by Emma Becker
I didn’t desire her as I would a man, but when she was close by all I could think of was her hair, her eyes, her white teeth, and the way she moved with the swiftness of a little animal. Suddenly she would sit next to me, grab my cards and giggle as she showed my hand, shamelessly flirting with me. It infuriated my sister.
‘Can’t you be discreet, Ellie? You’re crazy!’ she complained, one night, in the tiny kitchen.
‘I can’t help it – it’s just the way I am.’
‘You should try to control yourself!’ my sister cried, as if it were that simple, as if I could ignore the way Lucy stared at me from beneath her heavy lashes, then stole one of my best cards.
That was it: everything for Lucy was a game of tarot. If I attempted a defensive move – she was no prettier than my other girlfriends – she would burst out laughing and produce her winning card. You couldn’t have said for certain whether she was beautiful or not until she stood in the right light when all doubt disappeared.
So it came to pass that summer, while I squirmed like a sardine in Monsieur’s net, that Lucy came to my rescue and welcomed me into her own. While we stayed in the Midi, I’d somehow kept the situation under control, but things changed when we moved to her country house. I was ashamed to catch myself staring at her for longer than I should.
I deflected the others’ attention by pretending to be interested in Antoine, who responded as anyone of his age would. It was yet another thing that got on Alice’s nerves: she thought I was trying to seduce all and sundry just to forget Monsieur. I never did seduce Lucy, but thoughts of her continued to assail me, even after I’d seen her cooing in the arms of her girlfriend.
I knew what she really thought behind the furtive glances and seemingly innocent teasing. Over the years, we had built a close friendship so I can’t imagine it was only a game. Anyway, I was highly unlikely prey. I’ll have to ask her, one day. What do you think, Lucy? I spend so much of my life in the arms of men that maybe I’m a challenge to you. Or is it something else? Something simpler. It’s probably unimportant. It’s in my nature to ask questions, but I’ve never asked myself why I liked you so much, despite the smallness of your breasts, your narrow, supple waist, the prominent bump inside your bikini bottoms. You’re the only one with whom I could have shared orgasms to the sound of Jacques Brel or Pink Floyd, or established an almost telepathic form of communication, as happened during our stay in the countryside or in the Sologne.
‘Maybe we could go for a drive, and later we can play ping-pong.’
Remember? It was two o’clock in the morning and I jumped out of my chair, staring at you as if you were a Fragonard portrait. ‘How the hell did you know that was exactly what I was thinking?’
You smiled and we began to dance to ‘Do You Love Me?’ by the Contours. Later, I was laughing too much to hit the ping-pong ball, but I could see you clearly. You were beginning to occupy an important place in my life.
One evening, I decided to read you an excerpt from a letter I was writing to Andrea, in which I talked about you at length. This marked the beginning of hostilities.
That evening, you dared me to make a pass at Flora – my sister! – and then at Clara – your girlfriend! – and I realized that, after all, you were far from perfect. Player or manipulator – but was that so bad? I fell asleep that night thinking of making love with you. The following morning, when I came across you, your ponytail askew and pillow lines still marking your cheeks, you smiled at me as if you had read my guilt.
Those days, in an attempt to overcome Monsieur’s absence, I was often on the phone to one of his colleagues, Maxime Zylberstein, thirty-five years old, gynaecologist by trade (and vocation). When I told him about you, he promptly pushed me into your arms. ‘Of course,’ you’d remark. ‘What could be more attractive than two young lesbians together? He couldn’t understand why I should hold back because you were my sister’s best friend. Had you been a boy, I would long ago have made a move. But, Lucy, think for a moment: how could I have survived had you rejected me? And could I have touched you without appearing naïve or clumsy? I would have loved to invent new caresses for you, kisses that expressed my attraction to you so much better than words. Most men have never understood the fear most women feel in the presence of other women. As if two girls together was no more than a starting point and all their techniques are worthless without a cock involved. And even though I was aware of the techniques and gestures, I had accumulated so many images of the way you might make love that I was terrified of failure with you.
What did I imagine? Your small, precise fingers pretending to discover new erogenous zones – I’m sure you’ve had enough opportunities to survey every inch of the female body. I don’t think of pleasure when I think of you, but of watching you, listening to the sounds you make, learning the taste of your mouth, the savour of your cunt, having the chance to make you as happy as I am when I’m around you.
Thank God, as soon I moved away from the countryside, I could breathe again. Monsieur took his rightful place in my mind and the radio silence continued. This was the life I led, balancing painfully between his absence and your constant chirping.
JULY
My sister, who is evidently unable to choose between her friendship with Lucy and her annoyance over my staring at her, has invited her to Normandy to our father’s place. She caught the first available train with her backpack, into which she’d stuffed the essentials: a T-shirt, knickers and grass. Alice and I waited feverishly for her to arrive, as if it had become a matter of life or death. We were bored to death. I was plodding on with Monsieur, lacking energy and inspiration away from Lucy and the others. After lunch, we would take narrow paths into isolated parts of the woods where we could smoke with no one to see us. The rest of the day passed so slowly, as if everything was conspiring to make us hate Normandy. We didn’t care that we always looked stoned or that our hair smelled of weed. Alice blamed our father for our boredom; she couldn’t conceal the redness of her eyes or the reason behind her uncontrollable laughter. At least the garden was large enough for us all to share it without having to cross paths too often.
Lucy arrived on the fourth day. The only day without rain. Coincidence? Or not? That afternoon, we’d splashed and floundered in the miserable stream that ran alongside the walls of the house and cast its dank, muddy smell across the garden. Alice, busy rolling yet another joint, had asked us to go and look for boots in the under-stairs cupboard, and as Lucy was bending over I saw her little bum half revealed by her oversize jeans. It was amazing how masculine she could appear even though she trailed the smell of woman in her wake. Reaching her, I began chatting, and our shoulders touched, generating an electric shock in the small of my back. I was somewhat slow in switching on the light and she remarked: ‘The perfect place for rape, no?’
‘Perhaps,’ I conceded, my heart beating wildly. I was alone with her in the one place in the house where no one, not even Alice, would think of looking for us. Her eyes shone brightly and the white lightning of her teeth pierced the darkness.
‘Rape, eh?’
If God had made me just that bit sharper, I would have stopped fumbling for the light switch and the boots, and let her caress me secretly against the shelves and their network of cobwebs. Just imagine the depth of that moment of silence. My hands under her T-shirt, and her lips against mine. Her fingers. I was literally close to a heart-attack, with all sorts of excuses springing to mind: I was wearing an old-fashioned pair of knickers, I’d not showered that morning, I was all hairy. I spoiled the moment: ‘So, who’s raping whom?’
‘I was only joking,’ she answered, barely registering my disappointment.
After a few minutes’ splashing around in the stream, which was no fun, we had other ideas. We threw the boots back into the under-stairs cupboard where hers landed on top of mine, haloed by a thin ray of sunlight rushing through the open door. A small detail that stayed in my mind: I knew I would write it down later in the notebook.
Everything, well, almost everything, happened that night, in the small room you shared with Alice. The classic aching-back scenario. I straddled your hard little bum to give you a massage. Alice gave me a filthy look, but I ignored her. I enjoyed kneading your soft flesh and watching you clench your teeth but feign surprise and pleasure. In my mind, I could see myself spoiling it by taking your breasts in my hands. Bypassing them was almost unbearable: there was no hiding the way they swelled under your arms, squashed against the mattress, the fawn light of the bedside lamp playing hide and seek across your skin, and why should I pretend I was blind? OK, Ellie, calm down. She’s a girl. That’s what I was thinking. I don’t know if you even noticed how hard I was struggling against the hunger I had for you, against the vision of your hard nipples between my fingers, but you probably did, because a few minutes later you volunteered to massage me. What should we have done?
Maybe what we did: nothing.
‘Goodnight, you old bitches,’ I mumbled, rising from the bed to go my room.
Alice chuckled, ‘You too, old cunt,’ but Lucy, her eyes illuminated by the light of the moon, seemed to take the insult too literally. Of course she was smiling. I owed my whole vocabulary to my lovers and everyone knows that you call a lesbian an old bitch as a form of endearment.
‘So, how is Monsieur?’ Lucy asks, as we sit smoking in a mosquito-infested alleyway.
Alice has just got up unexpectedly and gone to fetch something to rehydrate our parched throats. It’s so hot that all the water in our bodies seems to evaporate in an instant, as if a pump were vacuuming it straight out of our mouths.
‘Physically? Mentally?’ I ask, looking at my knees, uneasy that I’ve generated so much curiosity among my friends. Since the summer began I’ve turned Monsieur into one of the main topics of conversation – I hate it .
‘How would I know? Just tell me more about him,,’ says Lucy, who’s never been particularly nosy or asked me for the sordid details I usually enjoy telling Flora or Babette.
‘Well, I can definitely say I’ve never come across another man with whom I’ve done so many filthy things.’
Lucy wrinkles her nose, visibly unimpressed. Right then, a deafening clap of thunder detonates above us, where a horde of dark grey clouds are gathering, dark and grey like the small house, grey like Normandy. The whole gamut of grey. With a sigh and a shudder, I continue: ‘I believe Monsieur is profoundly perverse.’
Lucy half smiles.
‘Not just sexually. It’s the way he behaves when I’m around that’s particularly perverse. As a matter of fact, so is our whole relationship.’
‘OK, Ellie, I see, but it’s the sort of relationship you were looking for, no?’
‘Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted it to be romantic, but maybe not that sort of romance. When I first came across Monsieur I wasn’t even in search of a relationship. Stupidly I got caught in a trap. And I can’t see my way out.’
Lucy’s wide dark eyes look up at me. ‘You can’t see a way out?’
I meant I just can’t see how one day I’ll manage to live without forgetting I’d once known him. A few weeks ago, I still believed that everything would be over once and for all when I’d finished writing Monsieur, but it won’t. What’s happened, what I’ve done with him, is so bizarre that even if I wanted to forget about it, some twisted part of my unconscious would be unable to. Even if he’s not worth remembering, which I strongly suspect.
‘It’s a good thing you’re writing about him,’ Lucy remarked. ‘Monsieur is a great book. It’s the book.’
Under my backside, notebook number two, with its purple cover, seems to throb softly, full of pride.
Sometimes Lucy manages to defuse tension before it takes hold. She has temporarily deflected her own status as obsession-in-chief and brought Monsieur back to the surface. Now that it’s just the two of us, the silence fills with all the ifs and buts in the history of the world, and I know too well that in an hour or so, I’ll be swearing under my breath because I attempted nothing, even something silly like inadvertently touching her hand or pretending to stumble over her, anything she could forgive or use to her own advantage. I do nothing, and I will do nothing because I’m a bloody fool. As I’ve always known.
The clouds burst one at a time. Lucy and I start to walk home and find ourselves sheltering beneath an oak’s heavy branches. She lights a cigarette, unwilling to go on now that the storm we’ve been expecting since midday has finally broken. I don’t know what we’re hoping for, waiting in the pouring rain, but it must be something buried deep in our psyche, something powerful, because I’ve never been able to watch lightning from my window without wishing to be at the very centre of the storm. What lies at the centre of a storm? What’s in the air? The idea that anything could happen and there would not necessarily be any lasting consequences? I see the same questions float like mist behind Lucy’s dark eyes. Sitting on Monsieur, I wonder how I could take advantage of this temporary madness, throw myself at her, pull her down into the grass, stray nettles stinging our arses and lightning racing above my head. I visualize her spread across the ground, huddled against me, her lips blue, her eyes lighting up in fluorescent shades. Fuck. I watch her, watch her cigarette as if was smoking it myself, tasting her saliva. It would be so uncomfortable to roll around in those bushes! Is there any activity, apart from a long siesta, that Normandy is actually cut out for?
Light years away from my lewd thoughts, Lucy has pulled out her phone.
‘Alice wants us to join her. She’s at home.’
‘Tell her to come here. It’s so cool to be right in the middle of the storm. It’ll make a change from the house.’
But Alice refuses, and the storm isn’t making the conversation easy, so Lucy hangs up. ‘She says we can watch The Wall on the plasma screen.’
‘But I want to stay outside!’
‘We can go on the terrace.’
Lucy stretches out her hand to clasp mine. The strength of her grip is surprising, maybe because her supple fingers are so long. I don’t know how to take her gesture – I may be misinterpreting an innocent touch. Lucy has never given me any indication as to her intentions towards me; but in the midst of my confusion over Monsieur, it bothers me.
I’m playing hopscotch between the puddles as I move along the muddy paths and the rain is beating down. About to turn a sharp corner, I recall a past Sunday in Normandy when I had taken a piss against an immense fir tree overflowing with sap. Over the phone, Monsieur had been delighted to hear about it. Although I didn’t want to know how he pictured me in that situation, I had read and reread his message. It had felt so wrong, as I squatted, knickers around my ankles, still dripping.
‘I’d love to be there and watch you pee. It would be so good to lick away those final golden drops from your little pussy.’
I had immediately texted back: ‘Absolutely not. That’s disgusting.’ All the time, I was looking around, almost convinced I was being spied on. I felt embarrassed and aroused, unable to stop watching the stream rushing down between my legs, asking myself how I would ever manage to pee in his presence. Or avoid it, and his latest proposal.
The world that surrounds me is full of women who’d shriek at the mere thought of finding themselves in such a situation
and men who, God only knows why, could talk for ever about it, were I to bring it up in conversation, their eyes shining as they imagine a woman squatting in a field. In men’s imagination, there is seemingly no dividing line between cleanliness and filth: all that matters is whether something makes you hard or not. And where do I fit into that equation? Having spent nineteen years concocting a series of standard female fantasies, I meet Monsieur and, just from reading his texts, find myself besieged by an assortment of daydreams that only the shameless sensuality of a man could conjure. I am twenty, wearing a cotton dress and leggings. My alice band is like a halo across my blonde hair, but beneath my blue eyes, there is a man’s brain, a man’s precise and perverse mind. I don’t know how I can regain my innocence, stop myself staring at Lucy’s pretty arms with a man’s lustful gaze. These days, my dreams are full of the way Monsieur looks at my cunt when it gapes open and, in the background, his wet cock readies itself for another assault. I no longer spend hours caressing myself thinking of the noise Monsieur makes as he walks into our hotel room, the muted sound of his shoes on the carpet, every step forward like another thrust inside me. Lately it’s been fun to make a top ten of my recurring fantasies, starting with Monsieur plunging deep into my throat and coming, while I almost suffocate, unable to distinguish between his cum and my saliva. That, or the idea of two men inside me. My nights are full of indecent close-ups, smells emerging from nowhere; my nights are like Monsieur’s hands on my neck, holding me in place, motionless. That’s what Normandy is all about, on and on: hundreds of hours spent in silence, with a subterranean network of new imagined perversions. No one could have any idea of the horrors I come up with.