The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (12 page)

and then, as the journey there had been so long, the cars soon set off again.

Many of these adventures take place at night, and this is obviously because the pub- lic places that allow you to gather in large groups and that provide amusing stages (for spectacles for which they were never inten- ded) are more accessible and are not usually as closely guarded. That is how one of Éric’s girlfriends came to know the icy but stimu- lating sensation a huge belt buckle left on her buttocks when the couple and a group of bikers had arranged to meet in the Bois. People also think that darkness protects them. But for some people, me included, it simultaneously opens the space around them up to infinity by making it limitless. The tall hedge a few meters away is no longer an obstacle. In fact, you hardly ever find com- plete darkness, and people actually usually prefer the vagueness of half-light. I myself would like total blackout because I could

then experience the pleasure of sinking into a sea of undifferentiated flesh. On the other hand, I know how to make the most of harsh light, too, because the initial blindness and inability to identify its source dissolve and blur the frontiers of the body. In other words, I am not afraid of being glimpsed un- aware, because my body is but a mingling part of the air around it and the continuum of other bodies connected to it. I therefore can’t even conceive that anyone is looking in from the outside.

When Bruno and I were out for a walk after dinner one night, some intuition drove us to an area of grass on the edges of the Bois de Vincennes. It was a halfhearted lawn, bordered by a strip of concrete rather like a sidewalk, with sparse, dry grass. There was a bench there. We sat and started pressing up against each other, not really caring that the place was lit by a streetlight and quite a way from the edge of the forest. It could have

been a scene from a film in the late forties, when the camera pans out and isolates the characters in a halo of light. When Bruno lif- ted up my dress and started energetically stroking my pussy, the trees were out of fo- cus. Even though we weren’t really aware how unwise this might turn out to be, we didn’t talk, and we did try to shrink the space we occupied by making only brief move- ments and taking turns to attend to each oth- er. While his fingers delved between my thighs, I stayed curled up against him with my legs folded up as tightly as the position of my arms would allow. I had kept my top on. When it was my turn to bend over the bulge in his jeans, he sat motionless with his head on the back of the bench, his body stiff as a board. I began a deliberate blow job, avoid- ing any changes of rhythm so as to prevent any sudden reactions. Suddenly, a second, powerful light came on in the distance, aimed toward us. For a moment we froze

expectantly, unable to identify exactly what this light was or where it was coming from. One of Bruno’s characteristic responses was to let himself be sucked off passively, as if against his will, sometimes even interrupting to then start the process up again without any warning by grabbing his prick and aim- ing it at my mouth, as if he almost would have preferred entering by force. That is what he did then, bringing my head down by pushing on the nape of my neck. My lips and hand resumed their regular movement. None of the things that this brutal illumination of our soldered forms implied actually happened. The light shone on the side of my face, and it was so bright that it dazzled me through my closed eyelids. I saw the fellatio through to its peaceful conclusion in the half-silence of our breathing and with the black and gold splashes of light dancing be- fore my eyes. Then we went home, sharing an amused feeling of perplexity we barely

discussed. Had we been in the headlights of a car? A police car or a voyeur? Had a faulty floodlight come back on by itself? I never found an explanation for that perfectly fo- cused light.

If I heard anyone say of me “Fucking for her is like breathing,” I would agree more than willingly because the expression could be taken literally. My first sexual experience, and many others since, took place in circum- stances that could lead one to believe oxygen has an aphrodisiac effect on me. My nudity feels more complete to me out in the open than in a closed room. When the surround- ing temperature, whatever it may be, can be felt by an area of skin it doesn’t normally reach, such as the small of the back, the body no longer presents an obstacle to the air, it is penetrated by it and is, therefore, more open,

more receptive. When the atmosphere that embraces the vastness of the world adheres to the surface of my skin like myriad tiny suction cups, my vulva also feels as if it has been drawn out and dilates deliciously. If a gentle wind blows across its threshold, the feeling is amplified: the labia feel bigger than ever, gorged with the air brushing past them. I will speak later, and in more detail, about erogenous zones, but I can say now that even the gentlest attention to the oft ignored area linking the anal depression to the triangle where the labia meet—that underrated rut between the asshole and the opening of the cunt—is guaranteed to subjugate me; feeling the air against that part of my body is more intoxicating than high altitude. I like opening up my buttocks and my legs to the flow of air.

There must be a fairly general intrinsic link between the idea of moving in space, of traveling, and the idea of fucking, otherwise

the widespread expression “getting off” would not have been invented. Taking into account all these factors, terraces, roadsides, stretches of open country and any space de- signed merely to be passed through, such as concourses and parking lots, all of these are places (or nonplaces as the anthropologist Marc Augé would describe the latter) where it feels good to me to follow their example and be open.

The first time I took off all my clothes in front of several pairs of eyes, I was in the middle of a garden surrounded by a mesh fence. You already know about this. I have also referred to that other garden, which was in a particularly interesting site overlooking the sea. The garden stretched out in front of the house, and even though we were in the Midi, there was very little shade. Right at the front, an area of paving served as a sun ter- race. We fucked there endlessly even in the heat of the day. Anyone flying overhead

would have been amused, as you can be from an airplane, by the juxtaposition of contrast- ing scenes. It is always funny seeing the frantic streams of traffic on the outskirts of the city you have just left, but also, in the same glance, seeing the emptiness of the sur- rounding countryside. It isn’t just that there is an abrupt join between these two images, running along the seam of a highway, but that they represent two conflicting things whose ignorance of each other is almost hos- tile; the speeding cars drawn magnetically to the city center seem to look down on the sol- itary vehicle fleeing to the countryside.

Up above Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat you could have seen an agglomeration of human bodies a little way away from a big house—aban- doned for enigmatic reasons—but very close to a road where the cars heading for the cape and those returning from it passed each oth- er continuously. It would have been difficult to make out the boundary that produced the

mutual indifference between this group of people and these cars. The low gray stone wall at the bottom of the garden threw little shadow, and it would not have been obvious from the air that the road was several feet below the level of the garden. That particular summer I had two acolytes: a lesbian girl- friend and one of those girls met by chance on an outing who, because we liked her, be- came part of the group for the vacation.

We didn’t spend much time in the villa ex- cept to sleep and to prepare meals, and our assiduous sunbathing had turned the terrace end of the garden into one of those meeting places that all households elect even when they are not necessarily the most convenient. New visitors arrived every day. With some, although of course not all, a bit of sun- bathing or an afternoon siesta would see some developments. It was a sort of casual summer activity, like going out for a spin in a boat. Judith, who preferred women,

nevertheless accepted anyone of either sex who expressed desire, with slightly detached good humor. She was a big girl, with the sort of body that is thought beautiful because it is—as they say—all in proportion, fashioned by a pantograph that simply amplified the blueprint of a slim girl. Her breasts were not heavy but shaped like cones with nipples perfectly in the center. The other girl had big, drooping breasts above a waist you could en- circle with two hands. As I lay on my back, shifting my head away from the shoulder ob- scuring my view, I could see her thin frame silhouetted against the sky, and the heavy teardrops of her breasts undulating in the wake of her movements. I thought that her body couldn’t possibly contain what she must have buried into it as she sat astride a particularly well-endowed member of the group. She had an angelic disposition, and we were an amicable trio with a constant ap- petite and no arguing. There was another

girl, who stood head and shoulders above all of us and who coiled herself up when she fucked as if trying to leave more room for the other, smaller body ramming her so zeal- ously, and I remember that once she burst a string of pearls with the tension in her flushed neck. Nothing ever disturbed the un- spooling of those compact segments of the afternoon, their rhythm slowed further by the humming of the traffic absorbed into the buzzing of insects, and even though the clat- tering of those pearls on the ground was barely discernible and this girl in her rapture didn’t moan any louder than anyone else, I was surprised by such a transport of ecstasy. I started to think: “Can a woman really ex- perience such overwhelming pleasure that her body undergoes this sort of external transformation?” I was free to watch the fixed grimaces on some men’s faces or, on others, the distant, absent mask, as their bodies reached maximum tension, when (in,

for example, the classic position) they arch their spine from the lower back right up to the necks, peeling away from their partner’s body with the same robust uplift as the prow of a schooner over the sea. But I watched wo- men much less, and without the mirror they could have held up to me, I had no image of my own body at such moments, even though I am not short on narcissistic tendencies. I knew how to take up the right position and what moves to make; beyond that, everything was diluted into sensations that I didn’t connect with any visible manifesta- tions. If I can put it like this, these feelings didn’t take on a physical form, even less so in the suave pleasures of the open air. There were times when I liked to withdraw, to de- tach myself from the great human centipede writhing on the beach mattresses, and to lie down on the wall just as I was. The light was too bright to stare up at the sky. If I turned my head to one side, the horizon was on a

level with my eyes; on the other side, I had to close them because the light bounced off the pale paving stones.

Now here is a position I really like: arching my back down to facilitate access to my pussy so that it can be decisively nailed from behind while contemplating a wide panor- ama. As Jacques has a predilection for im- promptu fucks in the countryside, I’m not deprived of these opportunities. In the re- gion where we vacation, lots of trails lead to dead ends in the vineyards. We come to one of these dead ends, high up and abandoned, and, avoiding the brambles, pick our way to the dry stone wall. Because I don’t want to take off my sneakers, I stretch my panties wide as I remove them. I am wearing a shirtdress, which I have unbuttoned, and Jacques lifts it up over my back. With out- stretched arms and clutching my rolled-up panties in one hand, I lean precariously against the crumbling stones. In these

circumstances there are not always prelimin- aries; Jacques enters my pussy, which gradu- ally opens up, squeezing the spare flesh un- der my waist firmly in his hands. With my head hanging down, I can look into the darkened room of my body as it bends over itself, my breasts hanging down and swinging, the regular undulations of my stomach and, at the end of the narrow gal- lery, where the light appears again, a little bit of the crumpled surface of his balls and, in- termittently, the base of his member. Watch- ing the very short, very measured coming and going heightens my excitement as much as if not more than the stroking itself.

I curve my back still further and lift my head to offer more resistance to Jacques’s hips as they smack more sharply against my ass. On the slopes of the little hill we’re over- looking, there are no more vines, only scrub. When my cunt has been sensitized to its very depths, I just have to close my eyelids, and

through my eyelashes, I can see the village of Latour-de-France over to the right. I still have the faculty to think to myself: “There’s Latour-de-France” and to appreciate not for the first time its picturesque position on an outcrop of rock in the middle of the valley. The landscape spreads wider before me. I re- cognize the moment when my pleasure won’t go any further (when I’ve come, however in- tensely), and I let Jacques come; he paces his thrusts more slowly until the final three or four of orgasm, while my mind abandons it- self to another fulfilling pleasure: floating freely, it hovers over and follows the con- tours of each hill, clearly distinguishing each from the next, and sinking into the inky ma- gic of the mountains in the background. I so love this constantly changing landscape, re- vealed as a series of planes falling heavily in front of one another, and right there and then I am happy to be flooded and

overflowing with come welling up in the depths of my belly.

Céret is a noble-looking town set in coun- tryside that still has a wild quality. There are very good restaurants there. Having arrived late one afternoon, too early to sit down and eat straightaway, Jacques and I decide to climb up to a sandy track some four or five meters wide. It slopes gently, and the ground is level so I don’t even have to take off the very high black patent-leather heels I’m wearing for the occasion. In the near dusk the contrast between the white path and the high dark vegetation bordering it is more striking. On the valley side, breaks in the fo- liage afford glimpses of the overlapping ex- panses of rustic tiles, which contradict the perception you have of the town when you walk between its elegant eighteenth-century facades, along its avenues roofed by thirty- meter-high plane trees. You would think that the entire plain had been pushed by the sea