Hervé Le Tellier - The Sextine Chapel

Does Xavier realize that some people are willing to spend $4.50 a minute to hear such things? Though there are discounts for loyal customers.

Elvire and Laurent. Two o’ clock in the morning: the television is broadcasting the next day’s schedule again and again. Laurent, curled up behind Elvire, is stroking her clitoris with his finger, while insinuating his penis, which is still seeking full rigidity, into her slightly sore vagina. They have made love so many times this evening that this attempt may well not succeed. Then the remote control tumbles off the bed, switching the image to a porno film featuring actors in far finer fettle than the two of them.

Where had Elvire read that pornographic films multiply by four hundred the number of asses you see in a lifetime? Yes, but, she thinks, 63 % of all statistics are false.

Laurent and Sofia. It is stiflingly hot. Lying on a cotton duvet in a three-room apartment in the southern suburbs of Paris, furnished by a Swedish manufacturer, Laurent and Sofia are rubbing their gleaming, agile bodies against each other. Laurent finds Sofia extremely exciting, but also as smelly and sweaty as a cyclist. She suddenly shifts away from him and goes down on his member, which she takes in her mouth and sucks energetically. To their mutual surprise, he comes between her lips only seconds later, with a jet of sperm as quick as a bumblebee’s flight.

Sofia tells him, with a certain pride, that her tongue piercing heightens men’s sensations during fellatio. Laurent feels rather disorientated.

Sofia and Zach. Lying on the teak deck of an elegant yacht, Sofia has spread her tanned thighs. Rocked by the gentle swell of the Aegean Sea, she surrenders herself to Zach, who is stroking her clitoris with a gently precise fingertip. When he notices signs of imminent orgasm in Sofia’s breathing, Zach whispers his Bataille citation into her ear: “The sexual act is to time what the tiger is to space,” which he still does not understand. She gently gauges his penis in her hand.

“You call that a tiger?” Sofia replies quite simply, either playfully or cruelly, who knows? And who, Zach wonders, said that in sexagenarian, there is still sex?

Zach and Galata. In his Epigrams , Martial wrote: nemo est, Thai, senex ad irrumandum (no one is too old, Thai, to be sucked off). Perhaps not, but on the patio of this superb country house in the Lubéron, Galata’s heroic efforts are having no effect on Zach’s member, which remains more like a noodle than a triumphant totem pole. She gives it a final kiss, before diving into the (guitar-shaped) pool, while Zach, to lighten up the atmosphere, tells her his joke about “A new drug, called Viazac, ever heard of it?”

It’s half Viagra™ and half Prozac™: you don’t get a hard-on but you don’t give a damn. Galata laughs politely; she’s already heard it.

Galata and Niels. In the sauna which Niels has had installed in his Soho apartment, Galata is glistening with sweat and presenting her buttocks to him, while he strokes them, kisses them, and, after a long moment of hesitation, separates her two globes so as to rim her backdoor, the one-eyed beast, the artists’ entrance, the evening star, the maw, in other words that violet carnation famously celebrated by Rimbaud.

If my sex life became public knowledge, Niels thinks, then everyone would be horrified. He supposes that everybody probably thinks the same thing, but this fails to reassure him.

Niels and Ursula. The convent, which survived the great Lisbon earthquake of 1666, is now a charming hotel. In the “Ambassador” suite, Ursula’s chocolate-brown skin is being set off by the whiteness of the sheet across the four-poster bed. Her dark hand brushes against Niels’s forehead, with its slightly receding hairline. She was born in California, and tells him that the name comes from calor , heat, and fornia , fornication, so it means “ hot sex country .” He finds this rather dubious.

Then he explains to her that the avocado takes it name from the Spanish aguacate, derived in turn from the Mayan ahuacatl, which means testicle; she doesn’t believe him either.

Ursula and Ben. On a lemon-yellow Japanese motorcycle, Ursula and Ben are speeding through the night towards Bâton Rouge. Ursula, sitting behind Ben, is hugging him. Suddenly, she takes off her gloves, unzips him and starts stroking his penis, which is both dangerous and not especially easy, given her position. She nevertheless succeeds. It is the first time that Ursula has had a lover as black as she is but, of course, at this time of night, and from where she is sitting, sex is color-blind.

The position is not a very good one for Ben, who is already so tormented by a rather irrational complex that he has bought a “penis enlarger” on the Web (an utter fraud, by the way).

Ben and Irma. Irma willingly admits that the idea is rather crazy. At dusk, she has taken Ben out onto the zinc roof of her apartment block in Montmartre. There, lying on a blanket, they stare at the night lights of Paris. The wind raises her cotton skirt, revealing her naked pink buttocks between which Ben gently slides one finger, then two. Irma groans and arches her back so as offer herself more easily to her lover. Ben vaguely feels that this is not the right time to admit that he gets vertigo.

All of this staging, Irma thinks, is a bit over the top. And anyway, when you actually act out a sexual fantasy, is it still a fantasy?

Irma and Philippe. On the snowy balcony of a Zermatt chalet, Philippe, in boxer shorts and thick socks, is trying to even out his tan in the high-altitude sun. Irma is moving her hand up and down his swelling member. Before Philippe, she had never been with a circumcised man, and she is amazed by the particular texture of the skin around the glans. Speaking so softly that Philippe cannot hear her, she suddenly whispers something to his penis — which cannot believe its ears.

Irma quoted Mao Ze Dong: “There are no straight roads in the world.” “And no straight dicks either,” Jiang Qing, his wife, would sometimes add.

Philippe and Wendy. It’s battle stations at the office: Wendy has had to cancel her Sunday squash match with Karin. But this technical translation — which was supposedly urgent — has not progressed very much: Philippe is holding his young trainee against the thick windowpane overlooking Neuilly and the river Seine, and his hand, after kneading her buttocks, has slipped beneath her cotton panties as far as her fine blond hairs. “Ass, dick, finger, come what may!” as Prévert used to say. But nothing much does come, because her clitoris is far from Philippe’s finger and showing how elusive it can be.

Wendy decides to guide Philippe. For the clumsy, the clitoris is the Rubik’s Cube of sex: they can fiddle around with it for hours without getting anywhere.

Wendy and Dennis. The electric door of the garage closes automatically. Wendy groans: “I’m not going to make love on the front seat of a car!” To which Dennis replies: “OK, we’ll use the backseat then,” and this argument overcomes the pretty brunette’s principles. Thus, leaning on the central armrest, she is now receiving his attentions. He takes her from behind vigorously, belly against buttocks. At first she nibbles the leather, then starts yelling, although bellowing might be a more appropriate term.

All these cries, all these pointless cries, it’s something that annoys Dennis even more than people who talk during a play.

Dennis and Katia. Beneath a painting depicting the almost Stendhal-inspired anagram by Jean Dupuy, Katia and Dennis are testing the solidity of an easy chair. Without taking off the skirt of her suit, this middle-aged lady has spread her thighs on the armrests, and is being penetrated by the young man, whose trousers have just slipped down over his socks. For the first time, Katia feels that the fear of revealing her aging body outweighs her desire to excite her lover. Tears of terror run down her cheeks.