by Emma Becker
I reckon Monsieur is one of those rare people in whom each positive quality has a corresponding flaw, and vice versa. For instance, he is a great manipulator and is also brilliant. He twists me around his little finger, which irritates me but encourages me to to meditate and analyse. Monsieur is highly susceptible, but no other man I know displays such charisma. Granted, he is a bastard, but he’s also a bottomless pit of culture. Monsieur is pretentious, but passionate too. He is deeply sensitive, but keeps his feelings to himself. All you know of Monsieur is what he allows you to see.
* * *
Often I can’t see anything beautiful or noble about Monsieur. Even his profession may be, for him, a means to an end – status. I basically hate him because of his arrogance and selfishness. I’ve even confessed to Babette a couple of times that I’ve never come across anyone as wicked as he is. In him, there is an undercurrent of sadism and the eighteenth-century libertine. Monsieur can be impatient, but never allows impulse to thwart his strategies. His artful trickery stems from his knowledge of women. When Monsieur acts unpredictably, it’s just that he’s decided to take a new path. His every silence is a killer: I’m always afraid he’s been caught out by his wife or that he feels he’s in danger. Now I know that if he doesn’t answer me, it’s just that he doesn’t feel like doing so. That he’s bored. He has no need to be polite because he doesn’t owe a kid like me any explanation. Sometimes I come to the conclusion that Monsieur is evil at heart: he loves only himself and can feign some form of passion for others.
You learn about Monsieur in the way you assemble a giant jigsaw puzzle, meticulously putting it together a piece at a time. It’s the only evidence I am left with, after I’ve spent weeks collecting all the facts I know about him. Whatever I have learned about him is intangible. All I know of Monsieur is a handful of words and smiles, absences and reappearances. Monsieur will not allow himself to be analysed, studied.
This is the man I am writing a book about.
* * *
Eight days since I’ve heard from him, and I am calling Monsieur at his clinic. I’m hopping up and down while the message at the other end of the line instructs me to dial one for the nurses, two for the nurses. There is no number for Monsieur.
The thought of having to confront the secretary is agonizing. I have no idea who I should pretend to be or how to ask for Dr S with the voice of a girl who’s never held her whole body close to his. The need for some form of clumsy justification, to have to invent a set of X-rays I need to talk about, all the time knowing the worst I’ve ever suffered is a sprained ankle. I am a terrible actress.
‘Who’s calling?’
Miss Becker. It doesn’t even sound like a real patient’s name, more like the name a pretend patient would use when trying discreetly to get in touch with her surgeon lover. A name straight out of a novel, which is why I chose it. But right then I have no way of knowing how wrong it sounds, busy as I am with my tales of secretaries and X-rays.
‘Please stay on the line,’ she says, and I hear Monsieur’s voice.
No way I can describe his ‘hello’, but that meaningless word journeys into my ears and through my body, awakening every hidden part of me with Pavlovian insistence.
‘Monsieur S,’ I mumble, instantly affected by the voice I know so well. ‘It’s Miss Becker.’
And then Monsieur, whom I hate and whose face I would slap wildly if he were with me, magically brings me to life, blowing on the ashes of my phoenix, his velvet tones, tender and amused, simply saying, ‘Good morning, Miss Becker.’
Enchantment. Not that it helps me forget all the nights I was unable to sleep, the time I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown staring at my phone, but all the pain and anger fade away beneath a cloud blanket that mutes their strength. Because I can visualize him perfectly, sitting behind his desk at the clinic, one hand in his pocket and a wry smile on his lips. From the sound of his voice, I know he is not angry.
‘Are you still alive?’ I ask, clumsily attempting irony. The knowledge that he is somewhere in Paris is as euphoric as an injection of morphine straight into my vein.
‘Absolutely,’ he says pleasantly.
My words get tangled as I struggle for breath, but after a few seconds the line breaks up. I hold on to him as hard as I can, desperate at the thought of losing him so quickly, but it’s all in vain. Monsieur, prompted by his fear of being compromised, has silently hung up.
‘You’re a fool, Ellie,’ I whisper to myself in the mirror, staring at the unhealthy redness spreading across my cheeks.
This is what has become of me: I’m frustrated but transported by a brief moment of communication and the euphoria induced by hearing Monsieur’s voice. How low have I fallen? If there was an expensive hotline on which I could listen to his voice again and again, I’d subscribe to it.
By the sink, my mobile vibrates, but I’m stunned by the turn of events and knowing that Monsieur has sent me a text would be too much for me just now. However, the prospect of talking to him tonight is enough to curb the hysterical impulses he triggers inside me. I’ve been like this for ten days now, on tenterhooks every time Monsieur calls or texts. Not that anyone has noticed. Since I’ve known him, I’m only truly alive for two hours a week, and right now not even a second. I spend the rest of my hateful life watching my phone, collapsing into indifference when it rings and it’s not him. I sleep. I try to think of other bodies, but there are none that interest me. I find this form of slavery intolerable. I can’t remember what it was like not to know him, even though I’d spent twenty years oblivious of his existence.
A few minutes later, as I’m about to step into the bath, Andrea texts, asking me to come to his place in an hour. I remember the days when I’d jump for joy every time he called. Had I not been in love with this guy? And when did it fade away? Why don’t I want to see him tonight?
Because Monsieur says he will call. I know what time he leaves work, and he’ll ring when I’m at Andrea’s. Maybe even as we’re making love.
Wash hair, dig out a decent outfit. I can’t be bothered with any of it if I’m seeing Andrea. I have the impression that going out or sleeping with me has become a polite routine for him. Later, I thought that if I were to caress myself in his bed, it would be when he was asleep. Andrea fucks rather well but, these days, he’s too polite for me, just annoys me: it distracts me from my lethargy, but is too finicky to transport me to worlds of erotic amnesia. It’s not powerful enough, at any rate, to overcome the looming shadow of my mobile phone on the bedside table. And, worse, Andrea suspects nothing. At no time over the past three weeks has he noticed my descent into lifelessness. On occasion, playing with him, I would mention Monsieur at the risk of betraying myself, and would have done so had Andrea been possessive. Out of the blue, I mentioned to him that a colleague of my uncle’s had suggested taking me to Geneva for a seminar.
‘So, are you going?’ was all he asked.
‘Of course not,’ I answered, annoyed that I could be sitting naked on his knees and unable to generate any jealousy. ‘You don’t think he’d want to try it on, once we’re in Switzerland?’ I added.
‘Of course he would,’ he answered, and that was it.
Maybe, at the end of the day, Andrea doesn’t want to know what’s going on.
A radiant purple summer evening. I’m scampering down the corridors of the Métro, carrying my wantonness like a cross. Over the last two weeks, my seraglio has burgeoned and I stink of sex. Mentally, I’m miles away. I’m fucking frantically. Andrea, Zylberstein, Thomas Pariente and Landauer don’t seem to have enough hands or cocks to appease me. It’s Monsieur I’m deprived of. Everywhere I go I gorge myself with men, my eyes devouring them from beneath the curtain of my hair. The moment I find myself alone I miss men. I search everywhere for Monsieur and find him dispersed among my lovers, in Zylberstein’s smart conversation and Thomas’s eloquence, in Jerome Landauer’s dark voice, in François’s oval features. Facing every one of my ‘friends’, a
s he likes to call them, I have a good reason to give myself to them.
Except Édouard.
Édouard is thirty-six. My friend Mélie first told me about him when we were having a coffee on the terrace of a café near place de la Bastille. It was summer and the sun was making a welcome appearance, but Monsieur wasn’t around. I was complaining about it. ‘Now that I’m no longer seeing him,’ I was more or less saying, ‘I want a guy with the same curiosity and lack of inhibition but I can’t find one.’
Mélie then told me about a university lecturer she’d slept with recently. One evening, as they were sipping glasses of wine on his couch, she had remembered she’d got her period, and decided that Édouard, like most men, would be turned off. She’d come clean.
‘No problem,’ he’d replied, with a smile.
‘Really?’
‘Is it a problem for you?’
‘Not at all. Well, it’s just that I feel a bit silly. I’m something of a poisoned chalice.’
‘You must be joking!’ Édouard had said, almost leaping out of his armchair. ‘It’s only blood. And it’s the time of the month when girls are really hot.’
He’d drifted away to change the music on the hi-fi. When he came back to her, Mélie was still a bit shocked by what he’d said. They had kissed.
‘But it was true – I did want it badly,’ she told me.
In the middle of a passionate embrace, Mélie was down to her pants – her big old period pair – when she had sighed into Édouard’s ear: ‘I’ve got to go and take my tampon out.’ She’d felt terribly self-conscious at the prospect of crawling to the bathroom, doing the deed and washing her hands, then having to apologize for sabotaging the evening. What a passion-killer.
But long-haired Édouard had whispered, ‘Stay here,’ and, without even interrupting their kissing, had pulled the tampon out and casually set it on an old copy of Le Monde.
‘Are you kidding?’ I said. I didn’t believe her.
‘I swear on whatever I hold dearest,’ Mélie answered. ‘I’ve been going out with the guy for five years, and I’m always the one who ends up red in the face. No way I could have invented it, Ellie.’
‘I must meet him,’ I said, slapping my hand onto the table.
It wasn’t really a question of tampons. I was already dividing men into categories, from complete idiots upwards, and a whole universe of possibilities was opening ahead of me in which men could love women enough not to make them feel dirty.
A few hours later, I had a text from Édouard. Mélie had described me to him in such glowing terms that he was suggesting we meet up the following evening.
Stupidly, I had second thoughts: he wanted to see me for a glass of wine in place du Panthéon, but I was so tired I couldn’t face small-talk, let alone sustain it. All I wanted was to fuck, endlessly. But you can’t tell a total stranger you just want to go to his place. So I turned him down and didn’t meet him until another mutual friend organized a dinner party. That was how we met. I never like to describe a man physically: it always sounds so banal. I could say he has brown hair, wide dark eyes, attractive white teeth and a body toned by all the tennis he plays, but that wouldn’t tell you much. Édouard is good-looking. For an hour we discussed the art of the novel, which he felt was dying. I fought tooth and claw for Maupassant, and he countered me with Kundera. We ended up at his place four days later. Smiling wildly, I told him what had compelled me to meet him and he burst out laughing, which made me feel totally at ease in his Vincennes flat, with its phantom-like cat and empty wine bottles scattered around. Édouard is, I think, the first man, Andrea apart, in whose place I didn’t mind spending the night: I didn’t have to count the hours before I was free again. That night, I slept like a log, sated.
Édouard’s in a category of his own, just like Monsieur or Andrea, even if he can’t understand why.
‘It’s not really a category,’ I was explaining to him one evening, after we’d smoked and drunk too much. ‘I don’t classify men like objects, or according to their function, perish the thought! It’s like a network. On one side, there’s Monsieur, OK? Then Andrea, who’s my boyfriend. Then you have François and Timothée, who fit together. Then—’
‘Wait.’ He stopped me. ‘I don’t understand. Why do they fit together?’
‘They’re best friends. I met them at the same function – actually, the same evening I met Andrea. Then there’s Thomas Pariente and Olivier Destelles – they fit together because they’re filthy rich. And then there’s Zylberstein, Jerome Landauer, Octave and Paul. They’re all medics and friends.’
‘So, how many doctors?’
‘Five, if you include Monsieur. But it’s not as if I seek out doctors. Once you get involved, it’s a circle that keeps pulling you in.’
‘And then?’
‘There’s you. I can’t fit you into any specific category, although you’re also part of a network, like Zylberstein. You’re different.’
‘Different how?’
I could have told him the truth: you’re different because, for one reason or another, you mean more to me than all the other guys. Is it because your attentions are so old-fashioned and you really seem interested in what I have to say? But I was scared that if I told the truth I might appear clumsy and frighten him away.
‘You’re different because you’re such a great fuck,’ I said, with great difficulty.
Flattered, he laughed and, encouraged, I added: ‘And it’s also because I like you more than the others. You’re nicer.’
Actually, Édouard is the best, on a variety of fronts. When I describe it like this, and my friends find out we see each other twice a week, someone invariably asks why we don’t go out together. It’s a question I always shrug off, as if the answer was self-evident, not that I know the answer. Because he’s sixteen years older than I am. Because it would complicate the perfect relationship we already enjoy (why am I using such a fucking cliché?). Because he’s not in love with me and I’m obsessed with and owned by Monsieur. In front of Andrea, I can pretend, construct all sorts of heartbreaking endearments, but Édouard doesn’t deserve to be on the receiving end of lies. He deserves the only thing I can freely give: simple but all-encompassing pleasure.
On rue Gracieuse, I walk along slowly, hoping Monsieur might have the grace to call me in the next couple of minutes. Even with my iPod plugged into my ears, it’s all I can think about. I’ve been holding my mobile in my sweaty hand ever since I set out.
I swear silently in front of Andrea’s building – Come on, you’ve got another thirty seconds . . . I’m already half an hour late, which would have made anyone else suspicious, but I know he won’t have a clue, won’t see anything beneath the mask I’m wearing. At moments like this I hate myself for not having the guts to leave him: he’s not bothered about me, and I don’t give a damn about him, but still we remain together. Maybe it’s in the eye of the beholder: it’s rather pleasing, isn’t it, a cute young Ashkenazy Jew wearing glasses alongside a pink and blonde shiksa? All very Portnoy’s Complaint. It’s probably convenient, been that way for more than five months now, so why should I rock the boat? Andrea and I are running a lazy race: it’s too tiring even to think of falling in love. Too easy, as far as I’m concerned. With Monsieur, it’s all about pain, which makes the game all the more addictive. I can feel him infiltrate every pore of my skin as my body vainly tries to resist. I think I’ve always enjoyed pain, long before I came to love the men who inflicted it.
20.30
No one would believe me, but I hate to see Andrea like this because of my lies. I’m no longer worried that I’m always play-acting. I’m accustomed to fucking a lot and with a whole gallery of men, and I don’t mind admitting it. I’ve reached the depths of corruption, seeking in their arms sensations and intellectual stimulation that would once have disgusted me. But what I hate most is the ease with which I can lie. I lie all the time, about everything.
‘You OK?’ Andrea asks, opening the door to hi
s small, well-lit apartment.
‘I’m fine,’ I answer, and my warm, cheeky smile is yet another lie.
I’ve become totally apathetic. Although it might seem that I’m keen to go to the restaurant, I’d be happier to stay here, sitting in an armchair, staring at my mobile. I flash Andrea to show him I’m not wearing pants and, well brought-up as he is, he pretends to be interested. The telephone rings just as he’s pinching my bum. While he’s on the line to a workmate, I look out of the window. His street is like a theatre set, a scene straight out of commedia dell’arte. Twitching, I watch the people on their way to meet friends for the evening. Everywhere there is laughter, the click-click of high heels on the uneven pavement, and I’d give so much to be elsewhere, far from this wide-open window. Fuck, I can’t breathe. All I can hear of Andrea is his exuberant voice, and it’s getting on my nerves. His laugh annoys me intensely. His once endearing habit of walking up and down the room and scratching his scalp while he talks on the phone is infuriating. I miss Monsieur physically. He’s like a drug; from the moment he reappears in my life, however briefly, all my days in rehab are swept away and I’m quivering again. There are times when my heart is beating so fast that I feel almost faint, my head spinning and a voice inside it whispering, I need Monsieur. I need him.
‘I’ll only be a couple of minutes,’ Andrea tells me quietly. ‘Keep your coat on.’
Then I feel a dull vibration in my handbag – it sounds like the trumpets of Judgement Day. I freeze like a rabbit in headlights, seizing my mobile, noting the divine ‘unknown caller’ as it flashes on and off. Monsieur’s sensuality forcefully invades the formal chill of modern technology. The words dance in front of my eyes, teasing me. Pick up, Ellie. Take me. I know you’re dying to find out who’s calling you. Who usually calls you at a quarter to nine in the evening, if not the man who stops you sleeping at night simply because he happens to exist?