The Possibility of an Island Read Free Page B

there is no one to put in my place. I am, very precisely, irreplaceable.”
    She frowned and looked at me; dawn had now broken, and I saw her breasts moving to the rhythm of her breath. I felt like taking one of them in my mouth, sucking it, and emptying my mind; but I told myself I should let her reflect a bit. That didn’t take her more than thirty seconds; she really was an intelligent girl.
    “It’s true,” she said. “There’s a completely abnormal frankness about you. I don’t know if it’s owing to a particular event in your life, a consequence of your education, or what; but there is no chance that the phenomenon could reproduce itself in the same generation. In fact, people need you more than you need them—people of my age, at least. In a few years’ time, that’ll all change. You know the magazine I work for: all we’re trying to do is create an artificial mankind, a frivolous one that will no longer be open to seriousness or to humor, which, until it dies, will engage in an increasingly desperate quest for
fun
and sex; a generation of definitive
kids.
We are going to succeed, of course; and, in that world, you will no longer have your place. But I suppose it’s not too bad, you must have had time to put some money away.”
    “Six million euros.”
    I had replied, automatically, without even thinking; there was another question that had been pestering me for several minutes. “Your magazine…Actually, I don’t resemble your readership at all. I am cynical, bitter, I can only interest people who are a bit inclined toward doubt, people who already feel that they’ve reached the end of the line; this interview can’t fit in with your editorial policy.”
    “That’s true,” she said calmly, with an astonishing calm when I thought about it later—she was so transparent and so frank, with no talent for lying. “There won’t be any interview; it was just a pretext for meeting you.”
    She was looking me straight in the eye, and I was in such a state that her words alone were enough to give me a hard-on. I think that she was moved by such a sentimental, such a human erection; she stretched out beside me, placed her head upon my shoulder, and began to jerk me off slowly, squeezing my sex and my balls. I relaxed, and gave myself to her caress. She lived in the sixteenth arrondissement, at the top of Passy; in the distance an aboveground metro was crossing the Seine. Day was beginning, the murmur of traffic was becoming louder; sperm spurted on her breasts. I took her in my arms.
    “Isabelle,” I said into her ear. “I would like you to tell me how you came to work for this magazine.”
    “It’s been hardly a year,
Lolita
is only at issue fourteen. I stayed a very long time at
20 Ans,
I occupied all the posts; Evelyne, the editor-in-chief, relied completely upon me. At the end, just before the magazine was bought up, she made me assistant editor-in-chief; it was the least she could do; for ten years I had been doing all the work in her place. That didn’t stop her hating me; I remember the hatred in her eyes when she handed me Lajoinie’s invitation. You know who Lajoinie is, does that ring any bells?”
    “Vaguely something…”
    “Yes, he’s not that well known to the general public. He was a shareholder of
20 Ans,
a minority shareholder, but he is the one who pushed for the sale; an Italian group bought it. Obviously, Evelyne was fired; the Italians were prepared to keep me, but Lajoinie inviting me to brunch at his house on a Sunday morning could only mean he had something else in mind for me; Evelyne could sense this, of course, and that’s what made her mad with rage. He was living in Le Marais, just by the Place des Vosges. Still, when I arrived, I was shocked: there was Karl Lagerfeld, Naomi Campbell, Tom Cruise, Jade Jagger, Björk…in other words, not the type of people I was used to meeting.”
    “Wasn’t he the one who created that gay magazine that’s doing very