And then they’d fuck again. Like strangers. Like beasts.
She would squeeze his ball sack while she sucked him, hard enough to make him wince or even his eyes water. He would bite her nipples hard in the course of improvised embraces hoping to make her cry. There was no tenderness, only anger.
They would both emerge from the room the following morning to share a croissant and coffee breakfast in the lobby in silence with their bodies bruised beneath their clothing, skin scratched, torn in places, a respective geography of desolation.
He kissed her. Her lips were dry. They parted. He watched her tall silhouette and her endless legs walk away along the Rue Racine away from the hotel. He walked up the stairs back to the room to pack.
Another encounter ending in silence.
This was Paris, this was yesterday. He sullenly now reflects on those past days of epiphanies and pain and sex. Of excess and emptiness.
And can’t help thinking of the only woman who never came to the city with him. ‘Je t’aime,’ he whispers in the morning dawn on yet another day when he wakes alone. The breeze carries his words away towards the South. He wonders idly if she will ever hear them.
About the Story
My parents moved to Paris when I was only three years old. As a result, I was brought up there and, apart from one final curriculum year at the Lycée Francais in South Kensington, London, have never been to school in England. As a result I have always had a curious relationship with France and the French. After all, I was the little English kid (despite my Polish name on my father’s side) who was accused of burning Joan of Arc and was on occasions beaten up in the kindergarten school yard for his imagined inherited sins. Needless to say I got my own back in later years when by virtue of being fully bilingual, few people around me even suspected me of not being French, and I could operate like a spy in the house of love, to paraphrase Anais Nin.
What this French side of me is grateful for is that I quickly learned to appreciate the art of erotic fiction, a literary discipline so much better appreciated by the French.
Sadly and inevitably, Paris has changed a lot since my teenage, and beyond, years. And even though, on my frequent return visits, I still haunt my old Latin Quarter patch, the charm has long dissipated. But then you can never revisit the past. I reckon it’s not only the city that has changed, it’s me too. But I still look forward to every new occasion I walk on to the Eurostar train and, two hours or so later, come in to the Gare du Nord, and the distinctive smell of Paris tickles my imagination. And I of course also invariably remember the naïve youth I once was and his awkwardness with women.
Naturally, whenever I am in Paris, I stay in hotel rooms. Most often in small establishments dotted between the Odéon area and St Germain de Prés. Which doesn’t mean this story is autobiographical. Well, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
The Red Brassiere
by EllaRegina
Outside Pascal’s bedroom window, erect nipples pressed against the glass. They shivered in the early hour crisp, waiting for him to awake, bucking towards the white duvet rectangle with a gentle persistent knock. Pascal’s fingers, curved around his morning hard-on, idly synchronised their rhythm to the odd staccato.
As the sun rose over the quartier, a shadow edged across the stone façade of the grey building overlooking Rue de Ménilmontant, then fell through the panes into Pascal’s room on the top floor where the patch of darkness landed on his face like a cloud blocking a piece of blue sky.
Pascal opened his eyes and looked towards the sound coming from the window. Paris was always grey to him, even though it was in colour. Now, suspended over the balcony and breaking into the black and white image, was a red brassiere– a buoyant arrangement of lace curves and negative space, alert and fastened, as if enclosing a body. The garment was animate, not clothesline-limp; it appeared to be levitating, like the velvet top hat hanging from invisible fishing line above his bed.
Pascal considered himself a fine magician though he had yet to make a woman disappear. He glanced around his bedroom. Everything was in order. The dove was quiet in its cage, under a canvas night cover. His props were in place near a battered green suitcase -scarves, card decks, a pile of rings. Near the door an arm emerged from the wall at the elbow, dressed in a navy blue suit sleeve, hand extended as if to shake another, its fingertips holding his velvet cape and black cane.
His performance the previous night had gone without incident; he had been onstage as usual, standing in the dank ancient dimly-lit Marais subterranea, twenty-five metres directly below a vitrined jelly-donut pyramid in a Jewish bakery, correctly guessing the identities of female audience members, prompted by spontaneous appearances of their names– a moving rash of lines on foreheads– written slowly in his loopy handwriting.
Pascal got out of bed and opened the floor-to-ceiling window. He squinted up the next building– a hand and forearm shaking out a grey rag. He looked down at the cobblestones– a black cat curled on the sidewalk, licking its genitals. The red brassiere moved aside. It was free-standing, apparently, not a snagged runaway specimen from the nearby weekly market.
Pascal stepped onto the balcony. The red brassiere bolted out of reach in a wide arc, then came closer, tentatively. It rubbed up against Pascal as if locked in his embrace. When he lunged for a shoulder strap it pulled away again. Not much for teasing, Pascal returned to his bedroom and closed the window, the red brassiere quickly following in a silent swoop, slipping inside before it shut.
Pascal returned to bed, unaware that the red brassiere was behind him. It flew up to the rafters, under the skylight, and angled downwards as if worn by a woman on a ladder. Pascal’s erection resurfaced and he closed his eyes, resuming his morning routine, stroking himself with more than the usual intensity. The red brassiere descended from its lofty perch to investigate, placing itself squarely above Pascal’s hidden hands. A perfume filled the room– that of Geneviève, an early love; the pungent grapefruit and cumin of her armpits, the private spices between her legs– and with it a distinct vision occupied Pascal’s imagination: Geneviève, on all fours, his full cock in her mouth, her wine-stained lips encasing him.
As he pulled at himself the smell grew stronger. Pascal opened his eyes. The red brassiere swayed at his face, emitting a heat along with the unmistakable scent. It did a bob and a bounce. The duvet rolled back into a croissant and Pascal’s pyjama pant buttons undid themselves one by one. His cock sprang out, shaking off his gripping hand, and disappeared into what felt like a mouth but was just empty space above a quivering piece of lingerie. The length of his penis came in and out of view as unseen lips slid over him. It was as if he were a figure drawing being erased and then re-sketched with the mouth’s advances and retreats. His palms grazed the red brassiere’s pebble-like nipple bumps. The fabric felt warm, inhabited. Pascal’s head flushed as if wrapped in a feverish blindfold. His eyelids burned. The invisible mouth took him deeper, containing him completely. He rubbed until his magic lamp released its oil then relaxed all muscles, spent. The red brassiere collapsed for a moment, folded at Pascal’s feet. He observed the silk and lace. On a shiny white label, flattened at the inside, near the underarm area, a size number and style name were written in his loopy script: 90C Geneviève.
As Pascal’s empty cock lay in repose the word vanished from the satin tag along with any traces of Geneviève’s fragrance. The red brassiere hovered motionless above the bed, as if waiting for a sign, a signal, an instruction.
Pascal enjoyed the company of women. Many many women– each one, one at a time. He was a sexual cartographer, leaving semen imprimaturs in bodies across Paris like inkblots on a map of the city. He had bedded women from every arrondissement, in every arrondissement, several times over. His erect cock had been a directional pointed throughout Paris as frequently as a Vous Êtes Ici map indicator. He could summon the chronicle of his roving carnal travelogue at will. Its various destinations were also the settings for his fantasies, both daydreams
and nocturnal reveries.
To Pascal’s highly developed sense of smell each woman was a snowflake– there were no two alike, even when they wore the same perfume. And of all the characteristics women presented to him their personal scent was the thing he found most arousing and the feature most indelible in his memory. He could recall the specific melodies of each one the way a gourmand has the ability to catalogue a history of refined meal courses. And, despite the esoteric differences between them, they were linked by an irrefutable underlying aura of femininity as a given, an aroma which also varied but was fundamentally and ultimately similar, exhibiting the entire olfactory spectrum, from highly pitched to low and broad.
Pascal eyed the red brassiere intently and re-wrapped his fist around his rigid cock. He closed his eyes and concentrated. The first woman to enter his thoughts was Delphine, the private tour guide who had fellated him in the artificial lake pooled beneath the Paris Opéra. Delphine liked to have sex in public or nearly so. She enjoyed being stripped naked except for a pair of high heels and a string of pearls. She favoured wearing a chef’s toque during intimate relations and bought them by the half-dozen at a uniform store on Rue Turbigo. She wore Mitsouko– he could always smell her before he saw her.
Pascal tugged at himself with ferocity, conjuring Delphine from puffy hat to pointy toes, filling in more of her details with each hard stroke. He raised his eyelids. He was face to face with the red brassiere, its cups enlarged as if supporting Delphine’s abundant breasts, the bedroom smelling like a Mitsouko tornado.
In that moment Pascal understood that the red brassiere was both a tabula rasa under his control and an object that could hold him simultaneously under its spell.
Pascal spent the entire day in bed with the red brassiere as his travel companion. He plugged and played, repeatedly. With each change of character the red brassiere assumed specific dimensions and offered Pascal a particular scent; the label changed its size and name information accordingly. He journeyed the entire city without leaving his bed:
Noémie had persuaded the man taking tickets for the Eutelsat tethered in the Parc André Citroen to let them up alone. Once the dirigible halted 150 metres above Paris she bent over and Pascal entered her derriére. Noémie’s dark hair smelled like roses. Pascal watched as the red brassiere showed its back to him– a narrow band of hook and eye– as he imagined Noémie. The odour of rosewater filled the room.
He and Agnès had visited the Panthéon forty-five minutes before closing. They’d positioned themselves against a column where Pascal could slide himself unseen inside her from behind and fuck her to the rhythm of Foucault’s slow-swaying pendulum. All the while Agnès kept a straight face, so as not to belie what was happening. The red brassiere tilted almost imperceptibly from side to side like a slow metronome wand as it gave off Agnès’s personal fragrance, a mixture of sex and tea tree oil.
Octavie was– appropriately– an accordionist who played beneath the arcades of the Place des Vosges. She and Pascal spoke about the perfect acoustics of the space then went for a pastry at Sacha Finkelsztajn on the Rue des Rosiers. Afterwards, Octavie played Pascal’s organ in private. She wore perfume made for babies. The red brassiere seemed to heave as if taking deep breaths while it replicated her bouquet.
Pascal went through his personal index of intimate sights and smells. He thought of the dark-skinned Sidonie (lilacs), whose long thin nipples echoed the dome tops of the Sacré-Coeur. He recalled Irène, into whose patchouli-cloaked nakedness he tunnelled until the houseboat on which she lived drifted away from its moorings. He remembered Odile, who had welcomed him inside her on all of Paris’ thirty-six bridges (Chanel No. 5, thirty-six times). There was Eugénie, whom he had balanced on his cock for 15 minutes in an automated street toilet, at her insistence (savon de Marseille with a hint of bleach). Clementine gave Pascal a handjob at dusk one summer night in the centre of the labyrinth at the Jardin des Plantes. She smelled not of clementines but of lemons. Vignette took him in her mouth on a rented boat in the Bois de Boulogne, lying flat so that he appeared to be the sole passenger, rowing as slowly as he could to keep the craft– and Vignette– going. She liked the smell of his semen in her hair.
Pascal dressed and left his apartment. The red brassiere followed him down the building’s spiral stairs in a corkscrew blur like a thrown party streamer. He stopped at the Bar des Sports for an espresso and a brioche. The red brassiere clung to his back, protected from onlookers, as he leaned against the zinc bar. He watched the twin peak line of red strap tops, like a child’s drawing of mountains, reflected in the mirror. A boy of twelve or so was playing a noisy game of flipper, head down. Pascal paid for his breakfast and a few loose cigarettes and was on his way, the red brassiere at his shoulder. He picked up a newspaper at the kiosk.
As Pascal walked the red brassiere played with him, evading his grasp when he tried for a strap, pulling a storey above, then falling down like a torpedo to reclaim its place beside him, each time smelling like someone else, a woman whose fleeting image had just made an appearance in his head because of something he noticed on the street, some je ne sais quoi suddenly noted, which struck him, awakened him, moved him– an object, a sound, a memory.
It began to rain. As its fabric soaked up the drops the red brassiere got richer in hue. Pascal unfolded his newspaper in an attempt to shield the garment from the elements. Before he could fully succeed a series of umbrellas opened like black flowers, clutched in fists at the ends of extended male arms left and right, one after the other like a choreographed dance, offering the red brassiere dry passage. It hopped from the shelter of one to the next, for the three-block duration of the cloudburst.
They passed a lingerie store where the red brassiere stopped for a moment of camaraderie with the black and white models in the display window, worn by silently laughing mannequins, until Pascal sensed its absence and walked back for retrieval, firmly hooking his fingers around the elastic straps.
At the flea market the red brassiere admired its own reflection in an antique mirror, its nipples brushing the hard surface as if kissing itself.
Back at his building Pascal tapped in the entry code and opened the heavy green wooden door. As he pushed inside the red brassiere broke free and flew to the top storey, hanging outside Pascal’s bedroom window until he arrived himself.
The next morning there were already several people waiting at the bus stop near the Rue des Pyrénées. An old woman bumped headlong into the red brassiere as if it were invisible but the men stared at it, unblinking, and stepped out of its way.
They boarded the 96 which would deposit Pascal in front of the magic club. The bus driver made him pay two fares. It was standing room only. A man with a white cane occupied the handicapped seat near the door. The red brassiere loomed above his shoulder in the last available wedge of space, overlooking a blonde woman in a blue trench coat flipping the pages of Paris Match. The red brassiere appeared to be reading over the woman’s shoulder.
‘Marie-Blanche?’ asked the blind man, arching his head in the direction of the red brassiere, ‘est-ce que c’est toi?’
The blonde looked at him quizzically. ‘We do not know each other,’ she said curtly.
‘Non– pardon,’ replied the blind man, ‘I was talking to her,’ again motioning his eyebrows towards the floating garment.
‘Qui? Il n’y a personne là, monsieur.’
‘Oui!’ he insisted. ‘Marie-Blanche!’ he continued in a singsong, ‘I was just thinking of you!’
‘Idiot!’ huffed the blonde, vacating her seat and pressing the red request button for the next stop.
Several women jostled the red brassiere as they left the bus, as if they did not see it. But Pascal sensed the sure and steady gaze of every male passenger– sitting or standing– their eyes, young and old; blue, green, grey, brown and hazel, uniformly fixed on the red brassiere, surrounding it from all spots in the bus. Pascal could see their erections, in various stages of angle development like
a progressive geometry diagram, pointing at the red brassiere from their trousers, a collective of anatomical radii, as if the red brassiere were the Place de l’Etoile and the fleshy arrows radiating spokes of the surrounding streets– avenues Victor Hugo, Kleber, d’Iena, Marceau, the Champs-Élysées… Pascal felt cornered. There was a quick change of plans: he would not go to the magic club today. At the next stop Pascal swiftly grabbed the red brassiere by a shoulder strap and hurried off, several pairs of men’s hands trying unsuccessfully to snatch the delicate fragrant gossamer as it passed– like sticks thrusting at brass carousel rings in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
‘Françoise!’
‘Adèle!’
‘Lucienne!’
‘Mignon!’
The men followed Pascal off the bus in pursuit of the red brassiere, and with each block more added to the mob, the mass of hands and shouts expanding like a bubble. A dozen Chinese men practicing Tai Chi in the Parc de Belleville got wind of the red brassiere, each man smelling a different woman. They tracked their noses and joined the rumble. Pascal broke into a sprint, the red brassiere an angel’s wing above him, just clear of the men’s grasps.
The Boulevard de Belleville was crowded, the market stalls taking up the shaded pedestrian median. The sidewalks on either side were filled with young women in hijab and shawls, men in kuftis and caftans– some of them shopkeepers in long blue smocks over their street clothing lounging in front of their stores, suitcase-sized bags of rice at their backs. Pascal ran in and out of traffic, on and off the sidewalk. He passed an Algerian patisserie, a Cambodian sweet shop, a Kosher restaurant, a halal boucherie, le Marché Franprix. A laughing teenage boy on a motorbike swung at the red brassiere, almost pinching it. The Muslim grocers in sandals, the Kosher felafellers, the Chinese and Vietnamese restaurateurs, the African marketers– all relinquished their posts to follow the red brassiere, each one with a massive erection, plainly visible, no matter the type of costume. Some were openly stroking themselves, with one hand or two, under and over their clothing. The men yelled women’s names in a Babelous ruckus:
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