Happiness

by Denis Robert

  You come to get me after she has finished with me. Left me there, melted. I would like to keep all these marks, so that every orgasm leaves its petrified trace on my body. Then I could have them to admire, like a collection of little treasures. The whip has one advantage over the caress. It leaves a more enduring trace. The body forgets its suffering. I would like to be marked so that my body could not forget any more. He comes up and says ‘Come on, we’re going home’ with a sleepy, contented sigh. I’ve never heard such an utterance from anyone but him. That mixture of indifference and attachment. He hands me my clothes which I put back on in a slow and disorderly fashion. He keeps my pants in his jacket pocket. Once we’re outside, the cold revives the damp cheeks of my arse. I’ll need to use all my powers of invention when I get home. The bigger the lie, the more they believe it. In any case, my husband told me that it was a good idea for me to have an evening out on Friday with a girlfriend.

  My brain fried, haggard face, awash with alcohol, I prepare for the ritual. Garage. Shower. Brush teeth. Dump underwear in the washing machine. Channel surfing on TV. Sleep. ‘You got back late last night, didn’t you, darling?’ ‘Yes, I was with Gérard and his wife. We drank a fair bit. I’m shattered.’

  I’ve learned to understand him. He is someone rather solitary and bossy, incapable of delegating except when it comes to sex with me. That’s his new hobby: fucking me via intermediaries. Man, woman: anything goes. This is how he’d like to love me. It frees him from a great burden.

  He’d like to see me happy with my husband. He thinks I still love him. I don’t understand the scale of values of love. At what point does love stop being love, and why? And what is it called then?

  I met Béatrice at a club. She likes sex. She’s single, a lawyer, no children, no taboos (she says). A few days later I send her to Béatrice’s place and ask her to wait for me there for a few hours. I wonder who will make the first move.

  I’m waiting for him at this girl’s place, smoking cigarettes and drinking champagne. She’s telling me her life story, all about her bisexuality. We’re drinking a lot. He turns up, kisses her, smiles at me, too complicit for her not to get the picture. I go and take a shower then wander about naked for a bit in front of her. Just so she can see. I lean down to him to whisper that I’d like to lick her. I know he’d like that. Smiling, he shares this with her. She roars with laughter. She has pretty teeth. I’m in a fever. I gingerly explore her skin, which is very soft. She remains passive, but opens her legs. My head snuggles down there while my hands run over her body. I fill myself with her smell, her sex is so tight, like a teenager’s. My hands move down to the inside of her thighs and I pull them apart slipping my tongue into her crack. His gasp encourages me, my tongue laps her, at first just from bottom to top without going inside. My nose rubs against the bristle of her pubic hair, I would like to drown in this sea. When I can feel she’s dripping wet my hands open her lips and my tongue ventures right down inside her, I’m exploring her, drinking her, melting into this double. I would like to make her come violently. I feel her orgasm slowly approaching and I decide to penetrate her with my whole hand while my tongue only exists for her clitoris. When her sex starts to dance, her lips opening and closing like a hungry mouth, her vagina sucking in my fingers, I experience a strange feeling of success. I climb back up her body to kiss her and make her share her scents.

  Then I look at you with infinite pride.

  Without taking my eyes off her, I turn Béatrice over and fuck her as well and as deeply as I can.

  You kiss me and I feel a violent wave rising up inside me. It could be called ecstasy, or just happiness. I close my eyes, aware of the smile that fills my face.

  It reassures me to see him so happy. He takes me home by car. There’s a long silence. I am crying uncontrollably. I am afraid he’s going to leave me. Perhaps it flatters him to see me so weak. I must be starting to disgust him. In the end, nothing that I am doing, nothing that he makes me do, is in the least bit admirable.

  She’s crying. I don’t know what to say to her. I let the silence continue and the tears flow. I don’t feel any compassion towards her. I do not feel I am responsible for her suffering. She chose this story as much as I did. I will never be able to give her anything other than what I am giving her right now. She’s crying for herself. That saddens me a little for she is the most honest person I know.

  When you told me how much you respected me, I couldn’t hold back my tears.

  I want time. I want him to use me for his pleasure, and thus for mine. I do not want love and above all I do not want his respect.

  I give the orders but it is she herself who makes the rules. Awareness of the emptiness we’re heading towards is becoming too strong. We will never be objects for each other. Yet we must reach that state. I try to tell her this. She stops crying, asks if I’d like her to suck me off.

  If he had set me up in a studio flat, the first thing I’d have done would be to buy a bed. The bed. I would have put it in the middle of the room, an iron bedstead with a canopy and bars everywhere with coloured drapes to make it less blatant. This is not a bed made for sleep. This bed will plainly state: ‘Fulfil all your fantasies with me.’ This bed will be just like me when I go out in the street with my thighs still damp and passers-by can clearly read the message I’m sending out: ‘Warning, sex object.’ Just thinking about this bed makes me wet.

  It was torture. I thought about her all the time.

  I saw an old tramp outside my place. I know him, his name is Louis. He fried his brains in the Algerian war. He lives in an abandoned garage. I thought of taking him home, making him take a bath, and offering him my little geisha. No, in fact I thought that he shouldn’t take a bath. I wanted him to fuck her in all the filth, I wanted to see her white skin in the middle of a heap of dirt. I wanted to see her begging me to stop. Actually, I don’t think Louis would ever agree.

  I content myself by pointing the old guy out to her from the car one day when we passed him. I drove that way for that very reason. I asked her if she’d be up for fucking a bloke like him if I gave the order. She said, ‘Yes, of course’. That is all I need. That kills me.

  He wants to see me settled, at any cost, and to be back in love with my husband. He thinks this will put an end to my suffering. He’s trying to soothe his conscience. I find myself making a joke of it, saying all he has to do is find me a new husband. Less of a joke than it seems, since I am ready to accept any choice he makes for me. I wish he had the courage to go as far as me in our story. I don’t want much, just that he takes responsibility for, and accepts, what I have become for him.

  The detachment that he displays on the pretext of stopping me suffering doesn’t convince me. Why has he still not understood that our relationship doesn’t have to bother itself with that?

  I’ve been busy with work. My wife can’t get over it:

  ‘I’d forgotten what it’s like to see you up and about so early!’

  I had almost forgotten her. At home I make chilli con carne and we invite Ernesto and his wife.

  ‘You seen her again, that chick from the last time?’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Because I might possibly be interested in trying it one more time.’

  I don’t answer but pointedly leer at his wife’s arse. He shuts up.

  My wife is full of praise for the new couple that Ernesto and his shrink have formed.

  Throughout dinner I think of you all the time.

  I had decided we had to have an evening of explanations. Getting things out in the open. What do you want from me? I have always had very contradictory ideas about him. Several times I had made up my mind to stop seeing him. I didn’t understand why I should want to see him. I ran through the list. He was nothing special, middle-aged, no sense of humour and smelled of cigarettes. A quick survey of the situation revealed that there really wasn’t much left for me in this little story. And how about the sex clubs? Let’s be honest. The clubs are loathsome
. The stench of mint that even spreads to the street outside, the stairways lit up like some ghastly cabaret, those human monsters with four heads, those arms and legs tangled together, all the horrors of exposed penises, shiny and sticking out and swollen with sperm, and those pussies wide open and red, those breasts kneaded by hairy hands, all that whinnying, that sweat, those folds of fat, the sound of hands wanking, closed eyes, goggling eyes, that repetitive coital music, eyes glowing in the dark, this trance.

  I am not a porno girl.

  Do I only have my arse to offer to the world? All this sodomy, all this swinging. I would so much like to rid myself of all this shit.

  When I opened the door she gave me an odd look. We hadn’t seen each other for a fortnight. I could feel that this wasn’t the evening for an adventure. She wore wide black trousers and a little knitted top. Very little makeup, very elegant. I got the impression that she didn’t necessarily want to fuck. First we went out to eat in a very classy Chinese restaurant. The charm was broken. I’m angry with myself for not having any new ideas. We drink two bottles of rosé and some hot sake. In the car I do two lines of coke. We don’t touch each other and we head off to a club. An unpleasant feeling of being regulars.

  Some American hard-core starlet is on the big screen. She is trying to beat the gang-bang record. To fuck eighty-two men in a row. I leave after number twenty. I counted.

  I ask her if she would enjoy taking her place. She doesn’t answer, doesn’t smile, looks sad and distant.

  When I saw him, his ridiculous bunch of flowers in his hand, my murderous thoughts vanished. It wasn’t the flowers but his presence, his scent, his self-conscious air. I regretted my outfit. I should have stuck with my thigh boots and mini-skirt. I should have made him understand that I wanted him more than ever to look after me. Impossible to imagine sleeping when he took me home at 3 a.m. My husband is snoring. I don’t really know what to do, I smoke three cigarettes in ten minutes and I decide to masturbate in front of the mirror. The cocaine makes orgasms unlikely. I want to go back to the club to finish myself off with all those who stayed there. I look at myself in the mirror and quite like what I see. I revive my makeup with very red lipstick of the kind I’ve never used before, and decide to go back out. But I don’t go anywhere, I sit on the ground in the garage and cry. I get drunk on pastis and I go to bed at exactly the moment that my husband turns round. I rub myself against his leg. I’m burning up.

  Before switching out the light, I kiss my wife’s shoulder.

  Last night or rather this morning, I threw up all the alcohol and sperm I’d swallowed during the night.

  I decide to forget. I force myself to work hard and do the cooking. Ten days pass or rather don’t pass. In the end nothing really passes at all. He phones and my voice once more answers ‘Yes’ when he asks if I’d like to see him. That always amazes me.

  What is he expecting from me exactly? I just can’t work it out. His reproaches when I don’t call him for a while are in total contradiction with the disinterest that he continues to cultivate in my presence.

  I call her back with the intention of making an excuse but she isn’t there. Just as well. I try again a few hours later without success. I tell myself that maybe this is how we can get out of it. Gently. But I know it isn’t possible. Finally, one Thursday around midday:

  ‘I missed you.’

  ‘Me too’, she says.

  Shit… I promise her that the next time she will have a surprise. I decide to take her to the country.

  ‘You took your time calling me. How long have you been there?’

  ‘Since yesterday, I went to my parents’ place first.’

  ‘Did you miss me?’

  ‘Yes, I missed you.’

  ‘So let’s meet, what would you like to do?’

  ‘I’d like you to prepare something good for me.’

  ‘What kind of thing?’

  ‘Something violent.’

  ‘Get ready for Saturday, I’ll pick you up around nine a.m.’

  ‘Saturday’s no good, my husband will be there, but I can do Sunday.’

  ‘OK, I’ll call you to confirm.’

  I hesitate to tell him again of my overwhelming desire to be beaten. I know he doesn’t really want to do it, isn’t sure what pleasure it could bring him. Me neither. For some days I’ve been developing an increasingly precise idea of what might unfold:

  I am standing, my wrists and ankles secured by very tight leather straps. My legs and arms are spread wide. I am on offer. When I move my arms a little, the leather burns my skin. The first pain, a foretaste of that which is to come. I try a few movements to assure myself that I’m powerless and to arouse the fear and pleasure of absolute submission. I let myself look, some guys are starting to wank, my eyes waver over them. They don’t have any consistency to me. The only thing that interests me is their penises, all sticking up in my direction.

  She doesn’t speak to me while we’re on the motorway. We’re heading for an old farm belonging to a friend of Ernesto. We’ll be in one of the barns. I show her the place, the beams, the pulleys. Then we go for a stroll round. And I blindfold her. I take her back to the barn and tie her up. I don’t speak. I whisper in her ear: ‘So, what would you like? Tell me …’

  ‘A riding whip.’

  After he’s whipped me, he removes my blindfold. I can make out shapes in the gloom. There are three of them, wearing sweaters, their cocks jutting out, in front of me. They wear hoods with eye slits, and condoms. I am naked and cold. Their erections are all the same, their cocks standing straight up along their stomachs. I recognise his. He’s standing back a little. In his hand he has a leather martinet which is serving to stoke the fire between my legs. He uses it quite delicately, dragging the strips of leather over my skin. Once in every ten strokes he gives a more violent one. That’s the best, the one I’m waiting for. I must be providing them with a beautiful show. This fact fills me with pride.

  Another man is hitting me with a riding crop. That’s the one that hurts most. At first his blows are a little timid. I shout at him to go harder. In the end he loses control of himself altogether.

  A third looks on. He asks them to turn me round. I raise my head to look at him and give him a smile. An innocent smile to thank him for finally giving me his attention. I receive a hard slap in return. This isn’t a warning, it’s my punishment. My eyes fill with tears. My mouth tastes salty from all the swallowed tears. Hands untie me so that my straps can be made tighter. Then comes a series of blows, the riding crop cleaving the air, lacerates my buttocks and back, the screams and sobs that I am choking back. His well-aimed, sharp blows become more and more violent, moving down between my thighs, reaching my sex.

  I am just a wound.

  Then they take turns to push themselves against me, holding me by the hips to make me bend back still further. One of them shoves himself inside me violently, fucks me frenziedly. He bangs against the top of my vagina as if he wanted to run me through and only comes out in order to fuck me in the arse equally brutally. Then he comes back to my cunt. Unless that is someone else. Fucked in front, fucked behind, until my pain becomes an extended pleasure. Until, much later, I feel the sperm run over my wounds and make the pain even worse.

  I didn’t think I would get so much pleasure from hitting her. I could barely control myself. She wanted more. More, still more. The other two didn’t go on. I gave her more than she wanted. Until the blood spurted. Until I could masturbate in her blood.

  I want pain and death, to be sorry to be there, to gasp out my sobs. I want to vomit up the knots in my stomach, the guilt of living. I want to be punished.

  On the way back she is more docile than ever. Her eyes sparkle with a new light. She sucks me again and does it so well. Once we get to Paris she says:

  ‘Next time, promise me we’ll try something else.’

  I promise.

  Why is men’s desire the only recognition I feel I deserve?

  I have never fel
t so free and also so dependent. It’s really contradictory. I never feel like this with anyone else. I like being in these borderline states, when I feel I am completely losing control. It’s compulsive and afterwards it’s frustrating. It’s rarely happy. It’s become deep-rooted in me. She eradicates the most deeply engrained truths. We have our own laws which are not those of others. Today I’m not sure of being the stronger. With her, freedom has something dangerous about it. After all the blows and wounds, what will be next? She plays at making me believe that she’s capable of going right to the end.

  I would like this to finish as least badly as possible. I would like this to finish.

  None of our experiences tells me anything about myself. To give up would be a failure.

  I went to the little studio flat belonging to Caroline with the cut-throat razor that we use to kill rabbits. We made love. I tied her up. She begged me to hurt her. When I softly slid the blade on to her skin, I saw her eyes fill with fear and contentment.

  She fainted. I took advantage of this to take the little notebook from her handbag. Then I left, telling myself that was the last time.

  Two weeks later, there was just a scab left. Then a white scar. And then I phoned you. I was bereft. It’s killing me, you bastard.

  I went to see a neurobiologist to get substitutes. Reserved, but with a kind face. He talked about sex with detachment. He began by prescribing antidepressants. Mid-life crisis. As I was talking confidentially, I told him about you. About us. Of your wish that I cut you. That I kill you. He said I was undergoing homeostatic pressure. It’s hormonal, my internal clock is out of order. We control ourselves but internally there’s a merciless struggle going on. Our systemic equilibrium is ever more difficult to maintain. Chronic drug-taking produces lasting organic changes. Sex was our way of getting high. Why don’t we go madder? Have you ever asked yourself that question? He explained that my brain was dependent on my muscles and my neurones and they were dependent on you. He added that only a ‘psycho-moral structure’ that was very strong could help us reduce our pursuit of these sensations and thus become less dependent on each other.