The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (25 page)

I masturbate with the punctuality of a civil servant. When I wake, or during the day, with my back up against a wall, my legs spread and slightly bent; never at night. I take just as much pleasure in doing it when I am penetrated in real life. In those instances, it takes me longer to come; I find it more dif- ficult to concentrate on my fantasy narrative because the organ lodged inside me does not

exclude the one I imagine. The real one stands ready, motionless and patient until I give the signal, a “yeah” of total acquiescence or a toss of my head, and the spasms that I have provoked meet the charges of the penis’s at their most powerful. Can I really be bringing together two such very different forms of pleasure? The one felt so distinctly that I can almost feel my internal space ex- panding in the same way that I would watch the tide rising over the beach; and the other, far more diffuse pleasure, as if my body were reverberating like a muted gong, like when we suffer extreme pain and the mind dis- tances itself from it.

I have never identified the contractions of my vagina when making love. I have re- mained completely ignorant on that subject. Is it because I don’t recognize that sort of or- gasm in those circumstances? Is it because, filled by my partner’s organ, my own does not have the same elasticity? Still, happily, I

did eventually realize that it was one mani- festation of the female orgasm. I was over thirty when a male friend and I had one of those intimate conversations that are very rare in life. He was worrying about how one could tell when a woman had come. “Is it when she has spasms? Is that the only proof?” he asked me. Hesitantly, but not wanting to look a fool, I said yes. I kept to myself the fact that I was thinking: “So that’s what it is.” Until then, when my body had emitted these sorts of signals, I had not iden- tified them as such, even if it was while I was masturbating with the precision I have de- scribed. Having not knowingly striven for the thing they signified, I could not recognize them. Some caresses made me feel good, some positions were better than others, and that was it. I now understand that this lacon- ic conversation (with a man—and this is not a coincidence—with whom I hadn’t had a sexual relationship) must have sown in me

the seed of an anxiety that took many long years to develop into the state of dissatisfac- tion I discussed at the end of the first chapter.

As I have also explained, for me masturba- tion was initially, and for a long time, not a question of addressing the clitoris directly, but of sliding the lips of the vulva against each other. It wasn’t that I didn’t know it ex- isted, it was that I hadn’t needed to worry about it in order to experience my pleasure. I belong to the generation of women targeted by feminist books with the aim of guiding them in the exploration of their own bodies. I have squatted on a mirror and looked at my genitals, but that only confused me. Perhaps I found it difficult to follow a very scientific description. Perhaps I was slightly preju- diced against the feminist approach, which I thought was intended for women who were inhibited or were experiencing difficulties in their sexual relationships; these didn’t

include me because, for me, fucking was easy. Maybe I didn’t want to call this “easi- ness” into question: yes, I fucked for the pleasure of it, but didn’t I also fuck so that fucking wasn’t a problem? Perhaps on that occasion I closed my thighs the way you would close a medical dictionary: for fear of finding in yourself the illnesses they de- scribe, which would deny you some very en- joyable habits…

I was absolutely right, because when I opened the dictionary of received wisdom much later, my worries started to well up. At that stage I had a relationship with one man, and then a second, and I got it into my head that I should feel the same spasms when I was making love to them as I did when I was masturbating. Was I sufficiently familiar with my own body to achieve this? And, as if my sexual life were happening in reverse, as if I had to ask myself the naïve questions after acquiring and then forgetting all my

experience, I was full of doubt about my clit- oral antenna. Did it respond when I aroused myself with a manic finger? For a while I thought I didn’t have one, or that it had at- rophied. A man who had the best intentions but nevertheless was not very adept, and whose finger kept missing the mark, didn’t help. Eventually I got it: the clitoris was not an obvious landmark like a nail on a wall, a steeple in a landscape or a nose on a face; it was a sort of muddled knot with no true shape, a minute chaos where two little tongues of flesh meet like when a wave hits the backwash of a second.

Pleasure taken alone can be told, pleasure taken with another is elusive. Unlike when I bring about my own orgasm, when I am with someone else, I never say: “This is it.” No de- fining moment, no fireworks. Rather a slow settling into a mellow state of pure sensation. The opposite of a local anesthetic that sup- presses sensitivity but allows you to remain

conscious: I am cut to the quick and my en- tire body becomes the rim of this laceration, while my mind is reduced to a sleepy stupor. I can move only on autopilot, but still able to utter a final social grace: “Does it matter if I don’t move anymore?” Is that fulfillment? It is more like the state we reach shortly before passing out, when we feel as if the body is emptying itself? Invaded, yes, but by empti- ness. I feel cold, like when the blood ebbs away. It flows downward. A valve has opened, and through it I am losing everything that made my body a compact mass. And I can hear the noise of this expul- sion. Every time the member renews its ad- vance within the soft pocket that I have be- come, the displaced air emits a clear sound. It is a while now since I gave up screaming, since I woke the neighbors’ baby and they complained by banging on the wall. The friend I was with was annoyed and he called me a few days later to inform me that “I’ve

spoken to a doctor friend about it; screaming like that is a sign of hysteria.” I got over the habit without even noticing. Since then, oth- er women’s screams have often reminded of those cries—more deliberate than spontan- eous—made by horseback riders to encour- age their mounts as they hurtle past you on the track. All I give out now are farts. The first one catches me by surprise as I lie dazed with fulfillment, as if dreaming. Others fol- low. I am amazed at my largesse.

Would the doctor friend have qualified or corrected his diagnosis had he known that, for a while, when my partners abandoned me on the bed, the table or the floor after mak- ing love, they left a body that was as stiff as a corpse? Luckily, it wasn’t like that every time, but as far as I can remember, when the pleasure had been intense, all of my muscles would lock up. I was never frightened. It didn’t last long. The same symptoms oc- curred once when I had an abortion, and the

gynecologist said that I was not getting enough calcium. It wasn’t even painful. It just occurred, like proof that something in- comprehensible had happened in my body, which no longer belonged to me. The para- lysis prolonged my lethargy. I obviously wondered whether, in addition to the salt de- ficiency, there wasn’t some subconscious motivation. Was I holding back my body be- fore or after orgasm? To avoid it or to pro- long it? The symptom disappeared, and I for- got to answer the question. Then the oppos- ite sort of behavior occurred. Instead of tens- ing as I teetered on the edge of the abyss, I would break down in tears. I would let go of all my tension with noisy, uninhibited sobs. I cried in a way that adults hardly ever cry, the heart filled with sorrow. The tension had to be particularly high, exceptional, even; per- haps more so than other women, I have a long way to go to reach ecstasy, and my tears are a little like those of an exhausted athlete

awarded her first medal. A few of my part- ners were terrified, afraid they had hurt me. But they were tears of hopeless joy. I had jet- tisoned everything, but everything was only this: the body I had offered was just a breath of air, and the one I held and kissed was already light-years away. So utterly desolate, how could I not express my distress?

Even the most violent onslaughts don’t get the better of me. You have to absorb the shocks, and when I end up with the small of my back crushed down onto the mattress, I feel too weighty for any form of ascension. When I am well prepared, I prefer certain tiny adjustments that conversely imply I weigh nothing. A brief gesture from one par- ticular man struck me as quite divine; he was much taller than I, and he would gently drum his fingers in the small of my back. His attentiveness was so well honed as to be mechanical: like a housewife doing her dust- ing. Three or four sharp taps and I rose into

the air like a sheet of paper in a draft. It made my cunt take in another few milli- meters of his cock. It was enough.

I am of average height and I have a flexible body, you can catch hold of me and turn me every which way. What surprises me the most when I see myself on video is this mal- leability. I usually feel so ill at ease, so awk- ward (I have hardly danced since my adoles- cence, and I couldn’t swim more than three strokes in the sea), that I don’t recognize this inoffensive reptile stretching, retracting and reacting swiftly and completely to every de- mand. Lying on my side in an odalisque’s pose, with my legs slightly bent to bring the curve of my buttocks into the foreground, my gaze turned in the same direction that this curve is offered, my hand open on my mouth as I wait to see what will happen. Then, still

on my side but curled more tightly to offer a better grip, my waist twisted a quarter turn to the back, making my upper body stand out, and my neck turned so that I can at a glance check that the slit is visible. In that position, I can do little. The animal pretends to be an inanimate object. The man bends my legs a bit farther so that he can wedge one of his in the triangle they form; he looks as if he is gathering a parcel to make it easier to pick up. He keeps them bent with a firm hand and shakes the object in front of him violently so that it springs back against his belly. I like this state of inertia, even though when my pussy is penetrated from the side like this, it is not very receptive. It is the same when the man comes to lie down on his side, forming the bar of a T for which I, hav- ing turned back onto my back, form the downstroke, with one of my legs lying over his waist and the other over his thighs. Again I take on an animal identity, somewhere

between a frog and those upside-down in- sects that beat the air with their short legs. As I have said, I do, however, prefer to be taken from the front. I feel each ram of the dick more clearly and can regain some un- derstanding of what is going on. By lifting my head and, if need be, holding up my ankles or my calves, I can watch the action, framed between my widely splayed legs. I can take the initiative: arching my back, for example, to raise my hips, and moving them as much as possible. The relationship between the elements is reversed: it is no longer a stake driving into the earth, but the earth quaking to swallow it up. Then I lie flat again. Pulled onto my back like a dead- weight, I become objectified once more. Later, on the video, I will see myself taking on the shape of an inverted vase. The base is my knees, which I have brought up to my face; my thighs are squeezed up to my trunk, forming a cone that gets wider as it reaches

the buttocks and then narrows at the neck after flaring widely on each side—would that be the curve of the iliac bones?—leaving just enough room for the plunging rod.

The pleasure is only fleeting because the body so pummeled, prodded and man- handled is evanescent. The body that has reached orgasm has been as completely ab- sorbed into its own deep, mysterious re- cesses as the body of a pianist is concen- trated in the tips of his fingers. And do the pianist’s fingers put any weight on the keys? At times it doesn’t seem so. Watching a video in which I masturbate with an airy, floating hand, the man next to me says I look as if I am playing the guitar. My fingers are relaxed and they swing back and forth in the dark cloud like clockwork, their movements very precise. When I am not alone and I know that they will soon be replaced by a much bigger instrument, I never press too hard, I make the most of this sweetness. I never

masturbate by inserting my fingers into my cunt, I make do with barely dipping in my middle finger in order to moisten the out- side. If the movements become a bit more pronounced, the fine skin on the inside of the thighs ripples in waves. I see that I am gently touching my partner’s organ in the same way.

As I get down to a blow job, I protect the bottom of his penis and his testicles in the crook of my hands in exactly the same way that I would pick up a lizard or a bird. One closeup shows me with my mouth full and my eyes wide open, looking at the screen; there is a degree of technical control in this gaze. In another, my eyes and mouth are closed, my mouth offered to the glans which explores it; I look as if I am sound asleep when I am actually concentrating hard to stay in focus. Later, wanting to take in the glans, I carefully open and push aside the

labia, well aware of how fragile this object that I am about to wrap myself around is.

Another film shows the whole of my body, behaving as it never would dressed, as I carry out my normal day-to-day tastes. Jacques, the director, makes me go up and down the stairs of our building twenty times in a dress of transparent black linen (there aren’t many people on the stairs at that time of day). As if I were wearing a normal, opaque dress and being followed by an X-ray camera, you can make out from behind the pneumatic anima- tion of the buttocks, and in front, you can see the trembling in my breasts each time one of my feet comes down on a step, while my pu- bic hair disappears into a wide shadow when it rubs up against the cloth. Even though my flesh has density, the silhouette is transient. For the next sequence, Jacques asks me to stand in the little shelter where the concierge works during the day, first with the top of the dress rolled down to my waist and then

without the dress, and he asks me to adopt the various poses of the job. Oh, if only you could leave home and go to work with noth- ing on like that! It wouldn’t be just the weight of the clothes we would be freed from, it would also be the heaviness of the body, which they would take with them. I admit it: the role that Jacques makes me play coin- cides so precisely with my own fantasies that I am unusually disturbed, almost embar- rassed to find myself more naked than my nakedness. We go back into the apartment. There, by contrast, my body stands out very clearly against the white sofa. In the middle the hand comes and goes slowly, weighed down by a huge ring, and it is only the inter- mittent glinting of this ring that comprom- ises the clarity of the image. My thighs and legs are spread wide, inscribing an almost perfect square. That is what I see today, but at the time I knew that it was what the man behind the camera was seeing. When,