Safe Word: An Erotic S/M Novel (29 page)

"I enjoyed the year," he said, "and I've always thought
you were a nice girl. I'm not so sure about that Jonathan,
though, you know."

"Well, I'll have to see," was all I said.

He supposed I would. He wished me luck, but unfortunately, he was a bit pressed for time at the moment. He had
an interview scheduled-a new young economics genius he
hoped to hire. It wouldn't be easy to replace Stefan, who was
training at that very minute, happy at last in the dressage
ring. Tony'd left two weeks ago, for New York, to try to make
it as a dancer.

Well, I said, I wish you luck, too, Mr. Constant. He'd
need it, I thought-or maybe it would be Annie who'd need
it, to impose some form and discipline onto Stefan's fierce
adoration. We shook hands, and I turned to go. Oh, just one
more thing, I said. I'd borrowed a book from his library....-

"Keep it," he said.

I wasn't sure I'd remember how to use money, but it didn't
turn out to be a problem. I needed clothes to go see Jonathan
in, and I started spending recklessly-going to snooty, ultrahip shops that charged a thousand francs for a tiny black
T-shirt that would leave a little line of skin above the top
of your skirt. It had been fun the first few days, in a numb,
giddy, slightly autistic way, and then I'd calmed down a little
and realized how alone I was. I hadn't wanted to admit to
myself how difficult it would be to be free and on my own,
even in Paris with a virtually bottomless credit card.

I phoned my friend Stuart in Berkeley.

"I'll pay for your plane ticket, I'll pay for everything,"
I said. "Please, I need to see you."

He could tell, when I came to meet him at the airport,
how overwrought and slightly hysterical I was, and how much
I needed to talk. We must have hit every cafe in the city, talking nonstop for the five days he was there, and I could feel
myself slowly calming down. I began with all my war stories from the year with Mr. Constant-but the conversation
gradually evened out, because he had a lot of stuff to work
through too. His boyfriend, Greg, had a job offer in Maine,
and he was probably going to take it. And somehow, the two
of them were determined to make this arrangement work. I
was pretty impressed, though all the stuff about relationships
was kind of a foreign language to me. And we spent hours,
poring over Jonathan's letter together.

"Mr. Constant was right," Stuart said, for about the
millionth time, his last day. "That's a spoiled, selfish letter.
Look, you've had your adventures. It's time to come back to
Berkeley. Come on. You can sleep on our couch. If you'll read
the other chapter of my dissertation, you can have the bed
and we'll sleep on the couch."

"I can't," I said. "You know I have to see this thing
through. And anyhow, I've made so many corrections to the
chapter I've been reading that it'll take you a year to get it into
shape. Good, though."

It was good. And I'd enjoyed adding my opinions. It had
been fun, all the arguments and discussions we'd been having.
I'd miss him. I put my arm around him, and he squeezed my
waist.

"So what'll we do this afternoon?" I asked. We had reservations for a fancy farewell dinner, and we'd figured we'd
go dancing later in some clubs he knew about.

"I need notebooks," he said, "sexy French stationery.
A good Waterman pen. I mean, we're in the world capital of
office supplies, you know."

We wound up spending more in the papeterie than
we would that night in the restaurant. And I cried when
he kissed me good-bye at the train station early the next
morning.

But, as the train started to fill up. I realized that I was
actually feeling pretty good. I pulled out one of the new
notebooks I'd bought, and the Waterman pen. And the book
I was reading. I wanted to copy down some words whose
eighteenth-century usages I wasn't sure of. Five days with
Stuart had brought back some of my pedantic old habits.

It was an interesting book. Clarissa, by Samuel
Richardson. All four volumes and two thousand unabridged
pages of it, that somebody had left in Mr. Constant's library.
I probably wouldn't have begun it, except that I'd been so
sick of reading stacks of downloaded pages. But now that I
was reading it, I was glad I'd picked it up. And surprised
by what I'd found, too, and increasingly involved in the
narrative alternations of female and male voice-eighteenthcentury gender impersonation-the male voice a funhouse
of narcissistic projection.

I had some breakfast in the dining car, my nose still in
Volume IV, and stumbled back into my seat, overturning the
open briefcase at the feet of the guy next to me. An English
translation of Sade's Justine tumbled out, as well as a bunch
of notebooks. I murmured that I was sorry, as he scrambled
to put the books away, repeating several times that it was "no
problem."

"That a good book?" he asked, in English. He was
American. A student, maybe. I didn't know if I really felt like
having a conversation right then. Yeah, and if you believe
that, well, there's a bridge halfway across the Rhone that
maybe I could sell you. The truth is I would have talked to
anybody who'd listen-the last few days with Stuart had
shown me how utterly starved for talking I was. Poor guy,
I thought, turning toward him and taking a deep breath, he
tries a cheesy pickup gambit, and in return he gets a lecture
on Samuel Richardson and the Deconstruction of Gender.
Tough, I thought. He asked for it.

He hung in, though, following my argument and even
asking some good questions. He hadn't read much, but he had
a logical mind, keeping me honest about stuff I was pretty
much spouting off on-the-fly.

"And the female voice?" he asked. "What keeps it so
grounded?"

I frowned. "Well," I said slowly, "Richardson would have
given you a religious answer. But I'd say the opposite. I think
she prefigures a kind of modern, secular autonomy. I mean,
even though she couldn't legally own anything, she always
owns her body and soul. You never doubt that."

"I think that she pissed off the Marquis de Sade, with
her groundedness, her reasonableness," I added. "So when he
parodied her in Justine"-I nodded toward his briefcase-"he
did her voice, like the big bad wolf doing Little Red Riding
Hood's grandma, in a kind of moral falsetto. He made her
goody-goody, namby-pamby. And-this was a smart, deconstructive move-he gave her a narcissistic streak. I mean,
Justine obeys more for effect than to save herself, or to save others. She gets off on what a good girl she is-she's as much
an admiration junky as Richardson's Mr. Lovelace."

And I could understand that, I thought. But then, I
seem to have an affinity for fables of domination, the ones
that interrogate the dark side of what it means to be material,
autonomous, and individual, and that career dizzily between
Richardson's impossible pieties and Sade's equally impossible
tableaux of total satiation. And I realized that I hadn't said
anything for a while.

"Still," I continued, trying to pick up the thread of my
argument, "Sade was a big fan of Richardson's, which might
seem surprising, but...."

I wondered, suddenly, if I'd embarrassed him by bringing Justine into the discussion like that. I mean, some people
are secretive about reading pornography. I hadn't meant it
that way, of course. I'd just wanted to talk about the books,
the writers. But you never know what people think is okay to
talk about. And I'd been cut off from normal conversation for
so long. My voice trailed off uncertainly.

"Yeah, you were saying?" he asked softly.

"Oh, nothing," I said. "Sorry if I was talking your ear off."
I had embarrassed him, I guessed. He looked nervous. I smiled
apologetically and made a show of turning back to my book.

"Oh, no," he said, "no, go on, it's interesting." He said
it slowly, making it a four-syllable word. And then neither
of us seemed to know what to say. The silence got a little
unsettling, and he bit his lip, nervously.

I noticed it then, the space between his front teeth. The
gold-rimmed glasses, wavy hair, aquiline nose. Cute, actually,
in a nerdy kind of way....-

"Oh, no," I gasped. "You!" And I'd been worried I'd
embarrassed him.

"I'm sorry," he said quickly. "Really truly. God, I'm so
sorry. I know there had to be a better way to do this, but you
have to believe me, I've thought about it for a year and I haven't
been able to figure one out."

How could I have not recognized him? The waiter, that
first night, the one Mr. Constant had shown me off to, "next
time, she's your tip." And we'd eaten in that restaurant a few
other times, and he'd given me to the waiters (he'd often done
that-once or twice to a chef, too, when the food was really
special), but this waiter hadn't been there any of those times.
I'd thought about him, too, I remembered. Yes, I'd even been
a little disappointed, I realized now, shamefaced and angry.

"I suppose you think I owe you a fuck," I said sharply.
"Well, okay, we can use the WC at the end of the car. Come
on.,,

I must have spoken more loudly than I'd intended
because the people in the seat ahead of us swiveled their heads
around, looking eager and amused and curious. I guessed they
understood English, or at least, what fuck meant.

Meanwhile, the guy, the waiter or whoever he was, was
looking terrified. "Oh, no, please," he whispered in a mortified voice. "Oh, god, no, that's not what I want. Oh, shit, well
of course I want to, but... please, Carrie...."

He knew my name. Well, of course he did. I could hear
Mr. Constant's voice, "It's nice to watch you, Carrie." And,
yes, of course, "Avignon, March 15," too. He knew my name
and he knew where I was going. And I could remember his
hands, too, how they'd felt on my breasts, my ass.

"Okay," I said, doing my best to stay calm. "I'll ride the
rest of the way in the dining car or in the WC or whatever.
No, even better, I'll just get off at Lyon. But first, just tell me
why you're following me, you creep."

"Listen," he said, softly, "working that private room is
always an amazing experience. The tips are great and the
women, well ...I hadn't known there were women like that.
And I especially wanted to work there that night, because I
knew that Edouard Constant had reserved the room."

"You know who he is?" I asked stupidly.

He looked surprised. "Well, he's, uh, famous," he said,
trying to cover up his astonishment that I didn't seem to
know this. "Anyway... the women are amazing-but not like
you were. I kept watching you-well, you know that, I knew
you could tell, I wished I could be cooler about it, but....-And,
well, by the end of the evening, I'd learned something. I mean
I'd learned everything. Or it seemed that way to me anyhow
About this whole other dimension to sex. Things that had
never made sense to me-perverse sex, fancy sex. It had
always sounded stupid, redundant. But I knew you weren't
stupid, and I watched you, and I got it. Like when I got calculus, maybe. I could see how sex could be like a story-one
that built up slowly, and kept you guessing, and maybe had
a trick ending. I could see the humor of it too, and the irony.
The infinity of permutations, the endless redefinitions to one
more point of precision, and the limit-well, I think if you
know what you're doing, maybe you never reach the limit..."
and he trailed off, seeing something, I thought, that I couldn't
see. Maybe it was some complicated curve plotted against a
pair of axes, or maybe it was me, in the restaurant, in my
punk Roissy dress.

"It was an education," he continued. "I mean, I've been
reading all this porn since then, but it just confirmed what I
learned from you that night. Of course, the problem with that
was that I also fell in love with you. It was the cognitive jolt,
I suppose-I tend to get the physical stuff all scrambled up
with important mindtrips-I mean the first woman I ever fell
in love with was my seventh grade algebra teacher."

I laughed and he bit his lip again, amazed, I guess, at
how much he'd told me without taking a breath.

"And I also thought you were incredibly beautiful," he
added softly.

Oh dear. What was I going to do with this sweet nutcase?
He was nice though, I thought, he really was. And when
you've lived a year in the land of Sylvie and Stephanie, it's
sort of pleasant to hear yourself called "incredibly beautiful,"
even if you know it's arrant nonsense.

"Anyhow," he continued, "when Constant said `Avignon,
March 15,' it soldered a whole new set of connections into
my brain. I've been planning this trip all year. I was gonna
plant myself in the Place d'Horloge all day and maybe tomorrow and then I was gonna tell myself, `Okay, Daniel, you can
forget about her now.' I didn't think we'd be on the same
train or anything. I didn't really believe you'd be here at all.
And then I didn't get out of work last night until like two
A.M. So I got to the station this morning figuring that if you
had been here I'd already probably missed you and, my God,
there you were, on line to buy your ticket. I got in line a few
people behind you and then those people changed plans or
something and got out of line and I was right behind you. I
was really worried-I was afraid to be quite so close to you,
you know. But you didn't notice, you didn't recognize me well, you had your face buried in Clarissa, anyway-and I
just held my breath and hung in there, and... and here I am.
I guess they sell the tickets in order of seats. I'm sorry, Carrie,
really. I didn't mean to scare you. But I've thought about you
all year. I had to come. But I won't bother you after today.
Please believe me. I promise."

"I believe you," I said. He's not a nutcase, I thought. He's
just got his nerves a little too close to the skin. Like I do.

"Why'd you leave the restaurant?" I asked a little peevishly, as though I thought he owed me a fuck.