Monsieur (5 page)

The heart of a

(connect the right answers. Level-four difficulty exercise.)

The hours are going to seem even longer. I wake up with my mind so full of images of you . . . a landscape of photos of you stolen from your Facebook page and the texts you've sent me . . . as if the motionless person in the photographs began moving, smiling, slowly undressing . . . My cock is so hard this morning . . . Having licked the palm of my hand and made it wet, I almost negligently caress myself . . . imagining your eyes watching me, conjuring the smell of your cunt on my tongue . . . Imagining your arse triggers convulsions in my wrist and I know that pleasure is advancing . . . but I hold back. On Tuesday I intend to burst within you, flooding your dark, moist, secret, forbidden place . . .

The room I enticed Monsieur to on that first morning in early May was – and still is, I guess – in the fifteenth
arrondissement
, an area I had seldom set foot in, and never have since. The window looked out on the rue des Volontaires, some decaying buildings and a miniature hospital surrounded by an incongruous cocoon of greenery.

‘Well planned. There's even a clinic over the road should I faint in your arms!' I wrote to Monsieur.

It was Monday night and I was quivering like a dead leaf, smoking fag after fag on the balcony. Behind me, the room was a pitiful mess – scattered clothing, the sheets stained with the juice of fresh blackberries and overripe mangoes. Six thirty p.m. Babette was spending the evening with Simon, Ines was in Deauville, Juliette and Mathilde had gone to the movies. I was on my own and likely to be until ten the following morning. Not a friendly soul to hold my hand throughout this endless and heartbreaking period of expectancy. From time to time, Monsieur would parsimoniously send me one of those riveting yet revolting messages that helped both shorten and lengthen the flow of time; that was my only contact with the rest of the world. Every time my mobile vibrated I was close to jumping out of the window. And as soon as I had read the message, there was a second or two while I wondered whether I should gather up all my stuff and leave like a thief, without warning Monsieur that in the morning he would find the scene of the crime empty. So many things encouraged me to do just that: the thought of my uncle, of my sister, who had seen me leave the house carrying all those nibbles, but most of all the immense fear of facing the man who, for the past five days, had thought of me as the most emancipated of all the girls he had held in his arms. In reality, alone in my vast cast-iron bed, I was rehearsing a multitude of positions that might hide from him the dubious extent of my depilation and the dimple on the left side of my bum, a blemish from puppy-fat days. I was consumed with fear. As two whole seconds slowly ticked by, a small squeaky voice in my head asked,
And what will the skin of such an older guy feel like? Will it be supple and firm or soft and wrinkled? And what happens if he doesn't even like me? If he's ancient and balding and his stomach sticks out? If he sweats like a pig? If he's toothless? What will I do if it turns out – and it could easily happen – that he's totally repulsive? And what about his cock? How do they get hard when they're so old? How hard can they get?

Incoming message during the course of my inner monologue: ‘I'm dying inside at the thought of being with you.'

As if it had been a waking dream, I retain few memories of the evening I spent with my friends from
Stupre
. There's the leather notepad in which Benjamin sketched my face in the style of Francis Bacon, drops of strawberry juice spread across it like dried blood. There's the photograph Kenza took while I was leaning against the bed post staring into nowhere, a cigarette in my hand. It's the only image in existence of me with my head so full of him. Two months later, I think my face has changed so much already. Maybe not its shape – although I did lose weight – but my eyes, a look in them that I've never seen since. I miss it terribly.

Later, already deep into the night, I washed my hair for hours, or at least it felt like it, even if I only spent fifteen minutes at it, lost in an alcoholic coma and senseless dreams. The room's mirrors were set up so that my naked figure in the shower spread right across the room – the optical illusion that we had found fascinating from a photographic point of view now felt disturbing, as if the room already knew everything of the future. From every angle, the small ill-proportioned room with its heavy curtains and dark wallpaper was already vibrating with the sheer essence of Monsieur. The mirrors I travelled between were searching for his unknown silhouette. And the immaculately made bed throbbed with anticipation. The sparse furniture was probably wondering what role it might play when he finally arrived.

Wearing a towel that was much too short, I leaned against the window and smoked yet another cigarette. Neither Paris nor the fifteenth
arrondissement
felt normal: there was a tremulous tension in the air, as if I were expecting the devil or the Messiah. Or the end of the world.

My mobile vibrated: a final message from Monsieur as if my nervousness reached him: ‘I'm about to go to bed. My next words will be for your ears only.'

The dreadful finality of that text assailed me and I flung away the cigarette. It landed on the roof of a car parked in the street. I felt on edge. I had given Monsieur the number of the room, the floor; he could appear at any moment, and there I was with my hair dripping, my face caked with streaming makeup, my legs still unshaven. And that was far from all of it: I was convulsed with so much more than the fear that I might not please him. The memory I had of him was terrifying: I could vaguely invoke his face, the shape of his mouth (why his mouth?). I drew back from completing the ghostly identikit portrait in my mind, even though it had been lingering there for days. The spectre haunting me was surrounded by a fuzzy mist, no nose, no eyes, no distinctive features, just that mouth. THAT mouth.

How good it feels to remember that evening now, some months later. Half-drunk in the Métro, I write it down lovingly with pencil on paper. I remember every single gesture. I could make a movie of that night without missing out a single detail. How I went to bed watching a report on the Arte network about young Belarussian rock 'n' rollers, transfixed by my appalling lack of interest in those people and their plight. How I set my alarm for six in the morning before switching off the lamp and the telly, left alone in the blue light of the empty streets. The anonymous smell of hotel sheets, always a bit too rough and not warm enough, but just then the level of discomfort I needed. I had no intention of spending a comfortable night.

When I started awake, the room was red. A beautiful, barely luminous shade of red.

It was a radiant beginning to the week. The uncertain light of a beautiful day threaded through the curtains. The sky was uniformly blue. I lay there waiting, apprehensive, like before an exam, my stomach in knots. The tenuous arpeggio of desire quivered deep inside me: I recognized its insistent vibrato drowning below the din of white noise. In a foetal position beneath the enormous white duvet, I watched the hours go by and the sun climb in the sky, torn by lack of sleep and seized by a sickly form of lethargy interspersed with dreams that were evocative of fever, as if I had fallen ill. I was acutely aware of every sound on the stairs outside, confined as I was to that small room with its blue walls. There was only one thing I could do while I lay there: count the number of flowers in the pattern of the wallpaper, catalogue them, analyse the blooms. Wide-open pink tulips, three-headed buttercups in a flurry of petals. A lily, leaves unfurling, was carved into the dark wood of the chest near the window.

The possibility that Monsieur might not prove attractive had occurred to me but I hadn't worried about it. There was something else, though: the certainty he and I shared, even if it was only over the phone, that we were reaching for something infinitely more important than a mere Tuesday morning in a Paris hotel room, something more subtle than the physical. It was not love, but the attraction we shared to a relationship that would be intellectual and immoral. I still had enough time to flee and stop thinking of how exciting sleeping with Monsieur would be: I was in love with the idea of being twenty and waiting naked, but for a pair of hold-up stockings, for a former colleague of my uncle aged forty-six and married with five children. A man who was slightly older than my father. But the absence of morality in this liaison held me there as if it were a ball and chain. I had never experienced such excitement, a curious blend of hunger, fear and finely chiselled expectation. Beneath the reassuring darkness of the duvet, I felt my heartbeat under the tight skin of my chest. The hours passed. I was waiting for Monsieur to free me, allow me to breathe again without pain.

I was pretending to be asleep, experimenting with my breathing, when Monsieur pushed open the creaking door I had left ajar. A man's slow steps, muffled by the carpet. My heart stopped. Until now it had only paused each time I'd heard a step on the landing, only to resume its monotonous beat, in unison with the silence. I could feel the new presence in the room, the intrusion, the movement in the air, thick and sweet like candyfloss, hear the door handle being turned (no one else is expected; what is to happen is just seconds away), the whisper of a coat being draped across a chair, but mainly the softness of his approach, almost imperceptible. In fact, with my eyes half open beneath my fringe, I found it difficult to focus on where Monsieur was standing. He could have been everywhere and anywhere, and my only clue was a purple shadow moving across the blue walls.

I was still seeking him out when my doubts disappeared: the mattress, to my right, sagged under his weight. The heaviness of him.

Strange how, sometimes, you can surmise with a degree of precision a man's state of mind by the way he sits beside you on the bed. Some are like tree trunks, paralysed by their desire. Others, impatient like children, move swiftly to caresses. But with Monsieur, there were a few brazen moments when I felt his gaze move across my naked back and shoulders, then the slow rise of a hand through the air and its slow landing on my neck, fluid and determined. I could hear his breath, intuit his calm. He was in perfect control. The way the fabric of his jacket brushed my skin, the click-click of the watch on his wrist, a tapestry of perceptions that betrayed civility: no doubt he had nodded politely at the receptionist two floors below as he walked across the hotel foyer. Even the fingers lingering on the back of my neck felt elegant and relaxed. For a few minutes they fluttered down my spine, reaching disturbingly for the depths of my soul.

Paris held its breath.

The infinitesimal portion of my brain not engrossed by the journey of his long, thin fingers along my shoulder blades was moving rapidly through the gears: I was grasping for a detail that might crystallize in one thought where those fingers had originated and what memories they held. I had to establish that those hands were his and not a stranger's. Why those caresses were anything but anonymous.

When his hand took hold of my arse, I stretched out like a cat, in perfect imitation of the sudden awakening of a child from heavy sleep. This was when Monsieur understood that I was aware of his presence. He whispered something I couldn't understand, muted as it was by the rustle of the sheets, but I recognized his voice, deep and grainy.

A distant church bell rang at ten o'clock as Monsieur, pressed into the curve of my back, ran his fingers over my body. On my shoulder the softness of a freshly shaved cheek, the silent epiphany of a kiss. Monsieur said nothing. His regular sighs contrasted with my gasps – he seemed unaware of the torture his belt buckle was inflicting on me. I was terrified of turning over and seeing him, afraid to disturb the hitherto cerebral desire I felt for him, a blend of attraction and repulsion I couldn't explain. His patience was wearing me out – that he couldn't see my face clearly didn't bother him. Like me, he was happy to tease out beauty and wantonness wherever it might exist, even if he was missing the whole picture. All I knew was that his hands were soft and his skin smelled good. Which told me that the entirety of Monsieur would not disappoint me.

Initially I thought I could play with him, as I had done with most of my thirty-year-old-lovers, holding the reins and controlling him by rubbing my arse against the hardness of his cock. But he stared at me with a perfect combination of naked desire and adult tenderness, which disarmed me. I realized there and then that Monsieur might well pretend he was yielding control to me, but that this was an illusion: even silent, facing my back, his eyes could tie me in knots.

His fingers sprang into action, seeking my folds, my openings, wandering wherever my impatience had left me vulnerable. I watched myself struggle against him, but Monsieur took control and, in an instant, my legs were wide open, my arse cheeks spread, and my attempts to free myself were those of an animal caught in a trap. The light of day, even muted by the curtains, meant I no longer had any intimate secrets from him. He knew how wet I was.

(The room smelled of old waxed wood and dust. It was the familiar odour of a bourgeois house, saturated with furniture polish, that I could smell as Monsieur held his hand to my mouth and I gasped for air, stuttering, ‘No, no,' into the sleeve of his jacket.)

My cheeks heated as I became aware that Monsieur was looking between my legs, with the elusive expression men reserve for gazing at that part of a woman's body. In that moment the connection between his eyes and his fingers felt eternal. I suppose it was a look of love, which I would continue to witness on every Tuesday morning that he parted my thighs. A form of love I had yet to tame, new to me and intimidating, scorching and rough, which I had come across only in the verses of Apollinaire or the colours of Courbet. It was then, I think, that I knew Monsieur would please me, beyond any physical consideration, with a love so fiery. I'd thought it didn't exist, but it does.