Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 5

  By a curious inversion of sensitivity, although I am relatively blind to a man’s seductive maneuvers—quite simply because I prefer them to be kept to a minimum, but I will come to that subject shortly—I am always well aware when a woman is attracted to me, not that I have ever expected a woman to give me any pleasure. Oh, I am not denying the devastating delight of touching smooth, rounded, delicate skin, which most women’s bodies offer and only a very few men’s. But I have joined in these embraces and their related fumblings only so as not to break the rules of the game. In fact, men who always suggest this sort of threesome strike me as boring and unimaginative, and I quickly tire of them. I do, however, love looking at women myself. I could make out an inventory of the wardrobes, guess the contents of the makeup bags, even describe the physiques of the women I work with better than their own male partners could. Out in the streets, I follow them and watch them more tenderly than any man trying to pick them up; I associate a particular conformation of the buttocks with a certain style of panties, a particular wiggle in a walk with the height of a heel. But my excitement is limited to a visual satisfaction. Beyond that I feel just a communal sympathy for hardworking women, for the huge fraternity of women who have the same first name as me (one of the most common names in France after World War II) and for the valiant warriors of sexual liberation. As one of them once told me (and she herself was a genuine and affectionate dyke but also a swinger): “Si être copains, c’est partager le pain, alors nous sommes de vraies copines” [If being copains (male friends) means sharing bread (le pain), then we’re truly copines (female friends) because we share dicks (pines)].

  There was an exception at an improvised orgy where half the participants had brought along the other half, who were novices. I found myself alone for a long time on the thick black carpet of the bathroom with a blonde who had curves everywhere: her cheeks, her neck, her breasts and buttocks, of course, even down to her ankles. I was struck by her majestic name; she was called Léone. Léone had taken some persuading before going with the flow. Now she was completely naked, like a golden Buddha in his temple. I was a little lower, because she was sitting on the step that ran all the way around the raised bath. How had we ended up in that confined space when it was a huge, comfortable apartment? Perhaps because she had been indecisive and I, once again, had felt compelled to take on the role of attentive facilitator? My whole face burrowed noisily in her fleshy vulva. I had never sucked on such a swollen extremity, and it really did fill my mouth, as those from the South of France say, like a giant apricot. I latched on to her labia like a leech, then I dropped the fruit and stretched my tongue so far I almost tore its root, the better to dive into the extraordinary softness of her opening, a softness that makes the smoothness of breasts and shoulders pale into insignificance. She was not the wriggling sort, she let out short, little moans, as soft as everything else about her. They resonated with sincerity and gave me a tremendous feeling of exultation. I put myself to work suckling the small raised knot of flesh; it was so good to let myself go as I listened to her raptures! While we all got dressed again, amid the fun and confused atmosphere of a locker room, Paul, who spoke with less fact than the others, turned to her and asked: “So? That was good, wasn’t it? Don’t we think she was right to let herself be talked into it?” She lowered her eyes and put a lot of emphasis on the first word as she replied that one person had certainly made an impression on her. I thought: “Please, God, let it be me!”

  We had found a ready-made philosophy by reading Bataille, but when Henri and I look back on that fevered period, I think he is right to say that our sexual obsession and our missionary zeal derived more from a youthful playfulness. The bed in that tiny apartment was positioned in an alcove, which reinforced the feeling of snuggling in a hiding place, and when four or five of us thrashed about on it together, it meant only that supper had turned into a round of “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours”: the diners had tickled one another’s parts under the table with their bare feet, or perhaps someone had proudly raised up a finger covered in a clear and slightly redolent sauce. Henri would make a game of it by bringing along a girl he had met just half an hour earlier in some arcade, and it was an adventure for our whole team to wander the streets at four o’clock in the morning, looking for some poor girl’s apartment, bent on disturbing her tidy bed. Half the time the ploy failed. The girl would let herself be fingered, would let someone take off her bra or her tights, but would end the evening clamped to a chair explaining that she really couldn’t, but yes, she was very happy to watch, that was fine with her, yes, she would wait till someone could drive her home. I’ve sometimes caught glimpses of people, men or women in fact, taking refuge on an incongruous upright chair or balancing their buttocks on the edge of the sofa, unable to take their eyes off the pale limbs flailing in the air a few inches away, a few inches which put them in a whole different time zone. They don’t take part, so you cannot really say that they are fascinated. Lagging behind—or shooting on ahead—they are the patient, studious viewers of an edifying documentary.

  Our zeal was, of course, only skin-deep, because the challenges we set were intended far more for ourselves than for those we tried to initiate. Henri and I once failed on the boulevard Beaumarchais in one of the big, bourgeois apartments whose intellectual owners lived with bare parquet floors and inadequate overhead lighting. The friend who welcomes us has a thick beard, permanently parted by his bland laugh; he is married to a modern woman. All the same, she balks and goes to bed. We play at transgression, and I seem to remember quivering and roaring with laughter between their streams of urine. No, no, Henri corrects me, he was the only one to piss on me. In any event, what is certain is that we took the precaution of getting into the huge cast-iron bath. Then the three of us did go and fuck a bit on the balcony.

  One of my girlfriends puts me up for some months. I sleep in a tiny, unfurnished attic room, sometimes with the cats for company. When her boyfriend comes to see her, she leaves the door to her bedroom wide open and neither of them makes any attempt to contain their exclamations. It never occurs to me to join them. I don’t get involved in other people’s business, and anyway, snuggled in my narrow bed, I think of myself almost as their little girl. But with that stubbornness peculiar to children and animals, I make quite sure that they get involved with my business. Given that, to some extent, I share her life, there is no reason why my beautiful hostess shouldn’t systematically take the same cocks between her thighs as I do. It works four or five times. She resolutely allows herself to be pinned to the bed, her legs waving in the air like butterfly wings. I really like it when she looks right at Jacques (whose dick is reverberating from the twang of elastic when he pulled off his underwear) and says loudly that he’s “hung like a horse.” That was Jacques, who would become my husband, but with whom, at the time, I was just beginning to get together. He now reminds me that I once had a tantrum and set about kicking him wildly when he was fucking her. I had forgotten that, too. Although I remember how I myself would niggle at the jealousies that other people never admitted. I feel as if I’m in a film about the free and easy lives of the young bourgeoisie when I go early one morning—stopping at the boulangerie on the way—to wake Alexis, who lives in a cute duplex on the rue des Saints-Pères. I notice the coolness of my skin next to his warm pajamas, a bit moist as I like it. He likes making fun of my promiscuity, and he says that, at least at this time of day, he can be sure of being the first person of the day to penetrate me. Well, no, he isn’t, actually! I spent the night with someone else, and we had a fuck before I left; his come is still in my pussy. I stifle my exuberant laughter in the pillow. I can tell that Alexis is a little upset.

  Claude told me to read The Story of O, and there were three ways in which I identified with the heroine: I was always ready; my cunt certainly wasn’t barred with a chain, but I was sodomized as often as I was taken from the front; and finally, I would have loved her reclusive life in a house isolated fro
m the rest of the world. Instead, I was already very active in my professional life. But the convivial atmosphere of the art world, the facility with which—despite my fears—I formed connections with people, and the fact that these connections could so easily take a physical turn led me to believe that the space in which this sort of activity was carried out was a well-regulated, closed world. I have already used the word “family” several times. Sometimes this metaphor has not been a metaphor. For a long time I kept the adolescent trait of exerting my sexual attraction within a family circle, when a boy or a girl goes out with someone and drops him or her to go out with a brother or sister, or a cousin. I was once involved with two brothers along with their uncle. I was a friend of the uncle and he often brought along his two nephews, who were even younger than I. Unlike when this man would take me to meet friends of his, there was no preamble or stage management on these occasions. The uncle would get me going and the two brothers would nail me. I would relax afterward, listening to their men’s talk, some new home-improvement gadget or computer software.

  I am still on friendly terms with a number of men whom I first knew as regular sexual partners. In other cases, we have lost touch. I remember most of these acquaintances with genuine pleasure. When I worked with some of them, I found that the enduring intimacy and tenderness facilitated our collaboration. (Only once did I get angry about a serious work matter.) What’s more, I never remove a person from his own network of friends and relationships or from the activities he enjoys. I had met Alexis as part of a group of young critics and journalists who were trying to set up new artistic publications. I was fucking two other people on the same circuit, and in fact Alexis had asked me, rather tartly, whether I had set myself a schedule to be “fucked by every young critic in France.” We worked in a “school’s out” sort of atmosphere, and my two other colleague-lovers, unlike Alexis, were still a bit rough around the edges even though they were already married. They both had pimply faces and did not exactly take good care of themselves. I gave in to one of them because, having been lured to his apartment on the pretext of a translation that needed checking through (another one of those cramped little apartments on Saint-Germain-des-Prés), he had whined that, seeing I was sleeping with everyone, it would be really mean if I didn’t sleep with him. The other had tried his luck more confidently. He had arranged to meet me at his publisher’s office, and the receptionist told him I had arrived, adding—with the consideration typical of women in her profession—that the young woman waiting for him in reception was not wearing a bra under her blouse. The sexual relationship with the first man came to a pretty abrupt halt, but with the second it went on for several years. Later, they became collaborators on Art Press and stayed there a long time.

  I have suggested that I met Éric through his friends, after hearing what they had to say about him. Among these friends was Robert, whom I met while putting together a piece on art foundries. In the event, he took me to a foundry in Le Creusot where he was having a monumental sculpture cast. We traveled back at night, and, during the trip Robert joined me in the back of the car and laid full-length on top of me. I didn’t bat an eye. It was a narrow car, and I was sitting sideways in my seat with Robert’s head resting on my abdomen, and my pelvis hanging over the edge to facilitate his groping. From time to time I would put my head down and he would give me little kisses. Glancing in the rearview mirror, the driver commented that I seemed out of it. In fact, the situation left me as dumbfounded as the visits to the foundries with their gigantic ovens. I saw Robert almost daily for quite a long time, and he introduced me to a lot of people. I could instinctively tell those with whom the relationship could take a sexual turn and those with whom it would not. An instinct that Robert also had: as a way of putting some of them off, he had come up with the idea of warning them that, as an art critic, I was beginning to wield some power.

  It was Robert who told me about that myth of Parisian life, Madame Claude. I had long fantasized about being a high-class prostitute, although I was neither tall nor beautiful, which I had been told you needed to be, nor distinguished enough for the job. Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curiosity; he would say that I could write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was Éric. But in the end, I met the latter through a mutual friend of theirs, a very edgy boy, one of those types who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity, and someone with whom I had spent some exhausting nights. In the morning, as if that wasn’t enough, the friend would take me to the huge studio he shared with his work partner, and there, languidly tired, I would let this other man come over and take me in his silent, almost serious way. One evening the friend invited me to go and have dinner with him and Éric. As we already know, Éric introduced me to more men than anyone else, friends, colleagues and strangers. For the sake of full disclosure, I must add that, at the same time, he introduced me to a rigorous way of working to which I still adhere.

  For obvious reasons, the pattern in which these relationships emerged, and the way in which individual incidents and deeds are recalled, overlap with aesthetic groupings. A painter friend called Gilbert, with whom I am reminiscing about my early beginnings, remembers that I restricted myself to discreet fellatio when I joined him in the afternoons in the apartment he shared with his family. Penetration was reserved for when he came to see me at my home. On the first of these visits, he didn’t “finish” very satisfactorily; at the last minute I asked him to switch to my ass. Such was my primitive method of contraception, bolstered by the image I had of my body as an integrated whole with no form of hierarchy in terms of either morals or pleasure, and each of its individual parts could, insofar as was possible, be substituted for any other. It was actually another painter of the same school who made a point of teaching me to put my cunt to better use. I had shown up at his studio early one morning for an interview, not knowing I was going to find a very good-looking and forthcoming man. I don’t think I left until the following day. As is often the case in artists’ studios, the bed was positioned under a glass roof or a window, as if to establish what was going on within a framework of light. My eyelids can still feel the powerful light flooding onto my upturned head and blinding me. I must have had the same reflex of slipping his dick into my anus, just like that. Afterward, he talked to me. He told me extremely persuasively that one day I would meet a man who would know how to take me from the front and to bring me to orgasm that way, and that it would be better than the other. Gilbert can’t believe it when I tell him that at the time I was seeing yet another of his painter friends (the near-sighted one whose insistent gaze carried me), who he thought had never cheated on his wife; on the other hand, Gilbert himself reminds me of a third man with whom I used to participate in foursomes, still in the little studio on the rue Bonaparte, and who used to talk about the boys having sex between themselves. But I am convinced that this was probably just a fantasy.

  When William became part of an artists’ collective, I found myself spending the night with John, one of the members of the group. I had already met him several times, and we had even spoken at conferences together. I found him very attractive; he gave speeches about theory that my approximative understanding of English turned lurid, and as he talked, the movements of his lips accentuated his fine young cheekbones. I had come to New York to meet Sol LeWitt, who had just started doing his works in torn and crumpled paper. When I arrived, I rang William from the airport to ask him to put me up. I can see us now, standing in the loft he had recently moved into, devouring each other with kisses, and him encouraging John to do the same. The walls went only three quarters of the way up to the ceiling and were arranged at right angles to form rooms that seemed laid out in random cubes like a child’s bricks. Four or five people came and went, apparently absorbed in some private task. William picked me up and carried me over to a mattress behind one of the walls. John w
as very gentle, providing a great contrast to William’s nervous, abrupt movements. William left us, and eventually John went to sleep. We had curled up together with his hand clamped onto my pubis. Early the following morning I had to extricate myself from his viselike grip with the slow deliberate maneuvers of a contortionist, and to crawl out of the sheets onto the floor because, despite the light that was pouring in through the skylights, he was still asleep. I ran into the street, caught a taxi to the airport and barely caught my flight. Even though I continued to follow that group’s work, I didn’t see John again for many years. When I did, during a retrospective, we exchanged but a few words because I found it so difficult to understand what he was saying.

  As time went by, my shyness in social situations was replaced by boredom. Even among friends whose company I enjoy, even if I follow the conversation at first and am no longer afraid to join in, there always comes a moment when I suddenly lose interest. It’s a question of time: all of a sudden I have had enough; whatever subject we are tackling, I feel as if I’m turning to stone, like when I watch one of those TV soaps that recreates humdrum domesticity too accurately. It is irreversible. In these instances, tacit gestures—sometimes unseen ones—provide some escape. Even though I am not very enterprising, I have often improvised a little pressure from my thigh or a little crossing of ankles with the man next to me at the table, or—better still—the woman (it is less likely to have repercussions) in the hopes of feeling that I am really a distant observer of this earnest assembly, busying myself with something else somewhere else. In the context of communal life—on holiday, for example, when a group of people does all sorts of things together—I have often felt the need to absent myself from outings and meals by acting randomly when the need arose. There were some particularly frenetic summers, defined by the incessant traffic between sexual partners, sporadically united in small orgies under the sun behind the low wall of a garden that overlooked the sea, or at night in the comings and goings between the many bedrooms of a villa.