The Sexual Life of Catherine M. by Catherine Millet

dime-store watch; a plastic brooch with a baroque geometric design
    typical of the early eighties; a necklace and a ring by Zolotas, which, sadly, tarnished very quickly; a pearl-edged pareo; a Japanese- brand vibrating dildo, along with three little metallic balls meant to be inserted in the va- gina to stimulate you during the act, which never worked for me…I should also add a contribution to the first dress I ever bought from a YSL boutique; a bath towel, also from YSL; extensive free dental care; and a loan of several thousand francs that I never had to repay. Taxis and airfare have always been paid for. “You looked lost,” someone who knew me when I was very young tells me, “and people just couldn’t help themselves giving you hundred-franc notes.” I must have gone on looking like that to men all my life, not like a woman who was after money, far from it, but like an adolescent who was no good at earning her living and needed help with a little allowance. I have, of course, ex- cluded from this list all the presents Jacques
    gave me, given that our relationship was of a different order, and I also separate the works given to me by artists, because I always think—as, indeed, I do every time my profes- sional interests have been closely linked with my sexual relationships—that they gratify the art critic in me just as much as, when that is their intention, they do the lover.

Always First Times

    We do not stick to the same sexual diet all the way through our lives! This may be due to our emotional circumstances (all our de- sires may be channeled through one person) but also to those times when we take stock of ourselves, thanks to changes that may have intervened in aspects of our lives not neces- sarily connected with love (moving, illness, a new professional or intellectual environ- ment), when we find ourselves off the track we were following.
    I can think of two occasions when my li- bido was stalled. When Jacques and I were preparing to live together, he wrote to tell me that we should hide absolutely nothing from each other, that we shouldn’t lie. Now, it just happened that I had formed some relation- ships that I thought he wouldn’t be happy about. I managed to avoid a couple of meet- ings, to stagger my visits to orgies and to go through with the rest in a guilty state that I had hardly ever experienced and which had an inhibiting effect, moderate but nonethe- less real. On the other hand, one particular orgy, which was in no way extraordinary, marked a turning point for me. I knew the couple who were our hosts, and—because he had just taken on the management of a big newspaper and she was a singer—I thought of them as parodies of characters from Cit- izen Kane. I had already fucked if not both of them, certainly him. There were some distin- guished guests, and they had split into two
    groups: one in a bedroom, the other on a sofa that stood rather oddly in the middle of a living-room, lit by a chandelier. I was on the sofa, definitely glad to be in the group that was better lit, and active as I always was. I rather liked our host’s dick, a short sturdy organ whose proportions made it a reduced model of his entire, compact body. Some people started to head for the bedroom, where a young woman buried in a thick down comforter and waving her limbs in the air like a baby in its crib was hidden under the succession of broad backs that came and covered her, and whose cries could be heard all over the apartment. I observe this sort of extroverted behavior with placid indiffer- ence. One of the participants expressed his admiration, saying she was “really going for it,” and I thought this was stupid. I went back to relax on the sofa. I thought that this young woman had taken up center stage, which, till then, had been mine, and that I
    should have been jealous of her, but my jeal- ousy was lukewarm. For the first time ever, I was pausing during one of those sessions in which I normally kept it