Guillaume Cordier moved his hand in the dark slowly toward Sandrine, who was curled up in the bed facing the other way. He stroked her back and felt her warm skin beneath the silky fabric of her nightgown. After all these years living together, his wife still had the same effect on him. She was a regular marmot and he loved waking her up just as she had dropped off, blowing gently in her neck and then pulling up her nightie. He would tickle her belly button, her smooth waist, her plump buttocks, lick the silky down on her slender thighs, turn her toward him, nibble her nipples, and then . . .
“Guillaume . . . ” she murmured in her adorable sleepy little voice, slipping one expert hand into his shorts.
He didn’t answer, let himself be overcome by the surge of desire. Her hand was soft and warm, and was moving with unbearable languor.
“Guillaume . . . ”
“Mmmm . . . ”
“You hear me?”
Her hand tightened its embrace and slowly increased its movement.
“Mmmm . . . yes . . . ”
“You didn’t give me your restaurant coupons this month, don’t forget, tomorrow, right?”
Guillaume felt as if he’d been dipped without warning into an icy bath. But Sandrine had turned to face him and her other hand came in support, moving up his inner thigh to grasp him, gently but firmly, from underneath.
“Promise?”
“Well, I think I used most of them, honey,” he whispered, as quietly as possible, while kissing her on the neck. “I only have what I need to finish the week.”
Both hands came to an immediate halt: Sandrine was wide awake now. In the dark her cat eyes shone with a disturbing brilliance.
“Really? You used them all?”
“We’ll talk about all that tomorrow morning, sweetheart,” he said in an affectionate voice, reaching up to take his wife’s breasts in his hands, seeking out her mouth for a voracious kiss.
Her breasts were both heavy and still amazingly high, as arrogant as a sixteen-year-old kid’s. Nor had her two pregnancies changed her figure: on the contrary, it had blossomed with age—slender shoulders and waist, generous hips, flat belly, and these breasts, these breasts . . . A wave of love and desire overwhelmed him, which had the effect of hardening still further the part of his anatomy that Sandrine held in her hands. The back-and-forth motion had started up again very slowly, and this soft torture required all his attention.
“So, no more restaurant coupons for your favorite foodie?” she murmured, half-teasing, half-sulking, biting his earlobe.
Their embrace had relaxed, ever so slightly, and Guillaume now felt her nimble fingers tickling him like a butterfly’s wings. At the beginning of their relationship, he used to explode in two minutes for less than that, and now he needed all his concentration.
“Next month, darling, promise,” he managed to utter, between two gasps for breath amidst her caresses.
Dammit, if she didn’t stop soon . . . Then suddenly the butterfly’s wings vanished, as if by magic. Guillaume waited for a second with his eyes closed, his heart rate veering into the danger zone, then he groaned with disappointment and opened his eyes. In the beam of moonlight filtering through the shutters he saw Sandrine staring at him, lying on her side, her nightgown still pulled up—her adorable mons veneris covered in a dark down, there, so close, and the lace straps were so low on her shoulders that he could see the large areolas of her white breasts. He held out his hands but she was faster, tugging the duvet up to her neck with a rapid gesture, before she turned back onto her other side.
“Sweetie . . . ” he whined, slipping one hand onto her hip.
All he got for his pains was a sharp tap on his fingertips.
“Next month, Guillaume. Good night.”
He tried a second approach and again felt a sharp little tap, more affirmative than the first one. He beat a retreat, buttoning up his shorts as he did so: you can never be too careful.
* * *
Sandrine had one great passion: food. Cakes, candies, but also Corsican or Italian charcuterie, Lebanese mezze, dim sum, sushi . . . Her eyes glowed with sensuous intoxication whenever she tasted a dish she liked or discovered a new one. She wandered up and down market aisles for hours, her nose on the alert like a wild truffle sow, ready to taste anything and everything they might offer her: old-fashioned vegetables with an earthy flavor, mountain charcuterie, matured cheese, crusts of bread. Early in the morning or at teatime, she could taste four or five olive oils by the spoonful—concentrating, her cat’s eyes narrowed—before deciding which one to buy. To choose her pepper she would breathe it in, deeply, before delicately depositing a crushed grain on the tip of her tongue, like the finest of sweetmeats. It was enough for her to leaf through a cookbook to go into a trance—and there was no lack of them on her bookshelves.
She was also a peerless chef, with a delicate, creative touch; her dinners delighted friends and family. Moreover, she could apply great inventiveness to recycling leftovers, with infinite variations. Already as a teenager she used to spend her Wednesdays baking cakes, seeking inspiration in recipes that she adapted to her taste: honey instead of sugar; a pinch of spice; chestnut flour or cornstarch for lightness. But her parents had trotted out the same old thing all through her school years: they were a family of civil servants, that was all there was to it. They would not pay for anything else. Cook? Run a restaurant? When her grandmothers had nearly killed themselves, precisely so that the next generation could avoid such a calamity? What other nonsense did she have in mind! It was an exhausting profession, often precarious, with impossible schedules unsuited to family life: that was their constant refrain, and her mother reminded her that she had done her homework and eaten her meals all alone for many long years, while her mother was serving a refined dinner only a few miles away. And besides, they’d never have the means to get Sandrine started in a business. No arguments to the contrary had managed to dissuade them, and it was with a heavy heart that she had enrolled in the law faculty. If only she had known how to stand up to them. She could have worked to pay for her studies; but she hadn’t dared try.
* * *
Her appetite, too, was a joy to behold. That was what Guillaume had found so charming about her the first time he’d invited her out to dinner—to see this slip of a girl wolfing down a cassoulet with such adorable gluttony. With hindsight he understood that his choice of venue, an auberge that specialized in food from the Southwest of France, might have been a catastrophe with any other female student. For sure another girl would have picked at or even refused such a tonic dish, with its white beans that made you fart and chunks of slow-cooked meat swimming in a rich sauce of fat and tomato—but Sandrine was over the moon. She licked her fingers without ever abandoning her regal air, and mopped her plate with thick chunks of rustic bread. That night they’d made love for the first time, in Guillaume’s little studio, and Sandrine was as light and fresh as before the meal, and full of initiative. Guillaume on the other hand had been bitterly testing the unrivalled reputation of the white beans, and was obliged to make several nocturnal visits to the tiny bathroom for a jolly little improv trumpet concerto.
And what could you do—a girl who could eat cassoulet with that much pleasure, and not take to her heels after such a night of love: well, you were duty bound to marry her, naturally. Particularly when she had magnificent breasts, the body of a doll, and the most sensual mouth you’d ever seen. Moreover, he quickly realized that she made love the way she ate a meal: starter, main course, dessert, and sometimes even a cheese course. Her greedy curiosity brought little stars to her eyes; she loved tasting everything with her lips and her insatiable tongue, before dropping off, purring like a sated kitty.
Over the years she had gotten into the habit of taking a few restaurant coupons from Guillaume: how could he refuse her when she came and rubbed up against him, offering him her red lips as if they were cherries? She had started when she was pregnant with Aurélien, at the beginning of her maternity leave. She was feeling fit as a fiddle and during her long strolls around the Abbesses quartier she would buy mangoes and figs, Lebanese pastries or strange little Korean desserts that she nibbled at with green mint tea. None of which were generally recommended during pregnancy, but Sandrine had not put on much weight and her blood tests were perfectly normal, so why should she deprive herself of the little things she enjoyed? When Aurélien was born, Guillaume’s restaurant coupons, amid the familiar upheaval that accompanies the arrival of a first child, had served, evenings and weekends, to feed the parents, exhausted by their sleepless nights: sushi, pizza, ready meals from the deli. And then by the time Sandrine went back to work the habit had taken hold. Two coupons here for a big plate of cheese, three there for some pastries or a good meal out with one of her girlfriends. Over the years Guillaume had learned to make do with lighter lunches, fixing himself a sandwich at home, or even skipping the meal altogether. Until one day he realized he only had three coupons left to get through the rest of the month, and it was only the eighth.
But by then there was no going back. Restaurant coupons had become a way of life, or worse, an acquired, irreversible right, like a salt tax he paid, a conjugal racket from which he occasionally managed to salvage a few scraps, but scarcely more. To regain some wiggle room, he’d had to amputate his reading and smoking budget. The advantage—if there really had to be one—was that he’d learned to resort to his deepest hunting and gathering instinct to feed himself at midday. This was why he’d ended up loitering by night outside newspaper kiosks and newsagents’ with a cutter in his hand to pilfer a few newspapers and magazines that he’d resell at a later date. Nothing spectacular in the beginning! He’d acted on instinct when he came upon a pile of the L’Équipe sports paper very early one morning when he was out for a jog, the day after the rugby championship final. He’d only taken one paper, for his own personal use. There’d been no plan just then, no premeditation, just the almost unconscious gesture of a man going past a pile of newspapers tossed outside a closed kiosk, who could not resist grabbing the one that was sticking out just that little bit, see, just there, with the ever so tempting headline about the victory of the Perpignan club.
The problem with little sins of pleasure that morality condemns is the strong urge to reoffend when everything goes well a first time. Reading that issue of L’Équipe that Sunday proved to be particularly delightful. Like a schoolboy’s petty theft, without consequence; perfectly modest forbidden fruit, after all; but for a man who was under the iron rule of a woman like Sandrine Cordier, it was already a significant, powerful act of emancipation. He reoffended the following week and also grabbed a copy of Elle à table for his nearest and dearest. Thus, one thing leading to another, he had become a modest but very active link in the media distribution chain in France, a little point of sale that did not figure on the Presstalis lists and was located in the basement of the headquarters of a manufacturer of orthopedic equipment in a northern suburb of Paris. Naturally the adjustment had been tricky: determining local demand, then non-local (spouses, families, certain acquaintances working in the same industrial zone), pinpointing stable suppliers while maintaining a wide diversity of supply, optimizing stock rotation, establishing a sound commercial policy: he’d had to learn it all from scratch.
He had quickly worked out what went on backstage in this world that was so new to him: the subtleties between the editorial policy of competing titles, the chestnuts that sold and the ones you had to avoid, the luridly appealing covers and the nefarious editorialists, the launches of new titles and new formulas. But also the likeable side aspects, such as the printers’ and distributors’ union, which several times a year would block the publication or distribution of a given title. He also took orders, now, thus reducing the risk he ran with oversupply, and consolidating customer loyalty. By chance, or coincidence, business at the two kiosks nearest to where he worked had fallen off so severely that they had no other choice than to close. In short, Guillaume Cordier was quite proud of what he considered to be his true professional success story, beneath the façade of being an assistant in the maintenance department of a medium-sized company—deep down, he considered it to be his primary career. In the space of a few years he had managed to generate the additional revenue of a thousand euros per month, with higher peaks during periods of enhanced news coverage: elections, royal weddings, Olympic Games, World Cups. And naturally this income was free of social and fiscal off-takes, but not of other charges, he affirmed: two or three times a week he drove all around Paris and the nearby outskirts, and fuel wasn’t cheap. Not to mention the amortization of his vehicle and the hours of sleep he lost: all arguments he put forward when tactless clients tried to haggle with him.
But almost overnight finding publications had become tricky. Some sites were now guarded by night watchmen who had unfriendly pit bulls by their side: one morning, Guillaume found himself staring into the muzzle of a ferocious member of the species outside a Maison de la Presse in Levallois, one of his most important suppliers. He went away empty-handed, unable to go anywhere near a single pile of papers. Giving up this supply point represented a loss of income of two hundred euros a month, at least. He had noticed other security guards in Boulogne and in Neuilly, near the Relay store. Not to mention that the number of sales outlets seemed to be melting away: every day another Parisian kiosk vanished from the street.
He had adapted his rounds, concentrating on the north, south, and east, rather than the west, of the city, which prolonged his tours by several dozen kilometers. He then focused on little outlets inside Paris itself, locating isolated kiosks in fairly deserted quartiers, but the end result was still more or less the same. Either the newspapers were being checked by night watchmen, or they were put in a secure spot, or they were simply nowhere to be found. Sometimes the piles had been vandalized, torn open there on the sidewalk, scattered all the way to the gutter, and then the magazines could no longer be sold. There could no longer be any doubt: he had a competitor, and surely not an artist who worked as he did, delicately, with a cutter, opening the piles cleanly so he could just pull out a few copies. No, for sure this was a real saboteur, a gravedigger of the French print media—might as well call a spade a spade.
Over the last few weeks the seam had dried up like a barrel of water in deepest Sahara: Guillaume had even had to reimburse a few of his subscribers. To all of them he explained that the spread of the cataclysm was due to fantastical, mysterious reasons—gang warfare among distribution unions, factories blocked by Romanian strike picketers, a collective of bloggers basely attacking the good old print media, stocks pulped because of toxic smeared ink. He promised things would soon be back to normal and he dexterously rationed whatever meager booty he happened to find during his rounds. Unfortunately his offer was restricted above all to poor quality, low-end publications—specialized reviews that were of little interest to the general public: RV Living, Mushrooms of Our Regions, Aluminum Lids, Blue Cheese of the Ariège Region. To be sure, last week he had managed to offload Firefighters of France in the place of the leading gay magazine, but he wouldn’t be able to get away with that kind of ruse for long. People would soon get weary, and he knew it only too well. A few more weeks like this and years of painstaking work would be wiped out. And as misery loves company, not only was Guillaume losing the business he had run so proudly for almost fifteen years, now here he was at one o’clock in the morning on his side of the bed with a hard-on like a donkey and Sandrine snoring next to him with a flyswatter in her hand.