Sexual Life Catherine M.

by Catherine Millet

  An Ability to Absorb

  One weakness of porn films is to present stereotyped images of orgasm; the characters always come after a series of accelerated jerks, eyes closed, mouths open and screaming. Now, orgasms can happen with no movement at all and in silence, and you can watch them building up and then unfold. It is usually when you want to fire up or stimulate desire that—in life as in films—you resort to clichés. Pretty much the same words, obscene or not, come to everyone. Men frequently order partners to ask for them and their organs (“Do you want a big one? Answer me,” “Say my name, go on, say it”), whereas women, even the most independent-minded, tend toward subjection, even to the extent of asking for what would be horrible injuries (“Stab it into me!,” “Go on, tear me open!”). Seeing myself in a video spreading the come that has just spurted onto me all over my breasts, I wonder whether I am not merely repeating something I have seen dozens of times on the screen. The jet is not as frothy as in the films, but it is nevertheless spectacular; the spunk makes my skin shine. Did men and women use the same rhetoric and was their erotic repertoire the same before the invention of cinema? But the more powerful the orgasm, the less “hamming it up” there is. I can confirm that in my own case. While the level of pleasure is rising, I take a very active part. As well as moving my hips, I use my arms and legs. If I am lying on my back, I spur on my partner by repeatedly kicking my heels on his buttocks and thighs. Then I reach a stage when this frantic level of activity drops. My partner is now concentrating on only one inert parcel of flesh. My voice sounds quite different. We have already abandoned our running commentary, the words we exchange become more laconic. I say “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” sometimes accompanying this litany with rapid movements of my head from left to right, or I keep saying “Go on, go on.” And suddenly my voice becomes higher, louder, with the clarity and authority of an actor who has learned to project her voice, and the words are more spaced out, the syllables more emphatic, “Keep go-ing.” Sometimes the “yes” becomes a “no,” and in some images I see myself burying my face in my hands.

  I wouldn’t do the job that I do, nor would I be capable of gathering together all these notes, if I did not have some gift for observation. A gift put to greater effect because it is coupled with a solid superego. I don’t let myself go easily, and in those moments when you are supposed to be completely passive, I am often still alert. I have, therefore, always paid very close attention to my partners, to those who I knew well, of course, but also to any level of relationship, a deep and lasting attachment or a passing affair. This degree of attention surely belongs to the same perceptive structure as the concentration I display in front of a painting, or my ability—in the Métro, a restaurant or a waiting room—to lose myself completely in my contemplation of the people sitting next to me. An attention that defines my acumen. I take pride in the fact that I am quite an expert, and I have become one because I have always been aware of the effects my initiatives produced. As I have described at the beginning of this chapter, I have spontaneously slipped under other people’s skin in an effort to feel myself what they were feeling. That is not just a turn of phrase; I have surprised myself by mimicking habits and exclamations that were peculiar to someone else. Which amounts to saying that I often relegated my own pleasure to the background. It took me a long time, a really long time, to identify the caresses, the positions that I liked best. I will venture this as an explanation: I was not from the start granted a body predisposed to pleasure. First I had to give myself—literally abandon my whole body—to sexual activity, to lose myself in it so thoroughly that I confused myself with my partner so that I could emerge from this transformation having sloughed off the mechanical body I was given at birth and taken on a second body, one capable of taking as much as it could give. In the meantime, how many faces and bodies did I lose myself in watching!

  With very few exceptions, I can remember with relative accuracy the bodies of my main partners, and even what their faces looked like at the moment when the other part of their being was released. These images are accompanied by memories of the convulsive movements and particular choice of words each of them made. Observation does not automatically lead to judgment, but if it is scrupulous, it keeps the conscience in the realm of objectivity. I may have been seduced by a man’s physical beauty, but that wouldn’t stop me from identifying flaws that could cut short any fascination for him. For example, a roundish face set off with almond eyes but mounted on a head that was peculiarly flattened at the back, so that when I looked at it in profile, it brought to mind a squashed balloon. A quarter turn and the man whose face could be compared to a Renaissance painting had no more depth than a picture on canvas. If I run back through a portrait gallery, then I can find fault with my memory and my powers of observation: paradoxically, there was one man whose good looks were particularly seductive to me (in fact, the only man of all my sexual contacts who was younger than I), but I have no sexual memories of him. I can call to mind lots of expressions and gestures he made and plenty of things that he said, but not one of them would have occurred while we were fucking!

  Was nature trying to spare men the danger of being torn in two when she ordained that, when their muscles are strained to the limits, this tension is compensated by bathing their faces in peace? Doesn’t it look as if they are throwing their faces back to refresh them under a fountain in that instant when they come to the end of the pursuit that has exercised their entire body? Many of them adopt this serene expression; not the man who looked like a Renaissance portrait. While there is a whole succession of peaceful faces in my memory—one making a little “o” with his mouth and, because he had a mustache, looking as silly as a child playing dress up; another who smiled so halfheartedly that it could have been a sign of embarrassment, the sort of smile a shy person would wear as he apologized for being caught in some indecent act—or again, another man whose face was usually so smooth, who wore a mask of suppressed pain. He would have seemed pitiable if, in those moments, he hadn’t added to the usual exclamation of “I’m coming, I’m coming!” the words “Oh, my God!” A comical invocation I couldn’t help noticing.

  But calm can also be mistaken for indifference. I knew one man who was so contemplative that he withdrew completely from his physical appearance to the extent that it no longer expressed anything. His body rested on me with all its weight; yes, it was active but impassive, as if he had abandoned it to me, and this absent face would park next to mine while I watched his ghost, transported by orgasm, floating above us like in a fantasy film. It was the same body that I saw when this man masturbated, indifferent to my presence and using a technique unique to him. He would lie on his stomach with his arms bent by his sides and squeeze his organ between his strong thighs by contracting them. It was a stocky body, and the muscles stood out all the more in this position. Being an expert in onanism, I admired the concentration he applied to the job, stubbornly and defiantly defending the mental isolation it requires.

  When you have made love with a man a few times, you recognize when he is going to come, even if he is not one of those who announce it out loud. Perhaps you know before he does, informed by tiny signs: perhaps because he has slipped you into a position that acts like a trigger on him; perhaps because he falls silent, his breathing becomes audible, appeased a few moments in advance. One friend who was an imaginative, talkative and active fucker, who would keep you there for an hour with his extraordinary erotic fabulations and would make you try out the most acrobatic positions and the most improbable substitutes (cucumbers, sausages, Perrier bottles, luminous white billy clubs, etc.), would suddenly grow quiet a few moments before orgasm. Whatever position I was in, he would bring me back underneath him, tunnel into me without forcing his way, and replace words with discreet moans. I was convinced that this final phase followed a decision taken with full knowledge of the facts, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to have heard him say: “Right, that’s enough fun and games, let’s get down to business.”
After he had ejaculated, he would stay on top of me, unleashing a little “Hee, hee, hee” in my ear, which sounded like a forced laugh, but was more likely his way of gently returning us to the real world. It was the laugh of someone who laughs first, in the hopes of finding your complicity and your forgiveness for having dragged you on some unexpected escapade. And as if to help extract me from our dream, before he opened his eyes, he would scratch my scalp affectionately.

  In the same way that I don’t take exception to flirting with abjection, that it nourishes my fantasies, that I have never been put off from titillating the folds of an anus with my tongue (“Hmm! It smells of shit,” I hear myself saying, “but it’s good”) and that I have willingly cast myself as a “bitch in heat,” neither am I disgusted—far from it—if I can feast my eyes on a body that may be in some way damaged. Yes, I like it when the whole body in my arms is as firm as a well-polished dick, but yes, I am as happy to edge beneath the drooping gut of a man waiting on his back like a woman for me to suck him off. Yes, I value the abilities of a man who spreads the lips of the vulva with careful surgeon’s fingers, and who takes the time to admire what he finds with a connoisseur’s relish, before he rubs the clitoris with a precision that soon becomes unbearable. But the man who grabs your hips with about as much ceremony as if he were snatching hold of the rail on a listing boat is just as welcome, and the one who mounts you with the vacant distant expression of a mating animal! The one who lies virtually full-length on your back, gripping the fat of your buttocks so hard that you find bruises on them the next day, and who doesn’t give a shit that you can keep your balance only thanks to the excruciating cramp in your thighs, which are supporting two bodies. After that you let yourself go, reduced to little more than a lump of flesh plonked onto the bed and turned over with no more response of its own than a ball of bread dough. Being the amorphous support of someone else’s frenetic activity, forgetting that your own flesh can have a specific form, and watching your breasts spreading and flowing with the movement, rocked like the water in the bottom of a boat, or seeing the cellulite on your buttocks squeezed in a big pair of hands: at times like these, as my eyes float over the surface of my molten body, I have to catch the eye of this workman dazed by his obstinate laboring. That face does not do beatific ecstasy. It would frighten me if the denatured bird that I am did not fall in love with the scarecrow. One eye is half closed because of a tensing effect that affects only half the face—I have already seen this feature in people who have had strokes—and the corresponding corner of the mouth twists to expose the gums. If I am not afraid of this snarling grimace, that is because it doesn’t express pain but rather a supreme effort, a prodigious tenacity, and I am proud to submit myself to this force.

  Patient

  For much of my life I fucked naïvely. What I mean by that was that sleeping with men was a natural activity that didn’t bother me unduly. Obviously, from time to time I would come across some of the attendant psychological problems (lies, wounded pride, jealousy), but they could be written off as losses. I wasn’t very sentimental. I needed affection and I found it, but without feeling any need to go and build love stories out of sexual relationships. When I did fall for someone, I think I was still conscious of succumbing to some charm, a physical seduction, even to the geometry of relations (for example, having affairs with a much older man and a younger man, and having fun shifting from playing the role of a little girl to that of a protector) without ever being fuly engaged. When I complained to a good friend how difficult it was managing four or five longer-term relationships at once, he would tell me that it wasn’t the number of men that was difficult but finding a balance between them, and he would recommend that I take a sixth. So I just left everything up to chance. I paid no more attention to the quality of sexual relationships. In cases where the man didn’t give me much pleasure, or even bothered me in some way, or when he made me do things that weren’t really to my liking, that alone wasn’t reason to call him into question. In most cases, it was the friendship in the relationship that was most important. It could obviously lead to a sexual relationship, and I even found that reassuring; I needed to sense that all of me was appreciated. Whether or not I found immediate sensory satisfaction was less important. That, too, was written off in profits and losses. I wouldn’t be exaggerating if I said that until I was about thirty-five, I had not imagined that my own pleasure could be the aim of a sexual encounter. I had never understood that.

  My hardly romantic attitude never stopped me from handing out “I love yous” to my heart’s content, only at the precise moment when the little motor situated in my partner’s groin revved up. Or I would keep saying his name out loud. I don’t know what made me think that this would encourage him to pursue and achieve his pleasure. I was all the more prodigal with these purely opportune declarations of love because they remained on the surface, uttered neither under the effects of any emotion nor because I was carried away in my ecstasy. I clearheadedly applied what I believed to be a technical knack. As time goes by, we do away with this sort of artifice.

  Romain was very gentle, almost indolent beneath a virile outward appearance, with his biker jacket slung over a bachelor’s rumpled T-shirt, yet another who lived in a studio on Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the least cluttered one I knew. We fucked on a mattress on the carpet, in the middle of the room, as the overhead light hit me full in the face. The first time I just kept on looking at the lightbulb and didn’t realize that he’d ejaculated. Weightless, his chest lay over mine, his head turned away. The only living thing that I could feel was the odd strand of his long hair brushing over my mouth and chin. I had hardly felt him penetrate, he had scarcely executed a few weak thrusts. I, too, lay motionless, embarrassed. I didn’t want to disturb him if he hadn’t finished, but if that was the case, wasn’t it my job to make my presence known and get him going again? But if I started moving and he was all done, wasn’t I going to look stupid? Eventually, I felt something running right at the top of my thigh, a bit of sperm spat out by my vagina.

  Romain’s cock was a good size, it got off quite happily but was completely passive. If I had wanted to personify his cock, I could have compared it to a novice who doesn’t move from his chair when all the participants in a ceremony rise to their feet: you felt no more urge to rebuke him than you would the inept novice. As I spread my legs under this boy, I had almost a sense of comfort from feeling nothing, nothing nice, but nothing nasty, either.

  In some situations, I can display a rare patience. I have in me sufficient resources to remain silent and give my mind a free rein, accepting the fact that others are living their lives alongside me. I can cope uncomplainingly with the manias, petty tyrannies or even outright attacks of others, and I can turn inwards when necessary. I let them get on with it, and do my thing. Looking back on it, I now realize just how patient I was in sexual relationships. Feeling nothing, not minding and accomplishing were the whole ritual to its conclusion. Not getting hung up about having the same tastes as my partner, getting on with it, etc. I was indifferent because mentally I was so well tucked away in my very core that I could control my body as a puppeteer does a puppet. So I went on seeing Romain. Thanks to the impression he gave of being a charming bastard, he had quite a lot of success with women, and I enjoyed imagining the surprise or the disappointment of those who thought they were taking on a real man. I saw the astonished eyes of one of these women, probing mine for the comfort afforded by sharing a disappointing experience: “But Romain…he doesn’t move a muscle!” I listened to the devastated creature’s confidences as placidly as a sage.

  I have spoken of the boredom that sometimes gripped me when meeting up with friends, and of the escape route I discovered by going off with one of them for a fuck. But even fucking can be boring! Still, I prefer that particular boredom. I can take in stride a cunnilingus that turns me neither on nor off; decide against redirecting a finger that is toiling away not at my clitoris but just to the side, where it hurts a bit;
and finally, I can be perfectly happy when my partner ejaculates even if I myself don’t get much out of it because, in the long run, being not quite “there” gets tiresome; I can tolerate all that so long as either before or afterward the conversation is stimulating, my dinner companions are fascinating, or I can wander around in an apartment I really like, pretending to have a different life…My train of thought is so detached from contingencies that it won’t be hampered by a mere body, even if that body is wrapped in the arms of another body. Better still, thought is all the freer if whomever you are talking to is concentrating on the body; surely it isn’t then going to resent him for using it as an erotic accessory!

  It is not necessarily womanizers who best satisfy women. It may even be that some of them—although not all—go from one woman to the next only to experience the beginnings and to spare themselves the stage when some sort of fulfillment is required. (No doubt you could say the same of some man-eating women.) One of the first I met, an artist, was also much older than I, and one of my friends had warned me: “When men are a bit older, it’s fantastic, they’re so experienced that you don’t have to do anything, just open up your legs!” I had to make quite an effort not to contradict her. In one of the rooms in his art studio, the one in which he received visitors, there was a big table laden with things. It was like a house of curiosities with a jumble of ornaments, lamps, vases, exotic-shaped bottles and kitsch ashtrays, as well as unusual tools and plans and sketches for his own work. We often didn’t bother to go as far as the bedroom; I would go and mingle with this bric-a-brac. He would push me up against the table. Was it because he was slightly shorter that I can remember his half-closed eyelids so clearly, the bags under his eyes like a reflection of his eyelids, and his childish, begging expression? Our pelvises were more or less on a level, and as soon as I felt the swelling under his trousers, I would set my “little motor,” as he called it, going. That is, I would jerk my hips rhythmically as I always did. And he would respond to these movements so that we rubbed our pubic regions against each other. What ramblings did my mind go off on once my excitement started to fade? Would I notice a new picture pinned to the wall? Would I think about the article I had to write? Or did I empty my mind and stare at the excrescences of brown skin on the surface of his eyelids? Did I think about the fact that we would have time to do this again later and that then his organ would go so far as to penetrate mine? He would throw his head back, push me a bit harder against the table, which dug into my buttocks, and let out a couple of whinnies. We could leave it at that.