A Very Bold Leap (40 page)

“If I insist on seeing you again!” Charles cried after reading the letter and crumpling it up. “I’d rather talk to a starving cow! You’re going to make one hell of a psychologist, you are! Your patients will be leaping off bridges left and right! You upstart! You lazy snob! You cold-assed bitch! If I had a university degree, you’d be singing a different song, wouldn’t you! If I were a doctor or a dentist, you’d be hanging off my tail! I regret every minute I spent with you! Go find yourself another snob to cozy up with, someone more compatible with yourself! You can fake your orgasms with him!”

He raged for three days, beside himself with fury. Despite his efforts to appear to be in a good mood, his colleagues at
Artist’s Life
, where he’d been working full-time for six months, knew that there was something going on.

“Are you all right?” Bernard Délicieux would ask him every now and then with a sympathy not unmixed with curiosity.

Finally Charles lost his cool and told Délicieux to mind his own business.

“Oh, Monsieur is in a bad mood, is he?” muttered Délicieux, offended. “Monsieur wants his solitude. Very well, we’ll give it to him. In spades!”

And he didn’t speak to Charles for the rest of the day.

His office-mate, Régine Allaire, a flirtatious thirty-year veteran of the theatre wars who in her time had dropped anchor in more than a few harbours, took a different approach, one that paid better dividends.

“My dear boy,” she said, after giving him a hard, penetrating look, “you’ve just been dropped, haven’t you? I’m right, aren’t I?”

He couldn’t deny it, and during their coffee break he told her the whole story, which brought on another shockwave of anger and resentment. By way of consolation, Régine suggested they go out for dinner to the Piémontais, where they washed down their meal with two bottles of Salice Salentino and countless apéritifs. By eleven o’clock, without quite knowing how it had happened, Charles found himself in her apartment, with Régine ardently trying to continue her consolations but not having much luck, since his youthful virility seemed to have been left behind in one of the bottles they had emptied and didn’t catch up with him again until the wee hours of the morning. He did his best to make up for lost time, although his pleasure was somewhat mitigated by his having a head like a football. Seasoned trooper that she was, she compensated for her fading charms with a wealth of technique and gentleness, and with a philosophical attitude towards the vicissitudes of life. The combined effect acted on Charles’s battered heart like a salve.

“If you find yourself feeling sad again some night, my love,” she told him as he was leaving, “just let me know. We’ll see what we can do about it.”

Charles told himself he would be over Stéphanie in a week. It took him two. One morning he woke up with the kind of dazed sense of well-being that follows a migraine. However, there then began a spell of bitterness that threatened to harden his attitude towards all women. Blonblon, completely tied up with his antique store and still head-over-heels about Isabel, had difficulty understanding his friend and therefore wasn’t able to be of much help.

“Women are only good for one thing,” Charles declared one night, thinking he had reached the summit of wisdom.

He continued to have adventures. His work at
Artist’s Life
provided several opportunities. Some of them were not exactly uplifting. And one of them could even be considered downright seedy.

A colleague at the magazine told him about a special establishment on Sainte-Catherine, at the corner of Saint-Laurent, where people going through a dry spell in the love department could go to satisfy their thirst in an original and not very expensive fashion. The place was called the Bird in Hand, the owner being a great admirer of puns. For the sum of thirty dollars, clients could sit in the intimacy of a private booth, in the comfort of an easy chair, and admire the sexy dancing of a naked young woman, and they were free to express their enthusiasm in any way they chose, however crude, provided they did not touch the dancer. It was all above board and completely safe.

One night when he was bored, Charles decided to visit the Bird in Hand and satisfy his curiosity.

There was a discreet sign on the street indicating that the establishment was above a shoe store. Charles mounted a narrow, dirty staircase and found himself standing before a pink door with a small window cut into it on which hung a sign that read, in blue and pink letters:

PRIVATE DANCERS

to suggest, no doubt, that the dancers in question were women.

He went in. A large woman standing at a cash register behind a counter welcomed him with a friendly smile. To her right was a bank of television screens, each one connected to a camera in one of the booths. The woman explained that the cameras were there to protect the dancers in the event of aggressive behaviour on the part of a dissatisfied client, as well as to allow the establishment to keep a check on the dancers themselves. Feeling intimidated, Charles paid and indicated a booth. Two dancers would take turns beguiling him with their charms; all he had to do was indicate which one of them pleased him the most.

The whole place seemed so sordid to him that whatever thirst he had felt abandoned him immediately; he would have asked for his money back, but the cash register had already swallowed it and there were no refunds. Charles advanced down a hallway lined with doors, behind a few of which he could hear snippets of music mixed with sighs and groans. A few minutes later he had chosen a pretty little blonde with a forthright air about her. She couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, if that. What was she doing in a place like this? Charles thought. Still talking, she took off her clothes and began dancing to music coming from her cassette player. Sitting in the chair, Charles watched her without moving. He felt like an idiot, and an ignoble idiot at that, and wished with all his might he were somewhere else.

The dancer soon noticed his disinterest.

“Just sit back and relax,” she told him, smiling.

He understood her words to be an invitation, but his modesty held him back. She was gently insistent, like someone coaxing a friend to do something she knew he would like very much. He eventually gave in and she started dancing again. After a few seconds, however, when she realized her client was distinctly lacking in enthusiasm, she came to his aid with a remarkable dexterity and a charming simplicity, even though such administrations were not included in the price.

“Thank you,” Charles said, doing up his belt. His face felt red and he wanted nothing more than to leave as quickly as possible.

She winked at him.

“Don’t mention it. You’ll be back.”

He left, filled with a curious sensation that was part sexual satisfaction and part sickness in the pit of his stomach.

Several weeks went by. One night, after working late at the magazine, he went into a restaurant on Sainte-Catherine, not far from his apartment, to grab a bite to eat before going to bed.

The blond dancer was there, sitting alone, with a large glass of Coke in front of her, and wiping her nose. She looked exhausted and unhappy.

Without thinking, Charles went up and asked if he could join her. She recognized him, told him he could sit down, and gently reproached him for not having gone back to see her.

“I’ve been swamped with work,” he told her, out of politeness.

They began to chat. Or rather, Charles chatted and she listened, still wiping her nose. She was greatly impressed to learn that he worked
at Artist’s Life
, and began questioning him about the singer Lola Malo and other stars of the stage, in the naïve belief that he was on a first-name basis with everyone in the entertainment world. Charles found her as pretty as he remembered, with lively, candid eyes, a small, delicate mouth, and skin of an exquisite pink that made him want to reach over and touch it; even her nose, though reddened and slightly swollen from her cold, was pleasant to look at. She spoke simply and without vulgarity. Her work tired her out, she said, because the hours were long and the clients not always very nice to her. This monster of a cold had kept her home for the past five days, but she was going back the next day.

“Why?” asked Charles gently, the good Samaritan moved both by charity and by a sense of lust. “Why do that kind of work?”