The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (22 page)

Image and language conspire. It is so stim- ulating to look in a mirror and measure—to the nearest centimeter—the amount of flesh that your own flesh can swallow, and this is

because the show gives rise to words. “Oh my! It’s going in so smoothly, so deep! Hang on, I’m going to leave it there so that you can really see it, I’ll fuck you right, afterward…” One kind of dialogue that Jacques and I ad- opted willingly can be characterized by being purely factual. If the vocabulary is crude and limited this has less to do with a desire to provoke each other by upping the obscenity stakes than a need to be accurate in our de- scriptions. “Can you feel how wet I am? Even my thighs are soaked, and my little clit’s all swollen.” “God, you move your ass well! Does it want my prick? Does it?” “Yes, but I want to feel your cock on my clit again first, can I rub you against it?” “Yes, and afterward we’re going to fuck the ass really good!” “That’s good. How about you, does your dick like it?” “Yes, he likes it.” “Is it pulling on your balls, too?” “Yes, it’s pumping them really well. But hey, we’re going to give this cunt another really good thrust, aren’t we?”

And so the exchange goes on in a tone of voice that remains, even as we approach the conclusion, fairly measured. Insofar as we don’t see or feel the same thing at the same time, each speaks to the other with the inten- tion of adding to his knowledge. You could also say that we’re like two dubbing actors, their eyes riveted on the screen where they watch the actions of the characters to whom they give their voices: with our words, we re- lay the actions of the protagonists in the porn film we are watching, and whose names are Ass, Cunt, Balls and Prick.

Description cuts bodies into pieces, satis- fies the need to fetishize them, to instru- mentalize them. That famous scene in God- ard’s
Le Mépris,
when, word by word, Piccoli runs over Bardot’s body, is a beautiful trans- position of the two-way traffic between sight and speech, each word bringing into focus a part of the body. How many times people say “Look!” when they’re fucking. Of course, you

are at your leisure to see things close at hand, but in order to see well, we sometimes also need to stand back, the way we move back from an exhibit in a museum. Undress- ing, I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock. Abiding by the law of the Gestalt the- ory, it looks enormous in relation to the body, which becomes almost fragile in its—sometimes laughable—seminudity and its unexpected isolation in the middle of the room; in any event, the cock certainly looks bigger than it would if I was looking at it on its own. In the same way, I can, without any warning, break out of the game and go and stand a couple of meters away, with my back turned, my hands forced onto my buttocks to spread them as far apart as possible, bring- ing into the same sight line both the brown- ish crater of the asshole and the crimson val- ley of the vulva. An invitation become imper- ative, like a greengrocer saying: “You must taste this fruit,” I’m saying “You must look at

my ass.” And because things are more pictur- esque if they are animated, I make it quiver.

To show my ass and to see my face. There are few pleasures to equal this double polar- ity. The layout of the bathroom is perfect: while the basin offers a perfect gripping point to brace the shocks to my rear end, I intermittently catch sight of my harshly lit face in the mirror above it, a face that—quite unlike my lower half, which is totally mobil- ized—is almost lifeless. The cheeks are hol- low and the mouth half open like a windup doll whose mechanism has wound down. It could be the face of a dead woman except for the eyes, which are intolerably listless. I try both to avoid them by lowering my eyelids and to seek out their gaze. That gaze is the anchoring point; it is by seeing its reflection that I establish this certainty: there I am, that is me coming. It is the siphon through which all of me is evacuated: I cannot recog- nize myself in such a state of release; with a

feeling of shame, I reject it. That is how pleasure stays on a knife edge: just as the multiplication of two negative numbers gives a positive number, this pleasure is the product not, as is sometimes said, of an ab- sence from oneself but of the bringing to- gether of this perceived absence and the feel- ing of horror that it provokes in a flash of conscience. Sometimes I bring myself to this peak of pleasure all by myself, as an interval in my bathroom routine. With one hand on the edge of the basin and the other one mas- turbating, I watch myself in the mirror out of the corner of my eye.

A particular porn film made quite an im- pression on me. The man was taking the wo- man from behind. The camera was facing her so that her face was in the foreground. Thanks to the pressure exerted on her whole body, her face was projected forward and distorted, as things are when they come too close to the lens. You could hear the man’s

orders: “Look! Look at the camera!” and the girl’s eyes looked directly into yours, the viewer’s. I thought he might well be pulling her hair to force her to raise her head. This scene has given me a lot of inspiration for the little scenarios that nourish my masturb- ating. In real life, a man I met only once gave me such intense pleasure that I have very precise memories of the encounter, and this was because with every thrust, he would or- der me to “Look me in the eye.” I did as I was told, knowing that he was witness to the dis- integration of my face.

One weakness of porn films is to present ste- reotyped images of orgasm; the characters always come after a series of accelerated jerks, eyes closed, mouths open and scream- ing. Now, orgasms can happen with no movement at all and in silence, and you can

watch them building up and then unfold. It is usually when you want to fire up or stimu- late desire that—in life as in films—you re- sort to clichés. Pretty much the same words, obscene or not, come to everyone. Men fre- quently order partners to ask for them and their organs (“Do you want a big one? An- swer me,” “Say my name, go on, say it”), whereas women, even the most independent-minded, tend toward subjec- tion, even to the extent of asking for what would be horrible injuries (“Stab it into me!,” “Go on, tear me open!”). Seeing myself in a video spreading the come that has just spur- ted onto me all over my breasts, I wonder whether I am not merely repeating something I have seen dozens of times on the screen. The jet is not as frothy as in the films, but it is nevertheless spectacular; the spunk makes my skin shine. Did men and women use the same rhetoric and was their erotic repertoire the same before the invention of

cinema? But the more powerful the orgasm, the less “hamming it up” there is. I can con- firm that in my own case. While the level of pleasure is rising, I take a very active part. As well as moving my hips, I use my arms and legs. If I am lying on my back, I spur on my partner by repeatedly kicking my heels on his buttocks and thighs. Then I reach a stage when this frantic level of activity drops. My partner is now concentrating on only one in- ert parcel of flesh. My voice sounds quite dif- ferent. We have already abandoned our run- ning commentary, the words we exchange become more laconic. I say “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” sometimes accompanying this litany with rapid movements of my head from left to right, or I keep saying “Go on, go on.” And suddenly my voice becomes higher, louder, with the clarity and authority of an actor who has learned to project her voice, and the words are more spaced out, the syllables more emphatic, “Keep go-ing.” Sometimes

the “yes” becomes a “no,” and in some im- ages I see myself burying my face in my hands.

I wouldn’t do the job that I do, nor would I be capable of gathering together all these notes, if I did not have some gift for observa- tion. A gift put to greater effect because it is coupled with a solid superego. I don’t let my- self go easily, and in those moments when you are supposed to be completely passive, I am often still alert. I have, therefore, always paid very close attention to my partners, to those who I knew well, of course, but also to any level of relationship, a deep and lasting attachment or a passing affair. This degree of attention surely belongs to the same percept- ive structure as the concentration I display in front of a painting, or my ability—in the Métro, a restaurant or a waiting room—to lose myself completely in my contemplation of the people sitting next to me. An attention that defines my acumen. I take pride in the

fact that I am quite an expert, and I have be- come one because I have always been aware of the effects my initiatives produced. As I have described at the beginning of this chapter, I have spontaneously slipped under other people’s skin in an effort to feel myself what they were feeling. That is not just a turn of phrase; I have surprised myself by mim- icking habits and exclamations that were pe- culiar to someone else. Which amounts to saying that I often relegated my own pleas- ure to the background. It took me a long time, a really long time, to identify the caresses, the positions that I liked best. I will venture this as an explanation: I was not from the start granted a body predisposed to pleasure. First I had to give myself—literally abandon my whole body—to sexual activity, to lose myself in it so thoroughly that I con- fused myself with my partner so that I could emerge from this transformation having sloughed off the mechanical body I was given

at birth and taken on a second body, one capable of taking as much as it could give. In the meantime, how many faces and bodies did I lose myself in watching!

With very few exceptions, I can remember with relative accuracy the bodies of my main partners, and even what their faces looked like at the moment when the other part of their being was released. These images are accompanied by memories of the convulsive movements and particular choice of words each of them made. Observation does not automatically lead to judgment, but if it is scrupulous, it keeps the conscience in the realm of objectivity. I may have been se- duced by a man’s physical beauty, but that wouldn’t stop me from identifying flaws that could cut short any fascination for him. For example, a roundish face set off with almond eyes but mounted on a head that was peculi- arly flattened at the back, so that when I looked at it in profile, it brought to mind a

squashed balloon. A quarter turn and the man whose face could be compared to a Renaissance painting had no more depth than a picture on canvas. If I run back through a portrait gallery, then I can find fault with my memory and my powers of ob- servation: paradoxically, there was one man whose good looks were particularly seductive to me (in fact, the only man of all my sexual contacts who was younger than I), but I have no sexual memories of him. I can call to mind lots of expressions and gestures he made and plenty of things that he said, but not one of them would have occurred while we were fucking!

Was nature trying to spare men the danger of being torn in two when she ordained that, when their muscles are strained to the limits, this tension is compensated by bathing their faces in peace? Doesn’t it look as if they are throwing their faces back to refresh them un- der a fountain in that instant when they

come to the end of the pursuit that has exer- cised their entire body? Many of them adopt this serene expression; not the man who looked like a Renaissance portrait. While there is a whole succession of peaceful faces in my memory—one making a little “o” with his mouth and, because he had a mustache, looking as silly as a child playing dress up; another who smiled so halfheartedly that it could have been a sign of embarrassment, the sort of smile a shy person would wear as he apologized for being caught in some inde- cent act—or again, another man whose face was usually so smooth, who wore a mask of suppressed pain. He would have seemed piti- able if, in those moments, he hadn’t added to the usual exclamation of “I’m coming, I’m coming!” the words “Oh, my God!” A comical invocation I couldn’t help noticing.

But calm can also be mistaken for indiffer- ence. I knew one man who was so contem- plative that he withdrew completely from his

physical appearance to the extent that it no longer expressed anything. His body rested on me with all its weight; yes, it was active but impassive, as if he had abandoned it to me, and this absent face would park next to mine while I watched his ghost, transported by orgasm, floating above us like in a fantasy film. It was the same body that I saw when this man masturbated, indifferent to my presence and using a technique unique to him. He would lie on his stomach with his arms bent by his sides and squeeze his organ between his strong thighs by contracting them. It was a stocky body, and the muscles stood out all the more in this position. Being an expert in onanism, I admired the concen- tration he applied to the job, stubbornly and defiantly defending the mental isolation it requires.

When you have made love with a man a few times, you recognize when he is going to come, even if he is not one of those who

announce it out loud. Perhaps you know be- fore he does, informed by tiny signs: perhaps because he has slipped you into a position that acts like a trigger on him; perhaps be- cause he falls silent, his breathing becomes audible, appeased a few moments in ad- vance. One friend who was an imaginative, talkative and active fucker, who would keep you there for an hour with his extraordinary erotic fabulations and would make you try out the most acrobatic positions and the most improbable substitutes (cucumbers, sausages, Perrier bottles, luminous white billy clubs, etc.), would suddenly grow quiet a few moments before orgasm. Whatever po- sition I was in, he would bring me back un- derneath him, tunnel into me without for- cing his way, and replace words with discreet moans. I was convinced that this final phase followed a decision taken with full know- ledge of the facts, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to have heard him say: “Right,

that’s enough fun and games, let’s get down to business.” After he had ejaculated, he would stay on top of me, unleashing a little “Hee, hee, hee” in my ear, which sounded like a forced laugh, but was more likely his way of gently returning us to the real world. It was the laugh of someone who laughs first, in the hopes of finding your complicity and your forgiveness for having dragged you on some unexpected escapade. And as if to help extract me from our dream, before he opened his eyes, he would scratch my scalp affectionately.