Satisfaction Read online

  People have probably never got off so much; they devour porn films, toys, all the women look like whores when they undress, they suck cocks as normally as they touch up their lipstick … But it’s like we’re dying to fuck even more. Sex, sex, sex. It drives us crazy.

  Are there still people out there who think of things other than sex?

  Women think about children, men too, we want children like children want toys, everyone wants children about the house, for the human warmth, because we’re afraid of death, all that, but what about the children themselves? Do you know any adults who are at ease with their elders, their family? Listen to them talking about their parents and you’ll see the look of terror in their eyes, every time their mother phones their faces contort with anguish as if they’d been trussed up and handed over to be tortured … It’s hell for kids, home sweet home, it’s another perversion, a sexual need … Promiscuity … I once saw a report on TV about rats. They swarm together one on top of the other until their tails knot together and they can’t get out. They try to pull themselves apart, but there’s this huge knot in the middle; they can’t get free, so they die. Shit, I’d want to puke.

  The Family. Frustration numero uno for adults, and a school of torture for kids, that’s what I think.

  If only I’d had different parents.

  Babe and I would have liked to have children, like everyone else. But she had three miscarriages in ten years, so that’s that. We got used to it.

  I had everything I needed in my car, and I did no one any harm.

  I love my wife, even though I don’t have sex with her very often. I love my son, even though I don’t see that much of him. I love my house, I love my car, I love my Elvis Presley records. One time Babe told me I needed to expand my horizons, but that’s just storybook stuff, women’s romantic fiction, they dream of adventure, but they wouldn’t be able to tolerate it in reality, what they want is a guy like me, one who’s always there, through thick and thin.

  My workmate Dick will chase anything in a skirt. Women don’t like his rat’s face, won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. They come after me instead, especially older women, they are the horniest and the most frustrated. I have to give them enough hope that they carry on being my customers, or become customers in the first place. I butter them up, I look them in the eye when I talk to them, I watch them lose all their reserve, and when I sense that they’re ready to get down and do it right there like a bitch in heat, I back off again, what a pro, it’s like a slap around the kisser, they don’t know which way to turn, then you act all cool for a while before you start playing them again, they love the torment, the whole movie thing, if you get them watering at the mouth, if you promise them something, even in front of their husbands, they can’t resist, it’s eating them up, they want to experience pleasure before they reach the stage when no one wants to screw them anymore, they panic, and when they’re in this state they’ll go with anyone who’s even halfway attractive. Anyway, Ratface usually mops up half of them, since I’m happy just to sell them an automobile and then go and jerk off in the can once I’ve broken them down.

  Ah! The sluts.

  Oh, and what use is it anyway to let women get inside your head? It doesn’t work, it never will. Deep down they don’t like us. They’d like us if we were like women, simple as that. It’s our dicks they’re interested in, and they’re not happy until they’ve chopped them off. The only way not to be consumed by it all is to be alone, as alone as possible. Parents, bosses, women, children, neighbors, politicians … money, work, TV, the law … Shit! They’re all perched on our backs, eating us alive.

  Only Carmen gives me everything without asking for anything in return. She’s a good lay. And so nice with it. Is your cock hard now? she always seems to be asking me with her cute, pink mouth. She’s so beautiful and I screw her when I like. When I like, however I like. I just have to open the case …

  I had taken a day off work to welcome her. When I asked if we could go round the back of the house so we could go straight into the garage I had a weird feeling. I had to, because of the woman next door. But introducing her like that, from the back … It was as if I was sodomizing my house, my home sweet home. I pulled down the metal shutter, and I was locked in with her. I was already creaming my pants; she was ready to offer herself.

  She was fantastic. She wore red lingerie. I could see her nipples and her pubic hair through the lace, which was as fine as a spider’s web. Her long black hair, her juicy lips, her large staring eyes. I started to stroke her. Her skin was soft and fresh, her flesh supple, firm and heavy.

  I laid her on the hood of the Cadillac. My two treasures. I undid her bra, slipped her panties down her legs. I spread her thighs. Her pussy, her bushy snatch … I dropped my pants; they were so tight now they hurt. Shit, she was good!

  We did it again, then I decided to tidy up the garage. I put Carmen away in her hidey-hole, which she found very amusing. She was too good, too easy. Even today, three weeks later, that’s the best I’ve ever had. I sometimes tell myself that if Babe had never found out, I could have gone on having it as often as I liked to the end of my days, in peace.

  I chopped up the box with an axe, put the bits of wood and polystyrene into a bag and took it down to the communal trash cans at the end of the street.

  Before Babe came home I had enough time to have Carmen once again. I just have to slip my dick into one of her holes. Within seconds it’s stiffened up nicely and she sucks away like a vacuum cleaner. To be totally honest, none of the women I’ve fucked before can compare with her. Once you’ve tasted Carmen, believe me, the others seem much less tempting …

  ι

  I talk in her. I talk into her ear, set off the words inside her, senseless, sensible, secret phrases. Words like bricks, sentences like walls, to stop the Wolf getting into the house.

  (As a child she watched the tape of Walt Disney’s Three Little Pigs, in which the wolf was drawn like a caricatural Jew. Of course, she wasn’t aware of that. So it didn’t really matter. Surely then nothing really matters, since no one is aware of what images show.)

  Everything in the cellar was in order. Not a spot on the Cadillac’s pink paintwork. If the girl had left the house, dead or alive, Babe would have heard it. She had listened hard enough while she was waiting for Bobby and after he came back, so the sound of the door closing, however quietly, would not have escaped her ears. As for the metal shutter of the garage, it was so noisy she wouldn’t even have considered it.

  There was no other way out, and yet the girl wasn’t here. Unless she had hidden herself somewhere in the house. Babe began to hope madly, with a knot in her stomach, as when you’re expecting to meet someone with whom you’re secretly in love.

  Babe stretched out on the hood of the automobile, legs and arms open wide, her mouth forming a wide O. She stared up at the lightbulb then, once she was fully in the role, turned to look up at the skylight. As from the outside, it was clear the glass was dirty. Through it she could see the light green of the grass and the darker green of the bushes.

  And the darker green of the bushes.

  Dark, bushy, like that woman’s pussy.

  If she hadn’t been so out of it, she would surely have seen me, thought Babe.

  She rolled over onto her stomach, her arms and legs still spread wide. She raised herself, lowered her pants and her panties and tried to find the position again. But this time she was shackled round the ankles by her clothes and couldn’t spread her legs properly. But she had to know what this girl had felt.

  Babe took off her shoes, her socks, her pants and her panties. She lifted her blouse and looked at her dark triangle, shaved along the bikini line to avoid any gross display. She ran her fingers over her flattened hairs to restore their natural body. Her index finger brushed her clitoris, but she resisted the temptation. She didn’t want to be deflected from her objective: to understand.

  Babe examined the hood of the Cadillac again. The bodywork was smooth
and shiny. She thought about the Pistol. Normally I think about Bobby, she said to herself. Now, all she could see was this packet of flesh that Bobby had between his legs; she saw it as if it were disconnected from Bobby, lying on top of the car like an enormous jewel in a shop window.

  Yes, that was it, it was no longer a Pistol, it was a Jewel. A jewel that came to life on, in and around the orifices of the Other. A strange jewel, a wild, primitive animal that crawled toward anything warm and moist, toward the shadow, into holes, a beast that slid out of pants noiselessly, without haste, with one thing on its mind, with its musky odor, its searching head, its moist eye.

  A real Thing, screaming its reality, while Bobby was nothing but a lie, a fabulation, a deceit. Bobby, with his fantasies that he mistook for reality, his inherited movie screen, Bobby who was always hiding things. Who was always hiding things from her, son of a bitch.

  And this deceit, this lie was like a darkness inside her, it was a bringer of death, it made her into a block of death.

  She undressed completely and once again pressed her stomach, her breasts and her right cheek against the bodywork. Her sex felt as heavy as an anvil on which a blacksmith was hammering out a large piece of red-hot steel.

  Finally, she got up. Her clothes were in a heap on the floor. She didn’t want to put them back on. After all, she was on her own. And if there was another woman in the house, she was hardly in a position to take offense …

  She went back upstairs in her undressed state and started looking in all the rooms. It wasn’t a big house, so it didn’t take long. There appeared to be no one else around. Trailing about from room to room in the nude like that, even she seemed like a phantom. But then it was her body that took up all the space, and the house had no more substance than a house of cards, liable to topple over at any moment. Babe started to crave company.

  Babe, the giant sleepwalker, her enormous body weighing on her belly, condensed into her sex … It was becoming difficult to walk. Invisible threads pulled her slowly, gently, firmly toward the French windows of the living room. Which opened onto the veranda and the street. Behind the curtains she was barely visible. But she only had to pull them back to reveal the spectacle of her nudity to anyone who happened to be passing by.

  She moved close enough to be able to rub her pubis against the wood of the frame. Before opening the curtains, she had the idea of massaging her nipples to make them stand up, but she realized there was no need: they were already erect, like two hunting dogs straining at the leash. Boldly, she pressed them against the glass. Then she didn’t move.

  The street was deserted. Bobby and Babe had to dig deep to afford this house in a quiet residential neighborhood; but she didn’t regret it for a moment.

  A fat child wheezed past on a brand-new bike. Jimmy, the neighbors’ son. She quickly hid herself behind the curtain. There was no need: the boy was cycling straight ahead, crouched over his handlebars, his fat cheeks flushed with the effort. He didn’t bother to turn his head to the left or right, knowing very well that there was nothing to see in these dreary alleys. Last week Shirley Gordon had told Babe that the doctor had advised her to get Jimmy to cycle to school, to stop him getting any fatter. You’d do better not to stuff his face so much, Babe thought in disgust. That Shirley! Always spying on you from her window or her veranda, ready to pounce and force you into conversation with her! And her awful jokes! What a degenerate, idiotic woman! And she was always flirting with Bobby; obviously she hadn’t looked in a mirror recently and seen herself as she really was: frightful. That dyed black hair, which only served to make her look older than she was! Her low-cut dresses revealing acres of flabby cleavage! Her cellulite-ridden ass! Her ridiculous makeup!

  Babe was still picturing herself bludgeoning Shirley Gordon’s ugly face to a pulp with her fists and knees and feet when she heard a car approach. She briskly pulled the curtains aside to reveal her naked body, aching now with a surfeit of desire and disillusion. It was unlikely that anyone inside the car would turn around, either, but she waited nonetheless.

  The tips of her breasts rubbed against the glass, and this tiny sensation rippled through her chest in gathering waves, communicating directly with her crotch, where she became a white-hot ball of steel.

  The automobile arrived and drove past. Slowly. Babe could clearly see a middle-aged couple in the front seats. An overweight man and woman whom she didn’t know. They looked straight ahead implied, like Jimmy on his bike.

  They didn’t talk to each other, didn’t move. Their Ford seemed more alive than them. They looked strapped in like statues that the vehicle was delivering somewhere. They drove out of Babe’s sight without the slightest flicker of interest in the world around them showing on their fat faces.

  This depressing vision at least had the merit of making things clear to Babe: the girl was definitely there, inside the house! Bobby had simply hidden her under the hood of the Cadillac! How had she not realized that earlier, when she saw that the car was locked? She couldn’t lay her hands on Bobby’s keys; they didn’t seem to be hanging in the hallway with the others. He had probably taken them with him, but Babe started rooting through his things anyway.

  She found nothing in their bedroom closet beneath any of the piles of socks, underwear, T-shirts and pullovers. Nothing in the pockets, inner or outer, of the trousers, shirts, jackets and coats that were hanging up. Nothing in the drawer of the bedside table, apart from an old pocket-size Bible, a pair of sunglasses and a packet of tissues.

  Nothing in the drawers of the bureau, either, or anywhere else in the study, including among the CD-ROMs and the books with garish covers stacked on the shelves. Nor in the living room, among the records and cassettes, nor under the cushions on the sofa and armchairs.

  And in the so-called guest room, where no guests ever slept, not even Tommy, Bobby’s grown-up son, for whom it was principally earmarked? Nothing, nothing at all. While she was upstairs, Babe also checked out the bathroom. In vain.

  Downstairs, only the kitchen remained. No trace of a key in any of the cupboards. Not even in the huge refrigerator, which Babe searched thoroughly, for once without feeling pangs of hunger.

  She should have thought of the basement straightaway. She went downstairs. It would be three hours before she went back upstairs, without success. It was the middle of the afternoon; Bobby would be home soon. What would he think of the fact she hadn’t been to work? She remembered his heavy footsteps on the stairs when he came back to their room the previous night. She had to get dressed at least, straightaway. His heavy footsteps … like those of an ogre in his giant boots …

  When Bobby came home, two and a half hours later, he found Babe and Carmen lying together on the floor of the basement, wrapped in the ethnic throw that usually covered the sofa in the living room. Babe woke up, saw Bobby’s petrified look and smiled at him. She was naked, like Carmen, whom she held wrapped in her arms and to whom she started whispering sweet nothings while she looked at her husband, her eyes glittering.

  The trunk of the Cadillac was open. And Bobby had thought that his rubber boots were such a good hiding place for his keys.

  κ

  The day that Bobby Wesson found his wife Babe and his mistress Carmen lying together wrapped in a rug on the floor of the garage, the rain had finally come to end, having fallen for a month nonstop, filling the TV screens with torrents of images of rivers in spate, flooded landscapes, people made homeless, so much so that on this first day of spring sunshine a new worry took root in the minds of the public, as they wondered what the papers would find to replace this daily manna of sensation in order to banish their Boredom, public enemy number one of the modern world.

  So it had been a fine day. Bobby had closed the sale of an old Plymouth, a deal that had triggered contradictory emotions: on the one hand, he had felt like he was losing his mother all over again, but at the same time he had had the satisfaction of earning sufficient commission to pay off his two latest playthings, the Cadillac and
Carmen, which permitted him to realize his wildest dreams every night.

  The Road Forks Garage sold only secondhand cars, among which were a few antique enough to be considered collector’s items and hence worth a whole lot more than the others. Joey, his boss, took care of the buying. He dealt with private individuals who wanted to get rid of their vehicles, and managed to snap them up for next to nothing by convincing them that they were nothing but old death traps, barely roadworthy. He then sold them at a nice profit, once Dick had checked them over.

  Bobby himself was a skilled mechanic, and he didn’t mind lending a hand between customers, giving advice or helping Dick. You might say Joey was an expert at exploiting everyone’s potential to the utmost. “Getting results” was what he called it.

  Bobby had found a sort of inner peace in his work. He liked to mess around with motors every now and then, and especially liked polishing bodywork and chrome to bring them back to their shining best after years of neglect. And on weekends he could devote himself to his passion: getting under his car, making it spit out its secrets, handling its oil-filled parts with the requisite skill and knowledge, starting up the motor, listening to it purr, the fiat lux of polishing, all those little acts through which he got to be on intimate terms with his beloved object and which brought him an idyllic erotic pleasure.

  It was essentially an exercise of desire. During the week he practiced it in another form: dealing with his customers, which was a culmination and an excitation of this eroticism, as he had to employ his powers of seduction and sell himself as well as the car.