Hotelles (27 page)

He did not seem to be implying anything, but I could have sworn my friend blushed.

“No!” she cried at last. “Have her. In any case, she dawdles like a cow!”

I interjected.

“Thanks! Maybe you could let the ‘cow' speak for herself!”

“Go on, don't make him beg. Your
colleague
insists.”

“Are you sure? You don't mind being alone?”

“Don't worry, I can run faster than the perverts!”

She bored her jet-black eyes into those of our surprise visitor.

Then she slapped me on the back, and I couldn't tell if she was encouraging or getting rid of me.

Louie opened the door, making room on the bench for me to enter. Then he knocked on the opaque partition between the chauffeur and us, signaling our departure. I barely had time to close the door behind me before the limousine took off, its cylinders growling.

 

I have never
fucked
made love in a car. And yet it's so commonplace! Sometimes I get the impression I'm the only one or, to be exact, the last one, having these
sexual
erotic experiences that everyone else has already had.
Starting with Sophia, who has told me some pretty good
stories about what's possible in such a confined space.

In this instance, if something had happened in that limousine, we would have had all the necessary comforts. There was plenty of space at the foot of his seat to crawl on my knees between his legs and pull out his cock. The car's supple suspension would have rocked me back and forth, and my mouth would have sucked up and down his shaft, effortlessly. From time to time, I would have nipped the base of his gland to anchor myself and keep potholes from throwing him too far down my throat. In the end, when he came, I would have pulled a cotton square from the nearby tissue box and wiped my mouth of semen with one movement, like a windshield wiper.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/11/2009

 

“WHERE ARE YOU TAKING ME?”
I screamed in a tone that annoyed even me. “The Hôtel des Charmes? My nights aren't enough for you now?”

“I would love to, believe me . . . But I don't do anything without your consent.”

He seemed sincere, and almost shocked that I would question his manners and good faith.

“I would not say you've been holding back!”

“Now, you listen,” he seized my hand. “If ever I had felt that you had doubts about doing something, I would have stopped everything at once. I mean, you saw, the other night . . . I put an end to our session. I'm not forcing you into anything, Elle. I am simply accompanying you on a journey that you began at your own will.”

His nerve was baffling. Me, of my own volition, in those rooms? Me, whom he had held hostage in his bacchanalia? The victim of his odious blackmailing?

His hand squeezed mine, imprisoning it momentarily, confirming my captivity. Then, as though remembering himself, he suddenly released his grip. Though he struggled to hide it, I could see an internal battle play out across his features. He felt me looking at him and turned his head to avoid my scrutinizing gaze.

I noted, however, that for the first time, we were speaking openly about our secret meetings in the hotel managed by Monsieur Jacques. In a sense, his frank intimations were a kind of confession. At last, he was showing me his true face. At last, I saw the social Louie and the secretive and manipulative Louie at the same time, as each one tried to conquer the other.

I wished I had something to keep a trace of this: the Dictaphone on my smartphone, for instance, which I could use to trap him. But the pockets of my gray sweats barely had room for my keys and a tissue pack.

“And what's keeping us from going further, huh? Who said I didn't want more that night?”

The field of erect penises pointing at me, trembling under my fingertips, rippled through my memory. I could almost hear their gasps and sighs echoing from the not-so-distant past.

“You weren't ready, Annabelle . . . Not yet. You have much to learn before we can go further.”

He was no longer wearing the expression of disdain that he tended to project in public. No hidden irony, no arrogant swagger. This had to be the real Louie. His cologne tickled my nose, but I resisted. I kept control over my attitude and voice. I didn't want to let myself get distracted again.

“Like your reading list? Is that what you mean?”

What was the first one on the list, again? Oh, right:
Secret Women
. Was that a hint? The first part of some kind of training? Is that what he wanted from me, in the end? That I, too, become a secret woman? His thing, his toy? For as long as he wanted and unbeknownst to his brother?

“Yes, that's part of it. But there's more . . .”

He let his sentence hang enigmatically.

Instead of answering me, he leaned toward the microphone that communicated with the chauffeur:

“The Tuileries, please.”

The motor purred. The car shifted gears, gluing us to the soft leather bench. I liked the sensation of power and gave in to it for a moment. I peered at Louie from the corner of my eye. He was as nervous and reserved as ever. Why didn't he trust me? He was the one uprooting me from my friend and my life. He was the one playing with my life as though it were just a game.

Outside, buildings had replaced trees. Our pace slowed, and the cacophony of impatient horns told me we were in Paris.

“You see, Elle, one cannot get to know oneself and one's sensations without becoming fully aware of the environment in which the body resides.”

I recognized the pontificating register from the visual design meeting. To be honest, I found it hollow: “Don't you see how our lives sorely lack sublimity?”

And yet the way he said each word resonated in me, thrumming an invisible chord whose delightful wave spread bit by bit to each of my organs. I could reject him, but he had this power over me: he thrilled me, no matter what he said, no matter the topic.

“And so?”

I pretended he could not win me over with ready-made phrases.

“Look outside! There is not one street, not one porte cochere, not one bench or even one simple cobblestone that is not filled with sensual history. Everywhere you go, no matter how small the nook or cranny, you can be sure that dozens, or even hundreds of kisses, sighs . . . and perhaps even orgasms have taken place there!”

I didn't back down.

“Yes, but the same goes for murders, calls for help, tears . . .”

“That's where you're wrong, Elle. To be sure, pleasure needs a certain dose of the morbid to blossom, but it always wins out over death. Do you hear me, always!”

Eros, Thanatos, a drive for life, a drive for death, and their eternal struggle to dominate the human psyche: his theoretical underpinnings, which he'd borrowed from Freud, were fairly apt. But where the Austrian psychoanalyst had imagined a tension that sought to bring balance between these two forces, Louie seemed to believe in the victory of pleasure over nothingness. What was troubling in his thesis, and also fairly seductive, was the way in which he integrated a spatial and historic dimension:

“And do you know why, Elle?”

His eyes were shining with newfound intensity. He gradually leaned in, and I could feel the fire in him at that moment.

“No,” I admitted.

“Because, quite simply, for every
one
death,
one
destruction, and before that the birth that led to it, hundreds of bodies have come together, somewhere in this gigantic erotic landscape you are contemplating. They have come, hundreds of times, there, all around us. For those who know how to look, traces of pleasure will always be easier to find than remnants of the kinds of tragic events you've just evoked.”

“Okay, why not? . . . But what does that have to do with us?”

“Patience. In a moment, I will give you a very pertinent example. You'll see.”

He murmured to the driver again, his mouth almost touching the partition:

“Richard, would you please accelerate a little? Thank you.”

Instantly, the car merged into the bus lane, extracting itself from the magma of vehicles crowding Rue Saint-Antoine. It then hurtled full speed down Rue de Rivoli, with no regard for the police, who were teeming.

Him, his look, his voice, his scent, his proximity in the other passenger seat, his hands grazing over the soft leather. They could have just as easily been running over another kind of skin . . . I was suffocating and took the liberty of opening the power window beside me. A little air for my overexcited senses.

I needed to get ahold of myself. Regain control. I couldn't let his sweet torpor get the better of me.

“Okay,” I finally agreed. “But on one condition: stop using Aurora's story to toy with me. I want to know how she died. I want the truth, Louie. The whole truth.”

He looked at me in surprise—was this the first time I had called him by his first name?—and a kind of respect. Or something more, maybe, deeper and filled with esteem.

Another wave rushed through me before I had the chance to fight it. I realized that in this confined space he'd had a thousand opportunities to slip a hand under the distended elastic of my sweats, and then into my panties. This thought made my labia contract as well as my perineum, which I struggled to control. And what if I got really wet down there, what then . . .

 

It's not really a dream, but a thought, one of those wet daydreams I have sometimes, while idling at a red light or when the metro stops in a station; they vanish as soon as I feel movement under me again.

In that brief space of time, I give all the men around me the same face. I choose the most handsome among them, of course, and copy-paste it on all the others in his vicinity. That way, everyone is equal in front of my desire. No one looks repellent to me. Everyone is worthy of my attention. I can sense their diversity, their differences in odor, for instance, and yet I see them as one. In this way, though they are numerous, I have no scruples about abandoning myself to their hands, which graze and pinch me, or to their penises, which penetrate me one by one.

With each new partner, the penis seems
bigger and harder in me.
When I come back to myself, it is always with the realization that I am not big enough, nor do I have enough holes, to satisfy them all. I chastise myself for this shortcoming. And as the train or car starts moving, I feel heat in my cheeks and moisture in my panties. And I promise them I'll do better next time.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/11/2009

 

AND YET, ASIDE FROM WHEN
he'd held my hand for a few seconds, Louie had refrained from all contact. Yes, to be fair, in his own contradictory way, this man did respect me. Or was his reserve just a more subtle way of using me, however and whenever he pleased, and not simply a question of circumstance?

“We are almost there . . . ,” he whispered, impatiently scanning the urban landscape. “And you'll see: what I have in mind will satisfy your curiosity.”

I did not really see the relationship between the Tuileries and Aurora's death, but I could not think of anything to contradict him either. So much the better, since anything that came out of my mouth at that moment would have sounded like a plea for him to throw himself at me. To take me. To spare me the pedantic explanations and give me what he kept deferring, at each one of our encounters.

At last, the Louvre's long body appeared on our left. And with a couple powerful pumps of the accelerator, we raced past the palace and arrived at the Tuileries, a patch of greenery in the dense city. It had not always been like this, I knew. Where today there were trees, there had once stood another building, the Palais des Tuileries, which the Communard insurgents had burned in 1871.

“For fun,” Louie went on, “we could each take the identity of a historical character. It's a fairly amusing game.”

What road was he leading me down now? I decided not to put up a fight, and even fed into his present whim by choosing a character to suit his ribald tastes:

“I have always seen myself as a Ninon de Lenclos . . . But I am probably overestimating my talents.”

His hands were now crossed in an apparent attempt to maintain control. Each one appeared to be fighting the other, restraining the other from jumping at me.

“David, for instance,” he went on, ignoring my reference, “has all the qualities of a little Bonaparte. Charismatic, determined, a conqueror . . . A man who takes everything by force, and who almost always succeeds.”

His panegyric smacked of criticism or, rather, incomprehension with respect to a nature that was so different from his own. But I had to admit that the comparison was not unfounded, even if, physically speaking, it did not hold. David was pleasant and attractive, and the emperor of the French sharp and disturbing.

The car stopped at the point where Rue de Rivoli and the Avenue Lemonnier intersect. The Tuileries Garden spreads over half the length of this latter. Louie maintained his stance as he refreshed my patchy notions of history:

“The palace that stood here one hundred and fifty years ago was the Louvre's centerpiece. Napoleon I figured among its list of prestigious occupants. For him it was a point of pride to live where Louis XVI had fallen during the Revolution. But that is not why we're here . . .”

“Why, then?”

“Almost the entirety of Napoleon Bonaparte's romantic life took place here. His first time was in the Palais-Royal when he was just a penniless young officer. A few streets down is where he first saw Josephine. And it was in this now long-gone palace that he received the vast majority of his countless mistresses.”

I wanted to shake him: Once again, what did this have to do with David, with Aurora? And above all: What did this have to do with us? With our obvious desire for each other? Every molecule of rarefied air in this vehicle was vibrating with it  . . .