13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [44]
Pierre has a dreamy look on his face when he says, “I swear, Henri, it was so magnificent that it transcended cocksucking. When I came into her mouth, she started to shiver and moan like she was coming too. I’d never seen anything like it. Like she was starving for it.”
“You weren’t touching her?” Henri queries. “You mean, she came just from sucking you off?”
“Yes! It was amazing. It was like worship. It’s the sort of feeling people are always trying to get in church. The poor bastards, they’re looking in the wrong place.”
Louise smiles to herself in the shadows: this is what men talk about, when they’re alone! She has caught them. It is good that the two of them hadn’t invited her father along, because had she heard such words coming out of his mouth, she would have fainted immediately.
What should she do? She wants to burst into the room, giggling with naughty joy, and fling her clothes all over the place. She wants to receive instructions on how to administer transcendent fellatio. Oh, their shiny drunken eyes and their laughter—she wants to be part of it.
They would be so aghast if they knew she’d heard them. It would ruin their evening.
Gingerly, she tiptoes back into the entrance and opens the front door. This time, she does so theatrically, and clears her throat. She shuts the door loudly, and says, “Hello? Are you home?”
She hears the shuffle of chairs as the men rise to greet her. They look jolly as they step out of the kitchen and into the living room, certain that Louise had a sweet, innocent time at the opera and knows nothing of their male crudity.
“Ah, Louise,” says Pierre, “good to see you. Henri says you’re well, and he’s right because you look lovely. How was Carmen?”
“Quite marvelous. The sets were beautiful.”
“Yes, I heard it was a wonderful production. Well, I should be getting on now. I wouldn’t want to keep the two of you from bed.”
“Well, thank you for entertaining my husband.”
“My pleasure.”
They say good-bye warmly and drowsily, and as Henri walks his wife back to their bedroom, he holds her hand. Louise is delighted at the thrum of sex in her blood and wonders if her husband will make love to her tonight, or if he is too drunk. She mustn’t get her hopes up; probably, he will go to sleep as soon as he lies down.
This thrum of sex, this slow unfurling of heat—there is something like possession about it, like the body being seized by an unchecked and dreadful force. The rush of blood from her frenetic heart is both exhilarating and ominous—like vertigo.
La Floride fleurie
THE NEXT MORNING IS when Henri makes love to her—Saturday. She wakes up to a strange sound in her head: a constant note like the moan of the metro train echoing in the dark tunnel, or perhaps a dim, distant alarm. Her eyes pop open and the sound clears with a brief effervescent hiss. She backs up against her husband’s warm slumbering body and discovers that he has an erection; she can feel it straining against her. She grinds against it. He wakes up.
They don’t speak; their agreement is immediate—more urgent than it has been in a long time. He gathers her to him and kisses the back of her neck, begins to work the nightgown off her with his willful hands.
He turns her around and takes her face to face, the two of them moving slowly on their sides. His slide into her is easy. They are surprised and glad for this sudden passion. She sucks eagerly on his impatient kiss. She can taste on his tongue the cigarettes that he smoked last night with Pierre. She tries the best she can not to think of Xavier Langlais’s face while her husband is inside her. She comes loudly, and several times, with a pained expression on her face that looks something like grief. Henri