Hervé Le Tellier - The Sextine Chapel

Katia and Laurent. Night has fallen on the “Fresh Fruit” parking lot at the Rungis market, where a Volvo pick-up truck, 349,548 kilometers on its counter, is parked. Behind the velvet curtain in the driver’s cabin, Laurent makes no effort to calculate how many trips around the world that makes. Kneeling on the worn and dirty mattress, he is struggling to penetrate Katia, who is grimacing in pain. He then spits a large drop of saliva on his penis (“yuck,” Katia thinks), even though a little patience would have done far better.

In one of those coincidences that sometimes go unnoticed, on the radio Mick Jagger is wailing: I can’t get no satisfaction.

Laurent and Mina. “Sure, no problem, by the end of the afternoon,” Laurent calls down from the window of his two-bedroom apartment in a leafy Paris suburb to Widow Chabert, who is speaking to him from two floors below on the sidewalk. The noon sun, as much as the pleasure, is making him blink, while mischievous Mina, crouched and invisible, has slipped down his trousers and boxer shorts, then runs her incisors over his penis before taking him in more fully. So it is that, a few minutes later and without interrupting garrulous Widow Chabert, who is now talking weather forecasts, Laurent ejaculates inside Mina’s welcoming mouth.

While tasting his admittedly bitter, but protein-rich sperm, Mina doesn’t really give a damn about being at one extreme of the food chain.

Mina and Niels. As soon as Mina, a temp secretary in the Paris office of Searson & Wilman & Partners, answers the telephone (with her left hand), she recognizes the vice-chairman’s voice. But she still does not release (from her right hand) the testicles of young Niels, who has recently been promoted to senior associate and whom she is gratifying through his flannel trousers. Quite naturally, she changes hands to note down an important telephone number with her blue ballpoint. She is neither gauche nor left-handed.

In a few hours’ time, Niels will learn that “the Lotus” is not just a sports car and that his marriage plans with Gertrud Wilman have fallen through for good.

Niels and Oriane. Because “Junkie” was too nervy this morning, Niels has mounted “Jade,” a three-year-old bay mare. At the end of his ride, Oriane is awaiting him, leaning against a tree. Her hand has slipped down across her belly, pushing into her mane and stroking the silvery pearl concealed within. As her blood pounds in her diaphanous temples, she emits a raucous gasp, and a spasm of pleasure quivers through her. Then, she throws herself onto Niels, unexpectedly grabs his index finger, and closes her crimson lips upon it, sucking avidly, while panting with desire.

Stunned by this festival of literary clichés, Niels thinks that Oriane is a dead-ringer for an oil painting by some artist or other whose name currently escapes him.

Oriane and Philippe. The Limoges-Paris midnight express is rattling through the night. In carriage 12 (first class), which is almost empty, the charming Philippe — with a golf handicap of five — is intrusively kissing his neighbor Oriane, after making her laugh with a dumb joke: “I’ve just won the Condom Open. . it’s a golf tournament, of course.” He starts stroking her naked thigh, before working up little by little toward her panties.

Philippe thinks how much kisses are like pickles in a jar. Once you manage to extract the first one, the others come out of their own accord.

Philippe and Qiu. The din of Shanghai fails to reach the twenty-third floor of the Hilton where Philippe, in room 2412, is kneeling on the thick carpet while licking with skill the delighted vulvae of Qiu, her legs spread across the bed. He then reaches out to stroke her breasts, in no way regretful about having provided them with a few extra centimeters. This position is also quite good for soothing tennis elbow.

Given that you need at least seven different clubs and nine holes to play golf, Philippe wonders: does this prove the superiority of golf over sex, or vice versa?

Qiu and Rémy. The bedroom window of Villa Luciana looks out over the blue sky, wheat fields, and cypresses of a Tuscan landscape. Wearing just shirts, Qiu and Rémy are lying on a white cotton sheet. On her Finnish-brand cell phone, Qiu composes a haiku text message for her husband, who has been away on a business trip to Dublin for the past two weeks. She punctuates each word, abbreviations included, with a kiss on Rémy’s still-damp penis. He’s humming a Haydn air and fingering the delicate hairs of her jade-colored, oriental pubis.

If, at that moment, Rémy could see inside Qiu’s belly, the first thing he’d say would be: “It’s a boy!”

Rémy and Sofia. The metro leaves the “Plaisance” station in Paris (line 13) with a roar, but without blonde Sofia managing to convince Rémy about the enormous absurdity of the Freudian notion of “penis envy” in little girls. Given such obvious lack of good faith, she drops the subject, sticks out her sharp pink tongue and abruptly slips her little finger into Rémy’s mouth. He instinctively parts his lips.

Sofia decides not to tell Rémy that women may not have penises, but this means that they do not — unlike you — spend their lives wondering if they’re well-endowed enough.

Sofia and Terence. The rumbling of the New York City — Philadelphia Greyhound is deafening at the back of the bus, which is almost empty. The diesel engine covers Terence’s groans of pleasure: he’s sitting, with his jeans round his knees, a Columbia University T-shirt hiked up over his chest, while penetrating Sofia, who’s in his lecture course and wriggling crazily as she straddles him. Any desire to urinate has utterly disappeared.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah!” he groans. If people have two ears and just one mouth, it’s because the latter tends to spout twice too much.

Terence and Ursula. On the patio of a penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson, dessert is being served. Terence is going on about how awful it is that young psychiatrists have stopped using hypnosis. Opposite him, Ursula, a slender and beautiful black woman, with cropped and dyed-blonde hair, stretches out her leg and wriggles her naked foot up between his thighs. Slowly, her deft toes open his fly buttons one by one, before rummaging inside in search of his suddenly swelling penis. Terence had no idea that such virtuosity was possible.

Losing his concentration, he tells the dinner guests that “the penis is an island” while “sexuality is a continent.” In other words, garbage.

Ursula and Vincent. In the bedroom of a two-star hotel in the tenth arrondissement of Paris, Vincent and Ursula are lying naked on their sides, head to toe. The bedspread is decorated with red fleurs-de-lis, and the window looks out over the tracks of the Gare du Nord, where the 1:29 train (it’s late) to Compiègne is passing alongside the Thalys from Brussels. Vincent slips his head between the young marketing director’s ebony thighs and starts to separate her pink labia gently. As for her mouth, it is just beside his erect penis. Though Ursula knows what is expected from her, she is still dithering about what to do next.

Ursula does not realize that, confronted by his swollen member, she now has the reptilian gaze of a crocodile in a tanner’s workshop.

Vincent and Wendy. Unafraid of the prowling, man-eating sharks (if the warning signs along the beach of Acapulco are to be believed) Wendy and Vincent have strayed far out into the Pacific, while still remaining in their depth. Vincent is kissing her young, hardening nipples; she is squeezing her charming “Frenchie” against her, while kneading his muscular buttocks and sticking her left index finger into his anus almost brutally. His eyes light up at once in astonishment.