‘Well . . .’ I wondered whether to lie about the distinct lack of flesh-on-flesh action that my flat-share had seen.
‘Have you heard of the . . . Hôtel Gibez?’ Again, she left an oh-so-meaningful pause. Her eyes locked on to mine and I knew that this was no real hotel. It was a declaration of intent.
2
I GATHERED THAT Nathalie had done this kind of thing before. She guided me briskly across the main boulevard and down the hill to a hotel set on a busy street corner.
It looked like a typical mid-range Parisian hotel. A converted nineteenth-century apartment block with a blood-red awning over each window and its name spelled out along the whole width of the ground floor. Hôtel Réage, it said, and the dark-blue plaque by the main door boasted three stars.
I wondered whether she’d reserved a room, and whether that would have been incredibly sexy or just a bit spooky.
But as we crossed the threshold, the confidence went out of her stride and she gripped my arm.
‘You ask, please. I hate this part,’ she whispered.
The lobby was tiny but plush. Half of it was taken up with a wooden staircase leading to the rooms upstairs. It was clear that people didn’t come here to hang around in reception.
The décor was classic bordello, or what I imagined classic bordello to be. The Prince of Wales’s photo had been in black and white, of course, but the colour scheme would probably have been exactly the same as this hotel. Dark-crimson walls and carpet, with light fittings, mirror frames and all other accessories thickly painted in old gold.
The receptionist behind the cramped counter didn’t look at all like a Madame, though. He was young and Spanish, dressed plainly in a white shirt and black tie.
His manner was just as discreet as his uniform. He must have known what Nathalie and I were up to, but he didn’t show it.
He greeted us with a quiet ‘Bonjour, Madame, Monsieur.’
‘Vous avez une chambre,’ I began, ‘pour . . .’
Should I say ‘one night’, I wondered, or would that be taking the pretence too far? He must have seen that we didn’t have our pyjamas with us.
‘Pour deux?’ the receptionist tactfully filled in the blank.
‘Oui.’ I turned round to share my relief with Nathalie, but she was engrossed in some tourist brochures on a revolving stand by the exit.
As the receptionist debited my credit card, he started to explain about breakfast times and how to get to the dining room, at which point Nathalie finally lost interest in the brochures and told him firmly that we wouldn’t be requiring breakfast, merci beaucoup.
He took the hint, handed over the key, and ten seconds later we were heading up to the first floor.
Walking up the stairs behind a woman can be a very pleasurable experience in Paris, where the girls generally take great care of their rear contours.
The Paris metro is not as far underground as the London Tube, so there are a lot fewer escalators, and a lot more stairs. The staircases are wider, too. In the time it takes to get from the platform up to street level, you’ll often have a selection of derrières to choose from, and in the course of a week of commuting you’ll see a vast and wonderful array of differently shaped backsides that make you glad to be human. I’m sure Parisian women get as much fun out of it as the guys.
But all this is idle fantasy, a way of making your commute less routine. Things are far more pleasurable when you are walking up the stairs of a Paris hotel in mid afternoon behind a rear end that you know for a fact you’re about to see – and grab hold of – in all its undressed splendour.
And I couldn’t get it out of my head that this was an older, and by definition more experienced, rear end. My first married one, too.
After the museum, this was becoming quite an afternoon of cultural discovery.
As Nathalie was obviously no novice at this hotel-sex game, I felt that it was important to play the seasoned veteran when we got into the room, so I resisted the temptation to turn on the TV to see what cable or satellite channels were on offer.
I did, however, sneak a peek in the minibar while Nathalie was in the loo. But she was out of there more quickly than I’d expected and caught me at it.
Oh no, uncool, I thought, until she gave a girlish squeal of delight and declared that I was a genius.
‘Champagne,’ she purred, ‘yes, très classe.’
She then invited me to come and undress her, switching over to French and calling me ‘vous’, as if we hadn’t been introduced, when in fact we were indulging in Mother Nature’s most intimate way of saying hello.
I wondered why I didn’t merit a ‘tu’. But given the choice between unbuttoning her blouse and discussing French grammar, I decided to save the linguistic questions for later.
Great lingerie, I thought to myself as she squirmed out of it. If she wore this kind of stuff every day, her husband was a very lucky guy. Except when his wife was screwing other men, of course.
Very inventive use of champagne, too. Not much of the chilled liquid ended up in the glasses. Most of it got poured over various sensitive parts of our bodies that fizzed and bubbled until we kissed them dry.
She had a surprisingly excellent body. I’d often wondered what happens to a woman’s body between, say, twenty-five and thirty-five. And the answer in Nathalie’s case was, nothing serious. She’d had two kids but the only clues that gave this away were a few wrinkles beneath the breasts and around the belly button. And she had a really flat stomach – another gold star for the French medical system, I concluded, helping women to keep in trim for all this post-natal, extra-marital sex.
Being such an experienced lady, Nathalie certainly knew what she wanted and knew how to get it, as the song goes. But, as the song carries on, she also wanted to destroy passers-by. Well, their eardrums anyway.
Several times I was sure that her screaming was either going to smash the windows or reach a crescendo, but each time it died back down again and I was left wondering whether the show was over.
I almost suggested adjourning to a hotel near the airport. With an Airbus landing every minute, we wouldn’t be disturbing anyone.
‘Don’t worry,’ she reassured me later, ‘it is not your fault. I can’t orgasm if I can’t scream.’
From where I’d been lying, it had certainly sounded like screaming, but I didn’t want to quibble about exact decibel levels.
In any case, the Frenchman in me was at work, and I was concentrating on more intellectual matters. Nathalie was calling me ‘vous’ again. And as we really had become very familiar with each other over the past half-hour or so, I felt at liberty to ask her why the formality.
She blushed scarlet. They really are obsessed with their language, I thought. She hadn’t shown the slightest pinkening of the cheek while we were making love and now she was as red as a nun at a nudists’ trampoline display just because I’d asked her to explain her use of pronouns.
‘C’est très sexy,’ she confessed.
‘Just saying “vous” is sexy?’ So this was why ‘French lessons’ was a euphemism for sex with a prostitute. Perhaps the hookers just read you a chapter from a grammar book.
In fact, it was more complicated than that. Nathalie told me how upper-class husbands, wives and lovers often call each other ‘vous’ in daily life, which in her opinion added a kind of thrilling contrast between the politeness of the way they usually spoke to each other and the vulgarity of what they did to each other in bed. The best thing, she said, was going from ‘vous’ to ‘tu’ just at the moment of climax. The switch was almost enough to give her an orgasm in itself. Pity she hadn’t told me before.
‘It is like being brutally seduced by a workman in a chic ballroom,’ she added. This was not an idea that had ever turned me on, but each to her own.
As it happened, our room looked very much like a ballroom. Decorated in a similar baroque way to the lobby, but with a huge crystal chandelier above the bed and thick purple drapes that almost obscure
d the windows even when they were held open by their gold braids. Like a ballroom, it was a place where you were meant to be in twilight.
The only bum note, in my opinion, was a gilt-framed photo staring down at us from above the bedhead – a black-and-white portrait of a leering, smoking man whom I recognized as the French singer Serge Gainsbourg.
Nathalie saw me frowning up into his nostrils.
‘He was a great lover,’ she said. ‘Once on live TV he told Whitney Houston that he wanted to fuck her. I am sure he called her “vous”.’
‘So as not to be too impolite, you mean?’
I’ve never figured out how this small, ugly drunk was a sex symbol in France. But then I’m not a French woman.
‘All the rooms here are named after famous French lovers,’ Nathalie said.
‘You’ve been here before, then? With your husband, of course?’ Her laugh told me the answer to that one. ‘Why do you do it?’ I asked. ‘Cheat on him, I mean?’ I knew as I spoke that I sounded somewhere between a naive schoolkid and a priest. A total hypocrite as well – the guy who’s just had sex with her coming over all moralistic.
She considered the question for a while, stroking my thigh as she did so.
‘With you, I suppose I am simply cheating on my husband to prove to myself that I am still alive.’
‘Oh, there’s absolutely no doubt you’re alive,’ I assured her.
‘And you, who are you cheating?’ she asked, giving me a teasing smile. I could tell that it was meant as a joke but I suddenly felt myself being dunked in a puddle of melancholy. ‘Oh, no,’ Nathalie said, seeing my expression. ‘Someone has been cheating you.’
This wasn’t really how I saw things with Alexa, but I found myself lying back and letting it all out. How we’d met when she was waitressing during a waiters’ strike, how she’d taken me on a tasting of France’s most disgusting cheeses and sausages, how I’d screwed things up by accidentally screwing someone else. The whole story.
It felt bizarre, opening my heart about Alexa to this woman I was lying in bed with. But it also felt totally natural. After all, there is no better place to receive an encouraging hug while you’re telling your sob story.
‘What makes her so special for you?’ Nathalie asked.
At first I didn’t know how to answer. I’d never asked myself in those terms.
Alexa was beautiful, sure, but in a less classy way than Florence, for example. She was sexy, too, though certainly much less upfront about it than Virginie or Nathalie.
I had vivid memories of the curve of her nose, the colour of her nipples, the smell of her hair, the taste of her sweat. But I hadn’t experienced any of those recently. I’d hardly even talked to her, and whenever we did speak we usually ended up arguing.
So what was so special about her?
‘She’s just her,’ I answered feebly.
Nathalie, though, nodded as if this was a profound piece of wisdom. ‘She has something?’ She was speaking English now.
‘Yes. She just fascinates me. She’s got all these things she wants to do. And she’s totally determined to do them, but she’s still really supportive about what I want to do. And I’d love to be able to help her, too. We just kind of . . .’ I couldn’t think of the right word.
‘Work?’ Nathalie suggested.
‘Yes. We could work.’
‘Then you must decide what you really want. It is like me. I do not want to leave my husband. I would only leave him if I fell so deeply in love with somebody that I could not stand to stay at home a moment longer. Perhaps that is why I content myself with these little aventures.’ She laughed. ‘Oh dear, Serge thinks we are stupid.’
I turned to look at him, and it was true that Monsieur Gainsbourg’s leer didn’t seem to be expressing the greatest respect for our discussion about the intricate workings of the human heart.
‘Just shut up and shag,’ he seemed to be saying.
Though from what I’ve heard of his songs, his lyrics are usually more subtle than that. Except for the bit in ‘Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus’ when he describes anal intercourse as ‘I come and I go in between your kidneys’. Full marks for anatomy, but romanticism – nul points.
Nathalie took Serge’s leer at face value. ‘What I really want now,’ she said, switching back to French and rolling on top of me, ‘is for you to pour some more champagne over me and make me shout.’
‘Comme vous voulez, Madame.’
She shuddered as the old vous-do magic did its trick.
3
HAVING A STABLE relationship was doing wonders for Benoît. (His partner being the tea urn, of course. I was assuming that it reciprocated his feelings.) He went from strength to strength, and started doing a full thirty-five-hour week, acting as a kind of gentle-giant team captain.
Once you got to know him, everything about the way he moved suggested quiet confidence, rather than laziness, as I’d first interpreted it. When he poured a cup of tea, you got the impression that he’d really thought through the importance of this particular cup of tea, and his relaxed smile as he handed it to you told you that you’d made the right decision in ordering it.
He had come to understand the correlation between a happy customer and the ringing of the till. And pretty soon he was even able to get on with serving one customer while all around him were flocking towards someone else in the queue who’d raised an armadillo/ tomato problem.
So when Jean-Marie called me up for a progress report, I was perfectly happy to tell him the truth. I let him know that I’d had to fire one of my other staff – Fabrice the ‘Polish’ student. In fact, he was a terrible timekeeper, but I thought it best to put the moral onus for his dismissal on Jean-Marie. If he was capable of recognizing such things as moral onuses, it’d be a point in my favour.
And I told Jean-Marie that Benoît had surprised me by slotting in really well. He’d put up with his boring kitchen duties, cured his bad habits, and now seemed to be in his element. What’s more, he was the one who finally worked out how to put my website on line via my email provider, so I owed him a debt of eternal gratitude.
Jean-Marie was delighted to hear all this, though there was still an impatient edge to his voice as he said so. Something else was bothering him.
‘Nathalie, the TV reporter, have you seen her?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I have.’ All of her, I wanted to add. We’d met up once more since our après-midi at the hotel. One Sunday afternoon she’d come round to my place in I Fuck There Street, pretended to be English to my delighted flatmates, and then come into my bedroom to shout things in her very own language.
She’d spent the best part of an hour chewing on a pillow but this still didn’t muffle the sound enough for my roommates, who reminded me later that that kind of thing didn’t go on in Free Ends. Shame, I said, that they didn’t offer a bit part to Nathalie. She’d have upped the ratings without even being in the same room as the main action.
‘Is she going to do a report about My Tea Is Rich?’ Jean-Marie sliced into my daydream.
‘I don’t know.’ This was true. We hadn’t spoken about it since the museum. Maybe all she wanted was my body. Not that I begrudged her its occasional use. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well . . .’ I guessed Jean-Marie was deciding which version of the truth, and how much of it, to tell me. ‘We were going to film for my portrait but she, how do you say, pulled me off?’
‘Called it off?’
‘Yes. She pulled it off. She said that she was working to do something different.’
‘Well I haven’t heard from her recently. Do you want me to ask her what she’s working on?’
The idea of calling Nathalie and maybe meeting up for another screaming session was quite a pleasant one. There didn’t seem to be any other women in Paris – or the other European capitals for that matter – as keen as her to sleep with me.
‘Yes, why not? Good idea.’ Meaning that it was what he’d planned all along. ‘You know,’ Jean-Mar
ie added, his voice more spritely now, ‘if Benoît enjoys himself, maybe I will buy My Tea Is Rich for him.’
I assumed this was a joke.
I duly left a message for Nathalie, and she dropped by at the tea room early the next morning.
Unlike Virginie, she was very good at what the French call ‘mondanités’, that is, making normal conversation in public with someone you’ve shagged as if you’d never shagged them. An essential social skill in chic circles, apparently.
We talked at the till while Benoît and Katy’s ears twitched with the effort of pretending they weren’t eavesdropping. I don’t think it would have occurred to them that I had had erotic encounters with Nathalie, though, because she spent most of her time talking about Alexa.
She showed me an entry in the small weekly Paris events guide, Pariscope.
‘This is your Alexa, isn’t it?’
I read the four-line announcement in the exhibitions section. It described an ‘exposition photo’, at a place called the Espace Photo Beaubourg, with a long, suitably arty sentence that I didn’t quite understand. Something about a voyage through men seen by a woman’s hidden eye.
A woman’s hidden eye? Sounded very dubious to me. It could have been the name of one of the gross sculptures at the erotic museum. Especially when combined with the title of Alexa’s exhibition, which I understood all too well: Des hommes, rien que des hommes. Men, nothing but men.
So Alexa had created a new version of that tent installation where Tracy Emin embroidered the names of all the blokes she’d ever slept with. Except here I’d be able to admire their photos, too. Brilliant. How lucky I was that Alexa had said she didn’t want me to see it.
‘Is it her?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you want to see the exhibition?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh, don’t you think it will be good? You said there will be a photo of you. I thought maybe it could connect with the story of your tea room, give me another location. But if you think it will not be very good . . .’