We are all subject to social laws and under obligation to family rites: we conform to what is now called “business culture,” and even in the intimacy of our sexual lives we instigate habits and institute a code applicable to only two people—a “couple culture,” you could say. So al fresco sex forms part of Jacques’s and my couple culture. In the same way that I have put colored thumbtacks into a globe to show the places I have visited, I could mark off on detailed maps the ruins and the rocks, the bends in the road and the clumps of trees where someone looking through binoculars could have stumbled across the quiverings of a minute two-headed silhouette. Early one morning, against the sour-milk-colored rocks of a steep mountainside, me with my body braced in its usual position, clutching the narrow trunk of a young tree with sparse foliage, with my shorts scarcely lifted. We are joined by a second man: are we in the area on vacation? Have we lost our way? Once he has moved away, we speculate that—to avoid possible burglaries—he must work guarding the hermitage, which was in fact the reason for our climb. Another chapel, this one in ruins but still with high walls standing proud on a flat plateau with a crisscross of little walls around it, those of the long crumbled sacristy where it’s good to walk and imagine its inhabitants, as in an ancient ruin. The short nave is in full sunlight, the choir in the shade, the altar of dark gray stone is intact. I lie down on it, too high off the ground to be taken there. While Jacques leans over and amuses me with a few playful licks, I keep my eyes wide open, gazing at the sky defined by the ridge of black walls; I could be at the bottom of a well. Once again we end up upright, in a tiny space just big enough for the two of us, and whose use we can’t really guess. A corridor? A recess for a long-lost statue?
Other ruins, other razed spaces, this time a huge fortified farm and its outbuildings, and the plateau that—from its steep banks—it still seems to defend. I should point out another particular of our couple culture: between a third and a half of our sexual embraces are an interlude in a photo shoot. On this occasion the latter was long and complicated. I’ve brought a variety of clothes, some very delicate, and I’m afraid of catching them in the bushes and the piles of stone. Same problem when I have to change clothes between poses, especially with a silk chiffon dress that corkscrews in the wind. Jacques is going for light contrast and gets me to explore every nook and cranny of the ruins. I walk carefully over the stony ground because my shoes have sharp, high heels and pointed toes that hurt. I also have to avoid the goat droppings because, before we turned this ruin into a photographic studio, a herd of goats used it for grazing. More than once, I climb the walls barefoot, then Jacques hands me the shoes and I slip them on for a few poses. For each pose, I have to find a compromise between the precise position Jacques asks for (down to the last centimeter of how much pubic hair is showing and how wide the thighs are spread, or how tightly the see-through top fits) and the pain in my feet as I try to balance or position my buttocks next to clumps of brambles. While my gaze wanders over the 360 degrees of the panorama, my body is reduced to an extremely narrow margin for movement. Once in position, I obey my instructor reluctantly. Then, before the film runs out, I in turn ask him to take a last few pictures of me walking naked along the wide path that slopes gently back down to the car, left in the middle of the plateau. After so many constraints, I need to move forward in the hot air like an animal of the savannah.
The open door of the four-by-four will be an unnecessary screen; we’ve already seen that there isn’t a car anywhere near the sole inhabited house on the plateau, and its inhabitants must, therefore, be out. Is it because of the two hours spent within reach of thousands of nature’s lowly little assaults, or perhaps because of my hovering suspicion that Jacques has recently grabbed other asses than mine behind this metal screen? My vagina isn’t ready. In these instances, I separate the lips and moisten them hastily with saliva surreptitiously tranferred to my finger tips. There will still be a bit of resistance, but the glans will scarcely have forced its entry before the juices have started flowing and soon the whole cock will have assumed its place in a suitably moist cunt. I think that first I put one leg forward and pushed it against the running board, perhaps to open the vulva a little farther, but it must be said that, if I have to turn my back on my partner, I like nothing better than jerking my ass back against him. To do this I have to keep my waist limber and it’s better to have my feet together. The more I stick my ass out toward him, the more I can fantasize that my ass has taken on the autonomy normally attributed to the head—the seat of thought which lives on independent from the rest of the body—thus, my ass is the counterpart of my head. While I sought out Jacques’s organ as if I were going to yoke it up to myself, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, with my body connected to his and to the whole background. When I see myself in the act, my features seem devoid of expression. There must be moments when, like everybody else, I make faces, but when I chance across a reflection in a window or mirror, I don’t look the way I think I do; at that moment my gaze is vague, looking inward as onto a open space, but trusting, as if trying to find some point of reference.
The practice of open-air fucking became anchored in the way Jacques and I organized our lives right from the beginning of our relationship. A visit to his grandmother in a nondescript little village in the Beauce region included a compulsory stop by the side of the road. He would park the 2CV on the shoulder, we would nip through a hedge and find a field rising gently up to the horizon, then we would disappear into the grass. We had to wriggle about laughably to get out of our tight-fitting jeans. I would put my jacket down on the grass under my head for fear of insects, and Jacques’s jacket protected the small of my back. Having not grown up in the countryside, I took naive pleasure in these hasty couplings of just two half-bodies; suddenly my legs and buttocks were not at the same temperature as the upper half of my body, which was still clothed, and Jacques somehow had to manage with his underpants and the waist of his trousers hampering his thighs. There is a childish pleasure in those naked parts getting off, as if the swaddled other half were an alibi.
The Mediterranean landscape in which we took to living for several weeks a year is very rugged, but its low vines and scrubland offer hardly any hiding places and even fewer natural beds. There isn’t any grass, and as there are no trees, I often had to hang on to the windowless door of an abandoned car or to the uprights at the opening to a pigsty, my rear end jutting out all the farther as my eyes and nose struggled with its stench.
We often used a track that led up to a field of young vines planted in crushed white rocks, a track that has almost disappeared since we stopped using it. We identified some favorite spots along that track as time went by. Halfway up, right before it steepened, it widened out onto a sandy platform, and all along one side the sand gave way to an outcrop of curved rocks; you could have fun imagining that they were the backs of hippopotamuses breaking through the muddy waters of a river that also bore along dented old gas cans and broken pallets. I could lie down on the smooth surface of the rocks with Jacques leaning on his arms like an awning above me, giving me a few quick thrusts of his cock. But it wasn’t easy for him to get deep enough in this position. The solution was for me to turn around and get on all fours, like the Roman she-wolf on her pedestal, receiving the very special offering of her devoted priest.
Farther up there was a hairpin bend in the track. On one side, there was a ditch that acted as a dumping ground, and every time we passed, we noticed that its contents had mysteriously changed: the carcasses of agricultural machinery, the Cyclops heads of washing machines, etc. On the other side, a pale colored rock ran along it for several meters, shear like a wall. Despite the intensity of reflected light, it was one of our elected stopping points, because there, too, the smooth rocks comfortably accommodated the palms of my hands, but also—and why not?—because we unconsciously liked to feel that our bodies came from the jumbleness around us. As there were no leaves to wipe ourselves with, and we didn’t al
ways think to come equipped with handkerchiefs, I would stay turned toward my rock for a few moments, with my legs apart, watching the come falling from my pussy onto the ground in a lazy drool the same whitish color as the rocks. Farther up again, on top of the plateau, the track ended in a huddle of trees where the remains of picnics sometimes mingled with the dry bushes, which might have offered a bit more shade. But we stopped there only a few times. You had to get there in the first place, and when we did, the business had often already been seen to. Jacques would not have been able to resist the undulating buttocks under the skirt or shorts in front of him, their movement as regular as breathing, marking out the rhythm as I walked; while I would be making the ascent absorbed in the thought of his eyes on me, giving me plenty of time to ready my cunt, which I can compare only to a baby bird’s tirelessly gaping beak.
For some indiscernible reason, then, the couple culture I am describing played out its adventures mainly in bucolic settings. It’s true that fucking in sunken tracks is less risky than on the porches of buildings, though I’d hasten to point out that, with other lovers, both Jacques and I did use urban locations. But Métro station corridors (where an employee uses the jostle of the crowd to brush imperceptibly over my buttocks—a tacit invitation to join him in a storeroom cluttered with pails and brooms) and little cafés in the suburbs (where joyless men take me in turns on a bench seat in the back room) are places I have visited with Jacques only in my imagination. And even then, was I taking him there? I have stopped doing it now, but there was a time when I liked to redecorate the room with my elaborate fantasies, gradually detailing the settings and the positions I adopted, in an almost questioning tone of voice because I would wait for Jacques’s acquiescence, which he would grant in a neutral voice and with the indifferent spontaneity of someone who’s thinking about something else (but he was probably only feigning indifference), while his tool worked sweetly and steadily. I draw two conclusions from these points.
The first is that, within a couple, each person brings his or her own fantasies and desires, and these combine into shared habits that then modulate and adjust to one another and, depending on the extent to which each partner wants them to be realized, cross the barrier between dream and reality without losing any of their intensity. My obsession with numbers found its realization when I practiced group sex with Claude and with Éric, because that was how their desires fused with mine. On the other hand, I did not feel any frustration at never taking part in group sex with Jacques (even when he told me he had done so without me); it must simply be that that was not the way in which our shared sexuality expressed itself. It was enough for me to tell him about my adventures and to intuit that they found some resonance in his fantasies, just as it was enough for him that I was a willing accomplice for his photographic reportages in those variously polluted landscapes, and an exhibitionist ready to expose herself for his lens—even if my vanity would have preferred more flattering backgrounds and more stylized portraits…
The second conclusion is that natural spaces do not feed the same fantasies as urban spaces. Because the latter is by definition a social space, it is a territory in which we express a desire to transgress codes with our exhibitionist/voyeuristic impulses; it presupposes the presence of others, of fortuitous looks to penetrate the aura of intimacy that emanates from a partially naked body or from two bodies soldered together. Those same bodies out under the clouds, with only God as their witness, are looking for the opposite sensation: not to make others come into the pocket of air in which their rapid breathing mingles but, thanks to their Edenic isolation, to let their pleasure spread as far as the eye can see. The illusion there is that their ecstasy is on the same scale as this expanse, that the body housing them is dilating to infinity. Perhaps the tipping into unconsciousness known as the petite mort is felt more keenly when the bodies are in contact with the earth, teeming with invisible life and in which everything is buried. Granted, most of my masturbatory fantasies take place in urban settings (apart from those already mentioned, the following is often called up: a man in a packed Métro train presses his fly up to my buttocks and manages to hitch up my clothes enough to slip his dick in; his maneuver is not lost on other men, who flow through the crowds to take his place; the carriage is divided between those taking pleasure and those taking offense, the factions start arguing—try and find a more Parisian fantasy!), and I managed to make do with the hard shoulders of main roads and with the parking lots of the capital. Even so, when all is said and done, I think I prefer vast open spaces.
Now at night, cities give the illusion of vastness. When Claude and I started living together, we would get home late to our little apartment in the suburbs, I would walk ahead of him and, without any warning, lift my skirt up over the naked globes of my ass, not as an invitation for him to fuck me there (I don’t think we ever did), nor to shock a potential passerby, but to breathe in the road around me, to let its refreshing breeze reach my quivering crack. In fact, I wonder whether the men from the clumps of trees and the parking lots, by their sheer numbers and their shadowy nature, aren’t made of the same substance as space, whether I didn’t rub myself up against shreds of the same fabric as air though with a slightly closer weave. More specifically: I have an unrivaled ability to find my way on an unfamiliar road. Perhaps this aptitude for passing from one man to another within a group, or for navigating—as I did at certain times in my life—among a number of different relationships, perhaps it belongs to the same family of psychological predispositions as a sense of direction.
Different Towns, Different Men
Throughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need for escape, for open air. That need even instigated them. It was when I ran away from home for the first time that I lost my virginity. I had argued with my parents yet again. Claude, whom I did not yet know, had rung at the door of our apartment to let me know that a mutual friend I was supposed to meet had been delayed. He asked me to go out with him. In the end, his Renault 4 took us all the way to Dieppe. We set up the tent on the edge of the beach.
Sometime later I fell in love with a student from Berlin. We did not make love together (he was a cautious young man, and I had not made any demands), but his long, sturdy frame lying next to mine and his big white hands sent me into ecstasies. I wanted to go and live in West Berlin. The wide Kudamm leading all the way up to the gleaming blue cathedral, and the parks of that great city—even though it was divided at the time—fueled my dreams. And then the student wrote and told me that it would not be sensible for us to be committed when we were so young. Another excuse to run away, again with Claude (whom I still saw) and his Renault 4. Destination Berlin, to talk with the boy who wanted to break up with me. An attempt to cross the border between East and West Germany which failed because I did not have the necessary papers. So the student came as far as the frontier to talk things out, and my first romance came to an end in a cafeteria on a huge parking lot in the middle of a forest, amid lines of people and lines of cars waiting to pass the wooden sentry boxes.
Unfortunately, I retained this propensity to flee without warning for many years, which was fair to neither the man I was living with at the time nor those who had brought me to my destination, nor those I had gone to meet and would abandon to return home. This restlessness was partly due to the febrile interest that we had (Claude, Henri, a few others and myself ) in the New World of sex, an attitude that would sometimes make one of us strike out on our own. The unspoken law expected this pioneering scout to come back and tell of his or her adventures. Which, of course, was not always the case, hence the mixture of oil and water that constituted, on the one hand, our disparate desires and, on the other, our libertarian minds. Going away for two days with a man I barely knew, or, as I did for several years, carrying on a relationship with a colleague who lived in Milan, was just as worthwhile for the journey and the change of scenery as it was for the promise of being bedded, touched an
d fucked in a fresh and unfamiliar way. If it had been possible, I would have liked to wake up each morning to the shadows of an as yet unexplored ceiling and to climb out of the sheets and stay for a few moments in the no-man’s-land of an apartment where I had forgotten overnight which corridor led to the bathroom. At times like that, it is the other body that you leave behind, a body you may have known only a few hours but which, during those hours, nourished you with its solid presence and its smell; it is that body which provides your only source of the ineffable well-being of the familiar. How many times have I thought, as I fantasized languidly about the life of high-class whores, that that was one of the advantages of their job. As for the journey itself, the time lapse we inhabit when we are no longer in one place but not yet in the next, it can be a source of pleasure measured on the same scale as the erotic. In a taxi, when all the bustle that precedes departure suddenly falls away, or descending into that semiconscious state while waiting at an airport, I can sometimes feel the unmistakable sensation of a giant hand inside my body, squeezing my entrails and drawing from them a sensuous delight that pervades my every extremity, exactly like when a man looks at me in a way that implies he has me in his sights.
In spite of this, I have never used the frequent long-distance journeys necessitated by my work to collect lovers. I fucked infinitely less when my timetable was more flexible than it is in Paris, and when I could have made the most of those casual relationships with no tomorrows. However hard I try to remember, I can think of only two men whom I have met on a journey and with whom I had some form of sexual contact during the journey itself. And when I say contact, there was only one instance each time, between breakfast and the first meeting of the morning with one, and during what was left of the night with the other.
Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 10