Maestra (24 page)

Real Paris is a small town, neat in its protective belt of
autoroute
. The suburbs, crammed with weary
fonctionnaires
and disaffected, violent Arab boys, don’t count. Like any city, it has its tribes, but they are tidily arranged like matryoshka dolls, one inside the other, with what the mags call ‘
les happy few
’ at the centre, but I wasn’t interested in fashion parties or the rich kids of Paris
ouest
, I was looking for something more particular. I ignored the neat ads in the back of the
Pariscope
, too. I’d tried them a couple of times on my gap year, the cellar bars thinly populated with middle-aged masturbators and tourists out for a thrill. I wasn’t opposed in principle to fucking ugly people, I’m democratic like that, but I could afford to raise my standards now. So I went to the obvious places first, Le Baron and La Maison Blanche, even poor old Queen on the Champs and le Cab in the Place du Palais Royal, went diligently and often until the bouncers said ‘
Salut, chérie
’ and undid the ropes as soon as they saw me. I sat and chatted and drank, and bought coke to give away and hundred-euro bottles of bad vodka to share with lesbian DJs and Italian playboys, concentrating on the women, always the women, until the inbox on my new phone was full of inane texts and kisses and somebody else might have thought she’d acquired some friends.

I met Yvette at a private party at Castel, full of skinny boys in velvet jackets and models with ostentatiously bare faces. She was wearing a white Stetson, dancing on a banquette, because if you’re crazeee you can’t dance on the floor, swigging from a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, contemptuously twirling a lasso over a crowd of drooling Eurotwinks, platinum dreads bobbing to Daft Punk. I liked her style, the way I always like people who are their own invention. I offered her a line and by 4 a.m., the white time, we were best friends. She introduced me to that night’s crowd: Stéphane, a dealer who looked like a philosophy student; a pair of six-foot Midwestern runway models who sure as hell weren’t in Kansas anymore; and a random Vicomte in Harley leathers who claimed to be a film producer. Everyone was shiny, everyone was pretty.

Even later, Yvette took me on to an ‘after’ in a penthouse in the seventh, trompe l’oeil corrugated copper walls and blackout blinds pulled against the dawn, a huddle of bodies crowded round a table covered with art books, jaws working, noses running, chasing their high off a Marc Quinn retrospective, the joyless air dense with nicotine and bullshit. A girl reared to her feet and began a impressionistic striptease, clutching vaguely at an imaginary pole, tugging at a ruined scrap of peach-coloured Chloé chiffon. A few hands, equally lackadaisical, fastened themselves over her flat breasts, tweaking the tan nipples like knobs on an old-school stereo.

‘I’m leaving,’ I hissed to Yvette.

‘What’s the matter, baby? Not your scene?’

‘I like that’ – I jerked my head to where the lost girl was jabbing her dry mouth at the crotch of the nearest guy, helpless as a baby vampire – ‘but not like this. You see?’

Yvette nodded knowingly.

‘Sure, baby. No amateurs, right?’

‘No amateurs, got it.’

‘Call me tomorrow, I’ll take you somewhere better.’

*

Somewhere better was an evening hosted by Julien, who I got to know later at his club, La Lumière. I met Yvette in the bar at the Lutetia. She was sober, if a little twitchy. The dreads, it turned out, were clip-ons, her own hair was a severe white-blond crop, dramatic against her perse skin and this season’s orange Lanvin shift, which she had accessorised with python Louboutins. No jewellery. I looked closer.

‘Nice dress.’

‘Mango. Don’t tell.’

‘I won’t. You OK?’

‘I will be in a minute. Want one of these? Just a little beta-blocker. Slows you down, takes the edge off.’

‘Sure.’ I mouthed the little tan pill into my
kir framboise
.

I asked about her day, in a desultory way. She was a stylist, she said. I told her I worked with pictures. We were neither of us really interested, now the coke had worn off, but it felt important to go through the motions.

‘So where are we heading?’

‘I told you about Julien? He has a club in the centre, but he also organises parties – something a bit more special.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

At ten, we took a cab up to Montmartre. I could see her watching the meter. ‘My friend, Julien,’ she whispered anxiously, ‘his nights aren’t that cheap, you know.’

‘No worries. I’m inviting you.’ Her face relaxed visibly. Ligger.

Julien greeted us at the street door of a sombre nineteenth-century townhouse. A slight man who compensated for his lack of looks with a slim-cut Italian suit and mirror-polished Aubercy wing tips, too dapper to be anything but sleazy. Yvette introduced us, and I reached into my bag, but he waved us casually through to the courtyard, ‘Later, darling, later.’ Inside, coloured glass lanterns and discreet electric heaters made the air feel cosy despite the April chill. My heels snagged; I looked down and saw that I was walking over a Persian rug. Heavy mahogany chaises-longues and armchairs, brass plant stands and ormolu side tables had been dragged in to make an outdoor drawing room. A stolid-looking young woman in a long black dress played a harp. It looked like the setting for a bourgeois Victorian novel, were it not for the fact that the waitresses handing round trays of iced Sauternes and oozing morsels of foie gras were naked except for black button boots, long black satin gloves and straw boaters with thick black grosgrain ribbon bands. Maybe thirty people were smoking and chatting in the warm glow of elaborate Fortuny lanterns, the women in simple, elegant cocktail dresses, the men in dark suits.

‘Wow,’ I said to Yvette, and I meant it. She smiled, a genuine smile.

‘You like?’

‘A lot. Thanks for bringing me.’

‘So . . . in a while we’ll have dinner, and then –’

‘And then.’ I smiled back.

Yvette greeted a few people she knew and introduced me. The women used the formal ‘
vous
’; the men stooped punctiliously to kiss our hands. None of the anxious status confrontations of Balensky’s boat here – if Yvette’s ‘career’ was not quite what she pretended, and I suspected it wasn’t, it didn’t matter. Beauty was enough, and were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty. We might have been at an old-fashioned society wedding, juggling canapés and small talk, were it not for the confident, measured glances passing between the guests, the humming radar of sex. One of the waitresses beat a small dinner gong and we trooped obediently indoors, through an anteroom to a staircase. Julien bobbed up again: ‘Ladies upstairs, please, gentlemen to the right, just here.
Voilà, comme ça
. Dinner is served in fifteen minutes.’ I followed Yvette’s heels upwards, to a large room with dressing tables and bright lights, presided over by another woman in black, compact and serious, her mouth full of pins. ‘She’s a hand at Chanel,’ whispered Yvette –
les mains
, the artisans who hand-stitch the beading and feathers for the couture. Around us, the women were undressing, folding their clothes to reveal expensive lingerie in coffee lace or fuchsia silk, slipping on heavy, delicately embroidered kimonos. The air was thick with our mingled perfumes. As each woman fastened her robe, the little ‘hand’ bustled up with a basket. The women looked elongated and alien, towering over her squat shoulders in their high shoes, like creatures of a different species, which I suppose was how we were meant to feel. With considerable muttering and comparing, the woman pinned a favour on a kimono, fastened a flower into a chignon or on a choker, wound a jewelled and plumed chain around a wrist. After looking at me for a long time, she rootled in the basket and brought out an exquisite white silk gardenia, so perfect that I wanted to smell it.

‘Bend down.’

I inclined my head and felt her fingers unpinning and refastening my simple up-do.

‘Nothing fussy for you, mademoiselle
. Très simple
. Yes, like that.’

She stepped back, speculatively inserted another pin, withdrew it.

‘Very good.’

As she moved on I sat at one of the dressing tables. My hair was twisted up, with the flower held in the cornet. I had been given a dark bronze kimono with white and cobalt embroidery, the silk stitching picking up the pale gleam of the petals. The table looked like a counter at Sephora, every kind of cream and cosmetic. I took a cotton pad and swiped off my make-up, which looked too modern for this setting, replacing it with just a dark red stain on my lips. My reflection looked strange, as though I had been redrawn by Ingres, and looking about, I could see that the other women were altered, too. Yvette wore a scarlet gown, with wide sleeves to the elbows, both her arms bound by a filigree of gold chains interwoven with leather and peacock feathers, like a hawk’s jesses. The little woman clapped her hands, though the room was curiously silent, concentrated, none of the giggling or exclaiming that usually feature when women are dressing together.

‘
Allez, mesdames
.’ Her voice was as matter-of-fact as if we were a troop of schoolgirls being herded worthily around a museum.

Heavy hems and vicious heels swooped and clacked over the parquet. We crossed the hallway to a set of double doors, the low hum within indicating that the men were already inside. The room was lit with candles, small tables positioned between sofas and low dining chairs. The waiting men were dressed in thick black satin pyjamas with frogged jackets, the sheen in the weft of the fabric offsetting their starched shirts. An occasional heavy cufflink or slim watch flashed gold in the candlelight, an embroidered monogram rippled beneath a flamboyant silk handkerchief. It would have felt silly, theatrical, had the details not been so perfect, but I felt hypnotised, my pulse slow and deep. Yvette was being led away by a man with a peacock feather pinned in his cuff – I looked up and saw another man approaching me, a gardenia like my own in his lapel.

‘So it works like that?’

‘While we eat, yes. Afterwards you can choose.
Bonsoir
.’

‘
Bonsoir
.’

He was tall and slim, though his body was younger than his face, rather hard and lined, with greying hair swept back over a high forehead and large, slightly hooded eyes, like a Byzantine saint. He led me to a sofa, waited while I sat and handed me a plain crystal glass of white wine, clean and flinty. The formality was arch, but I liked the choreography. Julien clearly appreciated the pleasure of anticipation. The mostly nude waitresses reappeared with small plates of tiny lobster pastries, then slices of duck breast in a honey and ginger paste, tuiles of raspberries and strawberries. Gestures at food, nothing to sate us.

‘Red fruit makes a woman’s cunt taste so beautiful,’ my dinner companion remarked.

‘I know.’

There was some quiet conversation, but mostly people watched and drank, their eyes moving from one another to the swift movements of the waitresses, who had dancers’ bodies, I saw, slim but strongly muscled, their calves full over their tight boots. Moonlighting from the
corps de ballet
? I saw Yvette dimly across the room, being fed almond-stuffed figs with a sharp-tined silver fork, her body laid out like a serpent’s, one dark thigh a hint between the red silk. Solemnly, the waitresses circled the room with candle snuffers, dimming the lights in a cloud of beeswax, and as they did so I felt the man’s hand on my thigh, circling and stroking, entirely unhurried, and an answering tautness between my legs. The girls set out shallow lacquered trays containing condoms, small crystal bottles of monoi oil, lube decanted into bonbon dishes. Some of the couples were kissing, happy with their matched partners, others rose politely and crossed the room to find the prey they had selected earlier. Yvette’s robe was fully open, her man’s head dipped to her cunt. I caught her eye, and she smiled, luxuriously, before letting her head fall back among the cushions with the ecstatic motion of a junkie nodding out.

Saint’s hands had reached my cunt. He stopped, unfastened my kimono and traced his fingers over my breast, twisting the nipple gently. I thought of that poor girl last night, coked out and whimpering in the penthouse.

‘Do you like this?’

‘Yes. I like it.’

I did. I liked the slip of his hands over my body, easy as water. I liked his mouth as he began to flick his tongue from my collarbone, over my stomach, to the lips of my cunt, changing the shimmering tap to firm strokes, wet, penetrating. I opened my legs a little.

‘Deeper.’

He moved so that he was kneeling on the floor, one hand still caressing me, his eyes level with the gaping lips of my cunt. He worked one finger inside me, two, then three, opening me fully, his tongue never leaving my clit. I closed my eyes, but it was no good, I wanted more.

‘Do you have a friend?’

‘Certainly. Come with me.’

We stood, he took my hand and looked around. The room was all bodies now, twisting and melding, sighs of pleasure and requests for more muffled by skin. He nodded to a man being straddled by a vanilla-fleshed brunette; he lifted her off and her mouth sought that of the woman next to her, a blonde, their hair mingling as they kissed, hands groping for another man who slipped off his jacket as he sank down between them.

Even in the low, flattering light, Saint’s friend was worn-looking, youngish but pale, his shirt with its initials straining a little over the beginnings of a paunchy belly.

‘Mademoiselle needs some assistance.’

If I hadn’t been so hot, I would have laughed then. When were they going to stop with the faux fin de siècle manners?

He reached for my other hand, and I walked carefully to keep my heels from skewering the skirt of my kimono as they led me through to a small, dim boudoir, entirely filled with a low divan, lit only with a stemmed candelabra. An incense burner released a dense scent of cinnamon and musk, leather straps hung from the ceiling like the tendrils of vines. I reached for one, gripping it between both palms, feeling the length of my legs, my breasts taut and erect against the cool silk, knowing I was lovely, knowing I was powerful. I nodded to Saint and he got into position behind me, fumbling a moment with the condom, then he was in me, good, firm and very confident, hands flat on my buttocks, thrusting hard.