Free The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet Page A

heard stories of fever- ishly erotic encounters in such places, not to mention in elevators or restaurant bath- rooms. I have always cut them short, rather abruptly even. I discourage them, humor- ously and gently, I hope, but in such an off- hand way that it must look like firm resolu- tion. Engaging myself in the playful mean- derings of seduction and, however briefly, keeping up the teasing banter that necessar- ily occupies the interval between a chance meeting and accomplishing the sexual act would be beyond me. On the other hand, if it were possible for the thronging crowds at a train station or the organized hordes in the Métro to accept the crudest accesses of pleasure in their midst as they accept dis- plays of the most abject misery, I could easily
    undertake that sort of coupling, like an animal.
    Neither do I belong to the category of wo- men who are “looking for adventure”; I have been successfully chatted up very rarely, and then never by strangers. On the other hand, I have willingly accepted dates over the tele- phone from a voice, purporting to have met me at some function or another, to which I could not put a face. I was easy to find; they just had to call the magazine.
    That was how I ended up at the opera one night, at a performance of La Bohème. I ar- rived late and had to wait till the end of the first scene before I could go and sit down in the darkness next to my virtual stranger. We had met, if you could call it that, a few days earlier at a mutual friend’s party (when the relationship returns to the realm of a possible one-on-one, men rarely use the term “orgy”), but the profile I could see, the balding head and the jowly face, didn’t mean
    a thing to me. I suspected that he had indeed been at the party but had not approached me there. He risked putting a hand on my thigh, looking at me furtively with something ap- proaching anxiety. He never shook off his air of weariness; he had a habit of rubbing his head in the same way that he ran his great bony hands over me, doing it mechanically and complaining of terrible headaches. I thought he had a screw loose, and there was something rather pitiful about him. I saw him several more times; he took me to shows and to very expensive restaurants that I found more than a little entertaining, not be- cause I could be mistaken for a prostitute but because I could outwit the ushers, the wait- resses and the bourgeois patrons around us, given that the bald gentleman with the drooping skin was in conversation with a card-carrying intellectual.
    To this day, Hortense (the switchboard op- erator at Art Press ) sometimes puts through
    someone whose name I don’t recognize. “They won’t take no for an answer, they say they know you well.” I take the call. From their carefully chosen words spoken in con- spiratorial tones, I quickly realize that the stranger thinks he is talking to a real good- time girl, the sort, if I’m not mistaken, who leaves a man with some very good memories. (Similarly, if I am introduced to someone at a private opening or a dinner, and I feel that I am meeting him for the first time but he delves his eyes into mine for rather longer than is necessary, saying, “But we’ve already met,” I tend to think that, in what feels like another life for me, he had an opportunity to look at my face at leisure while my gaze may have been locked on his pubic hair). I may no longer have the curiosity to take it any fur- ther, but I still have a profound admiration and sympathy for the suspension in time in which lovers live. It could be ten years, even twenty or more, since a man has made love
    to a woman, but he still talks about it and ad- dresses her as if it were yesterday. Their pleasure is like a hardy perennial that knows no seasons. It flourishes in a greenhouse, isolated from outside contingencies so that they always see the body they held in the same way, even if it is now withered or lying stiffly in a robe. Be that as it