Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 3

  The pleasure that I felt as I succumbed to a long session at Chez Aimé with my buttocks parked on the edge of a big wooden table and the overhead light hanging down over my torso, as if I were some sort of board game, is equaled only by my loathing for the journey there. It was a long way from Paris: you had to drive through the sinister darkness of the Bois de Fausses-Reposes at Ville-d’Avray, and then you had to find the house at the bottom of a skimpy garden that looked like something from the suburbs of my childhood. Éric never gave me any warning of the evening’s agenda because I think he drew some of his satisfaction from elaborating it with surprises; it was his own way of creating weird and wonderful situations. Anyway, I played along by asking no questions. Even so, when I gathered that we were heading there, I would worry not only at the thought of all the strangers who would soon be forcing me to wake up to where I was, but also in anticipation of the energy I would have to expend. It was a feeling not unlike the one I get before giving a conference, when I know I will have to be completely focused on what I am saying, and at the mercy of my listeners. Both the men met in those situations and the audiences plunged in darkness are faceless, and, miraculously, between the anxiety of anticipation and the weariness at the end, you are perfectly unaware of your own exhaustion.

  Visitors went in Chez Aimé through the bar—I don’t remember ever being taken in there (even though the feel of my pussy against the moleskin of a bar stool with my flattened buttocks lending themselves to furtive fondling belongs to my very oldest fantasies). I’m not sure I even paid much attention to what was going on around me, to the few women perched by the bar whose buttocks and thatches passersby certainly did uncover and play with. My place was in one of the back rooms, lying—as I have said—on a table. The walls were bare, there was no seating, there was nothing in these rooms except for the rough-hewn tables and overhead lights. So I could stay there two or three hours. Always the same configuration: hands running over my body, me grabbing at cocks, turning my head from left to right to suck, while other cocks rammed into me, up toward my belly. Twenty could take turns in an evening. That position, the woman on her back with her pubis on a level with the man’s as he stands squarely on the ground, is one of the most comfortable I know. The vulva is well opened, the man in just the right place to thrust horizontally and strike deeply without stopping. It makes for a vigorous and precise fuck. I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends of the table with both hands, and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.

  In the end Aimé closed. We went one last time; the place was deserted and Aimé himself, his bulk hovering behind the bar, was quietly but furiously railing at his wife. He had been summoned by the police. He was angry with her because she had persuaded us not to come back later.

  That evening we ended up at Les Glycines, my first visit to a place that had seemed enchanting. Claude, a friend called Henri, and I made up the most amicable trio. Henri lived in a tiny apartment on the rue de Chazel, facing the pale, roughcast surface of a high garden wall that hid a large private house. Because it was on our way, Claude and I used to stop off with Henri on our way home from our Sunday visit to our parents. The three of us would fuck together, both boys inside me at once—one in my mouth and the other up my ass or my cunt—under the playful gaze of one of Martin Barré’s loviest paintings: we called it Spaghetti and the artist himself had given it to Henri. Afterward we would look out of the window, watching the comings and goings at Les Glycines. Henri had heard that the club was used by film stars, and sometimes we would think we’d recognized someone. We were just kids, the best kind of gawpers, fascinated and amused by this secret activity that we didn’t even try to imagine, and actually more excited by the sight of things that were completely inaccessible to us: the swanky cars dropping people off, the classy deportment of the silhouettes who stepped out of them. When I went through the porch a few years later, I knew instantly that I preferred Chez Aimé’s less spare style.

  We went up a little gravel path blocked by a group of Japanese visitors who had been refused entry by the flight-attendantish girl at the door. The latter asked to see my Social Security card, to prove I was not a prostitute. Not being regularly employed, of course, I didn’t have one, either on me nor anywhere else. Even on the occasions when I was able to produce a pay stub, I would still be in the wrong because, even today, whenever confronted by a woman taller than me, I turn into an awkward child. We went in anyway. It was lit up like a dining room, there were a lot of people lying naked on mattresses on the floor, and what unsettled me even more than the threat of the “employment officer” was that people were telling jokes. A woman with very pale skin, no makeup and tousled hair that still had the vestiges of the same French braid as the hostess, was making everyone roar with laughter because her little boy “really wanted to come with her this evening.” I could see Éric, who was always very practical, working his way along the baseboard looking for the outlet, because we had managed to arrange a swap with a couple and it would have been nicer to unplug the light. There were little waitresses navigating amid the bodies, holding aloft trays of champagne in flutes; one of them caught her foot in the electric cable and switched the light back on. She even accompanied the act with a loud “Shit.” After that, I don’t recall us waiting for me to extract even the scantiest bodily emission.

  Apart from in the Bois—even there, as we’ve seen, even there!—you don’t mix with people until you have greeted them first, until you have respected a transitional moment in which a few words are exchanged, where each person maintains just the time and space between themselves and the others to offer a glass or hand over an ashtray. I always wanted to abolish this suspense, but there were some rituals that I tolerated better than others. Armand used to make me laugh when, while everyone else was still at the chatting stage, he would strip completely naked, incongruous by a few minutes of anticipation, and fold his clothes as carefully as a butler. Or I would comply with what I thought was the stupid policy of one group who would not swing until they had eaten dinner, always in the same restaurant, like an old-school reunion; and what made their evening was to strip off the panties or stockings of one of the women in their party while the waiter was going around the table. On the other hand, I thought it was obscene to tell salacious stories at an orgy. Was it because I instinctively made a distinction between the playlets presented as a prelude to a play—the better to prepare you for it—and the playacting that serves only to delay it? The acts performed in the one are never performed in the other, where they really would be “out of place.”

  Even if I have kept some of the reflexes of a practicing Catholic to this day (secretly making the sign of the cross if I’m afraid something is going to happen, feeling watched as soon as I know I have done something wrong or made a mistake), I can no longer really pretend that I believe in God. It’s highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships. Finding myself vacant, then, with no other mission to fulfill, I grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me. I am more than dependable in my pursuit of these aims; if life went on forever, I would pursue them for all eternity, given that I did not define them myself. It is in this spirit that I have never wavered in the job I was given (a long time ago now), publishing Art Press. I was involved in its creation, and I have dedicated myself sufficiently to the work that I have become to some extent identified with it, but I feel more like a driver who must stick to the rails than a guide who knows where the port is. I’ve fucked in the same way. As I was completely available, I sought no more ideals in love than I did in my professional life; I was seen as someone with no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited, and I had no reason not to fill this role. My memories of orgies, of evenings spent at the Bois or with one of my lover-friends, are interlinked like the rooms in a Japanese palace. You think you are in a closed room u
ntil one of the partitions slides back, revealing a succession of other rooms, and if you step forward, more partitions open and close, and if the rooms themselves are numerous, the ways of passing from one to the other are infinite.

  But trips to swingers’ clubs hold little place in these memories. Chez Aimé was a different story: it was the very birthplace of fucking. And I have remembered the disappointment of Les Glycines because it was the exemplary realization of a dream I had carried with me since adolescence. Perhaps it is since my memory is chiefly visual that I remember more, for example, of Cleopatra—a club opened by some former customers of Chez Aimé, in an extravagant setting in the middle of a shopping center in the 13th arrondissement—than Les Glycines’s neat decor and the activities to which I abandoned myself there; when all is said and done, they were quite banal. On the other hand, other places and other events are so vivid that I could almost file them by theme.

  There would be the image of a lively line of cars, led by our own car. And as we are going up the service road on the avenue Foch, I have an urgent need to pee. Four or five cars slam on their brakes behind us. As I get out and run over the strip of grass to squat next to a tree, car doors start to open; a few people, misunderstanding my maneuver, come toward me. Éric rushes over to intercede, the place is open and very well lit. I get back into the car and the cortege sets off again. The parking lot at the Porte de Saint-Cloud: suddenly the attendant sees fifteen or so cars diving into the tunnel one after the other, then surfacing again, in exactly the same order, an hour later. During that hour, I was taken by about thirty men, several of them first held me up against a wall, and then they lay me on the hood. Sometimes the script is complicated by the fact that we have to shake off a few cars on the way. The drivers agree on a destination, a line of cars forms and is spotted by others who join it, but then the line is too long and it is wiser to limit the number of participants. One night we drove around for such a long time that it felt like the beginning of a journey. One driver knew of a place, and then he admitted that he was no longer sure of the way. Through the rear window I could see the pairs of headlights behind us navigating left and right, disappearing and reappearing. There were several stops, and several discussions, and eventually—in the bleachers of a sports stadium somewhere in Vélizy-Villacoublay—I had the pleasure of the patient pricks of those who had not gotten lost along the way.

  Drifting could have been another theme. Cars trundle along, stop, set off again, brake abruptly like remote-control toys. Little ploy at the Porte Dauphine: we eye one another up from one car to the next, and the password seems to be “Do you have a place?” So some cars leave the circle, and we start on a sort of chase to an unknown address. Once, and it’s true it was only once, the search went on a bit too long and we ended up doing something foolish. I am with a group of friends who don’t know the Bois very well; there are six of us squashed into a Renault, and we’re getting ready to go home after driving around in circles. We spot two or three cars down one of the many roads, we park alongside them and I, the brave and boastful little soldier going ahead in the name of all the others waiting behind me, go and give a blow job to the driver of the car behind us. As luck would have it, two policemen come and take up positions in front of me when I withdraw. They ask the man, who is awkwardly buttoning up, whether he paid me, and they take down everybody’s name and address.

  Even when a memory centers on physical facts, it is less the sensations than the atmosphere to be evoked first. I could gather together a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which, for years, I put my anus and, as frequently, if not more so, my vagina. In a beautiful apartment behind the Invalides, during a small-scale orgy, in a room on a mezza-nine floor with a long bay window and floor-level lighting like you find on American film sets, I am taken in that orifice by the tool of a giant. Is it because the coffee table in the sitting room is a giant resin model of an open hand in which a woman could stretch herself out luxuriously that the place itself somehow feels disproportionate and unreal? I’m frightened of this great Cheshire cat’s organ when I understand the route by which he is planning to penetrate, but he manages it without forcing too much, and I am amazed, and almost proud, that size represents no obstacle. Neither does number. Was it because I was ovulating or had a touch of the clap that at another orgy, a much larger one this time, I chose to fuck only with my ass? I can see myself at the foot of a very narrow staircase, in the rue Quincampoix, hesitating before deciding to go up. Claude and I were given the address by chance. We didn’t know anyone. The apartment was very dark with a low ceiling. I could hear men nearby putting the word about, whispering, “She wants it up the ass,” or warning someone who’s heading the wrong way, “No, she only takes it from behind.” That particular time it did hurt at the end. But I also had the personal satisfaction of having had no feelings of restraint.

  Imaginings

  As I read through the previous pages, still older images have come back to me, and these images were fabricated. How I conceived them, way before having my first experience and a very long time before I shed my innocence, constitutes a seductively appealing mystery. What shreds of the real world—photographs in Cinémonde; veiled comments of my mother’s, like the time we left a café in which there was a group of young people, only one of whom was a girl, and my mother muttered that the girl must be sleeping with everyone; or the fact that my father came home late at night, funnily enough having just come from that café—did I pick up and thread together, and what instinctual material did I formulate so that the stories I told myself as I rubbed the lips of my vulva together so accurately prefigured my future sexual adventures? I even remember a criminal case: the arrest of a rather obscure, aging woman (she must have been something like a maid on a farm) who was accused of killing her lover. I have forgotten the details of the murder because what really struck me was that among her belongings, they found notebooks that she had filled with memories and into which she pasted little relics—photographs, letters, locks of hair—connected with her lovers, who turned out to have been extraordinarily numerous. As a child I loved sticking bits of plants and flowers into my holiday project book, and I had a tidy scrapbook with precious photographs of Anthony Perkins or Brigitte Bardot, so I admired the fact that the woman had managed to collate this treasure, these traces of the men she had known, within a few simple notepads, and a secret corner of my libido was even more disturbed by the fact that this woman was ugly, and ended up alone, wild and outcast.

  There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never actively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived have had little part in nourishing my imaginings. Perhaps I should just assume that the fantasies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences. Since I never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and I reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered not opposition to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

  My brother and I were rarely taken to play in the park, but there was a little one that we crossed on the way to school. Down one side of the square there was a long wall with three pretty lean-tos along it. They were made of brick and wood, painted green and surrounded by shrubs. One was used for gardening tools, the other two housed the public toilets. There must have been groups of boys hanging about in the square. In any event, the very first narrative that accompanied my masturbating—and one that I used again and again for many years—put me in a situation where I was dragged into one of these shelters by a boy. I saw him kissing me on the mouth and touching me all over as his friends came to join us and they all started fondling me. We always remained standing, and I revolved in the middle of the tightly knit group.

  Most Sunday mornings our parents would alternate on taking us to the matinee performance at the local cinema, whate
ver they were showing, and fleeting, barely-understood sequences glimpsed in romantic films and trailers; fired my imagination. I fantasized that I was allowed to go to the cinema alone. There were lots of people lining up. Suddenly someone would squeeze my ass. And again everyone else around me in the line would follow suit, and when I reached the ticket desk, the salesgirl could see that my skirt had been lifted up, and I would talk to her while someone rubbed themselves against my buttocks; I wouldn’t have any panties on. The excitement would rise. My top would be off by the time I had crossed the foyer (I formulated an image of myself as an adult blessed with substantial breasts, an image I still resort to in my fantasies, whereas my breasts are actually average size). Sometimes the manager of the theater would ask us, calmly but with some authority, to wait until we were in the auditorium to get on with our disheveled embraces. At first I would wriggle about with one boy, squeezed up to him in the same seat. He was the rather taciturn gang leader who, having heated me to fever pitch, would then turn away abruptly and kiss another girl, abandoning me to his “men,” and we would drop in a heap to the carpeted floor between the rows of seats. The narrative continues: perfectly respectable men could leave their seats and their suspicious wives to cross the auditorium in the dark and prostrate themselves on top of me. Sometimes I would have the lights turn back on during all this cavorting; or I would go to the bathroom and have a succession of comings and goings between there and the auditorium. I think sometimes I would have the police intervening. Another take: the manager would ask me to come to his office, then would call for all the boys, too. Another version: I would follow the group who had adopted me in the line all the way to a stretch of wasteland. And there, behind a picket fence, they would strip me naked and paw me. It was a compact group forming a circle around me, like a second fence screening me from view. One by one, the boys broke away from the circle to press themselves against me. In another version, I was nestled deep in a seat in a nightclub with a man on either side of me. While I busied myself with one of them and we kissed each other hungrily, the other stroked my body. Then I would turn around and kiss the second one, but the first would not let me go, or he would give up his place to a third man and so on; I kept swinging from left to right. I’m not sure that when I first started succumbing to these fantasies, I had ever done any petting or even kissed a single boy on the mouth. I was a late starter. When I came out of school, I would quite often meet up with a group of friends in the bedroom that I shared with my brother, but it was usually to have fights with them. At that sort of age, girls’ bodies are more mature than boys’; I was quite well built and I would sometimes win.