Monsieur (23 page)

(A contemptible tremor of delight spread through me from the base of my ponytail.)

‘And it'll start all over again, and you'll be even more miserable . . . Ellie, what the hell do you expect? You'll have busted a gut for months on end, writing that book. He'll read it, he'll feel like the king of the castle, and what happens then? How have you turned into such a different person since Alexandre?'

‘Oh, stop talking about Alexandre! He never loved or respected me for who I am, and never gave a damn about my writing!'

‘The week after Alexandre left you, you were much less of a wreck than you are now. You weren't writing to satisfy the whim of a tyrant.'

‘If I can only evoke pity in you, maybe it would be best if I went home.'

‘I take pity on you because you're my friend and I want to help you.'

‘I don't want to be helped, Valentine.'

‘I know. It's Monsieur you want.'

I resorted to my usual technique, face raised skyward, to keep the tears from falling. ‘I promise you I'm not in love with him. It's just that I'm obsessed with him and I don't understand why. All I can think of is being fucked by him, touching him, smelling him, and I know it's not love. Love isn't about feeling hurt all the time.'

‘You're not cut out to be a sex slave. You can't want a man so strongly without your heart becoming involved. That's why I admire and love you – because you're always in love and it makes you so alive. The only funny thing about you and Monsieur is when you left your shit on him. Is there anything else about him that ever made you laugh? And, if my memory serves me right, he never made you come.'

‘Never, but that's another problem. I've never found another man so interesting. And there's nothing more dangerous than intelligence. So, what am I to do?'

Valentine sighed theatrically. ‘Right now, I haven't a clue. To begin with, I'd suggest that, in the absence of a lift, we climb all six flights of stairs up to my flat. In the opposite building, there's a guy who's ugly as sin. We could show him our tits – he's a perv, always standing at his window.'

As I stood there deep in thought, pierced by every arrow she'd fired at me, Valentine said: ‘OK, I know it's not much of an inducement for you to climb six flights of stairs, but he's
pretty
hideous and
very
pervy. We could even take a photo of him and put it on Facebook. Remember how good I am at that.'

Valentine still smiled as she did when she was fourteen, and I remembered how that year she'd convinced some dirty old man to show her his cock on a webcam. She had sent me the entire conversation and the accompanying screen shots and I'd burst out laughing as I sat at my laptop. Alice thought I'd gone crazy.

‘And you can tell me about all your other recent lovers. If I'm to believe Babette, there've been enough to fill a whole Métro compartment.'

I chuckled and, as if by magic, began walking towards Valentine, who was laughing her head off. It was almost painful forgetting Monsieur for a while, and intuition told me he would take his revenge for my having neglected him, but I put my hand into Valentine's and we walked down rue Charlemagne, fags hanging from our lips. I was reminded of years earlier when we'd walked home for lunch through the small alleys of Nogent-sur-Marne, confiding in each other about our breathless adventures with the senior boys, who were close to the adult world.

I mentioned this to Valentine as we reached the third floor of her Parisian Golgotha, and she made a remark that was to stay a long time in my mind: ‘Basically, even if their hair has turned grey, the men we see are still babies. You and I, all the girls we know, all we've done is grow mature. The only thing about us that's changed is the size of our arseholes.'

‘How vulgar!' a neighbour on a lower floor, hearing us, remarked.

My first hysterical laughter, hyena-like, for a thousand years at least. Oh, God!

JUNE

Separated from my girlfriends, who'd joined their parents in the Hamptons, I fell back on the family house in the Midi, with a gang of my sister's friends. The weather was so hot you could have dropped dead and no one would have noticed. The humidity was overwhelming. At half past three in the afternoon, the silence felt so heavy that even the song of the cicadas seemed muffled. A sizzling halo rose from the asphalt: one of those summer days in which life went on in a frying pan. I was in the swimming-pool, thinking of him, a little stoned after the few joints I'd smoked. Next to me, my sister and Lucy were spreading out a set of tarot cards. I went up to my room, a short journey that had erotic allure, and the quality of the light as it filtered through the old shutters, was identical to that of my childhood memories. A beige sort of light, soft and sensual. Very sensual in the way it floated all the way from the curtains and illuminated the whole room with a deceptive glow. It had been two months since Monsieur had shown any sign of life, and now he was all around me, because of the heat and the light . . . Monsieur and his hazy eyes.

* * *

Alice rushed through my dreams like a cannonball, giving me the crafty look that seldom requires the addition of words.

‘Lucy's just laid out the cards.'

I snapped out of it, careful once again not to give the world a hint that I was still under the spell of an older man. My head was full of him but I had to keep up appearances. Outside, the tarot game was in full flow. I fled, like a thief, naked from the waist up. My mind was torn in every direction. What should I do with my phone in which his familiar first name had been replaced by ‘Monsieur' in the Contacts list? I was still learning to act with dignity again, reclaiming my pride. Just enough to stop hating myself so much, enough to summon plenty of excuses each time I was on the verge of cracking up, or calling Monsieur and talking to him about the book and my bum. Monsieur adored my bum; surely that would never change. My excuse for today: how to provoke his erection.

Onlookers at their windows that day would have seen a half-naked girl shimmying shoeless across the hot asphalt, with her phone stuck to her ear. Monsieur, of course, wasn't answering. So I left him a long, long message.

I want to hear from you.

I want you to stop being afraid of me.

I want to talk to you about
Monsieur
, which is making progress.

I want to tell you about the swimming-pool. I'm in the South, at our house, with my sister. It's difficult to explain but the heat is so overwhelming that nature is becoming silent. It's the sort of heat you only get in the Midi. A short while ago I was swimming naked, completely stoned.

I was sluggish, numbed by the grass and the heat, so perfectly languorous. And I began to think, God only knows why, that we could have been together in that pool. Just you and me. I imagined you squashing me against the hard edge. And I was saying things like, ‘Come on, let's go up to the room. I want to fuck.'

And you answered, ‘Fine, but only if you allow me to stare at your cunt for as long as I like.'

I was in total agreement. We left the pool, slowly, to go to my room on the first floor, where the light is dim, just right. I'm sure you'd approve of the light.

You stared for a long time between my legs, but this time it made me happy. I didn't complain, or maybe just a little, the way you like me to. I know we were fucking. I can't really explain how we were doing it. Just imagine. Imagine the way I would hold on to your back.

That's all I wanted to say. It's odd, but I remember that when it was over I said I had no desire for anything else.

Call me back.

Or don't call me back, your choice.

I knew that leaving a voice message for Monsieur was not the best way to get a reaction out of him. I didn't believe it would make any sort of impression on him. I'd never understood how he dealt with his voicemail. It was as if my attempts to contact him were getting lost in a vortex, and as much as I pulled on the wisp of thread that connected us, Monsieur had, without telling me, cut it.

* * *

The following day I got back, drenched with sweat, from the centre of town to find a message waiting for me. I was about to open my mailbox, hoping against hope. It was bound to be a disappointment. Mum? My grandfather, worried about the gas cooker? Zylberstein, thinking of me during his nights on duty?

No. It was Monsieur. Monsieur who said (oh, the beauty of that voice): ‘Hello. You wanted to talk to me about the book.' (A short, almost imperceptible hesitation.) ‘And also the swimming-pool. Kisses.'

I put my phone down. My heart was thudding. I could no longer hear the cicadas, or the laughter of the people I loved around me. I could no longer understand anything. I think it was the first time I'd felt crushed because of him. I couldn't fathom why this time my silent scream had connected with him. Maybe it was because my message had been so much more to the point than the others. I had tried to appeal to his baser senses, not his mind, and it had worked. He had fallen for it, hook, line and sinker.

Punch-drunk, I climbed up to the terrace, where I could see the others playing volleyball. They were full of irrepressible laughter, but I knew not one of them was buzzing as I was, with the crazy joy of a girl who's been told she's still desirable enough to be fucked. Sitting alone at the table, my sister Flora was rolling herself a cigarette.

‘A message from Monsieur,' I explained, my smile ecstatic.

‘Really?' she cried, almost swallowing the filter tip she had been holding between her lips. ‘What did he say?'

‘Yesterday I rang him.'

I fell quiet. How could I explain to an eighteen-year-old virgin why I had called the man who had broken my heart to talk to him about the swimming-pool and my pussy without looking like a fool? Flora was used to my tales of adventure, but you needed to have fucked, to have wallowed in the vocabulary of love, to understand.

‘I'll keep it short. I talked dirty to him and Monsieur is fuelled by sex.'

‘You should take your time to reply,' she remarked, lighting up, knowing I would answer him sooner rather than later.

This was, after all, Monsieur, the man in the black notebook I was slowly filling with words.

‘Of course I'll keep him waiting. It's what he deserves,' I said.

Two and a half hours later my resolve broke.

I rushed outside while the others were cooking and, with the sound of pots and pans in the background, I composed myself, modulating my voice in some semblance of sensuality.

‘Hi! I wanted to talk about the book. And the swimming-pool. Call me back.'

A few minutes later I was hating myself again. And as if he had guessed I was far from assured, Monsieur didn't call me back. I spent the following days soothing myself with the fantasies he evoked in me. Under his tutelage, I began to imagine scenes I would never have enjoyed before meeting him. Deviant images assaulted me from every side. But Monsieur failed to appear in them. All he did was trigger my fertile imagination. Slowly his absence felt less cruel and visions of him deserted me. Zylberstein, Édouard, more readily available prey, began advantageously to replace him. My friends filled my days and nights. We clustered together on the terrace playing tarot and smoking countless cigarettes while listening to Michael Jackson. I would write page after page, stimulated by the loving atmosphere, as the house filled with sand, pine needles and long hair. I kept on with
Monsieur
and there was no longer any bitterness in trawling through the memories. I had become something of a doctor: I was studying a human being, dissecting every step of the affair. It was only when I read over what I had written, checking the narrative flow of a scene, that I thought of Monsieur. Strange: on one hand there was Monsieur, the man, and on the other, there was
Monsieur
, the novel.

I read sections of
Monsieur
to Flora, peaceful moments when we lay in the heat across the pink and white mattress. She would close her book and ask: ‘Read me a chapter.'

She'd light a cigarette she'd rolled earlier and, awkwardly, I would read aloud my most recent pages, my voice lost among the chirping cicadas, the wind and the music of the Kinks. And Monsieur came alive. Sometimes, attracted by the peace that surrounded us,, Antoine would come and sit beside us, wrapping his arms around his knees; I didn't pause. Have I ever had a better audience? No one made any comment. Once I'd finished, I would close the notebook and the conversation would begin again where we'd left it earlier. Now, others knew about Monsieur, which I liked. He floated above us like a shadow, endowing our holiday with an extra dimension. I wasn't spending my time just sleeping or smoking or kicking my heels in the pool. I was writing. I was assembling a story about a man I had known intimately, but who seemed to the others like some fabulous beast, his existence confirmed by laconic messages. I allowed them to listen to my voicemail; his deep, insolent voice made them all blush.

Oh, how I loved them. In the evening, when our favourite TV programme was on, I made my way to the couch with my notebook and wrote like an automaton, hardly aware of the noise, the laughter, or the joints passing from hand to hand. And it was in the midst of this hubbub that I came up with my best sentences. When I read them again, the next morning, there was nothing I wanted to change. Every comma, every full stop, seemed magically to be in the right place. The pages were covered with chocolate stains and sap from the enormous pine tree that loomed above the terrace, but that only reminded me of something I would otherwise have forgotten and prompted the choice of a particular word. When I wrote alone at siesta time, I was pernickety, too concerned with minute detail, and lost my way.

Although everything that had happened was between me and him, Monsieur will never understand how much he owes to the people who were part of my life down there, the thousand occasions they threw the wet volleyball over my open pages, the thousand times they spilled tomato sauce on the line where I was about to describe a blow-job, a thousand times dripped sun cream on the cover. Without the imprint of their presence on the immaculate white pages spat out by my printer, it's so much less fun. My manuscripts looked like Henry Miller's in his Paris days. They had class.