Hotelles (35 page)

“Yes. Not for long. Why?”

“I have a few details I'd like to go over with you.”

“What kind?”

“Well, the canopy supplier is out of ecru. We'll have to choose another color. And soon . . . Otherwise we won't be able to get anything at all.”

I felt so removed from ecru canopies, suppliers for the wedding . . . and this union, regardless of the tent  . . .

“Later, okay,” I said lightly.

I was trying his good nature, when suddenly an idea occurred to me. I quickly rummaged through my bag, looking for that large, lockless key. An intuition.

“Armand . . . You recognize this key, right?”

He looked surprised, narrowed his eyes under his bushy brow, and said at last:

“No, I don't . . .”

“This key wouldn't by any chance open the door to Brown Rocks, would it?”

His embarrassed look quickly turned into a warning. He was forgetting that I was not supposed to know about the Barlet family's coastal retreat.

“No idea. You know, I've only ever been once or twice.”

I knew he was lying. I could still hear Louie's words ringing in my ears: “I believe Armand goes once a year to clean house.”

“Okay. I see.” I was being purposefully enigmatic.

For the time being, I preferred not to say anything. After all, wasn't it where David and I were going for our honeymoon?

I wasn't so sure anymore how much honey there would be. I wasn't so sure of anything anymore.

30

T
he car sped over the mostly deserted highway. Mile after mile, we passed trucks braving the Sunday ban. The sun was still high in the sky. Every segment of tunnel eclipsed its light, a frequent occurrence on this strip of road approaching the tollbooths. Sophia only ever slowed when there were signs for radars. We hadn't spoken a word since we'd left Rue de la Tour-des-Dames, and even if we'd wanted to, the cabriolet's top was down and the wind would have blown it all away, past my friend's chocolate curls, which whipped gracefully behind her.

“You have a car now?” I'd asked over the phone, my expression icy.

“It's not mine. It's Peggy's. She's always said I could borrow it if I needed . . .”

Peggy. Her
other
best friend. The one Sophia had known since early childhood. The one she had generously introduced to Belles de Nuit before me.

“ . . . and, well, I think today is the day.”

But, to borrow Rebecca's expression, “Peggy was a pain in the ass, a girl with issues.” She ended up quitting the agency under troubling circumstances, pressing charges of rape against one of her clients, who had insisted on finishing the night somewhere other than the Hôtel des Charmes, at a less chic establishment than the one run by Monsieur Jacques.

Apparently, once they were in the hotel room, he had tried to reenact a few particularly raunchy scenes from an erotic bestseller. The more violent episodes offended the tastes of the delicate Peggy, a little woman with a disproportionately large chest, who captivated men with her triumphant bust. Police report, trial, financial settlement . . . Enough to satisfy the young woman, though it had also tarnished the reputation of Madame Sibony's Hotelles.

The convertible Beetle turned onto an access road and was soon heading due west, away from the capital, away from the recent revelations of these past few hours . . . I was leaving Paris so that I could return in a better condition. That was the reason I had so urgently needed to see Sophia, the traitor.

 

TWO HOURS EARLIER, ON THAT
Sunday in June, sitting on the terrace of Café Marly with a gaggle of tourists: I could make out every language in the world around me except French. Discretion assured. And I didn't doubt for a second that that had been the reason behind my interlocutor's choice of locale.

François Marchadeau arrived ten minutes late, without so much as an excuse. Instead, he pointed to the glass pyramid inside the Louvre's courtyard and said:

“Did you know that Andre Barlet was the one who initially gave Mitterrand the idea to build that pyramid?”

“No . . . ,” I admitted, skeptical.

Who said so? The Barlet family? I could believe that Andre, like Pierre before him, and David after, had walked the halls of the Republic in search of support. At a certain level, everything is political. Everything happens or comes undone in gilded ministerial offices. But to believe he had whispered into the ear of the president . . . into the ear of the Sphinx . . .

“Mitterrand could not in all decency leave the Élysée and move into the Louvre. But, among intimates, he did say he wanted to send a message of presidential authority.”

“What kind of message?”

“Symbolic. To speak plainly, he wanted all the trappings of being king without the title. So Andre had this genius idea, which he got from the nickname that Mitterrand's detractors called him. And what do you find behind the Great Sphinx of Giza . . . but a pyramid?”

I sipped my ideally proportioned Monaco, determined to cut short this erudite chatter. I didn't care about the thousands of anecdotes with which the Barlet family wove its own legend. I wasn't their biographer, much less their hagiographer . . . I was barely even a journalist. I was just a lost girl looking for truth.

“Are you interested in what I have to say . . . or do you want to queue up for the museum?”

I pointed toward the line of tourists stretching from the glass entrance all the way to the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel. Marchadeau had obviously dressed in haste, and was wearing a pair of linen pants and a crocodile polo shirt; he could have easily blended in with the mini backpacks and cameras slung over shoulders.

“You're as beautiful as I remember you,” he flattered me, smiling playfully.

“Apparently not enough for TV . . .”

 

The difference between the sexes will never cease to amaze me. We women are quick to forget the men who have possessed us,
fucked us, rammed us, depending on how
much they put into it.
In any case, that's what the author of this one magazine article claims, and I agree. I tend to remember the feelings they've inspired in me, but their hands, their cock, all those sensations simply disappear. And I don't feel that I have a claim on them anymore.

Men, on the other hand, maintain a proprietary attitude with respect to their conquests, no matter how dated. A body embraced is theirs forever, even only tenuously, and even if they no longer desire it. That explains a good deal of male comportment and their general propensity to want to sleep with their exes,
go back to familiar vaginas.
But a woman would find that anachronistic, incongruous, just wrong.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/14/2009

 

NOW ALL I HAD TO
do was unload my angry and bitter little story: the preparation of
Culture Mix
in record time, the way the debut had been pushed up, and the fact that, in the end, the show was never broadcast. Of course, I did not mention the part concerning Louie and his special report.

I extrapolated a little, applying the same sequence of events to other shows and other young female journalists who'd started at the station before me, and arrived at this sentence:

“David messes with shows and fake viewer reports to advance women he wants to bed or is already bedding.”

Marchadeau's gaze lingered a second longer on my cleavage, as though proving a point about his friend's motivations. Then he straightened and said in a blasé and unexpressive tone:

“If that's true, and if I'm not mistaken . . . it's benefitted you more than anyone else! David is not really the type to ask the first girl who comes along to marry him.”

“The CEO of a telecommunications company is lying to his employees, spending his company's money for personal gain . . . and that doesn't shock you?”

“If I got emotional over all the abuses of company funds by CEOs on the CAC 40, I would spend my life crying into a hankie, Elle.”

He wasn't being cynical. For him it was obvious. A reality that nothing and no one could make more moral.

“Believe me,” he pressed on, “the dodgy dealings of many business leaders disgust me. David knows it. He and I have gone head-to-head on this issue many times. Either because he was involved in something or because he was covering for his cronies.”

“But you don't say a word of it in your column!” I replied haughtily.

“If I went on that crusade, I would be thrown out of the game. I don't need to tell you that, you're not so naive: a counterpower is much more effective if he wears a mask and sucks up to the prince than if he goes tilting at windmills.”

The reference to Don Quixote did not make his metaphor more convincing. When had his pen ever served as a weapon? Had he ever confronted the economic powers that be and said out loud what so many journalists were whispering among themselves in the shadows?

“Your loyalty does you honor. David is lucky to have friends like you . . .” I pretended to take his side. “As for me, pardon my sins, which are no doubt the result of my excessive youth, but I still have illusions about the integrity of
our
field.”

The thrust of the sentence lay in the possessive pronoun, which I had chosen specifically to associate the two of us, him and me. Two journalists, despite the massive difference in age and experience.

“Don't you tell me about how integrity fades with age, Elle . . . Not
you
.”

Now it was his turn to play with subtleties. The “
you
” to which he so forcefully referred was not the wise young girl in front of him but the courtesan to which he had treated himself at the Hôtel des Charmes for a few bills, several months back. Despite the inherent risks, I decided to continue with this train of thought:

“You're the one choosing to take it like that, François. It's your choice,” I bluffed. “Just as it will be my choice when I reveal to David how we ended the night together that one time.”

“You would never do that.” He was trying to convince himself. “You have too much to lose.”

“You're wrong. I've already lost what matters.”

“Yeah, what's that?”

“My illusions. About him . . . about you.”

I got up to leave in anger, pulling at the hem of my skirt as I stood, when his hand reached for my wrist and pressed it into the little round table's wooden surface.

“Wait . . .”

“Let go,” I said in a measured tone.

“What you're telling me is nothing compared to what I have on the Barlet Group . . .”

He freed my hand, certain he'd caught my attention. I let myself fall back into my crimson seat.

“Really?” I challenged him to say more.

“Really.”

His shoulders slumped, suddenly overwhelmed by an invisible weight. He seemed exhausted by what he was about to tell me. His eyes escaped for a moment out the open arcades. A refreshing zephyr fluttered by us. Rays of sun beamed on our side of the terrace. He was without sunglasses and blinking furiously.

When he brought his gaze back into the shadows, he shot me an ambiguous look that I took to mean this: I was at once the worst and best thing that had happened to him. A curse, but also an opportunity that would not otherwise have presented itself to him so soon to cut the cord that had tied him to David for all these years. The hour of revenge. The hour to bite the hand that had been weighing him down for so long. Too long.

“We are in agreement,” he whispered. “This meeting never happened, and I never said what I am about to say.”

“Okay.”

He swallowed two mouthfuls of beer before he began, a bit of foam sticking to his upper lip. A thin lip that I had pressed against mine one night, I remembered involuntarily.

“The Barlet Group does not just produce television programs for a French audience.”

“I know that.”

“Of course . . . What you don't know is that in some markets it makes rather unconventional shows.”

I understood what he meant, but I wanted to hear him say the rest.

“What kind?”

“X-rated stuff. Pretty hard-core. Through lots of different fronts, of course.”

The euphemisms used in X-rated book and movie titles have always made me smile. And blush.
Gone With the Minge
,
Citizen Cock
, or
Horny Potter
. I often imagine one of these films while playing with myself: the hero, a well-equipped and energetic hardeur, comes out of the screen to satisfy me in my bedroom.
He
bangs
me,
sparing
none
of
my
orifices.
Although he's arrived in my home by accident, he ends up preferring me over the siliconed actresses, who become dispirited on the other side of the mirror by his absence. All they can do is watch us, the actor and me, demonstrating our (almost) perfect sexual harmony. In truth, his sex is much too big for mine, which forces us to get into positions where only his tip and the upper third of his shaft are penetrating me. The title of this masterpiece, which is only showing in one theater, the one in my fantasies:
Cairo's Enormous Snake
.

 

Handwritten note by me, 6/14/2009

 

I CONSIDERED THIS PIECE OF
information for a moment before replying:

“And why? After all, other media groups don't hide the fact that they
also
produce adult content. It doesn't bother anyone, neither the general public nor their stockholders.”

“You're right. It's less a question of what's in these pictures than the conditions in which they're filmed.”

“What do you mean?”

He cleared his throat, rinsing it with another glass of amber.

“Young girls from Eastern Europe are much cheaper and more open: Hungary, Bulgaria, the Baltic states . . . Some will even work for free. And that is very interesting for a producer and distributor like Barlet. Economically speaking. With the production costs reduced to nothing, or almost nothing, the group maximizes its profits.”

“For free?”

I could not suppress my horror.

“Practically. The local producer sets up a give-and-take relationship: the girl plays in three or four films in exchange for a residency card in the country of her choice. France, the United Kingdom, Germany, et cetera. Greasing a government worker's pockets ends up being much cheaper than paying a French porn star.”

There was one thing I didn't get.

“What's in it for the producer? If the girls are so cheap, why can't the producer simply pay them directly?”

“He could. But the method I've just described attracts a larger pool of actresses, which keeps the product fresher since there are many more girls interested in immigrating than in double penetration. Porn is a genre in which the star system has little impact. There are only maybe two or three actresses who are famous enough to make money off their names alone.”

The way he was talking, you would have thought we were having a conversation about the frozen food section in a supermarket.