The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (6 page)

flirted or tried to score. On the other hand, I was completely available: at all times and in all places, without hesitation or regret, by every one of my bodily orifices and with a totally clear conscience. If, as Proust’s theory goes, I see my own personality in terms of the image that other people have made of it, then that is the dominant trait. “You never said no, never refused anything. You didn’t put on airs.” “You were far from inert, but you weren’t demonstrative, either.” “You did things so naturally, you were neither reticent nor dirty, just a tad masochistic from time to time.” “At an orgy, you were always the first to jump in, right out there in front.” “I re- member Robert would send a taxi for you as if there was some emergency, and you would go.” “People thought of you as some sort of phenomenon; even with an incredible num- ber of guys, you would still be the same, right up to the end, at their mercy. You weren’t playing the little woman who wants to please

her man, or the ball-buster. You were a friend who happened to be a girl, a girl- friend.” And also this note that a friend put in his diary, which still gives me a glow of pride: “Catherine, who deserves the highest praise for her calmness and availability in every situation.”

The first man I knew introduced me to the second. Claude was friendly with a couple, colleagues some ten years older than us. The man was not very tall, but he had the muscle tone of a sportsman; she had magnificent, slightly Asian features, with short-cropped blond hair; she also had one of those stiff personalities with which intelligent women sometimes modulate their sexual freedom. It could be that Claude had had some sexual encounters with her before introducing me to the man, before, that is, arranging for me

to fuck him. We carried on a sort of loosely arranged partner swap that continued even after Claude and I had rented a studio next to their apartment. I would go and meet the man at their apartment, while the woman would join Claude in ours. The wall was like a television remote control: there was a dif- ferent film on if you switched sides. There was only one occasion when this disjunction was not respected. It was while we were on holiday in a house that they owned in Brit- tany. A cold, mellow afternoon light per- meated the sitting room, right into the corner where the man was resting on a daybed. I was sitting at the foot of the bed, the woman was in and out, Claude had gone off somewhere. The man gave me that weak, almost submissive look that some men have even when they are expressing the most im- perious of orders, drew me to him, held my chin and kissed me, then pushed my head down toward his penis. I liked it better like

that—using me to harden him up while I lay curled in on myself rather than stretching up to his face for a long kiss. And I sucked him off well. Perhaps it was on that day that I realized I had a gift for it. I concentrated on coordinating the way I moved my hand and my lips; from the pressure of his hand on my head, I knew when I should speed up the rhythm or slow it down. But it was definitely the facial expressions that I remember most clearly. When I occasionally looked beyond the immediate horizon of his zipper to take a deep breath, I saw her expression—as gently vacuous as a statue—and his, almost disbe- lieving. I now feel it was then I first hazily grasped the fact that if relationships with friends could spread and grow like a climb- ing plant, twisting and knotting together in perfect and reciprocal freedom, and that all you had to do was to let yourself go with the flow of its sap, then this was all the more reason for me to decide on my own behavior

for myself, resolutely and solitarily. I like this paradoxical solitude.

The art world is made up of a multitude of communities or families, and their rallying points—at the time when I started working as a critic—were more places of work, galler- ies and the editorial offices of magazines, than cafés. Naturally these little networks were breeding grounds for casual romances. As I lived right on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, which was where the modern-art galleries all were at the time, there was not far to go between an exhibition and a little cuddle. I can see myself on the pavement of the rue Bonaparte with a new painter friend, a shy boy who never really looked up as a smile spread across his face or as he peered at you through his thick glasses. I don’t remember how he led me to understand that he wanted

me, probably very warily (“I’d like to make love to you, you know”), perhaps even without touching me. Most likely I didn’t give much of a reply. What I do remember was how resolute I was. I took him all the way to my room. He let himself be led without realizing that he was urging me on, too, weighing me down with those subjug- ated, tentative eyes. My pleasure derives from the precise moment when I have made the decision and the other feels a bit taken aback. I have an intoxicating feeling of ful- filling a heroine’s destiny. But the best thing to put him at his ease is the girl-who’s-just- escaped-her-parents’-clutches speech: I ex- plain daffily that “I want everything.” He car- ries on, encouraging me with his attentive eyes. Someone who once took the same route has since admitted that my room under the eaves reminded him of a place you might rent by the hour, and that the rather coarse fabric serving as a bedcover seemed like a

tarpaulin to protect it from the activities that were about to take place.

A group visit to an exhibition organized by Germano Celant in a Genoa museum. Claude, Germano and the others are walking ahead; I spend a little longer in each gallery, accompanied by William, who has contrib- uted to the exhibition. With quick, furtive gestures, he lands his hand across my snatch, I grind the bulge in his trousers, amazed to find it so hard, like an inanimate object, not like part of a living body. He has a very distinctive laugh, which sounds as if his mouth is already engaged in a long, deep kiss. He’s having fun teaching me English: cock, pussy. Not long after that, he spends a few days in Paris. As he comes out of the Rhumerie, he licks my ear and whispers in English, “I want to make love with you,” leaving a little pause between each of the words. In the corner next to a service door at the back of the post office that stands where

the rue des Rennes meets the rue du Four, I mutter my own English contribution: “I want your cock in my pussy.” Explosive laughter, the same trip all the way to the studio on the rue Bonaparte. William, like Henri and like many others, would return several times. We fuck there as a twosome and with others. The pretext is often a girl picked up by one of the boys, who needs a bit of persuading that it’s even greater fun when there are more than two to share in the pleasure. It doesn’t al- ways work, and when it doesn’t, I am given the job of reassuring her, consoling her. The boys disappear discreetly to have a cigarette on the landing. I don’t actually speak, I ca- jole, give her a gentle hug; girls are more eas- ily convinced by another girl. Of course they could just leave, but not one of them ever did, not even the one who remained friends with Claude and admitted, twenty years later, that it was because she was still a vir- gin that she had refused to comply that

evening and burst into tears. Henri remem- bers another girl: I locked myself into the kitchen—which also served as a bath- room—with her to clean her face because her tears had smudged her mascara. He main- tains that from the communal toilets on the landing, he could hear us moaning through the skylights. She probably wanted to thumb her nose at the boys, and I, perversely, played along with her.

By a curious inversion of sensitivity, al- though I am relatively blind to a man’s se- ductive maneuvers—quite simply because I prefer them to be kept to a minimum, but I will come to that subject shortly—I am al- ways well aware when a woman is attracted to me, not that I have ever expected a woman to give me any pleasure. Oh, I am not deny- ing the devastating delight of touching smooth, rounded, delicate skin, which most women’s bodies offer and only a very few men’s. But I have joined in these embraces

and their related fumblings only so as not to break the rules of the game. In fact, men who always suggest this sort of threesome strike me as boring and unimaginative, and I quickly tire of them. I do, however, love look- ing at women myself. I could make out an in- ventory of the wardrobes, guess the contents of the makeup bags, even describe the physiques of the women I work with better than their own male partners could. Out in the streets, I follow them and watch them more tenderly than any man trying to pick them up; I associate a particular conforma- tion of the buttocks with a certain style of panties, a particular wiggle in a walk with the height of a heel. But my excitement is limited to a visual satisfaction. Beyond that I feel just a communal sympathy for hardworking wo- men, for the huge fraternity of women who have the same first name as me (one of the most common names in France after World War II) and for the valiant warriors of sexual

liberation. As one of them once told me (and she herself was a genuine and affectionate dyke but also a swinger): “
Si être copains, c’est partager le pain, alors nous sommes de vraies copines
” [If being
copains
(male friends) means sharing bread (
le pain
), then we’re truly
copines
(female friends) because we share dicks (
pines
)].

There was an exception at an improvised orgy where half the participants had brought along the other half, who were novices. I found myself alone for a long time on the thick black carpet of the bathroom with a blonde who had curves everywhere: her cheeks, her neck, her breasts and buttocks, of course, even down to her ankles. I was struck by her majestic name; she was called Léone. Léone had taken some persuading be- fore going with the flow. Now she was com- pletely naked, like a golden Buddha in his temple. I was a little lower, because she was sitting on the step that ran all the way

around the raised bath. How had we ended up in that confined space when it was a huge, comfortable apartment? Perhaps because she had been indecisive and I, once again, had felt compelled to take on the role of at- tentive facilitator? My whole face burrowed noisily in her fleshy vulva. I had never sucked on such a swollen extremity, and it really did fill my mouth, as those from the South of France say, like a giant apricot. I latched on to her labia like a leech, then I dropped the fruit and stretched my tongue so far I almost tore its root, the better to dive into the extraordinary softness of her open- ing, a softness that makes the smoothness of breasts and shoulders pale into insignific- ance. She was not the wriggling sort, she let out short, little moans, as soft as everything else about her. They resonated with sincerity and gave me a tremendous feeling of exulta- tion. I put myself to work suckling the small raised knot of flesh; it was so good to let

myself go as I listened to her raptures! While we all got dressed again, amid the fun and confused atmosphere of a locker room, Paul, who spoke with less fact than the others, turned to her and asked: “So? That was good, wasn’t it? Don’t we think she was right to let herself be talked into it?” She lowered her eyes and put a lot of emphasis on the first word as she replied that one person had cer- tainly made an impression on her. I thought: “Please, God, let it be me!”

We had found a ready-made philosophy by reading Bataille, but when Henri and I look back on that fevered period, I think he is right to say that our sexual obsession and our missionary zeal derived more from a youthful playfulness. The bed in that tiny apartment was positioned in an alcove, which reinforced the feeling of snuggling in a

hiding place, and when four or five of us thrashed about on it together, it meant only that supper had turned into a round of “I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours”: the diners had tickled one another’s parts under the table with their bare feet, or perhaps someone had proudly raised up a finger covered in a clear and slightly redolent sauce. Henri would make a game of it by bringing along a girl he had met just half an hour earlier in some arcade, and it was an adventure for our whole team to wander the streets at four o’clock in the morning, look- ing for some poor girl’s apartment, bent on disturbing her tidy bed. Half the time the ploy failed. The girl would let herself be fingered, would let someone take off her bra or her tights, but would end the evening clamped to a chair explaining that she really couldn’t, but yes, she was very happy to watch, that was fine with her, yes, she would wait till someone could drive her home. I’ve

sometimes caught glimpses of people, men or women in fact, taking refuge on an incon- gruous upright chair or balancing their but- tocks on the edge of the sofa, unable to take their eyes off the pale limbs flailing in the air a few inches away, a few inches which put them in a whole different time zone. They don’t take part, so you cannot really say that they are fascinated. Lagging behind—or shooting on ahead—they are the patient, stu- dious viewers of an edifying documentary.

Our zeal was, of course, only skin-deep, because the challenges we set were intended far more for ourselves than for those we tried to initiate. Henri and I once failed on the boulevard Beaumarchais in one of the big, bourgeois apartments whose intellectual owners lived with bare parquet floors and in- adequate overhead lighting. The friend who welcomes us has a thick beard, permanently parted by his bland laugh; he is married to a modern woman. All the same, she balks and

goes to bed. We play at transgression, and I seem to remember quivering and roaring with laughter between their streams of urine. No, no, Henri corrects me, he was the only one to piss on me. In any event, what is cer- tain is that we took the precaution of getting into the huge cast-iron bath. Then the three of us did go and fuck a bit on the balcony.

One of my girlfriends puts me up for some months. I sleep in a tiny, unfurnished attic room, sometimes with the cats for company. When her boyfriend comes to see her, she leaves the door to her bedroom wide open and neither of them makes any attempt to contain their exclamations. It never occurs to me to join them. I don’t get involved in other people’s business, and anyway, snuggled in my narrow bed, I think of myself almost as their little girl. But with that stubbornness peculiar to children and animals, I make quite sure that they get involved with my business. Given that, to some extent, I share