by Denis Robert
I ask her if she can find a pretext for us to spend three days together.
I’m finishing my book. My publisher is happy. No one in my circle has any suspicion of my parallel life with her. I’m a responsible, well-adjusted, monogamous citizen. I never talk about sex in public.
I use the excuse of a family reunion to take a long weekend. Then I phone my mother to explain that I’ve got too much work to spend two days away. These lies appal me.
The two hours before I see him allow me time to daydream. I want to undress, to be an exhibitionist, to make him hard just by moving. I can easily imagine his eyes taking me in, his little encouraging smile. I can picture my movements perfectly: my hands running up my thighs, dragging my ridiculously short skirt with them, the swing of my hips and my shoulders, my head thrown back and my hair touching him when I turn round to show him my other side. My fingers slipping under the elastic of my skirt and making it fall. My thong which goes the same way. My red nails making ten little marks on my white buttocks when I begin to stroke myself. My body bent forward so he can push himself in between my breasts, deep, like my smile.
When she enters my office, which luckily is empty at this late hour of the evening, I throw myself on her without bothering to say hello. I pull up her skirt, ask her to turn round. She puts her arms on the wall. I screw her quickly, not bothering whether she’s enjoying it. I bang away and come very fast. She turns round and bites my shoulder till the blood comes.
I don’t mind being welcomed like this, indeed I find his assault rather pleasant after these weeks apart. I protest vaguely, just for form’s sake. He asks me if I’m not afraid of getting raped going around dressed like that. It never crossed my mind. My outfits are intended for him. I see myself through his eyes.
I came too fast. She would like me to get hard again. We play around a bit. I let the phone keep ringing until someone knocks on the door. I ask them to wait. I make her hide in the cupboard, and stick her skirt under my sweater. My seven o’clock appointment comes in.
I’m squatting down in the cupboard. His sperm trickles out on to some newspaper. My arse will be black. His voice lulls me. Once my mother watched me while I was trying on clothes in front of the mirror: a little black dress and knee-high suede boots. I turned and asked her what she thought. She answered very politely that it was perhaps a bit ‘tarty’. I smiled, only too happy that we agreed.
I’ve nothing else to do in this cupboard but play with myself and doze.
I can hear my mother’s laugh. We’re in her little green car. I’m about nine years old. Her laugh when she said: ‘What? You don’t know what getting hard means?’ My girlfriend didn’t know either. We hadn’t encountered the word, despite our sex education classes. My mother laughed, but didn’t explain anything. The next year, during dictation, there was fat Ludo, the one who always came to school in a tracksuit. I was sitting next to him. A gleam in his eye, and a nudge with his elbow: ‘Look, I’ve got a hard-on’. It took that bulge in his velveteen tracksuit pants for me to understand my mother’s laugh. Ludo had spots and yellow teeth. And I made him hard. So young.
I let the interview run on for an hour. I enjoy thinking about her, with my hands in the deep pockets of my trousers. Letting the bloke talk, I touch myself to check. Still hard. When he leaves I open the cupboard door. She smiles at me. She stretches her bare legs. She howls with pain. Cramp. She says I’m a complete bastard to make her suffer like that. Arse in the air, she throws punches into space. I catch her fists and stick my tongue in her mouth. She doesn’t resist. I make her bend down in front of me. I unpack my cock, stiff with waiting.
He sometimes talks to me about prostitution. He says he could sell me to friends or wealthy strangers. Realising that it is possible for me to earn money with my body sends me off into a trance. I’ve always been fascinated by prostitution. The lack of emotion reassures me. Not to be obliged to feel affection, to be free of any attachment, to become an object to be used and with a price, all that lifts a great weight from me. I am not so sure that emotions are necessarily forgotten in relationships like this. The absence of constraints gives a greater freedom, opens the door to a different form of love.
I am thinking of my friend Ernesto. He would pay to have her, I’m sure. I think she’d like that. He mustn’t know that I know her. And then she will tell me all about it. Ernesto is going to marry a girl from Neuilly. Lots of money, great arse.
In the end, I think he’d rather give me away than sell me. When we return in the early hours, after our little tour of the clubs, he tells me that a friend is sleeping at his place and he’d like me to go and join him in his bed. The idea of being apart from him for even a minute doesn’t exactly fill me with joy. I feel lost if he doesn’t participate, even just by watching, in shows that are put on just for him. I find it hard to imagine what kind of pleasure he could get by imagining me with his friend. Perhaps he wouldn’t get any? I hope at least that his satisfaction will be in proportion to the obedience that he’s managed to get from me.
She looks sullen in the morning.
‘So how was it?’
‘It was crap, total crap.’
‘Yes? Why? What happened?’
‘Why didn’t you come?’
‘I couldn’t. I don’t want to fuck with friends. And I am sure you enjoyed yourselves.’
‘That’s one way of putting it… I tried to make him hard but he was embarrassed by the situation. I am not sure he appreciated your wedding present. It put him off to know you were next door. You ought to have gone out.’
‘It’s my home, after all.’
‘I don’t care. If you had really wanted to please him, you shouldn’t have stayed here. You either had to come, or go.’
I don’t feel anything in particular. I feel empty. Not jealous or worried, not excited at the idea of knowing she was fucking someone else. I think I did it to test her obedience. To know that she is so submissive is a little disturbing. Just how far does she want me to go? How far can she go?
Twenty centimetres long, twelve in circumference, my new vibrator is rather well proportioned. It never breaks down, you can count on it 24 hours a day. You can even, if you so desire, dress it in a real false skin in pink latex which takes perfection to the point of imitating the swollen veins of an erect penis. It has an adjustable gentle vibration, which is very pleasant if you manage to ignore the fact that it sounds like an electric mixer when you switch it on.
She asks me if she is supposed to laugh or cry at a gift which heralds lonely nights. I tell her that we have to see each other less often because my wife and daughters are back. I take her to the video shelves to choose a film that we can watch in the sex shop cubicle, while waiting for the peep show to start.
I’m ignorant when it comes to pornography. The only time I’ve ever seen a film of that genre was in my early teens. I was on holiday with my aunt and uncle. I was about as virginal as you could be at this time and they had quite a row about whether they should let me watch such a film. Opinions were divided between fear of shocking me, wanting to make me happy, and trying to help with my education. For an hour I listened to them argue, telling me at the same time that they wouldn’t dare send me to bed. I was thirteen or fourteen. They had rented a vaguely pornographic film. A story about young girls at a boarding-school knocking off the gardener. When I think back to it, I feel rather uncomfortable and I can’t understand what the pleasure was for them. Watching a porn film with the family, what a bizarre idea! I remember being disappointed when, right in the middle of the story, my uncle turned off the TV. The gardener must have got his tool out. I went to bed reluctantly. I don’t think I really felt any pleasure. Vulgarity has a disastrous effect on my libido. Tongues hanging out, obscene expressions on faces, and the dialogue, especially the dialogue, was really awful. ‘Leave a bit for your pal.’ Two girls sharing a cock and a guy as thick as two short planks. Yuk.
As far as I can remember it was a German film. The girls ha
d white breasts and bore the marks left by their pants and bras. I watched it when my parents were out. I also bought some shrink-wrapped Danish books that I hid in the attic. My mother asked my father why I spent so much time up there. ‘Leave him be, he’s just clearing up’, said my father. Between thirteen and fifteen I must have jerked off a thousand times. Later, other hands helped me. My parents never talked about sex in the house, or only jokingly. Sex and its representations were forbidden. Banished. Buried. You either had to live without it or make it a subject for belly laughter. The dirtier the laughter, the better.
Bodies in action fascinate me. In the sex shop you are sitting beside me, with your skirt up, and your smile. We’re warming ourselves up by first watching a video. I find you beautiful. I like watching you enjoying these forbidden images. It’s a real little treat.
It’s time for the six o’clock show. The curtain rises. On the stage a woman with lifeless skin slowly takes her clothes off. She wears a wig as dark as her glasses. Three men in pleated trousers have got their penises out and are masturbating as they circle round her. Hands rubbing, stroking, touching, pushing. All the cocks stretching out towards this one woman.
We try the vibrator in all positions and every speed. On my clit, between my lips. In front. Behind. With Vaseline. In my mouth, without its skin – that’s not bad. The cocks ejaculate one after another on the body of the woman in the wig. Her stomach and face are covered in long, white slicks. I would like to be in her place.
In China, the masters of Tai Chi teach their disciples that avoiding ejaculation prolongs life. We have to store up this nourishing sap, this life-giving energy.
I will die young and wrinkled.
He’s tired and morose. I’m grumbling. We have our first quarrel. Like a lot of men, he devotes a great deal of his life to his work. It’s become a job like any other. He lives off it. I can feel he’s tense, drowning in contrary currents. Yesterday he told me he hadn’t seen his daughters growing up. That’s not my problem. The only time I get from him is between midnight and five in the morning. He doesn’t know me any better than he knows them. What could he say about me? I’m a good fuck. I give good head. I’ll do anything with nothing in return. One day he told me that I was someone very rare. It was supposed to be a compliment. Our three days are reduced to two. He decides to go away, I don’t know where, or for how long. He is very sorry, he can’t do anything else. I think he likes seeing me deeply affected. Hurt. Having believed I was hard as steel, he now sees I’m vulnerable.
I told her that deriving great pleasure from making love with someone isn’t the same as loving them. When I leave she cries for the first time.
I’ve known for a long time that I’m not cut out for happiness. I only have peaceful moments in between long periods of self-analysis. None of this has anything to do with him. To see me weak reassures and flatters him. He doesn’t know what stance to take faced with my sudden outburst of emotion. Where did I go to find all these reserves of pain?
My dependency is first of all a physical one. Our game has driven me crazy. When I feel I may lose him I get withdrawal symptoms. I can’t do anything to prevent this anxiety. I don’t know whether I love him or don’t love him. I don’t care. He blocks out all reflection on the subject. He’s my needle, and my cancer, and my fuel. He makes my life exciting.
You’ve become like a hard drug. You make me forget everything else. You create a fog. You stop me seeing the world around me. You stop me living. You are eating me up from inside. You disgust me. You understand?
I’m asking myself how you’ve managed to make me such a slut. I didn’t have any particular tendencies in that direction. Today you want me to see other men, you don’t want me to get attached…
My dependency only reveals yours.
My husband is away more and more. I go out with a journalist to pass the time. He takes me to the theatre. He’s very kind and patient, can spend two hours talking to me about Italian neo-realism. I met him in the Métro. I was looking at a poster with the week’s cinema listings, and he gave me an animated critique of every film on offer. He asked me to join him and some friends for a meal at their place; I agreed to come and have a drink. I left him two hours later with his phone number scribbled on a beer mat. I waited until I had heard nothing from you for three weeks before calling him.
In the interval at the theatre I rush off to phone you. You ask me to come and join you straight away, although you know very well I am with someone. I try to persuade you to wait for a couple of hours but you’re not having it. I go back to him and explain that I’m terribly sorry but I absolutely have to go, that it is very important for me.
Those are my words, my own words: ‘Very important for me.’
I leave him standing there before he has time to answer. Are all the nights with you worth these humiliations?
Sex needs lies and secrets in order to survive against everything else. There are my daughters, my wife, my plans, the books, the ones I’ve read, the ones I’ve still to read and to write, my memories, my friends, my last illusions, the sport that I have to play if I want to avoid a heart attack. There are dinners at home drooling over the X.X.O. cognac swilling around in the bottom of our fat balloon glasses. There is cocaine. There is the endless, weary repetition of things and ideas. There is the obvious absence of freedom. Boring conversations with friends. My wife going on about her wrinkles and that new liposuction cream that she’s just bought at the gym, and that painter who’s so charming – oh, what’s his name, you know, Claude’s friend? No, I don’t know and I don’t give a shit. There is my nonexistence and the fact that I don’t really know any more what will become of me. The way you look at me is the best thing that has happened for a long time.
I exist in your words and through your caresses. I don’t control my body. I submit totally and unreservedly to your will.
The gift of my body is just a form of exchange.
It’s only fair.
Our pursuit of pleasure is something fragile, it depends entirely on us and our psychological inclinations. Our bodies go into action later on. Contrary to the beliefs of novice voyeurs, there is nothing mechanical about it. This search for danger, this certainty that tomorrow it’ll be over, and this permanent transgression of all the codes of love – is absolutely thrilling.
With her, I can’t see any prohibitions.
Some nights I’d even fuck a tree. Thinking of you.
In my case, it’s the tree that would fuck me. If it had your scent.
I couldn’t live with a girl like her. If her husband and my wife didn’t exist, our story wouldn’t exist either.
An erect penis pointing up at me is a proof of love. I sometimes feel that very deeply yet I have never confused sex and love. I even persist in wanting to separate them, with dubious determination.
Sometimes I shake myself and ask if I really like you. You have never done anything to make me like you. You’ve never shown me more than one side of you. The sexual side.
I am finding it harder and harder not to feel guilty at the secret life we lead. I feel her suffering. I see her waiting for me. She puts up with all my delays and rejections. I try to reverse the roles. I suggest that she calls me when she wants to see me. I know it won’t make any difference.
Whenever he leaves me, he always asks whether I need money. And I always answer yes, firmly and formally.
I have the ambiguous feeling that he must pay for the love he doesn’t give me. I’m not trying to put a price on my body; it’s my self-esteem that needs to be remunerated. I need damages for all the cancelled appointments, the weeks without news, the place that he takes up in my life.
I would like him to buy me so that I can justify making myself completely available to him, so that at last I have a reason to do what I’m doing.
Yesterday she broke a rule. She phoned me at home. I am cross with her. I sometimes imagine that she’ll try to wreck my life. I can see her phoning my wife, my children, calling
me to account. I don’t know if I should make her believe I am going to abandon her. I don’t feel able to abandon her.
I would like him to set me up in a flat and keep the keys. Then he could come whenever he felt like it, for a night, an hour or a minute and I would always be there for him, ready and waiting.
She said to me:
‘I don’t want you to go without coming in my mouth first.’
I don’t think she cried, or at least no more than a brief tear when we were in the bath and she was sitting between my legs. I was soaping her back. I had made her understand that it was soon going to come to an end. Men have a hard time with breaking up. They beat about the bush. So I prevaricated, incapable of being firm. In that bath, with my soft cock resting between the cheeks of her arse, I had the feeling that we weren’t going to go on much longer. She only asked me:
