Lorenz

Lorenz is a regular client whose relationship with the narrator makes the boundary between paid sex and emotional intimacy increasingly difficult to maintain. Their connection is measured in repeated visits and a fee, yet over time he shares news of his private life with her, and she responds not with professional distance but with an intimacy that surprises her. His disclosure that his girlfriend is pregnant with twins becomes the clearest instance of the affection and complications accumulated inside the transaction.

Identity and Place in the Narrator’s Work

After more than nine months working at La Maison, the narrator finds that her schedule is full mostly with familiar clients, not new ones. Lorenz is among the men whose names and faces have become part of that recurring pattern. The house’s varied selection may appear to offer men a succession of different partners, but her experience is less a procession of strangers than a return to the same people. She greets returning clients in increasingly fluent German, and the work’s repetition gives some encounters the ease of recognition.

Lorenz’s relationship with her has lasted for months. The narrator says that after eight months he knows her real name; elsewhere she describes seeing him for more than six months. These durations register the persistence of the connection, while the fee seems to preserve its official limits. She frames the arrangement as one in which men pay for a mistress, and, more specifically, pay to see the same woman again. The transaction supplies a boundary, but it also enables the repeated meetings that gradually make the boundary harder to believe.

A Paid Relationship That Acquires Personal Knowledge

The narrator’s account of regular clients shows how money does not necessarily make a relationship emotionally negligible. Lorenz knows her real name, while another client has read her book and another has her telephone number; such details mark different forms of personal access rather than a single uniform intimacy. In Lorenz’s case, the repeated meetings bring him into the narrator’s emotional life even as the payment continues to define the encounter as work.

She describes the hour as costing 160 euros and observes that this price can make a familiar client reluctant to risk disappointment elsewhere. Habit, familiarity, and the desire for a known experience help explain why men return. But the narrator does not treat this as a purely commercial calculation: their stable connection has lasted long enough for the money to seem less like a clean separation than a misleading barrier against attachment. The same payment that names the relationship as an exchange cannot prevent the people in it from becoming significant to one another.

The narrator’s reflections on clients also distinguish sex from the time that follows it. After the sexual work is over, she values the talking and laughter, the touch, the music they comment on, and the accounts they give of their weeks, their satisfactions, and their sorrows. She becomes part of these men’s lives without quite belonging to them. Lorenz’s later disclosure takes place within precisely this uneasy in-between: a paid relationship, but one in which he trusts her with news about a pregnancy and she experiences his confidence as emotionally consequential.

The Pregnancy Disclosure

In December, after they have had sex, the narrator complains about the approaching Christmas holidays and the obligations of family, gifts, meals, and celebration. She tries to bring Lorenz over to her side of the complaint. Instead, with his arms crossed behind his head and his eyes fixed on the small red light above them, he smiles and says, “I think it’s going to be a good Christmas.” When she asks why, he replies, “My girlfriend’s pregnant.” His cheeks have suddenly turned pink.

The narrator reacts as though the announcement were being made within a much closer relationship. She feels an upsurge of euphoria, compares the moment to a woman telling her husband that she is pregnant, and blurts out her disbelief. Lorenz’s news is not merely a piece of background information: it unsettles the categories that are meant to keep client and sex worker apart. The narrator finds herself sharing his joy, though she is neither his partner nor a member of his family.

The pregnancy is complicated, and Lorenz’s girlfriend must remain lying down for six months because she is carrying twins. The narrator sees that Lorenz is somewhat uncomfortable being with her rather than at his girlfriend’s bedside. Their sexual encounters are, at this point, gentle and cautious, shaped by the danger that even a small movement might threaten the lives of the two fetuses. The scene therefore holds tenderness beside an uncomfortable fact: while his pregnant girlfriend is confined to bed, Lorenz is spending time with the narrator.

Intimacy, Infidelity, and the Narrator’s Interpretation

The pregnancy disclosure recalls an earlier story the narrator heard in Paris from a married man. On the night his first child was born, he left the clinic overwhelmed by love and anxiety, bought wine, and went to the apartment of his mistress rather than sharing the moment with friends. He admitted that he had wondered whether he was behaving like a bastard, but said he had felt so much love that he needed to share it with someone. Asked whether his infidelity might have come from fear, he agreed that he had been terrified by the love he felt.

That earlier story gives the narrator a way to consider Lorenz’s situation without reducing it to a simple moral label. She imagines that fatherhood can bring both love and fear, and that an affair may coexist with a man’s devotion to his family. Her interpretation does not make the contradiction disappear: it brings into view the possibility that a man can feel real tenderness and still betray the person who is most exposed to the consequences. In Lorenz’s case, the narrator recognizes his awkwardness about being with her while his girlfriend’s complicated pregnancy keeps her at home.

The narrator also considers the wider economic arrangement that makes such encounters available. A brothel can function, she suggests, as a paid mistress for bourgeois couples: the cost of a visit may be lower than the combined expenses of a hotel, champagne, dinner, and gifts, while payment gives a married man a ready explanation if he is discovered. Lorenz’s disclosure makes that account more than a general observation. The narrator is not simply an anonymous service in his life; she is someone to whom he tells important news. Yet the fee remains part of the relationship, both its practical structure and the defense that can make its emotional reality seem deniable.

Narrative Significance

Lorenz is presented through the narrator’s reflections on regular clients, but his importance emerges most sharply in the contrast between what the relationship is called and what it comes to contain. He pays for time with her; over months he also comes to know her real name, and she shares in his happiness at the news that his girlfriend is expecting children. The narrator neither claims that the arrangement is ordinary romance nor treats money as proof that no genuine feeling exists. Instead, their encounters show how a commercial boundary can organize intimacy without erasing it.

His pregnancy announcement also gathers the book’s tensions around fidelity, dependence, and emotional exchange into a single scene. Lorenz’s happiness is sincere in the moment as the narrator perceives it, but it exists alongside his absence from his girlfriend during a dangerous pregnancy. The narrator’s own response is tender and implicated: she feels the joy of the announcement as if it were addressed to a spouse, while knowing that her place in Lorenz’s life is made possible by payment. The gap between those positions is not resolved. It is precisely what makes Lorenz’s relationship with her revealing.