they looked like silkworm cocoons. I told him so. He ignored me.
I hitched my pencil skirt up shorter.
“That’s Lola,” said James. “She is a Chartreux. I breed. One is not supposed to breed Chartreux on English shores according to the blasted CFA.”
“CFA?”
“Cat Fanciers’ Association. But to hell with them!” His face became angry. “They are the most sumptuous pussies in all the world as far as I’m concerned! In all of Europe. I’ve been obsessed with them ever since I came across one while backpacking through the Chartreuse Mountains, from whence they derive their name.” He stared into my eyes. “I was a young man then. That was before I met Margaret.”
I reached for the tiny green balls but they had all gone.
“There, the mountains are blue,” said James. “The monks make blue liqueur. Everything is blue.”
“I want to go there,” I said.
A white statue wearing nothing but a pair of jazzy Speedos and Ray-Bans was standing in the corner of the elevator, reflected a million times in the mirrors that fenced us in. James and I were reflected too: we looked hideous together. The statue was made of porcelain, not marble. Its hair was slicked back, American Psycho style.
“He reminds me of my father,” I slurred, pointing to the statue. We were heading up to the seventh floor: good luck. “’Cept my father was taller and looks more like Tom Cruise in Risky Business. Have you seen that film?”
James shook his head.
“Me neither. But I’ve seen the posters. There’s a photo of my mother and father on a cruise ship in 1984. That was the year they met. Actually, they met on the cruise ship. Because my father was making a noise in cruises. A big noise. And my mother was just . . . there. It was sailing from Portsmouth to Bilbao.” I looked at my million weathered faces in the mirrors. “They fell in love.”
There was a ding. The doors opened. The hallway was long and pale and candy colored. It was making me seasick. I touched the wall, and found that it was made of leather.
“Was your mother selling croissants on the cruise?”
“No,” I said. “That was in her muffin phase. She was selling muffins.”
James laughed heartily and grabbed my hand. He kissed my knuckles. I balled my fist. He pried my hand open and put my index finger in his mouth. He sucked it very slowly. I watched him, fascinated.
“I love a girl with imagination,” he said to my finger.
“But that bit about the cruise ship was true,” I told him.
James was in the bathroom grooming. The bathroom door was closed. I sat on the end of the king-size bed and stared at the cupboard containing the TV for a long while. Then I shouted loud enough for him to hear: “I love you!”
“I love you too!” he shouted back.
I opened the cupboard and stared at the blank TV screen inside. I opened the minibar and uncorked a bottle of champagne. It hissed. I filled two flutes.
A collage of insects hung over the candy-colored leather sofa, which matched all the cushions and all the curtains and all the sheets. On closer inspection, I saw that the insects were cutouts of vintage porn. This was confirmed by the framed text next to the picture. There was a stack of magazines on the coffee table: Frieze, Monocle, Dazed and Confused.
I turned on the TV. Come Dine with Me. A brunette was laughing and pointing at a mound of collapsed cream and banana.
James appeared, full of the joys of spring. I was full of something; not spring. The champagne had failed to go to my head. He looked about twenty years younger than he had in the bar. His comb-over was freshly oiled.
Now he opened the box of truffles on the pillow and pushed one into my mouth. It tasted too sweet. He unfastened my pencil skirt and rolled it over my legs. He rolled down my tights too. He rolled down my underpants. He was squatting in front of me like a toad.
I shifted away from him and turned the volume up loud. “I think it’s the voice-over,” I said. “That’s what makes this show so funny.”
The brunette was leading a conga line around her front room. A man who looked like an accountant was circling his hips, unevenly. The song changed to “Macarena.”
James pawed at me.
I said in a loud, assertive voice: “Sebastian’s parents would never let their kids watch TV. That’s why they grew up so creative. When Sebastian first came to my school, I’d only ever read The Baby-Sitters Club and Sweet Valley High.”
“Who’s Sebastian?” said James.
“But then he introduced me to all these books. Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.” I turned to James. “Have you read them?”
He shook his head.
“I thought Sebastian was a genius like Miller,” I went on. “He said he wanted to make my ovaries incandescent like Miller. But when we did it the first time, they didn’t go incandescent. So Sebastian.” I laughed. “Got really angry and started punching the wall and going insane. It was funny. Because he wasn’t really like that—he wasn’t insane.”
James lay back on the bed. Then he sat up again.
“He wasn’t really a genius either,” I said. “When we were about thirteen he told me that I wasn’t in love with him—I was in love with love itself. He said it was a privileged form of mania because apparently a lot of artists and writers had it. He said he didn’t have it, and he seemed really angry about that. But I was sure it was a curse—whatever he said I had. It must have been a curse because it meant my heart didn’t belong to—myself. It belonged to someone other than myself. It belonged to him.”
“So you like being owned?” purred James.
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.” I laughed. “We ran away to Paris after our SATs. When we were fourteen. We left in the middle of the night and got the bus to Dover. Sebastian had stolen the money from his parents. Then we got the ferry. It was amazing—we went out on the deck in the pitch-black darkness and you couldn’t see the horizon. Everything looked black. We got wet from the water.” I laughed again. “Obviously. It was the sea. We stayed away for three days. My mother went fucking crazy but his parents didn’t even notice that he’d gone. They thought he was on a school trip that they’d forgotten about.”
“Hmm.”
“When we came back, there was this awful meeting with my mother and his parents. His mother said that we should give our children roots and wings, but my mother said that ambition is the best form of contraception and the French are notoriously sex mad.”
“Yes, you are.”
“She said that France is a sex mad country, but Sebastian’s father said: ‘But a lovely place for a romantic weekend away at this time of year.’ Sebastian said his father wanted him to die because he was too tall. My mother tried to stop me from seeing Sebastian, so I ran away to his house and
