The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (4 page)

there, I would worry not only at the thought of all the strangers who would soon be for- cing me to wake up to where I was, but also in anticipation of the energy I would have to expend. It was a feeling not unlike the one I get before giving a conference, when I know I will have to be completely focused on what I am saying, and at the mercy of my listeners. Both the men met in those situations and the audiences plunged in darkness are faceless, and, miraculously, between the anxiety of anticipation and the weariness at the end, you are perfectly unaware of your own exhaustion.

Visitors went in Chez Aimé through the bar—I don’t remember ever being taken in there (even though the feel of my pussy against the moleskin of a bar stool with my flattened buttocks lending themselves to furtive fondling belongs to my very oldest fantasies). I’m not sure I even paid much at- tention to what was going on around me, to

the few women perched by the bar whose buttocks and thatches passersby certainly did uncover and play with. My place was in one of the back rooms, lying—as I have said—on a table. The walls were bare, there was no seating, there was nothing in these rooms except for the rough-hewn tables and overhead lights. So I could stay there two or three hours. Always the same configuration: hands running over my body, me grabbing at cocks, turning my head from left to right to suck, while other cocks rammed into me, up toward my belly. Twenty could take turns in an evening. That position, the woman on her back with her pubis on a level with the man’s as he stands squarely on the ground, is one of the most comfortable I know. The vulva is well opened, the man in just the right place to thrust horizontally and strike deeply without stopping. It makes for a vigorous and precise fuck. I was sometimes set upon so violently that I had to hold on to the ends

of the table with both hands, and for a long time I bore the scar of a little gash above my coccyx, where my spine had rubbed against the rough wood.

In the end Aimé closed. We went one last time; the place was deserted and Aimé him- self, his bulk hovering behind the bar, was quietly but furiously railing at his wife. He had been summoned by the police. He was angry with her because she had persuaded us not to come back later.

That evening we ended up at Les Glycines, my first visit to a place that had seemed en- chanting. Claude, a friend called Henri, and I made up the most amicable trio. Henri lived in a tiny apartment on the rue de Chazel, fa- cing the pale, roughcast surface of a high garden wall that hid a large private house. Because it was on our way, Claude and I used to stop off with Henri on our way home from our Sunday visit to our parents. The three of us would fuck together, both boys inside me

at once—one in my mouth and the other up my ass or my cunt—under the playful gaze of one of Martin Barré’s loviest paintings: we called it Spaghetti and the artist himself had given it to Henri. Afterward we would look out of the window, watching the comings and goings at Les Glycines. Henri had heard that the club was used by film stars, and sometimes we would think we’d recognized someone. We were just kids, the best kind of gawpers, fascinated and amused by this secret activity that we didn’t even try to ima- gine, and actually more excited by the sight of things that were completely inaccessible to us: the swanky cars dropping people off, the classy deportment of the silhouettes who stepped out of them. When I went through the porch a few years later, I knew instantly that I preferred Chez Aimé’s less spare style.

We went up a little gravel path blocked by a group of Japanese visitors who had been refused entry by the flight-attendantish girl

at the door. The latter asked to see my Social Security card, to prove I was not a prostitute. Not being regularly employed, of course, I didn’t have one, either on me nor anywhere else. Even on the occasions when I was able to produce a pay stub, I would still be in the wrong because, even today, whenever con- fronted by a woman taller than me, I turn in- to an awkward child. We went in anyway. It was lit up like a dining room, there were a lot of people lying naked on mattresses on the floor, and what unsettled me even more than the threat of the “employment officer” was that people were telling jokes. A woman with very pale skin, no makeup and tousled hair that still had the vestiges of the same French braid as the hostess, was making everyone roar with laughter because her little boy “really wanted to come with her this even- ing.” I could see Éric, who was always very practical, working his way along the base- board looking for the outlet, because we had

managed to arrange a swap with a couple and it would have been nicer to unplug the light. There were little waitresses navigating amid the bodies, holding aloft trays of cham- pagne in flutes; one of them caught her foot in the electric cable and switched the light back on. She even accompanied the act with a loud “Shit.” After that, I don’t recall us waiting for me to extract even the scantiest bodily emission.

Apart from in the Bois—even there, as we’ve seen, even there!—you don’t mix with people until you have greeted them first, un- til you have respected a transitional moment in which a few words are exchanged, where each person maintains just the time and space between themselves and the others to offer a glass or hand over an ashtray. I al- ways wanted to abolish this suspense, but there were some rituals that I tolerated bet- ter than others. Armand used to make me laugh when, while everyone else was still at

the chatting stage, he would strip completely naked, incongruous by a few minutes of anti- cipation, and fold his clothes as carefully as a butler. Or I would comply with what I thought was the stupid policy of one group who would not swing until they had eaten dinner, always in the same restaurant, like an old-school reunion; and what made their evening was to strip off the panties or stock- ings of one of the women in their party while the waiter was going around the table. On the other hand, I thought it was obscene to tell salacious stories at an orgy. Was it be- cause I instinctively made a distinction between the playlets presented as a prelude to a play—the better to prepare you for it—and the playacting that serves only to delay it? The acts performed in the one are never performed in the other, where they really would be “out of place.”

Even if I have kept some of the reflexes of a practicing Catholic to this day (secretly mak- ing the sign of the cross if I’m afraid something is going to happen, feeling watched as soon as I know I have done something wrong or made a mistake), I can no longer really pretend that I believe in God. It’s highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships. Finding myself vacant, then, with no other mission to fulfill, I grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me. I am more than de- pendable in my pursuit of these aims; if life went on forever, I would pursue them for all eternity, given that I did not define them my- self. It is in this spirit that I have never wavered in the job I was given (a long time ago now), publishing
Art Press.
I was in- volved in its creation, and I have dedicated myself sufficiently to the work that I have

become to some extent identified with it, but I feel more like a driver who must stick to the rails than a guide who knows where the port is. I’ve fucked in the same way. As I was completely available, I sought no more ideals in love than I did in my professional life; I was seen as someone with no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited, and I had no reason not to fill this role. My memories of orgies, of evenings spent at the Bois or with one of my lover-friends, are in- terlinked like the rooms in a Japanese palace. You think you are in a closed room until one of the partitions slides back, reveal- ing a succession of other rooms, and if you step forward, more partitions open and close, and if the rooms themselves are nu- merous, the ways of passing from one to the other are infinite.

But trips to swingers’ clubs hold little place in these memories. Chez Aimé was a differ- ent story: it was the very birthplace of

fucking. And I have remembered the disap- pointment of Les Glycines because it was the exemplary realization of a dream I had car- ried with me since adolescence. Perhaps it is since my memory is chiefly visual that I re- member more, for example, of Cleopatra—a club opened by some former customers of Chez Aimé, in an extravagant setting in the middle of a shopping center in the 13th ar- rondissement—than Les Glycines’s neat de- cor and the activities to which I abandoned myself there; when all is said and done, they were quite banal. On the other hand, other places and other events are so vivid that I could almost file them by theme.

There would be the image of a lively line of cars, led by our own car. And as we are going up the service road on the avenue Foch, I have an urgent need to pee. Four or five cars slam on their brakes behind us. As I get out and run over the strip of grass to squat next to a tree, car doors start to open; a few

people, misunderstanding my maneuver, come toward me. Éric rushes over to inter- cede, the place is open and very well lit. I get back into the car and the cortege sets off again. The parking lot at the Porte de Saint- Cloud: suddenly the attendant sees fifteen or so cars diving into the tunnel one after the other, then surfacing again, in exactly the same order, an hour later. During that hour, I was taken by about thirty men, several of them first held me up against a wall, and then they lay me on the hood. Sometimes the script is complicated by the fact that we have to shake off a few cars on the way. The drivers agree on a destination, a line of cars forms and is spotted by others who join it, but then the line is too long and it is wiser to limit the number of participants. One night we drove around for such a long time that it felt like the beginning of a journey. One driver knew of a place, and then he admitted that he was no longer sure of the way.

Through the rear window I could see the pairs of headlights behind us navigating left and right, disappearing and reappearing. There were several stops, and several discus- sions, and eventually—in the bleachers of a sports stadium somewhere in Vélizy-Vil- lacoublay—I had the pleasure of the patient pricks of those who had not gotten lost along the way.

Drifting could have been another theme. Cars trundle along, stop, set off again, brake abruptly like remote-control toys. Little ploy at the Porte Dauphine: we eye one another up from one car to the next, and the pass- word seems to be “Do you have a place?” So some cars leave the circle, and we start on a sort of chase to an unknown address. Once, and it’s true it was only once, the search went on a bit too long and we ended up doing something foolish. I am with a group of friends who don’t know the Bois very well; there are six of us squashed into a Renault,

and we’re getting ready to go home after driving around in circles. We spot two or three cars down one of the many roads, we park alongside them and I, the brave and boastful little soldier going ahead in the name of all the others waiting behind me, go and give a blow job to the driver of the car behind us. As luck would have it, two police- men come and take up positions in front of me when I withdraw. They ask the man, who is awkwardly buttoning up, whether he paid me, and they take down everybody’s name and address.

Even when a memory centers on physical facts, it is less the sensations than the atmo- sphere to be evoked first. I could gather to- gether a good many anecdotes concerning the use to which, for years, I put my anus and, as frequently, if not more so, my vagina. In a beautiful apartment behind the Inval- ides, during a small-scale orgy, in a room on a mezza-nine floor with a long bay window

and floor-level lighting like you find on American film sets, I am taken in that orifice by the tool of a giant. Is it because the coffee table in the sitting room is a giant resin mod- el of an open hand in which a woman could stretch herself out luxuriously that the place itself somehow feels disproportionate and unreal? I’m frightened of this great Cheshire cat’s organ when I understand the route by which he is planning to penetrate, but he manages it without forcing too much, and I am amazed, and almost proud, that size rep- resents no obstacle. Neither does number. Was it because I was ovulating or had a touch of the clap that at another orgy, a much larger one this time, I chose to fuck only with my ass? I can see myself at the foot of a very narrow staircase, in the rue Quin- campoix, hesitating before deciding to go up. Claude and I were given the address by chance. We didn’t know anyone. The apart- ment was very dark with a low ceiling. I

could hear men nearby putting the word about, whispering, “She wants it up the ass,” or warning someone who’s heading the wrong way, “No, she only takes it from be- hind.” That particular time it did hurt at the end. But I also had the personal satisfaction of having had no feelings of restraint.

As I read through the previous pages, still older images have come back to me, and these images were fabricated. How I con- ceived them, way before having my first ex- perience and a very long time before I shed my innocence, constitutes a seductively ap- pealing mystery. What shreds of the real world—photographs in Cinémonde; veiled comments of my mother’s, like the time we left a café in which there was a group of young people, only one of whom was a girl, and my mother muttered that the girl must

be sleeping with everyone; or the fact that my father came home late at night, funnily enough having just come from that café—did I pick up and thread together, and what in- stinctual material did I formulate so that the stories I told myself as I rubbed the lips of my vulva together so accurately prefigured my future sexual adventures? I even remem- ber a criminal case: the arrest of a rather ob- scure, aging woman (she must have been something like a maid on a farm) who was accused of killing her lover. I have forgotten the details of the murder because what really struck me was that among her belongings, they found notebooks that she had filled with memories and into which she pasted little relics—photographs, letters, locks of hair—connected with her lovers, who turned out to have been extraordinarily numerous. As a child I loved sticking bits of plants and flowers into my holiday project book, and I had a tidy scrapbook with precious