The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (16 page)

contraction of Jacques’s buttocks, which scarcely rolled his hips. Anyone who has been constrained to seize their pleasure in public involuntarily (in a boarding school dormitory, a small family home) knows what I am talking about: if you achieve your pleas- ure, then it will have absorbed the utter si- lence and the near paralysis of the bodies that were its preconditions, and it will have been the more intense for them. Under- standably, people then try to re-create this lack of privacy in more or less artificial ways, and some try to achieve it by choosing the most unexpected and public nooks and crannies.

Listening closely to the breathing around us, which suspended its various regular rhythms when the train jolted sharply, I ac- tually felt afraid on that bunk, me who would have been perfectly indifferent to, for ex- ample, hitch up my skirt on the platform if Jacques had had the urge to ask me—I was

afraid that the children would guess what we were doing. It was as if I were sharing a bed with my mother, but I had changed roles; yes, I was still the one succumbing to clandestine activities, but I had become the adult who might feel disgust at the child’s re- action. In fact, I had not forgotten the sense of decency that I’d had then, one that was all the more intransigent at that young age than one might think or appreciate precisely be- cause it reflects the superiority of childhood to adulthood. Put differently, I may not have minded what the adults thought of me, but I did mind what the children thought. I didn’t want to put before them something—not that they should not yet know—that was too seri- ous and precious to reveal carelessly. Be- cause I had relationships with men who had children, I twice very nearly gave them a far more graphic scene than my mother’s sneaked kiss with her friend. The first time I spent the night with Robert in his home—in

fact, the only time—I watched him wedge the door handle with the back of a chair. “Funny, those things you see in old action films really work!” I thought. In the morning, his daugh- ter rattled the door, demanding to see her father before leaving for school. He yelled at her to go and get ready, and said he would come and see her. Which he did. On vacation once, during siesta time, Éric’s son called his father from the other side of the cotton cur- tain that partitioned off the bedroom. Éric detached himself from my breast by leaning on an elbow, like the lid of box pivoting on a hinge. “Go away,” he bellowed angrily. “Go on, get out of here and let me sleep!” Both times I felt for the rebuffed child.

When you pass a very large vehicle on a mo- torbike, however little wind there is, there is always a precise moment when the air

snatches you. This moment comes when you have reached the front of the truck, just be- fore you start to pull back into the lane. There is an in-draft, and your torso under- goes a double twisting motion. One shoulder is thrust forward, the other backward, and this movement is reversed just as sharply. You are like a sail snapping in the wind. Just seconds earlier you were cleaving through the space as it opened up before you. Sud- denly, that space closes in and shakes you up, assaults you. I like this feeling and can identify it in various different situations: feeling that you are right at the heart of a space that opens and closes, stretches and contracts. And in that space you are like a rubber band that has been stretched and then released, and comes back to smack the hand holding it; you are alternately the sub- ject that possesses its environment (even if only by looking at it) and the object possessed.

I felt this, quite unexpectedly, in a sex- shop. I liked going there with Éric. While he kept the assistant busy with his requests, which were always extremely precise because he knew exactly what had just come out, es- pecially video, I would wander around the shop. The first picture I saw, whatever it might be (a girl holding her scarlet vulva open with her manicured fingers, her head in the background, slightly raised, her gaze floating above her body with the same lost expression as a patient trying to see her feet at the end of a stretcher; another one sitting back on her heels in the traditional pinup pose holding her massive breasts in her open palms; a young man in a three-piece suit pointing his dick toward an older woman bending over her desk—she is a lawyer or CEO—and even bodybuilders intended for the gay clientele, strapped into G-strings that look minute in comparison to their bodies), any sort of picture, graphic, photographic,

cinematic, be it realist or caricature (a model posing in the underwear pages of a mail-or- der catalog; great droplets of come splattered outside the margins of a cartoon), every im- age I would say even at first glance made me feel that characteristic nerve tingling deep between my thighs. I leafed through the magazines on display, cautiously turned over the shrink-wrapped ones. Isn’t it wonderful how you can be aroused so freely, in full sight and full knowledge of all the other cus- tomers doing the same thing, even though each behaves as if he or she is searching through the display racks at the local news- stand? Isn’t it admirable, the apparent de- tachment you have in public, contemplating pictures and objects that would certainly make you lose your composure at home? I liked to imagine myself in a mythical world where every shop offered that sort of mer- chandise, in among other goods, and where, with apparent nonchalance, you were

gradually suffused by that warm feeling, ab- sorbed in your perusal of organs reproduced in full color that perfectly depicted their moist surfaces, and you might shamelessly turn and show them to the person next to you. “Excuse me, could I borrow your pa- per?” “Oh, please do.” Etc. The quiet, unas- suming blatancy that reigns in a sex shop spread to every aspect of social life.

Going through into the back room where the peep show is going on is like arriving late at the theater. You are plunged into dark- ness, in a circular corridor lined with booths. You need coins, not to tip any ushers but to pay to illuminate the two-way mirror that looks out on the central stage where a girl or a couple undergo a series of unbelievably slow contortions. It is so dark in the little kiosk that I have never been able to see a thing around me, not even the walls, which amounts to being in a void. There is, though, a faint bluish light coming from the stage,

and a beam of this light settles on the base of the member that I have just taken in my mouth, so that the perceptible space around me is reduced to this section of wrinkled flesh dotted with hairs, which I swallow rhythmically. Perhaps Éric has to go to the register to change a bill for some more coins. Having turned toward the window, I then don’t recognize the hands that start smooth- ing over my exposed buttocks; I can believe that both the hands and indeed the buttocks are far, far away from me, also on the other side of the screen. Just after we go into the kiosk, we feel each other blindly, our eyes fo- cused on the show, which we are discussing. We agree that the girl has a nice pussy. The guy is a bit too cutesy. Éric would really like to watch the girl and me bring each other off. I ask whether we could meet up with her af- terward, etc. Then we are taken up in the ac- celeration of our own movement; the couple in the blue light becomes less real; they are

merely the distant, almost subconscious pro- jection of the images conjured in the minds of those busying themselves in the dark. The shadow bent over my back lets out a hoarse “Ahhh” as it smacks more firmly against my ass.

The fantasy exchange between the show and the real action, when you fuck while watching a peep show, is not as fluid as what happens when you watch a movie on televi- sion, occasionally releasing your own grip to follow the action on the screen, and using it as a pretext for changing position. While the flickering pixels blur boundaries so that the space they delineate becomes almost an ex- tension of the space you are in, the window at a peep show is a hiatus that substantiates the separation between two symmetrical parts, one that can be crossed but remains tangible. Two further points: pornographic films have a story line that, however formu- laic, holds your attention, whereas the action

in a peep show evolves very little; finally, you can watch a film continuously or spend the night in front of the television, but the bot- tomless kiosk has a limit, which is attained when the timer runs out.

Who doesn’t have, somewhere among their memories, some of those voracious kisses, those exchanges of tongues that suddenly made full use of their complement of muscles, their great length and their mon- strous adhesion, exploring each other as well as the relief of their partner’s entire mouth and lips? And didn’t this obscene deploy- ment happen on some doorstep, at the foot of the stairs in an apartment building or on the corner of a porch, just where the light switches are (but, of course, you hadn’t used those)? Adolescents rarely have somewhere they can call their own, so their carnal

displays take place in these semipublic spaces such as side doors, stairwells and landings. I have referred to the need—felt most keenly by the urban pubescent popula- tion—to establish an intimate sphere within forbidden spaces. The sexual instinct, which civilization has made secret, finds its first spontaneous expression not behind a closed bedroom door but in places we pass through, which belong to everyone and where cour- tesy reaches its peak of reserve: “Good morn- ing. Good evening. I’m so sorry. After you,” etc. The number of times I have had a breast mauled by clumsy hands in the exact spot where my neighbor usually holds the door for me. Even once I had become an emancip- ated adult, I still sometimes displayed suffi- cient masochistic impatience to let myself be manhandled like a heavy bag in a tiled hall- way lit by the streetlights filtering through a vent, while I sat on the radiator with my knees under my chin and the cast-iron ridges

digging a little farther into my buttock flesh with every slam. As a result, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether the taste for trans- gression that encourages adults to choose this sort of place—and other, even more pub- lic and uncomfortable ones—to undertake the sexual act, whether this derives from some so-called primary transgression, and whether their “perversity” should not be put down to a venial immaturity?

Before I came to know the games played on the paths in the Bois de Boulogne or the exploits at the Porte Dauphine, my outings with Henri and with Claude allowed me to continue having these surreptitious petting sessions (pretty heavy, some of them) in the common space of Parisian apartment blocks. At the witching hour, when thieves are abroad, we disappeared into a group of buildings, looking for a friend’s apartment. Even though she was an artist and always liked to appear very relaxed, rebellious even,

she was bourgeois—we’re talking the boulevard Exelmans here, quite a chic ad- dress—and on top of that, she was the girl- friend of the man who was our boss, Henri’s and mine. Our aim is childish. We want to go and ring the doorbell and beg her most sweetly to forgive us for disturbing her. The ulterior motive is that at least one of the boys will succeed in ramming his persistent prick into the depths of her little cushion of moist flesh, impregnated with the smell of sleep. But we still have to know exactly which building and on which floor the girl was sleeping. Claude, very sure of himself, volun- teers to explore one of the buildings floor by floor, probably deliberately leaving Henri and me to linger in another, where our search proves fruitless.

Henri is always tender in his movements; his fingers always seem slightly awkward, as if he uses them more to establish things than to hold them. I am usually more forthright.

Standing clamped together, we start by stroking each other’s buttocks. Mine are bare under my skirt. There is not much more of him than there is of me, and I like to take a man’s ass in my hands and to be able to put my arms around him easily. I have been with tall, well-built men, but I have never snubbed the seductions of small men. If a man’s size is comparable to my own, and I feel an equal division of physical strength in our embraces, I experience a very particular kind of pleasure, which probably includes the desire to feminize the man in question, or even a narcissistic illusion: by holding him I can experience the same pleasure he has in holding me.

I hope, later in the book, to do justice to the intoxication that overruns me when my mouth is filled by a stiff penis: one of the roots of this feeling is an identification of my pleasure with the man’s; the more he arches his body, the more emphatically he moans,

gasps or whispers encouragement, the more I feel he is expressing the frantic calling com- ing from deep within my own genitals. For now I must concentrate on describing the scene with Henri, given that I sucked him with what he called astonishing ardor. How did I go about it? Following the instinctual pressure of his pubis against mine, did I let myself fall at his feet, guided down the length of his body by the persistent embrace of my arms, and then, kneeling before him, did I, as I usually did, rub my face, cheeks, fore- head and chin over a shape that by its form and hardness always remind me of a darning egg? The light went out. Henri joined me on the threadbare mat and we curled up togeth- er at the bottom of the stairs, facing the elev- ator shaft. I extricated the object that was imprisoned behind the straining fly and helped it assume the correct shape with slow, regular hand movements. Then, my head bent between his legs, I continued the

motion with a similar to-ing and fro-ing of my mouth. The light came back on, suspend- ing my progress. I felt the hammering of fear beating in my chest and ringing in my ears, its echoes reverberating as far as the erogen- eous zones in my mound…But no sound fol- lowed the light. While we waited, I automat- ically kept my hand over his organ, which was now too swollen to be put back where it belonged. Then, reassured, we settled more comfortably on the stairs. Some of the rules of fucking, especially if it is performed in a place that does not lend itself to excesses, are like the rules of courtesy: the partners take turns devoting themselves to the other’s body, temporarily keeping their own body out of reach, just like two people exchanging thanks or desultory compliments in a one- upmanship of unselfish attention. Henri’s fingers triggered a spasm in my cunt like the connecting rod of a train, while I sat against the front of the stairs, taking only the