Feelings of Fear (22 page)

She came up to him and unfastened the top button of his shirt. He looked down at her – at her calm, perfect face; at the trees of pale blue veins in her breasts; at her stiffened, rouge-brown nipples.

“How old are you?” he asked her, with a phlegmy catch in his throat.

“Eighteen and a half,” she replied, unfastening another button, and another, and running her fingernails lightly through the hair on his chest.

“You're having a baby, and yet you're still doing
this?”

“What else can I do?”

“You can contact your local department of welfare, for starters. You can get all kinds of financial help. You're a single mother-to-be, for Christ's sake, you're entitled. You don't have to work for Mme Leduc.”

“But I do.”

“No, listen to me, you don't. This really isn't suitable work for anybody who's pregnant.”

She looked up at him. “So what are you trying to tell me? That you wouldn't have picked me if you'd known that I was fat?”

“You're not fat, you're pregnant, and if you want to know the truth I find you extremely attractive. But this isn't socially responsible.”

“You don't want me, then? You want Eloise instead? Or Martine?”

“I didn't say that. I simply said that in your condition you shouldn't be working in a bordello.”

“I don't have any choice.”

“Yes, you do. You
do
have a choice. There are plenty of people you can turn to. I mean, what about your parents?”

She looked away. “Dead, both of them.”

“Brothers or sisters? Aunts or uncles?”

She shook her head.

“Then, listen, maybe
I
can help you.”

She said, “I don't want you to help me. I don't want you even to try. This is what I do. This is what I am. Other men have offered to help me, too, and every time I have to tell them the same thing.”

Vincent didn't know what to do. He walked over to the white-blinded window and then he walked back again.

“You came here for pleasure,” said Catherine, standing exposed in front of him, making no attempt to hide her complete nakedness with her hands. “Why don't you enjoy it while you're here?”

She came up to him and stood close so that her distended stomach touched the bulge in his pants. “Pleasing men is what I do best. I got pregnant, pleasing a man. Let me please you too.”

“I don't know. I—”

She kissed his chest. She unbuttoned the last of his shirt buttons and then she started to unbuckle his belt.

“What about the baby?” he said, weakening. “Isn't it dangerous or anything?”

“There's plenty of room inside me,” she said, pulling down his zipper. “Once I had three men inside me all at once, and baby, too.” Without any hesitation, she wrested his rising cock out of his shorts,
and pushed him back toward the bed. He sat down on it, and she dragged off his pants and his socks.

“Listen,” he said, “maybe a blowjob'll do it … I don't want to take any risks.” But he could hear his own voice and he knew how ineffectual he sounded. He wanted her desperately, he wanted her so much that his cock was visibly pulsing with every heartbeat. She pressed him down so that he was lying amongst all of those white downy cushions, and then she knelt beside him and took his cock into her mouth, running her tongue around his shiny purple helmet, sucking at it, licking it, and then sliding her tongue all the way down to his walnut-crinkled balls.

From where he was lying he could see underneath her body, her big swaying breasts, her rounded stomach. He reached out and cupped her breasts, feeling her rigid nipples brushing against his palms. Then he smoothed his hands around her stomach. He was surprised how hard it was, how tight it was. He thought to himself:
another man has fucked her, and left life inside her, and here it is, growing.
Although he couldn't understand why, he found the idea of it unbelievably erotic.

As she sucked him, he looked down the length of the bed toward the cheval mirror, and through the curtains of her hair he could see her lips enclosing his red, glistening shaft. She glanced up, and caught sight of his reflection. She smiled, and gave the head of his cock a long, lascivious lick.

In return, he lifted her right leg so that she was kneeling right over him. Right in front of him was her smooth crimson vulva, her lips thickened with pregnancy, her vagina flooded with juice. He buried his face in it like a man burying his face into a watermelon, licking as deep inside her as he could, then taking whole mouthfuls of her and sucking her until she let his cock out of her mouth and gasped, and pushed her hips even more forcefully into his face.

He lost all awareness of time. He gave her one orgasm after another, until her stomach was rock-hard and he was afraid that she was going to give birth. At the same time, she played with him, bringing him right to the edge of ejaculation and then letting him subside, until his balls ached and he was right on the edge of anger.

The bedroom was dark when she led him over to the chaise-longue and made him lie on his back. She straddled him, looking down at him, and it was so gloomy now that he couldn't see her face beneath the shadows of her hair. He could smell her, though. Her sex and her perfume and the same smell that he had detected on Mme Leduc: the smell of memories.

“I think you should make love to me properly,” she whispered. “It's what you want, isn't it, to share my body with my baby?”

He half-rose, saying, “I can't.” But she pushed him back again. She took hold of his erect penis and positioned herself right over it. She rubbed the head of his penis backward and forward between her lips until it was slippery with juice. “You want to meet my baby?” she teased him. “Don't tell me that you don't want to meet my baby.”

She sank down on him, until he was buried right inside the warm elastic tightness of her body. She leaned forward so that her nipples touched his chest, and then she kissed him, and made a snorting sound of satisfaction in his ear. He climaxed with such violence that his whole world went dark.

It was almost eight o'clock when he left her sleeping on the four-poster bed. He dressed, and crept out, taking one last look at her. She was lying on her back with her hand lying idly between her legs, her hair fanned out across one of the pillows. It unnerved him to think that he had probably started to fall in love with her. He knew for sure that he would have to see her again. You can't have an encounter like this and just forget about it, just let it go.

He had never experienced an afternoon like it in his life. The way she had eaten his balls as if they were fruit. The way she had rubbed him until he had climaxed all over her breasts, and it had dripped from her nipples like milk.

“I want to feed my baby, when it's born,” she had told him, massaging his sperm around and around.

“So when will that be, exactly?”

“I looked at my horoscope and my horoscope said soon.”

“What about your gynecologist?”

She had frowned at him as if she didn't understand what he meant.

He walked back along the gloomy corridor feeling both elated and deeply guilty. He loved her, he wanted her, but he knew that he had to save her, too. He had to save her from Mme Leduc. Most of all he had to save her from men like him.

He had almost reached the hallway when he saw the shield-shaped plaque on the wall. He stopped, and peered at it, like Lawrence of Arabia peering at a mirage. It said
“École St Agathe, fondée 1923,”
and underneath the lettering was an emblem of a goose flying from a blood-red lake.

He was still peering at it when a voice said, “Did you have a good time, Vincent?” He turned to see Mme Leduc standing in the hallway. He didn't know whether it was the dim evening light or maybe his own sexual satiation that made her look older, much older, and far less beautiful. She looked rather like the Snow Queen, from the story that his mother used to tell him when he was young, frigid and stern.

“I had a very good time, thank you,” he told her. “Well … let's put it this way, I had a very interesting time.”

She reached out and stroked his cheek. Her colorless eyes were almost sad.

“Why do you—” he began, and hesitated. Then he managed to say, “Why do you
do
this? These girls, they're all so young. They have so much in front of them … so much life to lead.”

“You disapprove,” she said. “I thought, from the moment that I opened the door, that you would disapprove.”

“It's not that I disapprove. It's more like I don't understand.”

She gave him a smile like diluted milk. She unfolded and refolded her negligée and gave him the briefest flash of heavy white breasts, with areolas the color of rose-petals, as they turn to brown.

“It isn't necessary for you to understand, Vincent. All you have to do is to enjoy yourself, and pay.”

“I mean, how did you
discover
this place?” Vincent asked Baubay, as they drove back toward Montreal along the Laurentian Autoroute. “It's great, I'll grant you that, but it's so strange.”

“What's strange about it? I think it's very normal. I went to a club in San Francisco where everybody was jerking off all over the place and there were three guys trying to make out with a one-legged woman. You've been closeted, Vincent. You don't know the half of what goes on. Group sex, leather clubs, bestiality. Compared to all of that, Mme Leduc is respectability itself.”

“So how did you find it?”

“Some guy at Dane Shearman Philips told me about it. Mme Leduc encourages her clients to pass on her card to anybody who might appreciate what she has to offer.”

“Seven young girls, not much more than eighteen years old. One of them six months' pregnant.”

“Don't tell me you didn't enjoy it. Don't tell me you won't be going back.”

Vincent said nothing, but looked ahead at the glittering lights of downtown Montreal. It looked unreal, like a city painted on the sky.

And of course he did go back, only three days later, and on his own this time. The hot weather had broken into a thunderous electric storm, and even though he parked his rental car right outside the house he was soaked by the time he reached the porch. He was still drying his face with his handkerchief when the door opened and Mme Leduc appeared – dressed in a robe of peach-colored silk.

“Why Vincent. I didn't expect you so soon.”

“I should have called, I know, but I didn't know your number.”

“And you didn't want to ask François for it, because you didn't want François to know that you were coming here?”

Vincent gave an awkward shrug. “I just wanted to see Catherine, that's all. Well, I wanted to see you, too.”

“You'd better come in, then,” she said, as another deafening burst of thunder shook the roof of the house.

Vincent followed her inside. “I'm worried about Catherine, if you must know. I haven't been able to get her off my mind.”

“You're not the first.”

“It's just that it isn't right, a pregnant girl having unprotected sex
with strange men. Think of the infections she could pick up. Think of the baby.”

“You
had sex with her.”

“Yes, I did. And I feel more guilty about it than I can possibly tell you.”

“So what do you propose to do?”

“I propose to make you an offer. Let me take Catherine away from here so that she can have her baby someplace quiet and comfortable, with a decent clinic nearby. I'll make sure you're not out of pocket. If you work out her potential earnings for, say, the next six months, I'll pay you in advance.”

Mme Leduc took him through to the living-room. The blinds were still drawn tight and it was so gloomy that he could barely see her. “Why don't you sit down?” she asked him. “Would you like some tea, or a glass of wine?”

“No, no thank you. I just want to hear you say that Catherine can come with me.”

Mme Leduc stood facing the mirror over the fireplace, so that Vincent could see only her dim reflection. “I'm afraid that's impossible, Vincent. None of us can leave this house, ever.”

“Why the hell not? What happens when the girls get older, and lose their looks? You can't run a cathouse with a collection of senior citizens, can you?”

Mme Leduc was silent for a long time. Then she said, “If I tell you why Catherine can't leave, will you promise me that you'll leave here, and never come back, and forget all about her?”

“How can I make a promise like that?”

“It's for her own good, that's why.”

“Well, I don't know. I'll think about it, okay? That's as far as I'm prepared to go.”

“Very well,” said Mme Leduc. “I suppose that'll have to do.” She turned around and came toward him, standing so close that he could have lifted his hand and touched her face. “A long time ago, in the 1920s, this used to be a school, an academy for young girls.”

“I saw the noticeboard in the corridor. St Agathe's, right?”

“That's right. It was quite a famous school, and diplomats and wealthy businessmen used to send their daughters here during the
summer to learn cookery and dressmaking and riding and all the social skills.”

“I see. Kind of a finishing school.”

Mme Leduc nodded. “One July day, in 1924, some of the girls were taken by their teacher to Lac du Sang, for a picnic. Lac du Sang is a local beauty spot, and very beautiful it is, too. They call it Lac du Sang because it's surrounded by maples, and in the fall, when the leaves turn red, the lake reflects them, and looks as if it's filled with blood. They say it was a magic place, a sacred place, where even the Indians would never venture.

“Anyway, the girls set out their picnic and the day was perfect. There was never such a day in the history of days. The lake, the trees, the sky so blue that it could have been ceramic. The teacher stood up and looked around at her girls and said, “What a perfect, perfect day. I wish we could all stay young forever. I wish the day could last for twenty-four years, instead of twenty-four hours.”