10 In the Shadow of Notre-Dame #5
After the initial unrestrained and passionate blaze, their gestures gradually tempered.
Paulina, naked in Jean-Pierre’s arms, was in heaven.
She noticed that his lean, well-built body smelled like tobacco, freshly cut grass, clean sheets, a box of Caran d’Ache crayons, and the afternoon snack of toast with chocolate from her childhood in Sant Pol.
She embraced his torso and found concentrated there many moments of her own happiness.
With Paulina’s hair fanned on his chest, Jean-Pierre couldn’t stop caressing her velvety and celestial peach-like skin.
From her legs to her bottom, from her back to her shoulders.
Her breasts, whiter, well proportioned, held themselves up with the pride of her almost thirty years.
Delicately, Jean-Pierre tended to her nipples with a respect no one had ever shown her.
With a violinist’s fingers, she thought.
Jean-Pierre knew a thing or two when it came to making love.
And Paulina was delighted. All the sensitivity and artistry in every aspect of his life had taught him to appreciate bodies, to respect them, and to understand that, beyond penetration, there is play and life and fire.
What a gift. With his expert fingers and inquisitive tongue, Jean-Pierre knew how to approach delicate places.
Paulina appreciated that he came to her sex with consideration, without roughness.
But also with the necessary gesture of masculine confidence to carry her up to the clouds.
They made love twice. Slowly. They kissed, they sweated, and they said beautiful things to each other.
“I’ve felt things I never thought I could feel.”
“No one has ever said anything so flattering to me.”
“I wasn’t just talking about sex.”
After that, Paulina got up to lower the curtain so that no one in the building across the way might see them. Jean-Pierre admired her young, strong legs.
“You’re incredibly sexy.”
She really was proud of her legs.
“Didn’t you say you have a white wine from . . . somewhere?”
“In the fridge.”
He hid the reluctance he felt about getting up.
“Would you like some?”
Jean-Pierre returned from the kitchen with two glasses and the open bottle in an ice bucket. He served them both. They toasted, sitting at the foot of the bed, and then lay down again, proud of their bodies and the moment.
Three glasses later, she told him not to move.
He was lying on his back, looking at the minimalist lamp inspired by a Calder mobile hanging above the bed.
Paulina pulled back the sheet and kissed him all over his body, noting that some of his hairs were beginning to turn white.
After caressing his arms and lingering around his navel, she climbed on top of him.
She braced him between her knees on the mattress, and guiding him with two fingers to remind him of the way, she suddenly had him inside her again.
She began to ride him, very slowly. In a rhythm.
Softly, so softly. Occasionally she arched her back and supported herself with her hands on his thighs.
At other times, with the same soft cadence, she bent forward against his chest, to feel him better, more deeply.
She realized her hair falling over his face might bother him, so she skillfully tied it back before continuing the languid, tranquil rocking. “Softer, softer, love,” she whispered.
Feeling liberated and unfamiliar with this version of herself, she liked setting the rhythm. Being in control. She wasn’t used to it. It was something different.
“Ne bouge pas. ‘Don’t move,’ I said.”
Jean-Pierre, motionless, grew even more aroused under Paulina’s command.
Her extremely slow movement—softer, softer—the perfect lubrication, the sensitive friction.
He felt every point of contact as if it were new each time, slowly, up and down.
The pleasure was long, intense, almost too much to bear.
“Softer, softer,” she repeated in his ear.
And the more she insisted, the softer Jean-Pierre felt himself making love to Pauline—fully surrendered, in another world, in a field full of butterflies with the most colorful patterns he had ever seen flutter anywhere.
He felt his head and his heart and all of him on the verge of exploding.
With each thrust, closer. “Softer, softer,” Paulina repeated, her chest growing rosier each time.
And he let her do as she pleased. Let himself be carried.
And they felt every flavor of it. And they opened their eyes, now and then, to acknowledge that they were together.
And they waited for each other. And at the same time, matching each other’s breath, they delayed the final moan as long as they possibly could.
Overcome by pleasure, they fell asleep in each other’s arms.
The first sunrays entered the room in Monday’s rudeness.
Paulina, who had slept soundly, without judging herself, without even thinking about who she was or what she was doing there, lifted her head inches from the pillow.
Through the window she saw a slice of the blue sky.
On the nightstand, the ice had melted into a puddle.
The bottle, upside down, had shed its label, which now floated in the water like a dead body.
When she turned to caress Jean-Pierre, he was no longer there.
Before she had time to worry, she heard the sound of the shower.
The frosted glass sliding door didn’t let her see his silhouette.
She stretched and let herself savor her laziness while taking in, left and right, the sanctuary of her .
. . lover. After spending a night at his place, could she call him that already?
At what point in a relationship, Paulina wondered, does another person become your lover?
Is a lover measured in kisses or in feelings?
Is sex what defines the term? And if it is, what kind of sex?
Is it a matter of how many times, or of intensity?
In the calm of the morning, Paulina didn’t regret anything she had done or said since Julie had introduced her to Jean-Pierre.
That morning she felt, for once, transgressive.
Not exactly proud of it, but not punishing herself either.
She would think about it on the plane home.
The plane home! She didn’t want to go back.
She didn’t want it to end. She knew she could keep this story in the required secrecy.
But again, the words troubled her: Why did she think of it as a story, an affair, when she was feeling things she had never felt before?
Where was it written that her relationship with her Mastroianni had to be just an adventure, or a fling, or one of those euphemisms invented to soothe guilty consciences?
Why limit it from the outset? Why not surrender to Jean-Pierre as much as he seemed to be opening himself to her, and later they would have time to decide what label to put on it?
Words are sometimes more incriminating than actions.
And she began turning all this over in her mind.
Perhaps the man in the shower had broken down a few of her barriers. How many, my love? How many, beloved?
From the bed, she could see that, next to the reading sofa that Jean-Pierre kept in the bedroom, in addition to a standing ashtray and a vintage lamp, there was an antique piece of furniture holding a telephone, some books, and a few photographs. She got up to look at them closely.
There were three pictures.
There was an old black-and-white wedding portrait in an extravagant silver frame. Based on the groom’s features, she had no doubt it was his parents’ wedding outside the church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, in interwar Paris.
A second faded photograph was clearly of a proud young Jean-Pierre, pipe in mouth, shaking hands with a painter she didn’t recognize. Judging by the joy on Jean-Pierre’s face, he must have been a renowned artist.
The third photograph on the piece of furniture unsettled Paulina much more.
In a chipped ivory frame was a photo of a little girl.
It was a close-up taken at the gallery on rue de Seine with a Polaroid camera.
Based on her features, she was a few years older than Gina but nowhere near as cute.
She had to be six or seven, eight at the very most. She was dark haired, with two Peruvian-style braids, and smiling at the camera in a way that showed off her fairly separated two front teeth.
She didn’t look like an Anouk, a name Paulina thought better suited to a woman than to a girl.
No matter how hard she searched, she found no resemblance whatsoever to Jean-Pierre.
He had told her he had no children at Julie’s wedding, and after the two days, and one night, they had spent together, this was not the moment—please no—to catch him in a lie.
There would be time enough later, if necessary, to untangle that mess.
She decided to go wish Jean-Pierre good morning.
She slipped off her panties, went into the bathroom, and, without him hearing her enter, stepped into the shower with him.
She poured the shower gel into her hand and slowly soaped him, as carefully as one cleans a Renaissance David.
Under the generous stream of water, the gallerist had stopped whistling.
“Did you tell your cousin you weren’t coming home to sleep?”
“Shit!”