by Corine Gantz
Gunter was standing by the open door, watching her with his smiling eyes. Her heart started beating way too fast. He extended an arm and shut the door. Now it was just the two of them in the beautiful room. He turned the key in the lock and walked toward her, still looking into her eyes until they faced each other.
She liked that he was taller than she was. She didn’t budge. I’m breathing in. I’m breathing out, she repeated to herself, but her breath was heavy. They stood in the center of the wooden floor, surrounded by the whiteness of the walls and the soft light in a room that suddenly felt immense. He kissed her neck. She stopped breathing. He kissed her mouth and she opened her lips. He slowly proceeded to undress her, right there in the middle of the empty room and she had never felt so deliciously naked. He caressed her body with the tips of his fingers, taking his time as she waited, breathlessly for more.
Outside Bistro de l’Aval, the thunder and lightning came simultaneously, and rain began dropping from the sky with the force of a waterfall. The humidity was quickly transforming the place into a sauna as Parisians began flocking in for refuge. From their table near the fogged up window, Annie watched the servers, the maître d’, the owner and his wife, all of whom she knew by name, go into overdrive. In minutes, tables for four had to accommodate six, the floor was becoming dangerously slippery, and the smell of wet coats and wet hair overpowered the smell of Plat du Jour.
Lola, using her fork to hunt bits of olives and anchovies the chef had refused to leave out of her Salade Niçoise, was describing in whispers what had happen at the studio with Gunter. Annie stabbed her grillade for relief, but it gave her none. She gave up on eating, stopped chewing and dropped her fork and knife on the side of her plate as Lola went on, giggling away as she spoke, not even bothering to mask how thrilled she was.
“I don’t think your husband actually meant it when he said you should have an affair,” Annie said.
Lola beamed. “Do you think I planned this?”
“You took off the ring!” Annie accused.
“I must have been sending out ‘I’m available’ signals. Unconsciously.”
Annie thought about this. If that was all it took, her own signals must be very weak. “But what about Lucas? You told me you liked Lucas?” she said breathlessly.
“I like Gunter better.”
“But you don’t even know him!” she blurted out, scandalized.
Lola laughed. “Believe me. I know plenty now! And the best part is how perfectly uncomplicated it is.” Lola put her hands over her face. “And oh my goodness... If you only knew the things he... did to me...”
“Tell me every detail,” Annie said grimly as she cut a piece of grilled meat and put it in her mouth. Her grillade tasted like cardboard now.
“I don’t know if I should, I’m a married woman,” Lola said coyly.
“Now you feel married?”
People were continuing to crowd in. Wasn’t it obvious they would never be able to accommodate everyone? Weren’t there restaurant regulations about this? Annie’s eyes searched for a sign indicating a maximum occupancy. The wool of her sweater made her neck itchy. Outside, thunder roared.
Lola leaned over the table. “It was the single sexiest, kinkiest experience, of. my. life!”
The word came out of Annie despite herself. “Ouch.”
Lola opened her eyes wide, innocently. Was she finally aware of how insensitive she was being? “What’s bothering you?” she asked. She really had no clue.
“No, please go ahead, rub my nose in it. I can only get laid vicariously, as you know.”
Lola frowned, “Annie, you can get laid whenever you choose to.”
“A widow with three kids, one mortgage, and an ass the size of the Arc de Triomphe doesn’t choose when to get laid, Lola.”
“This is Paris, the City of Love. Women are treated like goddesses. You can have any man you want!”
“Let me rephrase, Lola. You can have any man you want.”
Annie felt dangerously close to crying, and over something so stupid. The bistro de l’Aval’s owner, Monsieur François, a jovial man with a wide stomach and luxurious moustache had seemingly solved his crowd control issue by distributing glasses of wine and small dishes of olives, and now everyone was standing, chatting and drinking merrily. Annie cut her meat angrily and, without meaning to, raised her voice. “I’ve had four lovers in my life. Four! One, two, three, four. One I married, and the others were awful one-niters in my twenties. I’m aging and flabby.” The end of her sentence distorted into a loud cry. “And no one is looking at me!”
Lola recoiled in her chair, her eyes darting to the other patrons. Tears began falling from Annie’s eyes, as uncontrollable as the storm outside. Lola seemed to duck under the table, but she was only retrieving her purse, in which she hid her face in search of a tissue and whispered frantically “Shhh. I’d say everyone in the restaurant is looking at you now.”
“They don’t understand English,” Annie wailed.
Lola looked supplicating. “Please... I hate being a spectacle.”
Annie pointed an accusatory finger and raised her voice. “You get laid in the middle of a yoga class, and I’m the spectacle?”
Lola looked over her shoulder to discover half the restaurant staring. “Shhh... Annie, we were alone, of course!”
Annie gave up on controlling anything. She was bawling in front of the whole restaurant. “But what about meeeee?”
Lola looked about to run away from the table, but instead she said, “Here, I’ll bet you a kilo of Gascogne foie gras that the owner thinks you’re fetching.”
“I’m only thirty-five!” Annie sobbed softly. “I could still have more babies.”
“And I bet he would love nothing more than to get into your panties.”
Annie blew her nose but tears were still falling freely down her cheeks. “I’m not dead down there you know.”
Lola called out in despair, “Monsieur François!”
“Stop it,” Annie said, wiping her eyes quickly. “I thought you hated being a spectacle.”
“Well, this is a crisis.” Lola made big motions with her arms. “Monsieur François!”
“Oh shut up, Lola! No! Don’t do this! I forbid you!” Annie dabbed her eyes and smoothed her hair with the palm of her hand as Monsieur François approached their table, smiling and readjusting his necktie.
“We need your expertise,” Lola said. “My friend here thinks that no man could possibly find her attractive.”
Annie, her eyes red and puffy, recognized the absurdity of the situation, so she looked up at Monsieur François as though he were a worldwide authority on the matter.
Monsieur François straightened his posture and looked around him as though he was looking for hidden cameras. “C’est une blague?” Is this a joke?
“You see a lot of people every day,” Lola said in her best French. “And as a man, what do you think?”
Monsieur François readjusted his sports coat. “I cannot speak for all men, bien sûr...”
Lola smiled encouragingly. “Of course.”
He bent down so that his face would be at the same level as theirs and whispered in a seductive breath that smelled of cigarettes and red wine. “I can’t be speaking for all men, but, I’d personally be happy to prove Madame l’Américaine, heu--”
“Annie,” offered Lola.
“Madame Annie, can count on me to be her...Chevalier Servant. It would be a pleasure. As long as ma femme is left out of all this, of course.” He stood up, caressed his moustache, and declared with loud panache as he walked off, “Two Moelleux au Chocolat, Gérard, on the house.”
Annie and Lola had to duck under the table at the same time to hide their laughter.
Chapter 22
Althea had been standing close to Jared at métro station Beaumesnil, her icy hand in his warm palm. It was just after dawn and they had been walking all night or so it seemed. Sleepless nights in the streets of Paris were adding up. She
felt spent, exhausted, cold to the bone. Jared, unperturbed by the temperature or the early hour, seemed lost in his thoughts. What were his thoughts? The station was mostly empty aside from a dozen men and women already on their way to work. It smelled of coffee and perfume, of warm sheets and hot showers, of dreams being put back together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Despite her exhaustion, she could not quiet down that newfound ability, that curse; she felt things now. Now she had desires and wants, she who had not cared about much of anything in her adult life. Even as they stood there in silence and exhaustion, she felt especially overwhelmed by her maddening need for Jared to tell her why he spent time with her. Who or what was she to him? Of course she did not dare ask. How she wanted Jared to kiss her. Why was he not kissing her? Did he not want to? But why then did he never let go of her hand? A frigid gust of wind found its way through the tunnels of the métro and through her clothes and she shivered violently.
“Tu as froid?” Jared asked, turning towards her. She nodded yes. What Jared did then was something wonderful and awesome. He opened his coat and let her take refuge against his chest. He then wrapped the coat around her and held her there. In one moment she was engulfed in the incredible pleasure of his scent, the muscles of his chest, of his warmth. At that moment, she could take it no longer. She raised her face toward his, dared to hold her body tight against his, and dared look into his eyes. “You’re very beautiful,” he told her.
She had closed her eyes, raised her chin, and whispered, “embrasses moi.” Kiss me.
When she felt his lips on hers the inside of her body, her heart, swelled, rose and spun. When the train arrived, she let Jared drag her like a rag doll into the car where they kissed all the way to the sixteenth arrondissement.
Nothing would taste or smell the same the week that followed; the espressos she drank in small cafés engulfed in the smoke cloud of Jared’s many cigarettes, the wet scent of deserted public gardens, the warm bread he hand-fed her at dawn when the boulangeries opened. She could now feel the world, see the world in new ways that astonished her. When Jared pointed to a strange person, a poster, a newspaper headline, an advertisement, a building, a tree, Althea saw those too for the first time. What Jared did, saw, thought, ate, and drank suddenly existed for her. And there was joy. Sometimes the sound of her own laughter would surprise her, and she’d be stunned by the possibility of her own happiness. She, Althea, had a boyfriend who found her beautiful, painted her for hours, kissed her, fed her. She lost herself in the sight of him. How he scratched his day-old beard, how he walked, how his hands held a glass, a fork, a paintbrush. She lost herself in his body next to hers, his scent, and now his kisses. But soon it was no longer enough, She began wanting for him to touch her body, but he didn’t. Why didn’t he? Did he not want to? What was wrong with her?
And then, just like that, they had a fight. It was late, almost dusk at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise. Jared had stopped in front of names like Jean-Paul Sartre and Serge Gainsbourg and rambled on about their genius while Althea watched the way his mouth moved. When they passed Jim Morrison’s tombstone and the dozen people taking pictures, she asked Jared if Jim Morrison was French.
He laughed. “Français? You don’t know who he is? You’re American.”
“I wasn’t sure,” she said impatiently. Jared should have known that she had not had a normal life where people have friends, listen to music, care, take pleasure in things. She had told him about herself, in simple sentences and he had listened. He knew about a lifetime spent in suspended animation, he knew about her jailor, the mother she never wanted to see again, the father too shut down from life to pay attention. Jared knew almost everything. Almost. He did not know there was a third jailer. And when she was with him she almost forgot she too was a monster.
The cemetery closing time was near and Jared took her in a corner to hide. They waited in silence for people to leave, the guards to make their rounds, the gates to close. “Why do you like cemeteries at night anyway?” she asked when they were finally alone and could move from their hiding place and sit on a bench.
“For the silence,” he answered. “And for the cats.” He looked at her and winked. “C’est plus romantique. Non?” She watched Jared take out a small boulangerie box from the depth of his pocket. “On mange,” he said and he opened the package and placed it between them on the bench. She took one look at the contents of the package, two coffee éclairs with glossy light brown icing. She felt anger rush through her. “I don’t want to eat that,” she said.
Jared ignored her, picked up one éclair and moved it gently toward her mouth. “They’re my favorite,” he told her. She jerked her head back and he considered her reaction with amusement. “Take a bite.”
Althea felt the familiar repulsion, the tightening of her hands into fists. “What happens if I don’t eat this?” she asked, rage in her voice.
“Then I’ll eat two,” he shrugged.
She fought to contain her tears. “What I mean is, I just think you should stop trying to feed me.”
Jared put the éclair down, licked his fingers. “You don’t like me to?”
She needed the truth. “I’m worried about being fat.”
He looked at her and frowned. “Tu es trop maigre,” he said shaking his head, “Much too thin,” he added with vehemence. “C’est pas bon ça.”
“Sometimes I feel that all I have in the world is my thinness,” Althea whispered.
Jared looked away. “That’s very strange.”
Althea’s eyes were full of tears. “Do you hate me now?”
Jared scratched his day-old beard looking unsure. “No, why?” He thought for a moment, then said, “Do you think that maybe you are sick?”
Althea’s body hummed with energy. She had heard this before. “I just want to be thin. What’s wrong with that? Everybody wants to be thin, but for me, suddenly, it means that I’m sick.”
“I’ll kiss you if you promise to eat some éclair, maybe not today, but one day.” Jared had moved close to her and held her face in his hands.
“You don’t understand, I’m really afraid to be fat. Really, really afraid,” she whispered when Jared’s lips were an inch from hers. Her secret out, tears fell freely from her eyes and down the side of her face.
“Promise you will try one day,” he said, “or I don’t kiss you.”
“But not today, right?”
“No, today, I’m the one who will be fat,” he said.
Lola brought the silk sheet to her chin to hide her grin. Everything was too perfect about this loft and about Gunter. What kind of man puts his mattress in the center of a room and sleeps on immaculate white silk sheets? She watched naked Gunter’s catlike body glide towards the bathroom. No bathing suit marks. She hoped he wasn’t the kind to go to the tanning booth, what a turn off. He had a perfect body. No, the perfect body. And this was the perfect room, white, light and airy, with high ceilings, piles of books on the shelves and the floor, incomprehensible artwork on the walls. Clean, Zen, and sensuous. Gunter was a travel journalist. He scoped the world for an upscale travel magazine, slept in lavish resorts, ate in opulent restaurants. And judging from his in-plain-sight selection of condoms—the ribbed, the fruit-flavored, and even the humorous ones—lovemaking was to him a lighthearted affair.
She stretched under the sheet. Wholly comfortable in his nudity, Gunter walked back to the bed, a joint at his lips. He crouched down next to her, offering her the joint along with a front row seat to his perfect genitalia. “No, no, no,” she said. “I don’t smoke. I’ve never smoked! Oh, fuck it!” She put the joint to her mouth, feeling completely silly. Every one of her moves in the last few weeks had been a source of utter self-amazement. She was already an adulteress, what further harm was there in being a pothead?
Lucas could tell that Annie was not in the best of moods. When the temperature went up like this, the only reasonable thing to do was to leave Paris. Within a short hour-and-a-half train ride he could be in h
is cottage in Honfleur. But instead of packing his duffle bag and heading north in a first-class TGV, instead of looking forward to a few days of sailing along the coast, he had stopped by Annie’s house and invited her to take a stroll around the Bois de Boulogne. Annie had accepted, and now she was blaming him for the weather.
“I’m sensing a heatstroke coming,” Annie said when they had barely stepped out of her house.
Lucas took her elbow, “it will get cooler by the lake.”
They walked down rue de Passy toward La Muette. “Give me my breeze,” Annie implored. “You promised me breeze!” Humidity wrapped around them like tentacles, but the tension and exhaust smell of the city did seem to wane as they approached the dark mass of Sycamores and Chestnut trees that was the Bois de Boulogne.
“The theme of the party will be Arabian Nights,” Annie said. He wondered again what guests she planned to invite since she had made sure to alienate everyone she and Johnny used to know. The thought had occurred to him that she had done it on purpose at the time, severing old relationships with Johnny’s crowd. She had been impossible, antagonistic, finding any pretext to shut off one friendship after another. He still saw a lot of these people, but she had made it clear that she didn’t want to know who was sleeping with whom and who had cheated on whom. Too many memories, too many worries.
For someone who felt too hot, Annie was walking fast, intent on getting from point A to Point B, instead of enjoying the stroll. She was preoccupied, he could tell. He noticed that her clothes were new. Had she lost weight? She was wearing a floating white blouse with folkloric motif, maybe something Russian, and cute shorts. Inside her sandals, her toenails were painted bright red. She continued walking fast beside him and talking about the party, but it felt as though she was making a point of not talking about something else. She seemed mad at him, in fact. “I bought scraps of fabric at the Marché Saint-Pierre,” she said, “and I’ve been sewing pillows since February. I really want the party to be outdoors in the backyard, a pillows-on-the-floor, eating-food-with-our-hands kind of party.”
