Come on, kids, hurry up!”
Sitting behind the wheel of his SUV, François-Maxime de Couvigny leaned out of the window and turned his head to Number 6, where the front door was still open; others would have sounded their horn, but the young banker considered it somewhat vulgar to use his horn except in extreme situations.
Four blond children came out of the town house, hurtled down the front steps, and dived into the car. The three girls sat in the back, while the boy, although the youngest, heaved himself up next to his father with the pride of someone who, in spite of being seven, having long hair, a slight profile, and a very high-pitched voice, shared the status of being a male.
Séverine appeared in the white stone doorway, dressed all in beige, her hair held in place by a celadon band; with the sun on her face, she leaned against the door frame to watch her family leave.
“What about Mommy?” François-Maxime exclaimed.
The children immediately turned toward their mother and started making big, highly exaggerated gestures at her, as if shouting in sign language.
As he was about to pull out, François-Maxime de Couvigny noticed the gardener, bare-chested and in shorts, cleaning the lawn on Place d’Arezzo. The apparition made him frown and his eyes clouded over.
A high-pitched voice on his right interrupted him. “You’re right to tell him off, Daddy.”
“What?”
“It’s not nice, Hippolyte is wrong.”
François-Maxime looked at his son. “Who are you talking about, Guillaume?”
“Hippolyte the gardener over there! He shouldn’t go around like that in a city. You should always wear clothes on the street. That’s what Grandma said in Saint-Tropez this summer.”
His eldest sister, Gwendoline, added her contribution from the backseat. “I seem to remember she said it when you wanted to go to the market in your swimming trunks.”
Displeased, Guillaume turned on his sister. “She only had to tell me once, but some people behaved badly all summer.”
“Well done, Guillaume,” François-Maxime de Couvigny said. “It’s good to understand the first time around.”
Once again, he glanced at Hippolyte, who was displaying his chest and thighs in an unseemly manner, then shrugged, started the car, slowly passed the double-parked official limousine with black, reinforced windows into which Zachary Bidermann, one of the glories of the neighborhood, was disappearing, and drove up Avenue Molière.
“So, girls, what classes do you have today?”
In order of age, the girls replied by itemizing the subjects awaiting them.
François-Maxime de Couvigny barely listened to them, just enough to spur them on and relaunch their private discussions. With delight, he felt as much a spectator as an actor in the scene he was experiencing. In the rearview mirror, he watched his daughters, fair-skinned, with perfect teeth, dressed in a manner that suggested the family’s affluence without proclaiming it too boldly; they spoke a fluid, elaborate language, made up of appropriate, carefully-chosen words, with impeccable syntax; even their pronunciation was careful, precise, proof of good upbringing. Above all, their physical resemblance was striking: although aged twelve, fourteen, and sixteen, they had the same shape face, the same brown hair, fine nose, long neck, and narrow body. They seemed to have come from the same mold, a demonstration of their solid lineage. In François-Maxime de Couvigny’s opinion, nothing was more disturbing than dissimilar siblings. When that occurred, he either suspected weak genes or feared the mother had conceived these disparate individuals with several husbands. When you saw the Couvigny children, you knew their parents hadn’t failed in their conjugal duties: they were an advertisement for marital fidelity. Only Guillaume had features different than those of his sisters, but that was all to the good, since he was a boy.
As he stopped at the red traffic light, an identical black SUV—the vehicle of the Ixelles upper middle classes—drew level with his, on his left.
“Oh, look, it’s the Morin-Duponts!” Gwendoline exclaimed.
The Couvigny children called out to the Morin-Dupont children, another tribe with identical features, this one made up, in an exactly reverse symmetry, of three boys and a girl.
François-Maxime de Couvigny greeted the driver of the car, Pascaline Morin-Dupont. She responded with a gracious expression.
A quiver went down the back of François-Maxime’s neck. She liked him and he knew it. His eyes glistened as he watched her, because he was eager to show her that he liked her too.
The result was that their pupils grew misty and they stared at each other a little too long, a little too intensely.
“It’s green, Dad!” Guillaume cried as if this were a major occurrence.
François-Maxime’s lips formed a disappointed smile for the benefit of Pascaline, a pout that meant: “What a shame it’s not possible between us.”
She agreed in her own way, by lowering her shoulders.
They drove off again.
Without saying a word, without the children noticing their complicity, François-Maxime de Couvigny and Pascaline Morin-Dupont had lived through a few delectable seconds, seconds in which a man and a woman admit they like each other but at the same time give up on the idea of an affair. They had just told each other that they were beautiful but would remain faithful.
The two cars took different directions. The Morin-Dupont children studied at the French lycée in Brussels, while the Couvignys attended École Decroly.
François-Maxime thought of his wife: how cute she’d looked earlier, leaning against the door frame, blinded by the sun. Cute and sad . . . Over the past few months, he had caught Séverine on several occasions when she was unaware of being watched, and noticed a morbid sadness, a kind of withdrawal into some unknown sorrow. Was it age? The fact that she was pushing forty? Maybe he should fork out for a gift . . . What if he bought her the marron glacé leather handbag over which she had gone into raptures on Saturday? He had wanted to buy it for her on the spot, but she had resisted, considering it ridiculous that her husband should grant her slightest whim. He had given in on that point, especially since the item cost as much as a piece of jewelry. Money was no object for either of them—she had inherited her wealth, while he had made his through his work—but they did judge prices in moral terms: was the cost exorbitant or not?
At the next red light, while Gwendoline was telling her younger sisters what she was learning in her drama class, a couple of young men in their thirties crossed the street, holding hands.
How ugly they look! How dare they go out on the street when they’re so unpleasant-looking?
He looked at their muddy complexions, their flaccid figures, wide hips, short legs, bloated beer bellies beneath black T-shirts, the green and blue patterns on their arms, their earrings.
Look at those tattoos! And those rings in their ears and nostrils! Like cattle! Branded as if they belonged to a herd of cows! How wretched . . .
Obviously he himself, with his wiry body set off by his severe made-to-measure suits, that purebred body with its precise, economical movements, evoked another world, the world of high finance, of ice-cold predators who, even when they kill, remain refined and courteous.
And I don’t understand the need to parade like that. Do we really have to know that those two sleep together? Why force other people to picture two sperm whales screwing? Have some pity!
He raised an eyebrow and gave a disapproving huff.
When he saw Guillaume looking at him questioningly, he realized that he had once again forgotten to accelerate as soon as the lights turned green—which, in the boy’s eyes, constituted the yardstick of good manners—and reacted.
The car continued on its way at a senatorial speed until it reached the school.
François-Maxime got out of the car, kissed his children, wished them a good day, watched until they reached the main door, and waited, proud of his family, for them to disappear into the building. Then he got back in the car and drove faster to the Bois de Cambre.
He parked on Rue du Vert-Chasseur, at the edge of the forest, got out his sports bag, and strode enthusiastically across the cobbled courtyard of the Selle Royale riding center. He loved the impatient cacophony of neighing, swishing, snorting, the sound of horseshoes tapping on the ground; even though he generally liked only subtle scents, he couldn’t get enough of the dark smell of dung, with its promise of the pleasures to come.
He greeted the overworked staff and went into a room that served as a changing room, cloakroom, and storeroom. There, he got undressed, changed his socks, and put on his jockey pants, a polo shirt, and a pair of bespoke boots.
While François-Maxime was looking for a coat hanger for his suit, Edmond Platters, another rider, came into the room.
“Hello, François-Maxime.”
“Hello, Edmond.”
“You’re so funny with your bachelor ways.”
François-Maxime’s shoulders quivered. Not only did he hate camaraderie, he detested any joke of which he was the butt.
Edmond continued his mockery. “Why this habit of changing your clothes? Can’t you come here in riding gear like everybody else?”
“First of all, after I finish riding, I don’t go back home but to my bank, where I work until eight in the evening.”
He took care to clearly say “my” bank, because he knew that Edmond was often in financial difficulty. Then he turned and added, calmly, “Tell me, Edmond, when you go to the swimming pool, do you leave home in swimming trunks?”
Having been put in his place, Edmond grunted something and walked out.
François-Maxime finished carefully putting away his suit, shoes, and socks, annoyed at the fact that no sooner did men meet in a dressing room than they took the liberty of becoming familiar.
He was about to leave the room when he noticed that he had dropped the envelope he had picked up from his letterbox half an hour earlier. He slipped it in his pocket, promising himself that he would open it on his ride.
He walked to the looseboxes, paid his respects to the owner of the stables, then went to Bella, his bay mare. The stable boy had already groomed and saddled her, and was in the process of sliding in the bit. He patted the mare’s nose. She had a slender head and broad shoulders. She closed her eyes as he caressed her.
Finally, he mounted her; the animal’s high-set tail whipped the air, and they left the riding center.
At this time of day, there were few people tramping up and down the forest paths. An old lady was pulling a paralyzed poodle at the end of a leash. Farther on, a cheerful young Arab was walking some unleashed dogs, mutts he would collect from their owners in the morning and take out as a pack.
After riding past the tennis courts and bypassing the old racetrack, he took a path on which horses were allowed, then, leaving the Bois de Cambre, that part of the forest enclosed within the city, he plunged into the vast Forêt de Soignes itself and set off at a sitting gallop.
His thighs quivered against the mass of muscles. Giving his commands without shouting, in an even, almost low voice, he managed to forget himself in the saddle and merge with Bella.
At the crossroads, after glancing around to make sure nobody saw him, he left the riding track and followed a path strictly reserved for pedestrians.
After three sharp turns, he made his way into the trees and glimpsed the figures of solitary men walking around with their hands behind their backs.
He carried on straight ahead, then, some hundred yards from the first walkers, dismounted and tied his horse to a tree. He took five or six steps into the forest and leaned nonchalantly against the trunk of a squat oak.
A minute later, a young man of twenty in a white T-shirt appeared. His fists stuffed into the pocket of his jeans, he admired the horse, noticed its master, and approached, shifting his balance from one leg to the other, hesitating to cross the last few yards.
François-Maxime gave him a brooding look.
The young man hesitated shyly, unsure whether or not to continue. Then François-Maxime slid his fingers under his polo shirt, sensually caressed his chest, and lifted his face ecstatically to the sunbeam piercing the foliage, as if the young man wasn’t there.
The young man froze, stared at François-Maxime with lust, wet his lips several times, checked that nobody was coming in their direction, and took the last few steps toward him.
Their pelvises came together. Then the young man grabbed François-Maxime’s fly and opened it.
Without a word, content with sighs that expressed their level of satisfaction, each tended to the other’s organ.
François-Maxime kept his eyes on the path. Whether he was the one who desired or the one who was desired, he loved the fear that came with the tension: not only was he indulging in forbidden love, he was doing so in the open air, which added the pleasure of transgression. Such a contrast with the cozy bedroom where he would go to Séverine for more predictable embraces! Here, there was the fresh air of nature, the smell of humus and heather and spring and game, and the possibility that an intruder might appear. There was also the risk of a forest warden suddenly bursting in on him. Or even a police officer. There was no knowing.
François-Maxime indicated with a groan and more rapid breathing that he was about to come. The young man understood and reached his climax at the same time.
Their excitement subsided.
A blackbird flew across the undergrowth.
Sensing her master’s return, Bella gave a long neigh, impatient to stretch her legs. François-Maxime was jubilant: he was going to have a good day. The young man got up, rearranged his clothes, and smiled. François-Maxime responded with a benevolent look. Then the young man murmured, “My name’s Nikkos.”
François-Maxime closed his eyes for a second; he loathed that stupid compulsion men had to introduce themselves. What was pleasant in these fleeting exchanges was the furtiveness, the fact that bodies could exult far from the social comedy.
The young man was staring at him with large, beseeching eyes, waiting for a reply.
“I’m Maxence,” François-Maxime murmured.
The young man received the name as if it were a precious gift. Nikkos grabbed François-Maxime’s hand and whispered, shyly, “Goodbye, Maxence.”
“Ciao!”
François-Maxime went to Bella, stroked her muzzle, untied her, got in the saddle, and rode away; he hated postcoital tenderness; that kind of cloying sentiment could retrospectively spoil the pleasure he had experienced. As far as feelings went, he had an ample supply of them at home, with Séverine and the children. So it was best not to get his wires crossed.
Once he and his horse were back on the paths where riders were allowed, he relaxed, forgot about what he’d just done, and, pressing his long legs to the animal’s sides, thought about his work. He worked out a few plans and strategies for the current transactions, delighted with his mental clarity. He was sure he was going to have a splendid day.
The stiff corner of the envelope dug into his pelvis, and he realized he hadn’t opened the letter he had received that morning. He unsealed it and read it.
Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
He gave a gentle laugh. “Ah, Séverine . . . ” Smiling at the horizon, he declared out loud to the trees lining the paths, “I love you too, my darling!”
Delighted, he put the note in his pocket and decided that he would devote twenty minutes of his work time to going and buying the overpriced handbag she had seen on Avenue Louise. She deserved it, after all.