Crush (9 page)

She shepherded her memories of various gardens: Villandry, Vaux-le-Vicomte, her grandmother’s vegetable patch, wondered about aromatic gardens, which reminded her that she had probably never completed her reading of
A rebours.
But these vague references did not help her to have a clear notion of David’s garden, to express a sensible point of view.

She ventured an awkward compliment: The garden had an almost Japanese kind of rigor. After one complete lap, all Amélie could smell was the odor of new-cut grass, all she felt was overwhelming boredom. David led her toward a lean-to backed against the house.

—I’ve got to trim some shrubs. You don’t mind, do you?

Obviously, David was counting on her for a bit of conversation. A distrustful Amélie sat down carefully upon a veritable rug of clover and thistles, as scrubby as her door-mat. She had to admit she had nothing to say.

Her mind dimmed by watching the insects around her, curtailed by an itch brought on by contact with the grass, she was incapable of the merry, witty bubbling he had expected.

Not wishing to denigrate his recipe for ordinary happiness, she tried a peaceful half-smile appropriate to the silent lethargy of well-being. She was playing for time.

When could she possibly leave without hurting his feelings? Once inside the house, what the devil could she do? Stupidly she had not packed any books. She missed her daughters. She couldn’t do any of the things one does at home on days of leisure: file papers, paste photos in albums.

She missed the anonymity of the Paris apartment that sheltered their rendezvous in an atmosphere free of other associations. There David proved to be impulsive, unpredictable, insatiable. Here he was gardening, fixing the house, and planning their future. He seemed different when he was himself. He assumed she’d bloom. She was bored out of her skull.

Inside the house she vacillated between relief and frustration. To want to give David the slip was hardly a cause to rejoice. Actually pulling it off, with such indifference, would not bring happiness, either. Where would it get her? Free to come and go, she was nevertheless under house arrest.

Four o’clock. Her idleness allowed her to gauge the weight of her discomfort. Pregnant with their six-month-long complicity, this divergence struck her as a miscarriage.

Deeply depressed, she had to fill the void. Vertigo would yield to sensations. There had to be biscuits or cocktail snacks in the kitchen cupboard. A hurried, nervous search for a substance that would cram her stomach revealed a box of cookies. She opened it feverishly, unmindful of the brand, the expiration date.

With the cookies in her mouth, she stopped thinking. Her jaws seemed to wreak their vengeance by crushing the shortbread dough. She was instantly comforted as her mouth, flowing with saliva, acquired a lining of warm pap, as soothing as a poultice. Within her sated body, matter had dispelled the anxiety of the void. There went the whole box! Amélie left the kitchen feeling bloated, nauseated. She went upstairs, where she remembered seeing a TV.

Arranged in alphabetical order, the videocassettes rested on ugly metallic shelves like parts of an Erector set. Having painfully decoded the VCR directions, Amélie curled up in a
great big armchair to watch Abel Gance’s
Napoléon.
That should fill a bit of time.

The emperor was dying in a smoke-filled room when David let out a yell from downstairs.

—Amélie, where are you?

—Up here! Watching television.

—My love, I’m so sorry. I forgot all about what time it was. I saw the light failing . . . I looked at my watch . . . It’s horribly late.

—You must have trimmed all the trees of your garden, didn’t you? Amélie shouted back, putting on a playful tone.

—Far from it! Branch by branch, it takes a while. I’ll continue tomorrow. But you must be hungry.

—Not really, she answered in a sluggish voice.

Her answer did not mean anything. She might have had a bit of appetite, or been starving without admitting it. She could also have lost her spirits. Actually, the thought of food made her nauseous after her cookie orgy and sedentary afternoon. But she had no substitute activity to suggest. It was the first time in David’s company that she reasoned as a traveler lost in a region devoid of tourist attractions. She was in need of a visitors’ office to assist her in this place without movie theaters, museums, restaurants, a place that left her devoid of all desires. Her imagination had run dry.

Beset by bizarre ideas, she thought of playing parlor games, which she detested. Then she invented unexpected impediments, like looking at a movie with David. She took exception to making love again, since using sex as a pastime seemed particularly repulsive.

Peeved by her own utter absence of initiative, she followed him to the kitchen. Moving step by step through his
reasonable, well-ordered existence would make her burst inward with boredom and bitterness. She was bound to leave him if she couldn’t alter the present state of affairs.

Dinner was silent, since she failed to chatter. David seemed pleased with his evening. He expressed the desire to retire early, drawing the curtains, closing all the doors, even those of the bedroom and bathroom. Then he promptly fell asleep.

Her eyes wide open in the dark, Amélie dwelled on her malaise. At home, she was in control of the semidarkness, leaving doors half-open to let in a bit of light. She had always been afraid of the dark, as well as fragmented spaces, closed doors and shutters, drawn curtains. Besides, David’s rigidity before falling asleep, like that of a praying bigot, turned her off. He must have been going over his duties as a man of property: Was the alarm on, as well as the automatic sprinkling system, and the gas flow? He had to check in his mind that he had not neglected any of the above.

She remembered her boarding school, the dormitory’s deceitful quiet, which misled the housemother. There were a few students like her, for whom breaking with the strict discipline of the institution was a form of artistic endeavor.

These associations of ideas were profoundly disturbing. She had to admit to herself that, lying by his side, she felt like shouting, dancing, indulging in the worst of pranks.

David’s breathing grew heavy, regular. She got out of the bed surreptitiously. Since she had had no part of dinner, she was hungry. She opened the bedroom door all at once, preventing the hinges from creaking, made her way down the dark stairway, and filched in the kitchen a bag of potato chips, which had escaped her afternoon raid.

Her excursion lacked grandeur. She fought against its mediocrity by returning to the second floor. She imagined herself in flight from Sodom, with Lot, her husband. And if David were to discover her in the middle of the night, stealthily climbing the stairs in defiance of divine interdict, her fingers clenching a bag of chips, she would turn to a pillar of salt. She stopped, confounded each time the wooden steps creaked, and assumed a tragic pose in the silence that followed.

Having reached the landing, she congratulated herself upon her performance, decreed she had done her best, like the bicycle racer at the end of the Tour de France. To go back to bed seemed ridiculous after this epic effort. She locked herself up in the television room, felt her way in search of an un-discoverable light switch. Finally she gave up and, trusting her memory, walked in the direction of the set. Seated in the lotus position, the screen her only source of light, she crunched her potato chips noisily. This is a form of enjoyable mischief, she reflected, regretting the absence of fellow viewers whose bitter protests would meet her noisy interruptions. Having made up her mind to watch as many programs as she could endure, she waited for exhaustion to set in before joining David in bed.

CHAPTER SIX

B
arely six o’clock; Amélie’s work was interrupted by a profound silence, as disturbing as a mysterious presence. It was an unusual silence, which seemed to have invaded the press office suddenly. How silly of me! Amélie told herself. It was an evening of general exodus at the start of a long weekend. She left her office. The car radio crackled warnings about driving conditions and road safety. This was of no concern to her. With Paul in the United States and her daughters in the country, there was no need to hurry. She had plenty of time to call David to let him know she was alone this weekend.

Her apartment seemed somehow larger, more fluid, be cause those who lived there were absent. She listened to music, watched
The Blues Brothers
for the tenth time, and realized she had no desire to see David. However, she decided to call him for conscience’s sake, much as one inquires about
the health and state of mind of a child gone to summer camp. She waited until midnight, the hour when her husband usually fell asleep, and cautiously muffled her voice as though she were not alone:

—Did I wake you up?

—No.

His concise answer and categorical tone sounded hostile. She reasoned with herself. Why should he resent a furtive night call, a secret from her husband? She thought he judged her severely because she was passing judgment on herself, guilty of lies that rendered David’s accusations meaningless. Anxious to redirect the conversation, she asked:

—Where are you?

—In bed. And you?

—In the bathroom, she answered, reclining on her bed.

—What are you wearing? No, don’t tell me . . . I loathe the idea of you in bed with him . . .

—You don’t think that I wear see-through negligees for my husband, do you?

There was nothing he could do—Amélie’s voice always gave him a hard-on. He had expected her call all day, had not stepped out of the house. Beset by mental snapshots of her body, he strung them together in his mind, like drawings for an animated cartoon, and now his head was bursting with cumbersome fantasies.

—What are you doing? Are you seated or squatting? He decided to make love to her by phone, moving each provocative word forward, like pawns on a chessboard.

She laughed, not quite sure of herself. What was he after? Dirty talk? He didn’t wait for her answer.

—Your throaty laugh is making me hard.

About to indulge in a conversation bound to unleash desire, Amélie experienced the heaviness of a deadlock. Yet, already excited, she dared to go on:

—Is that so? Touch your prick. Tell me if it’s hard.

She strained her ears to listen to David’s hand run down his belly, imagining his stiff, plump penis slowly expanding to its full stoutness. She heard his breathing and the crumpling of the sheets. David let her direct him, his cock sheathed by her raw words, by her embarrassment, which was leaking out through her audaciousness. He continued:

—It’s thick, hard. I’d like you to suck me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?

—Oh, yes, she sighed.

David was aroused by her assent. He thought of the words he might have extracted from her, were he able to touch her: how she longed to suck him off, swallow his cum. He’d have put her on all fours, called her a whore while shoving his penis deep into her mouth. He began to masturbate, his fingers tightly closed about his prick, his thumb curled toward the inside of his thighs to caress his balls:

—Tell me if you’re wet.

Amélie dipped her index finger into her slit, exploring the source of the dewy wetness irrigating her vulva. Her fingers frolicked and fribbled in it like vacationers on a deceptively quiet shore:

—You’re getting me all excited . . . I’m dripping wet . . , D’you hear me touch myself? . . . I close my eyes, imagine I’m sitting on your cock . . . Gently because it’s so big. I suck it up into my cunt . . . I hold your balls between my buttocks . . . I’m masturbating . . . You’re watching me do it, you feel me flow all over you . . .

Amélie was a beginner in this kind of audacity. She got caught at her own game. Aimed at exciting David, selected with an alchemist’s infernal skill, the words she uttered, rising like potent exhalations from the devil’s own alembics, sent their fumes up to her brain. Her cheeks aflame, her cunt replete and swollen with desire, she plunged her fingers into the moist interior of her slit before harrying the ruby-colored cap on her labia’s crest.

David listened to the flow of Amélie’s words, as provocative as a striptease, yet they spawned fantasies more potent than the most shameless baring of flesh. Unpredictable, and as effective as the numbers of a safe-deposit box, they shaped a frenzied combination, accelerated the motion of his hand upon his prick, propelled him to uncover the tip of his glans:

—You’re going to make me come too fast . . . Play with yourself . . . You’ll let me suck you, won’t you? I’ll stick my finger up your asshole at the same time. You like that, don’t you?

David’s words became images. Amélie could see herself legs spread above his mouth, coming down upon his lips, her loins arched to welcome his finger. She could feel him suck her clitoris, penetrate her ass . . . Her fingers became whirling dervishes spinning in an ecstatic trance.

Judging by the whirring over the telephone, Amélie could no longer control herself. David envisioned her teetering on the edge of orgasm. He could not hold out any longer. To make her come now, he upped the ante of obscenity.

—And my prick in your ass, you like that, don’t you?

Amélie was overcome by a succession of blended images. David was about to sodomize her. On all fours, trembling with apprehension and expectation, she spread her ass to him.

Caught in the trap of his own imagination, David clearly saw her proffered asshole, her submissive hips. His prick pointed at its target, he prepared a strategic move whereby he’d approach her cunt only to fuck her in a surprise attack. His balls were full, swollen. He was about to shoot his load.

—You’re coming? he asked hopefully.

Amélie heard herself utter a primitive moan, which rose from her gut like bile. David’s discreet groan echoed back to her like a canon song.

—I’ve got it all over me, he complained at the sight of his sperm spread upon his belly.

Emerging from orgasm, Amélie was astonished, as she always was, by the way her shuddering cunt took possession of her entire body before beating a hasty retreat.

—That was so good! she moaned.

—You’re going to sleep soundly.

—Oh, yes, she answered smiling.

She put down the receiver.

T
he following day, after a night peopled by nightmares, Amélie was awakened by the calm of an empty apartment. The pulsation of her arteries, pounding the silence like a metronome, dictated a measure of gravity. David had become an obsession. The memory of their conversation of the previous night, the violence of her orgasm, pressed on her temples like a hangover. At the core of these contrasting feelings, a diffuse, opaque bad conscience was beginning to rise. She had to make sense of it all.

Gradually, Amélie had begun to feel she was slipping toward sham. At first she had curtailed her meetings with
David, to disguise her boredom, much as one edits out a film’s slow scenes. Then spreading their encounters thin, she made up all kinds of obstacles in order not to see him. She could no longer pretend being quietly happy, feeling that it would be like dreaming in front of a perfumer’s display window, its fake scent-bottles filled with colored water.

She could still feel the gusts of the boredom she’d experienced during her visits to Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Seated in an armchair next to the sofa in which an expansive David poured his heart out to her, exhausted by her day at the office followed by bottlenecks at the Paris exits, she could feel her eyes close with boredom. She recalled watching the level of wine in David’s glass as he sipped it after dinner. How long would it take him to drain it to the last drop, getting ready to go to bed? She was bitterly disappointed when he poured out another, absorbed by the charms of his own conversation.

Occasionally, when she was tired or short of time, David would meet her in Paris, at a Porte Maillot or la Défense hotel . . . The desk clerk registered no emotion. The room fridge opened on generically labeled shelves: sodas, plain mineral water, chocolate . . . You had to pay to open them, to look. Once out of every two tries, it didn’t work, like defective automatic distributors in deserted train stations. Nothing to be done!

Their encounters followed an immutable scenario. She could reconstitute every scene. No sooner had they entered the room than David showed himself cold, distant, almost unpleasant. He didn’t take her in his arms, showed no joy in seeing her. Walking around the bed, whose size alone revealed the function of this anonymous room, he’d go over to the only armchair, settling in it ostensibly to distance himself from the role of stereotypical lover that she attributed to him.

She’d pretend not to notice his lack of tenderness, his bad humor. She’d begun to understand his reticence in her presence, the overwhelming resentment, the flood of reproaches he held in check.

When he was home alone, comforted by the sound of her voice on the telephone, the prospect of an imminent meeting, he was able to fool himself: traces of her presence, memories she left in the house took the place of her company. He preferred this kind of life to losing her. But he gauged his physical need of her as soon as, reaching out, he could touch her. In retrospect, he felt robbed, abandoned.

Stretched out upon the bed she would chat to entertain him, to avoid apologizing for their shaky liaison. Time enough to smoke one or two cigarettes. David would get up from the chair and pace the room throwing burning glances at her. Yielding to his desires like an addict unable to shake his habit, he’d ask her in an expressionless voice to undress, stroke him, suck him off.

His lovemaking was frenzied. He savored the orgasms he inflicted on her like a punishment, himself on the verge of fainting. In the silence that followed, pleasure acquired the seriousness of a death sentence, confirming their dependence on one another.

She had to leave. David apologized for having spoiled their meeting. The knowledge of being deprived of her presence prevented him from savoring the joy of being with her, whereas the memory of the moments spent together conferred on him the strength to endure without her.

Ready to go, her bag over her shoulder, she listened to David enumerating his apprehensions. His moping was bound
to become tiring. She reassured him, speaking slowly so as not to show him that she was in a hurry.

On the point of leaving her, David would grow suspicious. She didn’t love him as before, he was certain of it. Having run out of reassuring phrases, she’d start laughing, but an uneasy feeling crept into her being, that of having misplaced the certainty of her love while making provisions to preserve it.

David lacked an inventive imagination, a lightness of the spirit. She made him unhappy. She should have let go, retreated, left him. But she also cared for him. In order not to jump at the chance of a breakup, which David’s uneven temper offered her, she had padded their love story with cheerfulness and spontaneity. She had actually reinvented it.

For his sake, she conversed with passion. She combed her past in search of childhood memories and family tales, painted amusing portraits of her relatives. Her capital of recollections, emotions, anecdotes was lavishly spent. Sold out of stock, she was concerned she’d stop pleasing him were she unable to deliver a parcel of new ideas, like an arrival of early fresh vegetables. She set out on a quest of new inspiration to surprise and entertain him.

She bent her mind to greater vigilance, sharpened her eye, her judgment, as to books she was reading, paintings she looked at, phrases overheard, making it a point of honor not to serve him bad imitations, clichés, as though the unreasonable demands she made of herself in this regard were a form of compensation for her miserly commitment to David.

Talkative without being a chatterbox, she allowed David his monologues. When he was through, she formulated her
discoveries, using the lightest brush strokes, as though they had just grazed her conscious mind.

David never answered her. She didn’t resent it right away. Perhaps she had overdone refinement to the point of incomprehensibility. She was accustomed to this situation. When she heard someone interrupt a remarkable paper, she kept quiet in the illusory hope that the tiresome pest might be won over to the cause of silence. Her subtle disapproval and annoyance seemed to her sufficiently explicit. She sent this message with conviction, but no one ever heard it.

In the long run, she understood that David didn’t listen. He loved the energy she expended on conversation, her gestures, the movement of her lips, her glowing cheeks. When he felt she was moved or sprightly, he’d interrupt her to tell her he desired her. He smiled at the music of her words, convinced it was the proof of how happy he made her. She didn’t get discouraged. Touched by David’s credulity, the faith he had in her happiness, she was sparing of her remarks, distilling a scanty portion of her chatter at each of their encounters. She tried countering his seriousness by arranging all manner of surprises. She hid her love letters to him inside his car, small gifts in the house, in a bag of coffee, or the bathroom cabinet.

She’d invite a tailor to his house when he needed a new suit, or leave her home at dawn, or in the middle of the night, to bring a kiss to Saint-Germain-en-Laye while her husband was sound asleep.

Their affair had the illusory cheerfulness of a conversation dotted with funny stories, yet taking a perplexing turn between two puns.

Sometimes she’d relax, weary of her premeditated inventiveness. It was tiring to always show enthusiasm, or organize
the unexpected. But her liveliness collapsed like an undercooked soufflé when she faced David’s grandiloquent declarations of love or his fits of despair. Yet still she’d felt an obligation to dust off their ennui, as though it were her responsibility to improve their daily life.