Authors: Michel Farnac
They
called
each
other
as
often
as
their
lives
allowed,
usually
once
or
twice
a
month,
but
mainly
they
corresponded
electronically.
The
frequency
of
their
communication
was
remarkably
steady
and
they
often
wrote
once
a
day,
but
the
intensity
of
their
correspondence
was
generally
dictated
by
his
work
schedule.
She
had
a
nine-‐to-‐five
job
and
usually
wrote
to
him
from
her
office
when
she
arrived
there
in
the
morning.
His
line
of
work
implied
an
erratic
schedule,
and
he
mostly
wrote
to
her
in
the
evenings,
often
late.
Because
of
the
three
hour
time
difference
between
the
two
coasts,
this
meant
that
they
usually
wrote
to
each
other
while
the
other
was
asleep,
which
added
to
the
onyric
quality
of
their
affair.
But
from
the
start
Michel
had
put
a
twist
to
the
dream:
within
two
week
of
their
first
conversation,
they
were
both
feeling
the
signs
of
a
rapidly
burgeoning
emotional
connection
and
she
mentioned
that
at
times
she
felt
as
though
she
might
wake
up
and
find
that
he
did
not
exist.
“But
instead”
he
said,
“you
wake
up
to
find
that
you
are
still
dreaming
of
me,
which
makes
me
just
about
as
real
as
it
gets
for
a
dream.
Think
of
it
as
lucid
dreaming.”
He
was
reminded
of
the
Offenbach
version
of
the
story
of
Troy
when
Paris,
upon
visiting
Helen
during
the
night,
assures
her
she
is
dreaming
and
they
engage
in
a
beautiful
aria:
“’tis
but
-‐
‘tis
but
a
dream
of
Love….”
This
was
his
realm,
and
he
knew
to
proceed
carefully.
His
European
upbringing
came
with
a
thorough
classical
education
and
as
a
young
man
he
had
favored
the
study
of
XVIIIth
century
romantic
literature,
first
and
foremost
the
Dangerous
Liaisons,
the
epistolary
masterpiece
by
Choderlos
de
Laclos.
He
had
always
seen
this
book
as
a
continual
master
class
in
the
art
of
using
ink
to
make
hearts
vibrate
and
throb.
And
so
he
warned
her
that
he
could
(and
would)
make
the
dream
very
vivid,
thus
installing
his
habit
of
obtaining
consent.
And
so
she
began
her
habit
of
giving
consent
without
probing
the
scale
of
what
she
was
consenting
to,
a
form
of
trust
that
touched
him
greatly
and
that
he
never
abused.
In
all
fairness,
it
was
she
who
had
immediately
set
them
on
the
path
to
a
world
of
sensations.
When
Alexander
had
surprised
her
with
the
gift
of
this
stranger
that
she
could
talk
to
about
anything
she
wanted,
she
had
been
forced
to
confront
questions
about
herself
and
her
motivations
in
clinging
to
Alexander
when
he
so
clearly
wanted
out.
He
wanted
out
of
what
he
had
started.
He
wanted
to
slam
shut
a
door
he
had
pried
open.
No,
worse
than
that,
he
wanted
to
un-‐ring
a
bell.
Alexander
was
a
predator,
a
married
skirt-‐chaser
so
emotionally
immature
that
sex
was
to
him
like
an
addictive
substance
whose
draw
was
insurmountable.
When
he
had
set
his
sights
on
Cathy,
he’d
had
thoughts
of
a
pearl
oyster
that
he
would
need
to
shuck
hoping
to
find
a
pearl.
A
more
proper
and
respectable
lady
you
could
not
find.
A
devout
Catholic
and
mother
of
two,
the
word
‘affair’
was
not
a
part
of
her
common
vocabulary,
relegated
to
the
same
page
in
the
dictionary
as
‘Hell’,
‘Sin’
and
others.
She
had
met
her
husband
in
college
and
notwithstanding
a
couple
of
chaste
escapades
in
high-‐school,
he
had
been
the
sum-‐total
of
her
sexual
knowledge.
After
fifteen
years
of
marriage
this
body
of
knowledge
was
at
best
stagnant
though
more
likely
decaying
at
that
point,
a
withering
spiral
notebook
with
a
few
pages
of
half-‐
erased
penciled-‐in
scribbles
buried
deep
inside
of
her.
Alexander,
suspecting
as
much,
had
reached
in
and
found
it.
As
he’d
suspected,
the
first
page
still
held
its
ornate
title
and
decorations,
drawn
when
she
was
still
naïve
and
curious:
Sex.
He
seduced
her
with
ease
and
panache
and
proceeded
to
make
her
discover
that
she
was
a
sexual
being,
capable
of
emotions
and
feelings
unknown
to
her
and,
yes,
capable
of
pleasure.
Alexander
had
given
her
this
most
amazing
of
gifts:
the
knowledge
that
she
could
be
brought
to
orgasm
by
a
man.
But
it
would
take
her
a
while
to
understand
that
this
was
what
had
made
her
a
changed
woman
and
for
many
different
reasons,
not
least
of
which
was
how
overwhelming
Alexander’s
own
motives
and
deceptions
had
been.
For
him,
Catherine
was
but
one
in
a
long
list
of
conquests
whose
sole
purpose
had
been
to
assuage
his
ever
more
extreme
desires.
While
no-‐one
with
an
open
mind
would
think
of
Alexander
as
a
man
with
perverse
tastes,
his
insistence
to
Cathy
that
all
men
liked
such
things
showed
in
retrospect
that
he
understood
his
own
tastes
to
be
more
risqué
than
most.
The
unfortunate
result
was
that
having
spent
nearly
all
of
her
life
ensconced
in
the
land
of
propriety,
morality
and
exclusively
reproductive
and
therefore
infrequent
sex,
she
now
sat
on
a
pendulum
that
had
swung
to
a
world
where
all
men
like
mild
bondage,
props
and
sex
toys,
and
that
she
enjoyed
them
too
because
she
wanted
if
nothing
else
to
reach
the
heights
that
Alexander
was
thrusting
her
to.
And
so
the
conclusion
was
rather
self-‐evident
that
the
only
reason
this
Michel
would
want
to
engage
in
conversation
with
her
was
to
talk
about
sex,
kinky
sex.
True
to
herself
she
had
resolved
that
unlike
with
Alexander,
with
Michel
she
would
be
in
control
of
the
relationship.
Without
much
self-‐awareness
she
spent
the
time
leading
up
to
the
encounter
rearranging
the
ground
beneath
her
to
make
it
as
stable
as
possible.
The
second
time
that
Michel
called
her,
she
used
the
word
“cock”
for
the
sole
purpose
of
asking
him
if
it
shocked
him,
perhaps
her
way
of
asserting
that
she
could
play
‘ball’
with
the
best
of
them.
His
response
foreshadowed
the
closing
figure
of
the
minuet
they
would
engage
in
during
the
next
couple
of
weeks:
“I’m
a
little
surprised,
but
not
shocked.
I’d
wondered,
of
course,
what
your
word
of
choice
might
be,
but
since
I
did
not
know
you,
it
was
pure
speculation.
I
myself
prefer
the
word
phallus.”
He
paused
for
a
second,
for
effect.
‘I
find
it
has
a
certain
ring
to
it.
And
it
works
in
many
languages.”
What
traveled
down
her
back
upon
hearing
those
words
could
hardly
be
called
a
shiver,
given
its
intensity,
and
it
left
her
spine
at
once
frozen
and
liquefied.
The
minuet,
while
choreographed
in
its
broad
moves
by
Michel,
came
to
be
because
of
Alexander’s
attempts
at
protecting
himself
all
too
late
from
his
own
scheming,
a
predicament
not
unknown
to
him.
This
time,
though,
his
motivations
were
quite
different.
Alexander’s
main
purpose
in
breaking
it
off
completely
with
Cathy
was
not
what
one
could
expect
from
a
philanderer
of
his
caliber,
but
indeed
quite
the
opposite.
It
was
a
desperate
and
last
ditch
attempt
at
saving
his
marriage,
at
foreswearing
infidelity,
at
not
taking
for
granted
the
one
thing
that
mattered
and
meant
something
in
his
life:
his
wife.
When
he
approached
Michel
and
asked
him
outright
is
he
would
be
interested
in
having
conversations
of
a
sexual
nature
with
a
‘friend’,
it
had
not
taken
long
for
him
to
admit
that
it
was
his
former
mistress
and
to
explain
the
situation.
But
in
the
days
that
followed,
Alexander
realized
with
distress
that
he
was
giving
a
colleague
full
view
of
his
innermost
and
darkest
fantasies,
and
he
began
making
abstruse
remarks
to
Michel
about
Cathy
as
a
way
to
distance
himself
from
what
Michel
was
about
to
discover
about
him.
This
culminated
in
the
infamous
remark:
“She
likes
pretty
kinky
stuff,
you
know…
bondage.”
While
this
did
not
disturb
Michel
per
se
and
he
assured
his
friend
that
he
was
well
able
to
engage
in
mild
forms
of
exploration,
he
immediately
decided
that
if
things
were
to
click
between
him
and
the
mysterious
woman,
he
would
soon
shift
things
to
more
mild-‐
mannered
activities.
In
his
mind,
excursions
into
pain
and
coercion
during
sexual
play
were
purely
a
means
to
provide
occasional
unexpected
spice
into
a
relationship,
and
not
an
appropriate
backdrop.
He
had
no
interest
in
the
exploration
of
the
boundaries
between
pleasure
and
pain,
a
topic
of
some
fascination
for
Alexander.
In
addition
to
a
lack
of
interest,
Michel
knew
of
the
danger
in
such
explorations
of
finding
that
the
boundaries
can
be
shifted
by
their
very
probing,
a
danger
in
part
the
cause
of
Alexander’s
predicament.