A Paris Affair (7 page)

*   *   *

His wife is preparing the baby’s bottle. Her face drawn by the sleepless nights she has endured since the child’s birth. The baby screams impatiently, wriggling in his crib. Stifling a yawn, she warms up the bottle. The baby is choking with rage, his face turning purple. She takes him in her arms and cuddles him. He calms down. She puts a bib around the baby’s neck, grabs the bottle, checks the temperature by pouring a few drops onto her wrist, and settles down to feed him. He drinks slowly and greedily, staring up into her bluish eyes. She is almost asleep on her chair, with this hot bundle pressed close against her. All is quiet. She feels tired. The baby burps on her shoulder; she tells him he’s a good boy, changes his diaper, and puts him back in his crib, a stuffed animal to one side and a musical box to the other. She winds up the musical box, but he’s already falling asleep. So she tiptoes out of the room and goes to take a look at his big sister, who is also asleep—that deep sleep of early childhood, breathing light and regular, round pink cheeks, teddy bear gripped tightly in her hands.

As she undresses, she realizes he is still not back. It’s forty-five minutes since he left to drive the babysitter home. And yet she doesn’t live far away. She shrugs, then slides into bed with a sigh of relief. He must be looking for a parking spot. She falls asleep as fast as her son. The next feeding is in five hours’ time.

As he enters the silent apartment, his heart is speeding. He listens carefully. Not a sound. He slips into the bathroom and takes a shower. He examines his penis. It looks a little red, the skin sore. Nervously he soaps it. Then he gets out of the shower and dries himself. He rolls on deodorant and sprays himself with cologne. He does not look in the mirror. He puts on a T-shirt and a pair of boxer shorts, then goes to look at his children sleeping, as he does every night. Tonight, there is an ashy taste at the back of his throat. He forces himself not to think anymore about that furtive blow job in the woods, about that stranger’s mouth sucking him, about the vague excitement he felt. He gets in bed next to his wife, who is sleeping the innocent sleep of the exhausted young mother.

*   *   *

A few months later, in February, she asks him sleepily as he sneaks into bed, “Why does it always take you so long to drive the babysitter home?”

In the darkness, he turns red.

“Traffic…”

“At this time of night?”

“There’s always traffic at this time of night.”

“We should try to find someone who lives locally.”

“Yeah,” he says.

*   *   *

In May, his son is six months old. He’s sleeping through the night. His wife is less tired. They start making love again. But he still feels drawn by the secret world of the woods, by those women who wait there, always available. He doesn’t feel as if he’s cheating on his wife because those women who dispense oral pleasure in the privacy of his car have no names, no addresses, no telephone numbers. And he limits himself to fellatio with protection; he would never have intercourse with them. That would be going too far. That would be cheating on his wife. He thinks he is not cheating on her like this, because he is not penetrating another woman.

Sometimes he goes there during the day. He goes to a different forest, farther away, because he’s afraid of seeing someone he knows. Instead of eating lunch with his colleagues, he drives off in his car. He now approaches these women unhesitatingly. He chooses one quickly, she gets in, he hands her the cash, and it’s all over in a few minutes. He goes back to the office, filled with a growing self-disgust. He loves his wife deeply, sincerely, but he also loves these sordid desires that rise up within him, those anonymous lips, those women who never say no. He loves roaming these hot places, seeing this display of flesh, the garish makeup, the obscene lingerie. Every day, he fights against these buried urges. Every morning, when he wakes up, he tells himself he has to stop before it’s too late. But each time he ends up driving to the woods, fascinated by this perverted drive-thru. He knows he could never talk to his wife about it. She wouldn’t understand. She would never accept it. He can imagine all too well how her face—her very existence—would collapse if she ever found out.

Does she ever suspect, when she cooingly secures her children into their seats in the back of the car, that dozens of prostitutes have sat in her seat and have put her husband’s erect penis into their mouths to make him come?

Yes, she suspects something. She thinks that the babysitter is perhaps her husband’s mistress. In June, she casually asks the girl how long it takes to drive to her house. “Ten minutes.” She asks if there’s much traffic on the roads, around midnight. “Hardly ever,” the girl replies.

She thinks about this. So, he should be home within half an hour at most, whereas he usually takes more than an hour. She is not a naturally suspicious woman, but she is not stupid either. She is a calm person, quite mature for someone of twenty-eight. She has been married for five years and she loves her husband deeply. She has never doubted him before.

“Are you happy?” she asks him that evening.

“The happiest man in the world.”

“And do you love me?”

“More than ever.”

“Have you ever cheated on me?”

“Never.”

“Have you ever wanted to cheat on me?”

“Never.”

She looks at him steadily. He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t appear guilty. But she puts her plan in action, all the same, just to be sure. She borrows her sister’s car for two days. She leaves her daughter with a friend for the night. She goes out to the movies and a restaurant with her husband. The babysitter looks after their son. They get home around midnight. She pays the girl. Her husband has stayed in the car, to take her home. She hears the car door bang and the engine roar. She races to her son’s bedroom, picks him up, as gently as possible, and places him in a bassinet. Then she leaves the apartment, puts the baby in the backseat of her sister’s car, and gets behind the wheel. She can no longer see her husband’s car, but she knows which way he is going because she knows where the babysitter lives. After a few minutes, she catches up with his car, and follows it from a distance. Checking her watch, she notes that the trip took no more than ten minutes. The metallic blue car stops; the girl gets out, waves good-bye, types in her entry code, and disappears through a gateway. So it’s not her; the babysitter is not the mistress. “What now?” she hisses.

To go home, he has to take the first left. But instead he drives straight on, and he drives fast. She follows him through dark, deserted streets. The baby is asleep. She is frightened, uneasy; her heart is pounding. But she wants—needs—to know the truth. The woods stretch toward them, black and tentacular. Still she tails her husband. There are lots of cars here; she is afraid of losing him. Where is he going? She doesn’t understand. Does he have a mistress on the other side of the woods?

Then she sees the prostitutes. Fluttering eyelids, blowing kisses, no more than a few yards between each of them, they flash their breasts, butts, and thighs to the passing cars. She feels her throat tighten. In the back of the car, the baby moans in his sleep. Her husband’s car comes to a halt. She brakes, and hears the honk of a horn from the car behind. Quickly she overtakes him, watching her rearview mirror, then stops a little farther on, eyes riveted to the little reflective rectangle. She sees a prostitute get in her husband’s car. The baby grumbles. He’s lost his pacifier. She doesn’t hear. The blue car makes a U-turn, and hurriedly she does the same thing, tires squealing. It turns in to an empty path. She extinguishes her headlights and drives slowly behind it. Silence descends upon the woods. She can no longer hear the raucous laughter, the traffic noise. He has switched off his engine, so she does the same. She can’t see much. The baby has fallen asleep again. She gets out of her car and quietly closes the door. There is a thick carpet of moss and twigs beneath her sandals. The night air is pleasantly cool. It feels like the countryside. She walks toward the blue car.

And then the moon, as if taunting her, emerges from behind a cloud, and she sees her husband’s face, contorted by pleasure. She moves closer still, her heart rent in two. Between her husband’s thighs she sees a head of brown hair, busily moving up and down.

Suddenly the baby screams, loud in the night. The man jumps, opens his eyes, and sees his wife standing in front of the car. He freezes, paralyzed with horror. The prostitute lifts her head and she, too, stares speechlessly at this sad, beautiful young woman bathed in moonlight.

His wife looks at him with sorrow, with pain, with disgust. Before leaving, she removes her wedding ring and places it delicately on the hood of the car, without a word.

T
HE
P
ASSWORD

If we are to make reality endurable,

we must all nourish a fantasy or two.

—M
ARCEL
P
ROUST
(1871–1922),
Within a Budding Grove

Hunter Logan is rather beautiful. She has turquoise eyes—a particular color found only across the Atlantic, in certain areas of Massachussetts; an intense blue, verging on green, with flecks of gold. She also has long, fair hair that turns platinum blond in the summer. She is a slender, square-jawed American girl with a predatory smile and athletic thighs. Sometimes people tell her she looks like the actress Cameron Diaz.

Hunter came to live in Paris for a year in order to improve her French. She is taking classes at the university and staying with a cantankerous aristocratic woman on Avenue Marceau, at the corner of Rue de Bassano. It is a large, dilapidated apartment with damp bathrooms and dingy bedrooms, but as soon as she saw it Hunter fell in love with its moldings and its marble fireplace, so decorative and so very Parisian.

Madame de M. has to rent out her rooms to students in order to make ends meet. Since the death of her husband and the departure of her six children, she has not been able to bear the thought of selling this two-hundred-square-meter apartment and leaving Avenue Marceau, where she has lived for fifty years. In order to extract the maximum amount of money for the minimum amount of comfort, she rents the rooms to American students, preferably wealthy ones, who are all charmed—as Hunter was—by the view of the Arc de Triomphe, the proximity of the Champs-
É
lys
é
es and the Eiffel Tower. And high-spirited eighteen-year-old Hunter is able to simply close her eyes to the tepid bathwater, the roaches, and the viscountess’s sour moods.

The ban on using the landline doesn’t bother her tenants either. The ingenious Savannah, from Colorado—a computer studies major who spends more time in nightclubs than in front of her laptop—managed to hack into the upstairs neighbors’ Wi-Fi connection, and Hunter is able to use this, too.

*   *   *

Hunter is a well-behaved young girl. Unlike Savannah, she rarely goes out. She has a boyfriend, Evan, who stayed in Boston to continue his degree in medicine, with whom she talks on Skype several times a week. The photograph of Evan is on her bedside table. He is a serious-looking blond boy with perfect teeth. Hunter thinks she will marry him. Hunter’s family is displayed above the fireplace: her parents, Jeff and Brooke; her younger sister, Holly; her brother, Thorn; and Inky the Labrador.

Sometimes, at night, staring up at the ceiling before falling asleep, she listens to the ceaseless rumble of traffic on Avenue Marceau, and the large family house on Carlton Street, which she had never left before, seems so far away that her heart aches. When she feels homesick like this, she sometimes walks down the endless hallway, the wooden floorboards creaking beneath her feet, to the huge, dusty salon with its furniture covered in white sheets. Hunter opens the rusty shutters on one of the five windows and walks out onto the balcony that runs around the entire building. Standing there and watching the city—the Place de l’Etoile, the coming and going of cars—makes her feel better.

One night, intoxicated by the indefinable odor of Paris, she felt a bony hand touch her shoulder, and gasped.

“What are you doing here?” wheezed Madame de M., dressed in an old bathrobe.

Hunter smiled. “Admiring your city,” she replied in her American-accented French.

The old lady observed her for a few moments. Then a smile softened her face. “Quite right,” she whispered. “You should make the most of it.” Hunter was surprised to notice that Madame de M. had suddenly started using the familiar
tu
form with her.

And Madame de M. went away, leaving the young woman alone with her thoughts.

*   *   *

Since moving to Paris, Hunter had still not gotten used to the interest she seemed to inspire in Parisian men. Even though Savannah had explained to her that all Frenchmen were obsessed by women—that this was a widely known fact she simply had to accept—she couldn’t help feeling ill at ease when confronted with those insistently staring eyes, those unambiguous whispers, and sometimes, walking in the Jardin du Luxembourg, she would break into a sprint in order to escape the attentions of a lone man. Even in winter, with her wrapped up in a padded anorak, men would still find some way to hit on her. To begin with, it had been flattering. Now it was simply annoying.

As soon as the sun rose each morning, the males of Paris seemed to lose their minds. Sitting on caf
é
terraces, they spent their days watching women. Especially on the Left Bank, Hunter noticed. All it took was a bare knee on Boulevard Saint-Germain and they were thrown into a frenzy. On sunny days, Savannah and a gang of American girls more brazen than Hunter would sit outside Les Deux Magots like princesses. Older men, with suntanned faces and graying temples, would drive past in convertibles and offer them weekends in Deauville or Saint-Tropez, screen tests for a movie, the cover of a magazine. As for Hunter, she would walk back to Avenue Marceau reading
Swann in Love
for the French literature course given by her young professor, Jerome D., at the university.