Woman in the Fifth

am also duty-bound to spread my legs and fuck the idiot twice a week … a disgusting experience as the fool always burps just before coming …’

We kept throwing the rakis back, and she kept lighting up cigarettes and coughing. Finally she told the two drunks to beat it. When they had both staggered out, she looked at the mess around her — the dirty glasses, the brimming ashtrays, the tables and counters that needed wiping down, the floor to be swept and mopped — and shuddered.

‘This,’ she said, ‘is the sum total of my life.’

‘I should go,’ I said.

‘Not yet,’ she said, standing up. She walked to the front door, locked it, then pulled down an inside set of shutters. She returned to where I was sitting, flashing me a drunken smile, took my hand and pulled me up from the chair, then placed the same hand under her short skirt and inside her petite culotte. As my index finger touched her slit, it became wet and she uttered a small groan before grabbing my head and shoving her tongue down my throat. I might have been drunk, but I was also cognizant of the fact that I was engaged in an insane activity. But my finger pushed deeper inside her. And her smoky, raki-coated mouth tasted … well, smoky and raki-coated. And the rational side of my brain was being trumped by the intoxicated moron with a hard penis. Before I knew it we were staggering into a dingy back room where there was a cot bed and a sink with rust stains (the small shitty details one notices while locked in a drunken carnal embrace), and she was unbuckling my jeans and I pulled down her panties and she kicked off her shoes, and we collapsed half-clothed on the cot, and I smelled damp from the grungy blanket covering the mattress, and the cot creaked under our combined weight, and when I hesitated from entering her she whispered, ‘It is safe.’ As soon as I was deep within her, she started doing mad, violent stuff like pulling my hair and lacerating my buttock with her nails, and pushing her free hand between us and aggressively rubbing her clitoris as I thrust into her. She must have woken two neighboring arrondissements as she came, then bit down hard on my tongue and wouldn’t let go until I detonated inside of her.

Immediately she stood up and said, ‘I have to clean up now.’

A minute or so later, after I had pulled up my jeans and spat blood into the sink (she had really done a number on my tongue), she hustled me out on to the street without a goodbye — just a fast guilty glance in either direction along the rue de Paradis to make certain no one she knew was about. The shutters came down. I walked a few steps along the street, then leaned against a wall, trying to fathom if what had just happened in the last ten minutes had just happened. But my brain was still too addled from all the booze and the sheer madness of it all. The blood in my mouth was flowing freely now and my tongue suddenly hurt like hell. So I staggered home and went back to my room and ran the tap and gargled with salt water for around two minutes, and spat out the bloodied water, and stripped off my clothes, and took three extra-strength ibuprofen tablets and a Zopiclone. The chemicals did the trick, but when I jolted awake at two, I found that I couldn’t speak.

I discovered this because my wake-up call this morning wasn’t my clock-radio; rather, several loud knocks on my door. As I staggered out of bed, my tongue touched the roof of my parched mouth and immediately recoiled in agony. I went to the little mirror hanging by the kitchen sink and opened my mouth. I shuddered when I saw what was inside. My tongue had taken on a general blue-black appearance and was grotesquely distended. The banging on the door increased. I opened it. Outside stood Omar — in a dirty T-shirt and a pair of cotton drawstring pants with fresh urine stains around the crotch. The first words out of his mouth were, ‘You give me one thousand euros.’

‘What?’ I said, sounding as if my mouth was filled with dental cotton wool. That’s when I realized that speech was virtually impossible.

‘You give me one thousand euros today. Or else you are dead man.’

‘I don’t understand,’ I said, though the sentence came out all muffled and distorted. As in: jenecomprendpas.

‘Why you can’t speak?’

‘Bad cold.’

‘Liar. She bit you, yes?’

Now I was very awake and scared.

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I see you this morning. Very early. Leave bar.’

‘I wasn’t in a bar …’

‘Bar closed. Shutters down. Shutters then open. She looks out, looks both ways. Coast clear. You come out. Shutters close. Got you.’

‘That wasn’t me.’

‘Bullshit. I am coming down street. I see her open bar. When she gives nervous look, I duck into doorway. Hidden. I see you. Now I tell Nedim — when he comes back next week — that you fucked his wife. How you like that, American? Nedim will cut off your balls. Unless you pay me to keep my mouth closed.’

I slammed the door in his face. He immediately began to pound on it.

‘You pay me one thousand euros by end of the week, or you are man who will lose his balls. You no fuck with me.’

There are moments in life when you feel as if you are in freefall. This downward spiraling motion is underscored with the knowledge that you have stumbled into something so potentially dangerous and maniacal — all because you have engaged in that most commonplace of male displacement activities: thinking with your prick.

I forced myself into the shower and into some clothes and out on to the street. Mr Beard glowered at me when I came into the cafe to collect my pay packet — did he already know what had happened as well? — but we exchanged no words, which was no bad thing just now, as any verbal utterances caused immense pain. My stomach was rumbling, I knew that solid food would also be a problem. So I hit upon a grim option: a chocolate milkshake at the McDonald’s by the Gare de l’Est. It was raining as I entered its portals. At three on a wet afternoon, there were a handful of travelers grabbing fast-food provisions before catching a train. Largely, however, the people huddled at the plastic tables eating plastic food were those who lived on the streets. Or they were immigrants — a melange of African and Middle Eastern faces — who saw this dump as nothing more than a cheap meal. Looking at my fellow diners, all I could feel was a curious solidarity with these people who lived in Paris and yet really lived outside of it; who had few opportunities here; who were quietly ignored or despised by everyone doing better than just ‘getting by’. But in expressing camaraderie with my fellow outsiders, I knew I was playing the hypocrite. After all, I longed for the other side of the Parisian divide — a nice apartment, an intellectual (yet chic) cinephile girlfriend; dinners in good restaurants; drinks at the Flore (and not worrying about the exorbitant prices they charged); a little bit of literary fame and its attendant fringe benefits (invitations to salons du livre ; being asked to write the occasional reflective article for Liberation or Lire; more women). Instead I was a self-marginalized loser — and currently a fearful one, as I wondered if Omar really would shop my ass to Yanna’s husband.

The catastrophist in me invented ten different ruinous scenarios, all of which centered around sexually transmitted diseases and grievous bodily harm being meted out by a gang of angry Turkish gentlemen.

But once the thousand euros was handed over to Omar, then what? Paying a blackmailer does not guarantee the cessation of threats. From my extensive knowledge of film noir and dime-store mysteries, I knew that, au contraire, it usually signaled the start of an intensive campaign of menace. And Omar was stupid enough to think that he was smart enough to get me cornered and keep the hush-money game going for as long as I lived in fear of disclosure.

Which meant that I couldn’t give in to the slob in the first place. But how to cut him off at the pass?

Margit would have an interesting answer to that question. But Margit was the last person to whom I could tell any of this … for obvious reasons. I lived in dread of seeing her in two days’ time, as all sorts of questions would be raised about my distended tongue and the scratch marks on my ass from Yanna’s exceptionally sharp nails.

For the next forty-eight hours, time flowed like cement. Everything seemed interminably long, overshadowed by my fears of disclosure and disease. However, I did do something sensible: I took myself off to a walk-in medical clinic on the boulevard de Strasbourg. The doctor on duty was a thickset man in his mid-fifties with thinning hair and an indifferent seen-it-all countenance. He looked at my tongue and appeared impressed.