She didn’t say anything in reply, and watched as he vanished into his room. Denis collapsed onto his bed and fell into a deep sleep that lasted all night long, then all the next morning.

  When he awoke, the woman’s face emerged from his memory. He rushed into the living room and found her stretched out on the sofa, a book in her hand.

  She had stayed.

  5

  Once he had turned forty, Philippe Saint-Jean no longer expected to know the joys of secrecy. He had never committed to a woman to the point of swearing he would remain faithful, other than with Juliette, whom he would not have betrayed for anything. So he had never known the delight of stealing moments from respectability, or the sudden intrusion of romance into the monotony of everyday life, or the inventiveness required to create an intimacy that no one else would know about. Mia was handing it all to him on a silver platter, with neither the guilt nor the pettiness of adultery. At a time when everyone was in search of his or her fifteen minutes of fame, these two were rediscovering the meaning of ‘hidden,’ like Romeo and Juliet in an era devoid of all romanticism. But the secret of their idyll would not last: already rumors were circulating about the special friendship between the beauty and the thinker; people who had seen them together had jumped to their inevitable conclusions, and all it would take now was for someone to do some cross-checking for their liaison to become official. Until then, they would meet when they could, in gilded hideouts that left their anonymity suffused with light.

  Philippe, however, found it somewhat baroque, the decoration of this balcony overlooking a sparkling blue Eiffel Tower. A midnight snack had been set out on a little circular table covered with red roses and purple carnations, a glass candlestick, a little bust of a marquise, and two little bowls filled with Iranian caviar that Mia was sampling as if it were yoghurt.

  “It’s so nice to be able to eat outside,” she said, “you can tell summer is coming.”

  “You’ve just come in from Vancouver and you’re leaving for Sydney the day after tomorrow. How on earth can you even tell that summer is coming in Paris? I’ve been waiting for it for months, I’ve seen it getting closer day by day. In February I was surprised it was still light out at five o’clock, and it put me in a good mood all evening. Not even three weeks ago I hesitated to take a coat and I went out with just my jacket and I wasn’t sorry. This summer is mine, I’ve been waiting for it, I deserve it.”

  “That’s one reason I love to be in your company. All anyone has to say is ‘the weather is fine’ for you to get all worked up about it.”

  The moment they entered the suite at the Hôtel George V, Philippe started commenting on a host of details that Mia had ceased to notice since her agency had started putting her up in the most luxurious hotels on earth. The place was more spacious than his own apartment, and it aroused his class consciousness—a delightful sensation he rarely felt: astonishment at how the truly privileged really live, bathing in pink marble, slouching on their Louis XV chairs, and slaking their thirst with a grand cru. In addition to the life in first class she was inviting him to share, he particularly enjoyed the precious time she devoted to him during her brief stays in Paris—given the cost of one hour with Mia, just to appear in public, he could consider himself flattered. And when she left him for a catwalk halfway round the world, he was surprised to find himself switching on the television to look out for a commercial where she was shown running half naked through the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

  “Tomorrow evening I have a meeting with some designers; it shouldn’t take forever. Then I have to stop off at the inauguration of the Espace Guerlain. And I promised my agency I would have a drink with the head of a group who want me to be the face of their public image. But we could meet up after that?”

  Just to make sure she understood that he too was a busy man, he answered, with a touch of mystery, “I’m never free before midnight on Thursdays.”

  “Good evening. My name is Laurent. I’m a swinger.”

  The man with the shaven skull who was introducing himself was dressed in a well-tailored blue suit and fine leather ankle boots, and he stood very straight, arms crossed, facing his audience. He had said it in a very natural way, I’m a swinger, and he clearly wasn’t trying to surprise or shock.

  “I’m fifty years old, I buy advertising space for a major food distributor, I’m married and have two daughters. For over twenty years, sex has been a central part of my life. A passion I share with my wife and my friends, one which fills all my free time, my evenings, weekends, and vacations.”

  In the little projection room with its black walls and rows of red seats, you could sense a sudden rise in the level of attention.

  “The way other people devote their time to making model aircraft, or river rafting, or politics, or fixing up their country house, I make love. For what it’s worth, let me point out that I am not a ladies’ man or a Don Juan. I don’t hunt, I don’t conquer: I consume. My wife and I go regularly to swingers’ clubs, but we also organize private evenings with various circles of friends, who have their own overlapping networks. In addition, we spend weekends with couples we find on the internet, and we go on vacation to specialized clubs where we find other like-minded people. No matter the context, my wife and I arrive together, and we leave together. Sometimes the evening might be planned so that it’s especially pleasant for me, and other times I arrange a session with Carole’s pleasure in mind.”

  The men in the audience respected the tradition of silence, even though most of them would have liked to cry out, Give us examples, dammit!

  “Yesterday evening we went to a club just outside Paris. Well acquainted with my taste, Carole quickly zeroed in on two women, and she was the one who approached them and served them to me. I spent the night with all three of them. Next Friday we are going to a private party where the ritual dictates that Carole will be at the center of a group of four or five men—I’m the one who picks them out and makes sure everything goes according to the rules—and in these cases, I’m just a spectator.”

  This man who defined himself as a swinger was driven by a desire that most men would never know. He was consumed by a rare fever that compelled him endlessly to seek out new bodies, new experiences, new combinations, in a never-ending quest for ecstasy, which made him a blissful slave to his senses.

  Like the others, Yves Lehaleur was dying to know how far the man’s escapades went, what limits he had set on what was taboo. But while he might admire the man’s frenzy, under no circumstances did he share it. To be sure, it would have been unthinkable not to take his pleasure from a body he was paying for, but he was not about to even think of giving pleasure to a prostitute, or trying to obtain any favors she reserved for the man she loved. Yves’s recently aroused need for variety was not in response to some voracious appetite: the more time he spent with these women, the more he realized that the real pleasure consisted in breaking through their tough outer shell, hardened by so many consensual rapes. More out of pride than out of the goodness of his heart, Yves tried to find the woman beneath the whore, and to relieve her, for a night, of the disgust her clients aroused in her. Yves Lehaleur thought he would be capable of finding the core of every woman he invited into his bed—her secret zone, somewhere between her head, her heart, and her sex, a place where the key to her entire being lay hidden.

  “On the rare occasions when we have our experiences apart,” continued Laurent, “it is always by mutual consent. For example, I sometimes play the ‘sexual coach’ with women who complain of erosion in their relationship before it has even fully blossomed. I offer to spend a few afternoons with them until they have experienced all the different orgasms a woman can have. I make their inhibitions and taboos disappear, so that their pleasure will reassure and guide them, and so that they can return to their husbands and share that pleasure with them, foster it and experience it again and again. As a rule, I never hear from them aga
in. As for Carole, she sometimes spends the evening with one of our friends who suffers from a distinctive feature that is all too rare among men: he is oversexed. The size of his member is enough to frighten off any partners he might have, and Carole is probably the only one who doesn’t run away.”

  Philippe Saint-Jean refrained from taking his notebook to write this down. In his life, he had encountered any number of boastful guys who could not shut up about their performance, real males who needed to shout it loud and clear in order to convince themselves of the fact. Laurent the swinger didn’t belong to this category; his direct, prosaic way of speaking of his passion was not out to convince, and not for one moment did he give himself away by any ribald gestures or innuendos: just the opposite of a pervert. In Philippe’s circles, few practiced swinging but many tongues wagged; there were quotations from Restif de la Bretonne and Georges Bataille; the misfortunes of virtue were set against the prosperity of vice; Japanese erotic cinema was discussed; sometimes dirty jokes were told, but always in a tongue-in-cheek manner that made them acceptable. Like the others, Philippe had spent time in the circles of hell in his library, and he’d never quite made the return journey. In his essay on the collective conscious, he had included an entire disquisition on the persistence of taboos, a brilliant combination of Freudian theory and the seven parts of the Kama Sutra. But so many views from the mental perspective rarely passed through the filter of experience. So much literature, for hardly a frisson!—that was what he was forced to conclude that evening, as he listened to Laurent the swinger. He suddenly took the measure of how conventional his own lifestyle was, for in bed he was neither bold, nor very creative, nor even sure of himself, no more than any other man, no more than women were. But what was the point of worrying about it, after all? No one could be Laurent and Carole the swingers, ceaselessly driven by their boundless quest for pleasure. And nothing, not even the fantasy of ultimate ecstasy, could match the fantasy and lightness of the nights he spent with Mia. Right at the start, she had had a fit of hysterical laughter as she watched him studying every part of her world-famous anatomy—as he caressed her legs, he had said, I already know these legs, I saw them in L’Express magazine. The high point was when he rhapsodized over the “three ochres” of her sex, confessing to her that making love with a métisse was something completely new for him. In one night, Mia’s body had made him forget Juliette’s.

  “What I am about to say may seem like a paradox, but I think only swingers have attained true sexual equality. Neither one of us makes sacrifices, or looks for compromises, or simulates or dissimulates, or forces him or herself to do something to make their partner happy. I might add that, in spite of our multiple partners, the most intense pleasure we ever have is when we are just the two of us, alone, in our bed at home. The love I feel for Carole remains the most powerful aphrodisiac I know.”

  Up to now the audience had been captivated: they wondered why this swinger was in their midst. In spite of his crude explanations he had never been indecent, but he might prove so after all if he went on flaunting his marital happiness and his talents as a sexual conquistador. If he did not justify his presence there among the brotherhood very soon, his listeners would begin to view him as a despicable agitator, and that very evening they might well be provoked into their very first attempt at lynching.

  From the very start, Denis Benitez hadn’t listened to any of it, so he expected nothing from what was to follow. Still, after many long weeks, he was there, present. At the brasserie, they had greeted the rebirth of the prodigal child, not as cheerful as he used to be, but ready for an active convalescence—to serve up a plate of leeks vinaigrette with stuffed cabbage was, for Denis, tangible proof that he had returned to reality. At the rate of three hundred place settings a day, Denis was reconnecting with his fellow human beings. He agreed to do two services and even stayed late after closing; he had plenty of energy. Everyone saw this as a sign that he wanted to make up for lost time, but everyone was wrong: he was forced to flee his apartment, now that an intruder had moved in.

  The very evening that creature had stepped across his threshold, Denis’s final certainties had melted away. The four walls that had been protecting him from the outside world had now become a theater of the absurd, home to outrageous situations. His refuge was a danger zone, and the vast outside world had become a refuge. If only these men here tonight, this brotherhood, knew how much their stories, which they thought were exceptional, seemed insignificant in comparison to his ordeal! But while they had once listened to him and felt sorry for him, this time they would merely view him as a lost cause, driven into mental confusion by his celibacy.

  After a brief silence, as if to announce an epilogue, Laurent said that he too was puzzled, why had he felt this need to share his private life with a group of strangers, who must have envied his healthy debauchery?

  “I am one of those people who believe that all life on earth is subject to a certain logic, a certain equilibrium, that there is a price for happiness, and a flip side to every coin, even if we don’t realize it until the time comes for the final reckoning. By making love with thousands of woman, perhaps I’ve violated some natural law and I ought to fear some sort of retribution. Perhaps I should be prepared to have to sacrifice something precious. So far, I don’t know what that might be. But I promise you that if any such misfortune befalls me, you will be the first to know.”

  No sooner had they poured their beers than Denis, Philippe and Yves were drinking to the health of Laurent the swinger, paying tribute as if he were there with them.

  “This evening I have learnt something yet again,” said Yves. “Women keep you young!”

  “Not exactly,” said Philippe. “What keeps you young is knowing not to do your head in over them.”

  He had deliberately used one of Mia’s expressions, which seemed to suit the occasion. In a literary gathering he would no doubt have turned the phrase differently, to convey the notion that only those rare male specimens who had been liberated from their emotions, their jealousy, and their predatory instincts could attain any sort of eternal carnal bliss.

  Denis agreed with a smile. What he wouldn’t give to feel even just a tiny bit casual around women. To be able to stop seeing them as creatures who could be magical or diabolical in turn, and view them rather as individuals whose mechanism might be intricate but certainly no more complex than his own.

  Over their beers they continued to chat without any further reference to the session they had just left. They did not broach any subjects that were too personal, or display any curiosity about the others’ future, yet god knows, since they had first met, each of them had experienced things that were far more disconcerting than anything anyone had come out with in public.

  Philippe resisted the urge to tell them about his night with one of the most coveted women on the planet—most men would dream of making such a confession between two pints. Making his buddies jealous would be less important than his need to describe his extravagant affair for the very first time. Once the moment of astonishment was over, he would answer their eager questions less from a sense of boastfulness than to see his fair mistress through their eyes. Out of superstition, he would start off by saying, We have nothing in common, because he had learned at his own expense that those stories that start off We are made for each other come to an abrupt end. He would also like to affirm that he was not in love: I tend to fall in love at first sight but in this case, no. Neither Denis nor Yves would believe him, and to convince them he would have to tell them the story of his first love, at the age of eighteen. Two years of passionate love, followed by three months of living together in a maid’s garret to get over it. Juliette came almost ten years later. Everything since then in Philippe’s life had been nothing but the post-Juliette era, an afterwards. Even Mia was part of this ongoing period, but the most delightful, the most unhoped-for part of it. Then Denis and Yves would press him to describe her the wa
y she really is, and Philippe would make a stab at this mandatory exercise, but how could you describe Mia other than to say she was a young lady who was capable of simplicity, with the naïveté of a young woman of her age, and the seasoned nature of a young woman of her time? Burdened by the image of herself that the world sent back to her, yet aware that all this hullabaloo would not last, that life already had episodes in store that would prove far more authentic. At the risk of disconcerting them, he would describe her as an aquatic creature, with an insular soul, who even in the heart of Paris lived as if she were by the sea. That was how he saw her, that Thursday night, but Philippe would not break their pact, he would keep their idyll a secret as long as was necessary.

  Yves’s secret, far less romantic, would be no easier to confess. If one woman had come into his life, he would not have hesitated to share his happiness with witnesses—but ten? Which name would he choose? Sibylle, Claire, Jessica, Samia? How could he introduce Sibylle other than as a gray-eyed brunette, fortysomething, with a body capable of bending itself into positions so indecent they were outlawed? And what about Lili, brainy Lili? More than just a pair of buttocks, she was a shoulder where a lost man could find refuge—a guy like Yves, obviously upset about something, but instead of trying to find women to hit on he paid a prostitute for the night. But the questions Lili asked him revealed more about her, and while Yves had stood fast and never mentioned Pauline’s name, Lili had cracked and gone on to describe the way her ex-husband had snubbed her. Claire was more reserved, almost shy, ashamed no doubt at being a sex worker, as she confessed her lack of experience to Yves, who had so little himself. She had gone through the gestures she thought a pro would make, all of them clumsy. He had clearly had been one of her first clients, and surely one of the last. Then he had met Jessica, through Sibylle; Samia had been sent to him by Jessica, but Yves already liked Agnieszka best of all. He did not know her yet, but Kris had lavished praise on her charms.