Hotelles (2 page)

2

The same day, a little later

S
o, basic . . . or
base
itinerary?”

The voice behind this terrible play on words came from a girl who loves to flirt with all things vulgar, knowing full well that it adds to her coarse charm. Sophia. My best friend. Kind of my only friend, to be honest. Sophia Petrilli, two years my senior and at least five years ahead of me in the world of men and sex. Chocolate curls that catch everybody's attention. Perfectly sculpted breasts that call out for hands to touch them. Eyes in which all men long to get lost. One of her first lovers nicknamed her Esmeralda because, being the young dancer that she is, she's wildly independent and makes men burn for her. In her everyday life, she is just Sophia, a little lost and without a serious boyfriend or stable job. But she is the most lively and independent person I know, and she has been a solid friend in the face of hardship. Boyfriends have come and gone;
Sophia
is forever.

“Mmm . . . ,” I replied, dodging her question with a shrug. “Second itinerary.”

“Makes sense, given the hour. I kind of figured.”

On nights when we were both working, we typically met at Café des Antiquaires on Rue de la Grange Batelière, which is just a few paces away from the Drouot auction house in Paris's 9th Arrondissement. The rule was simple: the first one to finish up with her client would wait for the other. Option number one rarely kept us out past eleven p.m. Number two could easily go into the wee hours of the morning.

“And you? Did you have a good night?”

“One might say,” she said, smirking.

“Rich client?”

“Disgustingly rich, you mean. I've never seen such a flashy Rolex. And he really pulled out all the stops: the Pompadour suite and all the trimmings.”

That was another thing about the Hôtel des Charmes: each room, which could be rented by the hour, was dedicated to one of French history's great seductresses and courtesans. The king's favorites, mistresses, queens, and simple ladies of the night whom posterity had not forgotten. A surprising collection of dancers, spies, artists, and half-socialites. All were remembered for their extraordinary powers over men and the ways in which they used them over the course of their tumultuous lives. No reference was made to these men in the hotel; none of them were associated with a room. Meanwhile, as I had noticed earlier, each room was decorated in perfect harmony with the time and period of the heroines I've just mentioned. Each room was a unique setting that embodied one woman and gave life to a whole fantasy.

“Not bad,” I said with forced enthusiasm. “I was in the Josephine.”

“Nice! Have you ever been there before?”

“No, first time.”

Sophia was more of a regular at the Hôtel des Charmes than I. Sometimes she'd go as many as two or three times in a month. On principle, never more than once a week, though depending on what else was going on in her life, these rendezvous were her primary source of revenue.

“And,” she asked, smiling coyly, “how was it? Good?”

“Sophia!” I cried. “You know . . . I can't.”

She knew the rules as well as I: the agency that put us in contact with our rich clients strictly prohibited us from talking about them. Nothing was to leave the walls of those quaint and charming bedrooms. Some of the men we met were important and very powerful. Any information related to what they did in their private lives, especially when it came to sexual preferences, could be used against them by their enemies. Their confidentiality was paramount, and secrecy became our dogma.

To be completely honest, I liked it that way. The agency's rule put a healthy barrier between me and Sophia's obsession. For Sophia, talking about sex was as much fun as having sex. It was a natural extension, as though language were an organ like the clitoris that could be stimulated. She considered sex a universal subject and would find any excuse to bring it up in conversation, in any context, with friends
and
total strangers. “Seriously,” she would say, trying to provoke me, “can you think of anything more interesting than sex? I mean, come on. We're not going to talk about the stock market or kids, right? We're both broke. And stop me if I'm wrong, but neither of us is going to have kids any time soon. Thirty-one, that's the average age of a first-time mom in Paris. Thirty-one!”

She could go on forever about her favorite topic of conversation, delighting in all the gory details, feeding off anything she could force out of those around her.

“Because my client tonight, you should have seen the size of his equipment! Monstrous! I mean, crazy! Even bigger than his bank account, which says something.”

“Soph!” I started, trying to keep myself from laughing.

“Seriously, the guy should join a circus.”

“Stop!”

“What? I didn't give you his name! I'm just telling you about his penis.”

“Awesome,” I said ironically. “You should make a reality show.”

“No, but seriously, he was so big I thought I'd choke when I ble—”

“Yeah, you're right.” I cut her off so I wouldn't have to hear any more. “It's better not to take forever when you're giving fellatio. Otherwise, they get addicted to it and that's all they want.”

My classic response to Sophia's tsunami of inconvenient truths: modestly limiting myself to tired clichés and ready-made phrases, most of which I got from sex columns in women's magazines.

“That said,” she went on, “it's hard to beat that guy who wouldn't touch me and who made me masturbate for two hours while he watched . . . He wore me out.”

“Yeah, but at least if he watches while you masturbate, he'll learn what makes you come. It's not a total waste of time.”

I think I got that from
Cosmo
, July/August 2007. It had to have come from there.

But what did I, Annabelle Lorand, actually know about sex? Not a lot.

Truth is, the agency's rule was a good excuse not to get into too much detail with Sophia. Most of the time it quelled her curiosity or at least put a damper on her shameless logorrhea. I would have been happy keeping my secrets to my little notebook. But there, somebody else's hand was recording them for me, in the intimacy of those white pages:

I know it sounds stupid, but I think genitals have soul mates. Every vagina only has one penis in the whole world that's made exactly to its dimensions. And vice versa. So long as it hasn't found its mate, it won't fully bloom. I know that's how it is for me: my vagina has not yet found its penis soul mate.

Anonymous handwritten note, 6/2/2009, slipped into my mailbox—He isn't wrong.

 

THE FACT THAT ANOTHER HAND
was writing these letters both excited and disgusted me; I couldn't separate the two feelings. In the end, I must have been pretty excited. After all, I did play along. I had kept the notebook, where I religiously filed my harasser's unavowable fantasies. I was receiving several a day. Once or twice, I staked out the mailbox for a few hours, but I never caught him.

Initially, I was able to keep the notebook secret from Sophia, who usually has a sixth sense for these kinds of things. That is, until a few days later, when I dropped my bag in a café, right next to her chair. She reflexively leaned over to help me pick up my stuff.

“What is this?”

“Nothing . . . Give it to me!”

“Fancy notebook! Is it your booty-call list?” she clucked.

“No . . . Stop . . .”

“Yes, it is . . . You're blushing!”

Without asking my permission, she opened it and read the first few pages under her breath  . . .

“I am not blushing! Give it back now!”

. . . then louder.

“ ‘ . . . I also wonder how it smells and tastes to a guy who is licking me down there . . .' Wow! Mademoiselle Lorand! Look at you!”

“Fuck, Sophia, give it to me!”

She ended up giving in, but it was too late.

“So, what, you're writing
The Sexual Life of Annabelle L.
?”

“I'm not the one who wrote it . . .”

“Well, well!”

“I promise you. This guy leaves notes in my mailbox every day. I don't know who it is or what he wants from me.”

“Really? And you just file them away in that binder?”

“Honestly, it's the truth.”

Trapped, I told her about the mysterious circumstances under which the notebook got into my hands. Then about how every day I received these journal entries that could be mine, but that somebody else—a guy? a girl?—was writing.

She was more amused than shocked. It had crossed my mind that Rebecca, the agency's owner, could be behind the poisoned present. But if that were the case, then why was I the only one getting messages? Out of all the other girls at Belles de Nuit? Otherwise, I know Sophia would not have waited one second to brag about them.

“It makes me crazy: out of all the girls in Paris, the nut who thought this up is stuck on
you
!”

“Why do you say that?”

“Er, Elle . . . Let's just say that it's more my thing than yours. I would have
loved
it if a guy had given me that present. And I'll tell you one thing, I would not have waited for him to write all the entries for me.”

I handed her the silver notebook, as if to unburden myself.

“If that's all it takes to make you happy . . . then here, take it.”

“Stop, no! It's yours,” she said, suddenly serious.

“Yeah, right . . . He could have put it in any girl's bag on that metro car.”

“No,” she corrected me. “Actually, when I think about it, I wouldn't say it's random. He knew you needed it. You, more than any of the other girls.”

To make you less square,
she probably wanted to add. I pouted in protest.

 

EVER SINCE THAT INCIDENT, AND
especially since I'd met David, it had gotten increasingly difficult to contain the Sophia inquisition. My boyfriend of three months was not a client. Never had been. So the rules concerning clients did not apply.

“And you never told me about David . . .”

“Never told you what?”

“Well, how's he hung? Normal? King-size? Mini, but knows how to use it?”

“Right, do you really think I'm going to answer that kind of question?”

Doesn't hurt to ask,
her smirk implied.

“Aren't you meeting him, like, now?” She tacked to a more chaste line of conversation.

“Yeah. Actually, no. He's getting home late. I'll see him tomorrow morning. If I see him . . .”

David's exceptional personality and stature brought out conflicting impulses in Sophia: the bimbo and the nymph, the dreamer and the man-eater. The fact that I had caught such a specimen baffled her. And in the name of our friendship and all the years we'd shared of emotional struggle, she thought I owed it to her to divulge everything exotic or alluring about him.

“You don't think it's weird to see him after you've been with a client?”

“I just told you, I probably won't see him before tomorrow night.”

“Still . . . ,” she insisted. “You're not scared he'll find out?”

“And what about you, you don't think it's weird never to sleep with the same guy twice?” I replied, tit for tat.

“Touché. Maybe even a little harsh.” Her face suddenly darkened.

Sophia had effortless sex appeal. But that, coupled with her rapacious appetite for sex, made it impossible for her to spend more than a few nights with a man. When she wasn't cheating on her man of the moment with the next lover, she was rekindling an affair with an old and dear acquaintance. There were incidents from time to time, and she paid the price. Whenever she got caught, or whenever she got tired of someone, she would go back to her sex toys. Her collection had seriously expanded over the years.

“Sorry . . .”

“Don't worry about it. You're not wrong . . . Want to get some air?”

 

WE LOVED WALKING THROUGH PARIS
after dark. Taxi lights sweeping through deserted streets. Nothing to do but stroll.

One of our supreme pleasures was to go window-shopping at the antique stores and jewelry shops that filled the streets around Drouot. We couldn't afford any treasures—not even the humblest ones. But that meant we could dream. We imagined the day when we would suddenly fall into wealth, a meteorite of material happiness dropping from the sky.

“Holy cow, look at that watch!” I exclaimed, pointing to the one in front, my face practically glued to the shop window.

“The men's chronometer?”

The shop, Antiquités Nativelle, had placed a small explanatory note beside each object, like some bookstores do to recommend titles.

“Yeah, look . . . It's one hundred percent mechanical, made in 1969!”

“So, what? You looking for an erotic watch?” she joked.

“
'69, année érotique,
” Jane Birkin had whispered over Serge Gainsbourg's oh-so-languorous instrumentals.

“ '69 was practically the year David was born. His birthday is January 5, 1970.”

“It was the year he was conceived.” She snickered. “But don't tell me you're going to get him such an extravagant gift?”

“It's not that I don't want to. It's beautiful, isn't it?”

The watch was fine and understated. It eyed me from its little velour case, its night-blue dial sparkling at me in the half-light. I couldn't help but notice the subtle curve of its protective glass, which certified the age and authenticity of the piece.

“A toy compared to the one my client had . . .” Sophia pretended to be unimpressed. “But I wouldn't turn my nose up at it if someone gave it to me, that's for sure.”