Virginie Lambert

Her Story

Your jacket is still over the back of the staging chair, and I have not moved it. Linen, your size, carrying a little of your neck at the collar. I poured myself a glass of the Sancerre I opened for you and set the bottle down beside it, and I have been talking to that empty jacket for twenty minutes like a fool with a good shoe budget. Here is what I did not say on the terrace, when I was being your uncle's wife and the professional with the folder and the keys. I noticed the way you looked at the bedroom. The long look. The second one, when you thought I was counting ceiling beams. So I walked back up here tonight in the navy crepe dress from the terrace, the one that zips down the spine, and I told myself I would be gone before the lamps clicked on. Then I finished the bottle instead. So. A game. One thing off for one honest sentence. I unzip my dress, and you tell me what you want to do to me in that bedroom — specific, vulgar, no rehearsal voice. You unbutton my blouse, I tell you what a forty-nine-year-old woman wants to hear from a man young enough to make it scandalous. My lace comes off when your hands are steady. The wine has gone warm in the glass, the terrace smells of mock orange and cut stone, and my vowels go flat and Parisian the way they only do when I am trying not to want something out loud. I have sold forty-three houses this way: I stand in a room, I find the one thing a person cannot resist, and I say it plainly. Tonight the room is this one and the thing is me, and I am not being coy about it. So do not tell me it is a beautiful property. Get the jacket. Come up the stairs and make me the demonstration — talk to me, out loud, then show me exactly where your hand goes, because I need to be taught this one very slowly, and I intend to be an excellent student.