Emmanuelle (6 page)

“Then why did you get married?”

“One day Jean announced to me calmly, as always, that his company was sending him to Thailand. ‘I’m going to marry you before I leave,’ he said without further ado. ‘You’ll join me later, when I have a house for you to live in.’”

“How did you feel about it?”

“I laughed wildly. A month later, we were married. My parents had considered it only natural for me to be Jean’s mistress, but they protested violently when he talked about marrying me. They tried to convince him that he was too old, that I was too young, even ‘too innocent’! What do you think of that? But it was Jean who convinced them. I wish I knew what he said to them. My father must have been hard to persuade. He couldn’t resign himself to seeing me drop my math.”

“What math?”

“I’d begun studying mathematics at the university.”

“What ever gave you such an idea?” asked Marie-Anne, laughing.

“Well, I love math. Jean was supposed to leave a short time after our wedding, but luckily he was delayed for six months, so we weren’t separated right away. I was able to be his wife as long as I’d been his mistress. And I found that it was as much fun to be married as it was to be a sinner, although at first it seemed odd to make love at night.”

“What happened afterward? Where did you live while he was gone? With your parents?”

“Of course not! I lived in his apartment, or rather
our
apartment.”

“He wasn’t afraid to leave you all alone like that?”

“Afraid? Of what?”

“That you’d deceive him, naturally!”

Emmanuelle laughed. “I don’t think so. We never talked about it. It must not have occurred to him. It didn’t to me, either.”

“But you still did it, didn’t you?”

“No. Why? Lots of men ran after me. They seemed ridiculous to me . . .”

“Then what you told the girls wasn’t a lot of nonsense?”

“The girls?”

“Yesterday, have you forgotten already? You told them you’d never gone to bed with any man but your husband.”

Emmanuelle hesitated for a fraction of a second. That was long enough to put Marie-Anne on the alert. She pivoted, knelt, and leaned over the arm of the chair, radiating suspicion.

“There’s not one word of truth in all that,” she said accusingly. “I can tell from your face. You ought to see how frank you look!”

Emmanuelle tried to be evasive, without conviction. “First of all, I never said any such thing . . .”

“What? You didn’t tell Ariane that you hadn’t deceived your husband? That’s exactly why I wanted to talk to you. Because I didn’t believe you. Luckily!”

Emmanuelle maintained her sophistry. “Well, you’re wrong. And I repeat that I didn’t say what you claim I did. I merely said that I’d been faithful to Jean the whole time I was in Paris. That’s all.”

“What do you mean, that’s all?”

Emmanuelle forced herself to appear nonchalant while Marie-Anne examined her face. Then Marie-Anne abruptly changed her tactics. Her voice became caressing.

“Anyway, why on earth should you have been faithful to him? There was no reason for you to deprive yourself.”

“I didn’t deprive myself. There was no one I wanted. It’s quite simple.”

Marie-Anne pursed her lips, reflected, then asked, “Are you saying that if there
had
been someone you wanted, you’d have made love with him?”

“Certainly.”

“How can you prove it?” Marie-Anne challenged, in the acid tone of a quarrelsome child.

Emmanuelle looked at her undecidedly, then said all at once, “I did it.”

Marie-Anne seemed electrified. She jumped up, sat down again, cross-legged, and put her hands on her knees.

“You see?” she said in an outraged and hurt tone of voice. “And you tried to make me think you didn’t!”

“I didn’t do it
in Paris,
” Emmanuelle explained patiently. “I did it
on the plane
. The plane that brought me here. Now do you understand?”

“With whom?” Marie-Anne asked skeptically.

Emmanuelle took her time before answering. “With two men. I don’t know their names.”

If she had thought she was going to cause a sensation, she was disappointed. Marie-Anne resumed her interrogation without showing any reaction. “Did they come in you?”

“Yes.”

“Were they very deep inside you?”

“Oh, yes!” Emmanuelle instinctively put her hand to her belly.

“Caress yourself while you tell me about it,” Marie-Anne ordered. But Emmanuelle shook her head. She seemed to have been suddenly tongue-tied. Marie-Anne examined her critically. “Go on,” she said, “talk!”

Emmanuelle obeyed. She was reluctant and embarrassed at first, but soon, excited by her own story, she gave all the details without having to be questioned. She stopped after telling how the Greek statue had ravished her. Marie-Anne had been listening with a studious expression, changing her posture several times, but she did not seem to be particularly impressed.

“Have you told Jean?” she asked.

No.”

“Have you seen those two men again?”

“Of course not!”

It seemed that, for the moment, Marie-Anne had nothing more to ask.

Emmanuelle called the little servant girl—straight out of one of Gauguin’s dreams, with her flowery black hair, her ocher body, and her scarlet sarong—and asked her to make some tea. She put on her shorts again. Marie-Anne put on her panties, but left her skirt on the floor. She then demanded to see all of Emmanuelle’s pictures of herself naked. When Emmanuelle had brought them to her, she recovered her caustic attitude.

“Listen, you’re not going to tell me you didn’t do anything with the photographer, are you?”

“He didn’t even touch me!” Emmanuelle protested. “And,” she added, with pretended rancor, “besides, I didn’t have a chance—he was a fag.”

Marie-Anne turned down the corners of her lips. She was still skeptical. She studied the pictures again. “I think an artist should always go to bed with his model before making a portrait of her. It was silly of you to choose someone who didn’t like women.”

“I didn’t choose him,” said Emmanuelle, beginning to feel genuinely irritated. “It was his idea. As I’ve already told you, he was a friend of Jean’s.”

Marie-Anne made a gesture that seemed to sweep away that past. “You really ought to have yourself painted by a good artist. It’ll be too late when you’re old.”

The image of what Marie-Anne must have meant by a “good artist,” and the idea of the imminence of her own old age, sent Emmanuelle into a fit of laughter. “I don’t like to pose, not even for a photograph, so for a painting . . .”

“And haven’t you done anything with men since you’ve been here?”

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Emmanuelle said indignantly.

Marie-Anne seemed preoccupied and almost disheartened. “One of these days you’ll have to find yourself a lover,” she sighed.

“Is it really necessary?” asked Emmanuelle.

But Marie-Anne was apparently in no mood for joking. She shrugged with annoyance. “You’re odd, Emmanuelle,” she said. Then, after a silence, “You don’t intend to go on living like an old maid, do you?” And she repeated, seized with a kind of anger, “You’re odd, really!”

“But I’m not an old maid,” Emmanuelle pleaded timidly, “I have a husband!”

This time Marie-Anne merely answered with a cold look. She seemed to find Emmanuelle’s argument pitiful, and to have no interest in continuing the discussion. But now it was Emmanuelle who did not want to change the subject. She tried to re-create the mood. “Don’t you want to take off your panties?”

Marie-Anne shook her braids. “No, I have to leave.” She stood up. “Are you going to take me home?”

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Emmanuelle complained. But she had already realized that Marie-Anne’s decisions were irrevocable.

In the car, Marie-Anne gave her a look of serious concern and said, “You know, I don’t want you to waste your life, you’re too pretty. It’s stupid for you to be as prudish as you are.”

Emmanuelle laughed loudly. But Marie-Anne did not give her time to make an ironic reply. “It’s incredible that you’ve gotten this old without ever having had anything but those worthless little adventures in your windowless airplane.” She shook her head sadly. “You’re not normal, take my word for it.”

“Marie-Anne . . .”

“Never mind . . . But there’s no use moaning over the past.” Her green eyes glowed. “From now on, will you at least do what I tell you?”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Everything I tell you.”

“Well . . .” said Emmanuelle, fascinated.

“Will you give me your word?”

“Oh, all right, if it amuses you.” She continued smiling, but Marie-Anne did not let herself be diverted from her solemnity.

“Shall I give you some advice?”

“No, thanks!”

The elfin eyes analyzed the seriousness of her case. She tried to maintain a casual attitude, without deluding herself about her chances of holding her own against Marie-Anne.

When the car stopped in front of the bank that her father managed, Marie-Anne said, “At exactly midnight tonight, caress yourself again. I’ll be doing the same thing at the same time.”

Emmanuelle blinked her eyes as a sign of complicity. She leaned out the window to throw a kiss to Marie-Anne, who called back to her, “Don’t forget!”

Only after she was gone did Emmanuelle realize that she had not been able to ask her a single question. She had told that little girl with braided hair everything about her private life, but she knew nothing about hers. She had even forgotten to ask if she was a virgin.

That night, when Jean had taken his shower and come into the bedroom, he found Emmanuelle kneeling on the edge of the big, low bed, naked. She put her arms around his hips and took his penis in her mouth. She had sucked it no more than a few seconds when it swelled and stood up. She passed it back and forth between her lips until it was very hard, then she licked it all over, tilting her head, pressing the blue vein that lay just under the skin, making it grow larger and more congested beneath her kiss. Jean told her that she looked as if she were eating an ear of corn and she bit him lightly with her little teeth to complete the analogy. She quickly redeemed herself by drawing the satiny skin of his testicles into her mouth. She lifted them in her hands, slipped the end of her tongue under them, caressed another vein, gorged herself on the warm blood she felt pulsing more strongly at the touch of her lips, explored more and more intimately, searched, moved forward and back, abruptly returned to the end of his penis, pushed it to the bottom of her throat, so deeply that she nearly choked, and there, without withdrawing it, she slowly and irresistibly pumped it while her tongue enveloped and massaged it.

Her hands clung to the small of his back with a passion that increased as she sucked him more regularly and the excitement of her lips and her tongue was communicated to her breasts and her sex. Between her joined thighs she felt a liquid flowing like the saliva that was now bathing his apoplectic member in her warm mouth. So that she could moan with pleasure and let a partial orgasm relieve her and enable her to continue her fellatio, she took her lips away from his penis for a moment, though without ceasing to caress its opening by licking it tenderly with the tip of her tongue. Then she again swallowed the bridge of palpitating flesh that bound them together.

Jean took her head between his hands, but it was not because he wanted to guide her movements or regulate their rhythm. He knew he would be better off if he left everything to her and let her refine their common pleasure as she saw fit. As always, the style she adopted this time would be different from any she had ever used before. Sometimes she played at keeping him in suspense. She would settle down somewhere, flit from one sensitive spot to another, ignore the moans and pleas she drew from her victim’s throat, make him twitch and pant, and drive him into a frenzy until at last she put the deft, precise finishing touch to her work. But this time she chose to dispense a more serene satisfaction. Without holding his vibrant penis too tightly, she added the pressure of her fingers and the regular movement of her hand to the suction of her lips, intent on delivering his organ of its semen and emptying it as totally as possible. When he surrendered, she sipped the substance she had succeeded in drawing from deep inside him; but, purring, she let the last spurt melt on her amorous tongue.

She herself was so close to orgasm that he was able to bring it on by simply pressing her clitoris between his lips.

“In a little while, I’ll take you,” he said.

“No, no! I want to drink you again! Promise! Promise you’ll come back to my mouth. Oh, I want you to flow into my mouth again! Say you’ll do it, please! It’s so good! I like it so much!”

“When I wasn’t here, did your other women caress you as well as I do?” she asked him later, when they were both resting.

“How could they? There’s no one who can compare to you.”

“Not even Thai women?”