Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 8
And it was when I moved away from the center of the spiral that I discovered something: my pleasure was never more intense than when it was the first time—not the first time that I made love with someone, but the first time we kissed; even the first embrace was enough. Obviously there were exceptions. Be that as it may, in most cases, even if what followed was not unpleasant, it was a bit like biting into the cone when you no longer have a mouthful of ice cream to melt on your tongue; it had all the attraction of a painting that you admire but on which you are feasting your eyes for the fifteenth time. If I was taken by surprise, the pleasure was overwhelming. It is these situations that provide some of my clearest recollections of orgasms. I can cite them: late at night, crossing the huge lobby of an Inter-Continental hotel; the elegant and distinguished assistant who has been traveling across the country with me for more than two weeks catches hold of my arm after we have just said goodnight to each other, pulls me to him and kisses me on the mouth. “In the morning, I’ll come and see you in your room.” I can feel the spasm rising right up to my stomach, and I set off toward the tiny little concierge’s desk in the distance, twisting my ankle as I go.
Another time, I dive down onto the carpet next to the master of the house, who, slightly drunk, has crashed out on the floor next to some other guests, and who pulls me toward him by tugging under the neck of my sweater, kissing me slowly with one of those cinema kisses that makes your head roll from side to side; this was not an evening destined to turn into an orgy, his wife was holding a conversation in the next room. One of his friends who was also sitting on the floor like us and whose face happened to be on a level with ours, watched us in amazement. I go completely limp.
And more: going to see the “Dernier Picasso” exhibition at the Pompidou Center with Bruno, with him there is always an element of chance. As he goes out of my field of vision while I go up to one of the paintings, his presence becomes all the more vivid and I am caught unaware by a brief but very distinct wetness between my legs. As I keep looking at the exhibition, I can feel the slimy patch on my tights alternately against the lips of my vagina and the swell of my inner thigh, shifting as I walk. In an early period of my life, I didn’t really care whether I reexperienced these feelings in more extensive caresses or during penetration, but later on, when I had come to understand how singularly limited it was, I started to hope that that faraway, ineffable tension in my lower abdomen, and the famous wave that dissipated it, could be repeated again and again as a relationship continued.
As I approached middle age, I had two successive relationships, one easygoing and the other emotionally charged, but nevertheless they both followed a similar pattern: I took the time to let the desire I felt for the other soak in, which made that desire all the more pronounced; it culminated in passionate bouts of fucking during which my satisfaction was never as complete as it had been in the inaugural physical contact. For many years I faithfully maintained a friendship with Bruno, but it was threatened periodically by bursts of desire, sometimes aggressive, frustrated, not satisfactorily fulfilled, etc. It was my only truly chaotic experience. I would go to see him every day for weeks on end, then one day I would ring the doorbell and there would be no reply; the door would stay closed for several weeks, months even. And this would go on until my incredulous persistence was at last rewarded by a hoarse interjection on the telephone, authorizing me to come see him once again. Probably because of this climate of uncertainty, I often came instantly to orgasm with him. We would talk volubly, exchanging impressions of books, usually standing in a sparse interior that would have made a Quaker feel at home. Time would pass and I would move toward him. “Do we want a little cuddle?” he would ask in the preoccupied but affectionate voice of an adult disturbed in his work by a child. Then his hand would push aside my panties, and two fingers, four, would elicit a brief, anguished cry from me, because it was as much a sensation of breathtaking surprise as of pleasure. He himself would have the satisfaction of knowing that my pussy was already dripping. We were generous with our kisses and caresses. He made sweeping movements. If I was lying down, he would brush aside the sheet with the same gesture that he used to stroke my breasts throughout; I could lie straight and motionless on my back while his palm swept up and down my entire length, as if I was just a sketch. When it was my turn to attend to him, in contrast I explored him minutely, paying special attention to the folds in his body, behind the ear, his groin, his armpits, the crack between his buttocks. I even scoured the furrowed lines in the crook of his hands. Throughout these preliminaries, I kept thinking how delicious it would be later on when he made up his mind to turn me over and take me the way I like it, from behind, when he grabbed my buttocks and smacked into them loudly and abruptly with his hips. I particularly like it when the dick jerks in and out; every three or four pumps, a slightly harder thrust comes as a glorious surprise. And yet it was only on a few exceptional occasions that I felt the same intense pleasure as when his fingers opened up the way. So I would start thinking that perhaps the next time I would, and I settled in to wait, occupying myself with the need to force the resistance of that closed door or the moral lesson.
Before that, I had a relationship with the author of the failed photographs taken in my office. He would arrange to meet me either in a hotel near Gobelins or in a disused apartment near the Gare de l’Est that was on loan to him. These meetings were always at an ungodly hour for anyone trying to carry on professional activities that were just a tad dependent on office hours: between eleven o’clock and midday, between half past three and four o’clock in the afternoon…The day before, I could already feel the anticipation in my pussy responding to the vibrating Métro seat while I looked forward to our reunion. The feeling could be so maddening that I sometimes preferred to get off a few stops before my destination, to calm myself down by walking. That man could lick my snatch indefinitely. His tongue moved languorously, diligently parting all the folds of the vulva, knowingly describing circles round the clitoris then licking broadly like a young dog over the opening. The need to feel his sex breaching that gap became imperative. When at last he penetrated me, just as softly and delving just as meticulously as he had with his tongue, my pleasure never managed to measure up to the escalation of desire.
Given the journeys I had to make to get to these rendezvous in only a short space of time, we sometimes missed each other. If he didn’t turn up, I would stay lying on the bed, swinging my legs, my wanting wedged painfully between my legs, stopping me from closing them like a crossbar. Afterward I felt a seemingly insurmountable oppression that stopped me from completing the day’s tasks, going back to the office, making telephone calls or even the simplest decisions. How could I live a normal life until the next time we met, as if things were just fine? My gaping desire made me feel like an abandoned wooden puppet, its stiff wooden legs spread helplessly, unable to move of their own free will. But happily, this debilitation, which always hovers over me and varies in obsessiveness according to the situation, does not last. Even though I never consciously decide that it should be, the door of my office is always a perfectly impermeable screen, and I may well be dripping wet between the legs (or could have been through any kind of event), I have the happy gift of being able to throw myself into my work with the same facility.
Would I ever have thought of writing this book, which opens with a chapter called “Numbers,” if I had not once experienced being a minute satellite that suddenly left the orbit where it had been held by a whole network of connections that no longer governed it? The liftoff happened in two stages. First, there were times when I found satisfaction less frequently, and I coped with this frustration less tolerantly than I have just described. My excitement could rise to very high levels. The signs I took as precursors of an overwhelming pleasure were goose pimples and my lips turning cold (I will come back to these sensations in more detail later). If, as had more frequently become the case, the process ground to a halt, I would feel like an insurmountabl
e obstacle towered in front of me instead of the vast release I had hoped for. Each time, in the very moment when my partner was moving away and I was closing my legs, I searched, with the same stubborn resolve as when I am trying to describe something in an article, for a definition of the feelings inside me that I could not put into words. What name should I give to this singular emotion? That was the question I put to myself. It was, I’m sure, a loathing of whoever was next to me at the time, but one obviously independent of my feelings for him the rest of the time. But at that moment this loathing filled me as closely and as fully as a liquid metal occupies a mold. I struggled obstinately to describe it to myself, and I remember sometimes comparing it to another form of sculpture: Tony Smith’s hermetic Die. Luckily, like the oppression that came over me after a failed rendezvous but never lasted beyond the trip back in the taxi or the Métro, this lacerating hatred put up no resistance to my reflex to slip off to the bathroom. And I think that it was in that position, as I ran a towel between my legs, that I first thought I ought to tell all about it.
For a period that I think lasted three years, perhaps four, and which constitutes what I think of as the second stage, my opportunities for sexual contact became rarer, and when they did arise, they were more or less like the frustrations described above. I also spent long weeks alone in Paris in the summer, my time divided between long working days and nights cut short both by the heat and by all the usual stress. That was when I delved through a pile of underwear and found the dildo I had been given years before and had never used. It had two different functions that could each be operated at two speeds. At one end there was a doll’s head with a star on her forehead and a hairstyle that swept into wide curls around her neck, corresponding to the rolled edges of the glans. This head rotated in smaller or larger circles while something looking rather like a wild boar, attached halfway down the shaft, quivered its extremely long tongue (either quickly or slowly), intended for the clitoris. The first time I used the thing, I came instantly, in one very long, perfectly identifiable, measurable spasm, and without needing to fantasize. I was completely taken aback. So an orgasm—an orgasm of the purest quality, even—could be achieved without perpetually having to return to that wellspring, the thrill of the “first time,” by recreating various first times, and without the time to convene my mental repertoire of delivery boys and workmen. I very often wept after these speedy sessions. They combined a painfully violent pleasure with that sensuous delight of being alone, here slightly heightened by a touch of bitterness. The contrast between something that corresponded so accurately with what is known as solitary pleasure and my usual taste for plurality was comic. One time I thought to myself that if I ever had to speak out about “the truth of the situation,” the book should be called The Sexual Life of Catherine M. It made me laugh out loud all by myself.
Although poorly provided for by nature in the first place, I now have the benefit of very healthy teeth, thanks to an excellent dentist who never once sent me a bill. The first time that he greeted me as usual in his surgery and then showed me through to another waiting room, not the one where I usually waited, a bigger room furnished quite differently with antique and not modern furniture, it was a bizarre, disturbing experience; it was as if, by passing through a familiar doorway, I had been magically transported to a film set or into a dream. He left me there alone. Then burst into the room, pushed my clothes away from my breasts and my ass, caressed me and disappeared. Reappeared ten minutes later with a young woman. The three of us fucked. I understood only later that it was a double surgery with two waiting rooms leading to two adjoining treatment rooms. Julien went from one to the other, treating one patient while the dressings on another dried. If I (or one of his other girlfriends, or a combination of the two) was in one of the treatment rooms, he could, with tremendous sleight of hand, rev up his dick against one of our pussies, tidy it away, disappear through the connecting door, then nip back. He usually ejaculated when he had scarcely penetrated. He had designed and decorated this double surgery himself, working on it late into the evening after his last patients had left. At the weekend he competed in tennis tournaments at quite a high level. He would sometimes arrange to meet me in the afternoon, having booked a room in a grand hotel. I would check in, he would join me for fifteen minutes and leave me the money to check out. I was fond of him. I was touched by the mysterious force that drove him in his tireless activity. And I identified with him, to some extent, because I never stopped, and as soon as I was in one place I wanted to be somewhere else, to see what was on the other side of the wall.
On walks, I hate coming back the same way that I set out. I study maps in minute detail to find a new way of getting to some piece of countryside, an edifice or a curiosity I haven’t yet seen. When I went to Australia, the farthest I could get from home on this earth, I realized that my perception of this distance could be compared to the concept of having no sexual barriers. While I was thinking about this, I wondered whether the joy of parenthood belonged to the same family of emotions. Éric’s ideas were in the same vein; he so cleverly adapted and changed the form our evenings took in the same way that (and these are his words) a “tour guide” would. What mattered, he would point out, was to “widen the available space.”
2. Space
Surely someone ought to write a study of the reasons why, during the course of their careers, eminent art historians (such as André Chastel and Giulio Carlo Argan) have focused increasingly on architecture. How did their analysis of the space represented in a painting mutate into an analysis of the way real space is organized? In my role as an art critic, I might have felt more inclined to follow their example if I had not come across modern and contemporary pictorial works that could be said to inhabit the cusp between imaginary space and the space we live in, be they Barnett Newman’s vast colored expanses (Newman himself said: “I declare space”), the radiant blues in the work of Yves Klein (who called himself the “painter of space”) or even Alain Jacquet’s topological surfaces and objects which juxtapose paradoxical abysses. What characterizes these works is not the fact that they open space up, but that they both open and seal it again—Newman with his closing “zips,” Klein by crushing his anthropometric forms, Jacquet by binding the ends of a Möbius strip. If you allow yourself to be led, it’s like the boundless inner surface of a lung.
The Gates of Paris
The Porte de Saint-Cloud parking lot borders on the boulevard Périphérique and in places is separated from it only by an openwork wall. All I had on were my shoes, having slipped off my raincoat, whose lining iced my skin, before getting out of the car. At first, as I have said, they rammed me up against a perpendicular wall. Éric saw me “pinned up by their pricks, like a butterfly.” Two men held me up under the arms and legs, while the others took it in turns hammering against the pelvis to which my whole person had been reduced. In these dicey situations, where there are many of them, men often fuck quickly and forcefully. I could feel the rugged surface of the breezeblocks digging into my shoulders and my hips. Even though it was late, there was still some traffic. The thrumming of the cars, so close they seemed to almost brush past us, lulled me into the same daze I feel at airports. With my body both freed of all weight and curled up on itself, I retreated within myself. From time to time I would glimpse through my half-closed eyes the headlights of a car as they swept over my face. The men moved away from the wall, and I felt myself being simultaneously levered up by two powerful jacks. A current fantasy, which had been nourishing my masturbation sessions for a long time, was to be taken to the dark foyer of a building by two strangers and to be impaled by both at the same time, like a sandwich, one in my cunt, the other up my ass, and here it found substance in an obscure atmosphere where reality and the images conjured in my mind fed off each other.
I must have come to, if I can call it that, when my body was returned to a more normal form of support. Someone threw a coat over the hood of a car, and they lay me down on it. I’m f
amiliar with this position, which is not an easy one; I kept slipping, and there was nothing to hold on to. I didn’t always respond well to the different cocks that sought out my wet, sticky canal. I was the focal point for a theater of shadows, invisible until headlights threw their insipid light over the scene. From there I could make out the group scattered far and wide about me; those who had already shot their load seemed to completely lose interest in the ensuing proceedings. In front of me was the silhouette of a much larger vehicle, probably a truck; perhaps it had been chosen as a makeshift screen.