Bold As Love (instrumental)

“Bold As Love (instrumental)” is a recurring musical cue whose placement near the book’s ending accompanies a shift from paid intimacy as a profession to the narrator’s doubts about her position within its stories. The title’s repetition gives the instrumental a structural role: it marks a point of return just as the narrator considers the limits of her own perspective.

Appearances and Placement

The cue appears twice in succession late in the book, immediately before the narrator reflects that working on the book makes her wonder whether she chose the wrong side of the story—or, more precisely, not the most interesting one. It returns again among the final music listings, close to the book’s acknowledgments. These placements make the title a frame around the closing reconsideration: first at the threshold of the narrator’s self-questioning, then again as the book approaches its end.

Intimacy as Performance and Exchange

The passages surrounding the cue repeatedly unsettle the distinction between paid performance and genuine feeling. In an earlier argument, Stéphane challenges the notion that a sex worker’s performance is effortless, distinguishing the narrator’s earlier Paris work—money for luxuries—from work that pays for rent and groceries. The disagreement turns on what it means to convincingly offer an illusion, and who bears the effort of producing it. The cue’s recurrence near the ending resonates with this unresolved tension between performed roles and the feelings that exceed them.

That boundary also blurs in the narrator’s encounters with clients. Heiko follows Lotte after her shift, hoping she will treat their meeting as a chance encounter, even though his presence outside the Maison makes the pretense transparent. His visit exposes how a client can seek a relationship beyond the paid appointment; Lotte, meanwhile, has struggled to refuse him, caught between tenderness at his happiness and anger at his expectation. The scene gives concrete form to the book’s wider concern with the emotional claims that gather around a commercial arrangement.

The narrator encounters the same mismatch when Mark visits her at home. She insists that he should have had the decency to say he wanted only sex, rather than letting her expect conversation. His eventual admission that he misses the physical side of their connection clarifies the gap between what she hoped the visit might mean and what he wanted from it. Here, money does not simply establish a clear boundary: expectations formed around intimacy can cross that boundary in incompatible ways.

The Returning Client and the Limits of the Transaction

After more than nine months at the Maison, the narrator notices that her schedule is full largely with familiar clients rather than newcomers. At 160 euros an hour, the price helps explain why men may prefer the known encounter to the risk of disappointment elsewhere. What begins as repeat custom, however, can become a stable relationship: some clients have been seeing her for more than six months, and she greets them with increasing fluency in German.

The narrator names specific departures from professional anonymity. After eight months of meetings, Lorenz knows her real name, Robert has read her book, and Jochen has her telephone number. Her kisses, too, have lost some of their professional indifference. The fee still appears to separate these relationships from an affair, but she describes that separation as a deceptive barrier: payment confines the connection to an agreed time even as familiarity and attachment give it substance.

Her account of Theodore complicates the pattern further. After six months, she no longer dwells on his mediocre appearance; his tenderness, humor, patience, and attentiveness in bed have made him sympathetic to her. He is a biologist who travels alone around Germany and brings back cuttings of unfamiliar plants. Because she knows his friends’ names but no women in his social circle, she wonders whether she has become the closest thing he has to a girlfriend. She also worries that their paid relationship might reinforce his belief that love is unavailable without payment. For her, the transaction does not prevent intimacy so much as make its meaning harder to determine.

The Closing Reversal

The narrator says the moments she prefers come after sex: clients talk, laugh, touch her sides, comment on her music, and tell her about the pleasures and sorrows of their week. She belongs to these details without quite belonging to the lives they describe. That formulation sharpens the book’s central contradiction: money is supposed to keep people at a distance, yet the repeated encounter creates a limited but consequential closeness.

In the closing reflection beside the final recurrence of “Bold As Love (instrumental),” the narrator imagines that she should have been a man—and, in this particular story, a client. She fantasizes about experiencing the profession from the other side, with the same female mind in the body of a young man, and imagines she would have been an exceptional client. The cue thus accompanies no neat resolution or promised romance. Instead, its return marks the narrator’s recognition that the story’s position from which she has been writing may not be the one that most fascinates her: the professional observer is also a participant in the attachments she is trying to understand.