One Night in Paris

It happened to people, this longing, emerging from an unknown void, grabbing the soul with a firm hand, the urge to simply let go and sink to the depths of the ocean. Deeper and deeper, without resistance, throwing away yourself and your life, as if you had come from the gorges of the sea and were destined to return there one day.

Vertigo marée, the old Breton fishermen called it, that desire that came from nowhere – to erase the self, to be free, free from everything. It usually came on the most beautiful of nights, that was why fishermen avoided looking into the deep, and hung thick curtains at their sea-facing windows when on dry land.

The thought of this occupied Claire as she dressed, and the stranger asked: ‘Will I see you again?’ He lay naked on the bed; the brass ceiling fan turned sluggishly, tracing a revolving star of shadowy stripes on his bare skin. The man stretched out an arm as Claire zipped up her pencil skirt at the back. He reached for her hand.

She knew he was asking whether they would do it again. Share a secret hour behind closed doors. Whether this would start to mean something, or end here and now, in Room 32 of the Hotel Langlois, Paris.

Claire looked into his eyes. Dark-blue eyes. It would have been easy to sink into their depths.

In every gaze, we seek the ocean. And in every ocean, that one gaze.

His eyes were the ocean at Sanary-sur-Meron a hot summer’s day, when the Mistral shakes the overripe figs from the trees and the dazzling white pavements are speckled with their purple juice and windswept blossoms. Eyes he had kept open the whole time, looking at Claire, holding her gaze as he moved inside her. The unfamiliar ocean of his eyes was one reason she had sought him out on the terrace of Galeries Lafayette. That, and the fact that he wore a wedding ring on his finger.

Just like her.

‘No,’ Claire said.

She had known that it would only happen once. No surnames. No exchange of telephone numbers. None of the intimacies of an all too banal conversation about their children, or shopping at the Marché d’Aligre, steakfrites at Poulette, movies, travel plans and why they were doing this to each other. Why they had left their lives for an hour to press themselves against a stranger’s skin, trace unfamiliar body contours, enclose unfamiliar lips, before slipping back into the regular outline of their lives.

Claire knew her own reasons.

His were none of her business.