by Denis Robert
‘Why now?’
It’s true, why now?
Do there really have to be reasons?
I used to be a bit disturbed by the fact that procreation didn’t appeal to me in the slightest. I didn’t know where that came from. Now my best friend has just called me up. She is pregnant. It wasn’t exactly a surprise. Her joy depresses me. She can’t wait to see me and tell me all about it. When we meet, I get the whole lot. The visit to the gynaecologist, the photo of the embryo, the dilemma over the choice of names. Now that she’s got this little one in her womb, I can’t stand her. No bigger than a lump of chewing-gum. Her new condition suddenly gives her every right in the world, starting with the right to be utterly boring. Even worse, she admits it:
‘Oh god, I’m so boring, aren’t I?’
No comment. From the moment when the little red stain appeared on her test strip she became another person. She’s a mother, a real woman. She gets on my nerves. It gives her an unquestionable superiority towards me and a completely new legitimacy. Her boyfriend – they aren’t married yet – comes and joins us. He looks modestly triumphant. He tells me how the thing is developing. At six weeks, it measures two centimetres. You can already make out the head and the beating heart…
I can’t remember any more after how many weeks I had my abortion. Did it already have hands and feet?
There was a point when I wanted to have a child with you. Just once, in a moment of depression. The idea of living alone with your bastard was suddenly comforting. I didn’t see it as a way of trapping you. It wasn’t revenge. No, it was just so that for once I’d have something that belonged to you. You’ve always kept everything for yourself, even your sperm.
The other day I screwed her before I caught the train.
I sat facing him. I put on my little kilt because that’s the one he likes best. I enjoy our daytime encounters. He had a quarter of an hour to devote to me. He came up to the tiny room a friend had lent me. It was cold; we didn’t undress. As he was leaving he said ‘I’d told you it would be quick’, as if he was excusing himself.
After a good fuck, I felt relaxed but also ill at ease. I am disgusted with myself for having devoted so much time and energy to it.
I am finding it harder and harder to tolerate my husband touching me. Or, to be more precise, I can tolerate it, but I no longer feel very much at all. I put up with it, like wasted time. I feel his somewhat limp penis clumsily penetrating me. He helps himself in with his finger, doesn’t stroke me. I would like to be less dry. To achieve that, I know just what to do. I think of my wild nights in all those clubs where my husband will never set foot. And then I forget that this penis is attached to him, and can thus have a bit of pleasure. Then, when I come back to my senses, I’m a bit vexed to see that he has taken my sudden revival of sexual excitement as being linked to him. Afterwards, he goes to sleep or gets up to read or work. Occasionally, he fucks me from behind. He looks satisfied. If you only knew.
I don’t know what I can come up with to turn her on even more. I could invite three of four friends for the weekend, and not tell them anything. She could have them one after another without anyone noticing. In the toilet, in the garden, in the kitchen, wherever. Then she would tell me all about it.
I watch him pacing him up and down in front of me. Sometimes he’ll brush my cheek or my breast with his hand. He looks at his watch and asks if I’d like to go for a drink. Have I ever said no? It’s five o’clock. I didn’t know that the clubs were open in the afternoon. Who can possibly go to sex clubs in the daytime? Blokes, obviously. There are five or six of them scattered about in the main room, all alone, all holding glasses. The lights revolve, pathetically, on the empty dance floor. It’s as sad as a Saturday afternoon in a café in a suburban shopping centre. We cross the room without stopping at the bar. My presence must be unhoped-for, as I should have guessed from the look the porter gave me. I imagine that they’ve all followed right behind us, without the customary little pause, the touch of politeness. They are all dressed, surrounding me, completely nude.
How has this happened so fast?
Then my friends could enjoy her as they chose, together or alone. They would be free to indulge all their fantasies. She would be their plaything.
I could have her fuck a whole lot of people, I could arrange a whole lot of evenings, but I don’t have the energy to do it. Her submissiveness is exhausting.
Arms hold me up, make me a living doll in their greedy hands. My fingers find straps above my head and hang on to them. I wrap my legs round someone’s waist. He’s behind me, he pulls my arse cheeks apart. He makes a sign, I hear the word ‘condom’ before feeling him penetrate me. I’m balanced on their penises like an acrobat. We’re in the ring of a little circus. Two strips of low wall form a circle with two entrances that can be closed off by attaching heavy cords. I see that the cords are in place; it seems everyone is in the ring.
There are hands and cocks and me, and I’m already not there.
I remember being worried about his flight. I got dressed again very quickly, I think someone said thank you to me, just thanks, while watching me leave.
I got home early. My husband asked me if I’d had a good day. I said ‘Yes’ and went into the kitchen to make a mushroom omelette.
There is something exquisitely pleasurable about submission. It’s hard to explain to anyone who’s too rational. To be submissive and consenting does not mean losing power or dignity. Quite the contrary.
One day she asked me to beat her till I drew blood. I put this off. What pleasure could I get from hitting her?
One day she asked me to cut her with a razor and lick her blood. I thought of that on the plane. The hostess smiled at me.
She came into my life with my consent. I had imagined something else between us. I feel like I’m at the wheel of a car that I can’t control. Since she’s been there, no other woman excites me. I don’t even know whether she excites me any more.
I did a test in Elle. ‘Have you got the infidelity bug?’ As if I needed to know. The result told me that I was ‘an easy lay’. I find this description rather offensive.
I am ‘at risk’. My doctor told me. Even if I use condoms when I have sex, the number of partners increases the chances of infection. I can catch the virus even if there is no ejaculation. The virus can be carried in the spermatic fluid. Condoms must be used from the first moments of penetration.
I can’t manage to convince myself. Never to feel the warmth of skin, the softness of the penis pushing into me. You have never fucked me without a condom. You’re not crazy. No doubt you see me as a breeding ground of microbes. You must imagine all kinds of monsters eating up my womb. And then you go soft, and my mini-skirts make no difference.
I like the feel of rubber. I like being shrink-wrapped when I fuck her so that I can come in her mouth later on. I find it even more pleasurable to come into a vacuum.
And what about all the sperm I’ve swallowed? The doctor in his white shirt gives me a knowing smile. There may be a risk but it hasn’t been proven. It depends on the state of my gums. Do they ever bleed? I run my tongue over my teeth. Yes, sometimes.
He makes it very clear to me that it would be better to use condoms for fellatio. ‘That would be safer’, he says, smiling, looking me straight in the eye. This guy can have no idea what a piece of lubricated rubber tastes like. This guy can have no idea what a cock tastes like.
Since I’ve known her, I’ve had regular tests. Every time I feel the same emotion. The letter which is slow to arrive.
I run to the letter-box as soon as the postman has come. Why am I so impatient to get the answer? I would prefer not to know. That would be simpler. Not to think about it. Forget all that. My father, who knows precious little about my life but knows his daughter well enough told me that one day I’d die of AIDS. It would only be fair, right? That’s what I tell myself when I’m feeling low and my life looks black.
She leaves messages on the mobile I’ve
just bought. Dozens of them. She says she would like me to fuck her in broad daylight in a big department store.
She arranges a rendezvous for five o’clock. She’ll be wearing a long skirt with nothing underneath. One seam of the skirt will be open all the way up to her backside. She’ll be on the bedroom linens floor. She used that word ‘backside’. For the first time she’s taking the initiative. I am not sure how to act.
I’m in the Métro, looking at people. How many are being unfaithful to their wives? I think about the air I’m breathing that’s already been in all these mouths. How many have sworn to be faithful forever?
I’m not really sure what I’m looking for or what’s happening to me. One thing for sure: don’t ask myself any questions. If I ask myself questions, I’ll lose him. And if I don’t ask, I’ll lose myself too.
One day I remember you said that ‘it is better to lose yourself in passion than to lose your passion.’ You said that to me casually on the phone. It was well before our first visit to a club. You cannot know how right I thought you were that day.
I wrote the sentence on the first page of the little notebook you gave me in which you asked me to record all that I felt. A kind of diary of our sexual adventures, you said. I jotted down the sentence in the heat of the moment. And then I didn’t record much more until yesterday, when you quoted that line from Serge Gainsbourg: ‘Physical love is a dead end’.
I don’t like writing, I prefer to talk. What little I note down I do thinking that you will read it. I don’t know where I am any more. There’s a force pushing and pulling me that I can’t control. I feel it inside me like molten lava and I cannot resist it.
What are you going to do with all this chaos in my head?
At five o’clock in the department store, I ask her to bend over and pull her dress open to show me her arse. This she does. We eventually fuck on the fire exit up against a wall. She takes off the condom to enjoy sucking me more. I come in her mouth. I ask her not to swallow. Absolutely not.
We walk for a long time. In the cold and the rain. Now and then we stop and the sperm changes mouth. We are walking in the cold and we are the only ones to be warm.
I wonder whether our desire to fuck has anything to do with the times in which we live. There have always been whores and brothels, but how did it all work before? Were people so furtive about sex? Things must have happened more naturally. Perhaps even in front of the children. It was the Church and morality that killed off this natural behaviour and invented frustration. And as a result, punishment, perversion and sophistication. So in a sense, long live the Church! In my dreams when I was very young I remember getting very excited at the idea of sucking off Jesus.
What is forbidden has nothing to do with morality or religion. We simply change where we place our taboos, like a cursor on a scale of values, according to the period.
We fuck our way through the end of the millennium. We’re lost in the new night that will last for a thousand years. Rootless and fearless, we go on fucking, roused only by the frenzy inside us. We fuck because that is how we conquer death.
I love sucking him. I know he likes it. He tells me so. I think he says so because he knows I really love doing it. Because I really love doing it to him. He must surely feel the pleasure that I get from doing it to him. I don’t think I do it especially well. I can’t do it as well as a professional, but I’m sure I get more pleasure from it than she would.
In fact I could do nothing but.
There is no one with whom I can talk about sex as well or as freely as with her. I could never experience that with anyone else.
After this, what could I make up?
With whom could I find this complicity?
With whom could I find again this obsessive absence of affect?
‘I don’t want to do it any more with my husband, you know. With you I always want to do it. There are times when I can’t think of anything else. But never with him.’
‘It doesn’t exactly turn me on when you talk about your husband.’
‘And why is that? It’s you who wants to leave me, is it not?’
‘Yes.’
‘You want to leave me but you don’t want to hear me speak about my husband. But it interests me to know that you fuck your wife at least twice a week. Everything interests me. For how long, in what positions, whether you come at the same time. Why do you think it could hurt me to know all these things? Does it annoy you to talk to me about them? Can you talk to me about everything else except that?’
‘That’s not what I said.’
‘Everything you do interests me, even if you do it with others, in fact especially if you do it with others. I want to be your closest confidant. I want to be the one who knows you best. I am ready to do anything for you.’
‘Don’t talk shit. We’re not playing a game here.’
‘I’m not playing a game.
‘Stop…’
‘You’re afraid and that makes me angry.’
She says that she’s happy to be with me because she knows that I will never leave my wife. She says that I love my wife more than her. She’s absolutely sure of it.
She is like no one else. I don’t know where she gets all this strength from.
I would have liked to live this story without any emotions. To tell myself that he is just the means by which I can realise my fantasies, that the object of my desire isn’t necessarily what it seems to be.
He told me: ‘I don’t think you love me.’ A great wave of doubt overwhelms me. How do others see so clearly through my fog?
All around me people talk endlessly about love, men who go on about the love of their life, women who tell me about the man of their life. They are all too sure of themselves, they make me want to throw up.
We’ve got company. This is rather unusual. Our little nights out had always been secret but on this particular evening one of my friends was with us, accompanied by his wife. Which is no doubt why we came to this crappy club. No hint of dark corners for swopping, no under-dressed, over-made-up waitresses. No smell of sperm and sweat beneath the peppermint haze of airfreshener. Just people, both sexes, equally represented and not yet intermingled, who are dancing and even look like they’re enjoying themselves.
My friend is a regular. He leaves the thousand francs at the door. He doesn’t fuck much. He’s a voyeur. His wife is younger than him. She must be near forty-five but doesn’t look it. Face lift.
I quickly downed a drink and went off to dance. Was there something special about me that evening? Perhaps I was already in a bit of a trance, one which made my swaying hips enticing. Very soon I felt various wandering hands. I fended them off because I was just fine on my own wrapped up in the music. Just me with a little pearl on my belly-button, on my own private trip to the latest tracks from DJ Cam. He wasn’t there and I like it to be him who directs operations. I lack confidence on my own. This went on for a short while, there were two or three of them who were trying different approaches and me dancing alone and trying to avoid them. When he came over, a space opened up around me. He’d brought his girlfriend on to the centre of the floor. She stood in front of me, her hands began fluttering over my body. Without quite touching me, she traced the shape of my shoulders, my breasts, moved down across my waist and hips, around the curve of my arse, lightly stroked between my legs, then moved her hands up across my stomach to my neck. I slowed my movements, my legs a little apart, now pinned to the spot, arms by my sides. I am now swaying only to the movement of her hands. In two steps and a few efficient moves, my skirt and little jumper end up at my feet. There I stand in bra and pants in front of this woman who was how old? Forty? Fifty? I close my eyes.
We did a line of coke. We drank five or six vodka tonics. She’s completely out of it this evening. She blames me for having abandoned her for several weeks. My friend’s wife has taken her hand and is sucking her fingers one by one. She does so as if they were tiny little cocks that she wanted to make come.
Her mouth has left my thumb and moved on up my arm, she’s sucking me, licking me, biting me and leaving long, shiny streaks on my skin. My pussy is already sending out distress signals, demanding attention. I am aware of every part of my body: wrists, elbows, armpits. They are all directly connected to my pussy. She kisses my neck. In normal times, a simple kiss above the hollow of my shoulder, just where the fine hair on my neck starts to grow, can give me an electric shock that runs right through from my feet to my head. I’m afraid of coming. My mouth had the time to attempt an astonished ‘oh’ when her bites became deeper. Her lips were already stuck to mine. She was sucking my tongue as if she were trying to swallow my whole body. My pussy began to pulse like a second heart and the muscles of my thighs trembled.
It reminds me of those skinned frogs in biology lessons to which we gave electric shocks to test their reflexes. Sex can reduce you this state. Sex can be a lobotomy.
I feel happy. This little nothing that has gone into my head like a rush of cold wind has made me calm. Only my nerves and muscles are sending me signals. I am a field of pleasure.
My friend’s wife kept her clothes on. She’s an expert. A fine lesbian. You are lying on your back, naked, your legs pulled up on your chest. My friend observes the scene without displaying any obvious emotion. But I have a feeling he’s intrigued by you. He’s smiling. Like a good voyeur, he keeps his distance. His wife signals me to come over.
