Hotelles (31 page)

 

I LEFT A MESSAGE FOR
David with Chloe and jumped in a cab on the company dime, arriving a few minutes early. I had only really started to discover the neighborhood a few months earlier, when Sophia had first brought me here.

As I waited, I did a little window-shopping. Every boutique seemed to speak to me. Every storefront reflected an aspect of my person or the present situation: the Queen of 2 Hearts was a rather racy lingerie store; One Way sold custom perfume; as for Dollhouse, which was located at the bottom of the building where the agency used to be, its small storefront was divided between erotic underwear and sex toys.

Sophia once told me about how she had started collecting sex toys. One of her girlfriends in college, a particularly liberated Swede, gave her a pink plastic vibrator. Ordinary but effective. Sophia's English was spotty, so she misunderstood what Jenny the Swede had told her. She honestly thought it was a gift so, naturally, a new object . . . when really it was a loan. In other words, Sophia had already experienced the joys of the little toy on several occasions before she found out that her friend had made abundant use of it before her. This discovery might have put her off sex toys, Jenny, and sex in general, but for her it was the height of excitement. She never gave it back to the Swede, who ended up being gracious enough to let her have it.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/12/2009

 

WHEN I ARRIVED AT THE
Lebanese restaurant, Rebecca signaled discreetly from the back. She was the same as ever: excessively groomed, outrageously blond, scary thin, and, to top it off, doused in enough Shalimar by Guerlain for everyone in the neighborhood.

She pretended to be nibbling on Middle Eastern pastries, which she pointed at with her long nails:

“Do you want one? The almond is delicious.”

“No, thank you . . . I'm not hungry.”

It was a fib. But I wasn't there for a tea party.

She began by telling me a lie that was as impossible to digest as her pastries seemed. She claimed there had been a police raid a few days before, in one of the hotels frequented by her girls. Without a place to land, some of the girls were put in a position where they could not offer their clients the full service. As a result, business at Belles de Nuit suffered almost immediately, which was why she had been forced to temporarily shutter the agency.

To the point of emptying the place? Of suspending her professional line? Of not answering her phone calls? None of it held. But I couldn't tell her what I had heard from her very mouth, thanks to Fred's pirate recording.

“Have you known Louie Barlet for a long time, Rebecca?”

She hid her surprise like an old fox who never bats an eye. Nevertheless, it wasn't hard for me to guess my question's real effect on her.

“Fairly, yes. Why do you ask?”

“Because he and I are going to be crossing paths rather often now.”

Her smile was wide as she tried to regain the upper hand in our conversation.

“That's right! I hear you and David are getting married. Congratulations. Yours will be at the top of the list of prestigious unions that the agency has made possible.”

“David Barlet was never one of my clients.”

“Oh, really?” she asked evasively, her gaze wandering absently.

“Did he ever go out with one of the other girls from the agency?”

She was still avoiding my face, so as I asked the question, I seized her hands firmly in mine. I could not care less if David had slept with all the Hotelles in her catalogue. That wasn't the past, the one over which he and Louie had practically come to blows, that interested me.

Her azure irises glared at me. Then, slowly overcome by my determined grip, she softened. Her eyes settled on me, heavy and tender. They were deeply sad.

“I've known Louie since I was twenty-one. He was barely fifteen. We met at one of the parties his mother used to organize for David and him. With all their money, and that stupid competition, the Barlet brothers didn't make many friends. Hortensia thought that if she invited the right kind of young people, plucked from among the children of their business acquaintances, they would learn how to mix with others. Apart from myself, who didn't have much to do with that milieu, it was a failure.”

“Were you lovers?”

“With Louie? Yes, you could say that. He would be angry if he knew I was telling you this, but for a long time I was his emergency wheel. Every time he got his heart broken, he'd come to me. For as long as it took him to repair his wounded pride . . . Then he'd go after someone else. Someone younger. Fresher.”

Rebecca, the old mistress, a haven of indulgence and tenderness in his otherwise tumultuous sentimental life.

So then, that night in Dinard, at the restaurant in Saint-Malo, in the car on the way back from Brown Rocks . . . It hadn't been Alice!

“When Aurora died . . . You guys were back together, right?”

“Yes. I was there. Just like every other time he needed me.”

She wasn't bitter. What she had for him was an endless love. An unrequited love.

“But it wasn't enough to keep her from being stupid and throwing herself in the water,” she lamented.

“He could have saved her.”

“No. She would have done it eventually, on that night or another. And David, too, in the end.”

She knew that with a suggestion like that I would have to ask.

“David? Are you insinuating that he wanted her dead?”

“Not exactly. But now that she was sick, Aurora wasn't much use to him. She was a faulty stone in his crown.”

That was how Louie had described him when we were at the Tuileries, as a monarch who only saw his relationships in terms of glory and ambition. A man who was sufficiently hardened as to wish for the death of a woman who was tarnishing both his image and potentially brilliant career.

“You think he let her condition worsen without doing anything?”

“Nothing . . . He even had a hand in it.”

I remembered the living situation Louie had described: the bachelor pad above the apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel. The endless mistresses. The secret staircase. The perfect Don Juan, consuming women without a second thought.

Tarnish his image—wasn't that exactly what Rebecca was trying to do right now, at Louie's behest? I kept myself from spitting contempt in her face. Sure, David was authoritarian, egotistical. Sure, he used others like pawns. All that was undeniable. His hasty decisions, including his tyrannical fit with me earlier that same day . . . But did that make him a monster, a quasi-murderer, such as these two accomplices were trying to paint him?

I tried to determine what obscure contract bound these two together.

“How did Louie recover from the accident? I mean, outside of his knee?”

“Poorly. He felt guilty he hadn't been able to do anything that day. And even worse for not having intervened sooner with his brother. When there was still time to get him away from Aurora.”

“Why didn't he?”

“The game,” she said simply.

I was not sure I grasped her meaning, in this context.

“The game?”

“The constant competition between David and him. Louie may be the elder . . . but at the time, it was already clear that David had won. Definitively.”

“With what Louie knew about him, he could have challenged everything,” I played the devil's advocate. “Blackmailed him!”

“It was too late. Andre, their father, had already chosen his heir. There was nothing Louie could do . . .”

She spent a while telling me about how Louie had taken refuge in an imaginary world of belles lettres, romantic and ephemeral passion, and more or less twisted erotic games. She excused him everything: according to her, Louie was the first and, in some ways, the only victim of Aurora's death. Rebecca painted a picture of a sensitive and fragile man who had been crushed more by his father's madness and the harshness of his brother than by the rocks in Dinard. But I couldn't shake the image of the manipulator who wanted to nip my happiness in the bud. Him, my master?!

The more she spun her tale, the more I felt I would explode.

“You asked how he recovered? The answer is: by giving himself the illusion that he was in control of every aspect of his life. By inventing ever more convoluted scenarios for himself . . . It is no doubt hard for you to believe, but back then, he wasn't the dandy you see today, lecturing everyone on life and elegance.”

He was as handsome as a bronze statue. As magnetic as a wild animal. And as  . . .

I knew all that. I didn't need his old, jilted mistress to tell me. I was in a pretty good position to know the kind of power Louie had over women.

“He was such a nice boy . . . so generous.”

She said this last bit like a close friend whispering a secret over tea. I snapped.

“Enough with the theatrics! If he was as great as you say . . .”

We were there. I had reached a critical moment, one where I had no other choice but to show my cards. Lower the different masks I'd had to wear at the Hôtel des Charmes. Even Sophia didn't know this much about me.

My anger did not unfurl like a wave in the Saint-Malo bay, hitting the shore with big, sonorous crashes. It unfolded like a long current of water, large and powerful. No seawall could stop it.

“If he's so great, why is he playing this game with me? Why does he want to ruin my marriage, Rebecca? What am I to him? A pawn on an old chessboard? His revenge against David? The epilogue to their twenty-year-old war?”

“None of the above.”

“He doesn't see that he could shoot twenty girls like me without even scratching his brother? He can massacre me like cannon fodder; he can fuck me or have others fuck me, in all the hotel rooms on earth if he so pleases . . . He will never be better than David. Never!”

She shook her equine head. I may have been sure of myself, but there was something sincere in her quiet denial.

“You don't understand anything. Nothing.”

It sounded like she was having a revelation.

“Understand what?”

She continued to shake her head incredulously, tirelessly, as though it could erase everything.

What had initially rattled me was now beginning to get on my nerves.

So, in spite of the waiters, who were serving hors d'oeuvres, and driven by the visceral need to empty myself, tired as I was by the constant pressure of their secrets, I screamed at the top of my lungs:

“
Understand what???
”

Every revelation in their web of interlocking lies trapped me inside a smaller and smaller Russian doll. Their dollhouse was going to suffocate me. Soon I, too, would be a broken toy on their hands. A dead toy. Like Aurora.

“He isn't doing all this to hurt David.”

“Why, then?”

A gentle smile suddenly made her lips look beautiful. Before, I had always found them thin and dry.

“He isn't trying to hurt anyone. He's doing it for you.”

She smiled like she was passing the baton.

She looked at me candidly and repeated:

“Simply for you.”

26

S
imply for me.

I spent several minutes trying to grasp the full meaning of this revelation, feeling it diffuse through me, a long perfusion of disbelief and joy. In the face of my silence, Rebecca felt the need to specify that she was willingly ceding Louie to me. She had long since accepted that the happiness of her one beloved depended on other women. She continued the thought—I was only really listening to every other word, if that—by listing everything that she and Louie still shared. Starting with their home. Ever since he had moved into the vast apartment on Avenue Georges Mandel, she'd occupied the one-bedroom upstairs. David's old bachelor pad. As Louie had told me, access between the two apartments had been sealed. So well that neither he nor she could burst in uninvited. So close, and yet so independent. Sometimes they didn't see each other for days on end. But just knowing that the other was only a few steps away was a comfort.

“But soon it will all change . . . ,” she lamented with a sigh.

“Why?”

My question appeared to come as a surprise.

“They haven't told you?”

Shocked, my mouth formed an O.

“Told me what?”

“Well . . . The construction!”

The racket of hammers and pickaxes we'd been hearing from our garden. Richard the Chauffeur in construction garb. A few snapshots flashed through my mind.

“When they first moved in on Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, Andre and Hortensia bought the house next door.”

“The one that used to be owned by Mademoiselle Mars . . . ,” I muttered to myself.

“Yes. They renovated the first, the bigger of the two, and moved in there with the boys. For a long time, Mademoiselle Mars's old house remained untouched, and such as it had been since the forties.”

I remembered the enamel plaque outside:
youth
travel
office.

“In fact, Mars House was deserted until Andre and Hortensia's death. In their will, they left David Duchesnois House, and Louie the other.”

My voice cracked.

“Louie . . . Louie is our neighbor?”

Why had they hidden it from me? David; Armand, who had even commented on the inconvenience of the work next door . . . Why had no one told me?

“Not yet. He started this completely crazy project ten years ago to restore the house to its original state. Every fresco, every door handle, identical. From what I've seen, it's magnificent. But it's also a money pit. All of his inheritance has gone into it.”

At least one of the thousands of little mysteries surrounding him had been solved: the day Felicity escaped, Richard's presence behind the blue door at 1 Rue de la Tour-des-Dames hadn't been random. Louie's chauffeur had an active role in his employer's project.

 

AFTER A LONG AND WARM
embrace, which caught me by surprise, Rebecca drove me in her cream Mini Cooper to Duchesnois House. I was no longer indifferent to the building on its left. Knowing that Louie would be living there soon threw everything into question again: my resolutions and my desires. I didn't know what I wanted, in the end.

“Take care,” she whispered as I got out of her car.

 

WHICH IS WHAT I DID
with my next hour. David was absent again, and I decided to take a long, hot bath. Try as I might, I could not get Rebecca's words out of my head. They played in a loop, floating all around me like my bath bubbles. Alas, they did not disappear when at last I unstopped the bathtub. They stuck to my skin. They fit me better than any bathrobe or article of clothing: “He's doing it for you. Simply for you.”

I went down to the ground floor wearing a simple robe—I could hear Armand in the kitchen. I found the new version of the prenup and a silver package on the console. Was Richard the Chauffeur his messenger?

I tore the paper and opened the box like a kid at Christmas. In addition to the usual magnetic key and note card, it contained a splendid black lace fan with a varnished handle the color of ebony whose tip bulged like a phallus. The accompanying note was like the others:

     
Ten p.m.

As usual,

it's up to you to find

our room.

Bring everything with you.

 

The last recommendation left me panting.
All
the objects he had given me? I climbed the stairs to the bedroom and took a rapid inventory, throwing everything into a light handbag.

Would I be playing with toys, as his latest commandment seemed to suggest?

6—Thou shalt master thy pleasure.

Was he planning on deferring our moment of physical contact much longer? It was driving me mad.

As I was leaving the house, I noticed the giant hourglass. Three-quarters of its contents had already changed sides. And what about me? Which side was I on? Did I really have to choose?

With no clear answer, I let my body decide: my feet led the way, my pelvis rushing toward pleasure, my sex throwing itself on whatever might flatter it, suck it, lick it, cleave it apart, everything it liked so much.

I was no longer in charge. I was but the sum of my organs, which were hungry for sensation. An erogenous puzzle that hoped to glue itself back together, and would moan with pleasure every time a new piece found its place.

 

THE RUE PIGALLE WAS VIBRANT
that night. Ambient happiness—groups of young people speaking loudly and drinking much on terraces—perfumed the air with a scent of summer. I should have been like them, with them, sipping a Monaco with Sophia and letting boys my age hit on me, footloose and fancy-free.

But I was the exact opposite, driven toward a single goal, drawn by one force, inconsequential but lucid. I was so focused that I had no trouble cracking the day's enigma. Monsieur Jacques could bugger off. The fan was the biggest clue in my bag. It could have only belonged to one courtesan at the Hôtel des Charmes: Caroline Otero, better known as La Belle Otero. She was a dancer at the Folies Bergère around the turn of the twentieth century. The dark beauty was famous for her loose morals and the dazzling grace of her perfectly sculpted breasts. In addition to her male lovers, she entertained sapphic friendships, notably with the writer Colette.

I could not be wrong. I had visited her room before, when I was still a Hotelle.

Like the last time, I entered without so much as a wave in the direction of the concierge and found Ysiam faithfully on duty in front of the elevators.

“You are very beautiful tonight . . . I mean, even more than the other times,” he said, charmingly awkward.

“Thanks, Ysiam. Could you take me to La Belle Otero, please?”

A few moments later, he confidently announced:

“Second floor. Would you please follow me?”

I found it touching how he remained ceremonial, despite the repetitiveness: the hall, the gilded door, which he opened, then locked behind me  . . .

The room was as I remembered it, decorated like a brothel from the roaring twenties, with red velour wall hangings and rococo mirrors framed in arabesques. On the wall were hung original posters of the Folies Bergère, a testament to the glorious past of the woman who gave the room her name and soul. From first glance, I could tell that this rendezvous would be markedly different from the others. Starting with the chandeliers, which gave off a bright, almost garish light, a sharp contrast to the darkness to which I had grown accustomed.

Another major change: For the first time, someone else was present in the room before I stepped inside. I excluded the previous encounter from my comparison since Louie—or the man pretending to be him—had been hiding in the shadows when I'd first arrived, and had not made his presence known until later. Finally, and this was hardly a minor change, the person in question was not a man but a woman.

She was wearing a mask that hid her identity, but there was no doubt about her sex, not with that voluptuous body and its telling feminine curves. I eyed her chest, waist, hips, buttocks, and tapered legs supporting the whole. She was quite simply magnificent. Her skin, whose amber shade elegantly accentuated her long and lean limbs, glowed luminously under the array of lights floating above. The girl was immobile, but everything about her, from the nonchalance of her jutting hip to her slender hand resting on her waist, betrayed the flexibility and grace of a dancer, like La Belle Otero. Indeed, like this latter, she had the most beautiful breasts I had ever seen, firm and haughty, perfectly curved.

But it was only when she took a few steps toward me, with all the feline grace of a runway model, that I recognized her, the Vine, the stunning ethnic woman I had seen with Louie the night we'd first met and again another time with that former client, in the lobby of this very hotel. Her flawless physique oozed disdain. She was the kind of woman whose perfection crushes us simple mortals.

“I have no desire to . . .”

She placed a finger as long and light as a reed on my lips, commanding silence. Her mouth formed a mute “shh.”

She guided my movements with natural authority, though without being brusque. I was surprised to discover that she possessed a languid, almost kindly, gentleness. There was no doubt her services had been ordered, but like all high-flying call girls, she knew how to give off the illusion of emotion. An actress more than a prostitute.

A piano piece swelled through the room, one I didn't recognize—Chopin again?—and she began undressing me, slowly, carefully as a wardrobe assistant, at pains not to wrinkle anything. Every article of clothing was a new opportunity for her hand to brush against my skin, which shivered with every touch.

When she finished the striptease, she rummaged through my bag of treasures, without asking permission, and withdrew the fan.

She presented it to me like a sacrament, as though my approval mattered to her. Stupefied, I did not move, and she began rubbing the handle against her vulva. She pushed her panties to the side, revealing herself to me. There was one thing she was not faking: when again she brandished the object under my eyes, it glistened with her desire.

“Lick it,” she instructed, her voice deep and thick.

I complied, timidly at first, then with more ardor. I swallowed the bulge of the black lacquer handle as though it were the most delicious penis. She encouraged me, stretching her hands onto my shoulders. They were long and fabulously satiny, and as supple and light as leaves on water. Her caress was dizzyingly slow, but it grew faster as her hands moved over my throat, my breasts, and below. Her fingers played with my fuzzy pubis, skimming it with the flat of her hand, a finger or two wandering over the edge of my cleft.

Reassured by my submissiveness, she became more enterprising. She kneeled before me, one hand firmly placed on my waist, gripping my little love handle with all her might, and inserted the varnished handle into my vagina. My legs trembled, and I thought I might stumble. But the combined pressure of her palm on my hip and the handle that was slowly slipping deeper inside me maintained a kind of balance. The fan was like a stick on which I was being delectably skewered, one sigh at a time.

The dimensions of the object did not exceed those of a penis. But its extreme rigidity provided a new sensation, pushing into the walls of my vagina with authority. I did not feel ripped apart or excavated. I felt full, invaded, incredibly dominated. And that such happiness came from that ordinary object, and at the hands of the most exquisite of women, well, I was in a state. I let the stake planted in me sink in, bending my knees, seeing just how deep the intruder could go.

“Come, now.”

She did not withdraw the fan as she led me to a bed covered in a single white sheet. She laid me down as cautiously as if I were a flower, making sure not to jostle the handle and wound my interior.

I realized that by accepting this new posture, I was abandoning myself fully to her. I was no longer capable of calculating, reasoning, or arguing with this sweet madness. So sweet  . . .

Sophia's fingers coming out of her pussy. The girl in the black light screaming in pleasure. The frightening chest of an unknown woman on the metro a few days before. A carousel of images flashed through my head, with women front and center, affecting me in ways I could not deny. I had never so much as touched any of them, but now their combined forces were offering me ecstasy. I was the one who desired them, but through the proxy of the Vine's delicate hand, they were the ones who possessed me.

“Faster . . . ,” I heard myself beg in a voice I didn't recognize. “Go on, faster!”

She plunged and withdrew the fan in and out of my vagina with force and regularity, relentlessly prodding my sex, demonstrating a kind of vigor that was surprising for her willowy frame. From under my half-closed eyelids, I read the excitement in her creased eyes and in the way her teeth sunk into her lower lip. Her whole being was concentrated on my enraptured cleft, which she would not relinquish until I had orgasmed.

It came from my innermost depths, like a ball born under my belly button. Heavy and overinflated, it rolled slowly, crushing each of my organs as it passed them by. When it reached the edge of my uterus, it swelled, stopped for a moment, and then at last unfurled in the wet and distended canal, taking everything, ripping pleasure from every millimeter. Howling, I had the distinct feeling that my cries came from my dilated cunt rather than my mouth. In the moment, I could not distinguish between the two orifices, and the astonishing pleasure being expressed by both.

“Very good . . . ,” she said pedantically. “You're coming from your vagina.”

True, and it was so pleasurable that when she withdrew the fan, I almost screamed in pain. It felt like she had just torn out my entire pelvic region.

Louie had dubbed himself the revealer. As I discovered hitherto unexplored territories of my sexuality, I found myself panting, my sex unsatiated and hungry for more. I longed for whatever he had planned next, like an expectant child waiting for her dessert. Not doubting for a second that he would give it to me. Confident in both him and my ability to receive whatever he offered. My fears had vanished. My senses were awake. And one by one, each new experience was unveiling new facets of a new woman. Up until now, my education, my principles, and, above all, my ignorance, had kept them locked up. At last they were free. They began to speak, one after another, expressing their unique desires, their particular fantasies. At that exact moment, I was not only La Belle Otero; I was also Marie, Josephine, and Lola.