Stéphane

Stéphane is Emma’s older lover and confidant, but not the uncomplicated partner she longs to make of him. Their relationship oscillates between awkwardness in public, powerful intimacy in bed, and separation that leaves Emma unsure whether she has been loved or merely allowed close for a moment. His presence also becomes a measure of her changing life: when she enters Le Manège, his earlier dismissal of her bravado returns as an uncomfortable contrast to the risks she is actually taking.

Identity and Background

Stéphane visits Emma in Berlin, where their difference in age and outlook shapes even their quietest encounters. Emma considers the possibility that the book she is trying to write began years earlier, or in the aftermath of losing Joseph, but also imagines its beginning as a winter night with Stéphane asleep beside her. He takes most of the blanket and snores heavily; the domestic irritation unsettles her romantic expectations. His age, audible in the snoring, becomes more than a passing annoyance: Emma wonders whether she has once again mistaken what she needs, and whether she might need someone her own age instead.

That thought does not erase her love for Stéphane. Rather, it makes the relationship’s contradictions harder to evade. Emma imagines the two of them as worlds separated not by distance but by time, as if no ordinary effort could make them fully coincide. She feels that he does not regard her as a woman in the same way she wants to be regarded, while she worries that she lacks the polish and hauteur of women who seem more at ease with male desire. Their age difference is visible to her not just as a number but as an unequal distribution of experience, confidence, and authority.

A Relationship of Distance and Intimacy

When Stéphane and Emma walk or dine together, they seem poorly matched despite sharing certain views and a similar sensibility. Emma dresses in a way that could make her seem like his daughter, partly to avoid looking like an escort accompanying a client. Stéphane is brusque, keeps the manner of someone suspended between friend and lover, and does not kiss or embrace her in public. Emma initially reads this restraint as a matter of consideration for others, then fears it may mean that he simply does not want that kind of closeness with her.

Their time outside together can leave them both tense. Stéphane finds their walks too long; Emma’s questions and uninterrupted talking, driven by shyness and fear that he will be bored, may overwhelm rather than entertain him. She is left to wonder whether he, too, longs for solitude in her company, even as she longs for solitude of her own. At the same time, she regrets not having been more tender or understanding and not having made him fall in love with her. Their partings therefore bring relief from the strain of trying to perform a relationship, but also the familiar regret that it might have been different.

In bed, the distance briefly changes shape. Emma describes their bodies as reaching a kind of serenity away from the eyes of the world, though the peace is interrupted when Stéphane begins to snore. During sex, he says her name with a tenderness that lets her imagine an intimacy beyond the age difference; afterward, he lies with his head between her breasts, then looks at her while stroking her hair. In those moments she can believe that they are wholly together. Yet she also sees perplexity in his eyes at the idea that pleasure could have come from her, the young woman she fears he will never love. The scene’s closeness is real, but it is brief and bounded: they can seem to understand each other in silence, only for that fragile state to disappear by morning.

Emma’s reflections make this intimacy neither a simple deception nor a secure romance. She calls it love, but locates its clearest expression in a small, temporary interval: the aftermath of sex, before sleep restores them to their separate places. Her urge to talk threatens that interval, because she wants to explain that there is a moment when they love each other while sensing that words might break the understanding she has found. Physical closeness grants her a powerful image of herself, but does not settle the emotional question that governs their relationship.

Berlin Visits and Unmatched Expectations

On a snowy walk along Danziger Strasse, Stéphane appears unusually cheerful. The snow makes the purposeless walk laborious, but he has enjoyed breakfast cake and the shops, and earlier smiled while they were going up Kastanienallee. In the middle of a silence Emma finds less uncomfortable than expected, he tells her that he could live in Berlin. His remark gives her pleasure, though she immediately notes that the weather—and, more decisively, his work—could prevent it. His momentary openness offers a glimpse of shared possibility without changing the practical distance between their lives.

The visit’s everyday details reinforce the gap. Stéphane can be delighted by a city that Emma herself knows she may lose her way in within a few hundred metres; he can also refuse to walk farther when she has no definite destination, or grow impatient when she loses track of street numbers. Emma imagines him returning by plane as a rough, older man who fills her room with groans and takes the whole blanket, yet who can say her name during sex in a way that makes her feel loved. Neither image cancels the other. His tenderness is concentrated in private, while age, impatience, and mismatched habits return as soon as the moment passes.

Le Manège and Long-Distance Confidences

Five months before Emma first mentions Le Manège to him, she and Stéphane had crossed Skalitzerstrasse while discussing prostitution. Emma had referred to an article about women in Paris who, under suitable management, might see eight to ten clients a day, and boasted that she could manage it. Stéphane answered that she did not know what she was talking about, that ten men was a great deal, and that she would not last two days in a brothel. Emma later recognizes that she does not know how much bravado drove her into the work. Stéphane, she suspects, still sees her as an unpredictable young woman governed by her hormones, and must have felt guilty when he learned that she had entered a brothel without a chaperone.

After a frightening experience at Le Manège, Emma considers telling him that her limits were reached not by being overwhelmed by sex but through a conversation with a Greek cocaine user. She imagines that the news would make Stéphane panic and tell her never to return to a brothel. She fears that even a tremor in his voice could destroy the defiance she has managed to preserve. His importance to her here lies partly in the way he can discuss brothel work as work, without turning it into an immediate reason for alarm; she does not want to lose that response by revealing how frightened she has been.

Instead, Emma messages him while he is beginning his day in London. She pictures him after a shower, smoking and typing, then learns that he is writing back and asks whether she is returning from work. As he rides his bicycle—something he took up at fifty-six, and in England—his breath over the phone makes her feel the world grow lighter. She tells him small stories, choosing details charming or funny enough to sustain the image of her as a literate young prostitute who can command a brothel. His laughter restores her courage and motivation to write: the book can contain what she has not told him because she feared worrying him, and the Greek man will seem smaller once she has made him part of a page.

Emma also lets the information about serious cocaine trafficking at Le Manège pass indirectly into the conversation. She reasons that if she disappears, Stéphane may then know where to look. The thought reveals how the same relationship that offers reassurance also sits beside her awareness of danger: she protects him from the full account, seeks his ordinary laughter, and quietly leaves a clue. At the close of these episodes, Stéphane is neither a rescuer who removes the risks nor a distant figure irrelevant to them. He is the person whose response can steady Emma, even as she decides what to withhold and turns her experience into writing.