Emmanuelle (8 page)

“I’d like to see that!” said Emmanuelle, laughing.

“They’ll even sing you serenades, if you make love in their territory. During the day, in the sunlight, with the sand massaging you, or in the shade of the sugar palms. You can always find a little boy who’s willing to fan you for a baht while your valiant knight is paying homage to you. And at night, lying on the beach at the edge of the surf, with your back caressed by the tongues of the waves and your eyes protected from the stars by an amorous face—ah, you really appreciate how lucky you are to be a woman!”

“If I understand you right,” said Emmanuelle, without being scandalized, “that’s the favorite sport in this country.”

Ariane stared at her with an enigmatic smile and did not answer her immediately. “Tell me, my dear . . .” She stopped short, seemingly working out some mysterious probability.

Emmanuelle turned to her and laughed. “What would you like me to tell you?”

Ariane reflected in silence, then she abruptly decided how much confidence the newcomer deserved. Her voice lost the tone of urbane banter that it had kept till now. She gave Emmanuelle a friendly grin.

“I’m sure,” she said, “that you have a passionate nature. You’re not as prim and proper as you pretend to be. And I’m glad you’re not. To tell you the truth, you interested me right away.”

Emmanuelle did not quite know what to make of this declaration. Almost in spite of herself, she remained on the defensive. She was more put out than flattered, because she did not like anyone to question her frankness. And what made those girls keep thinking she was a prude? It had made her laugh at first, but now it was beginning to annoy her.

“Don’t you want to enjoy yourself here?” Ariane went on in a tone that said more than her words.

“Yes,” said Emmanuelle. She realized that she was venturing onto a dangerous path, but she was even more afraid of being suspected of virtue.

Ariane’s smile of approval rewarded her only partially. “Then come with me some night, my pet. You can tell your husband you’re having dinner with a group of women. You’ll see what kind of a sewing circle I’ll take you to! You could search forever and a day without finding bolder or more gallant warriors than mine. They’re witty, young, and robust, and they know how to wield their weapons. You have nothing to fear. Will you come?”

“But you hardly know me,” Emmanuelle said evasively. “Don’t you . . .”

Ariane shrugged. “I know you well enough! I don’t need to keep you under prolonged observation to know that you’re beautiful enough to stun both men and women. And those I have in mind are experts when it comes to beauty. It would never occur to me to introduce you to them if I weren’t sure of them and of you. So, you see?”

“And . . .” Emmanuelle hesitated. “What about your husband?”

Ariane’s laugh was full of frankness. “A good husband likes his wife to be happy.”

“I don’t know if that will seem so normal to Jean.”

“Then don’t take him into your confidence,” Ariane said jovially. She suddenly moved closer to Emmanuelle, put her arms around her waist, and hugged her. “Will you swear to tell the truth?”

Emmanuelle blinked without committing herself too much. The solid, warm breasts against her shoulder unsettled her a little, whether she cared to admit it or not.

“You won’t go on trying to make me believe that your husband is the only man you’ve ever welcomed into that exciting body of yours, will you? Of course not. Well, have you told him about it every time?”

Emmanuelle felt tormented. The quest for confessions was beginning again! But what would be the use of defending herself? And why should she try to seem more innocent than she was? She shook her head in answer to Ariane’s question.

Ariane kissed her gaily on the ear.

“You see!” she said triumphantly, contemplating her with pride. “I promise that you won’t be sorry you came to Bangkok!”

Her tone seemed to imply that Emmanuelle had agreed to sign a pact. She tried to escape. “No, listen, I’m embarrassed . . .” All at once she became bolder. “Don’t think it’s out of prudishness, or for moral reasons. It’s not that. But . . . at least give me time to get used to the idea . . . by degrees.”

“Of course,” said Ariane. “There’s no rush. It’s the same as with the sun.” She seemed to have had a sudden inspiration; she let her lips sketch a furtive smile and sat up. “Come, we’re going to have a massage.”

She put on her bikini. Then, a little disdainfully, as though she were speaking to a small child, she added, “Don’t be afraid, sweetie, only women will be there.”

Emmanuelle left her car at the club and went with Ariane in her open convertible. They drove for half an hour through tricycle rickshaws and motorcycle taxis that spewed smoke into the streets lined with Chinese signs. They stopped in front of a new one-story building flanked by silk shops, restaurants, and travel agencies. The façade was adorned with an inscription in characters that were unknown to Emmanuelle. They opened a thick glass door and stepped into the reception room of a bathing establishment, little different in appearance from what it would have been in Europe. A Japanese woman in a flowered kimono greeted them politely, bowed to them several times with her hands crossed over her chest, before leading them along halls that smelled of steam and
eau de cologne
. She stopped in front of a door and bowed deeply again. Emmanuelle wondered if she was mute.

“You can go in here,” said Ariane, “the masseuses are all good. I’ll take the next cabin. We’ll meet in an hour.”

Emmanuelle had not expected Ariane to leave her. She felt a little disconcerted. The door that the Japanese woman had opened led into a small, clean, low-ceilinged room where a slender Thai girl in a white nurse’s smock was standing between a bathtub and a massage table. She had the face of a bird that had returned from many journeys. She bowed also, then said a few words without seeming to care whether they were understood or not, came over to Emmanuelle, and began carefully unbuttoning her blouse.

When Emmanuelle was undressed, the masseuse motioned her to get into the bathtub, filled with bluish, fragrant, warm water. She passed a damp cloth over her face, then methodically lathered her shoulders, back, chest, and belly. Emmanuelle shivered as the sponge swollen with lather moved between her legs.

When she had finished bathing and drying her with a big, warm towel, the Thai girl motioned her to lie down on the padded table. First she hammered her lightly and rapidly with the edge of her hand, then pinched her muscles, pressed down on her thighs and back, pulled her toes, massaged the back of her neck for a long time, and patted her on the head. Half-dazed, Emmanuelle felt relaxed and happy in spite of everything.

The masseuse opened a cupboard, took out two devices the size of a cigarette pack, and attached them to the backs of her hands. They immediately began to make a humming sound. Her vibrating palms slowly crawled over Emmanuelle’s naked body, sinking into everything that offered a cavity or a fold, slipping into the hollow of her neck, under her armpits, between her breasts, between her buttocks, with irresistible proficiency. Then they sought the most receptive spots on the inner surface of her thighs. Emmanuelle’s flesh trembled. Her legs parted and she raised her pubis slightly, offering herself with an inimitably graceful movement that held out the lips of her sex as though for a childish kiss. But the hands moved away and rose toward her bust, coming and going with professional skill, making long, repeated sweeps like an iron smoothing a piece of percale. When Emmanuelle began moaning almost inaudibly, they climbed to her nipples and made circular motions on them, sometimes barely grazing them, sometimes pushing them down into the thickness of her breasts. Waves traveled through her all the way to the base of her spine. She arched her back and cried out plaintively for long minutes. The hands continued their work on her sensitive nipples until her orgasm died down, leaving her limp and inert.

Without wasting any time, the masseuse shifted to her shoulders, arms, and ankles. Emmanuelle was slowly returning to normal. She finally opened her eyes and smiled faintly. The masseuse smiled back at her stiffly and said something that sounded like a question. At the same time she moved her slender fingers toward Emmanuelle’s belly, looking at her with her eyebrows raised, as though waiting for permission. Emmanuelle nodded. The hand, weighted by the vibrator, carefully made practiced movements on the surface of her sex and in its folds, knowing exactly what to do at each moment in order to give the greatest pleasure. Sure of the outcome, adding the virtuosity of its quivering, rubbing, and scratching to the power of the electric vibrations, it made no effort to be gentle, and gave Emmanuelle no respite.

She held back with all her strength, but her resistance was short-lived. She had another orgasm, so violent that even the masseuse’s face showed a certain alarm. For a long time after the hands had been withdrawn from her, Emmanuelle continued writhing, gasping, clutching the edges of the white table with her fingers.

“The walls are supposed to be soundproof,” Ariane said as they were leaving together, “but I heard you right through them. Now I hope you won’t ever try to tell me you prefer mathematics.”

Marie-Anne came to Emmanuelle’s house on four afternoons in a row. She interrogated her more closely each time, demanding—and getting—new details about her relations with Jean and the incontinence of Emmanuelle’s daily reveries.

“If you’d actually given yourself to all the men you’ve imagined doing it with,” Marie-Anne observed one day, “you’d be an accomplished woman.”

“You mean I’d be dead,” retorted Emmanuelle, laughing.

“Why?”

“Do you think a woman can make love with men as often as she can make herself come by her own efforts?”

“Why not?”

“Listen, it’s tiring to be taken by a man!”

“And caressing yourself never tires you?”

“No.”

“How often do you do it now?”

Emmanuelle smiled modestly. “I did it a lot yesterday. At least fifteen times, I think.”

“There are some women who do it that often with men.”

Emmanuelle nodded. “Yes, I know,” she said, though she did not seem tempted. “Men aren’t always so exciting, you know. They’re heavy, they’re hard, sometimes they even hurt you. And they don’t necessarily know the way a girl likes to come best . . .”

Paradoxically, there was only one subject about which she could not bring herself to speak frankly. She barely alluded to it now and then, awkwardly, unable to discern whether Marie-Anne understood or not. She herself had difficulty in understanding a shyness and discretion that nothing in her visitor’s conduct seemed to justify. Marie-Anne always undressed as soon as she arrived. She had readily discarded her blouse the first time Emmanuelle had suggested it to her, and from then on they spent their time together naked, on the terrace surrounded by foliage. But Emmanuelle showed her excitement only by caressing herself more often. She did not dare to touch Marie-Anne or invite her to touch her, even though she wanted it so much that it kept her awake at night. A strange modesty and a strange immodesty were battling for her soul. She sometimes wondered—though confusedly and without allowing herself to think about it too deeply—whether that unwonted reserve was not actually a new and superior refinement invented without her knowledge by the intuition of her senses, and whether the deprivation of Marie-Anne’s body that she thus inflicted on herself, against all instinct and reason, did not ultimately have a more subtle savor, a more perverse attraction, than physical intimacy might have had. And so instead of suffering, as she normally would have, from that situation in which a little girl manipulated her at will without granting anything to her desire in return, she discovered in it an unexpected source of sensual delight.

Just as an unknown pleasure had thus arisen from the frustration of what had always seemed to her the most natural of all carnal desires, and the one she prized most highly, another erotic value had been revealed to her by the remarkable secrecy that Marie-Anne maintained with regard to her own sex life. When she noted the ease with which she resigned herself to knowing nothing, or almost nothing, about Marie-Anne, Emmanuelle realized that she had more cerebral and physical enjoyment from giving another girl a lewd spectacle than she would have gotten from witnessing it herself. She eagerly looked forward to Marie-Anne’s arrival every day, but it was now less for the excitement of seeing her naked or watching her lascivious games than for the infinitely more scandalous, and therefore more delectable, excitement of caressing herself, stretched out on her deck chair, before her friend’s attentive gaze. When Marie-Anne was gone, the spell was not broken— Emmanuelle would imagine her green eyes fixed on her sex and continue masturbating until evening.

On the Wednesday following their first meeting, Emmanuelle was invited to tea by Marie-Anne’s mother. In the pretentiously furnished drawing room she found a dozen “ladies” who all seemed equally insignificant. Marie-Anne was sitting demurely on the rug, absorbed in her duties as a model little girl. Emmanuelle was already regretting that they could not be alone when her interest was revived by the arrival of a very elegant young woman who, at first sight, appeared to be as much out of place as herself.

Emmanuelle was reminded of the Parisian models she had loved. The young woman had the same tall, slender figure, the same imponderable lassitude and illusory remoteness. Her mouth, partly open “like a rose,” her amber eyebrows raised above immense eyes, and the winsome curve of her eyelashes gave her face a look of ingenuousness so improbable that it seemed an act of bravado. Emmanuelle told herself intolerantly that she was the only one present who, because of what she called her “experience,” could discern the modesty in that totally studied elegance, the captivation in all that passion hidden beneath the detachment of a lustrous gaze. She recalled having thus discovered in her friends’ faces, “borrowed from the proudest monuments,” what Baudelaire had meant in condemning “movement that displaces lines.” The alabaster goddesses had been made flesh, but Man, who believed only in inaccessible paradises and inanimate gods, had kept his desire for statues, and the worshiped flesh had become stone again.