Diane had been tied to her bed for eight hours, blindfolded and gagged, without food or drink. Cooler air was coming into the bedroom from the window, mottling her naked skin with shivers. Her knees, chafed by the floorboards, were starting to hurt from bearing her whole weight.
Shortly after her visitor had left, she had waited to see what he would do next to free her. After all, the stranger had behaved like a gentleman, giving her some rare sensations. In her fertile imagination, she had pictured several possibilities, two of which seemed exciting . . . In the first, the stranger called the firefighters, claiming there was a fire in the apartment. They kicked the door down and discovered her, naked and handcuffed—they might even be turned on by the sight. In the second, the crueler of the two, the stranger told the police that he had heard screams coming from the fourth floor. The police came, freed her, and, because she didn’t answer their questions, took her into custody, where she finally told them everything: a delicious prospect, a refined twist on the kind of sado-masochistic situations she enjoyed.
Eight hours later, she decided that she had idealized her stranger. He had simply run away, period, without planning any second act for this scenario.
And now, with her joints inflamed, she was trying, in spite of her hands still being tied to the bed, to find a less painful position. This really was sadism! But boring, pointless sadism: she was just hurting, that’s all, with no pleasure involved.
At seven in the evening, her husband Jean-Noël came back from work. After calling her from the hallway, he went from room to room and discovered her in the bedroom. He immediately tore off her mask and gag.
“Please hurry up and remove the handcuffs,” Diane cried. “I can’t wait any longer: I’m bursting to take a leak!”
Luckily, the visitor had put the keys in plain sight on the night table. Freed, Diane got stiffly to her feet, moaned a few times, and ran to the toilet.
By the time she came back into the living room, Jean-Noël had prepared two martinis. She slipped on her silk robe and sat down with a sigh. “What a day!”
Jean-Noël laughed and collapsed into an armchair. “I think you may have quite a story to tell me.”
They clinked glasses and, rubbing her sore wrists, Diane recounted her experience of that morning. Aware that her husband was captivated, she went into increasing detail, analyzing her many sensations, turning the episode into an epic.
Jean-Noël listened, mouth ajar, eyes gleaming with fascination.
“Anyway,” she concluded prosaically, “with all that, I didn’t have time to buy or cook anything, so you’re going to have to take me out to dinner.”
Jean-Noël did as he was told. Aroused by the adventure, he felt desire for Diane, but knew only too well how she would react to him: with disdain. “What, like this? In bed, Ma-and-Pa style? Oh, no, for pity’s sake, we’ve done that, it’s boring.”
Diane loved inventive sex. In truth, Jean-Noël wondered if she liked inventiveness more than actual sex, seeing how much pleasure she got out of coming up with novel situations and staging them. Going to bed with Jean-Noël in a legal, middle-class, repetitive way bored her, and she made no attempt to conceal it. He was sometimes surprised and had even complained. But Diane wouldn’t listen. “Oh, no, don’t start on that again, you’ll make me depressed. I didn’t marry you to have dreary sex but to try the impossible. What’s marriage for if it doesn’t allow you to try out hundreds of ways to come? For pity’s sake! As far as I’m concerned, conjugal life should be a stimulant, not a sleeping pill.”
She meant it. In her loose, hippieish youth, she had ended up with a baby whose father she despised, and had devoted herself to bringing it up while doing all kinds of insecure jobs and living through some extreme adventures. Once her daughter had settled in the United States—on the pretext of finishing her studies, although Diane proudly claimed that it was really to get away from her unstable mother—she had remembered that, although she was blessed with a superb body, time wasn’t on her side and that she would eventually become less irresistible, and so she had chosen Jean-Noël—a recently divorced, high-flying engineer—attracted by his comfortable financial position and glistening eyes.
He was forty at the time and had expected this to be just one more affair, but Diane had forced him to follow her into a world of sexual escapades: she had taken him to swingers’ clubs, invited him to unusual parties, had given herself to other men in front of him, and had involved him in various sado-masochistic scenarios.
To Jean-Noël, this voyage of exploration had been an eye-opener. Although he was wary of women, considering them cunning and self-interested, he put all his trust in Diane, who was so different. She had conquered him and her victory was all the more complete in that she hadn’t used any of the weapons of her peers, such as modesty, fidelity, tenderness, moderation, security. On the contrary, she was crude, dominating, outrageous, crazy, a lover of the unexpected, hungry for danger, and had set free the anti-conformist he had kept imprisoned in order to achieve success.
When she proposed marriage, he didn’t see it as a trap, but as another fantasy. He congratulated himself on marrying the least marriageable woman in world, freethinking, unfaithful, transgressive, a woman who would never obey him, who would be responsible only for her own pleasures, who would forbid him from making love in bed, on the kitchen table, or even on the piano, who would always lead him into unlikely situations that would set his heart beating with a mixture of passion and fear.
That evening, they went to La Truffe Blanche, one of the best restaurants in Brussels. The maître d’ did a double take when he saw them but then, as the professional he was, he bowed and took their coats. In a flash, he ordered the waiters to prepare the table at the far end, the one kept apart from the others in a kind of shell. He was determined to isolate this couple because the previous time he had received complaints from patrons about the outrageous obscenities they had heard the woman say. In two hours, she had managed to empty the restaurant. Since the husband, noticing what had happened, had left a very generous tip, the maître d’ wouldn’t think of turning them away this time but thought it wise to take precautions.
But Diane didn’t even mention sex over dinner. Instead she launched into a subject that fascinated her: the early Church fathers. As a matter of fact, she had decided to write a thesis about Origen. How had she discovered Origen? Why had she become interested in him? Jean-Noël wondered if it was the name, Origen, that had attracted her . . . There was origin and gene in the name Origen, which, poetically, made him into a fundamental character, the man from whom everything springs . . .
So Diane talked to him about this third-century theologian from Alexandria who castrated himself in order to devote himself to God, which Diane considered a mistake but also proof of true character.
“Mark said, ‘If thy hand offend thee, cut it off.’ What Origen does is castrate himself in order to escape temptation. Also, as a young man, he saw his father beheaded right in front of him. He’s not weak, or melancholy, or dull, no, he’s a violent man in a violent world. I’m interested in what he thinks. It doesn’t actually matter if he’s right or wrong.”
Here too, Jean-Noël found Diane fascinating. Who today, apart from a fossilized academic searching through dusty libraries for a career niche, would become so passionate about Origen, Ammonius Saccas, or Gregory Thaumaturgus? This woman—his wife—had a gift for avoiding the ordinary.
When they got back home, she grabbed her volume of Nietzsche, propped herself up with pillows, and resumed her reading, putting the yellow letter next to her.
Jean-Noël took it and read: Just a note to tell you I love you. Signed: You know who.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know.” She continued reading but, twenty seconds later, added, “And I don’t care.”
Jean-Noël agreed, but slipped the message into his own book: he had just had an excellent idea.
Two days later, Diane discovered another yellow letter in her mail, and this time she was more interested. Meet me tonight, Thursday, at 11 PM, La Vistule, next to the high-voltage building, at the foot of the antenna. Be naked under your mink. Signed: You don’t know who.
She smiled and bit her lip. “Well, well, this is getting better and better.” Remembering that Jean-Noël was having dinner with colleagues that night, she was glad she could go to this intriguing rendezvous.
At ten-thirty, she set off in her little Italian car. Until the last minute, she had thought to disobey and put on black underwear or maybe just garters, but then she had decided that the writer of the letter must have his reasons to demand nudity, and that it was pointless to sacrifice lace that cost a fortune.
Guided by her GPS, she left Brussels, drove through a forest, then some sinister hamlets—just a few squat houses along the side of the road—and ventured up a steep path that led to a wire gate. A sign eaten away by rust, hanging lopsidedly by just one nail, said LA VISTULE.
Diane got out, felt the cold around her, pushed open the gate, which screeched, then got back in her Fiat and drove into this muddy terrain with its potholed paths. This must have once been an industrial area but all that was left now was crumbling vandalized buildings, probably inhabited by squatters. The authorities had cut off the electricity supply and the place was shrouded in irredeemable darkness. Diane drove in the direction of a shape that stood out against the flat sky, assuming it must be the antenna. As a matter of fact, as she drew nearer, her yellow headlights revealed beneath the metal structure a kind of concrete bunker covered in Danger of Death signs.
She switched off the ignition. She was trembling.
How could she be sure that it wouldn’t be just the anonymous letter writer who appeared, but also others who weren’t part of the scenario, people who lived outside the law amid the ruins?
She looked around at the grim landscape, the gutted tippers, the piles of rubble, the rolls of barbed wire. She immediately pictured the headlines: Woman Raped at La Vistule. Pictures flashed through her mind, images of herself lying dead in the mud, blood all over her face. She could guess the comments: What was she doing in that danger zone? Who forced her to go there? A murder that looks like suicide.
Should she get out of the car? No, better to turn and go back.
At that moment, headlights blinked in the darkness.
“It’s him.”
She did not know who “he” was, but his presence calmed her.
She did have an appointment, after all.
A man’s voice, distorted by a loudspeaker, came from the distance. “Get out of the car!”
Swallowing, she made up her mind to leave her shelter.
The headlights blinded her. All the same, she walked bravely toward them.
“Open your coat.”
She opened her fur coat wide, revealing her nakedness.
“Good. Now take the path on the right and keep moving straight ahead.”
She saw a clay path that led into darkness and slowly started along it, her high heels unsuited to this irregular terrain, especially when she couldn’t even see it.
Suddenly, she was able to see the obstacles more clearly, because a harsh light cast her shadow in front of her: the stranger’s car, a station wagon, was following her.
“Don’t turn!”
Anticipating her reaction, the voice commanded her to keep walking. The throbbing hood of the vehicle was coming closer and closer.
What if he suddenly speeds up? she wondered, nervously.
In response, the engine roared, and that reassured her. The fact that the driver had tried to scare her meant that it was a game he too was playing scrupulously, that she could be afraid in the same way as when you watch a horror movie and suspend disbelief.
She walked another fifty yards, until the voice ordered her to stop.
“Put your coat on the hood.”
As she did so, she shivered, because the April night was getting colder. The lights went out. Three men in ski masks appeared and they threw themselves upon her. She fought back a little, they overpowered her, and she stopped struggling and abandoned herself to them on the car body.
Twenty minutes later, as she was coming to her senses, a hand helped her back on her feet and put the mink coat over her shoulders.
The station wagon began to reverse, taking away two of the masked men.
The one who’d been left behind waited for the car to disappear, and for their eyes to get used to the dark, then removed his mask. “Will you give me a lift back?” Jean-Noël asked.
“You’ve earned it.”
When they got into her tiny Italian car, he sighed, contented. “I enjoyed that.”
“Me too,” Diane chuckled. She meant it. “Especially when I was walking in the dark and could have been run over.”
“I thought you’d like that kind of detail.”
She gave him a grateful pat on the cheek, then started the car.
“Do you want to know who the two—”
“Oh, no!” Diane replied, offended. “You’re going to spoil my memories!”
They drove back quietly, listening to a Bruckner symphony in the background, Diane having decided that Bruckner was an orgiastic composer.
When they got to Place d’Arezzo, Jean-Noël came straight to the point. “Shall we go to Mille Chandelles on Saturday night?”
“An orgy? Won’t that be boring?”
Jean-Noël congratulated himself on living with the only woman capable of uttering such words as “An orgy? Won’t that be boring?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve spoken to the owner, Denis. He’s invited a French chef with three Michelin stars.”
“So?”
“So he has a proposition for you.”
On Saturday night, at Mille Chandelles, Diane enjoyed herself as she never had before.
They prepared her in the kitchen for three hours. The prestigious chef, accompanied by four apprentices, had wonderful fingers. She might have lost patience, but, instead, she put up no resistance and joked with them as they worked.
When midnight was about to strike, the four cooks lifted the huge serving dish the size of a stretcher, music from the court of Louis XIV started playing, the doors were opened, and they walked in, majestically, carrying on their shoulders a truly choice morsel: Diane, naked and stuffed with two hundred exquisite appetizers.
For Diane, being served as a royal dish by a three-star chef represented the apotheosis of her licentious life. Was it because of that pride, the pomp of the music, the applause of the guests, or the intoxication produced by the fragrances and flavors with which she was garnished? Whatever it was, she felt tears well up in her eyes.
She was placed on the table and offered to the guests.
If her eyes had not been filled with tears of emotion, she would have recognized the man busy picking shrimps from her toes as the famous Zachary Bidermann, who had come stag.