Sexual Life Catherine M. Read online

  If I am going back as far as my fantasy life during my childhood and adolescence, I should point out the initial disparity between fantasy and my actual behavior, especially, as I recall, at puberty. I had started reading a Hemingway novel (The Sun Also Rises, perhaps), and I was sufficiently disturbed by the description of one of the female characters, who was attributed several lovers, to stop reading the book. And I never went back to it. A conversation with my mother also gave me a shock. I don’t remember how we got on to the subject, I can just see her setting the table in the kitchen as she confided in me that she had had seven lovers in her life. “Seven,” she said, looking at me, “it’s not all that many,” but there was a shy questioning in her eyes. I scowled. It was the first time I had heard anyone say out loud that a woman could know more than one man. She became a bit defensive. A long time later, when I looked back on that rare moment of intimacy, I regretted my attitude. What was seven compared to a score that was still open?

  When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude passing from one partner to another. One of the most detailed scenarios that illustrates this point of view was the following: I am the guest of a vulgar, fat man—pretending to be an uncle—at a business meal in a private salon in a restaurant. There are twenty or thirty men sitting down to eat, and my first contribution is to do the rounds, sucking each of them off under the table. I can picture their faces above me, surrendering saggily, as each of them successively, and briefly, lays out of the conversation. Then I get up onto the table and they amuse themselves finding interesting substitutes for me to take, cigars, sausages; someone eats a sausage from between my thighs. As the meal goes on, I am conscientiously fucked, some leading me off to a sofa, others taking me standing up, from behind, bent over the table, while the discussions go on around us. The maître d’ and the waiters have their turns. If my masturbating has not yet been ended by an orgasm, then the kitchen boys finish me off. Finding myself in a group of men getting on with their different jobs, stopping only to join me in a casual, offhand way, is a recurring scenario. A subtle alteration turns the uncle into a stepfather, and the conference into men playing cards (or watching football), and they take turns fucking me on a sofa while the others get on with their hand (or gesticulate at the television screen).

  All my life I have gone back over, tinkered with and developed these few imagined situations with the application of a musician composing a fugue, and those that serve me today are more or less altered versions of these originals. I mentioned brief film sequences that gave rise to certain fantasies. I saw only an extract of Éric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse when it came out, on television perhaps. In a vacation house, a man goes into a room and walks past a couple making love on the bed with perfect indifference; he just catches the young woman’s eye. As I have gone back to this sequence again and again, my own transposition has created this: a deliveryman comes into my house, although—oddly—I don’t have to open the door for him, and he finds me in my bedroom (where the half-light is very like that in the film), watching a pornographic video. Without a word, he lies down on top of me and is soon replaced by a second deliveryman, then a third, both of whom behave just as naturally. The story sometimes continues: a male friend is coming to pick me up, and I have to get ready. I carry on fucking while standing up, taking care not to smudge my makeup or rumple my clothes, with my skirt lifted up over my back. The friend then takes the trouble to ring the doorbell, and I go to let him in, waddling like a duck with one of the deliverymen’s dicks burrowed in my cunt from astern. The friend, aroused himself, quickly undoes his fly, etc.

  Sexual fantasies are far too personal for them to ever really be shared. Still, I had a powerful imagination, and this gave me a well I could draw from when, later, I started meeting talkers. In my experience, most men make do with a few expressions and catchphrases; you’re their “little cocksucker,” you’re “a talented ball eater” before entering the ranks of the “little slut who’s not too ashamed to go on like that all night,” and you will rarely be “rammed right up to the hilt” or “fucked good and deep” without the incident being announced out loud. You encourage them, admitting that you’re just a “bitch in heat,” and as they reassure you that you’re going to get “rammed,” “nailed” or “plugged,” you gasp and say “it’s so big,” “it’s so hard” and “it’s so good” until you eventually

  “swallow the spurt,” like the cat that got the cream. But these are merely accentuations, reiterations punctuated by the mantra of interjections, gruntings and all the inflections of the usual cries. Because, paradoxically, these words need less reciprocation than caresses do, dirty words are always more stereotyped, and perhaps some of their power derives from the very fact that they belong to the most immutable inheritance. So, in the end, even words—which should help to distinguish us from each other—serve to fuse us all together and to accelerate the annihilation of the senses that we are all trying to achieve in those moments.

  It is quite another story to construct a complete running commentary throughout the act, given by two voices, in counterpoint to the physical exchange.

  Another man immeasurably—and quite fantastically—widened my understanding of fornicatory communion. He started the conversation by saying that he was going to take me to a hotel; there was little point in specifying what sort. There would be men lining up by the bed, all the way out to the corridor. How much did I think they would pay to shoot their load in my cunt? I suggested: “Fifty francs?” The correct sum was whispered quietly in my ear: “That’s far too much. No, they’ll give twenty francs to fuck you from the front and thirty to give it to you up the ass. How much of it are you going to take?”

  Knowing that I always underestimate, I ask, “Twenty?” A hard thrust of his dick given as a warning shot: “Is that all—thirty!?” Another stab in my vagina: “You’ll take a hundred and you won’t wash.”

  “There’ll be young boys who’ll shoot their load almost before they get inside me.”

  “They’ll do it on your stomach and your tits, too, you’ll be covered in it.”

  “Yes, and there’ll be some who are very old and very dirty, they won’t have washed for so long that they’ll have scabs on their skin.”

  “Yes, and how much would you take to let them piss on you?”

  “Will some of them shit on me too?”

  “Yes, and you’ll lick their asses afterward.”

  “And will I refuse to at first? Will I fight?”

  “Yes, and they’ll smack you.”

  “It’s disgusting, but I’ll clean out the folds of their ass-holes with my tongue.”

  “We’ll get there in the evening, and you’ll stay there till the following morning.”

  “But I’ll get tired.”

  “You will be able to sleep, they’ll keep on fucking you. And we’ll come back that evening, and the hotel manager will bring his dog, and there’ll be someone who’ll pay to see you doing it with the dog.”

  “Will I have to suck it?”

  “You’ll see, it’ll have a very red cock and it’ll climb on top like you’re a bitch and stay stuck inside you.”

  Other times the events would unfold in the workmen’s shed on a construction site, and whole teams of workmen would file through, paying no more than five francs a go. As I have suggested, my body sometimes convulsed in response to these images, but not always; the real action and the fantasy scrolled in tandem and merged only sporadically. We spoke in measured tones with all the precision and attention to detail of two scrupulous witnesses helping each other reconstruct a past event. When he came close to orgasm, my partner became less talkative. I don’t know whether he was concentrating on one of the images of our imaginary film. As for me, I would sometimes bring the scenario back to a more private situation. The shed on the building site would become the caretaker’s quarters in a building undergoing repairs. In those sort
s of cramped spaces, the bed is sometimes just hidden behind a curtain. Only my stomach and legs were visible in front of it, and the workmen still kept coming in droves to service me without my seeing them or their seeing me, under the gaze of the caretaker who regulated the traffic.

  Communities

  There are two ways of envisaging a multitude, either as a crowd in which individual identities become confused, or as a chain where, conversely, what distinguishes them from one another is also what binds them, as one ally compensates for another’s weaknesses, as a son resembles his father even while he rebels. The very first men I knew immediately made me an emissary of a network in which I couldn’t hope to know all the members, the unwitting link in a family of biblical scale and diversity.

  I have already explained that I was reticent in social relationships and saw the sexual act as a refuge into which I willingly abandoned myself: it was a way to avoid looks that embarrassed me and conversations for which I was ill prepared. There was, therefore, no question of my taking any initiative. I never flirted or tried to score. On the other hand, I was completely available: at all times and in all places, without hesitation or regret, by every one of my bodily orifices and with a totally clear conscience. If, as Proust’s theory goes, I see my own personality in terms of the image that other people have made of it, then that is the dominant trait. “You never said no, never refused anything. You didn’t put on airs.” “You were far from inert, but you weren’t demonstrative, either.” “You did things so naturally, you were neither reticent nor dirty, just a tad masochistic from time to time.” “At an orgy, you were always the first to jump in, right out there in front.” “I remember Robert would send a taxi for you as if there was some emergency, and you would go.” “People thought of you as some sort of phenomenon; even with an incredible number of guys, you would still be the same, right up to the end, at their mercy. You weren’t playing the little woman who wants to please her man, or the ball-buster. You were a friend who happened to be a girl, a girlfriend.” And also this note that a friend put in his diary, which still gives me a glow of pride: “Catherine, who deserves the highest praise for her calmness and availability in every situation.”

  The first man I knew introduced me to the second. Claude was friendly with a couple, colleagues some ten years older than us. The man was not very tall, but he had the muscle tone of a sportsman; she had magnificent, slightly Asian features, with short-cropped blond hair; she also had one of those stiff personalities with which intelligent women sometimes modulate their sexual freedom. It could be that Claude had had some sexual encounters with her before introducing me to the man, before, that is, arranging for me to fuck him. We carried on a sort of loosely arranged partner swap that continued even after Claude and I had rented a studio next to their apartment. I would go and meet the man at their apartment, while the woman would join Claude in ours. The wall was like a television remote control: there was a different film on if you switched sides. There was only one occasion when this disjunction was not respected. It was while we were on holiday in a house that they owned in Brittany. A cold, mellow afternoon light permeated the sitting room, right into the corner where the man was resting on a daybed. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, the woman was in and out, Claude had gone off somewhere. The man gave me that weak, almost submissive look that some men have even when they are expressing the most imperious of orders, drew me to him, held my chin and kissed me, then pushed my head down toward his penis. I liked it better like that—using me to harden him up while I lay curled in on myself rather than stretching up to his face for a long kiss. And I sucked him off well. Perhaps it was on that day that I realized I had a gift for it. I concentrated on coordinating the way I moved my hand and my lips; from the pressure of his hand on my head, I knew when I should speed up the rhythm or slow it down. But it was definitely the facial expressions that I remember most clearly. When I occasionally looked beyond the immediate horizon of his zipper to take a deep breath, I saw her expression—as gently vacuous as a statue—and his, almost disbelieving. I now feel it was then I first hazily grasped the fact that if relationships with friends could spread and grow like a climbing plant, twisting and knotting together in perfect and reciprocal freedom, and that all you had to do was to let yourself go with the flow of its sap, then this was all the more reason for me to decide on my own behavior for myself, resolutely and solitarily. I like this paradoxical solitude.

  The art world is made up of a multitude of communities or families, and their rallying points—at the time when I started working as a critic—were more places of work, galleries and the editorial offices of magazines, than cafés. Naturally these little networks were breeding grounds for casual romances. As I lived right on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was where the modern-art galleries all were at the time, there was not far to go between an exhibition and a little cuddle. I can see myself on the pavement of the rue Bonaparte with a new painter friend, a shy boy who never really looked up as a smile spread across his face or as he peered at you through his thick glasses. I don’t remember how he led me to understand that he wanted me, probably very warily (“I’d like to make love to you, you know”), perhaps even without touching me. Most likely I didn’t give much of a reply. What I do remember was how resolute I was. I took him all the way to my room. He let himself be led without realizing that he was urging me on, too, weighing me down with those subjugated, tentative eyes. My pleasure derives from the precise moment when I have made the decision and the other feels a bit taken aback. I have an intoxicating feeling of fulfilling a heroine’s destiny. But the best thing to put him at his ease is the girl-who’s-just-escaped-her-parents’-clutches speech: I explain daffily that “I want everything.” He carries on, encouraging me with his attentive eyes. Someone who once took the same route has since admitted that my room under the eaves reminded him of a place you might rent by the hour, and that the rather coarse fabric serving as a bedcover seemed like a tarpaulin to protect it from the activities that were about to take place.

  A group visit to an exhibition organized by Germano Celant in a Genoa museum. Claude, Germano and the others are walking ahead; I spend a little longer in each gallery, accompanied by William, who has contributed to the exhibition. With quick, furtive gestures, he lands his hand across my snatch, I grind the bulge in his trousers, amazed to find it so hard, like an inanimate object, not like part of a living body. He has a very distinctive laugh, which sounds as if his mouth is already engaged in a long, deep kiss. He’s having fun teaching me English: cock, pussy. Not long after that, he spends a few days in Paris. As he comes out of the Rhumerie, he licks my ear and whispers in English, “I want to make love with you,” leaving a little pause between each of the words. In the corner next to a service door at the back of the post office that stands where the rue des Rennes meets the rue du Four, I mutter my own English contribution: “I want your cock in my pussy.” Explosive laughter, the same trip all the way to the studio on the rue Bonaparte. William, like Henri and like many others, would return several times. We fuck there as a twosome and with others. The pretext is often a girl picked up by one of the boys, who needs a bit of persuading that it’s even greater fun when there are more than two to share in the pleasure. It doesn’t always work, and when it doesn’t, I am given the job of reassuring her, consoling her. The boys disappear discreetly to have a cigarette on the landing. I don’t actually speak, I cajole, give her a gentle hug; girls are more easily convinced by another girl. Of course they could just leave, but not one of them ever did, not even the one who remained friends with Claude and admitted, twenty years later, that it was because she was still a virgin that she had refused to comply that evening and burst into tears. Henri remembers another girl: I locked myself into the kitchen—which also served as a bathroom—with her to clean her face because her tears had smudged her mascara. He maintains that from the communal toilets on the landing, he could hear us moaning through the skylights. She probably wanted to
thumb her nose at the boys, and I, perversely, played along with her.