The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (14 page)

most of my masturbatory fantasies take place in urban settings (apart from those already mentioned, the following is often called up: a man in a packed Métro train presses his fly up to my buttocks and man- ages to hitch up my clothes enough to slip his dick in; his maneuver is not lost on other men, who flow through the crowds to take his place; the carriage is divided between those taking pleasure and those taking of- fense, the factions start arguing—try and find a more Parisian fantasy!), and I managed to make do with the hard shoulders of main roads and with the parking lots of the capital. Even so, when all is said and done, I think I prefer vast open spaces.

Now at night, cities give the illusion of vastness. When Claude and I started living together, we would get home late to our little apartment in the suburbs, I would walk ahead of him and, without any warning, lift my skirt up over the naked globes of my ass,

not as an invitation for him to fuck me there (I don’t think we ever did), nor to shock a po- tential passerby, but to breathe in the road around me, to let its refreshing breeze reach my quivering crack. In fact, I wonder wheth- er the men from the clumps of trees and the parking lots, by their sheer numbers and their shadowy nature, aren’t made of the same substance as space, whether I didn’t rub myself up against shreds of the same fab- ric as air though with a slightly closer weave. More specifically: I have an unrivaled ability to find my way on an unfamiliar road. Per- haps this aptitude for passing from one man to another within a group, or for navigat- ing—as I did at certain times in my life—among a number of different relation- ships, perhaps it belongs to the same family of psychological predispositions as a sense of direction.

Throughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need for escape, for open air. That need even instigated them. It was when I ran away from home for the first time that I lost my virginity. I had argued with my par- ents yet again. Claude, whom I did not yet know, had rung at the door of our apartment to let me know that a mutual friend I was supposed to meet had been delayed. He asked me to go out with him. In the end, his Renault 4 took us all the way to Dieppe. We set up the tent on the edge of the beach.

Sometime later I fell in love with a student from Berlin. We did not make love together (he was a cautious young man, and I had not made any demands), but his long, sturdy frame lying next to mine and his big white hands sent me into ecstasies. I wanted to go

and live in West Berlin. The wide Kudamm leading all the way up to the gleaming blue cathedral, and the parks of that great city—even though it was divided at the time—fueled my dreams. And then the stu- dent wrote and told me that it would not be sensible for us to be committed when we were so young. Another excuse to run away, again with Claude (whom I still saw) and his Renault 4. Destination Berlin, to talk with the boy who wanted to break up with me. An attempt to cross the border between East and West Germany which failed because I did not have the necessary papers. So the student came as far as the frontier to talk things out, and my first romance came to an end in a cafeteria on a huge parking lot in the middle of a forest, amid lines of people and lines of cars waiting to pass the wooden sen- try boxes.

Unfortunately, I retained this propensity to flee without warning for many years,

which was fair to neither the man I was liv- ing with at the time nor those who had brought me to my destination, nor those I had gone to meet and would abandon to re- turn home. This restlessness was partly due to the febrile interest that we had (Claude, Henri, a few others and myself ) in the New World of sex, an attitude that would some- times make one of us strike out on our own. The unspoken law expected this pioneering scout to come back and tell of his or her ad- ventures. Which, of course, was not always the case, hence the mixture of oil and water that constituted, on the one hand, our dis- parate desires and, on the other, our liber- tarian minds. Going away for two days with a man I barely knew, or, as I did for several years, carrying on a relationship with a col- league who lived in Milan, was just as worth- while for the journey and the change of scenery as it was for the promise of being bedded, touched and fucked in a fresh and

unfamiliar way. If it had been possible, I would have liked to wake up each morning to the shadows of an as yet unexplored ceiling and to climb out of the sheets and stay for a few moments in the no-man’s-land of an apartment where I had forgotten overnight which corridor led to the bathroom. At times like that, it is the other body that you leave behind, a body you may have known only a few hours but which, during those hours, nourished you with its solid presence and its smell; it is that body which provides your only source of the ineffable well-being of the familiar. How many times have I thought, as I fantasized languidly about the life of high- class whores, that that was one of the ad- vantages of their job. As for the journey it- self, the time lapse we inhabit when we are no longer in one place but not yet in the next, it can be a source of pleasure measured on the same scale as the erotic. In a taxi, when all the bustle that precedes departure

suddenly falls away, or descending into that semiconscious state while waiting at an air- port, I can sometimes feel the unmistakable sensation of a giant hand inside my body, squeezing my entrails and drawing from them a sensuous delight that pervades my every extremity, exactly like when a man looks at me in a way that implies he has me in his sights.

In spite of this, I have never used the frequent long-distance journeys necessitated by my work to collect lovers. I fucked infin- itely less when my timetable was more flex- ible than it is in Paris, and when I could have made the most of those casual relationships with no tomorrows. However hard I try to re- member, I can think of only two men whom I have met on a journey and with whom I had some form of sexual contact during the jour- ney itself. And when I say contact, there was only one instance each time, between break- fast and the first meeting of the morning

with one, and during what was left of the night with the other.

There are two explanations. First, right at the beginning of my career, a more experi- enced female colleague had led me to under- stand that conferences, seminars and other meetings held in seclusion with people who were temporarily cut from their usual ties were God-given opportunities for furtive creepings up and down hotel corridors. I was used to sexual rendezvous of a more ad- vanced nature; nevertheless, this shocked me to the same extent as the shapeless clothes people wear to show that they are on vaca- tion, when they are usually very particular about their appearance. With the in- transigence of the newly converted, I be- lieved that fucking—and by that I mean fuck- ing frequently and willingly whoever was (or were) the partner (or partners)—was a way of life. If not, if this thing was permitted only when certain conditions were met, at

predetermined times, well then it was just a vacation from values that remained com- pletely traditional. (A little aside to put this severe verdict into context. We no longer need so much to prove that our sexual tend- encies can turn inside out like an old um- brella, and the device that protects us when the wind blows with reality can flip the other way and leave us to get soaked in the squalls of our fantasies. Once again, I am bringing together fact and fantasy, in this case to ex- pose an amusing antinomy: despite the mor- al stance I have just expressed, I have often been aroused by imagining myself as a “scumbag” for a group of stressed executives at a conference; each would shoot his load into me secretly, hiding at the back of a hotel bar, even in a phone booth, with the receiver in one hand while carrying on a ritual con- versation with the wife: “Yes, darling, it’s go- ing well, but the food’s not so great,” etc.

That’s a sure-fire scenario to get me off on my own complete degradation.)

In the realms of reality, though, the exotic adventures of this spelunker of Parisian parking lots can be dealt with in just two paragraphs. The assistant who had so em- phatically drawn me to him right in the middle of the hotel foyer did indeed come and wake me up the following morning. Judiciously, he had let me rest after our long travels—we were crossing Canada—over the last few days. He pushed his hips calmly. I let him get on with it without much conviction, but I encouraged him almost as a profession- al would, nonetheless choosing a vocabulary that was rather more amorous than obscene. Afterward he said, quite sincerely, that he had been thinking about it for several days, but that he had waited until the end of the trip so as not to disturb our work. We worked together a number of other times. He never made the slightest gesture of sexual

invitation again, and neither did I. It was the first time a sexual exchange that had started with someone whom I was to see again did not continue, did not naturally fertilize the soil of our relationship as friends and col- leagues. It has to be said that I was at a stage in my life where I was trying with limited success if not to be faithful, at least to limit myself. I thought that these might be the venal transgressions permitted to people who were not libertines. It was the only time in my life that I vaguely regretted a sexual act.

A Brazilian adventure left me with more complex feelings. I had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first time, and of all the tele- phone numbers I had been given, the only person to reply was a certain artist. As luck would have it, he was familiar with an area of French cultural history that was my field, and we stayed up very late, chatting on a gloomy terrace in Ipanema. Several years

went by, he came to Paris, I went back to Brazil a couple of times. In São Paulo, as we came away from a party for the Biennial, we took the same taxi. He gave the address of my hotel. Without taking my eyes off the back of the taxi driver’s neck, I drummed my fingers lightly on his thigh. He gave the ad- dress of his hotel. The bed stood by a bay window, and street signs outside threw blocks of yellow light across it as in an Ed- ward Hopper painting. He did not lie over me and cover me, he sowed parts of his body like gentle seeds over mine, reassuring him- self that I was there with his hands, his lips, his penis, as well as his forehead, his chin, his shoulders and legs. I felt good as I sank into the depths of a migraine, which terrified him. I could hear him whispering about the time, all that time. There was no second time with him, either. Later, in another taxi, in Paris this time, as I watched rather than listened to him speaking to me attentively, I

was overcome by an intense feeling of joy: I was thinking about the geographical distance between us, the long intervals of time between our meetings, which were neverthe- less regular—sometimes, when in Rio, I might give him a quick phone call; and I thought of that single occasion when time and space had come together and their union had formed a perfect architecture.

The other explanation for the limitations in my adventures while traveling is connec- ted with a subject I raised in the first chapter. I liked to discover—on the condition that I had a guide. I liked it if a man was in- troduced to me by another man. I would take my cue from the relationship the one had with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sex were almost two separate activities; I could want a man very much and feel no frustra- tion if nothing ever actually happened. I was

a dreamer, a gifted fabulist; a major part of my erotic life was lived like that, heightened by the friction on my vulva, held between my thumb and index finger. Sex really answered a wider necessity: to carve a smooth path for myself in the world. As I have illustrated, I was living in the comfort of a familial com- plicity; something you do not get when you arrive for the first time (and without any spe- cific tips) in some distant city.

With many men, it is their houses that I remember before anything else. That is not an excuse to underestimate other memories that I have of them; it is rather that they can- not be dissociated from their background, and it is a spontaneous reconstruction of this background that brings back a moment of af- fectionate friendship or the geometry of bod- ies. The reader may well have realized: I quickly take in the setting. When my most intimate opening has given access, I have opened my eyes wide, too. I learned to use

this method, among others, to find my way around Paris when I was very young. An ar- chitect friend whom I used to visit in his Parisian pied-à-terre on the top floor of a new building—so high up that the view from the bed dived straight into the sky—once commented that from my place in the rue Saint-Martin on the Rive Droite to his at the top of the rue Saint-Jacques on the Rive Gauche, you just had to follow a straight line. I came to love the area around Invalides when I accompanied my dentist friend on his trips to one of his girlfriends. She had been a successful variety singer in the 1950s, and she still had the bland and uptight appeal of record covers of the period. She submitted with lukewarm enthusiasm, and I amused myself by playing the aesthete, scorning the low tables cluttered with a collection of tor- toises of all sizes, in stone and in porcelain, and going to gaze through the windows at

the sublime proportions of the buildings along the esplanade.

Each home elicited a specific way of look- ing at it. In Éric’s apartment, the bed was the nerve center in a kaleidoscopic arrangement of camera lenses, screens and mirrors; in Bruno’s, based on the model of Mondrian’s studio, a vase of flowers was the only focal point in a space where the doorjambs, the beams, the frames of the cupboards and the furniture all seemed to be one continuous unit, all with homogenous proportions, as if the same volume repeated several times served a variety of functions, as if the big dining table, for example, was merely an el- evated replica of the bed.

I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments in Italian cities. When my collab- oration with Enzo began, he was living in Rome, in what I think was an outlying part of the city, in one of those ocher-colored build- ings separated from others by open spaces.