Monsieur (7 page)

‘You should come and watch me perform an operation,' you suggested, a few minutes later, nibbling my neck.

It would be so risky to join you at my uncle's old clinic in that pretty part of the Marais, where hordes of nurses might recognize me as the little girl with flat shiny shoes running up and down the corridors when nice Dr Cantrel visited. I would have to invent university coursework to justify my presence and lie to at least twenty people to drag the sexual tension and sheer wrongness of our affair into the aseptic operating block.

‘That would be so cool!' I answered.

And then you left, in the middle of a fascinating conversation rudely interrupted by your damn phone. I jumped from the bed, scattering cushions and pillows, shrieking wildly, ‘No! Stay a little longer!' In truth, I was strangely anxious to be alone so that I could examine my memories with forensic attention. There was little I could do while still in your presence: I could store away precise images of you, fragments of conversations and the sound of your velvet voice. Maybe I already knew how much I would miss the aura that surrounded you.

‘I can't, sweetheart. I have to go to work. But believe me . . .'

Another meaningful gaze.

‘. . . it's the last thing I wish to do.'

I would hear many similar excuses, punctuating the course of our narrative. Weren't we characters in a script? Remember how you took flight, that final, pensive look in your eyes as you reached halfway down the stairs, me standing with naked breasts on the landing, framed by the door, still steaming with lust. As if you were exiting stage left. Once I returned to the room, traumatized by your departure, I went through the motions of an actress after a show, packing up my makeup, folding my clothes, bone tired but happy. I smoked, sitting on the bed, facing the open window, absolutely starving. Physically, it felt much like the first time, the same recognizable lassitude; a deep craving to fill myself with pasta, chips, peanuts, shandy, to feel complete again.

But when I got home, having hurled my bags onto the bed, I couldn't even summon the strength to walk up to the kitchen. Spread out beneath my bed cover, I closed my eyes, trying to muster the energy to heat a saucepan of something, and woke at five o'clock, refreshed. My sister watched me drown a whole packet of
biscottes
in cold milk and frowned. Perhaps she'd noticed the purple rings of makeup and fatigue around my eyes.

‘What's up?' I queried, somewhat aggressively.

She was sitting next to me at the table. I could hear the distinctive murmur of her breathing.

‘Nothing,' she answered, without looking at me, and I knew that she knew.

Something had betrayed me.

ELLIE

A good thing my mother is still asleep. I would have found it pretty awkward to explain why I had dressed like this on a Wednesday morning during the student strikes. At eight o'clock. Without even being conscious of it, I'd done myself up like the perfect tart. The world surrounding me may be unaware of it, but I'm not. It's the way my legs hurt from wearing these heels, and my skirt's designed to be pulled off in one movement.

I stop a taxi, the posh way to reach the opulent Marais district. I'm already late anyway. By at least twenty minutes. All the way to the Gare de Lyon, I alternately watched the cab's ticking meter and my watch. My mobile phone didn't ring. Afraid. I can't even be a proper mistress. I'm twenty, I'm jobless, I spend my life sleeping: I should always be on time for Monsieur.

And then, I don't know how, everything changes. I see the Saint-Paul church, its slate roof bathing in the warm early-morning sun, all the fools in their two-piece suits strolling like robots to their tiny offices, while I'm sitting here, oblivious, in my skirt and high heels, travelling to the man who had me years ago (or was it just two days ago?), to watch him perform in his surgical scrubs, laughing in the face of danger personified by the doctors and nurses who dined at my uncle's when I was only five, my head in the clouds. I must talk to someone. I must call someone or I'll start to scream: it's happiness, stage fright. If not I'll explode into a million pieces. I must call Babette. It's ten to nine and she'll kill me, but no matter.

Babette must have gone to bed late and smoked a lot with her boyfriend. Her voice has the charm of a betting-shop manageress's.

‘Is it important? If not, I'm falling asleep while you're talking.'

‘Don't go back to sleep. I must share this amazing moment with you!' I'm like a cat on hot bricks, watching the rue de Rivoli speed by outside the cab window.

At the other end of the line, Babette is shaking herself awake. Knowing her, she's already sitting cross-legged and lighting a Lucky Strike. I like Babette. Ines would have hung up on me without a second thought.

‘Guess where I am?'

‘I haven't a clue. Somewhere that makes you happy.'

‘I'm in a taxi, near Saint-Paul. I'm about to watch Monsieur at the clinic, operating.'

Seconds pass, and Babette is totally silent. I'm dismayed.

‘And . . . I don't know . . . I just had to tell someone . . . explain how madly happy I feel. Not that it seems to have had any effect on you.'

‘May I point out to you again that I've just woken up? So, you're going to see Monsieur, then?'

‘Absolutely.'

‘But you saw him yesterday!' she shrieks, as if it were now her turn to be agitated. ‘Are you mad?'

‘I promised him I'd go to the clinic and watch him operate.'

‘And you're trying to justify the fact that you give in to his every whim.'

‘Maybe . . .' I admit, red-faced but proud to have become his whim.

Whims are so underrated: the way they consume you from the inside, evidence of immaturity; it's easy to forget how vital they can be, the craving they represent for beauty or more. After all, I'm only twenty. What more could you expect of me? I don't care that I have to rise at seven thirty in the morning on a strike day to fit into Monsieur's timetable, so that he can see admiration as well as desire in my eyes. But Babette doesn't share my view. ‘You'll kill me,' I tell her. ‘There I was, flying through the cloudless sky like a seagull, and you're taking aim at me all the way.'

‘Not at all. Anyway, you know that you and him, it can't go anywhere. Might as well enjoy it while it lasts.'

‘Did you have to say that?'

The driver manoeuvres the taxi into the rue du Roi-de-Sicile (we're getting so close and my whole body is on edge), and Babette bursts out laughing. Then she says, ‘I just don't want to have to pick up the pieces. Anyway, go ahead and let Monsieur pinch your tits under those awful blue pyjamas.'

‘So I have your blessing?
On the right, here, please
.'

‘Sure. Although I know I'll regret that when you come to me with tears in your eyes, but we're all fallible. We can't predict the future, can we? Who cares? Two seconds of pleasure versus two weeks of pain? Just go for it.'

‘OK, I have to hang up. We're almost at the clinic and you're giving me the creeps.'

‘Go and get drunk with happiness.'

I can't help laughing, but I sense that Babette's last words will come back to haunt me. I get out of the taxi, almost stumble, and there I am, at the clinic. Remember, Ellie, when you were only ten you hated to be brought here, and now a few years later you've actually spent thirty euros to get to the place faster.

Those were the days, when I tried to hide around the corners in corridors to escape the visits: twenty minutes of being stroked by patients who gushed at the sight of the cluster of little blonde girls hanging on to Dr Cantrel's coat, in rooms stinking of ether and pain, and as a bonus, the occasional sight of enormous, bleeding lines of stitches across the knees of sobbing old women. I can remember how my sister Louise was unable to eat the piece of chocolate she had been offered by the nurses, arguing it must taste like the scabs she had seen on the shin of an Algerian workman. We spent hours – or so it felt to us – in the waiting room, Alice hiding from the doctors behind Philippe's legs. Disgusted as I was by the spectacle of wounds and the heavy smell of medicine, I was endlessly fascinated by the way others looked up at him with respect and gratitude. You could be a famous surgeon and still run around the Luxembourg Gardens with a swarm of brats in your wake, or take hold of our small hands, sticky with popcorn, to guide us across the rue de Rennes. It was only, many years later, when I visited the clinic that I
realized
we had a doctor in the family. That was also the first time I came across Monsieur, or at any rate the anonymous pair of grey eyes he then was.

Another real-life-encounter memory. It's all coming back to me, like a dream, or maybe even a sequence from a good erotic movie. An evening party on the occasion of my uncle's birthday: I was barely eighteen, and we must have ignored each other.

(How curious it is that the men we love already exist in their own right before our perception changes them and they enter the familiarity of our world.)

How nice it would have been if he had already known then that the plump, blonde schoolgirl sitting at the table across from him would one day encircle his body with her legs. I can almost feel the tension in the air: halfway through a formal conversation I could have whispered in his ear, ‘I will become your mistress,' then moved away from the table, still wearing my school uniform, leaving him to guess at the shape of my breasts under the T-shirt, and what the whole body he would caress two years later actually looked like. Sliding like a snake between tables and chairs, spreading my smell across him, like a spell, as my hands waved in the air. It would have been nice to be able to watch him silently, and then, under the cover of innocence, speak to him, make him laugh, imagine myself naked against him. I can picture an evening spent moving together from room to room, not daring to do anything. Then, in a neglected corner of the house, Monsieur and I would begin to debate literature, he sitting in a deep armchair, me cross-legged on the bed at the other end of the room. The door wide open, he would not have tolerated any suggestion of impropriety, even though those few stolen minutes away from the other guests would have been full of unspoken cravings deep inside our guts. Monsieur understands perfectly what lies behind a young girl's eyes, when she is at an age that makes men reluctant to respond to her smiles. He is one of those men who recognize the way blushes spread across cheeks, the initial listlessness clouding the eyes, and responds accordingly, already so cleverly aware of what lies in wait beneath the mask.