The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (11 page)

down by walking. That man could lick my snatch indefinitely. His tongue moved lan- guorously, diligently parting all the folds of the vulva, knowingly describing circles round the clitoris then licking broadly like a young dog over the opening. The need to feel his sex breaching that gap became imperative. When at last he penetrated me, just as softly and delving just as meticulously as he had with his tongue, my pleasure never managed to measure up to the escalation of desire.

Given the journeys I had to make to get to these rendezvous in only a short space of time, we sometimes missed each other. If he didn’t turn up, I would stay lying on the bed, swinging my legs, my wanting wedged pain- fully between my legs, stopping me from closing them like a crossbar. Afterward I felt a seemingly insurmountable oppression that stopped me from completing the day’s tasks, going back to the office, making telephone calls or even the simplest decisions. How

could I live a normal life until the next time we met, as if things were just fine? My gap- ing desire made me feel like an abandoned wooden puppet, its stiff wooden legs spread helplessly, unable to move of their own free will. But happily, this debilitation, which al- ways hovers over me and varies in obsessive- ness according to the situation, does not last. Even though I never consciously decide that it should be, the door of my office is always a perfectly impermeable screen, and I may well be dripping wet between the legs (or could have been through any kind of event), I have the happy gift of being able to throw myself into my work with the same facility.

Would I ever have thought of writing this book, which opens with a chapter called “Numbers,” if I had not once experienced be- ing a minute satellite that suddenly left the

orbit where it had been held by a whole net- work of connections that no longer governed it? The liftoff happened in two stages. First, there were times when I found satisfaction less frequently, and I coped with this frustra- tion less tolerantly than I have just de- scribed. My excitement could rise to very high levels. The signs I took as precursors of an overwhelming pleasure were goose pimples and my lips turning cold (I will come back to these sensations in more detail later). If, as had more frequently become the case, the process ground to a halt, I would feel like an insurmountable obstacle towered in front of me instead of the vast release I had hoped for. Each time, in the very mo- ment when my partner was moving away and I was closing my legs, I searched, with the same stubborn resolve as when I am try- ing to describe something in an article, for a definition of the feelings inside me that I could not put into words. What name should

I give to this singular emotion? That was the question I put to myself. It was, I’m sure, a loathing of whoever was next to me at the time, but one obviously independent of my feelings for him the rest of the time. But at that moment this loathing filled me as closely and as fully as a liquid metal occupies a mold. I struggled obstinately to describe it to myself, and I remember sometimes com- paring it to another form of sculpture: Tony Smith’s hermetic
Die.
Luckily, like the op- pression that came over me after a failed rendezvous but never lasted beyond the trip back in the taxi or the Métro, this lacerating hatred put up no resistance to my reflex to slip off to the bathroom. And I think that it was in that position, as I ran a towel between my legs, that I first thought I ought to tell all about it.

For a period that I think lasted three years, perhaps four, and which constitutes what I think of as the second stage, my

opportunities for sexual contact became rarer, and when they did arise, they were more or less like the frustrations described above. I also spent long weeks alone in Paris in the summer, my time divided between long working days and nights cut short both by the heat and by all the usual stress. That was when I delved through a pile of under- wear and found the dildo I had been given years before and had never used. It had two different functions that could each be oper- ated at two speeds. At one end there was a doll’s head with a star on her forehead and a hairstyle that swept into wide curls around her neck, corresponding to the rolled edges of the glans. This head rotated in smaller or larger circles while something looking rather like a wild boar, attached halfway down the shaft, quivered its extremely long tongue (either quickly or slowly), intended for the clitoris. The first time I used the thing, I came instantly, in one very long, perfectly

identifiable, measurable spasm, and without needing to fantasize. I was completely taken aback. So an orgasm—an orgasm of the purest quality, even—could be achieved without perpetually having to return to that wellspring, the thrill of the “first time,” by re- creating various first times, and without the time to convene my mental repertoire of de- livery boys and workmen. I very often wept after these speedy sessions. They combined a painfully violent pleasure with that sensuous delight of being alone, here slightly heightened by a touch of bitterness. The con- trast between something that corresponded so accurately with what is known as solitary pleasure and my usual taste for plurality was comic. One time I thought to myself that if I ever had to speak out about “the truth of the situation,” the book should be called
The Sexual Life of Catherine M
. It made me laugh out loud all by myself.

Although poorly provided for by nature in the first place, I now have the benefit of very healthy teeth, thanks to an excellent dentist who never once sent me a bill. The first time that he greeted me as usual in his surgery and then showed me through to another waiting room, not the one where I usually waited, a bigger room furnished quite differ- ently with antique and not modern furniture, it was a bizarre, disturbing experience; it was as if, by passing through a familiar doorway, I had been magically transported to a film set or into a dream. He left me there alone. Then burst into the room, pushed my clothes away from my breasts and my ass, caressed me and disappeared. Reappeared ten minutes later with a young woman. The three of us fucked. I understood only later that it was a double surgery with two waiting rooms lead- ing to two adjoining treatment rooms. Julien

went from one to the other, treating one pa- tient while the dressings on another dried. If I (or one of his other girlfriends, or a com- bination of the two) was in one of the treat- ment rooms, he could, with tremendous sleight of hand, rev up his dick against one of our pussies, tidy it away, disappear through the connecting door, then nip back. He usu- ally ejaculated when he had scarcely penet- rated. He had designed and decorated this double surgery himself, working on it late in- to the evening after his last patients had left. At the weekend he competed in tennis tour- naments at quite a high level. He would sometimes arrange to meet me in the after- noon, having booked a room in a grand hotel. I would check in, he would join me for fifteen minutes and leave me the money to check out. I was fond of him. I was touched by the mysterious force that drove him in his tireless activity. And I identified with him, to some extent, because I never stopped, and as

soon as I was in one place I wanted to be somewhere else, to see what was on the other side of the wall.

On walks, I hate coming back the same way that I set out. I study maps in minute detail to find a new way of getting to some piece of countryside, an edifice or a curiosity I haven’t yet seen. When I went to Australia, the farthest I could get from home on this earth, I realized that my perception of this distance could be compared to the concept of having no sexual barriers. While I was think- ing about this, I wondered whether the joy of parenthood belonged to the same family of emotions. Éric’s ideas were in the same vein; he so cleverly adapted and changed the form our evenings took in the same way that (and these are his words) a “tour guide” would. What mattered, he would point out, was to “widen the available space.”

Surely someone ought to write a study of the reasons why, during the course of their ca- reers, eminent art historians (such as André Chastel and Giulio Carlo Argan) have fo- cused increasingly on architecture. How did their analysis of the space represented in a painting mutate into an analysis of the way real space is organized? In my role as an art critic, I might have felt more inclined to fol- low their example if I had not come across modern and contemporary pictorial works that could be said to inhabit the cusp between imaginary space and the space we live in, be they Barnett Newman’s vast colored expanses (Newman himself said: “I declare space”), the radiant blues in the work of Yves Klein (who called himself the

“painter of space”) or even Alain Jacquet’s topological surfaces and objects which juxta- pose paradoxical abysses. What characterizes these works is not the fact that they open space up, but that they both open and seal it again—Newman with his closing “zips,” Klein by crushing his anthropometric forms, Jacquet by binding the ends of a Möbius strip. If you allow yourself to be led, it’s like the boundless inner surface of a lung.

The Porte de Saint-Cloud parking lot borders on the boulevard Périphérique and in places is separated from it only by an openwork wall. All I had on were my shoes, having slipped off my raincoat, whose lining iced my skin, before getting out of the car. At first, as I have said, they rammed me up against a perpendicular wall. Éric saw me “pinned up by their pricks, like a butterfly.” Two men

held me up under the arms and legs, while the others took it in turns hammering against the pelvis to which my whole person had been reduced. In these dicey situations, where there are many of them, men often fuck quickly and forcefully. I could feel the rugged surface of the breezeblocks digging into my shoulders and my hips. Even though it was late, there was still some traffic. The thrumming of the cars, so close they seemed to almost brush past us, lulled me into the same daze I feel at airports. With my body both freed of all weight and curled up on it- self, I retreated within myself. From time to time I would glimpse through my half-closed eyes the headlights of a car as they swept over my face. The men moved away from the wall, and I felt myself being simultaneously levered up by two powerful jacks. A current fantasy, which had been nourishing my mas- turbation sessions for a long time, was to be taken to the dark foyer of a building by two

strangers and to be impaled by both at the same time, like a sandwich, one in my cunt, the other up my ass, and here it found sub- stance in an obscure atmosphere where real- ity and the images conjured in my mind fed off each other.

I must have come to, if I can call it that, when my body was returned to a more nor- mal form of support. Someone threw a coat over the hood of a car, and they lay me down on it. I’m familiar with this position, which is not an easy one; I kept slipping, and there was nothing to hold on to. I didn’t always re- spond well to the different cocks that sought out my wet, sticky canal. I was the focal point for a theater of shadows, invisible until head- lights threw their insipid light over the scene. From there I could make out the group scattered far and wide about me; those who had already shot their load seemed to com- pletely lose interest in the ensuing proceed- ings. In front of me was the silhouette of a

much larger vehicle, probably a truck; per- haps it had been chosen as a makeshift screen.

I remember when we arrived at the little stadium at Vélizy-Villacoublay how funny it seemed. The trip there had been so long, the leader of the convoy so mysterious about the destination, that when we came upon the place, like a great clearing in the middle of a forest, it just made us burst out laughing. It was a clear night. When you go to so much trouble to find a place, it’s usually for some- where less exposed, more appropriate for complicity! On top of that, we all realized that we were going to be fornicating amid the ghosts of all the adolescents who came and played soccer there every Wednesday after- noon. Our guide responded to our questions by admitting that this had indeed been where he came for soccer practice. He looked crestfallen, as if he had been forced to admit to a long-standing fantasy. Who hasn’t

dreamed of polluting some ordinary and in- nocent place they know with a bit of hanky- panky? The group took refuge under the sloping terraces because it goes so against human nature to copulate in full view of the horizon or in too expansive a space. On the whole, we protect ourselves less from others’ gazes, which can constitute an even more definite barrier than their bodies. People who fuck on the beach on moonlit summer nights think about the intimacy of their situ- ation, and this cuts them off from the im- mensity around them. Our group was too big and too spread out to create that sort of in- timacy. I took the cocks standing up, hanging on to some of the posts under the terraces, with my dress lifted up (I didn’t want to take everything off because it was so cold, but my buttocks were still completely exposed). Be- cause I have a very supple waist, I am well suited to this position. So this circle of joyful activity continued, forming a perimeter

around my outstretched ass, while I gazed absently through the frame of floorboards to the empty field.

I think I must have ended up naked. There was some joke about the available changing rooms: might as well make the most of them. They were behind a little shed, which must have served as a concession stand as well be- cause it had a counter along the front. I lay down there for a while, taking ambivalent pleasure in being manhandled and inspected like a choice piece of merchandise. I wriggled about and breathed deeply of the damp night air. The shed roof extended into an awning over the counter. The wooden walls were clean and smooth, with no notices pinned to them, the general impression simplicity bor- dering on minimalism, like those theater sets that designers dream up that are like work- ing drawings, far removed from reality. I was treated to some final fondlings, to a few licks on my vulva offered at just the right height