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The Sexual Life of Catherine M. - Softcover

CATHERINE MILLET

 
9781852428112: The Sexual Life of Catherine M.
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1852428112 ISBN 13: 9781852428112
Verlag: SERPENT'S TAIL, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A window into a life of insatiable desire and uninhibited sex - this is Parisian art critic Catherine M.'s account of her sexual awakening and her unrestrained pursuit of pleasure.

From the glamorous singles clubs of Paris to the Bois de Boulogne, she describes her erotic experiences in precise and beautiful detail. A phenomenal bestseller throughout Europe, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., like Fifty Shades of Grey, breaks with accepted ideas of sex and examines many alternative manifestations of desire. Told in spare, elegant prose, her story will shock, enlighten and liberate you.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Catherine Millet is the editor of Art Press, an influential Paris art magazine. She has written books on modern art, including a monograph on the painter Yves Klein.

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The Sexual Life of Catherine M by Catherine Millet

Leadtext: Different towns, different men..

Throughout the first few years of my adult life, my sexual experiences were intimately linked with the need to escape and get out into the 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, who I did not yet know, had rung at the door of our apartment to let me know that a friend I was meant to be meeting had been delayed. He asked whether I would like to go out with him. In the event, his Renault 4 took us all the way to Dieppe. We set up the tent on the edge of the beach.



Some time 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 voiced any desires), but the long sturdy frame of his body lying next to mine and his big white hands sent me into ecstasies. I wanted to go and live in West Berlin. The wide Kudam leading all the way up to the gleaming blue cathedral, and the parks of that great city - even though they were enclosed - fuelled 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. Pathetic attempt to cross the border between East and West Germany because I did not have the necessary papers. So the student came as far as the frontier to talk it out, and my first romance came to an end in a cafeteria on a huge car park hacked out in the middle of a forest, amidst queues of people and queues of cars waiting to pass the wooden sentry boxes.



Unfortunately, I retained this propensity to flee without warning for many years, which was neither fair to the man I was living with at the time, nor to those who had brought me there, or those I had gone to meet, and would abandon to slink back home. This restlessness was partly due to the scatty, kittenish attitude that we had (Claude, Henri, a few others and myself) towards the New World of sex, an attitude which would sometimes make one of us break away from the close-knit group and strike out as an individual. The unspoken law expected this pioneering scout to come back and talk about their adventures. Which, of course, was not always the case, hence the mixture of oil and water which 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 and shafted in a way I was not accustomed to. If it had been possible, I would have liked to have woken up each morning to the shadows of an as yet unexplored ceiling and to have climbed out of the sheets and stayed for a few moments in the no man's land of an apartment in which 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 during those hours it nourished you with its solid presence and its smell, it is that body which provides your only source of the ineffable well-being of familiarity. How many times have I thought, as I fantasised languidly about the life of high class whores, that that was one of the advantages of their job. As for the journey itself, the lapse of time 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 erotic pleasure. In a taxi when all the bustle that precedes departure suddenly falls away, or wallowing in that semi-conscious state while waiting at an airport, I can sometimes feel that instantly recognisable sensation of a giant hand inside my body, squeezing my entrails and drawing from them a sensuous delight which irrigates my every extremity, exactly like when a man looks at me in a way which implies he is moving in on me in his head.



In spite of this, I have never used the frequent, long-distance journeys necessitated by my work to find 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 that 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.



There are two explanations. Firstly, right at the beginning of my career a more experienced female colleague had led me to understand that symposia, seminars and other meetings held in seclusion with people who were temporarily cut from their usual ties were God-given opportunities for furtive creepings up and down hotel corridors. I was used to a rather different and far more concentrated speciality in sexual rendezvous; nevertheless this shocked me to the same extent as the shapeless clothes people wear to show that they are on holiday when they would usually be very particular about their appearance. With the intransigence of the newly converted, I believed that fucking - and by that I meant fucking frequently and willingly whoever was (or were) the partner (or partners) - was a way of life. If not, if this thing were only permitted when certain conditions were met, at pre-determined times, well then it was carnival time! (A little aside to put this severe verdict into context. We no longer need to prove that our sexual tendencies can turn inside out like an old umbrella, and the device that protects us when the wind blows with reality can flip the other way and leave us to get soaked in the squalls of our fantasies. Once again in this book, I am narrowing the divide between fact and fantasy, in this case to expose a pleasing antinomy: despite the moral stance I have just expressed, I have often been aroused by imagining myself as a "spunk bag" for a group of stressed executives at a meeting, they would each dump their load on me secretly, hiding at the back of a hotel bar, even in a 'phone box, with the receiver in one hand as they carried on their statutory conversation with their wives: "Yes darling, it's going well, it's just the food that's not..." etc. That's one of the scenarios that is most guaranteed to get me to orgasm at my own complete degradation).



In the realms of reality, though, the exotic adventures of this speleologist of Parisian car parks can be dealt with in just two paragraphs. The assistant who had so emphatically drawn me to him right in the middle of the hotel foyer did indeed come and wake me up the following morning. Being very fair, he had let me rest after our repeated travelling - we had been going across Canada - over the last few days. He pushed his hips calmly. I let him get on with it without much conviction, but I encouraged him almost as a professional would, simply choosing a vocabulary that was rather more affectionate than obscene. Afterwards he said, quite unaffectedly, that he had been thinking about it for several days, but that he had waited until the end of the trip so as not to upset our work. We worked together again a number of times. He never made the slightest gesture of sexual invitation again, and neither did I. It was the fist time that a sexual exchange that had started with someone whom I was to see again did not continue, did not naturally infiltrate the soil of our relationship as friends and colleagues. It has to be said that I was at a stage in my life where I was trying with limited success, if not to be faithful, at least to restrict myself. I thought that this might be the sort of pardonable transgression permitted to people who were not libertines. It was the only time in my life that I vaguely regretted a sexual act.



A Brazilian adventure left me with more complex feelings. I had just arrived in Rio de Janeiro for the first time and, of all the telephone numbers I had been given, this artist was the only person to reply. As luck would have it, he was very familiar with an area of French cultural history which was my field, and we stayed up very late, chatting on a gloomy terrace in Ipanema. Several years went by, he came to Paris, I went back to Brazil a couple of times. In Sao Paulo, as we came away from a party for the Biennial, we took the same taxi. He gave the address of my hotel. Without taking my eyes off the back of the taxi-driver's neck, I drummed my fingers lightly on his thigh. He gave the address of his hotel. The bed stood by a bay window and street signs outside threw blocks of yellow light across it like something out of a Hopper film. He did not lie over me and cover me, he sewed my body with parts of his, reassuring himself that I was there with his hands, his lips, his penis, as well as his forehead, his chin, his shoulders and legs. I felt good, and then I was drowned in the depths of a migraine which terrified him. I could hear him whispering about the time, about all that time. There was no second time with him, either. Later, in another taxi, in Paris this time, as I watched rather than listened to him speaking to me attentively, I was overcome by an intense feeling of joy: I was thinking about the geographical distance between us, the long intervals of time between our meetings which were nevertheless regular - sometimes, if I was travelling through Rio, I might just give him a quick 'phone call; and I thought of that single occasion when time and space came together, and their union formed a perfect architecture.



The other explanation for the limitations in my adventures while travelling is connected with a subject I raised in the first chapter. I liked to discover - on condition that I had a guide. I liked it if a man was introduced to me by another man. I would leave it up to the relationship with the one and with the other, rather than having to think about my own desires and how to satisfy them. In fact, feeling desire and having sexual relations were almost two separate activities; I could want a man very much and nothing might ever actually happen without my feeling any frustration. I was a dreamer, I was gifted when it came to fantasising; a major part of my erotic life was lived like that, heightened by the friction on my vulva, held between my thumb and index finger. Copulating really answered a wider necessity: carving a smooth path for myself in the world. As I have had the opportunity to illustrate, I was evolving in the comfort of a family-like complicity. Something you do not get when you arrive for the first time (and without any specific contacts) in some distant city.



With many men, it is their houses that I remember before anything else. That is not an excuse to underestimate other memories that I have of them, it is rather that they cannot be dissociated from their background, and that it is a spontaneous reconstruction of this background which brings back a moment of affectionate friendship or the details of how we were lying. The reader may well have realised: I quickly take in the setting. When my most intimate opening has given access, I have opened my eyes wide too. I learned to use this method, amongst others, as a way of finding my way around Paris when I was very young. An architect friend whom I used to visit in his Parisian pied-á-terre on the top floor of a new building, so high up that the view from the bed dived straight into the sky, once commented that from my home in the rue Saint-Martin on the Rive Droite to his at the top of the rue Saint-Jacques on the Rive Gauche you just had to follow a straight line. I came to love the area around Invalides when I accompanied a dentist friend on his trips to one of his girlfriends. She had been a successful variety singer in the 1950s and she still had the bland and slightly starchy appeal of record covers of the period. She lay back with lukewarm enthusiasm and I passed the time by playing the aesthete for my own amusement, scorning the pedestal tables cluttered with a collection of tortoises in all shapes and sizes, in stone and in porcelain, and going and gazing through the windows at the sublime proportions of the buildings along the esplanade. Each home elicited a specific way of looking at it. In Eric's apartment, the bed was the dispatching centre in a kaleidoscope of camera lenses, screens and mirrors; in Bruno's, based on the model of Mondrian's studio, a vase of flowers was the only focal point in a space where the door jambs, the beams, the frames of the cupboards and the furniture all seemed to be one continuous unit, all with homogenous proportions, as if the same volume repeated several times served a variety of functions, as if the big dining table, for example, was merely a taller replica of the bed.







I carry in me a sweet nostalgia for large apartments somewhere in Italian cities. When my collaboration with Enzo began he was living in Rome, in what I think was an outlying part of the city, in one of those ochre-coloured buildings which stand apart with unexplained gaps between them. When I compared this place to the suburb of my childhood, I was amazed that there was so much space lying fallow. There must have been a sort of feudal urbanism dictating that each building should be able to project its entire shadow onto the ground in the evening. Inside, the rooms were much larger than those in apartments in a comparable category of building in France. Voices echoed in the bathroom, and the tiling which covered the floor of the entire apartment was so clean that it made it all the easier to appreciate the full extent of the space, as if someone had just finished washing it down in honour of our visit. After a couple of years Enzo moved to Milan. The buildings were older, the apartments even more spacious, the ceilings higher. There was no more furniture. It was such a pleasure wandering around it with nothing on, as pristine as the fresh paint on the walls, as true to myself as the bedroom was true to the essence of a bedroom, furnished as it was with only a bed and an open suitcase! Pulling off my sweater and letting my skirt slip to the floor caused an in-draught which aroused my entire body.



© Serpent's Tail and Adriana Hunter, 2001

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Verlag
SERPENT'S TAIL
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1852428112
ISBN 13 
9781852428112
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
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