La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams

1

At the café

M.K. is visiting my apartment. She brings a glass of water from the shower to the kitchen and pours it on a black coffee table. The water spreads out without spilling over, making the surface of the table shine like an instant oil slick.

2

Dampierre. The guests are gathering in the dining room. Z. comes down, looking stunningly pretty. I lead her into a small room, narrow as a passageway. I tell her I’m going to leave her. She says:

“I’m still going to give you a”

(the noun escapes me: tribute, diploma, secret, tablet). She places a necklace around my neck.

3

I am in a bed with P. We’re actually in a café, with a fairly large number of people, but nobody is surprised to see us in bed, nor are we bothered by it. Still, I tell myself, it’s curious to make love in a café; even if we furl ourselves in the sheets as much as we can, you can still see the movement of the covers. Anyway, we begin a complicated gymnastics of undressing. It’s simple enough for me, but for P. it’s much trickier.

At one point she gets up and unhooks her bra. Her breasts are swollen and purple, spangled with stains, or rather with hematomata from exceptionally voracious suction, prolonged and repeated. I am jealous of the man who did this to her.

She rises, gets out of the bed wearing nothing but a transparent T-shirt, goes to put a record on the player and announces the song to the people in the café, then goes into a slightly more discreet corner, takes off her T-shirt and comes back to bed, hiding most of her breasts and privates with her arms and the bit of fabric.

Now someone serves us food on a long table alongside our bed, where two diners are already seated. They toss us a menu: appetizers, entrée and dessert. I order only a steak. They put in front of me a very strange dish, telling me it’s an appetizer, then that no, it’s a dessert for the diner at the end of the table. My steak arrives, but it looks terrible.