Hotelles by Emma Mars

Author:Emma Mars
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2013-03-10T16:00:00+00:00

I STRETCHED OUT ON THE sofa in the living room, abandoning myself to my muddled and contradictory thoughts. Felicity crawled onto my stomach and I ran my hand over her tabby fur. It was soft and reassuring. I tried not to give in to black-and-white thinking, remembering another lesson from my mustachioed professor in the journalism department: even in times of war, never consider a subject in terms of sharply divided sides: “Only in the Bible and Hollywood movies will you ever find a pure, immaculate, untainted Good side on the one hand and a truly evil Bad side on the other. Real life is not made up of Cains and Abels, Luke Skywalkers and Darth Vaders. It’s always infinitely more complicated than that. And your job is to untangle this impossible web. You have to tug on threads and show your findings to the public, but without blaming anyone for original sin. There is no such thing as a first cause. Only visible points in a long, long chain of causality. It’s up to you to choose a point and explain why you’ve chosen it. And that’s the angle of your paper, your subject.” To my great disappointment, Mr. Mustache was one hundred percent right.

Everything would have been so much simpler for me if Louie had been content to lie and play with me like a toy, and if he hadn’t made me feel anything—neither desire nor pleasure. Everything would have been so much clearer if David had controlled his hand rather than his secrets.

I was trying to curb my emotions, but I was livid. My time off was misleading. I owed this moment of respite to my temporary withdrawal, and it couldn’t last long.

I rummaged through my bag for the papers I’d received the night before in the Païva room. I took a moment to scan the list Louie had written. While some of the titles were vaguely familiar—my knowledge of erotica was extremely limited—I had to admit that I hadn’t read any of these books. The ones that were most familiar to me had been adapted to the silver screen:

1. Secret Women, Ania Oz

2. Lady Chatterley’s Lover, D. H. Lawrence

3. The Eleven Thousand Rods, Guillaume Apollinaire

4. Sexus, Henry Miller

5. Story of O, Pauline Réage

6. Philosophy in the Bedroom, Marquis de Sade

7. Emmanuelle, Emmanuelle Arsan

8. Delta of Venus, Anaïs Nin

9. Fanny Hill, John Cleland

10. Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth

11. Irene’s Cunt, Louis Aragon

12. Story of the Eye, Georges Bataille

13. The Butcher: And Other Erotica, Alina Reyes

14. The Lover, Marguerite Duras

15. The Mechanics of Women, Louis Calaferte

16. The Black Notebook, Joë Bousquet

17. The Ages of Lulu, Almudena Grandes

18. The Sexual Life of Catherine M., Catherine Millet

19. Tales of Ordinary Madness, Charles Bukowski

20. My Secret Life, Anonymous

21. The Surrender: An Erotic Memoir, Toni Bentley

Whether it was The Eleven Thousand Rods or Irene’s Cunt, I could not imagine reading any of these books in front of David, much less in a public place like the metro.

I did not feel ready—would I ever be? did I ever need to be?—to show that part of myself to the world.

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