The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (19 page)

that is still ours, Jacques’s and mine. But I found I couldn’t even lean against the door frame, unconsciously afraid that I would re- lease the spring of a trap. So I had to hop backward because the man kneeling in front of me and trying to get to the mound under my skirt had automatically put one of my legs over his shoulder. I lost my balance at the foot of the bed. His incredulous face stared at me through the V of my upturned legs. I brought an end to the exercise and got back to my feet aloofly.

These are the limits set by a morality that belongs more to the realms of superstition than to a clear understanding of what would be right and what would be wrong. First, these limits or markers send signals in only one direction; I have never had any scruples in someone else’s bathroom about using her perfumed soap to chase away the fetid residue of the night. Then, I may have cheated on someone in a way that, if and

when it was revealed, might have hurt him much more than finding that I had cavorted in his sheets with someone else. I appropri- ate to other people the same adherence to environment that I have myself, which makes every intimate thing—or anything that has served an intimate purpose—a sort of ex- tension of the body, a sensitive prosthesis. If, while someone is away, you touch something that he touches, he himself is involved by his proximity to it. During an orgy, my tongue could easily lick a pussy that had just been ejaculated into by a man who had first been turned on with me, but the thought of drying myself on a towel that some woman who came clandestinely to my home may have used to wipe between her thighs, or the thought that Jacques might use the same one as some guest of mine whose visit he knew nothing about, horrifies me as much as an epidemic of leprosy. What is more, as a pre- cursor to this fear itself, a hierarchy is

established in my mind, granting greater im- portance to a respect for physical integrity (everything attached to it and that I attach to it) than for moral serenity, because I con- sider it more irremediable to damage the first than the second. Although I have man- aged to relativize this theory, I tend to think that we “cope” better with an invisible wound than an external wound. I am a formalist.

There is a paradox with respect to this char- acter trait, and that is that, even though im- ages have such a dominant role in my life and even though my eyes guide me far more than any other organ, during the sexual act, it is as if I am blind. You could say that on the continuum of the world of sex, I move like a cell within its tissue. The nocturnal outings, and the fact of being surrounded,

carried and penetrated by shadows suit me well. Better still, I can follow my partner blindly. I put myself in his hands, abandon- ing my free will; his presence keeps anything bad from happening to me. When I was with Éric, we could drive for ages toward some destination unknown to me, I could end up in the middle of nowhere or three stories down in an underground parking lot, I never asked any questions. When all was said and done, whatever happened was less strange than nothing happening at all.

I have bad memories of the basement of a Moroccan restaurant, near the Place Maubert, not an area we often went to. There were couches and low tables dotted about in the chilly room under the vaulted ceiling. We had dined there alone, me with my breasts bared and my skirt hitched right up. Each time the waiter or the man I thought was the owner brought dishes over, Éric would push my top a bit farther aside and run his hand

insistently under my skirt. I remember less about the heavy and not altogether friendly way these two men looked at me than I do the way they touched me, quickly, sporadic- ally, on my companion’s tacit invitation. It was I who brought the waiting to an end by burying Éric’s organ in my mouth. Surely my intention was to escape the less than friendly attentions of the staff. We left the restaurant without finishing our meal. Were the usual customers not there? Did Éric know the place well, and hadn’t he overestimated the welcome we might receive? I felt more ap- prehensive than if I had been in some incon- gruous place and a herd of strangers had set upon me with their dicks hanging out. With Éric I always knew that anyone that we met, in whatever circumstances, could, on some imperceptible sign from him, open my thighs and slip in his member. I didn’t think there could be any exceptions to this, as if Éric was a sort of universal ferryman, not to take me

across to some promised land but to let people penetrate me, one after another. Hence my uneasiness that evening.

In the undefined places where I met people whose diverse social backgrounds were leveled by a sexual egalitarianism, I was never confronted with any threats or viol- ence; I was even gratified with a degree of at- tention that I didn’t always find in a classic two-person relationship. As for any fear of the police, there was no such thing. On one hand, I have a childlike trust in the ability of the man I am with to ensure our safety—and, in fact, there was never a single incident. On the other hand, even though I feel overcome with shame when a conductor asks me rather rudely for a ticket I have temporarily lost, I would have been only a little put out if I had been caught in the act on the highway. The body discovered by the representative of the law would have been no more or less than the body penetrated by the stranger in the

Bois, not so much an inhabited body as a shell from which I had withdrawn. This reck- less lack of concern is also at the root of the determination and perseverance I can dis- play during the act, and—indeed—other activities, and is not unrelated to the dissoci- ation that I have just mentioned: either the conscience is annihilated by that determina- tion and can no longer view the act with any distance; or, quite the opposite, when the body is surrendered to automatic functions, the conscience escapes and loses any associ- ation with that act. At times like this, no ex- ternal factor can disturb my body or my part- ner’s, because nothing exists outside the space they occupy. And how small that space is! You rarely fuck expansively in a public place. You tend instead to burrow into each other.

There are few places that have as many forbidden areas as a museum: the works themselves are roped off, and there are

plenty of places from which the public is banned. The visitor makes his progress with a vague sense that there is another parallel world that he cannot see but from which he is being watched. Henri, myself and a friend called Fred therefore took advantage of a door that had exceptionally been left ajar at the end of a vast, momentarily deserted gal- lery in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. We slipped in behind a flimsy partition wall that hid the pandemonium of what I imagine was a temporary storeroom. We didn’t go far into the room. It was very cluttered; but we made up our minds quickly, without thinking it over. Still, I could see the shaft of light on the floor, because we had left the door as it was while I formed a bridge between the two men. After a few minutes they changed places. They both came, one in my cunt, the other in my mouth. I don’t know which one of them intermittently suspended the action of his prick to run his hand under my

stomach and pleasure me. It encouraged me to do it myself and to set off my own orgasm while the shrinking prick still lingered in my cunt and the other, whose come I had swal- lowed, had moved away to free me from one of my moorings the better to enjoy my pleas- ure. This led to a little conversation about the way I masturbated. I explained, believing that I was revealing something astonishing, that in less precarious circumstances I could have had two or three consecutive orgasms. They made fun of me. That was very com- mon for a woman, they claimed, as we slowly tucked our shirts back into our trousers. When we went back out into the light, the museum was just as empty. We went on looking around the exhibition. I went from one painting to another, and from Henri to Fred for their comments, and this visit was all the more enjoyable because it was bolstered by the complicity that from then on

would link me to those two men and to that place.

In the dark storeroom, with my body bent double between two other bodies and my eyes staring vertically down, I was com- pletely hemmed in. I am convinced that when my field of vision is limited, then in some primitive way, this provokes anything that could threaten me or simply upset me—in fact, anything that I don’t want to countenance for one reason or another. The body of whomever I am with becomes an obstacle, and whatever lies beyond it that I cannot see doesn’t really exist. So, in the pos- ition I was in at the museum, only this time on the first floor of a shop selling sadomas- ochist gear on the boulevard de Clichy—again in a stock room—I have one cheek pressed up against Éric’s tummy while he holds me by my shoulders and the owner of the boutique grasps my rear end, ramming me back and forth on his dick. Before

assuming this position, I notice that the man is very small and thickset with short arms, but as soon as he disappears from view, his person disintegrates—so much so that I ad- dress my request to Éric for the man to put on a condom before penetrating. The man is perturbed by this request and forced to rum- mage through some boxes; he admits quietly that he is afraid his wife might come in. Even though he has a thick organ that has to force entry, he hovers in limbo the whole time. A girl who looks like a shy employee watches the entire scene rather sullenly. From time to time I catch her eye as I glance sideways; her eyes are black, probably ringed with kohl. I feel as if I am on a stage, separated by some indistinct void from a gloomy spectator wait- ing for the action to start. When I look at her, I am in some ways looking back at myself, and I end up seeing myself, but just the head, the neck hunched back into the shoulders, the cheek crushed against Éric’s jacket and

scuffed by the zipper, the mouth is open, whereas what is going on above the waist is part of a sort of backdrop. The dwarf’s pokes became as unreal to me as a sound heard thundering from the wings of a theater, to imply some far-off action.

Another time, in a sauna, it was the friend- liness of a little masseuse that brought about this duality. The tiers of slatted wooden benches had forced me to keep turning around. I had alternately bent and reached up to take all the eager pricks in my mouth. I don’t sweat much. So I stayed dry long enough for each of them to grab hold of me, while I myself had to make great efforts to hold on to and direct pieces of flesh that had become viscous and slippery. All the way to the showers, they worried at my clitoris and pinched my nipples. Eventually I lay down aching on the massage table. The girl spoke softly, leaving a pause between her sentences in the same way that she stopped to put talc

on her hands between each series of move- ments. She was sympathizing with my fa- tigue:
When you feel like that, there’s noth- ing quite like a sauna followed by a good massage, is there!
She feigned ignorance of exactly what sort of ordeals I had just subjec- ted my body to, and she spoke to me as a beautician would, offering professional but also maternal ministrations to a modern act- ive woman who without reserve puts herself into her hands. I have always liked slipping into a role, especially in this sort of situation, and I replied to her questions, relaxing more by this conformism than by the action of her fingers. It amused me to feel her kneading muscles that a few moments earlier, had been subjected to more carnal pressures. She also seemed distant. I was separated from her by a succession of transformations. She took on a disguise constructed by the course of our conversation, but beneath this dis- guise was my skin, which she touched so

gently, overlaying the other caresses that had gone before, and I abandoned this skin to her just as willingly, like an old castoff. After all, I was no more the debauched little bour- geoise she must have taken me for than the steadfast one we were inventing. As far as I know, we were the only two women in the es- tablishment that evening, but I thought of myself as being in the active realm of the men—and, in a way, they were still standing around me—whereas I saw her in a passive feminine realm, a place she occupied as an observer, and the two were incontrovertibly separate.

In the end, the selection operated by my sight is intensified by the assured protection of my partner’s gaze, by the veil with which he covers me, a veil that is of course both opaque and transparent. Jacques does not tend to choose the busiest places to take pic- tures of me naked—he would only show me off in the photo—but he has a predilection

for places one passes through, and more par- ticularly for the transitory nature of the things you find in them (the carcasses of abandoned cars, pieces of furniture, ruins), which took us to the places where these things are used. We are cautious. I always wear a dress that is easy to button back up. In the frontier station of Port-Bou, we wait until the platform is empty. There is a train pulling out, but it is two or three platforms away. Anyway, the people are far too busy to notice us, and we make sure that the three or four frontier guards are still chatting with one another. I am looking into the light, so I can’t really make out the signs Jacques is giving me. I start walking toward him with the dress open right down the front. I gain confidence as I go. Hypnotized by the flutter- ing of the silhouette waiting for me at the far end, I feel as if I am carving out my own channel as I go, opening up the acrid, laden air to form a space no wider than the gap

between my two swinging arms. Each click of the camera confirms the impunity of my ad- vance. When I reach the end, I lean against the wall. Jacques takes a few more pictures. More nonchalance is authorized once the open space is behind me. The euphoria of a conquest: we were no more interrupted in the underpass that links the platforms, or in the large, empty, echoing concourse, or on the little terrace that one of the station en- trances opened out onto, a place invaded by cats and graced with a fountain.

The second photographic session of the day takes place in the sailors’ cemetery, in the walkways between the rows of family graves built in several stories, on Benjamin’s tomb, in a game of hide-and-seek with two or three women walking slowly to visit graves. It seems obvious to me to be naked in the sea air and among the dead. But I feel unsure about being in that ambiguous place, which is both open to all and profoundly