Un Homme à Tout Faire

CW: Sexual coercion

Predators don’t lurk in dark corners with glistening horns and sharpened talons. They parade in broad daylight, wearing cashmere and expensive eau de parfum. 

Mine spoke with a buttery-smooth French accent, and placed temptation insidiously in my path.

My first encounter with the elusive Madame de Froberville was in the doorway of her lavish home, where she greeted me in kitten heels and a black negligé that left little to the imagination.

But it was the dark crimson stain on her hands that rooted me to the front step.

“Entre, mon garçon,” she said, as though expecting me. The cigarette dangling from her fulsome lips made smoke tendrils that coiled through the air before she disappeared down the hall. 

Perhaps if I hadn’t been fresh out of high school and in need of a job, I would have had the sense to get out of there. Instead, I willed my frozen limbs to move and followed those curling tendrils, like a fish lured by glimmering bait. Behind me, the solid oak door closed with a groan.

For weeks, I had observed the property. Peeking through hedges while tending to the neighbouring lawns. But for all its opulence and grand façades—white marbled exteriors and sprawling, manicured grounds—the de Froberville manor told a startlingly different story once you crossed its threshold. 

The smell struck me first. Musty and laced with the sourness of week-old alcohol and stale tobacco. Beneath that, lingered the unfamiliar sting of turpentine. Empty wine bottles gathered dust around the open-plan kitchen. Paintbrushes soaked in jars of murky water beside open tubes of crimson oil paint, discarded carelessly across granite countertops. 

Amidst the disarray, the lady of the manor leaned against the kitchen island, drawing in one last drag before stabbing her cigarette into a crowded ashtray. Daylight streamed through the window, rendering her already sheer nightdress more transparent. Cheeks burning, I fixed my attention on her wineglass, watching the yellow-gold liquid rise dangerously close to the brim as she poured. 

Gesturing vaguely at the surrounding mess, she muttered French words that I failed to make sense of. Something about un homme à tout faire. It didn’t matter. The number she scribbled onto a scrap of paper was clear, and generous enough for me to accept without question.

I later learned the translation for homme à tout faire: One man—for everything.

Madame de Froberville spent her days sipping chardonnay and gliding paint onto canvas, while I kept busy with the task du jour—scrubbing and polishing this or that. We rarely interacted, yet I was acutely aware of her watchful gaze. Peeping through windows while I pulled weeds from the soil. Pausing in doorways, always lingering, while I hammered nails into plaster or screwed bulbs into light sockets.

One afternoon, while on the hunt for masking tape, I stumbled across a drawer bursting with stacks of loose artwork. Curious, I pulled a few free.

Sketched in stark black and white, each page was a drawing of a different young man, sprawled across an armchair or at the edge of an unmade bed. It wasn’t their naked forms, laid bare in explicit, unapologetic detail that stunned me. It was the hollow emptiness of their eyes. As though they had drifted somewhere far from the rooms their bodies occupied.

“Magnifique, non?”

Without a sound, she appeared behind me, her breath hot on the nape of my neck. When I spun around, her inscrutable expression revealed nothing.

“S-sorry!” I stammered, stepping aside and losing my grip on the sketches, scattering them across the checkered tiles. 

Before I could crouch down to gather them, she caught hold of my collar and pulled me closer. 

“Shh,” she said, tracing my lips with her finger before travelling down the front of my shirt, undoing each button with delicate precision. I froze under her touch, like a petrified mouse pinned beneath sharpened claws.

“Tu es magnifique,” she purred in my ear. I inhaled a jagged breath as she sank her chardonnay infused teeth into my neck—careful enough not to draw blood, firm enough to hit that sweet spot between pain and pleasure. 

As her fingertips grazed the skin above my navel, the drawings, still scattered beneath my feet, caught my attention. Dozens of hollow eyes haunted me from below. 

I lurched back, a nauseating sensation swirling deep in my gut. When she made another attempt, coaxing me with a soothing murmur, I shook my head and quickly added more distance between us.

Madame de Froberville studied me solemnly. For a moment, all I heard was the soft click of her heels as she glided past, then the creak of a drawer opening behind me. She returned with a slip of paper and pressed it into my palm. 

“Un bonus.”

Staring at the check, the ink barely dry, I thought about my dwindling college fund, keeping our family afloat. I pictured my parents—every backbreaking sacrifice they had made. All so that their only son might have a chance at “life in first class,” as Dad liked to say.

Without speaking, I turned and fled the room, down the spiral staircase and out the front door, leaving it gaping open behind me.

By the end of that week, I had made up my mind. 

Back at the manor, I marched down the now-familiar halls, footsteps squeaking against polished floorboards, and found her in the boudoir. Draped across a velvet-trimmed chaise longue, a sketchbook rested on her lap, the scratch of charcoal against paper echoed around us with each deliberate stroke. She ignored me when I entered.

Words I had rehearsed on my way over died in my throat the minute I saw what lay on the glass coffee table between us. Another check. This time, a jaw-dropping sum. Enough to cover a year’s worth of tuition—maybe even more. 

Only then did she look up, a defiant smile twisting her face as I approached. Unhurried, my hands worked on my shirt buttons until I stood before her, bare chested. The sketch she had drawn came into focus, revealing the grey outline of a half-undressed man, his hollow eyes as familiar as my own.