13, Rue Therese - Elena Mauli Shapiro [52]
Xavier’s face is flushed and gleaming with perspiration. As helplessly as his flustered pores pour forth sweat, his mouth pours forth lectures about women, about mysterious fires in the blood; he cannot help himself. Still, he is happy at this moment. He can tell that his students are listening, truly listening to him today as he tells them, “They are aching for it too, you know, perhaps as much as we are. What if it’s more, can you imagine? You never know what manner of sensuous and exquisite hell is roiling in those bodies of theirs. Their bodies do not signal arousal as crassly as our bodies, the infernal creatures. But sometimes you will see them boil forth—you will see them boil forth with impersonal and all-destroying desire and you will be stunned and you will be conquered and how prone we all are to such sickness!”
He interrupts himself, and looks over the room full of adolescent faces raptly turned toward him. He glances at the watch that he plucks from his pocket. The bell will ring soon, and the realization of what he has said to them for the past hour washes warmly over him. But he is not embarrassed and he is not frightened; he is conspiratorial. He says to them, “Now pack up your books and go home, and think on this. This new disease that you have in your blood now, boys, it will never get better. But, they have the same disease. We all manifest it in our ways. What I have just told you, dear boys, don’t tell a soul. You wouldn’t want to get a giving teacher such as myself in trouble, would you?”
For several seconds, an electric silence, and then the boldest boy says aloud, with military gusto, “No, Sir!”
They all laugh, and Xavier shuts his tiny book with a swift snap of his hand, tucks it back into his breast pocket.
THIS DAY (MONDAY) XAVIER Langlais feels exceedingly peculiar. As a matter of fact, he feels so peculiar that he is half-convinced that he is somehow outside himself. Or no, rather, he is inside himself, but someone or something else is inside his body too, turning up the heat. On his ride home on the metro, his brain crackles with the memory of his strange lunchtime rendezvous, with the extraordinary session he has given his students, with this other vaporous presence superimposed on his flesh, directing him. He is filled with his own surging pulse. His sweat output has not gone down but increased. He shivers. Is he afflicted with some sort of fever? He cannot tell for certain what is happening to him. He shifts in his seat. He jiggles his foot. His back is sore.
That confounded woman. His confounded self. At this moment, he is filled with dark need, and he wonders why exactly he feels so uncivilized, so uncontrolled. It must be that damned Louise has infected him! Or resuscitated him. His long-lost fighter pilot the Angle must be preparing for a mission of some sort, because Xavier’s head is spinning. He feels that he might fall on his knees and vomit, right here in the train car, spraying his stomach juices across the aisle.
Something in him keeps his back straight, keeps him from losing control of his swooning body. A great burst of heat tingles in his solar plexus. It floods his musculature to his fingertips, seeps into his bones. The feeling is pleasant. It agrees with his body. Arousal stirs, and he must rest his briefcase on his lap.
Surely such a surge of unexplained emotion will bring about disaster: this illness—this feeling of falling—the engines roar and his eyes are tingling with smoke. He must disengage his flying machine. He must pull up but he cannot.
His body braces itself for the crash because all of Xavier Langlais is on the same wavelength now; all of