The Sexual Life of Catherine M. Read Online Free PDF Page B

restaurant, like an old-school reunion; and what made their evening was to strip off the panties or stock- ings of one of the women in their party while the waiter was going around the table. On the other hand, I thought it was obscene to tell salacious stories at an orgy. Was it be- cause I instinctively made a distinction between the playlets presented as a prelude to a play—the better to prepare you for it—and the playacting that serves only to delay it? The acts performed in the one are never performed in the other, where they really would be “out of place.”
    Even if I have kept some of the reflexes of a practicing Catholic to this day (secretly mak- ing the sign of the cross if I’m afraid something is going to happen, feeling watched as soon as I know I have done something wrong or made a mistake), I can no longer really pretend that I believe in God. It’s highly possible that I lost this belief when I started having sexual relationships. Finding myself vacant, then, with no other mission to fulfill, I grew into a rather passive woman, having no goal other than those that other people set for me. I am more than de- pendable in my pursuit of these aims; if life went on forever, I would pursue them for all eternity, given that I did not define them my- self. It is in this spirit that I have never wavered in the job I was given (a long time ago now), publishing Art Press. I was in- volved in its creation, and I have dedicated myself sufficiently to the work that I have
    become to some extent identified with it, but I feel more like a driver who must stick to the rails than a guide who knows where the port is. I’ve fucked in the same way. As I was completely available, I sought no more ideals in love than I did in my professional life; I was seen as someone with no taboos, someone exceptionally uninhibited, and I had no reason not to fill this role. My memories of orgies, of evenings spent at the Bois or with one of my lover-friends, are in- terlinked like the rooms in a Japanese palace. You think you are in a closed room until one of the partitions slides back, reveal- ing a succession of other rooms, and if you step forward, more partitions open and close, and if the rooms themselves are nu- merous, the ways of passing from one to the other are infinite.
    But trips to swingers’ clubs hold little place in these memories. Chez Aimé was a differ- ent story: it was the very birthplace of
    fucking. And I have remembered the disap- pointment of Les Glycines because it was the exemplary realization of a dream I had car- ried with me since adolescence. Perhaps it is since my memory is chiefly visual that I re- member more, for example, of Cleopatra—a club opened by some former customers of Chez Aimé, in an extravagant setting in the middle of a shopping center in the 13th ar- rondissement—than Les Glycines’s neat de- cor and the activities to which I abandoned myself there; when all is said and done, they were quite banal. On the other hand, other places and other events are so vivid that I could almost file them by theme.
    There would be the image of a lively line of cars, led by our own car. And as we are going up the service road on the avenue Foch, I have an urgent need to pee. Four or five cars slam on their brakes behind us. As I get out and run over the strip of grass to squat next to a tree, car doors start to open; a few
    people, misunderstanding my maneuver, come toward me. Éric rushes over to inter- cede, the place is open and very well lit. I get back into the car and the cortege sets off again. The parking lot at the Porte de Saint- Cloud: suddenly the attendant sees fifteen or so cars diving into the tunnel one after the other, then surfacing again, in exactly the same order, an hour later. During that hour, I was taken by about thirty men, several of them first held me up against a wall, and then they lay me on the hood. Sometimes the script is complicated by the fact that we have to shake