by Ketty Rouf
I don’t need much time to get ready tonight. Less makeup, no extensions. My hair looks fine this way, just natural. Tonight, Jo’s the one going onstage.
I look at all the men fidgeting, drinks in hand, ties undone, smiling crookedly. This is it, the final act of the grand piece of theater I’ve allowed myself to indulge in. A lot of businessmen frequent this kind of club. They often come with their clients or future colleagues, pay for their dances, ply them with champagne. In the intimate atmosphere of the private rooms, negotiations are conducted and agreements reached, all parties pleased to enter into a contract that includes, between its lines, the big breasts of one, the naughty tattoos of the other, and all our smiles crowned with that intense scarlet that celebrates their glamour. The striptease artist drives the economy; she is its secret booster. I have the bitter impression of having contributed much more to the world’s inner workings here than I have at school. Such is life.
Still. It’s hard tonight without Fleur. I keep feeling tiny, nagging prickles of shame. Without alcohol, I forget to play the tease; I’m articulate, and men find themselves respecting me. This means they don’t want to see me naked, and they don’t buy tickets. The place is almost empty, as one might expect the night after New Year’s Eve. That reassures me. If I luck out and get one good client, I can still have a good night. Otherwise, I’ll just wait patiently for the end, giggling with the girls. I don’t feel like trying to drum up business, and that’s not my specialty, anyway. I go back onstage after a pee break. I sway my hips exaggeratedly; that’s the least you can do when you’re a stripper. A few moves later—really skanky moves—I stop short. Thomas is sitting alone at the bar. I launch myself in his direction. He looks at me and drains his glass. He’s sitting up straight, perfectly sober. “You’re not going to let me go home all alone tonight, are you?” he asks.
“I don’t know. I could walk you to your door.”
“My place doesn’t have a sidewalk, or a door.”
At five-thirty in the morning, I’m finally free. Rose Lee doesn’t exist anymore, but I’m leaving with Thomas, because I want to. The embankment is swallowed up in darkness. Behind us, the Place de la Concorde and the glittering city. The Seine flows silently on our right. Thomas tells me some facts about the Champs-Élysées port and its fifty-one houseboats, which he calls “my neighbors.”
“Mine’s moored just in front of the Pont Alexandre-III. It’s the biggest one. Belonged to my grandfather. Now it’s mine, it’s part of my heritage. I spent my childhood on the Seine. My grandpa and I used to walk to the Louvre. He took me to the museum every week.”
“You must know all the collections by heart.”
“Well, I know my memories of them by heart. And The Wedding Feast at Cana. Wait a second there; it’s dangerous.”
A light starts blinking. He holds out a hand to help me aboard. A row of potted bamboo plants forms a little hedge along the edge of the deck, concealing a wooden table and chairs. He offers me a seat and says he’ll be right back, vanishing below deck and coming back up with a bottle, two glasses, and a blanket. The white wine he pours me melds with the icy night. I’m wearing a long white dress, and I must look like a firefly in the darkness.
“Just ten minutes, okay?”
I nod, incapable of refusing. He sits down across the table, facing me but not looking at me. Head tilted back, his gaze is fixed on the sky, even on this starless night. He starts to whistle, then hums a tune I think I recognize.
“’Casta Diva’?”
He continues serenading the sky, methodically, skillfully. I turn my glass, watching the wine dance. His phone rings, and he breaks off mid-treble. An irritated expression crosses his face as he looks at the screen, and he rejects the call.
“Come on, I’ll give you a tour.”
I gather up the blanket and the bottle. “Leave it,” he says, “I’ll do it,” and holds out his hand again as we go down the stairs. His gaze falls on my stilettos, while mine drink in the sight of a black lacquered table, vases of white peonies, upholstered chairs, carpets, a stoup, Monet’s Impression, soleil levant, a poster for the 1974 Centenary of Impressionism exhibition at the Grand Palais, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filled with volumes, bottles and glasses, ornaments, framed family photos, chandeliers, magazines on a low table. The room is like one long stretch of light, with a grand piano at the far end, the final elegant touch in this glory of culture and richness. A slight, almost imperceptible sensation of floating completes the place’s black-and-white perfection. Thomas glances at my shoes again.
“Should I take them off?”
“Oh no, never!” he says quickly. “A woman should never take off her heels. Can you play an instrument?”
“No. I took a class on musical theory and can recognize a treble clef, but that’s as far as I got—with some music history and concerts thrown in, plus a fairly sensitive ear. I’m a philosopher, really. A philosophy teacher, I mean.”
Thomas stops putting away magazines and says: “That’s not possible; you’re too well-dressed to be a teacher. Civil servants never have any style.” Then, his back to me:
“The myth of the cave?”
“It’s an allegory, not a myth. Plato, The Republic, book VII.”
“Transcendental schematism?”
“Kant, Critique of Pure Reason.”
“Monads?”
“Leibniz, Discourse on Metaphysics.”
“Rhizome theory?”
“Deleuze and Guattari.”
He turns and grins at me, his face filled with new excitement.
“Very unusual, mademoiselle! I tip my hat to you, and as a sign of my respect I’ll start by playing a piece you might know, by Philip Glass. Please, come here.”
I’m laughing, too, at finally having unmasked myself. It was nice to be Rose Lee, but it’s not enough. For worldly, rich men, she’s just another plaything.
He stops playing. “I really only like singing.”
“Go ahead and sing, then. I’m all ears.”
“It won’t be perfect, and I hate imperfection. I don’t like my voice very much.”
“Still . . .”
He starts playing again, the notes merging with the words and silences that flow from him as he talks about his childhood:
“I used to dream of having a soprano voice; I wanted to be a woman, and to sing the way only women can. Kids believe in miracles. I ran away, looked for a doctor, a hospital, ‘Operate on me, please, I don’t want to grow up. I want to have a divine voice, a voice like an angel. I don’t ever want to be a man . . .’”
“Un bel dì vedremo” fills the room. He’s Madame Butterfly now, all world-weary eyes and trembling mouth. Un bel dì vedremo levarsi un fil di fumo sull’estremo confin del mare . . .
I think I understand what he was looking at in the club, with that unseeing gaze, beyond the décor, the naked girls, the night, and his own drunkenness. The impossible life, the perfection of what doesn’t exist. He stops singing like a woman now and says to me, “The high notes always used to make me cry with happiness. I wanted to be a castrato. Oh, well.” He closes the Steinway. With a deliberately theatrical flourish, he presses his lips to the piano lid, brushing away an imaginary tear of adulation before putting down a little white pebble which he then crushes and grinds and spreads out with his credit card. Two white lines, perfectly parallel, equally thick, stretch away on the lacquered black surface. He takes a metal straw from his pocket—is it silver?—and holds it out to me. “No, thanks, I’m okay.” He inhales one of the lines in a single sniff, looks at the other, and blows, as if to extinguish the candles on a birthday cake. The white powder vanishes in an aerial dance that is quickly swallowed up by the whiteness of the room: it’s the same whiteness, but one lacks the purity of the other. Thomas picks up a remote control and aims it like an arrow at the ceiling. The strains of “Vissi d’art
e” fill the room. He crouches next to me, caressing the heels of my stilettos, kissing the leather. One hand strokes upward toward my knee, then creeps higher. I take a step away.
I’m hot. I’m cold. I don’t know anymore if I want to leave or stay, disarmed by this man who was—or wasn’t—a child with an impossible dream. Is the story he just told me really his own? You don’t joke around about childhood and its dreams. Should I laugh or cry? The thoughts are knocking around in my head. I can sense the wound, the cry, and they’re tearing me apart. He gets up and offers me another drink. “You want one, right?” I don’t say yes or no. His phone rings. He glances at it, and this time he answers. “Hello? Be quick, I’m with a philosopher. I mean it, man.” He listens, doesn’t speak, eyeing me the whole time. He hangs up.
“I’m invited to a party; it’ll be going on for a while yet. You want to come with me?”
I force a smile. “No, thanks, it’s already too late for me; I shouldn’t even have come here.” I scroll through my phone, looking for a number to call a taxi, but Thomas is quicker than me; he’s hardly picked up his own phone again when the company’s already on the line.
“Pont Alexandre-III, please, as soon as possible. Yes, we’re in a hurry.” He hangs up. “I’ll drop you off,” he says to me. “Just give me two minutes to change my shirt.”
Coat shrugged on quickly, my purse under my arm, I wait. Two minutes is a long time when you’re in someone else’s house. A door closes, and then Thomas is there in front of me, completely naked. His face has the same expression I saw on him in the club, sprawled on the VIP couch, pouring a five hundred-euro bottle of champagne down his gullet. A sort of chaotic arousal propels him toward me; he wants to kiss me, to undress me. His dilated pupils are speaking, but it’s the language of speed freaks, empty words, life rushing past in a pointless haze of chemically induced euphoria. His is a martyr’s body, denied redemption, and I want to weep for him. It’s a body that doesn’t belong to anyone anymore, a body he’s offering to me the way you’d give up your seat on a bus. I push him away and run for the dock.
There’s a taxi waiting near the Pont Alexandre-III.
I go home.
PART THREE
ECCE FEMINA
1
Forehead pressed to the window, gazing out at the cars and the bus stops and the impatient pedestrians: the city waking up and beginning to toddle, as clumsily as a child. I, myself, am in the relaxed, loose-limbed pose of adolescence, because it’s seven o’clock in the morning and I didn’t sleep at all last night. In twelve stops, my life starts over again.
A half-smile flits across my makeupless face. There it is, still in the same place, the gray gate. It’s like seeing an old friend again. I could almost jump for joy. Left foot, right foot, both feet together. Jump, jump, jump high, Little Miss Grasshopper. Jump, jump, jump high, Little Mister Sparrow. I’m almost there. Clinging tightly to the hope of a transfer, to all these men I love, Kant and the others, to my own good intentions. This world, disillusioned as it may be, is nonetheless reassuring. That’s what I tell myself this morning as I make my way to the school.
The gate opens. For once, it isn’t broken.
The students always come in earlier than usual on the first day back after a vacation. They cluster in noisy little groups, teasing each other, yelling, parading their triumphant insolence, sitting on the back of a bench passing a joint around. They’re all there, acting like they rule the world. The boys, and that cruel age where you’re nobody unless you have the right sneakers. The girls, and their too-short skirts even in winter, because that’s what makes you a Free Woman. I glance at the crowd just once. That’s enough to know he’s there. And how could I not see him? Even from a distance, mingling with the others, even disguised, or blending into the dark night, I’d recognize him. He looks up, looks toward me, and stares at me with a man’s eyes, which I can’t see, but I can sense. My heart implodes. Straight as a steel blade, Hadrien watches me. Next to him is the student in his final year of IT and business admin studies. His name comes back to me abruptly now, with the cold-water-in-the-face slap of reality: it’s Kevin. Martin had him in one of his classes last year. I pretend not to see them; it’s too far, anyway, and too early, and maybe I’m imagining it. But my heart and my legs tremble, my briefcase almost falling from my hand.
Martin is already in the teachers’ lounge. The universe is reconstituting itself in the vague smiles of colleagues, fingers and throats scorched by coffee and tea from the machine, stories about their holidays, glances at clocks or watches, open pigeonholes, cabinets closing, cold lunches in Tupperware containers on the table. I kiss Martin’s cheek, pressing my lips to his clean-shaven skin, wondering if he can somehow sense all those mouths that wanted to touch me, the eager mouths of all the men who paid me money. Who knows if he, and all the other men in this room, can smell the sulfurous odor of my nights, the smell of money, of my exhilarating, intoxicating trade. Dirty money, they would say.
It’s over.
Here, it’s starting again.
In my pigeonhole, among the white sheets of paper, there is a red envelope.
Drancy, December 16, 2005
Dear Madame,
You get it. You’ve understood everything. None of the other teachers would ever be able to. You know just what to do, and suddenly I wish I had more hours of philosophy class. It’s not just talk; you’ll see, one day, how serious I am. I’m going to try to do well in your classes. I won’t annoy you. I’ll take notes.
I’ve been thinking about what Marcus Aurelius said. He’s a good one, too. It helped me make a decision. I’m going to contact Anne. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. I know the fairy tales about the princess and her Prince Charming aren’t real. I just want to be happy, and fulfill my desires when I get the chance.
It’s helped me so much, writing to you.
Thank you.
Sincerely, your loyal student,
Hadrien
I’m early for the last hour of the day with my group of seniors. Even from the far end of the hall, I can make out Wallen in the dim light, standing near the door. As I get closer, I see that she’s bent beneath the weight of her backpack, two plastic bags filled with chips and cookies and sodas at her feet.
“Are you done with class for the day, Wallen? Shouldn’t you be there now?”
“Yes, Madame. I—I ditched, Madame.”
“You ditched?!”
“Yes, sorry—but it’s for a good reason, Madame!! It’s Hadrien’s birthday, you know. You gotta celebrate turning eighteen! And we all wanted to surprise him. We were counting on you. For the surprise, I mean. If we’d had your phone number, we’d have called you . . .”
“And my class? Isn’t my class also important?”
“Yeah, but—”
“I’ve got your essays to hand back from before the break, too. And they were pretty good.”
“Really, Madame? Oh, that’s great—good news always comes in twos, that’s what my aunt always says! But we can do both, can’t we, Madame?”
So Hadrien’s just turned eighteen. The coincidence makes my blood run cold. What if it had been Hadrien in the club instead of Kevin? He could have caught me in the act, too. I stare at the key in my hand. I fit it into the lock and turn it. Once, twice to the right. No, it must be to the left. It seems like it’s just turning uselessly. The damn door won’t open. I pull out the key and start over.
“Madame, are you okay?”
“Yes, Wallen, of course I am.”
It staggers me that already I can’t remember exactly, or maybe I remember all too well, the view from that stage that raised me above men, the world, everything. Truer than a movie, more beautiful than life, reality dissolving on contact with fantasy and with my happiness. I wish I could tell you everything, too, my little Wallen; who knows what you would think—it might make you want to try it yo
urself . . . but me, I’m fucked. That thought crashes through my mind now, too, because suddenly I remember the fatal sight. Kevin and his father. What did they see?
The door finally opens. I have to teach this class, to last fifty-five minutes without looking away from the students. I watch them arrive in small groups, with wings instead of feet—this is the last class of the day, their afternoon snack of philosophy, and we’re going to munch on ideas. I arrange the seats a bit more whimsically, imagining a journey.
“You remember the peripatetic philosophers? Well, today we’re going to have class Greek-style, with one extra little rule: to earn the right to feast at this banquet, you have to say something. Something intelligent and well thought-out. So, one good idea equals one good mouthful. Two good ideas, a swallow of Coke.”
