The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet Page B

with him, our bodies tangled up on his
    bed, we suck each other off for hours. During a sixty-nine, it really gets me going to rub my breasts against a slightly rubbery tummy. “It’s true, you seem to go for chubby ones.” Me: “I dreamed I met François Mitterand at an orgy!…and I like them not that clean, too…I’m pretty sure he never brushes his teeth.” “You’re disgusting. He’s married, isn’t he?” Me: “I’ve seen a picture of his wife. So ugly you wouldn’t believe it.”
    That gets me going, too. My voice is no louder than usual, but I give details only sparingly. I take pleasure in evoking this dirtiness and this contagious ugliness, at the same time savoring the disgust of the man questioning me. “You suck each other. And then?” Me: “You can’t imagine the way he moans when I lick his ass…he gets in the doggie position, his ass is so white…he wriggles it when I burrow my nose into it. Then I get onto all fours…he finishes quickly, with short little thrusts that are—how shall I
    put this—very precise.” The man I’m talking to is part of the scene, too, but I’ve never happened to sleep with him. I’m not espe- cially attracted to him, either. The man I’m referring to is not the sort to assail me with questions, but he listens to me, and in the end, because everyone ends up calling their friends’ friends by their first names even if they haven’t met them themselves, I think of him as part of the group.
    The more sociable I became, the better I cultivated my innate pragmatism in all as- pects of sexual exchanges. Having, in the early days, tested various partners’ receptiv- ity to ménages à trois, I adapted the words I used. A faint, decadent aura around me was enough for some, whereas others, as I have illustrated, wanted to enjoy by proxy every last fingering. Added to this is the fact that even the most truthful speech is obviously never absolute, is always colored by the way feelings have evolved. I was very talkative
    with Jacques at first, but then I had to cope, more or less well and anyway belatedly, with the ban imposed on sexual adventures and accounts of these adventures the moment our relationship was perceived and lived as one of love, even though more than once, I read descriptions of erotic scenes in Jacques’s books that could only have been reworkings of anecdotes I had told him. Of all the men I saw for any length of time, only two brought my exhaustive exposés to an ab- rupt halt. And even then I am pretty sure that these details they didn’t want to know, and which were therefore not mentioned, still formed a central part of our exchanges.

    Those who obey social mores are probably better equipped to confront demonstrations of jealousy than those with a libertine philo- sophy that leaves them feeling helpless in the
    face of passion. A person can prove her ex- tensive and sincere liberality by sharing the pleasure she takes with the person she most loves, only for it to be pierced, without any warning, by an exactly proportionate intoler- ance. Jealousy may have been bubbling with- in like a spring, and as the bubbles burst it might even have been giving a regular and subterranean form of irrigation to the garden of libido, until—suddenly—it formed a tor- rent and then the entire conscious mind was submerged by it, as has been described by so many people.
    I have learned this from observation as well as from experience. I personally have experienced my confrontations with these passionate expressions of jealousy in a sort of stupor that even the brutal death of a loved one did not provoke. And I had to read Victor Hugo, yes, I had to go and seek out that portrayal of God the Father, to under- stand that this stupor is comparable to the
    sort of denial displayed by children. “To ac- cept facts as they are does not belong to realms of childhood. [A child forms] impres- sions as his terror grows but without making any connection between the