The Pleasure of M

by Michel Farnac

  The Pleasure of M.

  A Novel by Michel Farnac

  for Catherine

  “Should I be led to understand from your last remark that no man has ever told you what he feels during an orgasm?” It must have been at a café in Paris. He was a snob, of course, but not her, not in the least, and it was usually he who chose the location. They had a long standing agreement, however unspoken, that whatever tricks he may have had up his sleeve, he would never lie. His honesty was painful at times and could make what she thought of as the normal patterns of an affair quite difficult to achieve in her eyes, but it was something that she had never encountered before and it hypnotized her. So though it was his silent dictate, she had entered into it willingly, almost ceremonially, after hanging up that time when she had furiously but unsuccessfully debated against the virtues of unvarnished truth.

  It could have been Venice, the Piazza San Marco with the Viennese wafts of salty air from the lagoon. But Venice is too romantic, not serious enough for the intricacies of a discussion about the ins and outs of male physical pleasure.

  It could have been a sunset on the ocean from one of those fancy restaurants on the coast highway in Malibu. But LA is too fake, not real enough to talk about real orgasms between educated people, something it had long relegated to the flight-‐ weary alienation-‐prone auteurs of the east coast.

  So it must have been Paris. They’d never met and never would, so each time they did, it was he planting a décor, stunningly vivid, that took them there. It was as if he captured each place he’d been to and distilled some essence thereof into little vials that he would have tied to the inside of his rainbow overcoat, pulling one at each encounter, popping its tiny glass cork and letting the genie out as a whirlwind that engulfed her senses, and transported her by some mystical Baudelairian correspondence to some amazing artificial paradise. He knew exactly what this was doing to her and loved how she liked to often mention how she came from potatoes, her way of reminding him, as if it were needed, how exotic these settings felt to her. He, on the other hand, came straight out of a book.

  She called him Michel. It was the name by which she had first heard of him and this had, as it often did, caused a short-‐lived misunderstanding as to the gender of the personage. Her first thought upon hearing the name had been “don’t tell me this brute wants me to talk to his new mistress!” But in truth nothing should be assumed from this as the thought was indeed the most natural one that could have occurred to her given several facts. That Alexander, who had just uttered Michel’s name, had so often behaved with her as a brute would rank high on the list. Then, the exact phrasing Alexander had used had, through a coincidental alliteration, given its full weight to the last mix-‐up: “I think you would enjoy speaking with a new colleague of mine on the studio bench. He’s a keyboardist from Europe called Michel.” And finally, who could blame her for hearing “Michelle” instead of “Michel”? But once the misunderstanding had been cleared, her anger was revealed to be the first in a long list of emotions, each a vividly colorful pearl in the new strand she would be adding to the necklace of her lives: perplexity, suspicion, befuddlement, sheepishness, curiosity and, more importantly in the end, pleasure. If one were to consider only the first and last in the chain of words, thoughts and events that had led from “Find” to “Michel”, one could be forgiven for thinking that Michel was Alexander’s gift in direct response to a plea that she had explicitly made. But when, in anger, she had asked her estranged lover to “Find me someone else to speak with!”, it had been a rhetorical gesture designed to make Alexander understand that she needed him, and that even if they now lived three thousand miles apart and even if she could admit that their affair was over, she could not bear the thought of never speaking with him again. Alexander had understood this quite well but had also heard the plea in a different light, as if she herself had answered her own conundrum. He’d mulled it over a long time, going through a list of every male he knew, testing in his mind the level of compatibility. But nothing had come of it and the idea had lain dormant until Michel was hired to join the bench of studio musicians that Alexander played saxophone on. Catherine’s continued and insisting presence in his life was proving a crescendo of alienation and paranoia for Alexander. He had made the move from New York to Los Angeles in large part to get away from her as a means to preserve his fragile marriage, convinced that he could only reform his skirt-‐chasing habits by first removing from sight every skirt he had ever chased. Perhaps Michel would alleviate the pain that he was about to inflict upon her through permanent silence. Needless to say she had no idea that her first contact with Michel would be Alexander’s de facto cue to never speak to her again. And in time, Michel would show himself more than equal to the task.

  Michel called her Catherine. He had asked for her permission, of course, or as a diplomat might say, he had obtained consent as a formality. A month or so into their relationship he had realized that there was something irksomely awkward about how they addressed each other even as with each successive conversation, they got to know each other a tad more. He had begun in earnest the task of weaving the rich and heavy tapestry of the dream they would share and he quickly saw that his discomfort was rooted in a growing asymmetry between them. It was clearly apparent that she was deriving much more pleasure in speaking his name than he in speaking hers. Her “Hello, Michel” dripped with ever increasing pleasure, becoming ever more melodious and lengthier. Having understood this and considering how much pleasure he derived from the rest of the conversation, he did his best to iron out this kink only to realize that the very image was the clue he needed. The name she used was as a fold in the sheet he laid on, almost impossible to pinpoint and yet in then end an insufferable shortcut, impeding his ability to have the real her within his reach, a façade that he clearly had the right not to be subjected to. And so the cold, wretchedly impersonal “Hello, Cathy” became the luscious “Hello, Catherine” that he would forever cherish. No-‐one had called her that since her father had passed away. It was a striking example of the power he already held over her and liberally wielded, methodically turning to dust her every defense by simply obtaining her consent, and so every time it felt as if he was calling her by her true name, a name for her that he shared with no-‐one. Later, he would tell her about places where people were given their true name in secret, revealed to them at coming of age, known not even to their parents, and about countries where parents gave their children their real name in secret, away from the tyranny of the missionaries who imposed “good, Christian names.”

  They called each other as ofte
n as their lives allowed, usually once or twice a month, but mainly they corresponded electronically. The frequency of their communication was remarkably steady and they often wrote once a day, but the intensity of their correspondence was generally dictated by his work schedule. She had a nine-‐to-‐five job and usually wrote to him from her office when she arrived there in the morning. His line of work implied an erratic schedule, and he mostly wrote to her in the evenings, often late. Because of the three hour time difference between the two coasts, this meant that they usually wrote to each other while the other was asleep, which added to the onyric quality of their affair. But from the start Michel had put a twist to the dream: within two week of their first conversation, they were both feeling the signs of a rapidly burgeoning emotional connection and she mentioned that at times she felt as though she might wake up and find that he did not exist. “But instead” he said, “you wake up to find that you are still dreaming of me, which makes me just about as real as it gets for a dream. Think of it as lucid dreaming.” He was reminded of the Offenbach version of the story of Troy when Paris, upon visiting Helen during the night, assures her she is dreaming and they engage in a beautiful aria: “’tis but -‐ ‘tis but a dream of Love….” This was his realm, and he knew to proceed carefully. His European upbringing came with a thorough classical education and as a young man he had favored the study of XVIIIth century romantic literature, first and foremost the Dangerous Liaisons, the epistolary masterpiece by Choderlos de Laclos. He had always seen this book as a continual master class in the art of using ink to make hearts vibrate and throb. And so he warned her that he could (and would) make the dream very vivid, thus installing his habit of obtaining consent. And so she began her habit of giving consent without probing the scale of what she was consenting to, a form of trust that touched him greatly and that he never abused.

  In all fairness, it was she who had immediately set them on the path to a world of sensations. When Alexander had surprised her with the gift of this stranger that she could talk to about anything she wanted, she had been forced to confront questions about herself and her motivations in clinging to Alexander when he so clearly wanted out. He wanted out of what he had started. He wanted to slam shut a door he had pried open. No, worse than that, he wanted to un-‐ring a bell. Alexander was a predator, a married skirt-‐chaser so emotionally immature that sex was to him like an addictive substance whose draw was insurmountable. When he had set his sights on Cathy, he’d had thoughts of a pearl oyster that he would need to shuck hoping to find a pearl. A more proper and respectable lady you could not find. A devout Catholic and mother of two, the word ‘affair’ was not a part of her common vocabulary, relegated to the same page in the dictionary as ‘Hell’, ‘Sin’ and others. She had met her husband in college and notwithstanding a couple of chaste escapades in high-‐school, he had been the sum-‐total of her sexual knowledge. After fifteen years of marriage this body of knowledge was at best stagnant though more likely decaying at that point, a withering spiral notebook with a few pages of half-‐ erased penciled-‐in scribbles buried deep inside of her. Alexander, suspecting as much, had reached in and found it. As he’d suspected, the first page still held its ornate title and decorations, drawn when she was still naïve and curious: Sex. He seduced her with ease and panache and proceeded to make her discover that she was a sexual being, capable of emotions and feelings unknown to her and, yes, capable of pleasure. Alexander had given her this most amazing of gifts: the knowledge that she could be brought to orgasm by a man. But it would take her a while to understand that this was what had made her a changed woman and for many different reasons, not least of which was how overwhelming Alexander’s own motives and deceptions had been. For him, Catherine was but one in a long list of conquests whose sole purpose had been to assuage his ever more extreme desires. While no-‐one with an open mind would think of Alexander as a man with perverse tastes, his insistence to Cathy that all men liked such things showed in retrospect that he understood his own tastes to be more risqué than most. The unfortunate result was that having spent nearly all of her life ensconced in the land of propriety, morality and exclusively reproductive and therefore infrequent sex, she now sat on a pendulum that had swung to a world where all men like mild bondage, props and sex toys, and that she enjoyed them too because she wanted if nothing else to reach the heights that Alexander was thrusting her to. And so the conclusion was rather self-‐evident that the only reason this Michel would want to engage in conversation with her was to talk about sex, kinky sex. True to herself she had resolved that unlike with Alexander, with Michel she would be in control of the relationship. Without much self-‐awareness she spent the time leading up to the encounter rearranging the ground beneath her to make it as stable as possible. The second time that Michel called her, she used the word “cock” for the sole purpose of asking him if it shocked him, perhaps her way of asserting that she could play ‘ball’ with the best of them. His response foreshadowed the closing figure of the minuet they would engage in during the next couple of weeks: “I’m a little surprised, but not shocked. I’d wondered, of course, what your word of choice might be, but since I did not know you, it was pure speculation. I myself prefer the word phallus.” He paused for a second, for effect. ‘I find it has a certain ring to it. And it works in many languages.” What traveled down her back upon hearing those words could hardly be called a shiver, given its intensity, and it left her spine at once frozen and liquefied.

  The minuet, while choreographed in its broad moves by Michel, came to be because of Alexander’s attempts at protecting himself all too late from his own scheming, a predicament not unknown to him. This time, though, his motivations were quite different. Alexander’s main purpose in breaking it off completely with Cathy was not what one could expect from a philanderer of his caliber, but indeed quite the opposite. It was a desperate and last ditch attempt at saving his marriage, at foreswearing infidelity, at not taking for granted the one thing that mattered and meant something in his life: his wife. When he approached Michel and asked him outright is he would be interested in having conversations of a sexual nature with a ‘friend’, it had not taken long for him to admit that it was his former mistress and to explain the situation. But in the days that followed, Alexander realized with distress that he was giving a colleague full view of his innermost and darkest fantasies, and he began making abstruse remarks to Michel about Cathy as a way to distance himself from what Michel was about to discover about him. This culminated in the infamous remark: “She likes pretty kinky stuff, you know… bondage.” While this did not disturb Michel per se and he assured his friend that he was well able to engage in mild forms of exploration, he immediately decided that if things were to click between him and the mysterious woman, he would soon shift things to mo
re mild-‐ mannered activities. In his mind, excursions into pain and coercion during sexual play were purely a means to provide occasional unexpected spice into a relationship, and not an appropriate backdrop. He had no interest in the exploration of the boundaries between pleasure and pain, a topic of some fascination for Alexander. In addition to a lack of interest, Michel knew of the danger in such explorations of finding that the boundaries can be shifted by their very probing, a danger in part the cause of Alexander’s predicament.

  Cathy (as she was still known) was bold in her conversations with Michel because she wanted to arouse him at her command and had been persuaded that men reacted strongly to such imagery. Michel was her first chance at expounding in her own terms her newfound sexual identity. She needed to seduce him as an affirmation of the reality of this new chapter in her life. The fleeting thought may even have crossed her mind of seducing this Michel person and dumping him presto as a way to get back at Alexander… or to get Alexander back. Alexander had called it quits a couple of times already, dumping her unceremoniously with hurtful monologues in voice-‐mails left on her work answering machine, and twice come back to seduce her again, knowing that she had no way to resist him. But this time, with him having moved across the country, she had a feeling deep inside that it could truly be over, and it was tearing her apart. She had a great husband, two wonderful children, a lovely job at city hall working with the community, a seat on the school board in her posh New York suburb. She was a respected and outstanding member of the community, the very image of rectitude and devotion, seen in church every Sunday. And yet she had never felt as alive as when she had been seeing Alexander. Even her marriage had benefited from her affair, and having dreaded marital sex for years, she now found herself silently bemoaning the lack of skill and endurance that her husband displayed (the husband meanwhile attributed his wife’s sexual reawakening to his own prowess and felt like a superhero). She feared that she might lose all of this, that Alexander’s silence could make it all go away and turn the carriage back into a pumpkin.