The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (21 page)

and a proportional excellence in practices that flout these qualities, brush them aside and deny them. We can demonstrate this ability to such an extent that we wouldn’t mind seeing the admiration it inspires turn- ing to mockery. Éric nearly punched one narrow-minded idiot we met one evening in the club called the Cleopatra. When I was offered something to drink, the idiot—who wasn’t able to appreciate my enthusiasm in a fitting manner—announced that it was about time because it was beginning to “smell of burned rubber.”

If each of us drew our own body as if by dic- tation from our own internal perspective, we would produce a real gallery of monsters! I myself would be hydrocephalic and callipygi- an, and these two protuberances would be joined by an insubstantial mollusklike arm (I

have trouble making my breasts count for anything), and the whole thing would be planted on two posts that impede movement more than they facilitate it (I have had a complex about my legs for a long time). Per- haps it’s my cerebral nature that has led me to accord priority to the organs of the head, the eyes and the mouth. There could even be a compensatory relationship between them. When I was very young, people used to com- pliment me on my big eyes; people noticed them because they were dark brown. As I grew up, my eyes became proportionately less important within my face, and when I was an adolescent, my wounded narcissism had to accept that no one made much fuss about them any more. So I made my mouth, which I thought was rather nice, a possible means of attraction. And I learned to open it wide, and to close my eyes at the same time, at least in certain circumstances, while my backside came to represent the image I had

of myself, its rotundity all the more accentu- ated by my pronounced waist. This backside that I extend ever farther into the unknown regions of the
outback
(the name Australians give to the desert that lies behind them), which I will never see. Jacques once gave me a postcard of a sketch Picasso made for
Les Demoiselles d’Avignon:
a woman seen from behind, her torso the shape of an isosceles triangle, her buttocks curving dramatically above what look like knuckles of ham. My portrait, he said.

My ass is another side of who I am. Claude used to say, “so-so face, but what an ass!” I like it when Jacques is on the job and he uses the word “ass” unspecifically to designate the whole lower part of my body, which he is penetrating, and when he accompanies his declarations of love addressed to it with sharp slaps on my buttocks. I make a point of asking for this sort of attention. “Rub my ass” is one of my most frequent requests. In

response, he grabs my buttocks and shakes their malleable mass as if he were trying to whip up two mountains of cream. If he fin- ishes the job by inserting two fingers in a duck’s-head formation and then opens the bill—i.e., parts the two fingers—in the nar- row corridor that leads from the parting of the buttocks to the opening of the cunt, then I just can’t wait for his cock a minute longer.

Once he is inside me, I, too, can get going. Whether I am lying down or on all fours, I play energetically on the suppleness of my waist, and the repercussions of my regular, vigorous thrusts provoke the fantastical melding of my mouth and my genitals. I want to know whether I am “sucking” him well with my cunt. “Am I going to suck up all your come?” The answer I hope for sub- sumes my identity into that part of me in which all of me is concentrated: “Oh, Cather- ine! Your ass, your ass…” Knowing that what I cannot see is being attentively examined is

just as stimulating. A focused ray of light (from an adjustable bedside lamp, for ex- ample) is preferable to more diffuse lighting. I have been known to suggest using a flash- light. By glancing back, I can see the expres- sion on a man’s face as he scrutinizes the cleft between my buttocks which facilitates the disappearance of his precious append- age. I rely heavily on the description he gives me, however literal and crude it may be. “You have a good view of my ass?” “Oh, yes, it’s gorgeous, you know, it’s really swallow- ing my dick. Oh, the bitch wants more…” If there happens to be a mirror nearby, if I put myself in profile, I can oversee the immer- sion and emergence of what looks like a piece of flotsam tossed by the swell. Because of this predilection for sensations in my rump, the doggie position has been my fa- vorite for a long time, until I ended up ad- mitting to myself—we always end up being sexually honest with ourselves, but this can,

of course, take a long time—that, even though it allowed the rod to strike deep and hard, it still wasn’t the form of penetration that satisfied me the most. In other words, having gone in pursuit of the dick with the energetic buckings of my hips, and having been alternately pinned down and buffed like a polisher’s duster, I like to be turned over and nailed in the classic position.

The pleasure I take in exposing my ass goes back a long time. When I was six or sev- en, I would expose it to my brother in a game that included some of the moves I used to masturbate. That is, with my skirt hitched up, I would crease my panties up into the front of my crack, and I would push my but- tocks out as far as I could beyond the back of the small bench I was sitting on. Then I would wait for the little guy to go behind me. What amused us about it was that I would pretend to have revealed myself quite

absentmindedly, and he pretended to brush my buttocks inadvertently.

It must be that we give caresses in the way that we receive them because I have always responded eagerly to men with sensitive asses. I have mentioned the friend who offered himself on all fours for me to finger- fuck until my arm and shoulder were para- lyzed with pain. Another one planted his but- tocks on my nose without any warning. At the beginning of our relationship, he was be- ing coy and I had to overcome his resistance before I could undertake fellatio. But I had hardly taken him into my mouth when his body stiffened and he pivoted around and presented me with two resolute buttocks. It was easier for me to get to his asshole than his glans. Even so, when I got back up, I thought he still wore the same severe, almost reproving, expression that he had assumed when I first took him in my mouth. After that, I got into the habit of exploring this

man’s body in minute detail; I have never licked, kissed and nibbled anyone so thor- oughly, from his earlobes to the shifting skin attaching his testicles, via the delicate de- pressions under his arms, in the crooks of his elbows and in the folds of his groin. It was the systematic occupation of a territory where I left my mark in the form of tiny gobs of spit released from a few centimeters to give the limpid saliva time to stretch out, soiling where I had passed.

Is it because people were less interested in my bosom that it is more lymphatic by nature, and is it because I never thought to offer it spontaneously to be seen and fondled by others that I find it tedious having to stimulate my partner’s nipples? A lot of men ask you to “do their tits” and they even ex- pect this coaxing to take the form of pinching and biting these delicate areas. I have regu- larly been reproached for not pinching hard enough when my hand hurt from rolling

nipples between my fingers, at the same time trying to squeeze them. Not only is the sad- istic the least developed of my impulses, I can’t find any resonance in myself for pleas- ure provoked in this way. Personally, I prefer my breasts to be enveloped in a wider, more subtle gesture, which is even nicer at the time in my cycle when my breasts are heavier because then I can feel them quivering gently. I don’t like them to be pressed or pinched. Any fussing over my nipples I keep for myself, and then only to feel how hard and rough they are under my smooth palms. But in my own intimacy, I can experience an even more striking contrast: kneeling or on all fours, I rub my breasts on my thighs, and this is a confusing feeling; it feels as if my own thighs are strangers to me, as if they don’t belong to me, that their touch comes from outside me, and I melt, always sur- prised by their velvety skin.

On the subject of seeking out a contrast between rough surfaces and soft ones, I have just remembered one of the first times I ex- perienced an erotic emotion as such. My brother and I would be sent to spend a holi- day with some friends of our father’s whose numerous grandchildren played with us. One day, the grandfather, who was ill, had to go to bed and I went to see him in his room. As I sat on the edge of the bed, he started to ex- amine my face. Feeling his way with his fin- gers, he commented that I had a very fine jawbone; when he reached my neck, he dia- gnosed that later in life I might be suscept- ible to goiter. These contradictory observa- tions worried me. Then, slipping his hand under my blouse, he brushed past my breasts, which were barely beginning to bud. And as I stayed there, silent and motionless, he said that when I became a woman, I would really like it when people stroked my “titties” like this. I still didn’t move, or

perhaps just my head, which I turned toward the wall as if I couldn’t hear what I was being told. The callused surface of his big hand snagged on my skin. I was aware for the first time of the stiffening of my nipple. I listened to his predictions. I was suddenly brought to the threshold of womanhood, and I felt a sense of pride. A child forges its power in the enigma of its future life. So, though discon- certed by this gesture, for which I had no prepared response, I turned back to look at this man, whom I was fond of, on his bed. I felt sorry for him because his wife was crippled, obese, her legs covered in suppur- ating sores that he dressed meticulously morning and evening. At the same time, his grayish face and his lumpy nose made me want to laugh. I extricated myself gently.

That evening, lying in the bed that I shared with one of his granddaughters, I told her about the episode. He had touched her, too. We looked each other right in the eye as we

spoke, trying to measure the magnitude of our discovery in the other’s gaze. We were pretty sure the grandfather was doing something forbidden, but the secret that he gave us to share was far more valuable than some moral whose meaning was, anyway, no clearer. When I once decided—again, with a sense of pride, almost bravado—to talk about my masturbating in confession, the priest’s reaction was so disappointing (he made ab- solutely no comment and just gave me a few Aves and the odd Pater to recite as usual) that I felt nothing but contempt for him af- terward. So, trying to tell him that I had been stirred because an old man had put his hand on my breast…!

If I see a man’s eyes alighting—even for half a second—on the place where I then de- duce that my bra is straining the buttons of my blouse, or, more usually, if I am talking to someone whose staring eyes are appar- ently following a train of thought unrelated

to what I am saying, I always take refuge in exactly the same modest behavior as in that first examination by the grandfather. For the same reason, you won’t find any low-cut or tight-fitting dresses in my wardrobe. This modesty extends to even those around me. If I am sitting on the sofa in someone’s living room, next to a woman in very revealing clothes, I will instinctively pull down the hem of my own skirt and hunch over to hide my breasts. In this sort of situation, my dis- comfiture derives as much from the impres- sion that, by association, it is my own ana- tomy that she is revealing, as from my tend- ency—described earlier—to break down the barriers of sexual contact from the word go; by adjusting my clothes, I am stopping my- self from burying my hands between the two half-exposed breasts and revealing them en- tirely. And yet I myself wore no underwear at all for many years. I can’t remember why I gave it up. It was definitely not to follow the

feminists who wanted us all to burn our bras, because I never adhered to that philosophy, but it was perhaps in the same spirit of re- jecting accessories of seduction. Obviously, the results could have the opposite of the de- sired effect; breasts that can be seen moving freely under clothes are just as tantaliz- ing—although more “naturally”—as those displayed to best effect by a bra. I could at least feel free from any suspicion of having a battle plan for my conquests. I passed up panties in the same way. For how many years was I compelled, for reasons of hygiene, to clean the crotch of my trousers every even- ing, when it would have been much quicker to put a pair of panties in the washing ma- chine? I just thought it was much simpler to slip all my other clothes on directly. This tendency was dictated to me by a minimalist, almost functionalist principle, according to which a free body need not weigh itself down with ornamentation, as long as it is ready

without the need for preliminaries, no shed- ding of lace or manipulating of bra hooks. In sum, I don’t like it when a man undresses me with his eyes, but once you get down to un- dressing for real, then it might as well be in one swift move.

If a subjective eye were on a journey, what a world of contrasts it would see! Like a mountain road interrupted by tunnels, you pass abruptly from darkness into light, and from light into darkness. Here I am trying to explain that I prefer to keep covered something that it is perfectly acceptable to reveal, when within these same pages I have displayed an intimacy that most people keep secret. It is obvious that, in the same way psychoanalysis helps you to shed unwanted parts of yourself, when you write a book in the first person the latter becomes the third person. The more detailed my descriptions of my body and my actions, the more I leave myself behind. Who recognizes themselves

in those magnifying mirrors that show cheeks and noses as vast fissured land- scapes? Because sexual pleasure brings you outside your own limits, it can impose the same sort of distance. Perhaps there is even a structural relationship, and the distance gov- erns the pleasure as much as it is governed by it, at least for the category of creature to which I belong. Because, and this is the point I wanted to make, the same woman whom I described as uncomfortable under someone’s insistent gaze, and who hesitates to wear suggestive clothes, the same woman in fact who partook blindly in sexual adventures with faceless partners, this same woman, then, takes indisputable pleasure in exposing herself on the condition that the exposure is distanced at once, by a narrative.