Sexual Life Catherine M.

by Catherine Millet

  I have methodically laid out the markers of a sexual territory within a professional location. Some places lend themselves particularly well, such as a photographic darkroom or those windowless rooms in which bundles of newspapers are usually kept. The first is closed off by a blackout curtain. It is so small that you have to stay standing, bathed in cabaret light. The light makes the skin look soft as velvet, and this optical impression exacerbates the touch; you only need to brush your hands lightly over each other. Especially as you feel disembodied: the red light makes pale skin almost transparent and swallows up the darker areas, hair or one’s clothes.

  In a storeroom the most unsettling thing is choosing a place. The area carved up into parallel alleys by the shelving is perfectly uniform, you are no less sheltered from intruders in one alley than another, and you would anyway be seen through the blank spaces between the piles of paper. The net result is that you settle in this place of accumulation as arbitrarily as you would in an empty space, and not before you have turned and looked about you a few times. In this sort of place, fellatio was preferable for me as the act that was easiest to interrupt. I think that it was to do with the gloominess of the place. In a wood, on a deserted track, in any sort of public place, there is always a good reason to choose to hide behind this clump of trees, or in that doorway, either because it offers the greatest comfort or safety, or because it has some playful or aesthetic quality. But here there was none of that. So your stop here was necessarily brief because you could just as easily move a few meters away and migrate from place to place. I would add to that the fact that, if we are happy to be caught in flagrante delicto in a picturesque setting, there would be something almost humiliating about being caught somewhere as ugly as that.

  I like the atmosphere of a deserted office, there is a feeling of calm that represents not an end of activity, merely a suspension of it. The harassment of the workday is over, but it still threatens in the shape of a telephone ringing persistently, the gaping jaw of a computer monitor, a file left open. All the tools, all the materials and all the space at my disposal—and mine alone—give me the illusory but calming impression that I have an unlimited capacity for work. As I have already said, when others vacate space, they also vacate time, and it is as if I have all eternity at my disposal to learn how to use every piece of equipment, and to analyze and resolve every problem; it is as if the very fact that I can go into an office without having to introduce myself or apologize smooths out my fitful, halting life. In these situations, and when I was joined in my solitary pursuit by a colleague who doubled as a sexual partner, I only occasionally made use of the relative comfort of the carpet. Worktables were more commonly my platforms. You might think it was because that position, with the woman sitting on the edge of a table and the man standing between her legs, is easier to modify if a colleague should burst into the room. This is not so. It was actually because the movements flowed naturally. Vincent used to make up the dummies, and he and I would sometimes stand side by side looking through the page layouts, not thinking to sit down because he was a man in a hurry and perhaps because we felt we could evaluate them better with an extra thirty centimeters’ distance. The slightest hesitation in the flow of our work, and I would turn around. One quick hop, and with my buttocks next to the dummies, my pubis was at the right level. And the level matters. Quite often the best moment to slip from a professional discussion to a silent embrace corresponds to a lapse in concentration, when, for example, you need to look for a document in a bottom drawer. As I bend over to get it, I push out my buttocks. All they want is to be grasped by two firm hands. Then they need a desk to lean on; I am always very cautious if I have to clear everything aside to lie on my back. But not all work surfaces are at the correct height, many are too low, and there are some desks I never went back to a second time. One graphic designer I used to go to see at his agency had cleverly addressed the problem by acquiring pedestal chairs whose height can be adjusted to the nearest centimeter. I would sit down on it in front of him, my genitals exactly opposite his. We had arranged to have a table behind him for me to put my feet on. We could stay like that for a long time without either of us tiring; for me it was like lying in a deck chair, while he rolled his supple waist as if twirling a hula hoop. Intermittently he would substitute his own movement with that of the chair seat, grabbing it with both hands and swinging it fluidly from side to side.

  Taboos

  I have rarely worried about being caught in flagrante delicto. In the above pages, I have referred several times to the awareness of risk if you undertake a sexual occupation in a place not intended for that purpose, because this awareness also contributes to the pleasure. Even so, the risk is almost always calculated, limited by implicit conventions: someone used to the Bois could draw a map of the places that are out of bounds but where the act is nevertheless possible, and those where it would definitively be impossible; and I have hardly ever made use of offices except outside working hours…In a rather prosaic way, the conviction that sexuality, whatever form it may take, is the most widely shared thing in the world, reassures me that nothing unpleasant will happen. An involuntary witness to a sexual act (if he is not driven to join in) would still be sufficiently confused by his own impulses to show no reaction, to maintain a discreet reserve. Jacques who, with a smile, worries about what would have happened if the young backpacker who had just greeted us had passed us two minutes earlier—when, that is, we had our trousers around our ankles and our bucking bodies rustled the leaves by the side of the path, making exactly the same noise as some little animal running for cover. I say nothing would have happened.

  I would add that I fear only those I know too well, not the anonymous who mean nothing to me, and I don’t think I am alone in this. In this area, the taboo for me would be to use the home you share with someone else while that person was out and unaware of what was going on. Early one afternoon Claude came home to the apartment—a big bourgeois apartment we had just moved into—and into the spare bedroom near the front door. He interrupted a copulation I had not been able to resist. It was the first time that, not in a group session, I had had the full benefit of Paul’s large body, which crushed me most pleasurably. Claude went back out without a word. I saw Paul stand up, his back filling the door frame, his naked buttocks proportionately so small as he followed Claude. Through the door I heard him say: “I’m sorry, old man.” I was struck by the unaffected tone he used to express his genuine discomfort. I, on the other hand, even though I had already fucked Paul in front of Claude, and even though Claude never referred to the incident, couldn’t think about it without feeling persistent guilt for a very long time. At least I could see the spare room as relatively neutral territory. Our shared bedroom, the “conjugal” bed, was absolutely out of bounds. On one occasion the deliquescence of my entire body and of my will (which I have already mentioned, as I have my fatal reaction to a man’s first touch) led me to the threshold of that room, the room that is still ours, Jacques’s and mine. But I found I couldn’t even lean against the door frame, unconsciously afraid that I would release the spring of a trap. So I had to hop backward because the man kneeling in front of me and trying to get to the mound under my skirt had automatically put one of my legs over his shoulder. I lost my balance at the foot of the bed. His incredulous face stared at me through the V of my upturned legs. I brought an end to the exercise and got back to my feet aloofly.

  These are the limits set by a morality that belongs more to the realms of superstition than to a clear understanding of what would be right and what would be wrong. First, these limits or markers send signals in only one direction; I have never had any scruples in someone else’s bathroom about using her perfumed soap to chase away the fetid residue of the night. Then, I may have cheated on someone in a way that, if and when it was revealed, might have hurt him much more than finding that I had cavorted in his sheets with someone else. I appropriate to other people the same adherence to environment that I have my
self, which makes every intimate thing—or anything that has served an intimate purpose—a sort of extension of the body, a sensitive prosthesis. If, while someone is away, you touch something that he touches, he himself is involved by his proximity to it. During an orgy, my tongue could easily lick a pussy that had just been ejaculated into by a man who had first been turned on with me, but the thought of drying myself on a towel that some woman who came clandestinely to my home may have used to wipe between her thighs, or the thought that Jacques might use the same one as some guest of mine whose visit he knew nothing about, horrifies me as much as an epidemic of leprosy. What is more, as a precursor to this fear itself, a hierarchy is established in my mind, granting greater importance to a respect for physical integrity (everything attached to it and that I attach to it) than for moral serenity, because I consider it more irremediable to damage the first than the second. Although I have managed to relativize this theory, I tend to think that we “cope” better with an invisible wound than an external wound. I am a formalist.

  Trusting

  There is a paradox with respect to this character trait, and that is that, even though images have such a dominant role in my life and even though my eyes guide me far more than any other organ, during the sexual act, it is as if I am blind. You could say that on the continuum of the world of sex, I move like a cell within its tissue. The nocturnal outings, and the fact of being surrounded, carried and penetrated by shadows suit me well. Better still, I can follow my partner blindly. I put myself in his hands, abandoning my free will; his presence keeps anything bad from happening to me. When I was with Éric, we could drive for ages toward some destination unknown to me, I could end up in the middle of nowhere or three stories down in an underground parking lot, I never asked any questions. When all was said and done, whatever happened was less strange than nothing happening at all.

  I have bad memories of the basement of a Moroccan restaurant, near the Place Maubert, not an area we often went to. There were couches and low tables dotted about in the chilly room under the vaulted ceiling. We had dined there alone, me with my breasts bared and my skirt hitched right up. Each time the waiter or the man I thought was the owner brought dishes over, Éric would push my top a bit farther aside and run his hand insistently under my skirt. I remember less about the heavy and not altogether friendly way these two men looked at me than I do the way they touched me, quickly, sporadically, on my companion’s tacit invitation. It was I who brought the waiting to an end by burying Éric’s organ in my mouth. Surely my intention was to escape the less than friendly attentions of the staff. We left the restaurant without finishing our meal. Were the usual customers not there? Did Éric know the place well, and hadn’t he overestimated the welcome we might receive? I felt more apprehensive than if I had been in some incongruous place and a herd of strangers had set upon me with their dicks hanging out. With Éric I always knew that anyone that we met, in whatever circumstances, could, on some imperceptible sign from him, open my thighs and slip in his member. I didn’t think there could be any exceptions to this, as if Éric was a sort of universal ferryman, not to take me across to some promised land but to let people penetrate me, one after another. Hence my uneasiness that evening.

  In the undefined places where I met people whose diverse social backgrounds were leveled by a sexual egalitarianism, I was never confronted with any threats or violence; I was even gratified with a degree of attention that I didn’t always find in a classic two-person relationship. As for any fear of the police, there was no such thing. On one hand, I have a childlike trust in the ability of the man I am with to ensure our safety—and, in fact, there was never a single incident. On the other hand, even though I feel overcome with shame when a conductor asks me rather rudely for a ticket I have temporarily lost, I would have been only a little put out if I had been caught in the act on the highway. The body discovered by the representative of the law would have been no more or less than the body penetrated by the stranger in the Bois, not so much an inhabited body as a shell from which I had withdrawn. This reckless lack of concern is also at the root of the determination and perseverance I can display during the act, and—indeed—other activities, and is not unrelated to the dissociation that I have just mentioned: either the conscience is annihilated by that determination and can no longer view the act with any distance; or, quite the opposite, when the body is surrendered to automatic functions, the conscience escapes and loses any association with that act. At times like this, no external factor can disturb my body or my partner’s, because nothing exists outside the space they occupy. And how small that space is! You rarely fuck expansively in a public place. You tend instead to burrow into each other.

  There are few places that have as many forbidden areas as a museum: the works themselves are roped off, and there are plenty of places from which the public is banned. The visitor makes his progress with a vague sense that there is another parallel world that he cannot see but from which he is being watched. Henri, myself and a friend called Fred therefore took advantage of a door that had exceptionally been left ajar at the end of a vast, momentarily deserted gallery in the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. We slipped in behind a flimsy partition wall that hid the pandemonium of what I imagine was a temporary storeroom. We didn’t go far into the room. It was very cluttered; but we made up our minds quickly, without thinking it over. Still, I could see the shaft of light on the floor, because we had left the door as it was while I formed a bridge between the two men. After a few minutes they changed places. They both came, one in my cunt, the other in my mouth. I don’t know which one of them intermittently suspended the action of his prick to run his hand under my stomach and pleasure me. It encouraged me to do it myself and to set off my own orgasm while the shrinking prick still lingered in my cunt and the other, whose come I had swallowed, had moved away to free me from one of my moorings the better to enjoy my pleasure. This led to a little conversation about the way I masturbated. I explained, believing that I was revealing something astonishing, that in less precarious circumstances I could have had two or three consecutive orgasms. They made fun of me. That was very common for a woman, they claimed, as we slowly tucked our shirts back into our trousers. When we went back out into the light, the museum was just as empty. We went on looking around the exhibition. I went from one painting to another, and from Henri to Fred for their comments, and this visit was all the more enjoyable because it was bolstered by the complicity that from then on would link me to those two men and to that place.

  In the dark storeroom, with my body bent double between two other bodies and my eyes staring vertically down, I was completely hemmed in. I am convinced that when my field of vision is limited, then in some primitive way, this provokes anything that could threaten me or simply upset me—in fact, anything that I don’t want to countenance for one reason or another. The body of whomever I am with becomes an obstacle, and whatever lies beyond it that I cannot see doesn’t really exist. So, in the position I was in at the museum, only this time on the first floor of a shop selling sadomasochist gear on the boulevard de Clichy—again in a stock room—I have one cheek pressed up against Éric’s tummy while he holds me by my shoulders and the owner of the boutique grasps my rear end, ramming me back and forth on his dick. Before assuming this position, I notice that the man is very small and thickset with short arms, but as soon as he disappears from view, his person disintegrates—so much so that I address my request to Éric for the man to put on a condom before penetrating. The man is perturbed by this request and forced to rummage through some boxes; he admits quietly that he is afraid his wife might come in. Even though he has a thick organ that has to force entry, he hovers in limbo the whole time. A girl who looks like a shy employee watches the entire scene rather sullenly. From time to time I catch her eye as I glance sideways; her eyes are black, probably ringed with kohl. I feel as if I am on a stage, separated by some indistinct void from a gloomy spectator waiting for the action to start. When I lo
ok at her, I am in some ways looking back at myself, and I end up seeing myself, but just the head, the neck hunched back into the shoulders, the cheek crushed against Éric’s jacket and scuffed by the zipper, the mouth is open, whereas what is going on above the waist is part of a sort of backdrop. The dwarf’s pokes became as unreal to me as a sound heard thundering from the wings of a theater, to imply some far-off action.