At one point over dinner, between the soup and the sushi, there was a moment of silence. Not unpleasant, not embarrassing: the sort of silence you could use to look at each other a little more intensely, or maybe to come closer over the table. At a moment like that you have the choice between saying something like “I really want to kiss you” or simply doing it, without feeling obliged to announce it. For a long time I’d belonged to the first school, and for the past couple of years more to the second. That’s one of the advantages of getting older: you’re more direct. But that’s not the situation tonight, or not quite, so we smile, enjoying the mild feeling of discomfort—which is very mild indeed, and even enjoyable, since it’s shared—and I bring up this column that I have to write over the weekend for an Italian magazine. “On what?” she asks.
“That’s just the thing, I don’t know. The idea is that it should be a male take on the female world, or, if you like, something about the relations between men and women, but written by a man and read first and foremost by women. At least that’s how I understood what the editor in chief said. Ideas?”
“You don’t have to look too far: Why not talk about our dinner?”
That’s what we start doing. We have dinner, eat our sushi, and talk about it. That is, we experience the situation while at the same time describing it to each other. It’s a bit caricaturally postmodern: a commentary on reality that takes the place of reality. At the same time it’s like when you tell your lover what you’re doing in bed while you’re doing it. I’m someone who finds that exciting, and so is she apparently. This is the situation: Friday evening, Japanese restaurant in Paris, blind date. We didn’t meet through the Internet, but through a mutual friend who’d said, “You know what? You two should meet.” Right now both of us are single—well, not really single, but available, and happy to agree on the word. Both of us are in our early forties, divorced, with two children. I write, she’s a painter; our mutual friend told her that I was seductive and me that she was seductive, and we seem to be pretty much in agreement. The purpose of our meeting being clear, there’s no way we can pretend it didn’t occur to us, as is strangely the case with so much interaction between men and women: you think about nothing else, you both know it, but it’s as if it were something to be ashamed of, as if admitting it would make you weak, or laughable, or the butt of cynicism. I spent my youth getting all wound up over dinner dates that skirted around the question of seduction. I remember I envied the gays, for whom things seemed more simple and direct. Their desire seemed easier to express, whereas we heteros seemed to have come no further than Montaigne, who asked, “What has rendered genital action—an act so natural, so necessary, and so just—a thing not to be spoken of without blushing?” (Isn’t that perfectly put?) Tonight, then, in this Japanese restaurant, we examine the possibility of having sex, I won’t say with detachment, but with a sort of lightness accentuated by the resolve we’ve just made, pretexting the needs of this column, to say and comment on what usually remains unsaid. What are we hoping for, deep down, what are we after? Let’s be honest: true love, real love, love that will last. Him for her. Her for me. We’re more or less halfway through life, we’ve divorced, loved and stopped loving, left and been left, but we continue to believe, to want to believe, not just that it exists, but that it hasn’t really happened yet, that it’s ahead of us, that at one unpredictable, unexpected moment it will be there and we’ll recognize it without hesitation, without the shadow of a doubt. The idea that in fact it’s behind us, that perhaps it already happened and we weren’t able to hold on to it, is too sad, and we reject it with all our might. As for me, I have to admit something: as I’m inclined to believe in it, I believe in it a little too easily. They say you can’t be wrong about something like that, but that’s just the thing: I can. Then I snap out of it, and that can hurt the other person. I’m just coming out of such a situation: the two of us head over heels in love, absolutely certain, three ecstatic months telling each other that we’re so lucky, that what everyone dreams of happened to us, that we’ll never part, that we’ll grow old together … Of course I was being sincere, but you can be sincere and be wrong, or in any case you can persuade yourself that you’re wrong as sincerely as you persuaded yourself of the contrary. The result: a turning away that’s as massive as my commitment had been, and she doesn’t understand, she’s suffering and says with a look of astonishment, “It’s incredible: I’m devastated, and you’re just a little put out.” And it’s true. I’ve just spent part of the afternoon with that woman who used to be the love of my life and who still thinks of me as hers; I was tender, half out of a real sense of tenderness, half so as not to think of myself as a bastard, and in the evening here I am, telling the story a bit complacently to another woman whom I don’t know, and who listens to me in such a way as to make me think that the story isn’t new to her, that she’s suffered as my ex-lover is suffering, that she got over it as my ex-lover will get over it, and that she doesn’t mind hearing it from the man’s point of view because this time it’s not happening to her. Then it’s her turn to tell me about her situation, with a guy she loves but who lives far away, in California. So he comes to France, or she goes there, it’s complicated … She loves him, fine, but is it him? She thinks, no, no doubt it’s not him. Anyway, if she has to think about it, that proves it’s not him. And if she’s here with me tonight … We’ve finished the sushi, we’re drinking green tea, we don’t know each other, but we talk freely, seduction is in the air but there’s no obligation, and since the game is to tell each other everything, nothing’s at stake. It’s a human, friendly, relaxing way of getting along, we feel, both civilized and a little vain. A small respite in the war between the sexes, like a cigarette shared on the trench floor. We tell each other everything, apart from one thing that we both know full well, namely that at our age a man’s fate is far more enviable than a woman’s, and that while he can look forward to a procession of young and attractive women, what awaits her is a dwindling number of married, elusive men. It’s terribly unjust, but it’s the truth. Aloud, now, we ask if we’re going to sleep together. By mutual consent we decide that, in any event, not tonight. We’ll see each other again, we’ll call. I pay and take her back home on my scooter. As we part, we say we had a nice evening, and it’s true. Riding back to my place, I wonder, just what does that mean, by mutual consent?
She’s a Kierkegaard specialist. And what, I ask you, is sexier than a sexy Kierkegaard specialist? I’ve known her for several years, I’ve always found her extremely attractive, but I was with someone, so was she, and it had on occasion happened that we’d said to each other half in jest that the day when we were both free, we should get together. Then the day comes: I’m free, she is, too—more or less, but more than less, she implies. I propose that we sleep together and more if we hit it off, and I strongly sense that we will. What a good idea, she says with a radiant smile. The only problem is that she’s leaving early the next morning so the time isn’t right—that’s what she says—despite which we kiss like adolescents on the street in front of her place, and I go home almost happy with this setback that leaves me ten days to savor being a little in love and to wait for her return. In her absence I try to reach her on her cell phone and can’t get through, but since she’s in Colombia, I put this silence down to a technical glitch. The day she’s due back I send her a huge bouquet of flowers. A couple of hours later I get a text message: she dreams of seeing me as soon as possible. Fine, it’s a dream that’s easy to fulfill, I want nothing better. I call. Both her phones are always on answering mode. I leave messages, send text messages and e-mails. Nothing. After a couple of days, again by SMS, she announces that she’s leaving on another trip, and that we’ll meet up as soon as she gets back. When she gets back, it’s the same thing. She closes all the channels through which I try to get in touch with her. A wall, thwarting all of my demands for an explanation. Because the situation isn’t only frustrating, it’s inexplicable. You’ll say there’s a simple explanation, very simple even: she’s not attracted to me. That’s possible, very possible even, but I don’t believe it. First of all because if that were the case, it would be easy for her to tell me—or to tell me she loves someone else, or that she doesn’t want to ruin our beautiful friendship … Secondly, because if it were true, a woman who doesn’t say it one way or another would be a ridiculous tease, and this woman is anything but a ridiculous tease. Finally—this might make you laugh after what I’ve just said—because I’m certain she’s attracted to me. Not that I think I’m irresistible, not at all, but in her case I’m certain, otherwise I wouldn’t insist like that. I know that this conviction leads me dangerously close to an interpretation along the lines of she’s avoiding me because she loves me, and from there straight to denying reality the way Belise does in Molière’s Learned Women, explaining the silence of her imaginary suitors with the words “They have, up to the present time, respected me so much that they have never spoken to me of their love.” I’m aware of all of that, but I insist nonetheless. I continue to wait for a sign, and to while away the time I read Kierkegaard’s correspondence, which she translated into French. The key to this correspondence is the story of Regine, the young girl who was engaged to the philosopher before he broke off the engagement, perhaps because he believed his melancholy would prevent him from being a good husband, perhaps for another reason; he never said and no one will ever know. What we do know is that he was passionately in love with her, that he remained in love with her for the rest of his life, but that, one fine morning, without a word of explanation, he broke off all ties. From that moment on, he did his best to be as odious as possible, both so that Copenhagen’s fashionable society would blame him and feel sorry for Regine, and also so that Regine would have good reason to hate him. He thought that the hatred and disdain she would feel for him would make her an accomplished woman, and that by mistreating her like that he was secretly doing her a service. These letters, in which he tasks his best friend with spying on Regine and gauging her progress along the path of frustration, of resentment, and, at the same time, of self-consciousness, are rather delirious, but for me, looking as I am for information not about the author but about his translator, they’re also food for thought. Since everything was preferable to what was unfortunately the most plausible hypothesis—she had better things to do than answer my messages—I identified her with the devious Kierkegaard and myself with the innocent Regine, who finally got over the separation but nevertheless spent a good part of her life waiting in vain for an explanation, as I do. Not understanding is the cruelest thing, and not explaining the most indelicate. With that in mind I keep reading and come across this sentence, which floors me: “In every love relationship that reaches an impasse, delicacy is in the end the most offensive behavior.” (Except that here, I immediately say to myself, there is no love relationship, and so no impasse—and so I keep trying.)
She’s my best friend. We used to be lovers, there’s no saying we won’t be lovers again one day, and for the more than twenty years that we’ve known each other, we’ve always gotten together just the two of us—we don’t have any mutual friends. We tell each other everything, confide in each other completely, laugh a lot, and sometimes even cry. This loving friendship is one of the most precious things in my life, in hers, too, I think, and I’m counting on it to show on Judgment Day that I wasn’t a complete washout. She doesn’t need to prove anything because God spits out the lukewarm, and she’s anything but lukewarm. Everything she does, she does with passion, starting with passion, without which she can’t breathe. She loves her husband with a familiar, stubborn passion, her children with a concerned passion, her lover with an all-out passion, and her project now is to put an end to their liaison before this passion turns into grief. That’s what they’ve resolved to do, they dream of a breakup that’s as sizzling hot as their affair; they feel the time has come, but they can’t go through with it. “I did it,” she said to me the last time we met. “I broke up with him.” But today: “I saw him again, it’s started up again, I can’t do without him, and he can’t do without me.”
“So why try?” I ask.
“Because it’s driving me up the wall: the meetings, waiting for the meetings, the pain each time we say goodbye, thinking about him all the time, even when I’m with my kids—and my patients [she’s a psychiatrist]. I want out, I want to take a deep breath, I want a bit of calm. Calm, you know?” She’s lost weight, she smokes a lot, her eyes shine. I think to myself that calmness will never be her strength, and I think that I envy her a bit. All the more so because today I don’t feel that proud. A little while ago I told her about these columns I’m writing and gave her the first one to read, a story about a blind date with no conclusion. She found it amusing and a little sad. What saddened her the most was when I say that past forty, men are better off than women on the love front. “You’re going to get irate letters,” she warned me.
She was right, I’ve received one already, which I show her. “I’m forty years old,” the woman writes. “I’m beautiful, lucky in love, and I plan on remaining that way. And you, you’re nothing but a loser. I wouldn’t give you the time of day.”
“The thing is,” my friend tells me, “I could have written that. I mean, did you mean what you wrote?”
I hesitate. The funny thing is that I wrote it after talking with a woman who had lucidly—and bitterly—defended that very point of view while I’d defended the opposite, and that in defending her ideas I thought I was expressing a woman’s point of view. After all, many women denounce it as a crying injustice, more social than biological, true, but as blatant as the reverse injustice in life expectancy: six or seven years less for men. Only, they say, at fifty men stand a better chance of being with a woman of twenty-five than a woman of fifty has of being with a man of twenty-five, that’s how it is.
“That’s how it is,” my friend acknowledges, “but on the one hand women care far less about bolstering their egos with younger partners, and on the other hand this is a purely sociological phenomenon with which your reader is right to take issue. She talks about desire, you don’t. She talks about uniqueness and you talk about generalities, and that makes all the difference. It’s like the difference between eroticism—which thrives on experience, free choice, and the entire history of the body—and pornography—which is neutral, afraid to choose, and subject to the authority of the interchangeable. In that sense your cynical little sentence is on the side of pornography. And it’s not surprising, considering the state you were in two months ago when we saw each other last. Remember: you weren’t in love, you weren’t attracted to anyone, when you met women all you thought about was what they were after, so as to avoid thinking about what you yourself were after. In pretending to put yourself in their shoes, you projected miserable magazine clichés onto them. Luckily, you’ve fallen in love since then. And to compound the irony it’s with the woman you’d just split up with, when you realized that she could leave you, too. You know what you should do? Use your column to answer this woman. Tell her that, yes, what you wrote was stupid, even if there is a grain of truth to what you said. Only it’s such a mediocre truth that it backfires on the person who says it. And say you’re sorry she wouldn’t give you the time of day. You don’t deserve that, I can assure her of that. Hey, that reminds me of a definition I read in the crosswords. Four letters: ‘young psychopath from the Carpathians.’ You give up? ‘Love.’ Because as Carmen says—and she should know—‘Love is a gypsy’s child. It has never, ever, known a law…’ So there you go: no age, no law, no generalities, that’s love. Or in any case, that’s desire.”
Today, as usual, we’ll talk about love—or about what counts as love—but also about movies. I’ve got a reason for that, namely that if everything goes well, I’ll shoot a movie at the end of the summer. I say if everything goes well because in this trade I discover that nothing is certain until the first day of shooting: an actor can drop out at the last minute, you can run out of money, as soon as you’ve fitted two pieces together on one side of the puzzle, a third that you were sure was rock-solid comes loose on the other. If you want to work in the business, it’s good not to have a heart condition. After months of stressing because the shooting might not go ahead, I’m now stressed because there’s a good chance it will. I wonder if that’s not worse; in any case I’m terrified: a rabbit caught in the lights of a car. The screenplay is a more or less fantastic tale, but above all it’s the story of a couple, and one day last week as we were reading it over, the lead actor said to me, “You know, you’re getting ready to film two people who talk, cross paths, avoid each other, and tear each other apart in the confined space of an apartment; you should really take another look at Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt. There’s no film that does a better job of showing all that.” I’d seen Contempt long ago; I remembered that it was beautiful, but I’d forgotten just how beautiful it is. Beautiful and terrible. Absolutely terrible. Rent it and watch it with the person you love. You risk a bad case of the blues, but it’s a truly overwhelming experience. It’s based on a book by Alberto Moravia and takes place at Cinecittà film studios at the start of the 1960s. A French screenwriter, played by Michel Piccoli, works together with the filmmaker Fritz Lang, played by Fritz Lang, on an adaptation of The Odyssey. To that end the screenwriter goes with his wife, played by Brigitte Bardot, first to Rome and then to the villa that Curzio Malaparte had built on the island of Capri. The producer, played by Jack Palance, notices that the screenwriter’s wife is beautiful, which isn’t difficult, and offers to drive her to his villa, where he’s invited the crew to join him. She shoots a look at her husband, hoping he’ll say, no, that’s out of the question, she’s coming with me. But her husband, who’s a bit of a coward and wants to get in good with the producer, says, of course, sure, why not, go on, honey, I’ll grab a taxi. She doesn’t say a thing, she just looks at him and it’s over, or at least it’s the beginning of the end, and the whole film shows the stages of torment that love goes through when it dies. A little later comes the scene that the actor said I should see. It lasts thirty-five minutes. Thirty-five minutes of two people together in an apartment. They go from one room to another, they pour a bath that they get into one after the other, he with his hat and cigar like Dean Martin in Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running, while she sits on the toilet in a black wig and smokes a cigarette. They get dressed, set the table for a meal they won’t eat, punch a bronze statue that makes different sounds depending on whether you hit the stomach or the breasts, and while doing all of that the way you do things in a place you share with someone else, they exchange banal, atrocious remarks. He understands that she’s annoyed with him but still doesn’t know why, or doesn’t want to know, and she refuses to tell him because there’s already no point. She says she wants to sleep alone from now on.
He says, “You don’t want to make love?”
She smiles. “Listen to the jerk…”
Since he hasn’t given up all hope, he asks, “Is that a mocking smile or a tender smile?”
“A tender smile.”
It’s clear that it’s not true, and he knows it, too, and from that moment on it’s like quicksand. He no longer stands a chance, he’s lost. Whatever he does, whether he’s ironic or brutal or imploring, he’s pathetic, he’ll never be anything but pathetic, because a man who’s no longer loved is pathetic, that’s just the way it is. I watched all of that with the woman whom I’d started to love again and who’d started to love me again, despite which—or because of which—our relationship hadn’t really improved. And even if it had, it would have been the same: teary eyes, goose bumps, something that gets you right in the gut, something that, in addition to its beauty—because it’s one of the most beautiful scenes ever shot—has to do with pure terror, no matter which of the two characters you identify with. Because falling out of love—the moment when the other person stops loving you and when you know that it’s hopeless, irrevocable, relentless, that you’re no longer anything at all, that you’re nothing in the person’s eyes, or in the eyes of the world, or even in the eyes of God, if you’re a believer—is the most terrible thing of all. It’s what everyone dreads the most, what they’ll do anything to avoid or put off, because it’s bound to happen one day. I think it happens in every life at one time or another, and that everyone is condemned to play one role or the other, one role and the other, and that the role of the person who no longer loves isn’t any more enviable than the role of the person who’s no longer loved.
(What I’m writing here isn’t upbeat, but who said love was upbeat?
Who? You. And me sometimes. I’ll try to remember that in the next column.)
A couple of months ago, not long after I met Hélène, I took her to dinner at François and Emmanuelle’s place. A couple of years ago, not long after I met Emmanuelle, I’d taken her to dinner at François’s place. The three of us spent a lot of time together. Emmanuelle and I were very much in love; we lived together for a year, then our love faded. We broke up, sad but not bitter, and not long after that Emmanuelle went to live with François. The months that followed were a bit embarrassing, then we became close friends again, with Emmanuelle’s now being with François and not with me not changing our affection: it was as if we’d simply traded places at the kitchen table where we’d spent so many evenings drinking wine, smoking joints, and swapping stories. François and Emmanuelle are my best friends, the people I go see when I’m lonely and down in the dumps. At any hour of the day or night I’m sure to find comfort, a bed if necessary, and an ideally tolerant friendship. I know the difficulties they’ve had as a couple; they know—Emmanuelle firsthand—the difficulties I have just being in a couple. Once we’ve drunk a bit, we ritually pat one another on the back for our three-way bond. You could find it all a bit twisted, regressive, vaguely incestuous even, but I like it and so do they, and I have a hard time imagining being together with a woman who doesn’t meet them sooner or later. For me that’s clear, but not necessarily for the woman in question, and Hélène wondered just what this presentation—which, as she said on the way home, reminded her of some kind of entrance exam—was all about. That she passed it with flying colors didn’t change that. What was the idea, to show her to Emmanuelle? To show Emmanuelle to her? To obtain the consent of both? Did I want each to find the other seductive, and to be flattered to have me in common? And did I want to pride myself on being that lucky man? “The problem when you meet past girlfriends of the man you love,” Hélène said, “is that either you like them, in which case jealousy isn’t far off, or you don’t, in which case your idea of the other person suffers. Of course the first case is preferable by far. It’s like that Jewish joke: Moshe and his wife, Rachel, are at a party. There are a lot of people and Moshe first points out his colleague Aaron, then Aaron’s wife, and then—he lowers his voice—that girl over there is Aaron’s mistress. Rachel takes a good look at Aaron’s mistress, then says to Moshe, ‘Ours is better.’ I liked Emmanuelle, I found her beautiful and intelligent, I like the fact that she likes you so much, and I think she’s sexy. But what I didn’t like is your way of showing me all that, the message you’re confusedly trying to get across. It’s as if you were telling me, ‘Look what a great ex-lover I am.’ As if you couldn’t wait for it to be over between us, for us to have put behind us the passion and fury [the fury would make its first appearance that night] so that we can settle into a peaceful, loving friendship. Well, let me tell you: that’s not how it’s going to be with me. When it’s over, it’ll be over. When we no longer love each other, we’re not going to be friends.”
A couple of days ago I reminded Hélène of this conversation, and she laughed. Because right now we’re in a strange situation. To sum up the previous episodes, some of which I’ve described in these columns: Our encounter last winter. Both of us totally in love. Three months in a tub of ecstasy. We make plans to move in together. No sooner do we start looking for an apartment than I panic. I want nothing better than to live with someone in general and her in particular, but at the same time I’m petrified. I can no longer get an erection, I no longer see her, all I see is my own panic. I know, all this isn’t exactly glorious, but I’m supposed to be Flair’s special envoy to the male heart, and the male heart can be a pretty weird place. She’s hurt, becomes afraid in turn, we split up. We both drift around on our own, taking care to suffer as little as possible by knowing as little as possible about what the other is doing, while doing all we can to find out. Jealousy, fear of loss, horror at the idea that stupidity and neurosis prevented us from getting what we’d always longed for, what we wanted the most. A timid reunion. Then? Then we’re careful not to talk of love, knowing that brings bad luck, at least to us. We don’t make plans together because we’ve broken up. We’re ex-lovers, friends and only friends, a promise is a promise, let’s let sleeping dogs lie. So we make love as friends, sleep at each other’s place as friends, go on holiday together as friends. It’s not out of the question that we’ll end up sharing an apartment in a friendly spirit, like Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. It’s like that story where everything you ask for is granted on one condition: that you don’t say a certain word. You can think about it all you like; as long as you don’t say it, all’s well. The only problem now is, how long can we go without saying it?
This column makes me a bit nervous because I have to write it in advance. Of course I always write them in advance, a month or so before they’re published, but here, because of the summer, the upcoming holidays, the film I’ll shoot in August, the gap is longer. I’m writing in July something you’ll read in October, and I can’t help thinking about everything that could happen in the meantime. It’s like when you prerecord a radio or TV program that’s supposed to be happening live, and the host reminds you that you have to say “good evening” although it’s ten in the morning, and that you shouldn’t say anything about what’s happening in the news because all of that will be long out-of-date the day the show is aired, and there’s no way of knowing what’ll be in the news then. All you can hope for if talk comes around to geopolitics, for example, is that nothing like 9/11 will happen in the meantime. I felt that particularly strongly two years ago when I wrote a piece for the major French newspaper Le Monde, which publishes a story by a more or less well-known writer every week in the summer. I had carte blanche to write about what I pleased; the only restrictions were the length, the date of publication—mid-July—and the deadline in May. I took the job on in April, spent a couple of weeks wondering what I could write, then got an idea that struck me as funny. In mid-July, precisely, my girlfriend was planning to come visit me on the Isle of Ré, off the west coast of France. I decided to organize things in such a way that she’d take the train precisely on the day my story would be published, and that she’d read it on the train. Then I sat down and wrote the story, which was explicitly addressed to her and took the form of instructions: You’re in the train going from Paris to La Rochelle. It’s July 20, 2002, 4:15 p.m. You read these lines, I tell you to do this, I tell you to do that—and this and that involved indulging in sexual fantasies and then going to masturbate in the toilet. So in short it was a pornographic letter whose distinctive feature was that it was to be read not just by the person it was addressed to, but also by the 1 million people who read Le Monde, some of whom would no doubt be sitting in the same train. Of course I didn’t tell my girlfriend, everything depended on surprise, and I was terrifically amused—and aroused—by the idea of concocting this thing that was simultaneously an erotic game, a joyful hijacking of the most respectable French newspaper, and a literary performance that was to my mind unprecedented. That said, my excitement was accompanied by a slight apprehension. Because between the moment in May when I would submit the text to Le Monde and the day in July when I’d welcome my girlfriend, wild with passion and gratitude, on the platform of the station in La Rochelle—when the operation could be considered a success—anything could happen, from the most minor setback to the most irremediable disaster: she could miss the train, the train could go off the tracks, she could no longer love me or I could no longer love her. And that was only what I imagined, whereas you can count on the gods to be even craftier than that when it comes to punishing smart alecks who dare to defy them by presuming, as I was doing, to control a future event. I was right in believing the gods could thwart my plans. The story caused a minor scandal in France (you can read it, and what happened next, in my book My Life as a Russian Novel, which gave the editor in chief of this magazine the idea of asking me to write these columns), but I didn’t care, caught up as I was with my own private 9/11 that resulted in things not at all turning out as I’d planned: I broke up with my girlfriend, what should have been funny and lighthearted turned out to be horribly sad, and I told myself that never again would I get mixed up in trying to control reality.
Why am I writing about this disaster? Because it has to do, I believe, with the fear of commitment that many men suffer from, many women complain about, and of which I, unfortunately, am a typical example. This fear is founded on a lucid and even wise apprehension of reality: the knowledge of the transience of things and feelings, of our inability to master them, of the risk that we may no longer be tomorrow who we are today, which also goes for the other person. But such lucidity and wisdom are paralyzing: if you listened to them, you wouldn’t say yes to anything, neither projects, nor children, nor erotic stories. I’m not saying my erotic story is a supreme human achievement, but even if I bungled the whole thing up, I don’t regret having written it, quite the contrary. To do something, to experience something, you have to agree not to anticipate, not to calculate, not to worry about suffering or causing others to suffer—and in writing this sentence I think that’s the most difficult thing, and I don’t think I’m speaking only for myself. Deep down we can accept being hurt without too much concern. But what many of us fear the most is hurting others; that’s what we have the hardest time accepting, and consequently it’s what’s the most necessary to accept. Sorry, I’m sounding a little pedantic here, but it seems to me that I’ve just understood this, not only in this column but in my life. Run the risk of hurting the other person, run the risk that today will be betrayed by tomorrow: take the plunge and swim. As General de Gaulle said when someone cried out “Death to idiots!”: “Vast program.”
“Yesterday at the beach I ran into a guy I used to know,” Hélène said. “We hadn’t seen each other for years and told each other what we were up to. His wife was playing with their two small children a little way off. The whole time we were talking she never approached, all she did was give a little wave at one point to say hi. She’s pretty, slim, Japanese, a little enigmatic the way Japanese women often are. She’s a novelist, her husband told me. She lives with him in France, she learned French and they speak French with their children, but she continues to write in Japanese. Her books appear in Japan, they’re not translated into any other languages, and he doesn’t understand Japanese. That’s strange, don’t you think? To live with an author and not be able to read what she writes? But the strangest thing is that her books are autobiographical and, it seems, erotic, if not pornographic.”
“How does he know that if he can’t read them?” I objected.
“She told him, and it’s also what their Japanese friends say when he asks about them. They look so embarrassed he thinks they must be pretty steamy.”
For me it sounded like the start of a novel, a Japanese novel in fact. A little perverse, a little chic, with just one weak point in the plotline; namely, that if he really wanted to read what his wife wrote, he could easily get it translated, just for himself. “That’s what I said to him,” Hélène said, “and he said that, yes, of course he could, that he thought about it often, but that in all the years he’d been thinking about it, he still hadn’t gone ahead and done it; a little because he was afraid, no doubt, and a lot because the situation excited him.” Fifty yards away the children were building a sandcastle with their mother. They were laughing, and Hélène wondered if they would read their mother’s books when they got older. There was a silence, then Hélène added in an offhand way, “Would you like me to read the columns you write for that Italian magazine, or would it bother you?”
The question took me by surprise. “Would you like to?”
“Let’s say I would. Would you let me read them?”
I said yes, what else could I say? And that evening at my computer I opened the French versions of the six columns I’d already written. I reread them, trying to put myself in the place of Hélène, the leading lady. It started with a breakup, followed by brief encounters, then a cautious, once-burned-twice-shy reunion, and most recently a loving friendship. The column I’d just sent off was a fastidious examination of this voluntarily precarious situation, blended with thoughts about my fears of no longer feeling tomorrow the sentiments I feel today, and so of hurting the other person, and so of committing myself … It’s a familiar, depressing theme, which depressed me all the more as I printed up the texts; there are better presents you can give a woman, that’s for sure.
At that point I looked at my e-mail and found a message from Fiona, the editor in chief of this magazine. She’s the one who recruited me, and our correspondence had been purely formal—I sent the text, she published it—until the day a month ago when, both because I was swamped with work and because I was quickly running out of ideas, I announced that I was stopping. From northern India, where she was on vacation, Fiona called me and told me that, no, I was not stopping. She knew perfectly well that she couldn’t force me to go on, she said, and that I was as free to leave as she was to fire me if my articles no longer suited her. However, in hiring me she’d given a commitment to her readers, and in accepting I’d given a commitment to her, so I wasn’t going to stop, period. Fine, fine, I said, and from that moment our relationship became affectionately sadomasochistic, without a clear distribution of roles. In her e-mail now, Fiona acknowledged receipt of my new column, informing me that something was definitely wrong. The worst thing was that it wasn’t my prose, but my life. My entire life, everything what I was: a complete disaster. I quote: “Emmanuel, do you really think I can publish a phenomenology of fear in a column signed by you as the special envoy to the male heart? I understand that, like Moses before the burning bush, you’re tempted to say, ‘Why me? Why was I chosen for this? Why is this woman hounding me to write about the depths of my soul while it’s so warm outside and I have so many other things to do?’ I understand all of that, Emmanuel. But, come on, is there nothing else in your life? No other sentiment that you feel for a woman? Something beautiful or painful, some passion, jealousy, tenderness, rage? Anything, in fact, other than this urge to flee, which you say is your chief characteristic? Don’t you get tired of that after a while?”
No doubt you’re starting to catch on that there’s no standing up to Fiona. She asked me to rewrite the text, I was going to have to do it, and as well as pleasing her, I wanted it to please my new reader: Hélène. I tried to imagine how the Japanese writer would feel if she decided one morning to let her husband read six years’ worth of porn novels dedicated to their married life. As for us, in the eight months that we’d known each other, we’d come as far as a sexual friendship. It’s a delightful state, but one that, in my mind, couldn’t last if we said a certain word. While I’d been burning to say that word for some time, I was afraid to pronounce it, terribly afraid even, for all of the reasons listed in the column that Fiona so disliked. It’s as if this woman whom I didn’t know, this editor in chief of a women’s magazine to which I contributed without reading it (I can’t read Italian), had morphed into a sort of Jiminy Cricket, an apostle of fearless love, who, perched on my shoulder, repeated, “Come on, you jerk, if you want to tell her you love her, tell her!” Okay, Fiona. I told her.
“Why not add a little sex next time?” asked Fiona. Good question. Why not? I thought back to my previous columns and said to myself that for someone who’d been hired on the basis of his reputation as an amiable pornographer, I’d been remarkably chaste up to now. Flirts with no tomorrow, lame blind dates, ruminations about the fear of commitment; lucky that in the meantime I’d fallen in love or, to be more precise, fallen back in love with the woman I left six months ago. She loves not only to make love but also to talk about it, two things that conventional wisdom deems contradictory (the more you talk about it, the less you do it), but on this point as on many others I distrust conventional wisdom. On the contrary, I believe that sex and talking go exceedingly well together. I like it when a woman tells me about her sex life, the ways she desired the men she desired, what she did to them, what they did to her, what their cocks were like. You can say an element of homosexuality is in all of that, I won’t take offense: I agree completely. As the time for writing this article was approaching, I consulted my lover: a thousand words, give or take a few, with a little sex thrown in. Any ideas? She had several, enough to fill a couple of columns. Here’s one:
“I was at a disco once, with some friends. There were a lot of people, it was dark, the place was packed. I’d been dancing for a long time and had come back to talk with a friend at the bar—well, talk: I mean form words with my mouth that the music and noise prevented her from hearing—and laugh with her because we couldn’t understand a thing. I’d drunk a bit, I was wearing a skirt and standing sideways at the bar, other bodies pressed up against mine but it didn’t last long, just in passing. Then something that must have been a hand settled on my butt and stayed there. I moved, shifted my weight a little, but the hand kept up its pressure. I analyzed the situation: a guy’s got his hand on my ass. Even without any whole-hog feminism it’s a gesture you associate with a lousy come-on, one that merits a rebuff or even a slap in the face. Normally you send a guy who puts his hand on your ass packing without much further ado. But this hand had—how to put it?—something friendly about it. It was firm but not clumsy, insistent but not indiscreet. It was warm; in fact I was happy it stayed put and wasn’t discouraged by my faked twitches of annoyance. I was also happy not to know who it belonged to. I continued to talk, and the hand that I had done nothing to discourage felt encouraged, the fingers slipped under my skirt from the waist, first the fingers, then the whole palm. Sure, everyone was squeezed together, still I wondered if anyone could see what was going on: a hand had slipped inside my skirt and now was rubbing against my panties. I moved to ease its way, and in any case from where it was the hand couldn’t fail to grasp that I was excited. It started caressing me—very well—and the whole time I kept talking to my friend, wondering if you could see on my face that an unknown hand was making me come. The funniest thing is that since she was standing in front of me, she must have seen the man or woman behind me who was fingering me so well.”
“What do you mean, the man or woman? You mean there’s a doubt in your mind?”
“Sure there is. I think it was probably a man, but who knows?”
“Come on, between a man’s hand and a woman’s hand caressing you, you should know the difference.”
“Really? You said the same thing when I blindfolded you the other day and defied you to say whether I was taking you in my mouth, my pussy, or my ass; you said it was too easy, that you’d tell from the first contact. And you were wrong, remember? Let’s say it was a man. Actually, I also think it was a man. To finish the story: He made me come, he felt me come from inside, he remained there for a bit, as if to calm me down, and then he took his hand out. I kept talking, pretending nothing was happening, and then a couple of minutes later I turned around. Some people were talking, drinking, and smoking behind me; the person closest to me was a man, neither good-looking nor ugly. The key thing is that if it was him—but maybe it wasn’t, maybe he’d already left—he didn’t give me the slightest sign. That’s what I like about this story: to have been jerked off in a public place by stranger, fine, but above all that this stranger remained a stranger, that that’s all he did, that he didn’t try to chat me up. It must have been enough for him to make me come, he didn’t ask for anything in return. It was a gift with no strings attached: the exact opposite of rape. You know, I was young when that happened, twenty or so, and it gave me a lot of confidence: in sex, in men, in men’s potential generosity, to the point where each time I met one who would count for me I imagined for a moment that it was him: the man who liked to make women come without asking anything in return, the man who loved their pleasure. I thought that about you, the first night. I wondered, not if it was you of course, but if you would have been able to do that. If you’d have liked to do that. I think you would. The men I like are the men I can think that about.”
It must be said: for men, there aren’t many things in the world that are more mysterious—and fascinating—than women’s orgasms. Just like men’s orgasms for women, I suppose, although I suppose it partly for reasons of symmetry, and almost of equity, because despite everything male orgasm is simpler, more mechanical—although it becomes subtler as soon as you dissociate orgasm from ejaculation, but if you like, we’ll talk about that another time. Today I want to use this column as a sort of chat room, to generate comments and gather reactions to a particular sexual trait. I don’t know if it’s rare or widespread, if it’s thought of highly or vaguely rejected, or even if it has a name, either scientific or informal. Two times in my life I’ve met women who ejaculated when they came. When I say ejaculated, I don’t mean the type of vaginal secretions we’re all familiar with, but a copious spurt of dense liquid that fills your mouth—because as far as I know it only happens with clitoral orgasms brought on by oral stimulation. The first time it happened to me I must have been around twenty. I didn’t understand what was happening, and I thought my partner was pissing. Although we were already pretty close, I couldn’t help thinking that pissing in your lover’s mouth like that without warning was pretty cavalier. A huge stain was on the sheet, the liquid tasted acidic and had a sour smell, but it wasn’t urine. What was it then? What had come out of her, together with her pleasure? I didn’t dare ask her; she seemed as troubled as I was by what had just happened: I got the feeling it didn’t happen to her every day. But it happened again with us. Not every time I licked her, but often, and was associated with the most violent orgasms, so that I came to consider these deluges as an indication of maximum satisfaction, which I did my best to bring about. It was as if my tongue were boring away at a dam, and I loved the moment when the dam finally gave way. It happened often during the time we spent together. I think that, seeing my pleasure when she came like that, she stopped trying to keep the floodgates closed, but we never spoke about it. We were young: maybe neither of us dared to admit our inexperience, so we both acted as if it happened all the time. It couldn’t have been that common, however, or I just missed out, because in the twenty-five years that followed no other woman gushed into my mouth like that. Until I met the woman I now love, and whom I hope to love for a long time to come. She was also troubled when it happened to her with me, but one of the advantages of being older is no doubt that it’s easier to talk with your lover, and she described it from her point of view. The first time it happened she must have been the same age as my girlfriend was back then, and not only did she not understand what was going on, she also felt horribly ashamed. She knew full well that it wasn’t urine, but it was similar, and the idea of pissing when you come is enough to inhibit even the most free-spirited of girls. That’s what she was, too; she loved making love, she loved men’s desire, their hands, their cocks, their tongues, but despite all that she was always a bit afraid of their tongues on her clitoris; it was the only thing she let happen without giving herself up to it, with a perpetual reluctance, always careful not to let herself go: she didn’t want to squirt like that again, or to be ashamed, or not to know what was going on. That was the real problem: not knowing. Not knowing if it was normal or abnormal, clean or dirty, possibly exciting or definitely disgusting. She tried to find out: she asked her gynecologist, read sexology books. In vain, or almost. Some women do that when they come: they’re known as fountain women. But what is that? What’s the real term? And why do some women do it and not others? What percentage of the female population: one, ten? Is it more like having green eyes or having an extra toe? Is it a talent that only a few privileged women cultivate, or a disability? “It’s funny to have a sexual tic that no one talks about although it seems that everything is talked about nowadays,” says the woman I love. “You can’t open a women’s magazine without coming across some kind of test: Are you vaginal or clitoral? Followed by a comparison of different lubricants. In fact it’s a little as if I didn’t know that all women have periods and had spent my entire adult life keeping quiet about this mysterious thing that happens every month to me and only me. Why don’t you talk about that in your Italian magazine? Who knows? Maybe it’ll come as a liberation to a whole bunch of women like me, who’ve always felt a bit strange. You’ll get letters, we’ll read them together, it’ll become a big social debate, and in the next elections to the European Parliament we’ll look on in pride as the party of the fountain women and the men who love to lick them makes tremendous strides. Fountain Pride: That’s quite the program, no?”
Published in Flair, December 2003–August 2004
This last column disgusted Fiona so much that she ended my collaboration with Flair. And more or less consciously, that’s why I wrote it: I’d had enough. After that I discovered that such female ejaculations, listed on porn sites under the heading “squirt,” are the delight of a large number of fans—myself included on occasion.