Monsieur

by Emma Becker

  ‘Ellie . . .’

  ‘And neither do I know you. I’ve written a book about you, but maybe I’ve got it all wrong. All I know of you is what you’ve been willing to let me see in just a few hours.’

  I raised my eyebrows in the way that Babette says gives an inkling of what I might look like in twenty years. I hate it when I do that.

  ‘So, in a nutshell, that’s what makes me sad. Not to know you, and being a semi-stranger to you makes me sad. And to know none of this affects you makes me sad.’

  ‘Who says it doesn’t make me sad too?’

  ‘No one, actually. Everything you think I have to read between the lines. You never say anything to me.’

  ‘It does make me sad,’ Monsieur says, his nose rubbing against mine, ‘that I don’t know enough about you, that I don’t see you, speak to you. It’s all so horrible.’

  I realised there was no point in saying anything more, I could just remain there coiled up against him, my face all sticky, and the situation would continue for some months still, conditions unchanged, with the faint hope of catching his attention, attracting his favours looming over an improbable horizon. We’d been stuck here for almost a year now. It wasn’t after a whole year I was likely to find a place for myself between Monsieur and his wife, isolated from his likely other girlfriends, in the margins, considered when he felt distracted, remembered when convenient. Forcing strangled sounds from my throat, I suggested:

  ‘So tell me it’s over, then.’

  ‘I can’t do such a thing.’

  ‘How bloody selfish you are!’

  I rose on the bed, shamelessly wiping my nose, now on my knees facing Monsieur who was still lying down, his mouth opening to come up with further objections.

  ‘You just don’t want to exclude the possibility of being able to fuck me whenever you feel like it. It’s all too human, but do understand how unhappy it makes me feel.’

  ‘You knew when we first began seeing each other how little time I had. Every time I see you, they happen to be minutes stolen from my time-table, my work, my . . .’

  ‘Don’t start mentioning her.’

  Her. Since when do I talk like a common mistress?

  ‘Don’t talk to me about your wife. I’ve always had the good taste to never include her in all the obstacles preventing us from seeing each other. I’ve never wanted to be in competition with her.’

  ‘I never saw you competing with her, but it’s also because she exists that I can’t look after you better. It’s the life I chose, long ago.’

  ‘Or maybe you just don’t give a damn about it all.’

  Monsieur suddenly grew stiff, and his fingers gripped the sheets, with all the white-knuckle intensity he usually displayed before he came. A bad sign. His voice full of fatherly aggravation, as if a single extra expression of rebellion would see him explode.

  ‘When will you ever cease thinking that I don’t give a damn?’

  ‘When you do something to prove the contrary,’ I answered, convinced he could never raise his hand to me, whatever the provocation. ‘When you have the guts to tell me it’s over, because you accept you will never have the time to properly spend with me.’

  ‘Should I call you more often? Is that what the problem is all about?’

  ‘Who said there was a problem?’

  A knot in my throat, I slipped my knickers on.

  ‘For over eight months now, I’ve been crawling around at your feet, hoping you’d notice me, start talking to me as if I were an adult. Maybe I’m the one who was wrong, or you were wrong to let me act in this way, but these are the facts: I can’t go on like this.’

  ‘I never wanted to make you unhappy.’

  ‘I know. No one ever wanted to make someone else unhappy. No one ever wants to make someone else unhappy, but it happens.’

  ‘As far as I’m concerned, I still want to keep on seeing you.’

  He sounded like a child who’s been sent to the corner, and it made me want to throw myself into his arms. It might have been a gentle deception, clever manipulation, I had no proof that Monsieur was genuinely in pain. Or experiencing as much pain as I did. That the thought of no longer having regular contact with me was truly affecting him. That just saying my first name had become painful, or even thinking it. I had a choice between throwing myself into his arms or hating myself for not doing so, or staying there like a pillock on my knees and come to regret months later a final occasion to breathe in his perfume, feel his whole body surround me. Clenching my fists, I nervously laughed, like a door closing, unable to look into his eyes.

  ‘Neither do I want us to stop seeing each other. It’s the last thing I want to do. Do you think I have anyone else in my life who can talk to me about Aragon or Mandiargues the way you do?’

  ‘We can always talk, no need to make love,’ Monsieur earnestly suggested.

  ‘You know all too well it’s impossible. I’ll still be consumed by the need to touch you. And you’ll always feel compelled to mess about with me under café tables. I will see so little of you. Even less than now. But it will still be enough to remind me of how things used to be, having you as mine. It won’t change anything.’

  ‘So what, Ellie? We stop calling each other, talking, finding out how we are?’

  ‘I stop calling you, talking to you, asking after you. And you continue as you’ve always done.’

  ‘So we’re saying it’s over?’

  I clenched my teeth, exasperated by Monsieur’s repetitive propensity for pushing me all the way, ignoring how much I had shed my naivety away from him. So, a final form of provocation, my heart beating wildly, I cried out:

  ‘Yeah, it is, it’s over.’

  Then, reassuring myself:

  ‘A decision had to be reached.’

  I could have fainted a hundred times over as I got dressed. Leggings. Knickers. High-collared Claudine dress. Bensimon trainers. Monsieur kept on watching me, as if he was holding an invisible piece of string keeping my nose pointed straight in his direction so that I might gauge his reaction but mostly I was gradually becoming aware of the fact I would never be seeing him again. It was difficult to get my mind around it. His eyes followed my movements with such calm equanimity confirming my deepest conviction: he had known, all evening, that I would be leaving him. That, in some way, I’d partly left him some time ago. And that my final flight had, consciously or not, long been planned. So why, oh why was he staring at me like this? Why did it feel as if he felt offended at the spectacle of my escape?

  I fixed my ponytail, twisting it around three times, using two separate elastic bands.

  I sat on the edge of the bed so I could lace up my shoes properly.

  I pretended to send four text messages.

  I was biding my time. Doing everything on automatic pilot, feeling dead inside. Finally, hands crossed over my knees, I realized there was nothing else for me to do but leave. Monsieur watched as I shivered and whispered my name. Head held low, below the shield of my hair, I saw his hand slowly moving towards me, open, unthreatening. And then, in a flash, it disappeared and I felt it in my hair, journeying backwards across my head, reaching halfway down my back. I briefly glanced at Monsieur, silently saying but what in hell do you want me to do?

  ‘Go,’ he said laconically, and it felt so much worse than ‘Stay’.

  The whole extent of the tragedy taking place in the room swept across me. What a huge, bloody mess. Hundreds of people had just died in an earthquake in Chile, Earth had possibly changed its course in the heavens, there’d been the thing in Haiti and the only drama I had been involved in, the only thing that could make me cry was leaving this man, eight months of my life, and it felt like my whole life. Like in the cartoons, my eyes had probably gone all red, and I threw myself at him, burying my nose into the softness of his neck, sobbing, my tears flowing, draining through the prickliness of his unshaven morning face. Monsieur dug his nails into my back with such fierceness that it left a mark for some time, a
few days at least: three initially pink moon-shaped crescents, which would later turn to red and brown. As I silently sobbed, my cheek against his, he took my tear-stained face between his hands.

  ‘Look after yourself, please. And don’t forget me.’

  ‘OK,’ I promised, sniffing away.

  ‘OK?’

  ‘You too, take care of yourself . . .’

  ‘Swear you will,’ Monsieur said, his nose touching mine, as I looked straight into his long lashes and grey eyes, finding no indication of emotion, just his customary neutrality.

  ‘I swear,’ I hiccuped, pulling my face away from his hands.

  Right then, did he even have a clue of everything I’d just lived through? I was standing up with difficulty (and how did I even manage that?) while Monsieur was still seated, the wet and sticky shadow of my cheeks on his. I just had to say something, for fear of losing what was left of my sanity, so I added, almost talking to myself:

  ‘Don’t talk to me of memories or farewells. I don’t believe in farewells.’

  ‘Neither do I.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, as I stood yet again on the brink of collapsing, ‘I was fifteen years old when I experienced my first sentimental break-up. I missed an afternoon class because I was so sad. I remember, my father and I walked to the bakery to buy girdle cakes, I was shedding tears like a fountain. I knew he didn’t know what to or say to make me feel better – you never could discuss those sort of things with my father – and he said to me you always come across the people who mean something to you or once meant something again.

  Turning my head away to wipe my snot on my collar, I continued:

  ‘That’s all I can think of right now. Such a stupid thing to say.’

  ‘No, it’s a lovely, thoughtful thing to say.’

  ‘Maybe a bit of both,’ I conceded, slipping my jacket on.

  Mid-season: it was still March, but May was fast approaching. The air smelled like last year. The chestnut trees were flowering. The sweetness of mangoes. A blend of Habit Rouge, dust and floor polish. The sky the same shade of blue. Was it a clue, the logical conclusion, the closing of circle I had always been unable to decrypt? I would have enough time to think about this on the Métro, as I knew no single track on my iPod would be able to interrupt the frantic flow of my thoughts. Nearby conversation would sweep over me, people would embrace, laugh, listen to the Beatles, read their copies of Cosmopolitan. Fucking hell, the world would go on! How was it possible? How could individual universes collapse on themselves and leave the rest of the world unaffected?

  As I leaned over to pick up my handbag, I willed myself to faint. But it wasn’t that easy.

  ‘So I’ll never see those panties of yours again?’ Monsieur said, sounding neither provocative nor funny I must say. Neutral. An open book.

  Never again. Sometimes there are words, standing next to each other, that make you want to feel sick.

  I don’t believe that a single man is worth those favourite panties that witnessed my first orgies, watched me straddle my first conquests, and tentatively step into my first alien bedrooms. It wasn’t a question of price, even if at the time it felt outrageously expensive: the noblest hands, the most precious hands had pulled on its elastic like the strings of a harp. The worthiest of eyes had devoured the plump spectacle of my flesh below the polish of its lace. I had leaked into its material so many times, in the most extravagant of places. At the Baron, chaperoned by Olivier Destelles. A few weeks later, high as a kite, I would drift through Thomas Pariente’s apartment starkers but for them and an Hermès scarf. Some years earlier, seeing them for the first time, straight from the precious small Agent Provocateur carrier-bag, Alexandre had remarked that they were my ‘heart-attack panties’. My whole sexual life was inscribed inside the black satin folds. I’d lost weight, put on weight again, and lost it again, but they’d never offended me by becoming too loose or tight. As by miracle, the material adhered to my flesh like a second skin. Those panties were mine.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said to Monsieur, with an uneasy smile.

  As soon as he held them in his hands, still looking attentively at me, he brought them to his nose, smelling the imprint of my cunt, his languid pupils like those of a perfumer facing the most exquisite of fragrances. This was why I had loved this man, the very reason I had fallen head over heels: the way his face lit up when I opened my legs. The greediness of his lust.

  ‘These panties are much too beautiful for you to give them to me,’ Monsieur noted, as his fingers wrapped themselves around the lace.

  ‘Wasn’t our relationship beautiful too?’ I said, with a fatalistic sigh that I instantly felt ridiculous, reciting platitudes like a sitcom actress.

  He smiled at me.

  As I took my first step towards the door, my body felt surprisingly light, considering I would never see Monsieur again. I was weightless. The wooden floor under my feet indelicately squeaked: I wanted to escape in total silence, unnoticed. I could feel Monsieur’s eyes behind me, scanning one last time my pantie-less silhouette (that promise of nudity had always had such a cataclysmic effect on him) and, for a man so at ease with words, he was struggling to somehow break the silence. Maybe he knew deep down inside he no longer had anything left to say. That there was a form of pain, like pulling out a splinter, which was impervious to words.

  I opened the door, struggling madly against the thought of turning back. The absence of sounds was the same, in the room and in the corridor. Inside me the silence was screaming. Surrounding me was a silence of mourning. Biting my lips, I turned the handle, a final whiff of Habit Rouge reached me, floating across my cheeks, and that was it.

  That was it.

  That feeling of getting away with it cheaply can prove terribly fragile. When I began to walk again, the carpet felt soft and deep, sickeningly soft. The smell of lilies washing over the landing was unbearable, the walls aggressively orange-coloured. I feared hearing Monsieur move behind me, just a few metres away, inside the room. The sound of the door handle turning.

  I ran down the steps four at a time, rushed past the reception desk like the breeze, refusing to look around the hotel I would never return to, ever, mumbling ‘thank you, have a good day’, my voice a ghost-like trickle (I’ve never wanted to reveal the name of this seventeeth arrondissement landmark of sorts, mentioning it just brings back the nausea. All I have to do is silently spell out the word and for ten seconds or so the people facing me, the world all around, the music I’m listening to, the silence even, they all freeze, lose colour, turning into those sort of silvery old photographs that cause my heart to tighten).

  It was midday on Rue des Dames. Standing on the small flight of steps I stared ahead at the continuous flow of grey passers-by, gasping for air. All the buildings seemed to rise to terrible heights, their windows like dead eyes. With no great conviction, I put a foot forward and walked down one step and a determined young executive almost bumped into me, instinctively mumbling ‘pardon!’ out of mere habit, and I leapt back like a cat to my original position, on the door’s threshold. It felt like being drunk, the way you become terribly clumsy after the third glass. Alone, mostly. Lost. Stranded halfway between two equal catastrophes, on one hand ready to melt back into all the waves of insignificance, on the other the desire to rush back towards the soft, cotton-like heat of the hotel, where Monsieur sat waiting for me, with his wolf-like smile. I’d often wondered if others also experienced the same sort of total loss of motivation, of frames of reference. If italicized sentences came to life in their mind, out of nowhere like they did to me.

  If you go back inside it will fuck everything up. But if you run away, it’s all the same. So, what are you left with, at the end of the day? Nothing. No desire to read, write, fuck or see people, no inclination to sleep or be alone, so what have I got left, damn? Have I ever really thought through what it would be like to never see Monsieur again? Don’t do it. If you do it, you’ll scream. You won’t see him again, not at the clini
c, not at Philippe’s, not at the hotel, nor in his car, nowhere. There is no place left on this planet that will bring you together. I loved Monsieur more than anything else in the whole wide world. I will not see him again. Our two lives will now follow parallel tracks, I . . . I will grow older without him being aware of it. I will know nothing of his life. He will forget you, he’s bound to. Or worse, he will never forget you.

  ‘Ouch.’

  You will never forget him. All I have left are these memories but oh God I now remember so little, oh God I’ve even forgotten his face, that face that never appeared to be the same in photographs. I just have fleeting images, and soon they will disappear like all the rest. Even if you write. Writing won’t stop time racing by, erasing everything in its passage. What’s worse? Forgetting? Or the contrary? But I don’t want to, me! I don’t want to forget! I don’t want him to forget me, dear God, to forget my arse, my smell or all the messages I used to send him, my name and my pitiful devotion, my dog-like devotion to him, I . . . oh fuck, who cares if he forgets me, as I’ll NEVER see him again. Breathe. I can’t breathe. I’m scared, the fear is killing me. So is the cold. I . . . sit down. You can’t allow yourself to collapse to the ground in front of all these strangers. Sit down, light yourself a fag. Hold it between your small trembling fingers. Oh, I just don’t want to be myself. I just want to wake up on the day when Monsieur’s name will have disappeared, has been expunged from my memory, when the thought of him barely raises a smile on my lips. Will it ever happen? Can I manage it? Will you ever be able to look at a photograph of him without it feeling like a slow-motion slap against your cheeks? I don’t want to be me ever again. I don’t think I can bear all this pain much longer. Or rather I know I will: I know I will take the Métro like any normal person, that I will find my way back home like a normal person, even if I’m crying or choking or snot is pouring from my nose throughout the journey, because who cares after all? I feel like being sick. I’m going to be sick. Swallow all that saliva down. Breathe, breathe. Don’t make the mistake and stop breathing.