HAVING A STABLE relationship was doing wonders for Benoît. (His partner being the tea urn, of course. I was assuming that it reciprocated his feelings.) He went from strength to strength, and started doing a full thirty-five-hour week, acting as a kind of gentle-giant team captain.
Once you got to know him, everything about the way he moved suggested quiet confidence, rather than laziness, as I’d first interpreted it. When he poured a cup of tea, you got the impression that he’d really thought through the importance of this particular cup of tea, and his relaxed smile as he handed it to you told you that you’d made the right decision in ordering it.
He had come to understand the correlation between a happy customer and the ringing of the till. And pretty soon he was even able to get on with serving one customer while all around him were flocking towards someone else in the queue who’d raised an armadillo/ tomato problem.
So when Jean-Marie called me up for a progress report, I was perfectly happy to tell him the truth. I let him know that I’d had to fire one of my other staff – Fabrice the ‘Polish’ student. In fact, he was a terrible timekeeper, but I thought it best to put the moral onus for his dismissal on Jean-Marie. If he was capable of recognizing such things as moral onuses, it’d be a point in my favour.
And I told Jean-Marie that Benoît had surprised me by slotting in really well. He’d put up with his boring kitchen duties, cured his bad habits, and now seemed to be in his element. What’s more, he was the one who finally worked out how to put my website on line via my email provider, so I owed him a debt of eternal gratitude.
Jean-Marie was delighted to hear all this, though there was still an impatient edge to his voice as he said so. Something else was bothering him.
‘Nathalie, the TV reporter, have you seen her?’ he asked.
‘Yes, I have.’ All of her, I wanted to add. We’d met up once more since our après-midi at the hotel. One Sunday afternoon she’d come round to my place in I Fuck There Street, pretended to be English to my delighted flatmates, and then come into my bedroom to shout things in her very own language.
She’d spent the best part of an hour chewing on a pillow but this still didn’t muffle the sound enough for my roommates, who reminded me later that that kind of thing didn’t go on in Free Ends. Shame, I said, that they didn’t offer a bit part to Nathalie. She’d have upped the ratings without even being in the same room as the main action.
‘Is she going to do a report about My Tea Is Rich?’ Jean-Marie sliced into my daydream.
‘I don’t know.’ This was true. We hadn’t spoken about it since the museum. Maybe all she wanted was my body. Not that I begrudged her its occasional use. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘Well . . .’ I guessed Jean-Marie was deciding which version of the truth, and how much of it, to tell me. ‘We were going to film for my portrait but she, how do you say, pulled me off?’
‘Called it off?’
‘Yes. She pulled it off. She said that she was working to do something different.’
‘Well I haven’t heard from her recently. Do you want me to ask her what she’s working on?’
The idea of calling Nathalie and maybe meeting up for another screaming session was quite a pleasant one. There didn’t seem to be any other women in Paris – or the other European capitals for that matter – as keen as her to sleep with me.
‘Yes, why not? Good idea.’ Meaning that it was what he’d planned all along. ‘You know,’ Jean-Marie added, his voice more spritely now, ‘if Benoît enjoys himself, maybe I will buy My Tea Is Rich for him.’
I assumed this was a joke.
I duly left a message for Nathalie, and she dropped by at the tea room early the next morning.
Unlike Virginie, she was very good at what the French call ‘mondanités’, that is, making normal conversation in public with someone you’ve shagged as if you’d never shagged them. An essential social skill in chic circles, apparently.
We talked at the till while Benoît and Katy’s ears twitched with the effort of pretending they weren’t eavesdropping. I don’t think it would have occurred to them that I had had erotic encounters with Nathalie, though, because she spent most of her time talking about Alexa.
She showed me an entry in the small weekly Paris events guide, Pariscope.
‘This is your Alexa, isn’t it?’
I read the four-line announcement in the exhibitions section. It described an ‘exposition photo’, at a place called the Espace Photo Beaubourg, with a long, suitably arty sentence that I didn’t quite understand. Something about a voyage through men seen by a woman’s hidden eye.
A woman’s hidden eye? Sounded very dubious to me. It could have been the name of one of the gross sculptures at the erotic museum. Especially when combined with the title of Alexa’s exhibition, which I understood all too well: Des hommes, rien que des hommes. Men, nothing but men.
So Alexa had created a new version of that tent installation where Tracy Emin embroidered the names of all the blokes she’d ever slept with. Except here I’d be able to admire their photos, too. Brilliant. How lucky I was that Alexa had said she didn’t want me to see it.
‘Is it her?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Do you want to see the exhibition?’
‘Not particularly.’
‘Oh, don’t you think it will be good? You said there will be a photo of you. I thought maybe it could connect with the story of your tea room, give me another location. But if you think it will not be very good . . .’
A cruel trick for fate to play on me. A TV reporter was interested in my opinion of the one exhibition in the whole of Paris I didn’t want to go to. And if there was the slightest chance that Nadialie might be interested enough to give Alexa TV exposure, then of course I had to make damn sure that Nathalie went along.
‘No, I’m sure it’ll be very good,’ I said. ‘I just think I’ll be sick with jealousy’
‘Oh . . .’ Nathalie very nearly gave my hand a consoling stroke. But she stopped herself at the last moment and turned slightly away from our eavesdroppers. ‘Well, we can go together tomorrow, then you will at least be there with a lover. Even if her photo is there with twenty of her lovers.’
She seemed to find this irony highly amusing, unlike me.
If only Alexa knew how much suffering I was going through just for her.