Monsieur (34 page)

‘I'm coming,' he whispered, his fingers wrapping themselves around my hair.

I love you
, I thought, stroking his cheek with the back of my hand. ‘Come.'

He threw himself back, holding his cock in his hand, veins throbbing, bones, ligaments, even, a whole unthinkable architecture exposed. I let him endlessly ejaculate across my pussy. A last drop lingered and I caught it on the tip of a finger before bringing it to my mouth, begging him hoarsely: ‘Take me in your arms.'

In the yellow room, the silence sheltered a world of tenderness that reminded me of siestas with my parents when I was five. My voice a thin whisper, I said: ‘I don't want to talk banalities with you. We see so little of each other that I hate the fact I've already wasted so much time chatting about uni, my friends, all those meaningless things.'

‘Those meaningless things interest me,' Monsieur replied, his hands still firmly pressed against my chest. ‘Everything about you interests me.'

‘I want to talk about literature. It's what binds us. And I have so many things I want to tell you, ask you, it's almost like suffocating.'

I turned to face him fully. ‘Stay with me a little longer so that we can at least talk about Bataille.'

‘Ellie, do you really believe we can say all there is to say about Bataille in two or three hours? It's not the way, debating literature at a moment's notice. It's normal that we talk about our lives.'

‘I agree, but you never stay long enough to get past the preliminaries, and that's all I'm left with.'

Despondent, I lowered my chin and Monsieur suddenly rose, his hands still grasping my neck. ‘All my obligations weigh on me, you know.'

‘Yes.'

‘So what can we do, Ellie? Do you think we should stop seeing each other?'

‘I'm not sure. It's been some time since I've had any idea.'

‘You don't want to see me?'

‘
I don't know!'

For a few seconds, I buried my face in the pillow, trying to conceal my irritation. ‘You see, I treasure the rarity of our encounters, that I can sometimes count them on the fingers of one hand in an entire season. It makes it seem a much less banal story.'

‘Is that good or bad?'

‘It works both ways, you know that.'

‘I didn't want us to live like ordinary people. We're both worth so much more than that, you and I.'

Monsieur always spoke with such assurance that I didn't have the heart to argue. Hiding my face in his shoulder, I continued: ‘Fine, but maybe I would have preferred it if our relationship had been less extraordinary and I'd seen more of you. Maybe I would have liked to join you every week in a hotel and ask you how your wife was while you undressed. It would have been better than five minutes every three months or so and never having the opportunity to talk. It might sound terribly banal, but there wouldn't have been any harm in it. If other people act that way, it means it works.'

I felt his lips purse, buried in my hair, and knew that he was pouting. That was how his scorn manifested itself.

‘Do you think a story that just anyone could have lived through would have inspired you to write a book?'

‘I would still have been happier if I'd seen you more often. Sorry! Do you even know how many of the three hundred pages of my book were written because I couldn't see you and had to find a way to speak to you?'

Monsieur sighed, massaging my small breasts.

‘You don't give a damn.'

‘Of course I do! Why are you saying such things? If I could spend more time with you . . .'

‘But you never have time. Time is the one thing you don't have. I know that. And I'm sick and tired of sentences beginning with “if”.'

‘It's true I seldom have time. I work fourteen hours a day and have a family.'

‘So why won't you tell me it's over?'

‘Because I don't want it to be!'

What struck me right there and then? What came to my mind first? Was it
What a selfish bastard
or
He doesn't want to leave me
? Was I relieved or dismayed? My eyes dry, I looked ahead but could see nothing with any clarity.

‘So would you rather I went on following you, always crying or dripping with wet from my cunt?'

‘What can I say, Ellie? That I no longer wish to see you? I can't lie to you.'

‘I can't stand this going on indefinitely.'

‘If I said, “It's over,” it wouldn't change your need for me or mine for you.'

‘I can pretend. I'll move on to something else. I'm only twenty-one.'

Taken aback, Monsieur removed his warm hands from my hips. I let go of his arm, which flopped against mine, and said: ‘I don't want still to be in love with you when I'm forty-five. This is the other side of the coin: our story is so far from banal that I'll remember you all my life.'

‘So it's not a bad thing, is it?'

‘And you, when you're seventy, you'll think of me. Haven't we found a wonderful way to be ever miserable?'

And, for the first time, Monsieur pulled me against him, asking: ‘So what do we do?'

‘I don't know,' I answered.

I had to give him enough time to feel scared. I wanted him to stop asking me what we should do, take a firm decision, beg me to break the awful silence. For once, if only for a few seconds, he would know how it felt. But my resolve broke.

‘I don't want to follow in your wake. It leads nowhere. It makes me sad.'

‘What makes you sad?' Monsieur leaned towards me, his long hand working its way across my stomach, automatically mapping every curve to my intersection. If I'd closed my eyes, I would have felt closeted with a somewhat unconventional psychiatrist.

‘I've—' My throat tightened, and I dived into the refuge of the pillow again. Monsieur took my chin between his fingers, but I was already full of tears and knew that within a few seconds I'd have two streams of thick snot escaping my nose and my eyes would be all puffy, not what was needed right now.

‘Leave me alone!' I protested, but he flattened himself against me, his long warm body surrounding me, taking my face between his hands.

‘What is it, sweetie?'

‘And stop calling me “sweetie”. You call everyone “sweetie”.'

‘What's making you sad?'

‘You're so clever, you're so damn
clever
, and you still have no clue?'

‘I still don't know you well enough, Ellie.'

Motionless in his embrace, I tried to avoid his gaze, hoping I could conceal my tears and raw nostrils from him. But Monsieur pursued me. ‘I have no idea what goes on inside your head. What you expect of others, what you'd like to become, what you expect from me.'

‘It's all your fault. I—'

‘I know, darling, I know,' Monsieur interrupted, kissing my forehead, then the tip of my nose.

‘If you'd given me time, I would have told you everything about me. You could have known me so much better than all the others.' I sobbed uncontrollably, and the kiss he gave me to calm me tasted of salt. ‘It makes me sad never to be able to reach you on the phone, that you never answer my messages, that you never call me back, that you invariably offer me false hope, then let me down at the last moment. There's no way you can learn about me. Over ten months of frantic comings and goings you've never managed to free yourself for one lousy evening to spend it with me, and you have the cheek to tell me you don't want it to end!'

‘Ellie . . .'

‘And neither do I know you. I've written a book about you, but maybe I've got it all wrong. All I know of you is what you've been willing to let me see in just a few hours.'

I raised my eyebrows in the way that Babette says gives an inkling of what I might look like in twenty years. I hate it when I do that.

‘So, in a nutshell, that's what makes me sad. Not to know you, and being a semi-stranger to you makes me sad. And to know none of this affects you makes me sad.'

‘Who says it doesn't make me sad too?'

‘No one, actually. Everything you think I have to read between the lines. You never say anything to me.'

‘It does make me sad,' Monsieur says, his nose rubbing against mine, ‘that I don't know enough about you, that I don't see you, speak to you. It's all so horrible.'

I realised there was no point in saying anything more, I could just remain there coiled up against him, my face all sticky, and the situation would continue for some months still, conditions unchanged, with the faint hope of catching his attention, attracting his favours looming over an improbable horizon. We'd been stuck here for almost a year now. It wasn't after a whole year I was likely to find a place for myself between Monsieur and his wife, isolated from his likely other girlfriends, in the margins, considered when he felt distracted, remembered when convenient. Forcing strangled sounds from my throat, I suggested:

‘So tell me it's over, then.'

‘I can't do such a thing.'

‘How bloody selfish you are!'

I rose on the bed, shamelessly wiping my nose, now on my knees facing Monsieur who was still lying down, his mouth opening to come up with further objections.

‘You just don't want to exclude the possibility of being able to fuck me whenever you feel like it. It's all too human, but do understand how unhappy it makes me feel.'

‘You knew when we first began seeing each other how little time I had. Every time I see you, they happen to be minutes stolen from my time-table, my work, my . . .'

‘Don't start mentioning her.'

Her
. Since when do I talk like a common mistress?

‘Don't talk to me about your wife. I've always had the good taste to never include her in all the obstacles preventing us from seeing each other. I've never wanted to be in competition with her.'

‘I never saw you competing with her, but it's also because she exists that I can't look after you better. It's the life I chose, long ago.'

‘Or maybe you just don't give a damn about it all.'

Monsieur suddenly grew stiff, and his fingers gripped the sheets, with all the white-knuckle intensity he usually displayed before he came. A bad sign. His voice full of fatherly aggravation, as if a single extra expression of rebellion would see him explode.

‘When will you ever cease thinking that I don't give a damn?'

‘When you do something to prove the contrary,' I answered, convinced he could never raise his hand to me, whatever the provocation. ‘When you have the guts to tell me it's over, because you accept you will never have the time to properly spend with me.'

‘Should I call you more often? Is that what the problem is all about?'

‘Who said there was a problem?'

A knot in my throat, I slipped my knickers on.

‘For over eight months now, I've been crawling around at your feet, hoping you'd notice me, start talking to me as if I were an adult. Maybe I'm the one who was wrong, or you were wrong to let me act in this way, but these are the facts: I can't go on like this.'

‘I never wanted to make you unhappy.'

‘I know. No one ever wanted to make someone else unhappy. No one ever wants to make someone else unhappy, but it happens.'

‘As far as I'm concerned, I still want to keep on seeing you.'

He sounded like a child who's been sent to the corner, and it made me want to throw myself into his arms. It might have been a gentle deception, clever manipulation, I had no proof that Monsieur was genuinely in pain. Or experiencing as much pain as I did. That the thought of no longer having regular contact with me was truly affecting him. That just saying my first name had become painful, or even thinking it. I had a choice between throwing myself into his arms or hating myself for not doing so, or staying there like a pillock on my knees and come to regret months later a final occasion to breathe in his perfume, feel his whole body surround me. Clenching my fists, I nervously laughed, like a door closing, unable to look into his eyes.

‘Neither do I want us to stop seeing each other. It's the last thing I want to do. Do you think I have anyone else in my life who can talk to me about Aragon or Mandiargues the way you do?'

‘We can always talk, no need to make love,' Monsieur earnestly suggested.

‘You know all too well it's impossible. I'll still be consumed by the need to touch you. And you'll always feel compelled to mess about with me under café tables. I will see so little of you. Even less than now. But it will still be enough to remind me of how things used to be, having you as mine. It won't change anything.'

‘So what, Ellie? We stop calling each other, talking, finding out how we are?'

‘I stop calling you, talking to you, asking after you. And you continue as you've always done.'

‘So we're saying it's over?'

I clenched my teeth, exasperated by Monsieur's repetitive propensity for pushing me all the way, ignoring how much I had shed my naivety away from him. So, a final form of provocation, my heart beating wildly, I cried out:

‘Yeah, it is, it's over.'

Then, reassuring myself:

‘A decision had to be reached.'

I could have fainted a hundred times over as I got dressed. Leggings. Knickers. High-collared Claudine dress. Bensimon trainers. Monsieur kept on watching me, as if he was holding an invisible piece of string keeping my nose pointed straight in his direction so that I might gauge his reaction but mostly I was gradually becoming aware of the fact I would never be seeing him again. It was difficult to get my mind around it. His eyes followed my movements with such calm equanimity confirming my deepest conviction: he had known, all evening, that I would be leaving him. That, in some way, I'd partly left him some time ago. And that my final flight had, consciously or not, long been planned. So why, oh why was he staring at me like this? Why did it feel as if he felt offended at the spectacle of my escape?