The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (7 page)

her life, there is no reason why my beautiful hostess shouldn’t systematically take the same cocks between her thighs as I do. It works four or five times. She resolutely al- lows herself to be pinned to the bed, her legs waving in the air like butterfly wings. I really like it when she looks right at Jacques (whose dick is reverberating from the twang of elastic when he pulled off his underwear) and says loudly that he’s “hung like a horse.” That was Jacques, who would become my husband, but with whom, at the time, I was just beginning to get together. He now re- minds me that I once had a tantrum and set about kicking him wildly when he was fuck- ing her. I had forgotten that, too. Although I remember how I myself would niggle at the jealousies that other people never admitted. I feel as if I’m in a film about the free and easy lives of the young bourgeoisie when I go early one morning—stopping at the boulan- gerie on the way—to wake Alexis, who lives

in a cute duplex on the rue des Saints-Pères. I notice the coolness of my skin next to his warm pajamas, a bit moist as I like it. He likes making fun of my promiscuity, and he says that, at least at this time of day, he can be sure of being the first person of the day to penetrate me. Well, no, he isn’t, actually! I spent the night with someone else, and we had a fuck before I left; his come is still in my pussy. I stifle my exuberant laughter in the pillow. I can tell that Alexis is a little upset.

Claude told me to read
The Story of O,
and there were three ways in which I identified with the heroine: I was always ready; my cunt certainly wasn’t barred with a chain, but I was sodomized as often as I was taken from the front; and finally, I would have loved her reclusive life in a house isolated from the rest of the world. Instead, I was already very act- ive in my professional life. But the convivial atmosphere of the art world, the facility with which—despite my fears—I formed

connections with people, and the fact that these connections could so easily take a physical turn led me to believe that the space in which this sort of activity was carried out was a well-regulated, closed world. I have already used the word “family” several times. Sometimes this metaphor has not been a metaphor. For a long time I kept the adoles- cent trait of exerting my sexual attraction within a family circle, when a boy or a girl goes out with someone and drops him or her to go out with a brother or sister, or a cousin. I was once involved with two brothers along with their uncle. I was a friend of the uncle and he often brought along his two nephews, who were even younger than I. Unlike when this man would take me to meet friends of his, there was no preamble or stage manage- ment on these occasions. The uncle would get me going and the two brothers would nail me. I would relax afterward, listening to

their men’s talk, some new home-improve- ment gadget or computer software.

I am still on friendly terms with a number of men whom I first knew as regular sexual partners. In other cases, we have lost touch. I remember most of these acquaintances with genuine pleasure. When I worked with some of them, I found that the enduring intimacy and tenderness facilitated our collaboration. (Only once did I get angry about a serious work matter.) What’s more, I never remove a person from his own network of friends and relationships or from the activities he enjoys. I had met Alexis as part of a group of young critics and journalists who were trying to set up new artistic publications. I was fucking two other people on the same circuit, and in fact Alexis had asked me, rather tartly, whether I had set myself a schedule to be “fucked by every young critic in France.” We worked in a “school’s out” sort of atmo- sphere, and my two other colleague-lovers,

unlike Alexis, were still a bit rough around the edges even though they were already married. They both had pimply faces and did not exactly take good care of themselves. I gave in to one of them because, having been lured to his apartment on the pretext of a translation that needed checking through (another one of those cramped little apart- ments on Saint-Germain-des-Prés), he had whined that, seeing I was sleeping with everyone, it would be really mean if I didn’t sleep with him. The other had tried his luck more confidently. He had arranged to meet me at his publisher’s office, and the recep- tionist told him I had arrived, adding—with the consideration typical of women in her profession—that the young woman waiting for him in reception was not wearing a bra under her blouse. The sexual relationship with the first man came to a pretty abrupt halt, but with the second it went on for

several years. Later, they became collaborat- ors on
Art Press
and stayed there a long time.

I have suggested that I met Éric through his friends, after hearing what they had to say about him. Among these friends was Robert, whom I met while putting together a piece on art foundries. In the event, he took me to a foundry in Le Creusot where he was having a monumental sculpture cast. We traveled back at night, and, during the trip Robert joined me in the back of the car and laid full-length on top of me. I didn’t bat an eye. It was a narrow car, and I was sitting sideways in my seat with Robert’s head rest- ing on my abdomen, and my pelvis hanging over the edge to facilitate his groping. From time to time I would put my head down and he would give me little kisses. Glancing in the rearview mirror, the driver commented that I seemed out of it. In fact, the situation left me as dumbfounded as the visits to the

foundries with their gigantic ovens. I saw Robert almost daily for quite a long time, and he introduced me to a lot of people. I could instinctively tell those with whom the relationship could take a sexual turn and those with whom it would not. An instinct that Robert also had: as a way of putting some of them off, he had come up with the idea of warning them that, as an art critic, I was beginning to wield some power.

It was Robert who told me about that myth of Parisian life, Madame Claude. I had long fantasized about being a high-class prosti- tute, although I was neither tall nor beauti- ful, which I had been told you needed to be, nor distinguished enough for the job. Robert used to joke about the combination of my sexual appetite and my professional curios- ity; he would say that I could write a piece about plumbing if I went out with a plumber. And he always maintained that, given my personality, the person I had to meet was

Éric. But in the end, I met the latter through a mutual friend of theirs, a very edgy boy, one of those types who pounds into you with mechanical power and regularity, and someone with whom I had spent some ex- hausting nights. In the morning, as if that wasn’t enough, the friend would take me to the huge studio he shared with his work partner, and there, languidly tired, I would let this other man come over and take me in his silent, almost serious way. One evening the friend invited me to go and have dinner with him and Éric. As we already know, Éric introduced me to more men than anyone else, friends, colleagues and strangers. For the sake of full disclosure, I must add that, at the same time, he introduced me to a rigor- ous way of working to which I still adhere.

For obvious reasons, the pattern in which these relationships emerged, and the way in which individual incidents and deeds are re- called, overlap with aesthetic groupings. A

painter friend called Gilbert, with whom I am reminiscing about my early beginnings, remembers that I restricted myself to dis- creet fellatio when I joined him in the after- noons in the apartment he shared with his family. Penetration was reserved for when he came to see me at my home. On the first of these visits, he didn’t “finish” very satisfact- orily; at the last minute I asked him to switch to my ass. Such was my primitive method of contraception, bolstered by the image I had of my body as an integrated whole with no form of hierarchy in terms of either morals or pleasure, and each of its individual parts could, insofar as was possible, be substituted for any other. It was actually another painter of the same school who made a point of teaching me to put my cunt to better use. I had shown up at his studio early one morn- ing for an interview, not knowing I was going to find a very good-looking and forthcoming man. I don’t think I left until the following

day. As is often the case in artists’ studios, the bed was positioned under a glass roof or a window, as if to establish what was going on within a framework of light. My eyelids can still feel the powerful light flooding onto my upturned head and blinding me. I must have had the same reflex of slipping his dick into my anus, just like that. Afterward, he talked to me. He told me extremely persuas- ively that one day I would meet a man who would know how to take me from the front and to bring me to orgasm that way, and that it would be better than the other. Gilbert can’t believe it when I tell him that at the time I was seeing yet another of his painter friends (the near-sighted one whose insistent gaze carried me), who he thought had never cheated on his wife; on the other hand, Gil- bert himself reminds me of a third man with whom I used to participate in foursomes, still in the little studio on the rue Bonaparte, and who used to talk about the boys having sex

between themselves. But I am convinced that this was probably just a fantasy.

When William became part of an artists’ collective, I found myself spending the night with John, one of the members of the group. I had already met him several times, and we had even spoken at conferences together. I found him very attractive; he gave speeches about theory that my approximative under- standing of English turned lurid, and as he talked, the movements of his lips accentu- ated his fine young cheekbones. I had come to New York to meet Sol LeWitt, who had just started doing his works in torn and crumpled paper. When I arrived, I rang Wil- liam from the airport to ask him to put me up. I can see us now, standing in the loft he had recently moved into, devouring each other with kisses, and him encouraging John to do the same. The walls went only three quarters of the way up to the ceiling and were arranged at right angles to form rooms

that seemed laid out in random cubes like a child’s bricks. Four or five people came and went, apparently absorbed in some private task. William picked me up and carried me over to a mattress behind one of the walls. John was very gentle, providing a great con- trast to William’s nervous, abrupt move- ments. William left us, and eventually John went to sleep. We had curled up together with his hand clamped onto my pubis. Early the following morning I had to extricate my- self from his viselike grip with the slow delib- erate maneuvers of a contortionist, and to crawl out of the sheets onto the floor be- cause, despite the light that was pouring in through the skylights, he was still asleep. I ran into the street, caught a taxi to the air- port and barely caught my flight. Even though I continued to follow that group’s work, I didn’t see John again for many years. When I did, during a retrospective, we ex- changed but a few words because I found it

so difficult to understand what he was saying.

As time went by, my shyness in social situ- ations was replaced by boredom. Even among friends whose company I enjoy, even if I follow the conversation at first and am no longer afraid to join in, there always comes a moment when I suddenly lose interest. It’s a question of time: all of a sudden I have had enough; whatever subject we are tackling, I feel as if I’m turning to stone, like when I watch one of those TV soaps that recreates humdrum domesticity too accurately. It is ir- reversible. In these instances, tacit ges- tures—sometimes unseen ones—provide some escape. Even though I am not very en- terprising, I have often improvised a little pressure from my thigh or a little crossing of ankles with the man next to me at the table,

or—better still—the woman (it is less likely to have repercussions) in the hopes of feeling that I am really a distant observer of this earnest assembly, busying myself with something else somewhere else. In the con- text of communal life—on holiday, for ex- ample, when a group of people does all sorts of things together—I have often felt the need to absent myself from outings and meals by acting randomly when the need arose. There were some particularly frenetic summers, defined by the incessant traffic between sexual partners, sporadically united in small orgies under the sun behind the low wall of a garden that overlooked the sea, or at night in the comings and goings between the many bedrooms of a villa.

One evening I decide not to join in the fun, and Paul, who knows me well, gently makes fun of my decision; Paul—who sometimes forcibly holds me back, locking both of us in the bathroom if necessary, just to excite my

impatience to mingle in the melee of bod- ies—promises to send me a friend of his that I have not yet met, someone who has nothing to do with the art world, a car mechanic. He knows that I would rather meet this man than go to the restaurant with the others and sit wearily on a terrace or in the corner of a nightclub waiting for the same weariness to overcome the rest of them. I don’t pay much attention to Paul’s proposition and look for- ward to an evening alone. There is something delicious about those moments when the emptiness around you opens up not only the space around you but also, somehow, the enormity of the time ahead. With unconscious economy, we make the most of this given opportunity by lazily set- tling into the depths of an armchair as if to leave as much space as possible to the on- rush of time. The kitchen is right at the back of the villa, and I go and make myself a sand- wich. My mouth is full when Paul’s friend

appears in the doorway that leads out to the garden. He is tall and dark with pale eyes, quite impressive in the darkness. He apolo- gizes amicably, he can see that I’m eating, begs me not to stop just because of him…I am ashamed of the crumbs in the corners of my mouth. I say no, no, I’m not really hungry, and I chuck the sandwich away furtively.

He takes me away. He drives his convert- ible along the Grande Corniche above Nice. He takes one hand off the steering wheel to reply to mine rubbing against the rough sur- face of the bulge in his jeans. That swelling, impeded by the tight, stiff fabric, is an effect- ive stimulus for me every time. Do I want to go and eat somewhere? No. I think he’s driv- ing a bit farther than he needs to, taking de- tours before getting home. He keeps his eyes on the road as I undo his belt. I recognize that little forward movement of the driver’s hips that makes it easier to undo his zipper.