Hotelles (47 page)

 

I desire you completely, fatally. I want to spend my life exploring you, and I know I will never be able to discover all of you. The more I possess you, the more secrets you will hold. The more your sex will be a mysterious continent rich in resources. The more it will jealously guard its pleasures.

Promise me.

 

Handwritten note by Louie, 6/18/2009

 

AGAIN HE STRETCHES OUT HIS
arm and withdraws a small object that can fit in his hand. He places it on the cover of our notebook. A key. Not a magnetic card, a real key. Unpolished metal, heavy. A tag is tied to its head. Despite the darkness, I manage to read the handwritten message:

     
Welcome to

room number one.

 

Room number one?

I almost break our silence to ask. But I refrain. A moment later, it becomes clear. The rooms at the Hôtel des Charmes aren't numbered because it is up to each person to live her own experiences and attribute numbers accordingly.

The Josephine will therefore always be room number one for me. It is where I experienced my first orgasm as a woman, a woman who chose to abandon herself to a man in order to know more pleasure. It was where we spent our first night together.

 

THE HALO OF LIGHT HASN'T
dissipated. On the contrary, it has become more intense than ever. I feel it all around us. It is surprisingly familiar. Now, it will be with us forever.

However, the musical theme has changed. The first song was imbued with so much meaning. Now, the selection is softer, more hypnotic. I wonder what it is called.

“ ‘Home,' ” Louie whispers with a smile.

Both the title of the song and the new status of this hotel. We both know it will forever be the seat of our pleasure. Our haven. Our home.

 

I HAVE NEVER BELONGED TO
that category of women who see all hotel rooms as identical, all one and the same, each an anonymous space without any character or personality.

Now I know why.

Acknowledgments

I
would like to thank my agent, Anna Jarota.

Thanks also to her wonderful team: Ted, Gwladys, Marc, Anne, and anyone I may be forgetting.

Thanks to editors from all over the globe who believed in this project and put faith in me as a French writer, with all my untranslatable Gallicisms!

Thanks to my father, who nurtured my adult imagination, and for the books he had around the house when I was young.

Thanks to all the tattoo artists who participated, in their way, during the months in which this project gestated, and particularly to the amazing girls at Dragon Tattoo.

Thanks to Alphabet Man, who is less virtual than he believes.

Thanks to my friends and their unwavering support and occasional goading: Valérie, Thomas and Miguel, Sophie, Éric, Florence, Virginie, Cécile, Ovidie, etc.

Finally, thanks to Emmanuelle, who will hopefully forgive all the (numerous?) things I have borrowed. But as she once said to me about my work: “I'm a writer—everything you say or do may end up in my novel.”

She had no idea . . .

Thematic Bibliography

For those interested in music, a soundtrack of sorts (in no particular order):

Nocturne no. 20 in C-sharp minor, Frédéric Chopin

“More Than This,” Roxy Music

“Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels),” Arcade Fire

“69 Année érotique,” Serge Gainsbourg

Boléro
, Maurice Ravel

“Karmacoma,” Massive Attack

“Dancin',” Chris Isaak

“Forever Without End,” Jocelyn Pook

“If You'll Be Mine,” Babybird

Trio for Piano, op. 100, second movement, Franz Schubert

Burst Apart
, The Antlers

“If You Run,” The Boxer Rebellion

“Carolyn's Fingers,” Cocteau Twins

“L'Amour,” Dominique A

“Party Day,” Cosmo Vitelli

“Shadow Magnet,” Lisa Gerrard and Pieter Bourke

“The Last Beat of My Heart,” DeVotchKa

“Something Good,” Paul Haig

“By This River,” Brian Eno

“Bela Lugosi's Dead,” Camping Car

“Walker,” Cascadeur

“Willow Tree,” Chad VanGaalen

Für Alina
, Arvo Pärt

“Hoppípolla,” Sigur Rós

Gnossienne
no. 1, Erik Satie

Theme to
The Persuaders!
, John Barry

“I Sold My Hands for Food So Please Feed Me,” Get Well Soon

“See My Eyes,” DWNTWN

“Breathe,” Télépopmusic

“Surface to Air,” The Chemical Brothers

“Consequence,” The Notwist

“Go With the Flow,” Lacquer

“A Pure Person,” Lim Giong

“Lady Sleep,” Maximilian Hecker

“A New Error,” Moderat

“Your Silent Face,” New Order

“Our Darkness,” Anne Clark

“Sehnsucht,” Ellen Allien

“All I Want,” Kodaline

“How It Ended,” The Drums

“Enjoy the Silence,” Depeche Mode

“Home,” Wave Machines

For those interested in compiling a library of erotic literature of their own, here is Louie Barlet's complete list of recommendations (in chronological order, from their date of publication):

Hymn to Aphrodite
, Sappho

Satyricon
, Petronius

The Art of Love
, Ovid

The Decameron
, Boccaccio

The Canterbury Tales
, Geoffrey Chaucer

The Lives of the Gallant Ladies
, Brantôme

Forbidden Fruit: Selected Tales in Verse
, Jean de La Fontaine

Giorgio Baffo's erotic sonnets

The Story of My Life
, Giacomo Casanova

The Sopha: A Moral Tale
, Claude Crébillon

Fanny Hill; or, The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
,

John Cleland

Erotica Biblion
, Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau

Le Pornographe
, Nicolas-Edme Restif de la Bretonne

Philosophy in the Bedroom
, Marquis de Sade

My Secret Life
, Anonymous

L'Enfant du bordel
, Pigault-Lebrun

Gamiani, or Two Nights of Excess
, Alfred de Musset

Venus in Furs
, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch

Chansons pour elle (Songs for Her)
, Paul Verlaine

Journal d'une enfant vicieuse
, Hugues Rebell

The Eleven Thousand Rods
, Guillaume Apollinaire

The Exploits of a Young Don Juan
, Guillaume Apollinaire

The Young Girl's Handbook of Good Manners for Use in

Educational Establishments
, Pierre Louÿs

Irene's Cunt
, Louis Aragon

Story of the Eye
, Georges Bataille

Lady Chatterley's Lover
, D.H. Lawrence

Tropic of Cancer
, Henry Miller

Our Lady of the Flowers
, Jean Genet

Sexus
, Henry Miller

Story of O
, Pauline Réage

Lolita
, Vladimir Nabokov

Emmanuelle
, Emmanuelle Arsan

Septentrion
, Louis Calaferte

The Margin
, André Pieyre de Mandiargues

Portnoy's Complaint
, Philip Roth

Delta of Venus
, Anaïs Nin

Tales of Ordinary Madness
, Charles Bukowski

The Two of Us
, Alberto Moravia

Fear of Flying
, Erica Jong

Les Mémoires d'une culotte
, Aymé Dubois-Jolly

Lunes de fiel
(
Bitter Moon
, Roman Polanski film adaptation), Pascal Bruckner

The Lover
, Marguerite Duras

L'Orage
, Régine Deforges

The Butcher: And Other Erotica
, Alina Reyes

La Femme de papier
, Françoise Rey

The Mechanics of Women
, Louie Calaferte

Autoportrait en érection
, Guillaume Fabert

Baise-moi
, Virginie Despentes

Sex vox dominam
, Richard Morgiève

Éros mécanique
, Pierre Bourgeade

In My Room
, Guillaume Dustan

La Foire aux cochons
, Esparbec

The Ages of Lulu
, Almudena Grandes

Vers chez les blancs
, Philippe Djian

The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
, Catherine Millet

The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir
, Toni Bentley

Femmes secrètes (Secret Women)
, Ania Oz

About the Author

EMMA MARS
is the pseudonym of an author who lives in France.

 

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Credits

Cover design by Amanda Kain

Cover photograph © Assembly/Getty Images

Copyright

HOTELLES.
Copyright © 2014 by Emma Mars. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

FIRST EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for.

ISBN 978-0-06-227417-5

EPUB Edition APRIL 2014 ISBN 9780062274182

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