Hotelles (19 page)

Words have the same effect, even when used in nonsexual contexts: ball, cock, pussy, dick, cleft, hole, bush, fur, poke, fill, ram, suck, lick, wet, finger, discharge  . . .

(To be continued . . .)

 

Anonymous handwritten note, 6/8/2009

 

EVEN THOUGH I WAS NOW
fully awake, I closed my eyes for the rest of the train ride for fear that David would look up from his screen and notice something in my face. I wanted to keep still, as well as weave an invisible thread between David and me, so I repeated a meditation chant that Sophia had taught me when she was going through her Ho‘oponopono phase: “I love you. I am sorry. Please, forgive me. Thank you.” According to Hawaiian wisdom, when these phrases are repeated over and over, they have the power to purge our bodies of toxins and reconcile us with ourselves.

 

WHEN WE GOT TO THE
British capital, I was almost in a trancelike state. David, who spoke perfect English, was already glued to his phone and hadn't noticed anything. He dropped me off at the Savoy, one of the most prestigious luxury hotels in London. The black-and-white-check marble flooring in the entry recalled Duchesnois House. As he left, David gave me a chaste kiss on the forehead.

“Have fun, darling. If you need anything, ask the concierge, Clive. He's a perfect, pure Oxbridge Englishman. Courteous to a fault.”

“Do you know him?”

“Only for the past fifteen years, dear. We used to come here with my parents. He'll bend over backward for you.”

“Okay.”

“I've got to go. See you tomorrow.”

Clive definitely lived up to his reputation. At his suggestion, I enjoyed the spa and its beauty services. Then the man with the mustache and bristly whiskers set me up with a hotel car, and I spent the afternoon going from boutique to boutique.

Spoiled and pampered, I only had one worry for the day, and that was to spend money that was not yet mine. I had to stock my wardrobe with more than the essentials I had gotten with Rebecca (at an unthinkable cost!). The stunning Alice had given me an idea of the level of dress among women at the station. I didn't want to let my man and boss down. For his part, I don't think this afternoon shopping spree was just an excuse to spoil me: he probably also considered the expense as a kind of investment. It was a fair exchange.

 

AROUND FOUR P.M., I HAD
my chauffeur, Will, drop me off a couple of blocks from the Savoy, and sent him to take my purchases to the room, whence they would be sent to Paris directly—not an unusual perk for regulars of that kind of establishment. I needed some air, and some freedom.

I wandered for a while through the streets of London, which smelled more metallic and masculine than those of Paris. I couldn't help but imagine what sort of licentious anecdotes Louie would tell on such a walk. Was this the hotel where Diana and Dodi met in secret for the first time? Did prostitutes walk these streets once?

Without knowing why, it made me think of Fred. Fred, the loser from the day before. Fred, ridiculous and humiliated. I owed him an explanation and, above all, my apologies. He was right: he did deserve a face-to-face talk. But he didn't pick up his phone. Maybe he was screening his calls, still licking his wounds.

I was mulling things over a few paces from the Savoy when I noticed one of the last remaining red phone booths. Like its French equivalent, in front of the Hôtel des Charmes, it started to ring just as I was approaching it. I turned to look around, searching for a spot from which someone could be spying on me, but I didn't notice anything suspicious. Just the insistent ring. Incredulous, I entered the booth and picked up the black receiver.

“Hello? Hello? . . . Is there anybody here?” I asked in my classroom English.

No, no one was on the other end, it seemed.

However, a local specialty caught my attention: lining the booth was all manner of promotional materials for strip clubs, call girls, and escorts. From an Indian women in traditional dress to a buxom matron of new burlesque, there was something for everyone. The city must not clean the phone booths as regularly as before since the racy flyers had begun to stack up, from the more recent ones to the most yellowed. One of the flyers on top caught my eye:

FRENCH LOVE WITH ELLE

The worst part was not the use of my nickname but the naked photo of me that had been taken at the Hôtel des Charmes in the Mata Hari room, the turn-of-the-century decor of which perfectly suited the choice of font. I tore it from where it had been pinned and was about to crumple it into a ball when I noticed what was written on the back:

2—Thou shalt awaken thine senses.

It was the same message I had received the night before. The one I had decided to ignore.

I leaned my back against the cool window, my head suddenly pounding. The flyer dropped from my hand. I was incapable of any movement. The message couldn't be clearer: no matter where I was—London, Paris, New York—he was never going to leave me alone. Wherever I went, he would find me and remind me of his desires, which I met in exchange for his silence. He didn't just deal in symbols; he was also very real. Invisible but oppressive. He tracked me like an occult power follows the protagonist in a spy novel.

I stumbled out of my vermilion shelter and hailed a cab. There was no point going back to the hotel: everything I needed I had on me, including my return ticket, which I had no problem exchanging for the next train to Paris.

I tossed and turned in my seat for the whole length of the trip, like an insomniac in her bed. I was light-years away from the feeling of excitement I'd had on the way to London, shuddering at the possibility that my picture might be on other flyers, in other phone booths near the Savoy. Who knows? The hand that was working against me on this side of the Channel might have posted some on the public bulletin board in the hotel's reception hall . . . or, even more to the point, directly on David's pillow in suite number twenty-four.

I was having a hard time collecting myself, even with Sophia's mantras, which my anger had transformed: “I don't like you, I hate you . . . I am not remotely sorry. Whether you like it or not, get out of my life! Thank you.”

I resisted the temptation to harass Louie's surly secretary—I didn't doubt for a second that she'd filter the call as she had the others—as well as the violent urge to go see him at Barlet Tower in person as soon as I got off the train.

Making a scene at BTV the day before I started my new job would not help my professional future. David could probably forgive me, but what about the others, the Lucs, the Chloes, the Alices? Moreover, I would have to explain to my future husband the reason behind such a show of anger and fear. Why on earth would I have attacked my brother-in-law, the very man who had been such an obliging tour guide the day before?

 

WHEN I ARRIVED AT GARE
du Nord, I took the RER line B and then changed to line A at the Halles. I arrived in Nanterre, my eyes heavy, less than forty minutes later.

“Have you eaten?” Mom immediately asked, worried.

It was after nine o'clock, and I hadn't had a bite of anything since my cucumber sandwich during my afternoon of shopping at Covent Garden.

“No . . .”

“There's still some blanquette, if you want. Or I could make a potato salad.”

“Salad.”

Once I was seated and poking my fork into small cubes of potato covered in mustard grains and flaky egg yolks, I noticed that her voice sounded weaker than usual and her breathing more haggard. It was clear she was not doing well. Yet she looked happy.

“Look what I got today!”

She disappeared for a moment into the living room and came back with a vase of wildflowers.

“Wait, that's not all . . .”

She gestured toward an enormous pastry box. I immediately recognized Ladurée's celadon-and-gold logo.

“Macaroons?” I guessed.

“
Fifty
rose-flavored macaroons!”

“Your favorite . . .”

“Yes!”

She was like a girl getting a bag of candy after school.

“Do you know who it's from? Was there a card?”

“Nothing. But I have an idea . . .”

The same as mine, if I understood the way she was smiling at me: David. How could he be so perfect? More than perfect, even. I must have mentioned in passing that my mom liked rose macaroons. And now he was spoiling her like he spoiled me.

Of course the fact that he had been in direct contact with her was unsettling. But maybe, with ten days before our wedding, he was just trying to force me into finally introducing them to each other.

I typed a quick thank you text message:

Thank you for the flowers and macaroons. Mom is in heaven. I love you.

 

Less than a minute later:

I love you, too. But sorry, I didn't send the flowers. Your mom has another admirer!

 

Louie! Who else? Certainly not Fred. Nor even our neighbor, the resident dirty old man, who had once taken a fetishistic interest in our home.

Louie was trying to insert himself into every facet of my life, every nook and cranny, in his own way. But as fleeting as it was, the joy he had given Maude was priceless. For that, I could not be mad. And he knew it: through her, he was holding my heart, in his elegant hands.

“Anyway, you can't be jealous today,” Mom added. “You also got a present.”

“A present?”

She pointed to a small box covered in silver paper that was sitting on the buffet in the living room, next to the photos of me. I hadn't noticed it before.

“I think your friend on student council has a thing for you,” she joked with a wicked smile. At least she was having fun.

“Oh . . . Yeah, it's not impossible.”

I took the precaution of waiting until I was in my room before opening it. Under the disapproving eyes of my old stuffed animals, I withdrew a kind of long metallic egg. Did Sophia have this sort of thing in her collection of erotic gadgets? I preferred not to think of its obvious function and tried to repress images of it in action, in me.

The accompanying envelope contained another keycard for the Hôtel des Charmes, as well as a predictable pink Post-it featuring the same handwriting as the other two messages:

     
Ten o'clock tonight.

Don't forget your present.

I am certain that, this time,

you will honor our engagement.

16

June 8, 2009

I
had been promising myself for months that one day I would verify whether or not the three trees planted in the small square were charms. Charm trees: the kind one plants, vaunts, and sells . . . And I was ready to give my charms away, at a loss, for a little peace and liberty.

I felt light, as though I were about to leave a piece of myself that I didn't want anymore in this room. Shed my dead skin. Yes, that was my plan, to pretend I was giving Louie everything he wanted. But I wouldn't really be there. Not with him. Not for him. All he would get was an obsolete version of the woman he had been circling all this time with his little obscene notes. He thought he'd almost caught her in his net. In reality, he would be devouring a ghost. Biting into a shadow. As for me, I would leave everything that created distance between David and me between these walls. Including the things I'd learned about him and that I never should have known. Then, and only then, I would really belong to him and only him. Annabelle Barlet, David's wife.

I don't know whom I thought I was fooling with such naive ideas. I guess it was what I needed at the time  . . .

I was already late. I rushed from the metro station Saint-Georges, where a film crew was getting ready to shoot a scene whose set, a retro booth and an automobile parked nearby, recalled the Occupation. As for me, I was wandering through a scene from the nineteenth century, over the steps where Louie and I had walked the other day.

I recognized the buildings whose history he had described in such detail. I hesitated on Rue la Bruyère in the idiotic hope I'd run into Marceline and her lover, arm in arm. At the intersection of Rue Notre-Dame-de-Lorette and Rue de la Rochefoucauld, a figure of Dionysus stuck its tongue out at me from under a columned balcony. At least someone appreciated the irony of the situation. For a fraction of a second, Louie's face appeared as the impish devil and winked. He was everywhere.

Why had he decided to play the role of the perverted marquis and manipulator? What had David done to him—nothing
he
wouldn't have done in his brother's place, I was sure—to make him harass me? It made me feel like an object in an endless transaction between them. If Louie ever decided to be the man he had been for a few moments during our walk—happy, funny even, delighted to share his knowledge and interest—could we one day become . . . I don't know, friends? Instead of being yet another reason for the brothers not to get along, I could help them bond. I could be their angel of reconciliation.

“Good evening, Elle. I didn't expect to see you again so soon . . . but I am delighted, of course.”

Monsieur Jacques, obliging as ever, waved from his counter and folded his long silhouette into one of his little bows, a fleeting bend of the torso reminiscent of Japanese culture. As I approached him, I caught a tart scent of bergamot.

“Thanks,” I said. “Tell me . . .”

I withdrew the polished metal egg.

“Oh my!” he exclaimed, his eye gleaming. “A new puzzle?”

I often wondered about Monsieur Jacques's role in Louie's games. After all, this was his hotel. The room keys didn't circulate without his knowledge. Did he simply furnish the elder Barlet with keys and turn a blind eye to what he did with them? Like his bald head, the concierge was as smooth as he was impenetrable.

“It would appear so, yes . . .”

“No clues this time?”

“No. Just this.”

I placed the object in his long, arachnidan hands, which were so delicate it was almost worrisome. He closed his fingers around the scintillating metal and inspected it with his bulging eyes.

“Marie . . .” He smiled after some reflection.

“Marie?”

“Marie Bonaparte.”

“Napoleon III's . . . daughter?” I guessed.

He corrected me politely, but I noticed his eyes cloud in what looked like worry, which did not fit with his usual erect, unwavering bearing.

“Napoleon Bonaparte's great-grandniece.”

“Oh. I believe you. But why an egg?”

He raised his nonexistent eyebrows and fixed his dizzyingly blue eyes on me.

“Hmm . . . No one ever told you about her relationship with the Freud family?”

“No,” I admitted.

“Marie Bonaparte was a social fixture in intellectual circles of the late nineteenth century. As a result, she befriended some of the great minds of her time, including the French psychologist Gustave Le Bon.”

“I've never heard of him.”

“At the time, he was much talked about. His work on crowd psychology was even a kind of bestseller. He's the one who recommended Marie read Freud's
Introduction to Psychoanalysis
.”

The rest seemed obvious. At last I understood where his erudition was leading.

“She also managed to meet Freud, is that it?”

“Even better: she became a patient of his, for almost fifteen years.”

“That's incredible. But what about the egg?”

“Well, dear Marie Bonaparte had some fetishes. Sexual fetishes.”

“Really?”

“She was incapable of knowing real pleasure. And for reasons that are still unclear to this day, she convinced herself that female frigidity originated not from an unconscious trauma . . . but an
anatomical
problem.”

He lowered his voice when he said this last word, as though afraid something awful might happen.

“Anatomical? What do you mean?”

“She believed that the clitoris was too far from the vagina to achieve its goal: orgasm. She wrote several articles on the subject.”

“And? She thought
this
would solve the problem?”

I pointed at the oblong object he was rolling between his palms like a pebble, having abandoned his gold-accented, black lacquer pen.

“No, not exactly. At first, she thought she could reconstruct the parts where nature had failed. She underwent no less than three operations to bring the ill-placed clitoris closer to the orifice of copulation.”

I gasped.

“What? Was she crazy?”

“A little, yes. After that, she put her hopes in the still nascent field of psychoanalysis. But despite all the years she spent on the couch, even Freud himself proved unable to divert her from her obsession. As for this little thing”—he raised the egg, a fragile trophy in his hands, and looked at it admiringly—“it figured among the many intimate toys she used and abused to stimulate herself internally and experience pleasure like she had never known from an external touch. She was so convinced that one day it would ‘loosen her up'—excuse my expression—that she became a devoted proponent of a new device: the vibrator. She promoted it and all its forms without any thought of recompense. For her, it was a kind of erotic sacrifice.”

“Incredible.”

“But don't be fooled. She may have been eccentric, but she was a good woman. During the war—she wasn't so young anymore—she personally intervened to help a number of Jewish intellectuals flee Austria and Germany. Freud included.”

He stooped to return my object, his voice vaguely melancholic:

“That's the whole story. The Marie Bonaparte is on the fourth floor, the first door on your left when you step off the elevator. Have a nice evening, Elle.”

No hidden meaning in his gravelly voice. Just his usual courteousness.

As I turned around, I was surprised by Ysiam's immaculate smile. Ysiam, who had led me to my first cell. Who hadn't answered my calls for help. The hand that had slipped Louie's orders under the door. Despite his gentle looks, Ysiam was a jailer.

“Please follow me, Mademoiselle.”

But was it reasonable to blame the messenger? He waited as I entered the elevator, which jostled us upward. When we arrived on the fourth floor—we didn't say a word to each other during the brief mechanical ride—he moved to the right to let me by and pointed at a night-blue door. The whole floor was that color, just as the sixth was all red and the second, where the Josephine was located, all gold.

Holding my keycard in front of the lock, I was about to question him about his boss when he broke the silence that had been imposed upon him ever since our first meeting:

“This time there won't be any instructions. You'll know what to do. On your own.”

“No instructions?” I cried. “And who decided there shouldn't be instructions today?”

“That I cannot tell you.”

“That's your instruction, right?”

“Yes.” He nodded.

I would have sworn his dark skin blushed.

“I bet you're dying to tell me . . . !” I said defiantly, playing with his show of reserve like a cat and its mouse.

The poor boy lost his perpetual look of quietude. He was so touching, with his scared, wide eyes. He looked lost, as though he were desperately searching for something to hold on to.

“Not at all!”

At last his gaze settled on the keycard in my hand. It was his escape, and he seized it. He slid the card into the reader. The door opened. My prison was his liberation.

Without saying another word, he disappeared in the flash of an eye to the other end of the hall. Louie could be proud: Ysiam hadn't failed. He must pay him well.

I knew he'd be back to lock the door behind me.

The room did not look like a place for sleeping but more like an office. It had a sober feel, and was decorated according to a turn-of-the-century style: a desk made of polished cherry, covered in green Moroccan tapestry, a metallic ball lamp, a small worn club chair, and, on the other side of the room, under the unique barred window, a velour blood-red sofa on which had been thrown a number of cushions embroidered in gold.

A coherent ambiance, especially considering the person who'd inspired it. What was expected of me seemed pretty obvious, and I lay down on the sofa without further ado.

As before, I waited a long time before anything happened. I heard the faint and rather distant sound of the elevator as it came and went, of doors that opened and closed, and something like the clanking of a room service cart that the attendant on the floor above must have been pushing through the hallway.

There was one modern feature in the room, a flat screen hanging like a painting opposite the sofa. I only noticed it when it flickered on. I checked to make sure I wasn't sitting on a remote. No. The electronic device was responding to an outside command. There was no other possible explanation, thought I. The static quickly gave way to an image of another room.

It looked nothing like the other rooms I'd seen in the hotel. No vintage decor nor gesture toward a historical figure. Its walls were a bluish black, the furniture consisting of a simple bed with a thick mattress and a comforter, as well as two Louis XV chairs upholstered in dark canvas. The lighting was poor, and I had to wait for two persons, one man and one woman, both naked and wearing masks, to enter, before I understood what was making the atmosphere so bizarre: their bodies glowed in the dark like two fireflies torn from obscurity by a black light, the kind dancers go wild for in nightclubs. Their skin shone brightly from the shadows. It was unreal. Every imperfection erased by the diffuse light and the effect of being filmed.

Did they know they were being observed? And if they did, who were they and why were they so willing to participate? They forwent preliminaries, undoubtedly thinking them superfluous, and got down to business so quickly that I decided they must be simple mercenaries, commissioned and paid for by Louie to put on a private show for me. The girl was smaller and more petite than I. She had two tiny bulges, like little apples, for a chest. She knelt before her partner and began using her mouth to make the flaccid and inert object between the boy's legs grow. She sucked diligently and with delicacy, using her tongue to excite his tip and only swallowing the whole shaft at privileged intervals. He grunted with increasing intensity each time her mouth jetted down his dick, which grew imperiously large, deep inside her throat.

The fact that the show was choreographed exclusively for me, that the two actors probably came from some live show in Pigalle, that it was all so artificial and fabricated, should have put me off. But indifference and disgust soon gave way to curiosity—I wanted to know how she would prolong his pleasure before the final moment. The very thing that I would have found unacceptable in an X-rated movie was now turning me on. The reality effect. I was fascinated by her lips, which were now moving slowly over the throbbing, swollen gland that shone with their desire. I hated to admit it, but yes, yes, yes . . . I found their bit madly exciting.

“More . . . Yes!”

Detecting a strange echo, I stood from the sofa and walked toward the hanging television, where I noticed that in addition to the integrated speakers, there was another source of sound, one that was more direct, more present. Indeed, the troubling fact of the matter was that the couple was making love in an adjoining room, and the wall was so thin that I could hear even the most discreet moan.

Knowing that they were so nearby, so close that I could touch them, unleashed a wild, voracious desire in me to join them. I wanted to participate. Torn between image and sound, I glued my ear to the wall, then took a step back to look at the scene on the television screen. Each peek revealed a different configuration of bodies. Each
Kama Sutra
move elicited a specific form of pleasure. Ysiam had been right, and the man who was orchestrating everything in the shadows, too: I knew what to do. I didn't need orders or instructions.

All I had to do was watch the man's hands, which were now running over the woman's body, pressing into her flesh, dashing into her orifices, a finger pushing into the crease in her ass or brushing across her brown lips engorged with desire. From my side of the electronic mirror, I slowly undressed, piece by piece, each article of clothing igniting a specific area of skin as it brushed across my body: buttocks, belly, thighs, shoulders, nipples . . . I could not take my eyes off the man's hands . . . Standing, my lace panties still in place, I tried to mime each one of his movements. I became my own lover, discovering hitherto unknown sweetness from my own touch.