wanted to explain it to him. He had to understand how that particular moment had come to crystallize everything we had been reaching for. For the first time, I think, I spoke his first name. Then came the post-joint babble: ‘How can one possibly write so beautifully? It’s not only a case of writing well, it goes miles beyond. I’ve never read anything as beautiful and truthful. In these pages, Aragon makes me think of Mozart. If you took just a single word away, moved a comma, it would collapse. Perfection.’

  And Monsieur didn’t understand. As a would-be writer, I was torn between awe and jealousy, or perhaps it was dismay. Just as I had when I first read Lolita (oh, Nabok
ov), I saw that every sentence, miraculously fine-tuned with the care of a goldsmith, had little to do with work or application. It was a thing of genius. To carve such a beautiful stream of words would have taken me hours, locked inside an empty room. And I knew I hadn’t the talent to join the ranks of such writers. I was serene in the knowledge, as you are when you accept the realities of life. But it hurt.

  ‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ Monsieur said.

  Right then, even if he was incapable of understanding my frustration, I found him truly exquisite and intoxicating. I loved sharing my appreciation for words and the flesh with him, that I could see in his maleness a woman’s inclination to hours of reading, living half of her life by proxy. And especially that he could watch me talking about Aragon while his eyes coveted me alongside the renewal of desire.

  Monsieur took the book back and opened it some pages further on. While I changed the music, he began to read a passage that was to transform my admiration for Aragon into worship: his description of Irene’s cunt. Every time I heard the words ‘cunt’ or ‘vulva’ (Aragon, from my own feminine perspective, is the only person who can write about a vulva without provoking waves of disgust in me), they had me squirming with pleasure and embarrassment, despite my veneer of worldliness. From the glint in Monsieur’s eyes, his delight in our situation, I could see that it still excited him to talk dirty to a young girl. During the conversation that followed, he told me about all the rare editions he owned. I adored Monsieur for his private library and imagined myself spending two nights and days there, collapsed in a large leather armchair, a cup of coffee in one hand, naked beneath one of Monsieur’s shirts, which, on the stroke of every passing hour, he would pull away from my skin.

  For a brief instant, I buried my nose in his hair and rubbed myself against him. I was passionately obsessed with him, but clumsy in expressing my love and desire. I found it so difficult to caress his chest or kiss him. My face in his armpit, I watched him. An invisible observer would never have guessed he’d just fucked me in the arse. Now Monsieur was all softness, like the pages of the book he was holding. Soft, soft.