Monsieur (10 page)

And there, within the neutral angle of that small sun-splashed street, where no onlooker can see us, I raise myself up, eyes closed, and Monsieur takes my face between his beautiful lover's hands. The seconds tick by as if our rapture shields us from the rest of the world. His scent eclipses that of the flowering chestnut trees, his thumbs on my cheeks protect me from the cold breeze. Then he recalls that we are not quite as isolated as we were within our Tuesday-morning cocoon. The atmosphere changes: a sense of urgency returns, and Monsieur kisses me, or am I kissing him? At any rate, we're kissing. For an instant our faces merge below the Paris windows.

‘It's awful,' I stammer, my lips puffy.

‘What is?' Monsieur asks.

My smile is sad. ‘You know all too well what's awful about this.'

His silent answer, his eyebrows conveying some mysterious empathy, an unreadable map of responses I am unable to decipher.
You are you and I am me. We live undeniably incompatible lives, your wife, your children, my parents, Andrea. It's awful that I can no longer think about them. Look at me. My boyfriend left for Brazil a week ago, and before I met you, all I did was pine for him. Now I dread the day he comes back because I don't know how to negotiate that relationship alongside ours. I don't know how I can juggle two men in my brain – right now you're occupying all the available space in it – and I don't want to. I can't. That's what's so awful.

‘I'll see how we can get organized for next Tuesday,' I say, taking a few steps backwards.

‘You don't know how much I'm looking forward to it,' Monsieur answers, grazing my skin one last time with his fingers.

It's the same for me. Lust cannot be tamed. Jogging towards the rue de Rivoli, all I can think of is the way my arse sways when I run. I don't have to check, but I know that Monsieur will be watching me until I'm round the first corner.

‘You're beautiful,' he texts me, two minutes later.

MONSIEUR

ELLIE

MONSIEUR

Sweet nothings exchanged with Monsieur on the phone at eight in the morning while I'm still buried beneath my duvet.

‘Did you write a bit yesterday?'

‘Not really. Just thoughtless scribbling,' I confessed, annoyed and ashamed.

‘You
must
write!' Monsieur stormed.

‘I know, I know . . .'

‘Seriously, Ellie. You know what you should write about?'

‘No.'

‘Write about us. Our story.'

‘Eh? What could I write about us?'

‘I don't know! You're the writer! When I read all your old mails, it's like reading a novel. Write a novel about us!'

I touch myself lazily as we speak, spurred on by the frustration of hearing his beautiful voice, his hard-on voice, singing songs of desire. Oh, the writing, the writing . . . These days, Monsieur is insistent that I should be writing. Come to think of it, it's all a bit of a cliché, a story about a married man with the niece of a colleague. But I shouldn't offend his literary pride.

‘Why not?' I know all too well that yet another strike day will just see me faffing around.

‘Give it a try, at least,' he answers. ‘I'll call you tonight, or at some point during the day if I can manage it. OK, my love?'

‘OK.'

‘Where are you now?'

The conversation is changing direction.

‘In bed. I've just woken up.'

‘Completely naked?'

‘I'm
always
naked. Like the day I was born.'

Between clenched teeth, Monsieur releases a painful sigh. ‘You make me hard!'

I chuckle contentedly, stifle a protest. ‘But I said
nothing
to provoke it!'

‘You said enough. My imagination does the rest. How's it going to look if I get to the clinic with an erection straining at my trousers?'

‘It'll fade,' I predict, stretching, even though I know that, given the chance, I'll make sure it doesn't. A fact Monsieur is quite aware of.

‘It'll fade, and you'll send me obscene text messages and I'll get hard again. Do you think it feels comfortable when I'm operating?'

‘If you'd rather I didn't . . .' I smile.

‘Are you crazy? Send me photos of your arse. I'll look at them between appointments.'

‘And then you'll sport a mighty erection in the presence of your lady patients. Not very professional.'

‘To hell with them. It'll relax me getting hard for you. You'll send me pics?'

I rephrase a small anodyne promise, a witticism, the foundation stone of most of our telephone conversations. What makes me wet, my version of hard, is knowing it's so easy to excite Monsieur. To think of him in his expensive suit, or his surgical scrubs, clearly erect, concealing his embarrassment beneath his mask, and all because of me. My fat arse stirring up such feelings inside him.

‘We'll speak tonight, darling,' I warble, still stretching.

‘Your voice arouses me,' he says, then brusquely ‘Till tonight.'

After an hour on Facebook, I summon the energy to open a new text folder, and stare at its emptiness like a chicken confronted with a knife. The problem of the white page is how full of emptiness and expectation it is. If you jot down a few words, the white void seems to shout, ‘Feed me!' How can I plumb its depths? I, who, for the last year, have been sleeping on the laurels of my one and only publication. For more than six months I've felt like a dried-up well from which only drops of muddy water have been painfully drawn. So, yes, I write. In notebooks I lose after a few days, across the virgin pages of my diary. Stupid thoughts. All the nothings that are part of my comfortable student life. Am I capable of more today?

I think of Monsieur's voice on the telephone as he expressed amazement that I knew so much about his private life over recent years, neglecting to mention that my mother had told me about that weekend in New Jersey long before we first met. So, with no thought of success, I improvise a few lines, like a compliant courtesan, to oblige him. I write:

I sent Monsieur a copy of my musings.

‘It's great. Go on with it!' was his response.

The following day, for the first time in weeks, I got up early and rushed out to buy a notebook.

‘How did you spend your day, dearest?'

‘This afternoon I sunbathed on the deck-chair in the garden, with my legs wide open. I think the family next door now have an intimate acquaintance with my knickers.'

‘What sort of knickers were you wearing?'

‘Actually, I wasn't wearing any. But I thought it would be in bad taste to let you know that from the off.'

‘You do make me laugh!'

‘Is it possible to make you laugh and give you a hard-on at the same time?'

‘It's essential.'

‘I'm a knickerless clown.'

‘And most appetizing at that.'

‘That's the nicest compliment.'

There are moments in the story I love recalling. Images that come to mind and make me smile, whatever the time of day, whatever my mood. The morning we spent in our small hotel on place de Clichy is in this exquisite garden of memories, every flower as precious as the next. Time can't change them.

I was sleeping heavily – but restless because of the vodka Babette and I had consumed the previous evening. A room decked out in red, with a stucco fountain in one corner, and there I was, snoring like a drunkard wearing only my Agent Provocateur pants. You can just imagine what a vision of bad taste I was when my mobile woke me up on the stroke of ten.

‘Another ten minutes and I'll be holding you against me,' Monsieur said.

I jumped out of bed as if I was on springs. I had ten minutes to rediscover my young-girl freshness and jettison my bad breath. There was not even enough time to experience the pangs of waiting, the tightness in the pit of my stomach. I threw myself under the shower, toothbrush in my mouth, eyes distorted with panic. I kicked the empty bottle under the bed. I was a mess, my hair all over the place, my eyelids puffy, but I knew that after just a few words Monsieur would see none of this. He would see all of me.

I crept out onto the landing, wearing only knickers, half a joint in hand. Sat down, legs through the banister, swinging in the void, watching the ground floor. The vertigo I felt had nothing to do with the height. Next to me, my telephone vibrated with languid insistence.

‘Hello?'

‘What are you up to, sweetheart?' Monsieur was smiling at the other end of the line, and I was about to coo when I realized I could hear his voice twice: in my ear and on the ground floor.

‘Not much.'

Quivering, I stood up, without losing sight of the stairs unfolding beneath me. I tiptoed back along the corridor to my room.

‘I'm in bed. You?'

‘Very close, darling. See you soon.'

Monsieur was testing the temperature. I buried myself inside the sheets, a flash of arousal coursing through me, almost as if I was playing hide and seek.

Have I ever told you about the sound of his steps on the stairs? Or, rather, as I think about it, an absence of sound, the magical way he moved from ground floor to second without making the slightest noise. Only a well-trained ear would have detected the subtle creak of a floorboard or the squeak of the carpet beneath his shoes. The ambient air changed texture, smell, density: a wave of goose pimples covered me from head to toe, while beneath my small breasts, my heart beat fast, its echo racing to my ears, eclipsing all other sound. With a whisper, the door handle swung from left to right. The ray of light now bathing the floor seemed to flow from Monsieur. As I was still in the embrace of the sheets and the curtains were drawn, he was making me a gift of the new day and doing his utmost to see it began well. After all, wasn't he the master of everything he surveyed?