With a wriggle he broke free and sat up. He pointed to his watch. “I have to go,” he said, and quickly pulled on his clothes. Marguerite, alone on the mattress and suddenly aware of her nakedness, covered herself with her dress.
Eric crouched in the corner tying up his shoelaces, his face hot with embarrassment, unable to say a word, the silence heavy in the air like a threat. From the corner of his eye he saw her leg, the purple-veined thigh with its furze of dark hairs, and he felt his top lip twitch with distaste. He went over to her, carefully avoiding her gaze and breathing through his mouth.
Marguerite was very quiet. Eric reached into his pocket and withdrew two ten-franc notes. “Here.” He held them out. “Merci,” he added, feeling foolish. But she just curled his fingers back round them and pushed his hand away. For a moment his hand with the notes seemed to hover disconnectedly between them. Suddenly Eric wished she had taken the money. It would have been better.
“Well, goodbye,” he said. “Au revoir.”
Outside, the air felt washed and fragrant. Eric took deep breaths and tried to lift the mood he sensed was descending on him as inevitably as night.…
The afternoon sun beat down on him. It was that curious pause in the year: high summer slipping into autumn. Things started to decay then: wars began; dogs went mad. The green of the trees and the grass looked tired, old and tramped-on.
“How was it?” Pierre-Etienne asked when Eric caught up with them.
“Fantastic,” Eric lied automatically.
“You were a long time,” Momo said.
“Was I? Oh, well, you know how it is.”
“Did you … really?” Pierre-Etienne asked.
Eric looked at him curiously. “Yes. It went just like you said.” He shivered. “She’s big. Huge … you know.” He weighed two mammoth breasts in front of him.
Pierre-Etienne and Momo looked on with ill-concealed amazement. Eric said, “Elle pue,” and they both laughed uneasily. He touched his back pocket and heard the crinkle of notes. He turned and walked away from the abattoir back towards the market-place. Pierre-Etienne and Momo followed behind, deep in conversation.
“Come on,” Eric shouted, “I’ll buy you a Diabolo-menthe.”
Marcel looked up in surprise when Marguerite said goodbye. Normally they parted without a word. She went to the café and ordered a drink. The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the street; a slight breeze shifted a scrap of paper on the pavement; amber light flashed momentarily from a chrome bumper. Some of the butchers from the day shift came into the café but she paid them no attention. She was thinking about clean shiny hair, smoothness, a touch.
She called for another calva. She would go home late tonight, maybe see a film or just sit on here in the café for a while. It was a pleasant evening. There was something solid and achieved about the depth of the shadows, it seemed to her; the kindness of the yellowy sun patches on the table tops pleased her obscurely. She took the last sip of calva. The English boy had been gentle and she had made him happy.
The waiter brought her new drink over. As he put it down he whispered his request in her ear. She looked round. The man leant confidentially over the table. She saw his oily hair, his silver tooth, his shiny watch.
“Well?” he asked, smiling, his eyebrows raised.
“No,” said Marguerite abruptly, before she had really even thought about it. “No. Tomorrow perhaps, we’ll see. But not today. Not today.”
My Girl in Skintight Jeans
I would like to make one thing clear before I tell my story. I don’t want you to think that because I have never married that there is any kind of … of a problem between me and the female sex. I could in fact have married any number of girls had I so chosen — but I didn’t choose to, so there it is. It was a question of my health, you see. I do not have a strong constitution and largely for that reason I decided, once my dear mother had died, to remain a bachelor.
My mother left me a small legacy along with the house. I live quietly and economically there. I have several projects with which I am currently occupied and they take up a fair amount of my time. I am a great reader, too, and one of the luxuries of not having to work for a living is that I can indulge to the full my passion for reading. Lately, however, I have grown rather tired of books and for the last year or so have read only magazines. I have subscriptions to thirty-eight and buy many others on a casual, sporadic basis. I read all kinds except the political ones; I like the bright, happy illustrations and I have been progressively coming around to the opinion that magazines are, indeed, more imaginative than many novels. The world of the glossy magazine holds more allure for me than the grimy realistic tragedies that pass for literature these days.
Every winter I leave the house, board it up and switch off the water and electricity. I spend the winter months in a small resort town a few miles up the coast from San Luis Obispo in northern California. I get all my magazine subscriptions forwarded there. It’s a quiet life, but cheap and necessary for my health. Over the years I’ve got to know most of the inhabitants, but they’re not very sociable folk and I find that few of them have much to say for themselves.
This last winter had been a bad one for me. My budget, due to the failure of one of my projects, was lower than ever and my life-style was correspondingly reduced. I had been chronically depressed through most of January and February and if it hadn’t been for the regular arrival of my magazines with their laughing happy people in their primary-colored world, I’m sure I would have done something drastic. However, as spring approached, my spirits rallied and I began to feel a little better.
Then she arrived — a modern primavera—and the sleepy resort town seemed to respond to her exciting presence. I began to think of her possessively as “my girl.” She was definitely my kind of girl. My girl in skintight jeans, I called her. It was merely a fancy of mine; I never actually plucked up the courage to introduce myself. I saw her regularly every day from my room and soon grew to feel that somehow I had come to know her, got to grips with what I believe is a rare, remarkable personality.
She’s beautiful too. Shaggy, clean blond hair, a short, crisp white T-shirt leaving a gap of navel-dimpled caramel belly between its hem and her dark, tight navy jeans. Those long-legged, tapered blue jeans.
It makes me feel good to think of her as my girl. For some reason she always wears the same outfit every day — but it’s always fresh and well laundered. She’s the most truly at-ease person I’ve ever come across: there’s an astonishing serenity that beams out of her eyes. I have noticed, too, that she never wears a brassiere, and the thin material of her T-shirt is molded closely to her breasts.
My room is small but I keep it tidy. There’s an electric ring and a sink in the corner but I don’t do much cooking because I hate the smell it leaves. My room is on the top floor of an old building on the seafront. It has two windows and from one of them I can get a good view of the ocean and the coast. In this town only two cafés stay open through the winter season and I divide my meals more or less equally between them; I don’t wish to seem particular and have no desire to give offense. In fact I prefer the Del Mar, but I don’t want to alienate old Luke who runs Luke ‘n’ Loretta’s. He’s nearly blind, but we talk a lot and I kind of like the old guy. I’m unwilling to tell him but, as his sight’s got worse, so has his place. Nowadays he leaves nearly everything up to his sister, Loretta. She’s an overweight, red-rinsed whore who lives in a camping truck out in back. For five dollars she’ll give you a quick time out there. Believe me, it isn’t worth it For some reason though, she’s taken a shine to me — asked me around for a drink after closing a couple of times. But since the girl in skintight jeans arrived I’ve stayed away. Then Loretta cut me dead in the street yesterday so I thought I’d better go back, just to keep the peace.