Platform (10 page)

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Authors: Michel Houellebecq

Tags: #Social life and customs, #1986-, #20th century, #Sex tourism, #Fiction, #Literary, #Social conditions, #France, #France - Social life and customs - 20th century, #Psychological, #Fiction - General, #Humorous fiction, #Thailand, #Erotica, #General, #Thailand - Social conditions - 1986

BOOK: Platform
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Part Two: Competitive Advantage

1
The plane landed at Roissy at eleven o'clock; I was one of the first to collect my luggage. By half past twelve I was home. It was Saturday. I could go out and do some shopping, buy some ornaments for the house, etc. An icy wind swept down the Rue Mouffetard and nothing really seemed worth the effort. Animal-rights militants were selling yellow stickers. After Christmas, there's always a slight falloff in household food consumption. I bought a roast chicken, two bottles of Graves, and the latest copy of
Hot Video.
It was hardly an ambitious selection for my weekend, but it was all I deserved. I devoured half the chicken, its skin charred and greasy, slightly revolting. Shortly after three o'clock I phoned Valérie. She answered on the second ring. Yes, she was free this evening; for dinner, yes. I could collect her at eight. She lived on the Avenue Reille, near the Pare Montsouris.
She answered the door wearing a pair of white tracksuit bottoms and a short T-shirt. "I'm not ready." she said, pulling her hair back. The movement raised her breasts: she wasn't wearing a bra. I put my hands on her waist, leaned my face into hers. She parted her lips and immediately slid her tongue into my mouth. A wave of violent excitement shuddered through me. I almost fainted, immediately got a hard-on. Without moving her pubis from mine, she pushed the front door, which closed with a dull thud.
The room, lit by a single lamp, seemed huge. Valérie took me by the waist and, feeling her way, led me to her bedroom. By the bed, she kissed me again. I lifted her T-shirt to stroke her breasts; she whispered something I didn't catch. I knelt in front of her, slipping down her tracksuit bottoms and her panties, then pressed my face to her. The slit was damp, the labia parted; she smelled good. She let out a moan and fell back on the bed. I undressed quickly and entered her. My penis was on fire, spasms of intense pleasure coursed though it. "Valérie," I said, "I'm not going to be able to hold out for long, I'm too excited." She pulled me to her and whispered in my ear: "Come . . ." At that moment, I felt the walls of her pussy close on me. I felt as though I was disappearing into space, and only my penis was alive, a wave of extraordinarily intense pleasure coursing through it. I ejaculated lengthily several times; right at the end, I realized I was screaming. I could have died for such a moment.
Blue and yellow fish were swimming around me. I was standing in the water, balancing a few meters beneath the sunlit surface. Valérie was a little way off. She too was standing, a coral reef in front of her, she had her back to me. We were both naked. I knew that this weightlessness was due to a change in the density of the ocean, but I was surprised to discover that I could breathe. In a few short strokes I was beside her. The reef was stippled with star-shaped organisms of phosphorescent silver. I placed a hand on her breasts, the other on her lower abdomen. She arched herself, her buttocks brushed against my penis.
I awoke precisely in that position; it was still dark. Gently, I parted Valerie's thighs so I could penetrate her. At the same time, I wet my fingers so I could rub her clitoris. I realized she was awake when she began to moan. She pushed herself onto her knees on the bed. I started to push into her harder and harder —I could tell she was about to come, her breaths came faster and faster. At the moment of orgasm she jerked and let out a harrowing cry; then she was still, as though exhausted. I withdrew and lay beside her. She relaxed and wrapped herself around me; we were bathed in sweat. "It's nice to be woken by pleasure," she said, putting a hand on my chest.
When I woke again, it was daylight; I was alone in the bed. I got up and crossed the room. The other room was as vast as I had imagined, with a high ceiling. Above the sofa, bookshelves ran along a mezzanine. Valérie had gone out; on the kitchen table she had left some bread, cheese, butter, and jam, I poured myself a coffee and went back to lie down. She returned ten minutes later with croissants and pains an chocolat and carried a tray into the bedroom. "It's really cold out," she said, getting undressed. I thought about Thailand.
"Valérie," I said hesitantly, "what do you see in me? I'm not particularly handsome, I'm not funny; I find it difficult to understand why anyone would find me attractive." She looked at me and said nothing; she was almost naked, she had kept only her panties on. "It's a serious question," I insisted. "Here I am, some washed-up guy, not very sociable, more or less resigned to his boring life. And you come to me, you're friendly, you're affectionate, and you give me so much pleasure. I don't understand. It seems to me you're looking for something in me that isn't there. You're bound to be disappointed." She smiled, and I got the impression she was about to say something; then she put her hand on my balls, brought her face toward me. Immediately I was hard again. She wound a lock of hair around the base of my penis, then started to jerk me off with her fingertips. "I don't know," she said, without stopping what she was doing. "It's nice that you're unsure of yourself. I wanted you so badly when we were on the trip. It was awful, I thought about it all the time." She pressed harder against my balls, enveloping them in the palm of her hand. With her other hand she took some raspberry jam and spread it on my penis; then she began conscientiously to lick it off with wide sweeps of her tongue. The pleasure was becoming more and more intense, I parted my legs in a desperate effort to hold myself back. As though it was a game, she started to jerk me off more quickly, pressing my cock to her mouth. When her tongue touched the tip of the glans, I ejaculated violently into her half-open mouth. She swallowed with a little moan, then wrapped her lips around the head of my penis to get the last drops. I was flooded with unbelievable serenity, like a wave coursing through each of my veins. She took her mouth away and lay down beside me, coiling herself around me.
"I almost knocked on your bedroom door that night, New Year's Eve, but in the end I didn't have the nerve. By then, I was convinced that nothing would happen between us. The worst thing was that I couldn't even bring myself to hate you for it. On package tours people talk to each other a lot, but it's a forced camaraderie; they know perfectly well they'll never see each other again. It's very rare for them to have a sexual relationship."
"You think so?"
"I know so: there have been studies on the subject. It's even true of 18-30 resorts. It's a big problem for them, because that's their whole selling point. Numbers have been falling consistently for ten years now, even though prices are dropping. The only possible explanation is that it's become more or less impossible to have a sexual relationship on vacation. The only destinations making any money are the ones with a large homosexual clientele like Corfu or Ibiza."
"You're very up on all this," I said, suprised.
"Of course, I work in the tourist industry." She smiled. "That's another thing about package tours: people don't talk about their professional lives much. It's a sort of recreational parenthesis, completely focused on what the organizers call the 'pleasure of discovery.' Tacitly, everyone agrees not to talk about serious subjects like work or sex."
"Where do you work?"
"Nouvelles Frontières."
"So you were there in a professional capacity? To do a report or something like that?"
"No, I really was on vacation. I got a big discount, obviously, but I took it as holiday time. I've been working there for five years and this was the first time I've been away with them."
As she made a tomato and mozzarella salad, Valérie talked to me about her work. In March 1990, three months before her
bac,
she started to wonder what she was going to do with her education —and, more generally, with her life. After much effort, her brother had managed to get a place in a geology course at Nancy; he had just received his degree. His career as a geological engineer would probably take him into the mining sector or the oil rigs: either way, he'd be a long way from France. He was keen on traveling. She too was keen on traveling, well, more or less; eventually, she decided to take a vocational-school diploma in tourism. She didn't really think the intellectual commitment necessary for university was in her nature.
It was a mistake, and one that she quickly realized. The level of her BTS class seemed extremely low to her; she passed her midterms without the slightest effort and could reasonably have expected to get her diploma without even thinking about it. At the same time, she enrolled in a course that would give her the equivalent of an associate's degree in "literature and human sciences." Once she had passed her BTS, she began a master's program in sociology. Here too she was quickly disappointed. It was an interesting field, with plenty of potential for innovation, but the methodologies suggested to them and the theories advanced seemed to her to be ridiculously simplistic. The whole thing smacked of ideology, imprecision, and amateurism. She quit her course halfway through the academic year without a qualification and found a job as a travel agent at a branch of Kuoni in Rennes. After a couple of weeks, just as she was about to rent a studio flat, she realized that the trap was sprung; from now on, she was in the working world.
She stayed a year at the Rennes branch of Kuoni, where she proved to be a very good saleswoman. "It wasn't difficult," she said. "All you had to do was get the customers to talk a bit, take an interest in them. It's pretty rare, in fact, people who take an interest in others." Then the management had offered her a position as an assistant tour planner at their head office in Paris. It involved working on concepts for the tours, preparing the itineraries, the excursions, negotiating rates with hoteliers and local contractors. She had proved to be pretty good at this too. Six months later she replied to a Nouvelles Frontières ad offering a similar sort of position. It was at that point that her career really took off. They had put her in a team with Jean-Yves Frochot, a young MBA who basically knew nothing at all about tourism. He took to her immediately, trusted her, and although in theory he was her boss, he gave her a lot of room for initiative.
"The good thing about Jean-Yves is that he was ambitious on my behalf. Every time I've needed a raise or a promotion, he's negotiated it for me. Now, he's head of Products Worldwide —he's responsible for supervising the entire range of Nouvelles Frontières tours, and I'm still his assistant."
"You must be pretty well paid."
"Forty thousand francs a month. Well, it's calculated in euros now. A bit more than six thousand euros."
I looked at Valérie, surprised. "I wasn't expecting that," I said.
"That's because you've never seen me in a suit."
"You have a suit?"
"There's not much point, I do almost all my work by phone. But if I need to, yes, I can wear a suit. I even have a pair of garters. We can try them out sometime, if you like."
It was then, somewhat incredulously, that I realized that I was going to see Valérie again, and that we would probably be happy together. It was so unexpected, the joy of this, that I wanted to cry; I had to change the subject.
"What's he like, Jean-Yves?"
"Normal. Married, two kids. He works a lot, he takes work home on weekends. I suppose he's a typical young executive, pretty intelligent, pretty ambitious; but he's nice, not at all fucked up. I get along well with him."
"I don't know why, but I'm glad you're rich. It's not important, really, but it makes me happy."
"It's true I'm successful, I have a good salary. But I do pay 40 percent tax, and my rent is ten thousand francs a month. I'm not so sure I've clone all that well. If my results fall off, they wouldn't think twice about firing me; it's happened before. If I had shares, then yes, I really would be rich. In the beginning, Nouvclles Frontières was just a discount-flight agency. They've become the biggest tour operator in France thanks to the concepts and the cost-efficiency of the tours; thus, to a large extent, to our work, Jean-Yves's and mine. In ten years, the value of the company has increased twentyfold; since Jacques Maillot still holds a 30 percent share, I can honestly say that he's grown rich because of me."
"Have you ever met him?"
"Several times. I don't like him. On the face of it, he's a stupid trendy Catholic populist, with his multicolored ties and his mopeds; but deep down he's a ruthless, hypocritical bastard. Jean-Yves had a call from a headhunter before Christmas; he's probably met up with him by now to find out more. I promised I'd call him when I got back."
"Well, call him then; it's important."
"Yes. . ." She seemed a bit doubtful; the mention of Jacques Maillot had depressed her. "My life is important too. Actually, I feel like making love again."
"I don't know if I'll be able to get it up right away."
"Then go down on me. It'll do me good."
She got up, took off her panties, and settled herself on the sofa. I knelt in front of her, parted her lips, and started to lick her clitoris gently. "Harder.,.," she murmured. I slipped a finger into her ass, pressed my face to her, and kissed the nub, massaging it with my lips. "Oh, yes," she said. I increased the force of my kisses. Suddenly, without my expecting it, she came, her whole body shuddering violently.
"Come here, to me." I sat on the sofa. She snuggled against me, laying her head on my thighs. "When I asked you what Thai women have that we don't, you didn't really answer. You just showed me that interview with the director of the marriage agency."
"What he said was true: a lot of men are afraid of modern women, because all they want is a nice little wife to look after the house and take care of the kids. That sort of thing hasn't disappeared really, it's just that in the west it's become impossible to express such a desire. That's why they marry Asian girls.''
"Okay." She thought for a moment. "But you're not like that. I can tell that it doesn't bother you at all that I have a high-powered job and a large salary; I don't get the impression that that scares you at all. But still you went off to the massage parlors and you didn't even try to pick me up. That's what I don't understand. What have the girls over there got? Do they really make love better than we do?"
Her voice had changed slightly on these last words; I was rather touched and it took me a minute before I could answer. "Valérie," I said at last, "I have never met anyone who makes love as well as you; what I've felt since last night is almost unbelievable." I said nothing for a moment before adding: "You can't possibly understand, but you're an exception. It's very rare now to find a woman who feels pleasure and who wants to give it. On the whole, seducing a woman you don't know, fucking her, has become a source of irritations and problems. When you think of all the tedious conversations you have to put up with to get a chick into bed, only to find out more often than not that she's a second-rate lover who bores you to fuck with her problems, goes on at you about her exes —incidentally giving you the impression that you're not exactly up to scratch—and with whom you absolutely must spend the rest of the night at the very least, it's easy to see why men might prefer to save themselves the trouble by paying a small fee. As soon as they're a bit older or a bit more experienced, men prefer to steer clear of love; they find it easier just to go and find a whore. And it turns out that western whores aren't worth die effort, they're real human debris, and in any case, most of the year men have too much work and too little time. So, most of them do nothing; and some of them, from time to time, treat themselves to a little sex tourism. And that's the best possible scenario: at least there's still a little human contact in the act of going to visit a whore. There're also all those guys who find it easier just to jerk off on the Internet or watching porn films. As soon as your cock has shot its little load, you're perfectly content."
"I see," she said after a long silence. "I see what you're saying. And you don't think that men or women are capable of changing?"
"I don't think we can go back to the way things were, no. What will probably happen is that women will become much more like men. For the moment, they're still very hung up on romance; whereas at heart, men don't give a shit about romance, they just want to fuck. Seduction only appeals to a few guys who haven't got particularly exciting jobs and nothing else of interest in their lives. As women attach more importance to their professional lives and personal projects, they'll find it easier to pay for sex too; and they'll turn to sex tourism. It's possible for women to adapt to male values; they sometimes find it difficult, but they can do it; history has proved it."
"So, all in all, things are in a bad way."
"A very bad way," I agreed solemnly.
"So we were lucky."
"I was lucky to meet you, yes."
"Me too," she said, looking me in the eyes. "I was lucky too. The men I know are a disaster, not one of them believes in love; so they give you this big spiel about friendship, affection, a whole load of stuff that doesn't commit them to anything. I've reached the point where I can't stand the word 'friendship' anymore, it makes me physically sick. Or there's the other lot, the ones who get married, who get hitched as early as possible and think about nothing but their careers afterwards. You obviously weren't one of those; but I also immediately sensed that you would never talk to me about friendship, that you would never be that vulgar. From the very beginning I hoped we would sleep together, that something important would happen; but it was possible that nothing would happen, in fact it was more than likely." She stopped and sighed in irritation. "Okay," she said wearily. "I'd probably better go and call Jean-Yves."
I went into the bedroom to get dressed while she was on the phone. "Yeah, the vacation was great . . . ," I heard her say. A little later she yelled: "How much? ..." When I came back into the room she was holding the receiver, looking thoughtful; she had not yet dressed.
"Jean-Yves met the guy from the recruitment agency," she said. 'They've offered him a hundred and twenty thousand francs a month. They're prepared to take me as well; according to him, they're prepared to go as high as eighty thousand. He has a meeting tomorrow to discuss the job."
"Where would you be working?"
"It's with the leisure division of the Aurore group."
"Is it a big company?"
"I'd say so; it's the biggest hotel chain in the world."

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