Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 7

  That gets me going, too. My voice is no louder than usual, but I give details only sparingly. I take pleasure in evoking this dirtiness and this contagious ugliness, at the same time savoring the disgust of the man questioning me. “You suck each other. And then?” Me: “You can’t imagine the way he moans when I lick his ass…he gets in the doggie position, his ass is so white…he wriggles it when I burrow my nose into it. Then I get onto all fours…he finishes quickly, with short little thrusts that are—how shall I put this—very precise.” The man I’m talking to is part of the scene, too, but I’ve never happened to sleep with him. I’m not especially attracted to him, either. The man I’m referring to is not the sort to assail me with questions, but he listens to me, and in the end, because everyone ends up calling their friends’ friends by their first names even if they haven’t met them themselves, I think of him as part of the group.

  The more sociable I became, the better I cultivated my innate pragmatism in all aspects of sexual exchanges. Having, in the early days, tested various partners’ receptivity to ménages à trois, I adapted the words I used. A faint, decadent aura around me was enough for some, whereas others, as I have illustrated, wanted to enjoy by proxy every last fingering. Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always colored by the way feelings have evolved. I was very talkative with Jacques at first, but then I had to cope, more or less well and anyway belatedly, with the ban imposed on sexual adventures and accounts of these adventures the moment our relationship was perceived and lived as one of love, even though more than once, I read descriptions of erotic scenes in Jacques’s books that could only have been reworkings of anecdotes I had told him. Of all the men I saw for any length of time, only two brought my exhaustive exposés to an abrupt halt. And even then I am pretty sure that these details they didn’t want to know, and which were therefore not mentioned, still formed a central part of our exchanges.

  Those who obey social mores are probably better equipped to confront demonstrations of jealousy than those with a libertine philosophy that leaves them feeling helpless in the face of passion. A person can prove her extensive and sincere liberality by sharing the pleasure she takes with the person she most loves, only for it to be pierced, without any warning, by an exactly proportionate intolerance. Jealousy may have been bubbling within like a spring, and as the bubbles burst it might even have been giving a regular and subterranean form of irrigation to the garden of libido, until—suddenly—it formed a torrent and then the entire conscious mind was submerged by it, as has been described by so many people.

  I have learned this from observation as well as from experience. I personally have experienced my confrontations with these passionate expressions of jealousy in a sort of stupor that even the brutal death of a loved one did not provoke. And I had to read Victor Hugo, yes, I had to go and seek out that portrayal of God the Father, to understand that this stupor is comparable to the sort of denial displayed by children. “To accept facts as they are does not belong to realms of childhood. [A child forms] impressions as his terror grows but without making any connection between the two and without drawing any conclusions,” I once read in The Man Who Laughs, finally finding an explanation for my mindless inertia. And I can confirm that, even after you have done all the growing you should do, you can still experience what I would describe as an incomprehension of injustice that prevents you from seeing the feelings behind the injustice. I was once beaten all the way along the path that runs from the rue Las Cases toward the area around the church of Notre-Damedes-Champs, beaten and trampled in the gutter and, when I got back to my feet, forced to walk through a series of punches to the back of my neck and my shoulders, the way they used to drive common thieves to the dungeons. We had just left a party that hadn’t come close to an orgy but had at one point been enlivened by a sort of conga around the apartment, during which a fairly prominent man had taken advantage of our passage through the dimly lit sitting room to push me onto a sofa and drench my ear with his saliva. And yet the friend who beat me had already come with me to other parties with much more absolute ends. When, later that night, I retraced our steps all the way up the path, in the vain hope of finding a piece of jewelry that had fallen off under his blows, my thoughts were focused exclusively on this specific loss. On another occasion, one of my unwisely detailed accounts earned me a less furious—although equally aggressive—revenge: a slash with a razor on my right shoulder while I lay sleeping on my belly, but not before the blade had been carefully disinfected on a burner in the kitchen. The scar, which I still have, is shaped like a stupid little mouth, a good illustration of what I felt at the time.

  My own jealousy has been episodic. If I have used my sexual itinerary to satisfy my intellectual and professional curiosity, I have nevertheless remained perfectly indifferent to my friends’ love lives and marriages. It goes even beyond indifference, perhaps contempt. I have had rushes of jealousy only with the men I have lived with and then, oddly, on a quite different basis in both cases. It pained me every time Claude was seduced by a woman whom I judged to be prettier than myself. I am not ugly, but only if you take my appearance as a whole; there’s nothing remarkable about my features. It galled me that I couldn’t enhance my sexual performances—which, in principle, had no limitations—with a physical appearance that, itself, could not be improved. I really would have loved it if I, the girl who gave the best blow job, the one who was always first to get going at an orgy, hadn’t been short, with eyes that are slightly too close together, a long nose, etc. I could describe in great detail the physical traits that attracted Claude: a triangular face and the hairstyle of one of the secretaries whose slender torso provided a contrast to set off her rounded shoulders and conical breasts; the pale-colored eyes of another woman, who had brown hair, like mine; the smooth temples and doll-like cheeks of a third. It goes without saying that such a powerful contradiction to the principles of sexual freedom meant that this agony could not be articulated and, therefore, reduced me to scenes and crying fits that were all the more intractable, and fits of hysteria worthy of Paul Richer’s L’arc hystérique.

  With Jacques, my jealousy took the form of a terrible feeling of being supplanted. The images I could dream up, of some woman whose haunches, while I was away, would obscure the tip of his sex from view, in a setting that was familiar to us, or whose whole enormous, ever expanding body inhabited the smallest part of our environment—the running board of the car, the leafy design of a sofa cover, the side of the sink you lean your belly on when you rinse out a cup—who might even have left strands of her hair inside my motorbike helmet, these images caused me such acute pain that I had to escape them with the most drastic fantasizing. I would imagine that, having caught them in the act, I would leave the house, set off along the boulevard Diderot toward the Seine, which wasn’t far away, and throw myself in. Or I would go on walking to the point of exhaustion and be taken to the hospital, speechless and out of my wits.

  Another, less pathetic, escape route consisted in intensive masturbatory activity. As I have already begun to disclose the sort of narratives that sustain this activity, it might be interesting if I said something about the modifications they undergo at a given point. My wanderings over wasteland and the delivery-boy characters, taking advantage of the situation phlegmatically, were replaced by a limited repertoire of scenes in which I no longer appeared and Jacques was the only male figure, accompanied by one or other of his girlfriends. The scenes would be partly imaginary, partly constructed from snippets harvested by trespassing into Jacques’s notebooks or his letters, because he’s not very talkative on the subject. Cramped in an Austin parked under a railway bridge, he keeps her head down on his belly, holding it carefully with both hands as if manipulating the glass dome that houses a precious object, until his come has spurted into the back of her throat and he has heard the gulp as she swallows reticently. Or a big white backside exposed on the sofa in the sitting room like a
gigantic mushroom, and Jacques sinking into it as he spanks it smartly. Another option is for the girl to be standing with one foot up on a stool, in the position some women adopt to insert a tampon; Jacques, hanging on to her hips and braced on his tiptoes, penetrates her in the same configuration: from behind. I would consistently orgasm at the point in my narrative when I allowed Jacques to ejaculate, when the watchful eye in my mind recognized that powerful asymmetrical contraction of his face. This confiscation of my old fantasies eventually produced a defensive reaction, but I still needed considerable perseverance and force of will for the sequences in which I was the protagonist to take back that zone of my imagination.

  I cannot close this chapter on exchange (which, like a silk worm’s cocoon, covers and constitutes the sexual relationships) without bringing up my only failed attempt at prostitution. When I heard mention of Madame Claude, I would always succumb to fanciful daydreams about high-class prostitution, envying Catherine Deneuve’s character in Belle de jour, but I would have been completely incapable of negotiating the least exchange of this sort. People used to say that Lydie, the only woman I knew who was as aggressive as a man during an orgy, had spent several days in a brothel in Palermo, earning enough money to throw a fantastic party for one of her friends. There was something mythical about this to me, and it left me stunned. I have made enough references to my shyness, to my excessive reserve, for the reasons to be clear. To establish a mercenary relationship, you have to navigate an exchange of words or at least signals, the sort of complicity that forms the basis for all conversations and which would have seemed, to me, closely related to the preliminaries of seduction that I avoided. In both cases, in order to keep to your side of the deal, you have to take into account your partner’s attitudes and responses. Now, even at the first contact, I knew only how to focus on the body. It is just when I have found my bearings with the body, as it were, when the grain of the skin and its particular pigmentation have become familiar to me, or I have learned to adjust my own body to it, that my attention could focus on the person himself, often to form a sincere and lasting friendship. But by then it would no longer be right to ask for money.

  Still, I really needed it. An old school friend wanted to help me out. A contact of hers had asked whether she would like to meet a woman who was keen to be introduced to very young women. She did not dare go herself but thought that I might be interested. My friend had an idea that doing such a thing with a woman was less “consequential” than with a man. I was given a rendezvous time in a café in Montparnasse, with a suspicious go-between, a man of about thirty-five who looked like a real estate agent. As a precaution, a friend watched me from a distance. I don’t remember anything about the conversation or the proposed arrangements; I seem to recall the guy was very careful to describe the woman we were meant to be meeting, while I, probably unable to imagine myself cast as a prostitute, switched the roles in my mind’s eye and imagined this woman as an aging call girl, with bleached hair and lingerie that sagged on her flesh, lying back on a furry bedcover with silent authority. Despite my naïveté, I realized as soon as the man took me to one of the little hotels I knew on the rue Jules-Chaplain that I would never see the woman. Perhaps the fact that he had spoken about her so much had immediately and definitively sent her back to the realms of imagination. The room was pleasantly cozy; he switched on both bedside lights without bothering to switch off the overhead light, undid his zipper straightaway and asked me to suck him, in the same tone of voice as a man apologizing for bumping into you on the Métro even though he seems to think it’s your fault. I carried out the job, only too relieved that I no longer had to face his rudeness. He lay down on the satin bedcover, he had a good hard erection and was easy to handle. I sucked him steadily without tiring, resting squarely on my knees, which were perpendicular to his hips—one of the most comfortable positions. I was keen to finish because my thoughts were spinning. Should I say anything more about the woman we were meant to be meeting? That would be stupid. Should I ask for money for the blow job? But shouldn’t I have done that first? What was I going to tell the friend waiting for me? I was surprised by the sincere and youthful, abandoned expression on his face when he came, it was such a contrast to the way he behaved; it was also the only time in my life that I saw our pleasure of a man I didn’t like. I still have a clear image of the room as it was when we left it, the immaculate bedspread, the untouched chairs and the uncluttered surfaces of the little bedside tables under the lamp shades. I denied it, but I could not disguise from the attentive friend who met me on a nearby terrace that I had made extensive use of my mouth. A blow job, especially if it is well done, bruises the insides of the lips. If you keep on going back and forth with your mouth, it’s better to protect the aroused member by curling your lips over your teeth—at least that’s the way I have always proceeded. “Your lips are all swollen,” said my friend, telling me I was a fool. The young man who looked like a real estate agent had followed me. He insulted us, claiming we had tried to con him in some way. I couldn’t quite see how, but luckily he didn’t press the point.

  What teasing I have had for offering my body so easily but not knowing how to make money from it! I was with men who were relatively well off, but I wasn’t the type to put on the sort of performance that would have been necessary to gain any material advantage from them—advantages that they doubtless conferred on other girls. If I had to make a list, like a head of state who has to keep records of gifts received from ambassadors or foreign heads of state, the spoils would be meager: a pair of sparkly orange stockings I have never worn; three thick 1930s bangles in Bakelite; a pair of off-white knitted shorts (definitely one of the first styles to come out in the winter 1970 prêt-à-porter collection) with a matching top; an authentic Berber wedding dress; a dime-store watch; a plastic brooch with a baroque geometric design typical of the early eighties; a necklace and a ring by Zolotas, which, sadly, tarnished very quickly; a pearl-edged pareo; a Japanese-brand vibrating dildo, along with three little metallic balls meant to be inserted in the vagina to stimulate you during the act, which never worked for me…I should also add a contribution to the first dress I ever bought from a YSL boutique; a bath towel, also from YSL; extensive free dental care; and a loan of several thousand francs that I never had to repay. Taxis and airfare have always been paid for. “You looked lost,” someone who knew me when I was very young tells me, “and people just couldn’t help themselves giving you hundred-franc notes.” I must have gone on looking like that to men all my life, not like a woman who was after money, far from it, but like an adolescent who was no good at earning her living and needed help with a little allowance. I have, of course, excluded from this list all the presents Jacques gave me, given that our relationship was of a different order, and I also separate the works given to me by artists, because I always think—as, indeed, I do every time my professional interests have been closely linked with my sexual relationships—that they gratify the art critic in me just as much as, when that is their intention, they do the lover.

  Always First Times

  We do not stick to the same sexual diet all the way through our lives! This may be due to our emotional circumstances (all our desires may be channeled through one person) but also to those times when we take stock of ourselves, thanks to changes that may have intervened in aspects of our lives not necessarily connected with love (moving, illness, a new professional or intellectual environment), when we find ourselves off the track we were following.

  I can think of two occasions when my libido was stalled. When Jacques and I were preparing to live together, he wrote to tell me that we should hide absolutely nothing from each other, that we shouldn’t lie. Now, it just happened that I had formed some relationships that I thought he wouldn’t be happy about. I managed to avoid a couple of meetings, to stagger my visits to orgies and to go through with the rest in a guilty state that I had hardly ever experienced and which had an inhibiting effect, moderate but nonetheless real.
On the other hand, one particular orgy, which was in no way extraordinary, marked a turning point for me. I knew the couple who were our hosts, and—because he had just taken on the management of a big newspaper and she was a singer—I thought of them as parodies of characters from Citizen Kane. I had already fucked if not both of them, certainly him. There were some distinguished guests, and they had split into two groups: one in a bedroom, the other on a sofa that stood rather oddly in the middle of a living-room, lit by a chandelier. I was on the sofa, definitely glad to be in the group that was better lit, and active as I always was. I rather liked our host’s dick, a short sturdy organ whose proportions made it a reduced model of his entire, compact body. Some people started to head for the bedroom, where a young woman buried in a thick down comforter and waving her limbs in the air like a baby in its crib was hidden under the succession of broad backs that came and covered her, and whose cries could be heard all over the apartment. I observe this sort of extroverted behavior with placid indifference. One of the participants expressed his admiration, saying she was “really going for it,” and I thought this was stupid. I went back to relax on the sofa. I thought that this young woman had taken up center stage, which, till then, had been mine, and that I should have been jealous of her, but my jealousy was lukewarm. For the first time ever, I was pausing during one of those sessions in which I normally kept it up without stopping. And I appreciated that pause in the same way as I valued those moments when I withdrew into myself during a meal or while out with friends. Of course, I wondered about this new reaction. The answer I found was that by constantly talking openly about these sort of practices with people who did or did not perform them; by commenting on them and interpreting them, usually with the arsenal of lay psychoanalysis (which had the same effect on me as a cavalry regiment descending on an encampment of rebel Indians); in short, by heading to a couch three times a week not to fuck but to talk about it, I had—without realizing it—taken on the role not only of an active participant but also of an observer.