Monsieur (18 page)

Or maybe not.

I can discern no trace of morality in the vices he teaches me, although I know it's always in the background. The rooms we share on Tuesdays smell of tobacco, grass, cum, pussy and a total lack of guilt.

Monsieur wears Habit Rouge by Guerlain, but whenever he is naked, that is not his scent. His hands, for instance, have their own spicy fragrance. His neck is a blend of hair and the detergent Estelle uses to wash his shirts. And what about all the other smells I furtively learned about and never forgot?

Monsieur shaves daily, but I still find it hard to believe hair grows across his face, as his skin is so soft. In fact, that softness is often at the core of my repulsion: Monsieur's cheeks are as velvety as my father's.

Monsieur was a house surgeon and later a head of department at the Saint-Louis hospital when their wards had a somewhat poor reputation. No one knows what really happened, but I guess that's where he came to know the vast majority of his hundreds of women, unless he's boasting too much.

He stores every album by The Who on his iPod. One morning, as he was getting dressed, I heard him hum ‘
My Generation'.
How to shed twenty years in a few seconds.

What sort of youth did he enjoy to have grey hair so early and acquire such an appetite for life? He seems to choose his age depending on what day it is, navigating between fifteen and thirty-two. Like a teenager, he is impetuous and easily bored, never in a rush to take important decisions. Even though he is married and the head of a family, even when he's in the clinic that's become his playground, Monsieur is like a cat on hot bricks, seething, all his soul seemingly screaming,
I want to live, LIVE
, and the pleasure he grants himself with me, the hours we steal from everyday life, make his eyes shine.

Monsieur has an eclectic taste in fashion. At the hotel and the clinic, I've only ever seen him wear a suit, determinedly elegant, devilishly seductive. But if I was with him for an evening, I'm sure I would discover another side to him: tight black jeans, crocodile-skin shoes, a matching belt and a leather jacket. When he described this outfit to me, I was nestling against him in a foetal position and bit my cheeks so I wouldn't offend him.

‘No way can you fall in love with a guy who dresses like Johnny Hallyday!' Babette would later remark.

Monsieur often gets on my nerves: he's always so full of himself and the success he's made of his life. It doesn't anger me as much in him as it would in others, because there are so many things he can be proud of. I can forgive him for it, but other men's boasting just stupefies me. Every day, while I idle in bed or chat with my girlfriends, he's repairing noses, lips, malformations of which I had previously been ignorant. He's worked hard to sit at the high table of his profession. His status doesn't stem from mediocrity. But how can Monsieur, having been with me five times and mistakenly believing he knows all about me, think that cars, money and success matter to me? I prefer discretion.

Babette and Ines are much less tolerant than I am, lacking my patience, my intuition that Monsieur needs my approval. I've kept quiet a thousand times when I felt I should offer him my advice. I just raised my eyes with a half-smile, as he got things off his chest, seeing straight through him. On those occasions, I felt superior to him: this, I thought foolishly, was the ultimate barrier that would prevent me falling in love with him.

Only once did Monsieur make me laugh uncontrollably, but it cost me a lot.

One early morning, I was trapped beneath him when he decided on the spur of the moment to add a variation to our doggy-style posture. I could feel his heart beat against my skin as I held on to the bed posts, my face flat against the wall hangings. Monsieur gripped my hips, then my tits and, last, my hair, which he wrapped into a rough ponytail around his wrist. Then he slid his fingers into my mouth, stretching it wide. Like a horse's bridle. He'd acted so swiftly I had barely time to open my eyes before he was pulling me backwards. Somehow I left my body to observe the process. Dazed, I reckoned there was nothing wrong with being mounted like a horse; after all, I had allowed him to take me like a bitch. My mind rambled, my features disfigured by the jockey riding me, and the thought occurred to me that if the shady owners of the small fifteenth
arrondissement
hotel had installed a mirror on the wall facing me, Monsieur would have seen how crude the situation was: how would he feel fucking a girl whose face had turned into a Hallowe'en mask?

I wanted desperately to feel attractive and bit down hard on Monsieur's fingers, the clever fingers that had filled me with shame. It didn't make him angry, and later, or was it another day?, he repeated the scenario as he thrust slowly into me, every inch of his cock. Pinned down, like a butterfly, I was buzzing and struggling, my legs round his back. I couldn't escape. I fought tooth and nail, appalled by his lack of understanding, his desire to see me at my worst, but his hold on my neck tightened. My only way out was to bite his hand hard. For a few seconds, the mood in the room changed. Monsieur looked at his fingers, then at me, unsure what to do. I think it was the only time I witnessed a trace of hatred in him.

The following day, I rushed to Babette's, and I remember laughing as we cuddled up on the couch and I described what had happened to her in minute detail. Monsieur had actually called me as Babette was giggling helplessly, and I had great difficulty in controlling myself. I had to bite my lip throughout the ten-minute conversation, feigning interest as he told me about his day. I relaxed only when he said something funny and I could laugh with him.

‘When you grow tired of getting fucked badly by twenty-year-old idiots who can't distinguish between sex and penetration, you'll gravitate to men like Monsieur. They'll help you forget everything you know about sex and teach you all over again so that you'll never want to do anything else, every day of your life.'

That's me, talking to my girlfriends.

Because, I confess, sex in his arms is a playground in which nothing, absolutely nothing, is forbidden. I feel as if I'm tiptoeing naked through long grass beneath a perfect sky, and Monsieur is helping me reach new heights – like the girl on Fragonard's swing – it's like being drunk, the sense of release so deep that I can't find words to express it.

Sometimes when I opened the door to Monsieur I hardly had time to look at him before he had me in his arms, his hands disappearing under my dress. He is filled with passion for the crevice that lies below my belly . . .

Monsieur likes mangoes but has never shared one with me on our Tuesday mornings. He didn't want my orange juice either or my grass. In fact, I've never seen him eat or drink anything. I've watched him come, but never drink a glass of water (and I sucked his cock long before I had seen his face).

I don't even know Monsieur's handwriting. I'd like to be able to study it, even if only a note, like ‘Approved', followed by his signature, which I guess is illegible, like all doctors' handwriting. But I'm sure something in it would tell me a little about him, something in the curvature of his letters.

Monsieur possibly made a pass at my mother, when they were all in Jersey. He talked about her, on that very first morning, as he caressed my breasts. ‘I don't know how your mother is, these days, but when I first met her, she was a very beautiful woman. We talked a lot.'

(‘We talked a lot,' my mother told me, when I asked her as we drove. ‘He was always asking me if I had read one erotic book or another. I was never interested, but he was OK. Always on about sex, but pleasant.')

‘I could feel a current passing between us. We got on well. We laughed a lot.'

(‘He could be unbearable. Pretentious. We laughed a lot, but he wasn't really my type.')

‘Your mother had just left your father, I think. She was a bit down. But a good-looking Israeli surgeon was staying at our hotel.'

(‘Yaacov!')

‘Your mother liked him a lot. Made her feel better about herself.'

(‘He was so good-looking!' My mother was enraptured, full of memories. ‘You can't imagine how beautiful he was.')

‘You could ask her, but I think they really had a connection. I don't know if anything happened between them, though.'

(‘Wouldn't you like to know, eh?' my mother said, sounding all mysterious, but her silence spoke for itself. Monsieur had told me of the tension between Yaacov and her. Just to muddy the waters, she continued: ‘Oh, he was so sexy! We spent all our time together.')

‘Your uncle, who's protective of his little sister, didn't notice a damn thing. We'd kid him that Yaacov had spent the night with some bird when we knew the last person he had been seen with the previous evening was your mother. It was hilarious.'

(‘Were you already divorced then?'

‘No,' my mother replied. ‘You were ten, and we divorced when you were twelve.')

Monsieur was turning my life into a game of Cluedo.

‘I've never touched your mother,' he admitted, following a lengthy silence.

I wondered if that was true. At the time how could he have known he would one day sleep with the daughter?

‘But she certainly was beautiful. I don't know why I held back.'

That's what we were all wondering.

‘But you look a lot like her. Your smile. Except you're much prettier. You also take after your father, some features in your face I don't recognize.'

Monsieur has a best friend, a woman, and he told her about us long before he and I had met. She is suspicious of me, warning him to be particularly wary of a young girl who reads the same books as him and cunningly parrots their words, turning his madness into lust. Monsieur's friend is unaware of the reality of our relationship: when a man is forty-six, he finds it too easy to escape from furtive shadows such as mine.

Monsieur has a deep fear of dying, which makes him the most alive person I know. Again and again I hear the words he said on our first morning as he held me tightly against him. ‘You know, there is a period of grace, between the ages of fifteen and thirty, when the whole world revolves around you. Everything men do is motivated by you. All they want is to please you and take advantage of the light you spread around you.'

‘And then?'

‘When you're forty, you see men gazing at schoolgirls as they walk past you.'

End of story.

Monsieur doesn't appear to understand the urgency that dictates my life. Although I'm less than half his age, I'm already condemned: I have a sell-by date. I've never worked out what made him say those things. I didn't want to think about it. I sighed. ‘So, who'll want to fuck me when I'm forty?'

‘I will,' he replied, kissing my shoulder. ‘I'll always be here for you. You'll always be my little girl.'

There's something childish about Monsieur's ‘
always'.

Monsieur is not over-fond of lesbians, unlike so many other men. They don't have cocks, he says. But I know that once, when I was waiting for him on a Sunday in our ninth
arrondissement
hotel, Babette had kept me company, spending the night with me, and he had wanted to find us tucked up together early in the morning.

Monsieur is an unyielding worshipper of girls' arses. I've always respected and been scared by this perverse form of love. With him, it's an obsession that acts as a counterpart to his passion for pussy. Monsieur can spend all day long visualizing my pussy, and often does, he says. His texts confirm it, in minute detail.

That's another of Monsieur's peculiarities: he loves to use my own weapons against me and to make me feel uncomfortable by using words I don't like. Monsieur knows I have to go to the Ladies when I'm at work to read his texts. Before we'd met, he would call me when I wasn't alone, forcing me to nod for minutes on end, a hostage to his words, unable to tell him this was not the right time without betraying myself.

‘May I masturbate while I'm thinking of you?'

‘If I said no, you'd go ahead anyway,' I said riskily, attempting to appear detached.

‘True. And I have . . . I'd so much like to feel you against me and make love to you. For a long time. Lick you until you—'

‘Could you call me back later?'

‘Am I interrupting something?'

‘Maybe.'

A cheeky laugh.

‘I love the sound of your voice. The soft voice of an obedient little girl.'

‘Really?'

‘Why don't you call me as soon as you can? If I don't answer, it'll just mean other people are around. I'll phone you back afterwards.'

‘Fine. 'Bye.'

‘Hold on, don't say anything. Just answer yes or no. Do you feel like making love with me right now?'

Usually, and as improbable as it might sound, it was at this point that the bus conductor, or whoever, would turn to me with understanding in his eyes. I cleared my throat.

‘Yes, yes.'

Monsieur, as Ines puts it, loves to scare the shit out of shy virgin souls. Even when they aren't that virginal.

To say that Monsieur lacks any moral compass isn't quite right. His own sense of morality is mainly affected by pleasure. He is motivated by his inexhaustible libido, and his whole life is consumed by a socially perfect form of sexual energy, which turns everything into a feast of delight, passion, an intoxicating flight of fancy.

I reckon Monsieur is one of those rare people in whom each positive quality has a corresponding flaw, and vice versa. For instance, he is a great manipulator and is also brilliant. He twists me around his little finger, which irritates me but encourages me to to meditate and analyse. Monsieur is highly susceptible, but no other man I know displays such charisma. Granted, he is a bastard, but he's also a bottomless pit of culture. Monsieur is pretentious, but passionate too. He is deeply sensitive, but keeps his feelings to himself. All you know of Monsieur is what he allows you to see.