The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (9 page)

prism of the painting does not stop the trees from growing or their leaves from dropping. It is not unusual, at an orgy, for a man oc- cupying a pussy that has already been well reconnoitered to worry about the effect his predecessors may have had. “You were cry- ing out earlier. Tell me about it. He has a big cock, doesn’t he? He must have really had to ram it in, and you liked it. You were behav- ing like a woman in love. Don’t deny it, I saw you.” I have to admit that sometimes, con- trary to expectations, I would reply hon- estly—no, I liked his cock just as much—be- cause at the time I hadn’t learned to correct my scrupulous instincts, but also because of my writerly unwillingness to repeat myself.

But usually this chronicling of events took place outside of carnal exchanges. In that in- stance, the words hang in the space between those who are speaking, like a house of cards built up by their play of questions and an- swers, and which they hope won’t suddenly

crumble in the face of prematurely salacious confessions or a curiosity that too quickly be- comes indiscreet. While driving in his falling-apart little car, one friend asked me almost curtly: How old were you when you started swinging? What sort of people did you meet at orgies—middle-class types? Were there lots of girls? How many men fucked you in one evening? Did you come every time? My replies were equally matter- of-fact. At one point he pulled over, not so that we could touch each other but to pursue the interrogation, his face quite relaxed, his eyes focused well beyond the end of the street. Did I take several at the same time, in my pussy and in my mouth? “That’s the best, and jerking off two more with my hands.” This particular friend was a journalist; he ended up interviewing me for a magazine he contributed to.

In my immediate circle of friends, it was a question of keeping the excitement at a

certain level verbally so that all the members of the club could clandestinely identify one another anywhere, at a work-related meeting or at a party, and could tolerate the conform- ist nature of the event, for example at a housewarming party where there are lots of guests. They come and go in the artist’s huge at-home studio and there isn’t anywhere to sit. “Is that guy there the one you have such a fantastic time with? That’s great; he’s not much to look at, but that doesn’t mean any- thing. What the hell does he do to you?” I reply with a nod of the head; it’s true that he’s ugly, and more than that, he’s out of place here. In my wanderings I come across lots of different kinds of people, and I like ar- ranging for these worlds to meet. I made sure he was invited even though they didn’t know him. Someone comes and asks me who the guy is in the hopelessly outdated hippie smock. All the same…When I spend the night with him, our bodies tangled up on his

bed, we suck each other off for hours. During a sixty-nine, it really gets me going to rub my breasts against a slightly rubbery tummy. “It’s true, you seem to go for chubby ones.” Me: “I dreamed I met François Mitterand at an orgy!…and I like them not that clean, too…I’m pretty sure he never brushes his teeth.” “You’re disgusting. He’s married, isn’t he?” Me: “I’ve seen a picture of his wife. So ugly you wouldn’t believe it.”

That gets me going, too. My voice is no louder than usual, but I give details only sparingly. I take pleasure in evoking this dirtiness and this contagious ugliness, at the same time savoring the disgust of the man questioning me. “You suck each other. And then?” Me: “You can’t imagine the way he moans when I lick his ass…he gets in the doggie position, his ass is so white…he wriggles it when I burrow my nose into it. Then I get onto all fours…he finishes quickly, with short little thrusts that are—how shall I

put this—very precise.” The man I’m talking to is part of the scene, too, but I’ve never happened to sleep with him. I’m not espe- cially attracted to him, either. The man I’m referring to is not the sort to assail me with questions, but he listens to me, and in the end, because everyone ends up calling their friends’ friends by their first names even if they haven’t met them themselves, I think of him as part of the group.

The more sociable I became, the better I cultivated my innate pragmatism in all as- pects of sexual exchanges. Having, in the early days, tested various partners’ receptiv- ity to ménages à trois, I adapted the words I used. A faint, decadent aura around me was enough for some, whereas others, as I have illustrated, wanted to enjoy by proxy every last fingering. Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always colored by the way feelings have evolved. I was very talkative

with Jacques at first, but then I had to cope, more or less well and anyway belatedly, with the ban imposed on sexual adventures and accounts of these adventures the moment our relationship was perceived and lived as one of love, even though more than once, I read descriptions of erotic scenes in Jacques’s books that could only have been reworkings of anecdotes I had told him. Of all the men I saw for any length of time, only two brought my exhaustive exposés to an ab- rupt halt. And even then I am pretty sure that these details they didn’t want to know, and which were therefore not mentioned, still formed a central part of our exchanges.

Those who obey social mores are probably better equipped to confront demonstrations of jealousy than those with a libertine philo- sophy that leaves them feeling helpless in the

face of passion. A person can prove her ex- tensive and sincere liberality by sharing the pleasure she takes with the person she most loves, only for it to be pierced, without any warning, by an exactly proportionate intoler- ance. Jealousy may have been bubbling with- in like a spring, and as the bubbles burst it might even have been giving a regular and subterranean form of irrigation to the garden of libido, until—suddenly—it formed a tor- rent and then the entire conscious mind was submerged by it, as has been described by so many people.

I have learned this from observation as well as from experience. I personally have experienced my confrontations with these passionate expressions of jealousy in a sort of stupor that even the brutal death of a loved one did not provoke. And I had to read Victor Hugo, yes, I had to go and seek out that portrayal of God the Father, to under- stand that this stupor is comparable to the

sort of denial displayed by children. “To ac- cept facts as they are does not belong to realms of childhood. [A child forms] impres- sions as his terror grows but without making any connection between the two and without drawing any conclusions,” I once read in
The Man Who Laughs,
finally finding an explan- ation for my mindless inertia. And I can con- firm that, even after you have done all the growing you should do, you can still experi- ence what I would describe as an incompre- hension of injustice that prevents you from seeing the feelings behind the injustice. I was once beaten all the way along the path that runs from the rue Las Cases toward the area around the church of Notre-Damedes- Champs, beaten and trampled in the gutter and, when I got back to my feet, forced to walk through a series of punches to the back of my neck and my shoulders, the way they used to drive common thieves to the dun- geons. We had just left a party that hadn’t

come close to an orgy but had at one point been enlivened by a sort of conga around the apartment, during which a fairly prominent man had taken advantage of our passage through the dimly lit sitting room to push me onto a sofa and drench my ear with his saliva. And yet the friend who beat me had already come with me to other parties with much more absolute ends. When, later that night, I retraced our steps all the way up the path, in the vain hope of finding a piece of jewelry that had fallen off under his blows, my thoughts were focused exclusively on this specific loss. On another occasion, one of my unwisely detailed accounts earned me a less furious—although equally aggressive—re- venge: a slash with a razor on my right shoulder while I lay sleeping on my belly, but not before the blade had been carefully disin- fected on a burner in the kitchen. The scar, which I still have, is shaped like a stupid

little mouth, a good illustration of what I felt at the time.

My own jealousy has been episodic. If I have used my sexual itinerary to satisfy my intellectual and professional curiosity, I have nevertheless remained perfectly indifferent to my friends’ love lives and marriages. It goes even beyond indifference, perhaps con- tempt. I have had rushes of jealousy only with the men I have lived with and then, oddly, on a quite different basis in both cases. It pained me every time Claude was seduced by a woman whom I judged to be prettier than myself. I am not ugly, but only if you take my appearance as a whole; there’s nothing remarkable about my features. It galled me that I couldn’t enhance my sexual performances—which, in principle, had no limitations—with a physical appearance that, itself, could not be improved. I really would have loved it if I, the girl who gave the best blow job, the one who was always first to get

going at an orgy, hadn’t been short, with eyes that are slightly too close together, a long nose, etc. I could describe in great detail the physical traits that attracted Claude: a trian- gular face and the hairstyle of one of the sec- retaries whose slender torso provided a con- trast to set off her rounded shoulders and conical breasts; the pale-colored eyes of an- other woman, who had brown hair, like mine; the smooth temples and doll-like cheeks of a third. It goes without saying that such a powerful contradiction to the prin- ciples of sexual freedom meant that this agony could not be articulated and, there- fore, reduced me to scenes and crying fits that were all the more intractable, and fits of hysteria worthy of Paul Richer’s
L’arc hystérique.

With Jacques, my jealousy took the form of a terrible feeling of being supplanted. The images I could dream up, of some woman whose haunches, while I was away, would

obscure the tip of his sex from view, in a set- ting that was familiar to us, or whose whole enormous, ever expanding body inhabited the smallest part of our environment—the running board of the car, the leafy design of a sofa cover, the side of the sink you lean your belly on when you rinse out a cup—who might even have left strands of her hair in- side my motorbike helmet, these images caused me such acute pain that I had to es- cape them with the most drastic fantasizing. I would imagine that, having caught them in the act, I would leave the house, set off along the boulevard Diderot toward the Seine, which wasn’t far away, and throw myself in. Or I would go on walking to the point of ex- haustion and be taken to the hospital, speechless and out of my wits.

Another, less pathetic, escape route con- sisted in intensive masturbatory activity. As I have already begun to disclose the sort of narratives that sustain this activity, it might

be interesting if I said something about the modifications they undergo at a given point. My wanderings over wasteland and the delivery-boy characters, taking advantage of the situation phlegmatically, were replaced by a limited repertoire of scenes in which I no longer appeared and Jacques was the only male figure, accompanied by one or other of his girlfriends. The scenes would be partly imaginary, partly constructed from snippets harvested by trespassing into Jacques’s note- books or his letters, because he’s not very talkative on the subject. Cramped in an Austin parked under a railway bridge, he keeps her head down on his belly, holding it carefully with both hands as if manipulating the glass dome that houses a precious object, until his come has spurted into the back of her throat and he has heard the gulp as she swallows reticently. Or a big white backside exposed on the sofa in the sitting room like a gigantic mushroom, and Jacques sinking

into it as he spanks it smartly. Another op- tion is for the girl to be standing with one foot up on a stool, in the position some wo- men adopt to insert a tampon; Jacques, hanging on to her hips and braced on his tip- toes, penetrates her in the same configura- tion: from behind. I would consistently or- gasm at the point in my narrative when I al- lowed Jacques to ejaculate, when the watch- ful eye in my mind recognized that powerful asymmetrical contraction of his face. This confiscation of my old fantasies eventually produced a defensive reaction, but I still needed considerable perseverance and force of will for the sequences in which I was the protagonist to take back that zone of my imagination.

I cannot close this chapter on exchange (which, like a silk worm’s cocoon, covers and

constitutes the sexual relationships) without bringing up my only failed attempt at prosti- tution. When I heard mention of Madame Claude, I would always succumb to fanciful daydreams about high-class prostitution, envying Catherine Deneuve’s character in
Belle de jour,
but I would have been com- pletely incapable of negotiating the least ex- change of this sort. People used to say that Lydie, the only woman I knew who was as aggressive as a man during an orgy, had spent several days in a brothel in Palermo, earning enough money to throw a fantastic party for one of her friends. There was something mythical about this to me, and it left me stunned. I have made enough refer- ences to my shyness, to my excessive reserve, for the reasons to be clear. To establish a mercenary relationship, you have to navigate an exchange of words or at least signals, the sort of complicity that forms the basis for all conversations and which would have

seemed, to me, closely related to the prelim- inaries of seduction that I avoided. In both cases, in order to keep to your side of the deal, you have to take into account your part- ner’s attitudes and responses. Now, even at the first contact, I knew only how to focus on the body. It is just when I have found my bearings with the body, as it were, when the grain of the skin and its particular pigmenta- tion have become familiar to me, or I have learned to adjust my own body to it, that my attention could focus on the person himself, often to form a sincere and lasting friend- ship. But by then it would no longer be right to ask for money.

Still, I really needed it. An old school friend wanted to help me out. A contact of hers had asked whether she would like to meet a woman who was keen to be intro- duced to very young women. She did not dare go herself but thought that I might be interested. My friend had an idea that doing