Satisfied that he was not a sellout in the eyes of his radical friend, Lucien moved to the topic of the house. He said Agathe was being overbearing, constantly texting him details about the property, details that he would spare me, but that she might show up there.
I was prepared for this. I said I had met Robert. I was sorry to have to inform Lucien of what happened, but his aunt’s husband had been inappropriate. I had gone out for a walk and encountered Robert parked on the road. He was touching himself in his car.
“Oh my God, Sadie. Are you okay?”
Lucien seemed to think this was my first lesson that men masturbate.
I said I didn’t want to make a big deal of things, but I didn’t feel safe thinking I might encounter Robert again. I was afraid of him.
“I should come up there,” Lucien said. “But everything is permitted and arranged for the shoot, and I can’t leave. I feel like I understand why I’ve never liked that guy. No one in the family can stand him.” He said he would call Agathe and tell her they should both leave me undisturbed. It was his house, and it was time to put his foot down. He might even tell Agathe the truth, that Robert had a problem.
Robert would be incensed, naturally. He would deny the accusation, but he would get the message. A message from me to him, to leave me alone. And Agathe would keep him closer to home, to keep an eye on him.
As we ended our call, Lucien said he could not wait to join me when the shoot was finished, six weeks from now.
“I’m thinking about you,” he said. There was an audible sigh. “I need you here,” he whispered.
A noisome image of Lucien naked flashed into my thoughts. This image was attended by a smell, or a memory of a smell (and what is the difference): the rankly sweet emanations from his armpits. His hot breath. His warm hands.
In Marseille, as we lay in the hotel bed, my back to him, pretending I was asleep, he said into my hair, “When I’m inside you it’s like I’m home.”
I’d shivered in disgust. Sensing my shiver as if it were a tremble of love, he squeezed me and whispered, “Sadie.”
His utterance of that name, using it without knowing who I am, didn’t function as it should have, to remind me this was all an act, temporary.
“Sadie.”
He had said it a third time as he rolled me toward him, summoning more physical strength than I might have expected him to have.
Perhaps with similar strength, but a mental kind, I forced myself to submit.
For several weeks I had patiently allowed Lucien to unbuckle my sandals and take off my jeans and my underwear and breathe all over me and slow everything down to the tempo of some song or movie he thought he was living in. I let him roll me toward him and look for home. I’m not all that different from Narc Cutler, except that I’m strategic, and Narc Cutler wasn’t.
Lynn Watson, with her ROTC shoulders, her CIA strut, she probably didn’t fuck anybody. But to her detriment, I’d wager. No one had liked her, she’d raised eyebrows, she had never effectively embedded herself, and at their first opportunity they’d pounced and ruined her.
With my long-ago and very first undercover assignment, wearing a wire for my biker and his associates, I had not found it a significant challenge to fake things. I had not had issues of internal resistance like I felt with Lucien.
Physically, I had suffered on that assignment. It had rained the entire job. I was constantly soggy and cold. I’d ridden hundreds of miles on the back of a chopper, on a hard and tiny seat, my tailbone absorbing every bump. I’d burned the inside of my leg on a motorcycle exhaust pipe, a burn that left a large brown bubble, which turned into a scar I still have. In our various travels, my biker seldom agreed to stop and by the time he did I had to pee so badly I would walk toward the bushes or toward a gas station bathroom hunched over, as if normal steps in an upright posture might produce a great involuntary release from my bladder of what I had been forced to retain.
My biker had a pocked complexion and a goatee whose prickly feel I never got used to. He had a long white scar up his belly like someone had tried to gut him. He was a good deal less considerate than Lucien. But unlike Lucien, he didn’t badger me for intimacy and acceptance. Whoever he believed himself to be was coterminous with his performance of who he was. He didn’t need a woman to make him feel whole.
I would be gone, my work here completed, before Lucien was done with his film shoot in Marseille. His plan for an eventual “honeymoon” (his expression) in the Guyenne would vanish like his delusion that he’d known me.
But these thoughts, my own actual thoughts, of Lucien breathing all over me, might remain. I might be stuck with the memory of him rolling me toward him at the hotel in Marseille, overpowering me and pinning me down in a manner he was convinced was right and good for both of us.
Revisiting that, unable to block it, I wondered if I was getting paid sufficiently for this work.
Things can be renegotiated, based on the unexpected, the challenges that crop up. I have always been a good negotiator. What amount would be enough?
Know your worth. Know your salt. Know their salt.
Proceed accordingly. Few could do what I do.
Name a price, I told myself.
But thinking of Lucien’s hands all over me like I was a book of Braille and he was a blind man insisting on reading this book, running his hands up and down my arms and legs and over my stomach and breasts, not to read me, but to force me to pretend I wanted to be touched like that, I could not come up with a number.
THE ITALIAN DOCUMENTARY that Vito had recommended, with nine-year-old Franck sharing his sexual philosophy while chewing gum, propped on an elbow, had also included an interview with a prostitute from Rome who worked the Termini train station.
I know that station a little. I once had to meet a contact at Termini, and afterward I had passed on foot through the sleazy neighborhood adjacent, composed of bleak and homogeneous postwar apartment blocks, lines mounted out every window and hung with flapping laundry—the international flag for anonymous women’s work.
Termini station is edged with another kind of anonymous women’s work, but the train station prostitute in the movie is interviewed at home, in her own kitchen. She’s in her forties. She does not suggest she’s retired from her streetwork but she’s not aging well. She has dressed primly for the occasion of this interview, in a high-collared synthetic blouse and an acrylic vest, garments that are the color of Nutella, the goo Italians are raised on despite lacking a word like “goo.”
Or she has not dressed for the filmmaker, and this is the real her. A woman who, if you glimpsed her at six a.m., bustling around her tiny apartment, would already be in these clothes, stiff and dowdy, and sitting at her kitchen table like a foreigner in her own apartment, even with no camera on her. Her kitchen is tidy and airless, everything put away, wiped clean. Domestic order is her solution to the rangy feel of the train station and its squalid and prisonlike perimeter, its concrete watchtowers, chain-link and barbwire, discarded needles, cigarette butts, graffiti on every surface, graffiti even on the vestiges of crumbling Roman wall.
Her brown hair is dull and short and set in a permanent. Her brown eyes are small and beady and reflect no light. Her eyebrows are drawn on, but I would not expect a woman like this to have any natural eyebrow left, at this point in her life. Her brows have been lost long ago to over-tweezing, casualties in the war of her life.
She’s not pretty but she’s confident when the voice behind the camera, it’s the same guy who interviewed young and horny Franck, asks her, “How do you please a man?”
She tries to summarize but falters. Her hesitancy is the kind you’d find in any expert speaking to a layperson, trying to locate the simplest language to explain a complex skill.
He presses her for details.
“You have to caress a man gently,” she says.
“What is a gentle caress?”
She rolls up her blouse sleeve to demonstrate on her own bare arm.