LITMIR.BIZ

Скачать книгу

stood up and gave a sunny, American smile. “I do hope you enjoyed the salmon.”

      “Where are you from?” he asked me.

      “France,” I lied. “Paris.”

      That tongue again. It was actually the color of beetroot. He extended it to maximum length, as though trying to catch a fly. He waggled it around. Then he put it back in his mouth. “Please come to the ASH Hotel bar after your shift.” He slid a business card toward me. “I will be waiting for you from midnight onward. I will wait all night.”

      Jasper was shooting balls off the end of the billiard table in the private members’ club upstairs. Samuel had been ordered to stand at the end and catch the balls on the premise that the ball boy was an esteemed and essential figure in any game. “Play up and play the game,” Freddie was repeating, stupidly.

      “You’re not supposed to be in here,” I said. “This is members only. Get out.”

      “Why are you always telling people to get out?” said Jasper, sipping his negroni.

      “And I want my money,” I said.

      “What money?” said Freddie.

      “For dinner,” I said.

      Freddie laughed. “I want my money for the booze earlier this afternoon. Think I’d forgotten about that, did you? Nice little outfit you came home with.”

      “I’ll call the police,” I said.

      Now they all laughed—even Samuel.

      “Tell Ann-Marie where you got that babygro, Samuel.” Freddie chalked his cue.

      “It’s a onesie,” said Samuel. “I made it! Yeah ’cause I read this article on VICE that had the coolest headline ever—‘Please Snort Me!’” He gestured to his chest. “So I, like, copied it!”

      “What was the article about, though?” said Jasper.

      “I don’t know.” Samuel looked ashamed. “I didn’t read it.”

      Now Freddie and Jasper nearly killed themselves laughing.

      “I’m calling William,” I said.

      “Ann-Marie.” Jasper tried to slink one well-moisturized arm around my shoulders, but I punched him.

      “Ow!” He rubbed his gut. “You can take it as payment for all the times you fucked me and then left me and went back to your whirling dervish of a boyfriend. Like what about that time in Vietnam in the Agent Orange forest, where there were just stumps. That was fucking romantic. When Sebastian was supposed to be chugging that fucking dreadful cod trawler around the Thanet coast but he was off poking Allegra in Paris. Wasn’t she doing a summer school at Lecoq?”

      “Yeah,” said Freddie.

      “For that one night at least,” said Jasper. “You didn’t think about Sebastian. You didn’t care about Sebastian at all. Did you, Ann-Marie?”

      “I always cared,” I said.

      “But you fucking loved it. Didn’t you?”

      “Can we talk about something else for once?” said Freddie.

      Jasper positioned himself over the billiard table and fired at empty space; no balls clicked. He turned to Samuel. “You know, one thing I will say. The problem with your big sister Allegra as a lay was that she was too damn pliable.”

      Samuel looked at Freddie.

      “Jasper,” said Freddie. “Dude. Don’t.”

      “Yah,” Jasper went on. “I mean, when I was fucking Allegra and I had her perfect fucking porcelain behind in my hands and I was squeezing her cunt, it was like trying to get blood out of a stone—”

      “You’re disgusting,” I said.

      “Wait,” said Jasper. “There’s a compliment for you.”

      I waited.

      “She was never really there, you know what I mean?” Jasper went on. “I felt like she could just be anything I wanted her to be like, like her buttocks were made out of melting wax and I could fashion them into anything I chose. I felt like I was crafting a woman!”

      Samuel left the room.

      Freddie followed him.

      Jasper stared at me.

      I stared at Jasper.

      “But with you at least I felt like you were with me,” he said.

FIVE

      What does it mean for a woman to submit?

      To submit is to lose oneself. To want to submit is to want to lose oneself. I’m talking about consent. We can lose ourselves through religion, alcohol, sex, drugs, political fanaticism, or love.

      Why would a woman want to lose herself in love?

      In short, why would she want to fall?

      Because it’s fun? Oh yes, it’s fun.

      Or because it offers her respite from the pressures of the meritocracy?

      The meritocracy demands that she alone is responsible—for her successes, yes. But also for her failures. Falling is a way of avoiding failure—or success.

      Falling is a form of submission.

      The modern woman senses that in order to win a man’s love, she must deny her capability and regress.

      Marge had left her copy of Stephanie’s book under the table. It was signed:

       Dear Marge,

       Sending you love from my (rightful?) place of exile. It’s cold here but the sistahood can’t get me from all the way across the Atlantic. I’m sorry again—if it’s right for me to say sorry?

       In solidarity, as ever,

       Steph

      I stroked the dust jacket, hoping to absorb the gravitas contained in those pages by the power of touch alone.

      I was sitting on the front step of the closed Barclays next to Leicester Square station, working my way through a family-size bucket of fried chicken, which I had purchased from the fake KFC across the road.

      A bachelorette party wearing angel wings and devil horns staggered out of the all-night pizza place, clutching a long train of torn white netting. Fiona! Fiona! they chanted. Fiona grabbed a man wearing a pin-striped shirt who seemed to be attached to the bachelorette party and shoved her clenched fist down the front of his trousers. He groped under her tube top. Her friends began to sing: Puuuuuurrrfect! The old Eddi Reader song. The man walked away.

      Rickshaws carrying cargos of people fucked out of their brains swerved dangerously close to the night buses that swelled with yet more people cramming kebabs into their mouths, letting their sleeping heads knock against the windows on the upper deck, missing the view of this splendid city.

      “Do you know, there is no direct translation for jouissance in English?” Toad Man was saying to me over martinis in the bar.

      I had taken a night bus from Leicester Square to the ASH Hotel, which was situated between the City and the East district, combining money with creativity in an ideal cocktail of dynamic penthouse suites, stellar service, and conceptual art, according to the brochure that I was reading intently.

      “I like to think of myself as French in spirit,” he went on. “Even though I’m English with only the faintest tinge of Scot.” He chortled and rubbed his belly. “So to sit with a French woman in the flesh is something of a minor miracle for me.”

      “Minor?”

      “Oh, they are hard to find in London. The French tend to stick together

Скачать книгу