If a woman doesn’t want to come, then a guy can screw his cock to shreds, and with a guy in his forties it takes a while anyhow—and who wants to put up with that? If I hadn’t been so tired and bored with standing around in the fog, I would have thought up something to get rid of him. Instead, I said to myself, Let him go on, he’ll get horny enough to come before it gets tedious. So I shut my eyes and let him move around inside me. But soon it got weird: it was just too pleasant. He was incredibly skillful and lay on me without crushing me, and he was clean and he had no flab and his skin was smooth and he was well built. I thought to myself, Christine, my girl, if you get soft now, you might really come, and then you’ll stay with him for a couple of hours and sleep till the day after tomorrow, and you may even fall in love with him, for Christ’s sake, and then you’ll be up to your ass in trouble. Pull yourself together, kid, and try to get rid of the guy as fast as possible and go out into the fog and earn an honest living. And at that same instant, he said to me (still in the same voice, as though we were sitting on a bench in the Jardin des Plantes), “Listen, my dear. You’re very sweet. Let me make a suggestion. For a couple of days you try to get used to me and to living with me. I earn enough to spoil you a little. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll go our own separate ways as the best of friends, and I’ll see to it that you won’t have lost too much income. And if it works, we’ll stay together for as long as it still works. I’m anything but rich, but I write for the movies, and there’s always a nice payday waiting. With a woman with a good head on her shoulders to look after the money, one can live quite comfortably.”

It wasn’t my first offer of this kind, and what pissed me off most was the way he used the stuff about the movies as bait. You can fool some dime-store clerk that’s still wetting her pants, but not a working girl like me. And besides, I thought, who does this bastard think you are anyway? Does he think maybe that because you’ve got a dick inside you, you can’t think clearly? Why doesn’t he just take a violin and fiddle a tango in your ear! And because I was mad, I did something dumb, and I thought to myself, If you tell me stories, buddy, then I’ll tell you a couple too, and I said, “You’re sweet, baby, and that’s why I won’t be nasty and lie to you. You see, I can’t live with a man. I can’t come with men—I don’t know if I’m a lesbian, but in any case, I can’t stand having a man around for more than half an hour.”