by Ketty Rouf
“I understand, but—”
“It’s better not to be too harsh, do you see what I’m saying? And I’m even tempted to say”—she leans even closer, her voice no more than a honey-sweet whisper I have to strain to hear—“you’re too pretty for that!”
The little group breaks up. The teachers are suddenly late; everyone makes a beeline for his or her pigeonhole, the corridor, the coffee machine, essays that need correcting. Martin arrives just then and heads straight for his intern. The minute I see his face, I know he knows what’s happened. He greets Claire sympathetically, says hello to the assistant principal, and hands her back the sheet of paper she put down on the table.
“I think you’d better take this. Mademoiselle Lopez did exactly what one is supposed to do in this type of situation. There’s no one in charge of discipline anymore, so we have to react accordingly, wouldn’t you say?”
“React? That’s not what I’m here for! I’m not a cop!”
“That’s not what any of us are here for these days, Madame. That’s exactly why you need to take this report and act on it.”
The assistant principal closes her mouth, puts Claire’s complaint form back down on the table, and leaves the room. Mademoiselle Lopez’s ordeal isn’t over yet. Martin picks up the form. “I’ll deal with it,” he tells her.
He leaves arm-in-arm with his intern, giving me a nod. Sometimes I think I spot a glint of lust in his eyes. Like now, with Claire, taking her arm to support her, or console her, maybe. Just a tiny, uncontrollable spark that escapes him like a cry.
5
Elbows propped on the bar, he’s with a brunette girl, who only stops laughing long enough to drain glasses of champagne, and two guys. One of them is explaining a cocktail to him:
“You take coffee liqueur, vodka, and . . . milk, if you can believe it—just a couple fingers of milk, you know, not too much—.” He shakes his pack of cigarettes like a cocktail shaker. “And then—down the hatch!”
I go over to see them. The one I noticed first is called Cédric. We introduce ourselves, and he starts talking about himself without much prompting. He runs a bar and restaurant near Montmartre. Before he began running his own business, he earned a living as a dancer—and stripper. He talks about the artistic life with sequins in his eyes, and with frankness. All kinds of exchanges went on behind the scenes. Women much older than him often offered him money.
He’s young, but he doesn’t lack confidence. I leave him just long enough to have my turn on stage and seek him out again immediately afterward, ignoring the crowd and the customers wanting dances. I agree to let Cédric and his friends take me back to my place, where I give myself over to them and the effervescent abandon that follows the night. By seven the next morning, in a café that has just opened, I am so happy. I stay with Cédric and the others, ice cream for me, champagne and cognac for them. I’m not sleepy at all. All I want is to be here where I am, sitting on this café terrace with them, waiting for the time when they’ll have to leave for work.
Back at my place, I put the red rose Cédric gave me into a vase. I take money out of my purse, a few business cards, a phone number on a scrap of paper, my makeup kit. Sometimes customers buy red roses from the Indian vendor who comes by selling them and offer them to their dream girls. The flowers are really just an excuse to scribble a few words and a phone number on a bit of paper from a pack of cigarettes, or toilet paper, or a five- or hundred-euro bill. In the wee hours of the morning, the girls go down to the locker room and toss the roses and the notes and the numbers into the trash can. The money, they keep. I get all those things, too: flowers, notes, money. But I keep everything. The notes and business cards end up in a blue box tucked away in my dresser among the t-shirts and underwear.
D.D., sales assistant. J.F., film producer. D.M., attorney at law. P.P., independent wealth management advisor. A.X., car-and-driver rental. F.F., director of sales. V.T., photographer. G.S., dental surgeon. L.S., osteopath. K., physical and mental fitness coach. Etc.
None of these men interest me, or if they do, it’s very rarely. It’s their numbers that fascinate me, and often their stories. I’m keeping track so that one day I’ll be able to look back and remember how many men I met, how many fantasies I was a part of. Because, at night, a man is an open book.
A hasn’t touched a woman since his divorce. He doesn’t get erections anymore. He’s afraid of women, comes here to try and cure himself.
B used to be a gigolo. Now he lives with his dream man. “Women destroyed me,” he says.
C loves his wife, goes on and on about his children, shows me photos of his whole family—which doesn’t keep him from describing his mistress’s body and pussy to me in great detail. He sees her at least once a week.
D is shy. He’ll pay for a dance but then doesn’t want me to dance. He’s only ever been with two women. His dream is to have a little daughter and call her Samia.
E never wants a dance. “I don’t like all that stuff,” he says, “all these naked bodies.” I talk to him about philosophy, and he feels better, tells me he’s a medical student, wants to be an ER doctor. “I think I’ve already seen too many naked bodies,” he says. “And the body is sacred.”
F has nine kids with four different women. “As far as I know, anyway,” he says. “I have one with a call girl. I know a lot of women like you.”
G is an ardent admirer of Spinoza. At first he doesn’t believe I’m a philosophizing stripper. Or a stripping philosopher. But it makes him want to lick my pussy even more. He stayed faithful to his wife for nine years, but then she stopped taking care of him. Now he’s got four mistresses in different cities around the world (he travels a lot). He wears a cashmere suit. Bespoke. Seven thousand euros.
J says, “This is the dream. You ask your wife, ‘Honey, would you put on a sexy little dress and strip for me?’ and you get hit in the face with an iron!”
K is crazy in love with Poppy. He got married last month, and his wife has already called him twelve times in one evening! He says she’s a ballbuster. He wants to tell her to go fuck herself.
L says that, out in the real world, a woman like the ones who dance here would never speak to him. Other girls, the kind men meet on the street, in regular life, can’t compare. He’s never touched women as perfect as us.
M says, “Can you please tell me what on earth I was thinking? I shouldn’t have come here; it’s too amazing. Do you realize you’re every guy’s number one fantasy?”
N spent more than fifteen years in the army. He knows the Amazon rainforest like the back of his hand because he was stationed there for a lot of that time. Three years of war in Yugoslavia; he didn’t think men were capable of such savagery. Now he works in logging in the Amazon and respects the trees. You don’t cut down a tree unless it’s eighty years old. He likes to have his nipples fondled.
O blubbers: “I don’t want to get hard! No, I don’t want to! What will you think of men? We’re all alike, filthy macho pigs. Horny pervs. I don’t want to offend you. Getting an erection here is disrespectful!”
P wants me to wear pantyhose. He wants to rip them off. Offers to pay for two hours in a private room.
Q says he can’t take it anymore. His wife won’t suck him off anymore, won’t have sex with him. He’s forced to see prostitutes just to feel a little bit like a man. “I need someone to take care of me!” he cries in my ear.
R wants more. I tell him I won’t do any more. “Why won’t you do that? I don’t get it. What difference does it make? It’s all the same stuff, right?” “No, dancing is not the same as letting myself be licked or penetrated.” “But I’ll pay you a lot of money!” “It’s not about the money.” “Then what’s it about? What else is there, other than money?”
S says, “I’m going to be honest with you. You make me hard as hell. Just tell me how much you want, doesn’t matter. You’re a real woman. You m
ake me so hot. I can satisfy you; I’m hung like a horse. I’m gonna lick you all over, I swear.” He’s twenty-two.
T hides his fantasy in a suitcase stashed away in the basement. Latex skirts, size 10 stilettos, chains. Every so often he’ll say he’s going out with the guys, but really he goes to S&M parties. He’s looking for a mistress, a dominatrix. He’s been married for twelve years. His wife doesn’t suspect a thing.
U says, “I love it when those nipples get hard! Is that for me? Do I make you wet? Is that it? I like big clits, too, a little meat there, know what I mean? Big lips . . . Hey, you got any dope?”
V was often punished by his mother when he was little. Spankings, his tears, and the hand groping for maman’s underwear beneath her skirt. The smell of his mother’s sex, his most precious memory.
W has never confessed his true sexual desires to his wife. He’s got enough money to pay professionals to sodomize him.
X enjoys touching a woman’s armpits when she’s sweating. That’s what he likes, to make love to a woman after her workout.
Y wants me to say sweet things to him, like I’m in love with him, and to look into his eyes, no dancing. An expression on my face that says, “I love you.”
Z sits perfectly still while I’m dancing. And then he cries. “It’s impossible,” he says to me. “A man can’t be with only one woman.”
Men. Letters of an alphabet I never knew, but I want to know it now. I see now that men do talk about love, and it’s also their words that intoxicate me: “You have the face of love . . . I wish I could be the pole when you dance onstage . . . You frighten me . . . If I were a beautiful woman, I would do the same thing as you—make men get hard . . . You’re a thief; you stole that smile from heaven . . . Is there any way I could buy one of your G-strings from you? . . . The most frustrating thing isn’t that I don’t possess you, it’s that you do this for me without knowing me . . . Is this the way you really are when you make love? . . . What you do should be covered by health insurance . . . Do you mind if I touch myself? . . . I wish my wife would do this for me at home . . . How many tickets would it cost for me to come? . . . May I kiss your feet? . . . If I were a woman, I’d be a whore . . . You’re just a one-night dream! I don’t have the right to fall in love with you . . . I’m not sentimental about women; they’re horrible . . . What are you doing next weekend? I know a really beautiful church. Want to get married?”
Amidst the night’s jumble of male voices, I sometimes feel the need to detach myself, to look in from the outside at the carnival, the endless whirling of the carousel, the tizzy of the skirt-chasers, the clowns’ capers versus their habitual ennui, the naked acrobats. The poles to which we cling like the pillars of time, and the never-ending spectacle. The coat-check girls coming round in an infinite loop to take the jackets of the dazzled men turning in circles, credit cards in hand. Here, the end of time is always pushed back to tomorrow, and while we wait, we dance.
In that whole faceless crowd, there is only one being that makes me wonder. He comes here often, a tireless partier who raises his glass like a victorious gesture. Dozens of victories, all of which he knocks back the same way, methodically, with no apparent pleasure or displeasure. He acts at home here, sometimes going up on stage, without anyone on staff batting an eyelash. He imitates the dancers, strikes lascivious poses, sometimes giving himself a little spanking. His hair is longish, and he twirls it around his fingers. Two enormous, limpid green bruises dominate his face: impossible to say if they’re really eyes. A gaze whose emptiness you can get lost in. I don’t dare approach him, even though something in me desperately wants to. Occasionally a girl will go up to him, hoping for a dance, but without success. Others just stare at him in astonishment, retreating into a silence of incomprehension or distaste. He’s a forgotten being, forgetting himself in a bottle, in the confusion of his actions, and always after two o’clock in the morning.
He is the one, this man with his disturbing beauty, who is beginning to inhabit my nights, in which all the others are becoming sadly ordinary.
6
I’m meeting up with Martin in half an hour. I’m exhausted, but I promised we’d see each other after his academic inspection. It was this morning; I hope it went well for him. I make myself another coffee, my fourth today, I think. Without sugar, the coffee from the machine has a musty taste that never fails to wake me up. It rises up into my brain before drifting back down and dissipating in the cold water I chase it with. Quickly now, walk a few steps. Moving around wakes me up, too. I only slept three hours last night. All I can see in the ladies’ room mirror are the black circles under my eyes. I apply another layer of makeup, but I don’t think anything can hide the excitement of my sleepless nights or my rapidly multiplying crows’ feet. Today I’ve got a copy of Alessandro Baricco’s Mr. Gwyn for Martin (he’s already read Ocean Sea and Novecento). It gives us something to talk about. Without him, there’s no question that I’d be absolutely lost at school. Kind of like today. I was so tired this morning that I forgot my packed lunch, which means I have to eat in the cafeteria. I head there like a beast to the slaughterhouse. The food looks utterly depressing on the plywood tables with their blunted corners, chipped carafes, and small glasses, overcooked pasta without salt. Teachers and students clench their ass-cheeks so they won’t fall off the tiny chairs they’re balanced on. It’s like one enormous, chewing jaw, this mass of humanity crushing any zeal, any enthusiasm along with its food. Nothing scares me more than the thought of becoming like them. Sitting here in this high school cafeteria, we are nothing but women and men brought together in an obscene display of our lack of drive and passion. Our faces and our speech are empty of any intensity. I never stop hoping to surprise my colleagues in the act of showing some life—anger or joy, it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s something alive. Judging them soothes me, in my smallness. Because, of course, I’m different from all those simpletons who think they’ve already won the battle of nobility against poverty of mind and are now content simply to let themselves drift down the long, lazy river of self-satisfaction. Congratulations, I think, disdainfully. They’ve never even thought about real happiness. There it is; that’s the reality they’re serving up in this room, on a plastic plate. I eat my scorn while I watch my colleagues swallowing, swallowing it all down, talking about students and methods, planning and staff meetings. They’re thrilled about the additional hour that’ll bring a little extra money at the end of the month. They’ve already got stacks of papers under their arm to correct on the train or the metro. I look away so I won’t have to participate in their conversations, reassuring myself that I’m not like them, taking refuge in thoughts directed toward the open spaces, the trees in the gardens. A window can be enough to save your life. I pretend not to hear Stéphane, sitting across from me, talking with his colleagues about whether it’s possible to instill perfect egalitarianism in French schools: “We have to get rid of everything but the essential subjects. Don’t you think, Jo?”
In asking me the question, he forces me to turn toward him and the others.
“What exactly is an essential subject, Stéphane?”
“Well, biology is essential, for example. It’s universal. All of humanity has a share in it, you know, this knowledge . . .”
“So we should teach music, but not French? English but not French history?”
“Good points,” observes Martin, who has just appeared. “The end of teaching is nigh, in any case. We’re doomed to extinction; didn’t you know? If what my intern says is to be believed, soon there will be nothing left but trainers and technicians.”
He gives me a kiss on the cheek and motions for me to come away with him.
“How did the inspection go?”
“Really well, as far as I’m concerned. I taught the class exactly the way I wanted to, as always.”
“Ah, I see, you stuck to the classics.”
“Yes, the inspector d
id get on my case a bit, for a certain lack of originality. See, literature isn’t original, apparently, and what she referred to as ‘abusing the classics’ just isn’t exciting enough. She reminded me that it’s ‘important to open schooling up to all forms of culture, without any exclusions.’ And why didn’t I use comics? Because ‘we have to embrace the cultural practices of the students,’ she says, ‘and from that perspective, content and materials are beside the point. Star Trek or Proust, it’s the same thing, if it’ll make them work without too much effort . . . it’s your responsibility to put yourself at their level . . .’”
“Well, here we are, Martin. The time has come when we have to learn from the learners, the era of the new liberal-libertarian European school, conveniently reliant on the persistent saintliness of teachers in the service of the child-king.”
“Exactly. At one point I called out a kid who was slumping sideways in his chair, maybe about to fall—he was half-asleep. And you know what she said to me? That we should ‘make sure they can express their spontaneity.’ She said she was unclear about what ‘skill’ I’d been trying to ‘enable’ in my students, and then she went off on this endless tangent about ways of acquiring knowledge, but then, of course, she also wanted to make sure I understood that ‘it isn’t knowledge that counts, but enabling skills.’ She went on and on about the sacrosanct use of images. I couldn’t stop myself from telling her that kids’ minds these days are already crippled by way too many simulacra.”
“You actually had the balls to say that?”
“Yeah, but she cut me off fast to remind me that I’m here to do what I’m asked to do, even if I don’t like it; I’m here to show them ‘the right images’ because they illustrate obscure ways of thinking that are otherwise inaccessible, because ‘it’s not easy to read André Gide, and even for us as educated adults, plays are often daunting and don’t lend themselves to being read.’ I mean, how the hell am I supposed to feel after that?”
