Monsieur (25 page)

‘Maybe. Maybe not. I wanted it to be romantic, but maybe not that sort of romance. When I first came across Monsieur I wasn't even in search of a relationship. Stupidly I got caught in a trap. And I can't see my way out.'

Lucy's wide dark eyes look up at me. ‘You can't see a way out?'

I meant I just can't see how one day I'll manage to live without forgetting I'd once known him. A few weeks ago, I still believed that everything would be over once and for all when I'd finished writing
Monsieur
, but it won't. What's happened, what I've done with him, is so bizarre that even if I wanted to forget about it, some twisted part of my unconscious would be unable to. Even if he's not worth remembering, which I strongly suspect.

‘It's a good thing you're writing about him,' Lucy remarked. ‘
Monsieur
is a great book. It's
the
book.'

Under my backside, notebook number two, with its purple cover, seems to throb softly, full of pride.

Sometimes Lucy manages to defuse tension before it takes hold. She has temporarily deflected her own status as obsession-in-chief and brought Monsieur back to the surface. Now that it's just the two of us, the silence fills with all the ifs and buts in the history of the world, and I know too well that in an hour or so, I'll be swearing under my breath because I attempted nothing, even something silly like inadvertently touching her hand or pretending to stumble over her, anything she could forgive or use to her own advantage. I do nothing, and I will do nothing because I'm a bloody fool. As I've always known.

The clouds burst one at a time. Lucy and I start to walk home and find ourselves sheltering beneath an oak's heavy branches. She lights a cigarette, unwilling to go on now that the storm we've been expecting since midday has finally broken. I don't know what we're hoping for, waiting in the pouring rain, but it must be something buried deep in our psyche, something powerful, because I've never been able to watch lightning from my window without wishing to be at the very centre of the storm. What lies at the centre of a storm? What's in the air? The idea that anything could happen and there would not necessarily be any lasting consequences? I see the same questions float like mist behind Lucy's dark eyes. Sitting on
Monsieur
, I wonder how I could take advantage of this temporary madness, throw myself at her, pull her down into the grass, stray nettles stinging our arses and lightning racing above my head. I visualize her spread across the ground, huddled against me, her lips blue, her eyes lighting up in fluorescent shades. Fuck. I watch her, watch her cigarette as if was smoking it myself, tasting her saliva. It would be so uncomfortable to roll around in those bushes! Is there any activity, apart from a long siesta, that Normandy is actually cut out for?

Light years away from my lewd thoughts, Lucy has pulled out her phone.

‘Alice wants us to join her. She's at home.'

‘Tell her to come here. It's so cool to be right in the middle of the storm. It'll make a change from the house.'

But Alice refuses, and the storm isn't making the conversation easy, so Lucy hangs up. ‘She says we can watch
The Wall
on the plasma screen.'

‘But I want to stay outside!'

‘We can go on the terrace.'

Lucy stretches out her hand to clasp mine. The strength of her grip is surprising, maybe because her supple fingers are so long. I don't know how to take her gesture – I may be misinterpreting an innocent touch. Lucy has never given me any indication as to her intentions towards me; but in the midst of my confusion over Monsieur, it bothers me.

I'm playing hopscotch between the puddles as I move along the muddy paths and the rain is beating down. About to turn a sharp corner, I recall a past Sunday in Normandy when I had taken a piss against an immense fir tree overflowing with sap. Over the phone, Monsieur had been delighted to hear about it. Although I didn't want to know how he pictured me in that situation, I had read and reread his message. It had felt so wrong, as I squatted, knickers around my ankles, still dripping.

‘I'd love to be there and watch you pee. It would be so good to lick away those final golden drops from your little pussy.'

I had immediately texted back: ‘Absolutely not. That's disgusting.' All the time, I was looking around, almost convinced I was being spied on. I felt embarrassed and aroused, unable to stop watching the stream rushing down between my legs, asking myself how I would ever manage to pee in his presence. Or avoid it, and his latest proposal.

The world that surrounds me is full of women who'd shriek at the mere thought of finding themselves in such a situation and men who, God only knows why, could talk for ever about it, were I to bring it up in conversation, their eyes shining as they imagine a woman squatting in a field. In men's imagination, there is seemingly no dividing line between cleanliness and filth: all that matters is whether something makes you hard or not. And where do I fit into that equation? Having spent nineteen years concocting a series of standard female fantasies, I meet Monsieur and, just from reading his texts, find myself besieged by an assortment of daydreams that only the shameless sensuality of a man could conjure. I am twenty, wearing a cotton dress and leggings. My alice band is like a halo across my blonde hair, but beneath my blue eyes, there is a man's brain, a man's precise and perverse mind. I don't know how I can regain my innocence, stop myself staring at Lucy's pretty arms with a man's lustful gaze. These days, my dreams are full of the way Monsieur looks at my cunt when it gapes open and, in the background, his wet cock readies itself for another assault. I no longer spend hours caressing myself thinking of the noise Monsieur makes as he walks into our hotel room, the muted sound of his shoes on the carpet, every step forward like another thrust inside me. Lately it's been fun to make a top ten of my recurring fantasies, starting with Monsieur plunging deep into my throat and coming, while I almost suffocate, unable to distinguish between his cum and my saliva. That, or the idea of two men inside me. My nights are full of indecent close-ups, smells emerging from nowhere; my nights are like Monsieur's hands on my neck, holding me in place, motionless. That's what Normandy is all about, on and on: hundreds of hours spent in silence, with a subterranean network of new imagined perversions. No one could have any idea of the horrors I come up with.

What do I want to be when I grow up? Like Monsieur, I aspire to be perverse.

Sitting on the couch, I'm kicking my heels. I watch Alice and Lucy argue over the computer and twiddle my thumbs. At times like this, I miss Paris so much. I feel impotent in the countryside. The further I am from Paris, the more my power over Monsieur diminishes. Holidaying here is like being in a convent: I can no longer bring to mind the city skyline when I'm confronted by the copper beeches outside. Even the colours are different: there is an overall shade of green that doesn't make sense, and I search in vain for the three hues I'm familiar with: the green of the RATP buses, that of the metal gratings of place Boucicault and, finally, the grey-green that dominates every Parisian statue. The sky is an exceptional blue, and the smell of the rain reminds me of endless days at my grandparents' home, when Monsieur was not yet around to fill my head with nonsense.

The storm has the after-taste of apocalypse: now hailstones as big as my fist are piercing the surface of the pond, and it's the middle of August. Only in Normandy would you find such a climate.

The blues. In Paris, many of the men I see regularly are back from holiday, or are gradually getting ready to leave. For some reason, Zylberstein is the one I'm most often on the phone to. But there is also his friend Octave, who cheered me up by mentioning ‘clit' in one of his texts; it made me feel warm inside as I imagined the strident sound of the diminutive word as spoken by a man.

I'm about to suggest we all do something I will no doubt come to regret very quickly, like yet another game of tarot, when my mobile starts vibrating. Almost two weeks since we were last in contact and Monsieur is acknowledging receipt of a mail I can barely remember, but in which I told him about my tribulations with Zylberstein: ‘I really enjoyed your letter . . .'

‘Hey, it's a message from Monsieur!' I type: ‘When was the letter dated? When did you get it? Don't you ever go on holiday?'

I'd crawl across the room on all fours for just a word from Monsieur, and I can't write about sex out of the blue, there and then. When it comes to him, I'm constantly in a state of need and reluctant to let him know it. But talking to him and getting impersonal messages are two very different things. Trying to imagine his voice reading the words to me is as productive as trying to wank with a broken finger. I want to hear his voice so much, and the more I think of it, the more it hurts.

Maybe if I explained things to him, with the right words, black on white, he would come to understand how I live in his absence. Maybe he wouldn't take a whole three days to respond to my texts with all their question marks and ‘call me back'. Maybe he would actually call me back.

We're halfway through a game of tarot when, at eight forty-five, Monsieur is calling me. Actually, the words ‘unknown caller' flash on the small screen, so it could be anyone, but I instinctively know it's him. I recognize the carnival masks he wears when he's on the phone, but most of all, since I've known him, I've come to experience a spectrum of cramps in the pit of my stomach when he rings. The ‘unknown caller' is well known to me. I snatch up my mobile, my arm brushing against the corner of the table, and Lucy immediately understands. I smile at her, suggesting she might follow me outside, the same Lucy who, that afternoon, had defiantly remarked that she had never seen me in a room with a man – me, of all people! Lucy wraps a blanket round her shoulders and leaves the room and the ongoing game, the game with me. I go outside.

‘You OK?'

‘What about you?' Monsieur answers.

It feels so good, so really good.

‘I enjoyed your letter. It reached me this morning,' he adds.

‘Only this morning?'

‘I read it while I was waiting for a patient. Made me laugh!'

Shoeless in the wet grass, I smile. ‘What are you doing right now?'

‘Driving home from work, I finished early. So, what did you want to tell me?'

‘Not much to say. I'm in Normandy. Bored stiff.'

Monsieur chuckles softly, and I can instantly picture him, his large hands on the steering-wheel, driving by instinct, his mind on our conversation. It's almost two months that Monsieur has been absent from my life, and I'd almost given up hope of speaking to him again. So much so that hearing him now feels as unreal as all those Tuesday mornings I can recall in every detail. Not for a second does he suspect the sort of life I've been living away from him. He sounds blissfully unaware that I have been in pain, or maybe he guessed and enjoyed it in the twisted way peculiar to him. But I'm not about to elucidate. I'd rather die: as far as Monsieur is concerned, Ellie has a life of her own when he's not around. And he's not completely wrong: I write. A book about him.

‘
Monsieur
is making steady progress.'

‘So you told me in your letter. You said it would be complete by September.'

‘I'll let you read it then.'

Monsieur's silences, which follow my peremptory statements, please me. That's how things work with Monsieur: when he doesn't actually say no, I instinctively translate it as yes.

‘What about Zylberstein?' Monsieur continues.

‘Oh, I stopped seeing him. Enough was enough, don't you think?'

‘Did he fuck you up the arse?'

I never quite know how Monsieur will react to any of my answers, Monsieur who's talking to me as if we're still together. I hazard: ‘Yes.'

‘Did it feel good?'

This is a new form of torture: should I say yes (meaning ‘live with it') or lie and not tell him that Zylberstein made me come?

‘It was good,' I answer, and as no one, apart from the metal heron in the centre of the pond, can see the expression on my face, I stand proudly, legs apart.

He should understand that I got from Zylberstein all that I could possibly get; he should understand that I came in spite of him, despite the looming shadow floating above me when I fuck that defies me to enjoy anything that it isn't part of. It happened and I can't say that when I came I didn't feel his presence close to me, I can't pretend I didn't feel like screaming his name. No, I can't say anything of the sort as even when I'm alone in my bed he is responsible for every crumb of pleasure I give myself, as I recite the two syllables of his name. Pitifully, I can't stop myself from saying: ‘But not as good as with you.'

‘Really? Why?'

‘Because he didn't do it the same way.'

‘How did he do it?'

‘You know . . .'

The right mood has been retrieved, in which Monsieur and I act out the roles of eternal lovers, and I relish the thought of revealing to him every detail of my evening with Zylberstein.

‘Actually, I was just leaving Édouard's place and—'

‘Édouard? Who's Édouard?'

‘A friend, who teaches French. I was with him that evening and he'd taken me from behind. Then Zylberstein called me as I was about to go to sleep, and I just felt like seeing him. So I took the Métro and went to his flat.'

‘Hold on, hold on. You're telling me you were fucked up the arse by two guys on the same evening?'

Monsieur sounds amazed, as if he'd had a journalistic scoop, that through my contact with him I'd become a true slut. I answer playfully: ‘Yeah, well. So then I went to see Zylberstein and—'

‘Two guys.' Monsieur sighs.

‘And when I told him I'd just been fucked in the arse, do you know what he said?'