The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (5 page)

photographs of Anthony Perkins or Brigitte Bardot, so I admired the fact that the woman had managed to collate this treasure, these traces of the men she had known, within a few simple notepads, and a secret corner of my libido was even more disturbed by the fact that this woman was ugly, and ended up alone, wild and outcast.

There are major structural similarities between situations I have lived and those I have imagined, even though I have never act- ively chosen to reproduce the latter in my life, and the details of what I have lived have had little part in nourishing my imaginings. Perhaps I should just assume that the fantas- ies forged in my earliest youth predisposed me to widely diverse experiences. Since I never felt ashamed of these fantasies, and I reworked and embellished them rather than trying to bury them, they offered not opposi- tion to what was real but rather a sort of mesh through which real-life situations that

other people might have found outrageous struck me as quite normal.

My brother and I were rarely taken to play in the park, but there was a little one that we crossed on the way to school. Down one side of the square there was a long wall with three pretty lean-tos along it. They were made of brick and wood, painted green and surroun- ded by shrubs. One was used for gardening tools, the other two housed the public toilets. There must have been groups of boys hanging about in the square. In any event, the very first narrative that accompanied my masturbating—and one that I used again and again for many years—put me in a situation where I was dragged into one of these shel- ters by a boy. I saw him kissing me on the mouth and touching me all over as his friends came to join us and they all started

fondling me. We always remained standing, and I revolved in the middle of the tightly knit group.

Most Sunday mornings our parents would alternate on taking us to the matinee per- formance at the local cinema, whatever they were showing, and fleeting, barely-under- stood sequences glimpsed in romantic films and trailers; fired my imagination. I fantas- ized that I was allowed to go to the cinema alone. There were lots of people lining up. Suddenly someone would squeeze my ass. And again everyone else around me in the line would follow suit, and when I reached the ticket desk, the salesgirl could see that my skirt had been lifted up, and I would talk to her while someone rubbed themselves against my buttocks; I wouldn’t have any panties on. The excitement would rise. My top would be off by the time I had crossed the foyer (I formulated an image of myself as an adult blessed with substantial breasts, an

image I still resort to in my fantasies, where- as my breasts are actually average size). So- metimes the manager of the theater would ask us, calmly but with some authority, to wait until we were in the auditorium to get on with our disheveled embraces. At first I would wriggle about with one boy, squeezed up to him in the same seat. He was the rather taciturn gang leader who, having heated me to fever pitch, would then turn away abruptly and kiss another girl, abandoning me to his “men,” and we would drop in a heap to the carpeted floor between the rows of seats. The narrative continues: perfectly respectable men could leave their seats and their suspi- cious wives to cross the auditorium in the dark and prostrate themselves on top of me. Sometimes I would have the lights turn back on during all this cavorting; or I would go to the bathroom and have a succession of com- ings and goings between there and the audit- orium. I think sometimes I would have the

police intervening. Another take: the man- ager would ask me to come to his office, then would call for all the boys, too. Another ver- sion: I would follow the group who had ad- opted me in the line all the way to a stretch of wasteland. And there, behind a picket fence, they would strip me naked and paw me. It was a compact group forming a circle around me, like a second fence screening me from view. One by one, the boys broke away from the circle to press themselves against me. In another version, I was nestled deep in a seat in a nightclub with a man on either side of me. While I busied myself with one of them and we kissed each other hungrily, the other stroked my body. Then I would turn around and kiss the second one, but the first would not let me go, or he would give up his place to a third man and so on; I kept swinging from left to right. I’m not sure that when I first started succumbing to these fantasies, I had ever done any petting or even

kissed a single boy on the mouth. I was a late starter. When I came out of school, I would quite often meet up with a group of friends in the bedroom that I shared with my broth- er, but it was usually to have fights with them. At that sort of age, girls’ bodies are more mature than boys’; I was quite well built and I would sometimes win.

If I am going back as far as my fantasy life during my childhood and adolescence, I should point out the initial disparity between fantasy and my actual behavior, especially, as I recall, at puberty. I had started reading a Hemingway novel (
The Sun Also Rises,
per- haps), and I was sufficiently disturbed by the description of one of the female characters, who was attributed several lovers, to stop reading the book. And I never went back to it. A conversation with my mother also gave

me a shock. I don’t remember how we got on to the subject, I can just see her setting the table in the kitchen as she confided in me that she had had seven lovers in her life. “Seven,” she said, looking at me, “it’s not all that many,” but there was a shy questioning in her eyes. I scowled. It was the first time I had heard anyone say out loud that a woman could know more than one man. She became a bit defensive. A long time later, when I looked back on that rare moment of intim- acy, I regretted my attitude. What was seven compared to a score that was still open?

When I was better informed about what sexual acts might entail, I integrated them into my imaginings, but coitus achieved did not preclude passing from one partner to an- other. One of the most detailed scenarios that illustrates this point of view was the fol- lowing: I am the guest of a vulgar, fat man—pretending to be an uncle—at a busi- ness meal in a private salon in a restaurant.

There are twenty or thirty men sitting down to eat, and my first contribution is to do the rounds, sucking each of them off under the table. I can picture their faces above me, sur- rendering saggily, as each of them success- ively, and briefly, lays out of the conversa- tion. Then I get up onto the table and they amuse themselves finding interesting substi- tutes for me to take, cigars, sausages; someone eats a sausage from between my thighs. As the meal goes on, I am conscien- tiously fucked, some leading me off to a sofa, others taking me standing up, from behind, bent over the table, while the discussions go on around us. The maître d’ and the waiters have their turns. If my masturbating has not yet been ended by an orgasm, then the kit- chen boys finish me off. Finding myself in a group of men getting on with their different jobs, stopping only to join me in a casual, offhand way, is a recurring scenario. A subtle alteration turns the uncle into a stepfather,

and the conference into men playing cards (or watching football), and they take turns fucking me on a sofa while the others get on with their hand (or gesticulate at the televi- sion screen).

All my life I have gone back over, tinkered with and developed these few imagined situ- ations with the application of a musician composing a fugue, and those that serve me today are more or less altered versions of these originals. I mentioned brief film se- quences that gave rise to certain fantasies. I saw only an extract of Éric Rohmer’s
La Col- lectionneuse
when it came out, on television perhaps. In a vacation house, a man goes in- to a room and walks past a couple making love on the bed with perfect indifference; he just catches the young woman’s eye. As I have gone back to this sequence again and again, my own transposition has created this: a deliveryman comes into my house, al- though—oddly—I don’t have to open the

door for him, and he finds me in my bed- room (where the half-light is very like that in the film), watching a pornographic video. Without a word, he lies down on top of me and is soon replaced by a second delivery- man, then a third, both of whom behave just as naturally. The story sometimes continues: a male friend is coming to pick me up, and I have to get ready. I carry on fucking while standing up, taking care not to smudge my makeup or rumple my clothes, with my skirt lifted up over my back. The friend then takes the trouble to ring the doorbell, and I go to let him in, waddling like a duck with one of the deliverymen’s dicks burrowed in my cunt from astern. The friend, aroused himself, quickly undoes his fly, etc.

Sexual fantasies are far too personal for them to ever really be shared. Still, I had a

powerful imagination, and this gave me a well I could draw from when, later, I started meeting talkers. In my experience, most men make do with a few expressions and catch- phrases; you’re their “little cocksucker,” you’re “a talented ball eater” before entering the ranks of the “little slut who’s not too ashamed to go on like that all night,” and you will rarely be “rammed right up to the hilt” or “fucked good and deep” without the incid- ent being announced out loud. You encour- age them, admitting that you’re just a “bitch in heat,” and as they reassure you that you’re going to get “rammed,” “nailed” or “plugged,” you gasp and say “it’s so big,” “it’s so hard” and “it’s so good” until you eventually

“swallow the spurt,” like the cat that got the cream. But these are merely accentu- ations, reiterations punctuated by the man- tra of interjections, gruntings and all the in- flections of the usual cries. Because,

paradoxically, these words need less recip- rocation than caresses do, dirty words are al- ways more stereotyped, and perhaps some of their power derives from the very fact that they belong to the most immutable inherit- ance. So, in the end, even words—which should help to distinguish us from each oth- er—serve to fuse us all together and to accel- erate the annihilation of the senses that we are all trying to achieve in those moments.

It is quite another story to construct a complete running commentary throughout the act, given by two voices, in counterpoint to the physical exchange.

Another man immeasurably—and quite fantastically—widened my understanding of fornicatory communion. He started the con- versation by saying that he was going to take me to a hotel; there was little point in spe- cifying what sort. There would be men lining up by the bed, all the way out to the corridor. How much did I think they would pay to

shoot their load in my cunt? I suggested: “Fifty francs?” The correct sum was whispered quietly in my ear: “That’s far too much. No, they’ll give twenty francs to fuck you from the front and thirty to give it to you up the ass. How much of it are you going to take?”

Knowing that I always underestimate, I ask, “Twenty?” A hard thrust of his dick giv- en as a warning shot: “Is that all—thirty!?” Another stab in my vagina: “You’ll take a hundred and you won’t wash.”

“There’ll be young boys who’ll shoot their load almost before they get inside me.”

“They’ll do it on your stomach and your tits, too, you’ll be covered in it.”

“Yes, and there’ll be some who are very old and very dirty, they won’t have washed for so long that they’ll have scabs on their skin.”

“Yes, and how much would you take to let them piss on you?”

“Will some of them shit on me too?”

“Yes, and you’ll lick their asses afterward.” “And will I refuse to at first? Will I fight?” “Yes, and they’ll smack you.”

“It’s disgusting, but I’ll clean out the folds of their ass-holes with my tongue.”

“We’ll get there in the evening, and you’ll stay there till the following morning.”

“But I’ll get tired.”

“You will be able to sleep, they’ll keep on fucking you. And we’ll come back that even- ing, and the hotel manager will bring his dog, and there’ll be someone who’ll pay to see you doing it with the dog.”

“Will I have to suck it?”

“You’ll see, it’ll have a very red cock and it’ll climb on top like you’re a bitch and stay stuck inside you.”

Other times the events would unfold in the workmen’s shed on a construction site, and whole teams of workmen would file through, paying no more than five francs a go. As I have suggested, my body sometimes

convulsed in response to these images, but not always; the real action and the fantasy scrolled in tandem and merged only sporad- ically. We spoke in measured tones with all the precision and attention to detail of two scrupulous witnesses helping each other re- construct a past event. When he came close to orgasm, my partner became less talkative. I don’t know whether he was concentrating on one of the images of our imaginary film. As for me, I would sometimes bring the scen- ario back to a more private situation. The shed on the building site would become the caretaker’s quarters in a building undergoing repairs. In those sorts of cramped spaces, the bed is sometimes just hidden behind a cur- tain. Only my stomach and legs were visible in front of it, and the workmen still kept coming in droves to service me without my seeing them or their seeing me, under the gaze of the caretaker who regulated the traffic.

There are two ways of envisaging a multi- tude, either as a crowd in which individual identities become confused, or as a chain where, conversely, what distinguishes them from one another is also what binds them, as one ally compensates for another’s weak- nesses, as a son resembles his father even while he rebels. The very first men I knew immediately made me an emissary of a net- work in which I couldn’t hope to know all the members, the unwitting link in a family of biblical scale and diversity.

I have already explained that I was reticent in social relationships and saw the sexual act as a refuge into which I willingly abandoned myself: it was a way to avoid looks that em- barrassed me and conversations for which I was ill prepared. There was, therefore, no question of my taking any initiative. I never