The cabs of semis are much better suited, mainly because they are equipped with a bunk. I can never catch sight of the girls waiting by the side of the road, their bodies covered in a patchwork of skimpy accessories, a demi bra glinting above the low-cut top—which doesn’t quite meet the miniskirt, which allows a glimpse of the garter belt below—I can never see them without thinking of the little jump they have to make on one foot to reach for the step in order to get up to the customer. I am familiar with the impulsion the body needs and the brief subsequent ascension that carries that body up to two tough men who greet it delicately, accustomed as they are to limit their movements in the cramped cab. My good fortune was not having to name a price or to wait out in the cold. I didn’t spend much on my outfit, either. I would wear just a coat or a raincoat that fell open like a dressing gown on the way up. Once when I was snuggled into one of these bunks—which just happened to be in an International Art Transport (one of the main transporters of art) truck parked near the Porte d’Auteuil—I received the most careful handling. On that occasion only one of the two truck drivers took care of me, at great length, to the extent that—to my surprise—he kissed me on the mouth and went on fondling me after he had come. The other one watched, first by adjusting the rearview mirror, and then he turned sideways but did not touch me. It got late, we chatted; it was a very convivial situation.
Snuggling down into a narrow bunk is an experience closely identified with childhood. Jacques and I shared one in a second-class sleeping car on the way home from Venice during a railworkers’ strike, and we were trapped in a compartment with a big family. We had to come to some sort of arrangement. We had elected to have one bunk for the two of us, one of the very top ones, which are very hot and can’t be reached without undertaking the most perilous and ridiculous contortions. The parents had taken the two bottom bunks, and the children had distributed themselves as best they could among the three remaining. We then settled into one of those lazy positions in which the human race will continue to derive certain delight for a long time yet (even if that means forgetting the entire repertoire of the Kama Sutra): that is, our bodies lay closely curled in a concave arc, and I warmed my buttocks against Jacques’s lap. When all the night-lights had been switched off, we took our pants down and had a deep, slow fuck. Without a word or so much as a moan disguised as a comfortable sigh, with no movement other than the imperceptible contraction of Jacques’s buttocks, which scarcely rolled his hips. Anyone who has been constrained to seize their pleasure in public involuntarily (in a boarding school dormitory, a small family home) knows what I am talking about: if you achieve your pleasure, then it will have absorbed the utter silence and the near paralysis of the bodies that were its preconditions, and it will have been the more intense for them. Understandably, people then try to re-create this lack of privacy in more or less artificial ways, and some try to achieve it by choosing the most unexpected and public nooks and crannies.
Listening closely to the breathing around us, which suspended its various regular rhythms when the train jolted sharply, I actually felt afraid on that bunk, me who would have been perfectly indifferent to, for example, hitch up my skirt on the platform if Jacques had had the urge to ask me—I was afraid that the children would guess what we were doing. It was as if I were sharing a bed with my mother, but I had changed roles; yes, I was still the one succumbing to clandestine activities, but I had become the adult who might feel disgust at the child’s reaction. In fact, I had not forgotten the sense of decency that I’d had then, one that was all the more intransigent at that young age than one might think or appreciate precisely because it reflects the superiority of childhood to adulthood. Put differently, I may not have minded what the adults thought of me, but I did mind what the children thought. I didn’t want to put before them something—not that they should not yet know—that was too serious and precious to reveal carelessly. Because I had relationships with men who had children, I twice very nearly gave them a far more graphic scene than my mother’s sneaked kiss with her friend. The first time I spent the night with Robert in his home—in fact, the only time—I watched him wedge the door handle with the back of a chair. “Funny, those things you see in old action films really work!” I thought. In the morning, his daughter rattled the door, demanding to see her father before leaving for school. He yelled at her to go and get ready, and said he would come and see her. Which he did. On vacation once, during siesta time, Éric’s son called his father from the other side of the cotton curtain that partitioned off the bedroom. Éric detached himself from my breast by leaning on an elbow, like the lid of box pivoting on a hinge. “Go away,” he bellowed angrily. “Go on, get out of here and let me sleep!” Both times I felt for the rebuffed child.
When you pass a very large vehicle on a motorbike, however little wind there is, there is always a precise moment when the air snatches you. This moment comes when you have reached the front of the truck, just before you start to pull back into the lane. There is an in-draft, and your torso undergoes a double twisting motion. One shoulder is thrust forward, the other backward, and this movement is reversed just as sharply. You are like a sail snapping in the wind. Just seconds earlier you were cleaving through the space as it opened up before you. Suddenly, that space closes in and shakes you up, assaults you. I like this feeling and can identify it in various different situations: feeling that you are right at the heart of a space that opens and closes, stretches and contracts. And in that space you are like a rubber band that has been stretched and then released, and comes back to smack the hand holding it; you are alternately the subject that possesses its environment (even if only by looking at it) and the object possessed.
I felt this, quite unexpectedly, in a sexshop. I liked going there with Éric. While he kept the assistant busy with his requests, which were always extremely precise because he knew exactly what had just come out, especially video, I would wander around the shop. The first picture I saw, whatever it might be (a girl holding her scarlet vulva open with her manicured fingers, her head in the background, slightly raised, her gaze floating above her body with the same lost expression as a patient trying to see her feet at the end of a stretcher; another one sitting back on her heels in the traditional pinup pose holding her massive breasts in her open palms; a young man in a three-piece suit pointing his dick toward an older woman bending over her desk—she is a lawyer or CEO—and even bodybuilders intended for the gay clientele, strapped into G-strings that look minute in comparison to their bodies), any sort of picture, graphic, photographic, cinematic, be it realist or caricature (a model posing in the underwear pages of a mail-order catalog; great droplets of come splattered outside the margins of a cartoon), every image I would say even at first glance made me feel that characteristic nerve tingling deep between my thighs. I leafed through the magazines on display, cautiously turned over the shrink-wrapped ones. Isn’t it wonderful how you can be aroused so freely, in full sight and full knowledge of all the other customers doing the same thing, even though each behaves as if he or she is searching through the display racks at the local newsstand? Isn’t it admirable, the apparent detachment you have in public, contemplating pictures and objects that would certainly make you lose your composure at home? I liked to imagine myself in a mythical world where every shop offered that sort of merchandise, in among other goods, and where, with apparent nonchalance, you were gradually suffused by that warm feeling, absorbed in your perusal of organs reproduced in full color that perfectly depicted their moist surfaces, and you might shamelessly turn and show them to the person next to you. “Excuse me, could I borrow your paper?” “Oh, please do.” Etc. The quiet, unassuming blatancy that reigns in a sex shop spread to every aspect of social life.
Going through into the back room where the peep show is going on is like arriving late at the theater. You are plunged into darkness, in a circular corridor lined with booths. You need coins, not to tip any ushers but to pay to illuminate the two-way mirror that l
ooks out on the central stage where a girl or a couple undergo a series of unbelievably slow contortions. It is so dark in the little kiosk that I have never been able to see a thing around me, not even the walls, which amounts to being in a void. There is, though, a faint bluish light coming from the stage, and a beam of this light settles on the base of the member that I have just taken in my mouth, so that the perceptible space around me is reduced to this section of wrinkled flesh dotted with hairs, which I swallow rhythmically. Perhaps Éric has to go to the register to change a bill for some more coins. Having turned toward the window, I then don’t recognize the hands that start smoothing over my exposed buttocks; I can believe that both the hands and indeed the buttocks are far, far away from me, also on the other side of the screen. Just after we go into the kiosk, we feel each other blindly, our eyes focused on the show, which we are discussing. We agree that the girl has a nice pussy. The guy is a bit too cutesy. Éric would really like to watch the girl and me bring each other off. I ask whether we could meet up with her afterward, etc. Then we are taken up in the acceleration of our own movement; the couple in the blue light becomes less real; they are merely the distant, almost subconscious projection of the images conjured in the minds of those busying themselves in the dark. The shadow bent over my back lets out a hoarse “Ahhh” as it smacks more firmly against my ass.
The fantasy exchange between the show and the real action, when you fuck while watching a peep show, is not as fluid as what happens when you watch a movie on television, occasionally releasing your own grip to follow the action on the screen, and using it as a pretext for changing position. While the flickering pixels blur boundaries so that the space they delineate becomes almost an extension of the space you are in, the window at a peep show is a hiatus that substantiates the separation between two symmetrical parts, one that can be crossed but remains tangible. Two further points: pornographic films have a story line that, however formulaic, holds your attention, whereas the action in a peep show evolves very little; finally, you can watch a film continuously or spend the night in front of the television, but the bottomless kiosk has a limit, which is attained when the timer runs out.
Who doesn’t have, somewhere among their memories, some of those voracious kisses, those exchanges of tongues that suddenly made full use of their complement of muscles, their great length and their monstrous adhesion, exploring each other as well as the relief of their partner’s entire mouth and lips? And didn’t this obscene deployment happen on some doorstep, at the foot of the stairs in an apartment building or on the corner of a porch, just where the light switches are (but, of course, you hadn’t used those)? Adolescents rarely have somewhere they can call their own, so their carnal displays take place in these semipublic spaces such as side doors, stairwells and landings. I have referred to the need—felt most keenly by the urban pubescent population—to establish an intimate sphere within forbidden spaces. The sexual instinct, which civilization has made secret, finds its first spontaneous expression not behind a closed bedroom door but in places we pass through, which belong to everyone and where courtesy reaches its peak of reserve: “Good morning. Good evening. I’m so sorry. After you,” etc. The number of times I have had a breast mauled by clumsy hands in the exact spot where my neighbor usually holds the door for me. Even once I had become an emancipated adult, I still sometimes displayed sufficient masochistic impatience to let myself be manhandled like a heavy bag in a tiled hallway lit by the streetlights filtering through a vent, while I sat on the radiator with my knees under my chin and the cast-iron ridges digging a little farther into my buttock flesh with every slam. As a result, shouldn’t we be asking ourselves whether the taste for transgression that encourages adults to choose this sort of place—and other, even more public and uncomfortable ones—to undertake the sexual act, whether this derives from some so-called primary transgression, and whether their “perversity” should not be put down to a venial immaturity?
Before I came to know the games played on the paths in the Bois de Boulogne or the exploits at the Porte Dauphine, my outings with Henri and with Claude allowed me to continue having these surreptitious petting sessions (pretty heavy, some of them) in the common space of Parisian apartment blocks. At the witching hour, when thieves are abroad, we disappeared into a group of buildings, looking for a friend’s apartment. Even though she was an artist and always liked to appear very relaxed, rebellious even, she was bourgeois—we’re talking the boulevard Exelmans here, quite a chic address—and on top of that, she was the girlfriend of the man who was our boss, Henri’s and mine. Our aim is childish. We want to go and ring the doorbell and beg her most sweetly to forgive us for disturbing her. The ulterior motive is that at least one of the boys will succeed in ramming his persistent prick into the depths of her little cushion of moist flesh, impregnated with the smell of sleep. But we still have to know exactly which building and on which floor the girl was sleeping. Claude, very sure of himself, volunteers to explore one of the buildings floor by floor, probably deliberately leaving Henri and me to linger in another, where our search proves fruitless.
Henri is always tender in his movements; his fingers always seem slightly awkward, as if he uses them more to establish things than to hold them. I am usually more forthright. Standing clamped together, we start by stroking each other’s buttocks. Mine are bare under my skirt. There is not much more of him than there is of me, and I like to take a man’s ass in my hands and to be able to put my arms around him easily. I have been with tall, well-built men, but I have never snubbed the seductions of small men. If a man’s size is comparable to my own, and I feel an equal division of physical strength in our embraces, I experience a very particular kind of pleasure, which probably includes the desire to feminize the man in question, or even a narcissistic illusion: by holding him I can experience the same pleasure he has in holding me.
I hope, later in the book, to do justice to the intoxication that overruns me when my mouth is filled by a stiff penis: one of the roots of this feeling is an identification of my pleasure with the man’s; the more he arches his body, the more emphatically he moans, gasps or whispers encouragement, the more I feel he is expressing the frantic calling coming from deep within my own genitals. For now I must concentrate on describing the scene with Henri, given that I sucked him with what he called astonishing ardor. How did I go about it? Following the instinctual pressure of his pubis against mine, did I let myself fall at his feet, guided down the length of his body by the persistent embrace of my arms, and then, kneeling before him, did I, as I usually did, rub my face, cheeks, forehead and chin over a shape that by its form and hardness always remind me of a darning egg? The light went out. Henri joined me on the threadbare mat and we curled up together at the bottom of the stairs, facing the elevator shaft. I extricated the object that was imprisoned behind the straining fly and helped it assume the correct shape with slow, regular hand movements. Then, my head bent between his legs, I continued the motion with a similar to-ing and fro-ing of my mouth. The light came back on, suspending my progress. I felt the hammering of fear beating in my chest and ringing in my ears, its echoes reverberating as far as the erogeneous zones in my mound…But no sound followed the light. While we waited, I automatically kept my hand over his organ, which was now too swollen to be put back where it belonged. Then, reassured, we settled more comfortably on the stairs. Some of the rules of fucking, especially if it is performed in a place that does not lend itself to excesses, are like the rules of courtesy: the partners take turns devoting themselves to the other’s body, temporarily keeping their own body out of reach, just like two people exchanging thanks or desultory compliments in a one-upmanship of unselfish attention. Henri’s fingers triggered a spasm in my cunt like the connecting rod of a train, while I sat against the front of the stairs, taking only the surrounding light into my mouth and, although I still held his member in my hand, no longer rubbing it up and down. Then I considered myself sated for now, and it was my turn to
close my thighs and bury my head back between his. Our movements took up no more space than our tightly joined bodies. The light went back on two or three times. In the intervals between, it was as if the darkness were hiding us in a crevice in the walls of the well formed by the elevator shaft. The blaze of light whipped my forehead to make me suck more quickly. I now don’t remember whether Henri ejaculated by “day” or by “night.”
The usual little patting movements with the flat of the hand to straighten out clothes and tidy hair. When Claude and I spent an evening with friends and I unexpectedly had a fuck—as I had that night—out of his sight, I couldn’t meet up with him again without feeling slightly awkward. I think it was probably the same for whoever was with me. That night Claude was waiting for Henri and me at the foot of the stairs; he pretended he had just come from another building. Henri thought he was behaving strangely. We gave up on the idea of finding the girl’s door.
Sexual Life Catherine M. Page 12