The Exchange (18 page)

For a while we lay panting and holding each other. Then we stirred and went back into the living room. Here, Morgan and Jeremy were sprawled out on the vast cream corner sofa, in bathrobes, sipping champagne and watching a porno.

Tatiana found some more robes and handed them out to us. For a while we just all sat stupefied and hungover on the sofa, not talking. Every so often, someone – usually one of the guys – would get turned on by something in the porno and have a little play with themselves or bring themselves off. But for a long time we didn’t touch one another. It was as if we’d sickened ourselves, overdone it. There was only so much you could do before you’d had enough.

But then Morgan hooked up his video camera and started to play the video of Tatiana and me in the bath, then of the three of us women in the shower and on the bathroom floor. For a while we just watched, but then suddenly we were all hot for each other again and I was up on my knees on the sofa, being fucked doggy-style by Morgan, watching Jeremy fucking Tatiana while he in turn was whipped by Alice. We swapped around a few times, over a couple of hours, until we’d all had a little bit of each other, and I wasn’t sure, but as I scrambled for my clothes, I thought that I’d come by all of them in turn. And I thought that I had made all of them come too. But it was a bit of a blur.

I took advantage of a moment when the two couples were fucking – both of them on the sofa – to make my escape, pulling my clothes on hurriedly and tiptoeing out, shoes in hand. By the time they noticed I was gone, it’d be too late – I’d be in the elevator on my way down to the lobby, or even in a taxi racing up Park Lane.

The video of me and the other girls in the toilet had been on repeat loop for a while, and the last thing I saw as I fled the penthouse suite was my own face filling the screen, contorted in orgasm, all control lost. I knew it was an image that I wouldn’t easily delete from my mind.

It started to get me down, feeling the way I did about Konrad and knowing that I both wanted to have him but in all likelihood couldn’t even if I tried. I started to make excuses when he texted, asking me to join him and others in another night of wild partying. It made me sad – they were very different from any crowd that I’d ever been in with, and that was probably a good thing. At home I gravitated towards people like me. Perhaps that’s why I’d leapt at this opportunity to break away from my old life, at least for a time. Perhaps it had all gone stale.

I found myself thinking a lot about Kyle, and about why things had gone wrong between us. I had cared for him, but in the end there had been no passion. But then, had there ever been any real passion in my life? Passion required a letting go, and that was something I couldn’t do. Perhaps that’s why I was both attracted to Konrad and afraid of him. And perhaps that was why I was so fascinated by Lisette and the dance scene. These girls, too, knew self-abandon. They had to, to do what they did. The ones who didn’t never made the grade.

Lisette invited me backstage a few more times, and I was soon on friendly terms with some of the girls, who agreed to let me photograph them some more, both posing and going about their daily business. Generally, this was inside the club, as they got ready for their show, or as they creamed the thick stage make-up off their faces and changed back into their jeans and boots and sweaters, or into something funkier to go partying in. I wasn’t sure whether it was surprising or unsurprising that most of them were just going home, alone.

I became particularly consumed by the aloof girl who’d first caught my interest, the night of Lisette’s Seven Veils debut – the girl who looked like a younger Dita Von Teese. As I’d expected, she resisted my efforts to be friendly and refused to have her picture taken by me, either while getting changed or in full costume. I asked Lisette about her but she knew nothing at all – said her name was Béatrice and that she had kept herself to herself since starting at the club about six weeks before. Lisette said she didn’t expect her to stick around – she didn’t seem cut out for the job temperamentally, and so far she’d shown little talent. She really didn’t know why she was doing it.

Béatrice’s refusal to be photographed or to integrate with the little backstage community niggled me. It was that old fascination I had with outsiders, whether they had been cast out of society for some reason, or whether they chose to remain outside it. The latter, to my eyes, were the more fascinating.

It was while I was leafing through a book on one of my favourite artists, Sophie Calle, that it came to me: I would follow Béatrice secretly and take pictures of her that, once assembled into a narrative, would reveal the truth of her identity and what she was concealing beneath her veneer of indifference.

A conceptual and installation artist, photographer and writer, Calle had – in her early career – followed a man who she met at a party in Paris as far as Venice. There she’d adopted a disguise and pursued him around the labyrinthine city, taking pictures of him, which she later collated in a book. There, she likened the thrill of the artistic chase to being in love.

I knew following and photographing Béatrice was morally wrong but justified it to myself as an art project. Of course, that was a load of bull. I was just obsessed by this elusive figure and by how different she was to all the other girls at Club GaGa.

Shadowing her as she left the club one night, I trailed her through Pigalle, expecting not to go far. I imagined that, like most of the dancers, she lived in a bedsit or old attic
chambre de bonne
somewhere in Pigalle itself. But we carried on out of the red-light district and continued south-west, past the Gare St-Lazare, where she stopped and bought a newspaper at a late-night kiosk. Then she hurried along the long rue La Boétie until it met the Champs-Élysées. Here she turned right onto the Champs-Élysées itself and walked along it to reach a grand-looking door between two shops, where she tapped a code into the security system and entered.

I crossed the road and looked up at the building. As I did, a light came on in one window and I saw a figure that could well have been Béatrice flit across it. I carried on watching and taking photographs. When the figure opened the French windows and stepped out onto the stone balcony, I sidled behind a tree but kept my head poked around and used my zoom lens to get a closer look.

It was Béatrice, topless, leaning against the stone balustrade, lighting a cigarette. I let my eyes roam the façade of the building. The apartments within a mansion of this kind and in this location must cost a bomb. Béatrice surely couldn’t cover that with what she earned as a chorus-line girl. Even the club’s best performers with the healthy tips they pocketed wouldn’t be able to stretch to something like this. It was positively palatial.

I kept taking pictures, and then when Béatrice went inside, drawing the curtains behind her, I reluctantly went home. I returned on foot, imagining myself walking in the footsteps of Brassaï and Miller, documenting the Paris night as they had done. It felt like a mission, and it made me feel better about being here yet not really fitting in anywhere.

And the Paris night distracted me from all thoughts of Konrad and also of Béatrice, at least for as long as I walked. From old ladies out walking their poodles late into the night to tarts and pimps, from mums pushing sleeping babies in buggies to young couples draped all over each other, all human life was there. Much of the frenetic Paris traffic had died down by now, but that only served to leave the way clear for the angry buzz of mopeds. Paris never seemed to let up. It was exciting and exhausting. I didn’t think I’d be able to live somewhere like this forever.

Once in bed, I couldn’t wind down, so I sat up scrolling through the images I had taken that night, erasing some and downloading others onto my laptop as backup. I was pleased with some of the ones I’d taken in the club, but I was most interested in those I’d snapped of Béatrice, waiting to cross the road or handing over coins at the newspaper kiosk, then at home – if that was indeed her home – smoking on the balcony. The images only served to make her seem even more of an enigma.

I decided to follow her the next morning, in daylight. It might mean many hours of waiting outside her apartment block until she came out, but now I’d seen where she lived, the mystery of her working at the club had deepened and I was hooked.

I knew that I was probably just transferring some of the obsession I had for Konrad onto Béatrice, to take my mind off him, but surely it was better to have some kind of aim than to sit at home moping and feeling sorry for myself, wishing I was back in London.

No, something would come out of this, even if it was just a handful of good pictures. It wouldn’t be time wasted.

Just as I was falling asleep, I got a text from Lisette, checking in with me, wondering where I’d hurried off to. I’d forgotten, in my haste not to lose Béatrice, that I’d said I’d join her at the bar of the club for a couple of drinks. I’d also forgotten that she said she had something to tell me.

I called her up. ‘I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I was really tired. I did tell Stéphanie to tell you I had to go.’

I hated lying and blaming an innocent party, but Lisette was my only friend in Paris and I didn’t want her to think I was taking her for granted.

‘No matter,’ she said. ‘Listen. You know I told you about this Russian guy I’ve been seeing?’

‘Aleksei?’

‘Yes. Well, he’s having a party tomorrow night, at a very exclusive club. And he’s – well, he’s asked me to bring a date for his friend Kir, who’s new in town.’

‘Oh Lisette, it’s really nice of you to think of me, but I really don’t know if I’m up for …’

‘He’s a nice guy,’ Lisette interrupted. ‘But more to the point, he’s a big player in the Moscow art world.’

‘And what’s that got to do with me?’

‘What it means is that he could be very useful to you. He specialises in contemporary photography. He’s incredibly well connected.’

I leaned back against my pillow and, phone clamped between my shoulder and ear, Googled ‘Kir Moscow contemporary photography’.

‘Kir Makarov’ came up over and over, with some images. In most he had a porny-looking bottle-blonde Russian hanging off his shoulder, smiling toothily. I was hardly his type. But his résumé was outstanding and Lisette was right in that he was hugely well connected and influential.

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘It’s really nice of you to think of me, Lisette. I hope I won’t disappoint – as a date, that is.’

‘I’m sure you won’t, said Lisette. ‘I’m sure you’ll have
lots
to talk about.’

***

The next morning I was outside Béatrice’s apartment block by 10 a.m., an almond croissant in one hand and my camera in the other. Her curtains were still drawn, so I knew all I had to do was be patient and remain focused. Any movement inside the flat needed to be monitored, but I had to keep one eye on the front door too. I had no idea how long I’d have to keep it up or why I felt this need to find out the truth about Béatrice. But it did intrigue me that she lived in such an expensive building while working for peanuts. Perhaps she had another job. But then why do something else she was clearly not cut out for?

I finished my croissant and worked my way through a takeout coffee, wishing I was home in bed. This past couple of weeks in Paris had taken it out of me a bit. I wasn’t used to all-night sessions with models and dancers and other party people. In London, most evenings found me at home, looking through my images, digitally manipulating those with flaws or other issues, and sorting them by theme or subject, depending on what I had in mind for them – perhaps an exhibition, or a magazine spread. Ultimately, I was working towards a book of my own photography, but the idea for that was only just taking shape. There had to be some unifying element, and to date my oeuvre had been quite disparate, despite my overarching interest in outsiders.

I gasped and pulled my camera to my face. Béatrice had suddenly appeared on the balcony up above, naked. I couldn’t help but take a few shots. In the sunshine of a glorious Paris morning, she looked amazing – her lambent skin a stark white, offset by her raven hair tumbling down over her shoulders. That, in turn, was echoed by the stark black triangle between her legs. Like the previous night, she leaned against the stone balustrade of the balcony and lit a cigarette.

Unless anyone had been actively looking at the balcony, it would have been hard to spot her, so it wasn’t as if she was doing anything particularly daring in standing naked. In fact, a row of tall trees fronted the apartment block, and I’d had to seek out my vantage point carefully in order to be able to see the flat where she lived. Luck had it that the apartment where the light had come on the previous evening, and its balcony, fell in a gap between two trees. But there really was little chance of being spotted up there.

Still, I envied her. Even knowing others couldn’t see me, I’d have found it impossible to step out there naked. And yet how wonderful to do that – to feel the sun on one’s limbs, the warming air caressing one’s skin. It made me tingle just to think of it.

Béatrice went back inside, and I spent the next hour psyched up for her going out, wondering what she was doing – bathing, dressing, breakfasting. The minutes dragged by. It was frustrating not to be able to take pictures of the life going on around me, too. The shops had opened around the time I arrived, and it was starting to get busy. Who knew what fantastic shots I might be missing out on? Quick glances revealed everything from laughing, stumbling clubbers on their way home, to street sweepers checking out high-heeled secretaries on their way to the office.

My single-mindedness was rewarded when I saw the heavy wood door onto the street opposite open and Béatrice exit. She looked nothing like she did at the club – there was not a trace of make-up on her pale, angular but lovely face, and her hair was pulled back into a chignon, emphasising her rather severe bone structure. She was wearing glasses with a heavy black frame and a black polo-neck sweater with black skinny jeans. She looked incredible but also about as far removed from Rochelle and Lisette’s world as you could get. In one hand she carried what looked like cardboard files.