It is curious that a first love, if by the frail state in which it leaves our heart it opens the way to our subsequent loves, does not at least provide us, in view of the identity of symptoms and sufferings, with the means of curing them.
—Marcel Proust, The Captive
G. GREW TIRED OF FIGHTING, GAVE UP PURSUING ME WITH his letters, and stopped calling my mother, whom he had been imploring day and night to stop me from severing contact with him.
Youri took his place in my life. He gave me the courage to leave G. and to resist all his frantic attempts to make me go back on my decision. I turned sixteen and moved in with Youri, who still shared a small apartment with his mother. My own mother didn’t argue. We weren’t on very good terms. I frequently reproached her for having failed to protect me. She would answer that my resentment was unjustified; all she’d done was respect my desires and let me live my life as I wished.
“You’re the one who was sleeping with him and I’m the one who’s supposed to apologize?” she said to me one day.
“So the fact that I hardly ever go to school anymore, the number of times I’ve nearly been expelled, it was a symptom of something, no? You might have noticed that my life hasn’t exactly been a bed of roses.”
But the conversation was impossible. Logically, the fact that she had accepted my relationship with G. meant that she considered me already an adult. Which meant that my choices were entirely my own.
Now all I wanted was to have a normal life, the life of someone my own age: under no circumstances to rock the boat, to be like everyone else. Now things ought to be easier. I was in high school. I was going to start going to school again. I was determined not to draw sidelong glances from certain students; I’d ignore the rumors that were starting to circulate among the teachers. “That new girl, apparently G.M. used to come and pick her up every day after class. I know some of the teachers at her old school—you know she was at Prévert—they told me. Can you imagine? And her parents just turned a blind eye!” One day I was having a coffee at the counter of the bistro where all the students used to hang out between classes. A teacher came and sat down beside me. He told me I was the subject of discussion in the teachers’ lounge. “You’re the girl who was dating G.M., aren’t you? I’ve read all his books. I’m a big fan.”
It would have been extremely satisfying to turn around and answer, “So you’re a disgusting pervert, right?” But now I had to make a good impression. I smiled politely, paid for my coffee, and left, trying to ignore the lewd way he stared at my breasts.
It’s not easy to regain your virginity.
Another day, a man stopped me on a side street, not far from my school. He knew my name. Told me he’d seen me several times in the neighborhood with G. a few months earlier. Unleashed a torrent of obscenities, lavish details about everything I presumably knew how to do in bed now, thanks to G. A heroine straight out of Sade!
Nothing excites these old men more than the thought of a completely depraved teenage girl.
I ran. I was crying by the time I got to school.
Youri did what he could to stave off my bouts of despair, which he was beginning to find oppressive, not least because he thought they were unjustified. “Come on, please, you’re young, your whole life is ahead of you. Smile!” Except that I was nothing but a ball of rage exhausting myself by acting like everything was fine, trying to pull the wool over everyone’s eyes. I did everything I could to suppress this anger, concealing it by turning it back on myself. The guilty party was me. I was the dropout, the slut, the good-time girl, the pedophile’s accomplice, the young woman whose besotted letters served as a kind of approval for the charter flights to Manila carrying perverts who masturbated over photos of boy scouts. And when I could no longer mask my distress, I sank into a depression, where all I wanted was to disappear from the face of the earth.
Only Youri, perhaps, could see it. He adored me, with the youthful ardor of a twenty-two-year-old, and what he loved more than anything was making love. Who could blame him?
When it came to sex, I oscillated between feeling all-powerful and completely apathetic. Sometimes I was filled with a feeling of intoxication—all this power! How easy it was to make a man happy. And then suddenly, at the point of orgasm, I’d dissolve into tears for no apparent reason. Too much happiness, was all I could tell him when he showed concern at my sobs. For entire days I couldn’t bear for him to touch me. And then the infernal cycle would begin again. I would recall my mission in life: pleasuring men. That was my condition, my status. And so I would offer my services anew, with renewed zeal and a simulated conviction that I even managed to convince myself was real. I faked it. Faked enjoying sex, faked my pleasure, faked knowing what the point of it all was. Deep down I was ashamed of being able to do it all so instinctively, when others had barely experienced their first kiss. I knew perfectly well I’d skipped a stage. I’d gone too fast, too early, with the wrong person. I wished I’d experienced all those moments of intimacy for the first time with Youri. I wished he had been my initiator, my first lover. Yet I didn’t dare admit it. I didn’t have enough confidence in myself, or in him.
And more than anything, I couldn’t tell him that the image I couldn’t get out of my head whenever we made love was G.
Yet G. had promised to bequeath me the most wonderful memories.
For years, however tender and considerate the boys with whom I attempted an uncomplicated sexual relationship, I found myself unable to get back to the point Julien and I had reached—the moment of innocent discovery and shared pleasure between two equal beings.
Later, with a little more maturity and courage, I opted for a different strategy: to tell the entire truth, admit that I felt like a doll lacking all desire who had no idea how her own body worked, who had learned only one thing: how to be an instrument for other people’s games.
Every time, this revelation brought the relationship to an end. No one wants a broken toy.