Sexual Life Catherine M. Read online

  One evening I decide not to join in the fun, and Paul, who knows me well, gently makes fun of my decision; Paul—who sometimes forcibly holds me back, locking both of us in the bathroom if necessary, just to excite my impatience to mingle in the melee of bodies—promises to send me a friend of his that I have not yet met, someone who has nothing to do with the art world, a car mechanic. He knows that I would rather meet this man than go to the restaurant with the others and sit wearily on a terrace or in the corner of a nightclub waiting for the same weariness to overcome the rest of them. I don’t pay much attention to Paul’s proposition and look forward to an evening alone. There is something delicious about those moments when the emptiness around you opens up not only the space around you but also, somehow, the enormity of the time ahead. With unconscious economy, we make the most of this given opportunity by lazily settling into the depths of an armchair as if to leave as much space as possible to the onrush of time. The kitchen is right at the back of the villa, and I go and make myself a sandwich. My mouth is full when Paul’s friend appears in the doorway that leads out to the garden. He is tall and dark with pale eyes, quite impressive in the darkness. He apologizes amicably, he can see that I’m eating, begs me not to stop just because of him…I am ashamed of the crumbs in the corners of my mouth. I say no, no, I’m not really hungry, and I chuck the sandwich away furtively.

  He takes me away. He drives his convertible along the Grande Corniche above Nice. He takes one hand off the steering wheel to reply to mine rubbing against the rough surface of the bulge in his jeans. That swelling, impeded by the tight, stiff fabric, is an effective stimulus for me every time. Do I want to go and eat somewhere? No. I think he’s driving a bit farther than he needs to, taking detours before getting home. He keeps his eyes on the road as I undo his belt. I recognize that little forward movement of the driver’s hips that makes it easier to undo his zipper. Then there is the laborious process of extricating the member, which has grown too big to slip straight out of the double envelope of cotton. You need to have a wide enough hand to gather up all the parts in one smooth gesture. I am always afraid of hurting it. He has to help me. At last I can get on with my conscientious stroking. I never start too quickly, I really prefer following all its length, feeling the elasticity of the fine sheath of flesh. I put my mouth to it. I try to hold my body as far aside as possible, so as not to be in his way when he changes gear. I keep to a moderate rhythm. I am conscious of the danger that driving in these conditions could represent, and as a result, have no inclination to court it.

  As far as I can remember, it was a very pleasant encounter. Even so, I didn’t want to stay the night with him, and he had to take me back to the villa before the group got back. It was not that I had forbidden myself to stay out all night, but that I wanted the time I had spent with him to stay as it was (like when your thoughts wander off into a daydream halfway through a conversation), a private place to which the others, for once, would not have access.

  The reader will have realized that, as I have explained, I exercised complete free will in my chosen sexual life, and if I orchestrated little breakaways, as I have just illustrated, this latitude could be measured only in terms of its direct opposite: the way fate brings people together, the determinism of the chain in which one link—one man—holds you to another, which links you to a third and so on. Mine was not the kind of freedom played out on the whims of circumstance; it was a freedom expressed once and for all, accepting the unreserved abandonment of the self to a way of life (like a nun saying her vows!). I have never formed a relationship—however fleeting—with someone I have met on a train or in the Métro, even though I have often heard stories of feverishly erotic encounters in such places, not to mention in elevators or restaurant bathrooms. I have always cut them short, rather abruptly even. I discourage them, humorously and gently, I hope, but in such an offhand way that it must look like firm resolution. Engaging myself in the playful meanderings of seduction and, however briefly, keeping up the teasing banter that necessarily occupies the interval between a chance meeting and accomplishing the sexual act would be beyond me. On the other hand, if it were possible for the thronging crowds at a train station or the organized hordes in the Métro to accept the crudest accesses of pleasure in their midst as they accept displays of the most abject misery, I could easily undertake that sort of coupling, like an animal.

  Neither do I belong to the category of women who are “looking for adventure”; I have been successfully chatted up very rarely, and then never by strangers. On the other hand, I have willingly accepted dates over the telephone from a voice, purporting to have met me at some function or another, to which I could not put a face. I was easy to find; they just had to call the magazine.

  That was how I ended up at the opera one night, at a performance of La Bohème. I arrived late and had to wait till the end of the first scene before I could go and sit down in the darkness next to my virtual stranger. We had met, if you could call it that, a few days earlier at a mutual friend’s party (when the relationship returns to the realm of a possible one-on-one, men rarely use the term “orgy”), but the profile I could see, the balding head and the jowly face, didn’t mean a thing to me. I suspected that he had indeed been at the party but had not approached me there. He risked putting a hand on my thigh, looking at me furtively with something approaching anxiety. He never shook off his air of weariness; he had a habit of rubbing his head in the same way that he ran his great bony hands over me, doing it mechanically and complaining of terrible headaches. I thought he had a screw loose, and there was something rather pitiful about him. I saw him several more times; he took me to shows and to very expensive restaurants that I found more than a little entertaining, not because I could be mistaken for a prostitute but because I could outwit the ushers, the waitresses and the bourgeois patrons around us, given that the bald gentleman with the drooping skin was in conversation with a card-carrying intellectual.

  To this day, Hortense (the switchboard operator at Art Press) sometimes puts through someone whose name I don’t recognize. “They won’t take no for an answer, they say they know you well.” I take the call. From their carefully chosen words spoken in conspiratorial tones, I quickly realize that the stranger thinks he is talking to a real good-time girl, the sort, if I’m not mistaken, who leaves a man with some very good memories. (Similarly, if I am introduced to someone at a private opening or a dinner, and I feel that I am meeting him for the first time but he delves his eyes into mine for rather longer than is necessary, saying, “But we’ve already met,” I tend to think that, in what feels like another life for me, he had an opportunity to look at my face at leisure while my gaze may have been locked on his pubic hair). I may no longer have the curiosity to take it any further, but I still have a profound admiration and sympathy for the suspension in time in which lovers live. It could be ten years, even twenty or more, since a man has made love to a woman, but he still talks about it and addresses her as if it were yesterday. Their pleasure is like a hardy perennial that knows no seasons. It flourishes in a greenhouse, isolated from outside contingencies so that they always see the body they held in the same way, even if it is now withered or lying stiffly in a robe. Be that as it may, experience has taught me that they cannot deny the principle of reality when it hits them in the face. If I don’t warm to the telephone conversation, they inevitably ask a question, like a password that may or may not open the door. For example: “Are you married now?” “Yes.” “Lovely, well, I’ll give you a call next time I’m in Paris and perhaps we’ll have a chance to see each other.” I know I will never hear from them again.

  To go back to those preliminaries that many women claim are the most delicious phase of a relationship, and which I have always tried to keep as brief as possible, I should make it clear that I have experienced them—and even then without prolonging them—in only two specific situations: when desire was already and unwittingly a breakaway faction of a profound and loving relations
hip; and after a relatively long period of abstinence, which amounts to exceptional circumstances.

  In the latter case the signs were: an unexpected and frustrating sitting for a photographic portrait because—needless to say—the lighting was never quite right; a ride up in a elevator that was about as chatty as a funeral vigil; tiny, furtive kisses, then sneaky bites sneaked along the top of my bare arm when I had to place it on top of the layout table…I inhaled these libidinous effluvia rather like an asthmatic who unwisely strayed into a stifling hothouse. Very aware that I had done nothing to cultivate this sort of feeling in the past, I put them down to a sort of gentrification of my erotic life.

  The other case proves that the sharpest of our sensual experiences can forge a path even through our least sensitive points of access. Even though I have no ear at all, and I go to the opera only for reasons that have nothing to do with the art of music, it is thanks to his voice that Jacques first appeared on the horizons of the vast plain of my desire. And yet his voice does not correspond to the sexy stereotype, it is neither velvet nor gravelly. Someone had recorded him reading a text and then played the tape to me over the telephone. I can still feel the echo it sent through me, radiating out to the most highly receptive point on my body. I gave myself over entirely to this voice, which itself seemed to give up entirely every detail of its speaker, a voice with the clarity and the calm rhythm of its brief inflections, as firm and assured as a hand turning up its palm to mean “There you have it.” Sometime later I heard it on the telephone again, live this time, pointing out a typo in an exhibition catalog in which Jacques had been involved and on which I was working. He offered to come and help me correct the copies. We spent hours on the work, inches away from each other in a tiny office, with me very embarrassed by my mistake while he just got down to correcting it. He was attentive without being especially friendly. After one of these tedious sessions, he asked whether I would like to join him for dinner at a close friend’s home. When dinner was over and several of us were squeezed next to one another on a bed serving as a sofa (which meant adopting an uncomfortable, semiprone position), Jacques stroked my wrist with the back of his index finger. It was an unexpected, unusual and quite delicious gesture, and it still moves me now, even when it is addressed to other skin than mine. I followed Jacques to the studio he was living in at the time. In the morning he asked me who I was sleeping with. “With lots of people,” I replied. “Damn,” he said, “I’m beginning to fall in love with a girl who’s sleeping with lots of people.”

  The Pleasure of Telling

  I have never tried to hide the extent or the eclectic variety of my sexual contacts, other than from my parents. (When I was a child and a “wedding night” was just a vague formula, even imagining that my mother would be able to picture me on that first night was truly a source of torment.) I have gradually and obscurely come to understand what this lifestyle had to offer me: the illusion of opening myself to innumerable possibilities. Given that I obviously had to comply with all sorts of constraints (a very demanding and stressful job, an upbringing defined by poverty and, the worst shackle of all, the baggage of family conflicts and rows in relationships), the certainty that I could have sexual relations in any situation with any willing party (as a matter of principle, the illusion held only on condition that anyone unwilling was excluded from the horizon) was the lungfuls of fresh air you inhale as you walk to the end of a narrow pier. And, as reality did still impose limits on this freedom (I couldn’t do only that, and even if I could, the bracelet of my thighs could link together only a tiny part of the human chain), this meant that the spoken word, the briefest evocation of episodes in my sexual life, should always conjure up the panorama of possibilities in all their fullness. “I am here, with you, but if I talk about it, I pull aside the sheet, I open up a breach in the wall, and I let in the entire army of lovers that surrounds us.” Usually, after about the third or fourth date, I would drop in a few men’s names, connecting them with day-to-day activities that were, nonetheless, open to ambiguous interpretation, and—if I was feeling more confident—I might refer to a few picturesque situations in which I had made love in the past. I would evaluate the reaction.

  I have said that I did not go in for preaching, and even less for provocation, except as part of a well-meaning and harmless perversion, addressed only to people who had already been identified as kindred spirits. I was careful to be sincere, adhering to a dialectic with three terms: to some extent I protected myself from new relationships by branching out only if there was a connection with my community of swingers; in doing this I could identify whether or not the newcomer belonged to this community; finally, whatever his reaction, while still taking care to protect myself, I would appeal to his curiosity.

  The friend who made me speak so much while we were fornicating insisted that, as well as evoking fantasies, I should talk about things that had really happened—as it should be. I had to give names, describe places and say exactly how many times. If I failed to specify when describing a new acquaintance, he was quick to ask: “Did you sleep with him?” But his interest did not focus exclusively on an obscene inventory (“What color was his glans when you drew back his foreskin? Brown? Red? Did you give him one up the ass? With your tongue? Or your fingers? How many fingers did you stick up his ass?”), it also extended to the more banal aspects of the setting: “We were visiting an apartment for rent in the rue Beaubourg, the carpet had balls of fluff all over it and he took me there and then on a mattress on the floor.” “He’s a bouncer for The Johnny Halliday Show; that’s how I saw the whole show from the side of the stage, it felt as if the speakers were inside me. We came home on his Harley Davidson; it didn’t have any backseat left, and the frame was carving into my pussy; when we did eventually fuck, I was already spliced open like a ripe grapefruit.” A basic sentimentality was always welcome: “Was he in love with you?” Me: “Hmm.” Him: “I’m sure he’s in love with you.” Me: “The other morning I was pretending to sleep, and I heard him whispering, ‘I love you, Catherine; I love you, Catherine,’ and these breathy words were accompanied by a little movement of his belly, not as if he was fucking but more like a big cat twitching in its sleep.” A sentimentality corrupted by the jealousy of a third party: “Does he know you fuck everyone in town? He’s jealous, isn’t he?” The antics of another friend of mine who fucked me laid out on his worktable, right in the middle of his high-tech art studio, while presenting his dick like a monstrous pistil emerging from the corolla of ephemeral, crotchless women’s panties—a baroque touch in that austere setting—particularly appealed to him. I had to narrate it dozens of times, not even having to embellish it with variations, and even after I had stopped seeing the other friend. If I could come quickly while masturbating that morning when I woke up, or in the office, in such and such a position and having made myself come X number of times in succession, that worked, too. I never invented an adventure that hadn’t happened, and my descriptions betrayed reality no more than any transposition inevitably does. As I have already pointed out, the realm of fantasy and the realm of experience may well be close neighbors, but to me, they are still independent of each other, like a landscape painting and the corner of the countryside that it actually represents; there is more of the artist’s interior vision than reality in the painting. The fact that, from then on, we see that reality through the prism of the painting does not stop the trees from growing or their leaves from dropping. It is not unusual, at an orgy, for a man occupying a pussy that has already been well reconnoitered to worry about the effect his predecessors may have had. “You were crying out earlier. Tell me about it. He has a big cock, doesn’t he? He must have really had to ram it in, and you liked it. You were behaving like a woman in love. Don’t deny it, I saw you.” I have to admit that sometimes, contrary to expectations, I would reply honestly—no, I liked his cock just as much—because at the time I hadn’t learned to correct my scrupulous instincts, but also because of my writerly unwillingn
ess to repeat myself.

  But usually this chronicling of events took place outside of carnal exchanges. In that instance, the words hang in the space between those who are speaking, like a house of cards built up by their play of questions and answers, and which they hope won’t suddenly crumble in the face of prematurely salacious confessions or a curiosity that too quickly becomes indiscreet. While driving in his falling-apart little car, one friend asked me almost curtly: How old were you when you started swinging? What sort of people did you meet at orgies—middle-class types? Were there lots of girls? How many men fucked you in one evening? Did you come every time? My replies were equally matter-of-fact. At one point he pulled over, not so that we could touch each other but to pursue the interrogation, his face quite relaxed, his eyes focused well beyond the end of the street. Did I take several at the same time, in my pussy and in my mouth? “That’s the best, and jerking off two more with my hands.” This particular friend was a journalist; he ended up interviewing me for a magazine he contributed to.

  In my immediate circle of friends, it was a question of keeping the excitement at a certain level verbally so that all the members of the club could clandestinely identify one another anywhere, at a work-related meeting or at a party, and could tolerate the conformist nature of the event, for example at a housewarming party where there are lots of guests. They come and go in the artist’s huge at-home studio and there isn’t anywhere to sit. “Is that guy there the one you have such a fantastic time with? That’s great; he’s not much to look at, but that doesn’t mean anything. What the hell does he do to you?” I reply with a nod of the head; it’s true that he’s ugly, and more than that, he’s out of place here. In my wanderings I come across lots of different kinds of people, and I like arranging for these worlds to meet. I made sure he was invited even though they didn’t know him. Someone comes and asks me who the guy is in the hopelessly outdated hippie smock. All the same…When I spend the night with him, our bodies tangled up on his bed, we suck each other off for hours. During a sixty-nine, it really gets me going to rub my breasts against a slightly rubbery tummy. “It’s true, you seem to go for chubby ones.” Me: “I dreamed I met François Mitterand at an orgy!…and I like them not that clean, too…I’m pretty sure he never brushes his teeth.” “You’re disgusting. He’s married, isn’t he?” Me: “I’ve seen a picture of his wife. So ugly you wouldn’t believe it.”