Foreign Tongue (4 page)

T
here was a message from Francis, an entertainment lawyer, on the machine. He represented a French band called Chronopop, and I’d done some translation work and writing for their electronic press kit and U.S. label launch. We’d never met, but from our numerous phone flirtations in L.A., I knew he was Irish, divorced, older. He was in Paris and wanted to take me out for dinner.

A date. My first date since Timothy. I mulled it over. I’d lost weight, and I had a silk dress I’d bought in the summer sales. I called him back. His voice, thick with that familiar brogue, barked a time into my ear.

“See you soon, you gorgeous thing,” he added.

“How do you know I’m a gorgeous thing?”

“You American girls.
Not
good at compliments. Fuck, should I have said ‘women’? Are you mortally offended now?” He barked with laughter and hung up.

I didn’t feel like a gorgeous thing, but being called one nudged me in
the right direction. A date, after all. Dinner with a man I’d never met. Anything could happen.

I put on stockings and high heels, sprayed myself with scent, and spent twenty minutes on my face. Two coats of rarely used but very effective curling mascara
plus
use of the eyelash curler that Timothy used to pretend to be afraid of. By the time I was done, I looked a little
fatale,
almost feverish—dark eyes, shiny lips, and hollow cheekbones. I powdered my long, thin nose as I listened to oldies on
Radio Nostalgie
and sang along:
“Je serai la plus belle pour aller danser.”

I shimmied into the dress. It was a slip of a thing, with tiny straps and a ruffled, flamenco-style hem that swooped up in front to midthigh. I scraped my brown hair back into a tight chignon. I looked more theatrical than I was used to: somewhat Carmen Miranda, sans fruit; a bit, as the French say,
olé-olé
.

“What the hell,” I said to the mirror.

Francis was pretty much the way I’d imagined him: about fifteen years my senior, navy blazer, gold chain, tanned skin, and bulging eyes with deeply etched laugh lines. His face lit up when he saw me, and he pushed a man purse off the passenger seat as I got in. I suddenly wished my dress wasn’t quite so insubstantial.

“Look at you,” he said, whistling. “Snow White with cleavage.”

Over a pleasant meal at a fancy Italian restaurant near l’Opéra, he told me about himself, how he’d piloted planes in the Caribbean, run a nightclub in Zagreb, and produced a few Spanish films in the nineties. He’d been divorced three times, no children, and now poured most of his money into a rhinoceros preserve in South Africa. “I’ll tell you, Anna, being there,” he said, “is the most fun you can have with your clothes on.”

“I’ll bite,” I said. “Where’s the most fun you can have with your clothes off?”

“Thailand.” He grinned. “But Claude, my partner, keeps raving about this insane French dominatrix.”

“You’re kidding,” I said, for lack of anything better.

“Honest injun,” he said, holding up his palm. I may have winced. “Hold on, I think I even have—” His phone rang as he searched his wallet. “Bloody hell. I’ll be right back.” He pushed a card across the table and went outside to take the call.

Francis was a character, it had been an interesting evening, but I was done. I slouched back in my chair, contemplating my after-dinner options: face mask, mint-verbena tea, maybe crack open the Flaubert.

I slid the black and gold business card toward me. It read:
“Madame Véronique: bondage, sado-masochisme, domination, soumission, fétichisme, spécialiste en accrochage. Donjon disponsible. Attention, âmes sensibles s’abstenir.”
Dungeon available. Hey, not everyone has a dungeon. I wondered about the phrase “specializes in hanging.” There was a phone number printed in Gothic gold type.

I could see Francis pacing up and down the sidewalk, gesticulating as he talked on his cell. I looked around the restaurant: a mostly older crowd, lots of couples, and a corner table of youngish businessmen in suits and ties who were all staring at me. Granted, I had paranoid tendencies, but this was unmistakable. Had I spilled something? Had my dress shifted? I glanced down, but the dress was fine. A little revealing but fine. Actually, very revealing. I looked up again, feeling a rush of blood to my face.

They thought I was a call girl. I felt it in the knowing, haughty glances of the women, the calculating looks from the table in the corner. The waiters, in their
smokings,
remained icily polite. They called me
“Madame”
and didn’t make eye contact; they’d seen it all before. It wasn’t my imagination: a waiter placed a snifter of cognac and a business card on the table in front of me, murmuring,
“De la part de monsieur,”
as he cocked his head toward the businessmen. One of them, a florid, beefy type with slicked-back hair, grinned. I thought I could hear the snap of his lips on his teeth.

He looked like one of my former students, from my days teaching
English to a senior manager at a telecom company. He’d hated lessons, resented my presence, and warmed up only when we talked about cars. He’d had shiny black hair parted on the side, worn tight suits around his barrel-like midsection, and bathed in cologne.

“I like,
comment dit-t-on,
difficult cars,” he’d said.

“Sports cars?” I’d ventured.

“
Non, non, des voitures nerveuses
. I like to dominate them.” He’d shot his cuffs as he said it, and admired his pudgy, manicured fingers. I’d been seized with a violent feeling of sexual repulsion.

I stared at my wineglass, frozen with embarrassment. I could feel my face turn red. I heard a low chuckle. I looked up, narrowing my eyes, and thought, You have no idea who I am. The gold print on the card twinkled at me.

And you never will. I fumbled in my evening bag for a pen. Not finding one, I pulled out a tiny stub of lip liner.

I flipped over Madame Véronique’s card and scribbled
“Appelle-moi”
in waxy red. Then I drew a heart around it and motioned to the waiter to take it to my admirer.

I bit the inside of my cheek, took a deep breath, and looked up coolly. They passed the card around, and one of them gave a low whistle. Another said,
“Excellent,”
and snickered. They watched, silent, as Francis came back and sat down. When they left, I waved good-bye. Madame Véronique owed me big time: I had a hunch some bad boys needed spanking.

We left after a round of espresso. In the car, Francis asked, “Shall I drive you home?”

“Yes, please. Unless you want to go out clubbing,” I joked. He maneuvered out of the parking spot and slid his eyes over to me.

“Depends on what kind,” he said. “I know a sex club nearby.”

I felt a slight shock, a rattle, like when you hit your funny bone. I didn’t say anything, wondering if he was putting me on.

He wasn’t. “It’s in a medieval building in the Marais. Very posh, with a restaurant, disco, and a few orgy rooms,” he continued. Now I was perturbed. “You can watch,” he added. “You don’t have to do anything.”

“So, it’s like a porn movie but more erotic?” I asked.

“Sometimes less erotic. If the people aren’t particularly attractive, for instance,” he said, shifting gears.

“Ah,” I said, studying his profile. I’d heard about these sex clubs, or private libertine clubs, as they were sometimes referred to, but I’d never been invited to one. It sounded so much better in French,
libertinage
—like it has a philosophical or political element, something that links it more to the racy eighteenth century rather than the seamy 1970s. No way in hell was I going, but it occurred to me Francis had some interesting knowledge. “How does it work?”

“The women rule. It only happens if a woman wants it to happen. For instance, someone—a man, or a woman—might make a gesture, and depending on your reaction, things would go from there. Like this.” He ran his thumb down my bare arm. It was casual and insinuating at the same time, as if he’d licked me instead of touched me.

“I have a girlfriend in Paris, Ariane. She and I almost never have sex, but she loves going to this place, it turns her on. The last time we went, she ended up in a ménage à trois with an Italian stud and his girlfriend. I can tell you one thing, whether you have an orgasm at the club, or with me, or by yourself later on, it
will
blow your mind,” he said. Then he giggled. He was like a horny bulldog puppy, happy and ready to hump furniture.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“You’re curious, admit it.”

“No one’s ever invited me to a sex club before,” I confessed, wavering. Hell, I didn’t know ordinary folks could go—I thought they were reserved for card-carrying denizens of some secret underworld. I could actually go to a sex club this evening, I thought, toying with the idea. I was curious. I could just watch.

“It’s right there,” he said, pulling over and pointing to a building with a valet parking attendant.

I laughed. It was a fake, tinsel laugh like, Oh, aren’t I sophisticated? It was a laugh like, Isn’t it interesting to imagine that I might actually contemplate going to a sex club in Paris? Francis turned to look at me. I opened my mouth to say no.

“When was the last time you surprised yourself? Did something wildly out of character, just for the hell of it?” he asked.

There it was:
la phrase qui tue,
literally, the sentence that kills, an arrow to the heart or, more likely, my self-image.

“I can’t remember,” I said, answering truthfully. I didn’t often do unpredictable things: I’d gotten on a plane to Paris, after all, not Ushuaia or Ulaanbaatar. I looked down and traced a pattern in the thin silk of my dress, trying to conjure up another version of myself, someone adventurous and fearless, even reckless. It was seductive, this flirtation with another me. Before I could think it through any further, out rushed “One drink, and we leave the second I feel freaked out.”

“Done,” he said.

Inside, Francis shook hands with a doorman in a long black coat, then paid an entrance fee at the counter and took my elbow. We went down a stone stairwell, the rock cold and slightly moist to the touch, to a large room. I eyed the buffet, with an enormous cheese plate and trays of cakes and pastries, and wondered who came to a sex club for food. There was a strong smell of eucalyptus in the air. Between several low sofas, upholstered in an unfortunate airline-seat print, were shiny white ceramic statues of life-size naked women in suggestive poses. Ropes of fairy lights hung in swags along the walls. So far, it seemed almost ordinary.

At the bar, Francis greeted the owner, a petite woman in a tailored lace suit named Ginette. He explained that it was my first time. She smiled and told me not to be nervous. As they continued talking, I watched the
bartender pour my drink, making sure he didn’t slip some mysterious drug into my gimlet. I poked my head in the disco, where one couple slow-danced alone while an older man sat between two women wearing skimpy dresses on a leather sofa. As he rested his head against the wall, the two women leaned across him and started kissing. I watched for a moment, trying to look nonchalant, until the man unzipped his pants and waved me over. I backed up into Francis, who danced out of the way of his splashing whiskey.

“Ahoy, matey,” he said. “How is our stranger in a strange land?”

“Observing the mating habits of the natives,” I said, a little prim.

“Come along, Little Bo Peep.” I followed him down another set of stairs to a
salon
. Through the somewhat low light, I could make out a wall with a giant “X,” against which a naked man stood blindfolded, his arms and legs attached to leather restraints. A woman bent over him, her head bobbing up and down, while another man stood behind her, thrusting. I blinked and looked away, then looked back. Francis laughed.

In another dimly lit room, I squinted at various groupings of writhing bodies and tried to figure out who was doing what to whom, while a lot of squishy, slapping sounds made me think of cake batter and spatulas. There were men and women of all different ages and sizes, and most of them were tan and trim.

There was something both weirdly erotic—the strangeness of the situation, the sheer proximity—and weirdly mechanical about it. As I wandered about, I felt like I’d ventured into the kind of situation you don’t necessarily enjoy but might look forward to telling people about later. I didn’t stay too long in any one place and avoided eye contact as I watched people have sex.

I noticed that here, either you got off or you got off watching. The former was out, as I didn’t go for sex with strangers and I wasn’t attracted to Francis; and the latter didn’t work for me either, as it turned out to be strangely bereft of the thing that could make it engaging: a
story, a sense of who these people were. I began to feel more and more out of place.

A pair of lips grazed the back of my neck as a hand cupped my buttocks.

“Cut it out, Francis,” I said. When the fondling didn’t stop, I turned around. It wasn’t Francis but a tall, thin woman about my age, with an asymmetrical haircut in a cut-out leather dress. She gave me a friendly smile. Behind her stood a tan man with full lips, fondling her through the slits in the leather. She was all bones and angles, like an Italian greyhound, and as I gave them an apologetic look, I had an absurd, vain thought: Was I her type? If I were gay, would she be mine?
“Excusez moi,”
I said, and went to find Francis. He was at the bar, talking to the bartender. I tapped him on the shoulder.

“I’m pulling the rip cord,” I announced. He shrugged and drained his glass. We went upstairs and down the street to the car.

“Well?” he asked, hands shoved in his pockets.

“I get it, but I don’t get it,” I said. “It’s funny, I kept wondering what all those people wanted, aside from the obvious. A connection? A thrill, something different? Who are they? What are they looking for?”

Francis shrugged. “It’s not that complicated. I was looking for a girl I met the last time. She was beautiful. From Cameroon,” he said, wistful. “Shall I take you home?” he asked. I nodded. It was a short drive. I gave him a kiss on the cheek and went inside.