Monsieur (12 page)

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, Nabokov), 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.

First lovers' tiff between Monsieur and me. Out of the blue, he asked me: ‘Did you fuck this week?'

‘What sort of question is that?' I moved a little away from him while I tried to work out the right thing to say.

‘It's nothing. I just wanted to know.' He appeared quite calm.

Shrugging, I said: ‘Yes.'

Then I asked him the same thing. Monsieur laconically confirmed that he had.

Oh, tell me more!

‘How many times?'

‘Twice.' He was not offended by my intrusion into his sex life.

‘With your wife?'

‘Yes. And you?'

‘With my boyfriend.'

The facts were the facts.

Maybe it was then that I first became aware of the trap into which I would soon fall. I was dying to know how she and he made love, after twenty years of marriage, the automatic movements of his hands across her body. But the thought released in me a jealous streak I hadn't known I had. Like a moth drawn to the brightness of a lamp, I asked: ‘How is it with your wife? After all, it's such a long time you've been sleeping together.'

‘It depends,' Monsieur said, in a strange tone to his voice. ‘But overall it's fine. After all these years, it's still good.'

‘You must know each other very well?'

‘Of course,' Monsieur replied, without further revelation.

I was consumed with the need to know everything, every single detail. How Monsieur fucked the woman who knew all his perversions. What was her body like? What did her face look like when she came? When did they do it? Did they have favourite positions, preferred techniques? Habits? Were there things they had never done? She was Monsieur's wife, and her shadow oppressed me.

‘And you?' he continued. ‘I'm sure it was pretty awful.'

‘Why should it have been?' I was offended.

‘Because boys of your age know nothing about women.'

‘He's thirty.'

‘Thirty?' Monsieur cried, eyes popping out of his head.

Was he joking? For a couple of seconds I stared at him, trying to assess whether his surprise was genuine.

‘Another older guy!' he said, the beginning of a smile on his lips.

‘So now you're jealous!' I smiled back. ‘You're shocked because I happen to have a boyfriend.'

‘I'm not jealous. I was just wondering why you always seem to go for older guys.'

He moved an inch or so forward across the bed, watching me intently. Then, he changed his mind: ‘Maybe I am jealous. Not a good idea, eh?'

‘No doubt about that,' I answered, surprised that I could make a man jealous, more so
this
man.

‘So, what do we do about it?' he asked.

‘What do you mean?'

‘We can go on as we are, can't we?'

And, in truth, I couldn't envisage pretending he didn't exist. The idea of living so close to him, knowing he was just a few kilometres away
but being unable to reach him
took my breath away. I strove to understand him. To unravel his mystery. And I wanted so much more. But all I could say was,‘Yeah, why not? We go on.'

We go on, even if I already know where it's leading. To disaster. I can feel in my bones that the coming summer without him, and that's just the beginning, will be unbearable. And I have no wish to be like the other fools who fall in love with married men.

One of the things I always admired in Monsieur was the way he became erect. So easily, so fast. He could talk to me for hours, casually playing with my nipples and earlobes, a rich intellectual discourse with his courtesan, discussing André Breton as freely as sex, making an inventory of authors still unknown to me. His breath on my neck spoke words of love interrupted by literary wit, then kisses and gentle bites. Halfway through one of my answers – I was about to contradict something he'd said – Monsieur mounted me in one swift movement. His first thrusts overwhelmed me, leaving me unable to breathe or speak, not that he needed any sign of my submission.

‘You like it in your little pussy, too, don't you?'

‘Have you slept with anyone else since we've been together?'

‘No. Why?'

‘Oh, nothing,' I lied.

It upsets me enough to imagine you making love with your wife but the idea of another woman underneath you hurts deep in my soul.

Monsieur raised himself beside me. ‘Are you jealous?'

There was a touch of jubilation in his voice, which irritated me. ‘Absolutely not!'

‘You're jealous as hell!' Monsieur insisted, feasting on the idea.

‘
Absolutely not
. I just wanted to know, that's all.'

‘Yes, you are. You want to know if I'm sleeping with other girls to establish that you're the only one. So, darling, you are most assuredly jealous.'

My lips barely parted as he kissed me.

Slipping his trousers on (oh, the curve of his back): ‘Of late, I haven't wanted to touch anyone but my wife and you. I'm always thinking of you.'

His gaze burned my back.

‘I think of your arse all the time. When I'm operating, your arse is all I can see. You, in that position.'

I was on the bed, contorted, with my bum in the air, my face under my hair, watching him dress. I loved how the light danced around him. I found him beautiful. He put on his pristine white shirt, which clung to the contours of his body. Do men ever consider the chasm between their nudity and the moment they unthinkingly rebutton their shirt? The way their fingers slowly manoeuvre upwards, all the way to the collar, sealing themselves away when, just a few minutes ago, they were on full display. Some, like Monsieur, however elegantly they may dress, still have an aura of nakedness. The suit jacket they add to the ensemble makes no difference: it's so easy to pull off again. Now, watching Monsieur's thighs inside his expensive grey trousers, I could already trace the contours of his next erection.

The handcuffs.

‘And I think of your body all the bloody time, not always in terms of making love with you. Just to feel close to you. I'm not aware of the age difference when I talk to you and listen to you.'

I smiled. Then I asked: ‘Are other girls of my age different?'

‘Yes. They're much more passive. They take, never give much back.'

‘I wasn't very obedient this morning,' I said, half hoping this would prompt Monsieur to propose a date for our next meeting.

‘It's not a question of obedience. I enjoy the random things that rush through your brain.'

‘Anyway,' I said, ‘you'd be a total bastard if you were sleeping with your wife, me
and
other girls of my age.'

‘You only say that because you're jealous.'

‘Once again, I'm not. It's just . . . you know . . . the situation . . .'

‘Jealous, darling.'