I found a letter from P in a file of invoices from the eighties. A large white sheet of paper folded in four. Semen stains had made the paper yellow and stiff and had given it a transparent and grainy texture. All he had written, in the top right corner, was ‘Paris, 11 May, 1984, 23.20, Friday’. It is all I have left of this man.

I met P, a publicist, a few weeks after my mother was admitted to hospital in a severely disturbed state. Her condition deteriorated with each passing day and she had suddenly become an old woman. I wondered how I was going to endure it. I would leave the hospital in a kind of stupor, putting on music, a tape or the radio with the volume turned all the way up, it was the time of Scorpions and ‘Still Loving You’.

P called me for I no-longer-remember-what project. His voice on the phone unsettled me, and I felt a desire to see him. But when I caught sight of him, already seated at the table in the restaurant on rue de Rome where we had agreed to meet, he appeared tired and quite ordinary, probably close to fifty. I felt it had been a mistake to accept the lunch date. I would never sleep with him, no matter how much I longed for a man, as I did then. Even though his voice and conversation, at once brilliant and aggressive, appealed to me, I made up my mind never to see him again when we parted. But later that night I was astonished by the violent urge to give myself an orgasm while thinking of him.

So when he rang a few days later to invite me to the Roberto Matta exhibition at Beaubourg I did not turn him down. With P, as often happens when I begin to desire a man, I wanted to make love as soon as possible to end the wait that keeps one from thinking of anything else and recovering a sense of calm.

When the day came, we had lunch at the restaurant on the rue de Rome and visited the Matta exhibition – nothing more. All we did was kiss in the taxi on the way back to the Gare Saint-Lazare. On the commuter train, angry and discouraged, I thought of how I would have to wait some more, see my sick mother a few times more, before getting laid (to use the expression I use only with myself ).

Over the following week, P contrived to make my desire unbearable with repeated phone calls in which he talked about his own desire. I received his proposal to meet for an hour at noon to make love in a hotel in the Opéra district – a time and place convenient to his work and which did not conflict with his obligations as a married man – as a deliverance.

After a silent, almost tense lunch, we took a cab which halted on a small and busy street between rue de la Paix and avenue de l’Opéra. The hotel we entered had a no vacancy sign hanging in the foyer. A man appeared and P had a quiet word with him while I stood aside. The man motioned for us to go upstairs. On the first floor, a middle-aged woman appeared in the dark hallway, and I saw that P was giving her money. She opened the door of a room and discreetly withdrew. It was windowless and gave onto a little sitting room which overlooked the street. The bed was covered in fake fur and surrounded by mirrors. I remember that we found ourselves naked in less than a minute and that he made me come with a gentleness and skill which for me have not been equalled since on any first time with a lover. The woman with shining eyes I saw in the mirror, just as I was leaving, did not seem to be myself. I touched my hair. A strand was damp with semen. We had been in that room for barely an hour.

Afterwards, all I wanted was to get home quickly. On the suburban train, I felt the strand of hair – dry now, matted and stiff – brush against my cheek. I wanted to forget that afternoon and the man who had taken me to a hotel that obviously rented rooms for paid sex or, at any rate, for clandestine affairs. In my state of fatigue and satiation, I was certain I would never want to sleep with him again. But by evening, I no longer saw any reason for leaving him: my sole desire was to sleep with him again.