The Classmate Read online

  Chapter Four

  —We’re going up to Paris this weekend, her Master announced. Make yourself pretty, I want to be proud of you. We’re leaving in two hours, by train—it won’t take as long as by car.

  V*** feared these homecomings above all. Nine times out of ten, the sessions led her to the point of breaking, her legs turned to jelly, with the sensation of not being able to take a step–without mentioning the pain, the burns of the whip or the lash, the spasms of her stomach or her ravaged anus. The worst was her breasts, because of the pincers. What had made him so proud at the beginning now made her smile less. And yet for almost fifteen days she had been without her ration of suffering.

  —It’s going to be a general presentation, continued her Master. We’re taking our submissives with us from all over France. You’ll see, for once, that you will not necessarily be the star. But I will be angry if your obedience is less than exemplary.

  Submissives...The “Masters” and other “Dominators” gargled with this theatrical vocabulary—they said “Submissives like they might have said, “Maids”—so as to reassure themselves at the same time. V*** was still feeling unsubmissive. She had not escaped from her father to “submit” to the first man who came along. She loved excess, in sex. There were masochists just like there were blondes or brunettes. But from that, to make it a religion, and to lose all sense of humor…the papal seriousness and the ceremonies for which J-L had trained her for two years made her snigger more and more. The masters! Those imbeciles were only too excited to get to abuse her…

  —I really don’t want to, she objected. Next week I have a crazy work schedule.

  —No fake tears, J-L interrupted. We’re at the end of October. You don’t have mid-terms until January.

  —I’ve got a big translation assignment.

  —You can work on it on the train, he said. On the way there. Because on the way back…

  He had an evil smile.

  —Get down on all fours, he ordered. No, better just squat. I am going to assfuck you dry. It will be an excellent gymnastic exercise.

  She knew that the discussion would end this way so she had taken the precaution of coating her anus and the first centimeters of her rectum with a suitable lubricant. She took the requested position, her head in her arms, and whimpered while he forced himself inside her. She whimpered the whole time because he wanted to hear her whimper. For the first time she was not herself. She felt nothing. A dildo would have been more exciting.

  Finally, he withdrew. His cock shrank before her eyes. “He came,” she said to herself, “and I felt nothing.”

  —Go get ready, repeated the Master while he got dressed. He had a smug look that made him instantly loathsome.

  “Alright,” she thought. Paris will be the last time.

  During the entire trip that Friday evening, they did not speak so as to not have to say anything. V*** worked on a translation of a sonnet by Shakespeare, and she let her spirit wander over the masked illusions,the ambiguities.Shakespeare wrote to a man whom he treated as a woman. She thought of a woman that she wanted to treat as a woman—the idea of touching Lauren’s body made her wet, instantly.

  Paris was grey. They had left the sun in Toulouse. J-L had reserved a room in a hotel on the corner of Boulevard Arago and rue Saint-Marcel. The elevated Metro, in front of the only window, roared past every three or four minutes. “This is intolerable,” she remarked.

  —What do you care? objected her Master, —we’re not going to be spending much time here. Get ready, make yourself pretty. Make-up, perfume. Stockings, your trench coat, nothing else. We’re not going far.

  They walked as far as Gobelins so they could get a cab. The already-winter wind climbed up the length of her legs and brushed her sex. She asked herself why she still obeyed. What she was looking for, she had already found. The answers were in Toulouse.

  They turned up at the home of a famous dominatrix, who had set up a dungeon in the 14th arrondissement. They were among the last to arrive, and V*** understood at once that she was going to be the showpiece of the evening.

  In the taxi that took them back to their hotel, around 4 a.m., she curled up into a ball in her raincoat. She had lost her stockings. J-L didn’t say anything—undoubtedly he felt he was beginning to lose her, because he had an almost animal intuition. “Nothing really original,” she thought, “I’ve spent the whole night wandering in a cliché.”

  The “Mistress”had required that she get down on her knees right at the entrance and pay her homage by carefully licking her cleft. She smelled foul—a loathsome mixture of Chanel and urine. V*** obeyed with her usual passivity. Then she was relieved of her raincoat, and taken to the participants—a dozen men and women—who exclaimed admiringly. Some of them whistled.

  She wanted to leave, but she let herself be overcome by events.

  “No imagination,” she thought to herself. She had been worked by the whip, fucked in front and behind, lashed, hog-tied, seated on a stake that monstrously distended her anus–a prelude to a fist-fucking attempted first by two women and then a man who stuck his fist in to plug her up; who made her scream as he forced himself in up to the wrist, who spent five long minutes kneading his fingers in her viscous insides, and who made her suck his fingers when he finally withdrew his hand from her ass.

  That was the signal. The theme of the evening was uro/scat. She was ordered to piss in front of everyone, into the mouth of a submissive who was even more lowly than her. Then they forced open her jaws with a metal bit to more easily use her mouth, the final receptacle of all the water droplets they would release.

  During the entire evening her spirit did not wander for a second from Lauren—Lauren in the shower, her diminutive breasts, buttocks without blemish, her adolescent body still growing quickly, her straw-colored hair and her blonde pussy, her large, naïve, doe-like eyes…She did not feel the blows, nor the cocks that forced entry, nor that waste that sought to transform her into a toilet bowl, as it was so elegantly said in those circles. She was no longer of this world.

  They returned to the hotel where she fell into bed like a dead weight, without even washing.

  They slept till late. In the afternoon, they decided to go to the cinema.

  Ridley Scott’s film, 1492, was a huge indigestible slab, but it gave J-L so much pleasure that not once did he turn to his companion in the grand theater on the Place d’Italie where the Dolby sound system suppressed any coversation. V*** was uneasy during the entire, interminable projection. First, her buttocks hurt, the Parisians hadn’t pulled their punches. The indifference of her Master convinced her of her own indifference. A story was written there, in that ultra-modern, antiseptic theater, where in the film Sigourney Weaver incarnated an improbable queen of Spain. Worse, Depardieu, in the starring role, was hard to tell apart from one of her tormentors from last night, a fat pig who wore a mask: she still felt his stomach swaying lewdly while he ravaged her anus, flopping like a wet flag against her kidneys. A half-impotent who lost his hard-on to his visible annoyance every thirty seconds, as if she were responsible for his condition—the word came into her head and made her snigger at a particularly dramatic moment. Was it possible that it had been the actor himself?…The sound of Christopher Columbus’ feet splashing in the waters of the Caribbean reminded her of the belly that slapped against her back and the sluggish prick that nevertheless managed to clear a path in her rectum, which opened like the mouth of an asphyxiating carp.

  They walked along the boulevard, discussing the film. J-L had enjoyed it greatly. When she dared to say that she had found it seriously boring, he interrupted, “You don’t understand anything, it was tremendous…” He spat. They picked up the pace, in silence, and went back to their room. “I’m tired out,” J-L said, and he plunged into his car magazine and in a few minutes sank into a perfectly blissful late afternoon siesta.

  V*** watched him sleep. Was it possible that she had devoted almost two years of her life to this sweetly sn
oring man? The labored breathing of a man who was too well-nourished was the last straw. Sometimes a ridiculous detail kills passion in a few seconds. An ill-timed reflection, a weakness in a profile, a belly disgracefully covered with curly hair.

  During all of those two minutes, the elevated train passed in a clash of tortured iron.

  She went out and telephoned Lauren and remained on the phone for a long time.

  Chapter Five

  —Let’s go to the movies, Lauren suggested. I really want to see that film.

  The film was Basic Instinct, the “work” that had re-launched the career of an almost unknown starlet named Sharon Stone. “Why the fuck would she want to take me to see that shit?” V*** asked herself–she was sure it was shit. Clearly, these days she wasn’t having any luck with the movies…

  The film confirmed her worst predictions. All the clichés of the S & M circus were covered within two hours. And Sharon Stone was a caricature of her own self–down to the deliberate absence of panties.

  There was so much dead air in that falsely trendy film that she made good use of it by reflecting. She was sitting next to the person she loved most in the world. Point number one. The return journey with J-L had been tiresome, and just as in the onward journey, she had found refuge in Shakespeare. Second point. Their story was over. Besides, after six days he had given her no news and she wasn’t waiting for any. And this film was inane. Last point.

  It was while watching the police psychologist (played by Jean Tripplehorn) disembark, while looking back and forth from the screen to Lauren’s taut profile, sitting cutely at her right, that she began to conceive of an audacious hypothesis: did Lauren identify with one or the other protagonists? And did they give her a part in her interior cinema? Based on all evidence, the two women in the film shared a complex amorous relationship. Furthermore, in maintaining another relationship with Dorothy Malone, a sixties-something escapee from Douglas Sirk’s sublime films from the 50’s.

  “Once,” V*** thought, I had an affair, during an evening at Lille, with a woman who had long ago passed her sixtieth…her sex was dry like a smoked fish and it had the same odor, and the taste…” But visibly, Lauren didn’t see the same things in the film as V*** did, and sighing, V*** wondered if her experiences during the past two years had made her age too quickly and had ruined her for simple things. Two years ago this film would have seemed audacious. Today it was a sentimental film designed for pimpled adolescent masturbation.

  How did Lauren touch herself? On her back? On her stomach? While beating down on her button? While forcing a finger into her cunt? Did she play with her asshole, perhaps? Did she make herself cum quickly, as a hygienic measure? Or would she take her time? What fantasies nourished her caresses?

  Her mind wandered. She no longer looked at the screen but the magnificent profile of her friend.

  Lauren’s arm was two centimeters away from hers, on the large synthetic velour armrest. “I’ve got to touch her,” she said to herself. “I’ve got to take her hand.”But goddamn, those two centimeters were hard to cross! “I am nothing,” V*** said to herself, and if I don’t reach out to take her hand, I’ll go home and hang myself. Lauren watched the screen, immobile, her profile taut. “I should reach out before we learn who the criminal is,” and she felt that the moment of the revelation was approaching. She advanced her fingers, brushing those of her friend, and at last, took them. She tightened her moist hand around a hand as lifeless as a cadaver, as if Lauren had not felt her take her hand. V felt overwhelmed with happiness. She caressed, with her thumb, Lauren’s open palm. The young girl had not stirred nor moved a centimeter.

  V*** caressed the fingers that she was permitted to, then climbed her wrist, the forearm, the curve of the elbow. Lauren watched the screen intensely the last spasms of an intrigue sewn with all too predictable threads. Her lips were just slightly open and V***, astonished, would have thought that she was in the midst of cumming.

  The generic ending paraded across the screen. During the three or four minutes of pointless details, the chief operator, stunts, make-up and other technical considerations, Lauren didn’t move and left her dead hand within V***’s fingers.

  When they left the Crater Theater, they were grabbed by the cold. The city was swept by the wind. Lauren wrapped herself up and leaned on V***. Arm-in-arm they followed the rue de Languedoc towards the historic city center, until reaching the rue de la Chaîne.

  —Do you want to come up and have tea? the tall blonde asked.

  V*** wondered if there was something more than the words said in an atonal voice.

  —Of course,” she answered, —we’re freezing our butts, I’d drink anything warm.”

  She watched while Lauren heated the water, emptied a teapot still full of tea from the morning, took out blue china teacups. It was within these careful gestures, and a glance that avoided her own, that there was something of a promise…

  —I’m going to turn up the heat, Lauren said, —while the water warms up.

  They were so cold that they hardly gave the tea time to brew. They served themselves large cups, poured slowly for the pleasure of re-warming their hands by holding the burning pot.

  They took a sip at the same instant their eyes met and the coincidence made them smile.

  “I can’t just let things stay like this,” V*** reproached herself. At the same time, she felt strangely paralyzed, as if her next act would change the order of the world.

  Vanessa’s manuscript ends here.

  Photographs of Vanessa

  Maxim Jakubowski

  By the time I came across Vanessa Duriès’ book in a boquiniste’s dusty box by the Seine in Paris in the summer of 1994, Vanessa was already dead. I knew nothing of this yet. I read the short novel back in London, intrigued by its intensity and courage, often stunned by the extremes of what we might term perversions its female protagonist endured. It rang true. It felt intuitively like more than just an update of The Story of O, another tale of submissive slave and master.

  On the back cover of the original French edition, Vanessa Duriès smiles at us, smiles at me, fresh-faced, almost innocent, beautiful, an attractive young girl emerging from adolescence, curly-haired. Could this, I wondered, be the real author of this dangerous tale of womanhood defiled and proud? The face, the dark eyes that led me, the accidental reader, into the depths of her soul, as her body stood tall under the bite of the whips, the obscene penetrations of every conceivable aperture, the random punishments, the rituals of torture and humiliation. I strongly suspected something of a hoax. Maybe, Vanessa Duriès and that candid photograph were the cover for a pseudonymous pornographer who had somehow hit a chord somewhere inside me?

  There she is, luminous, wondrous and young.

  Tell me it isn’t so, Vanessa, I wondered.

  I rang her French publisher, Franck Spengler, and offered to acquire the rights and get the book translated into English and asked him the obvious questions.

  He had harbored the same doubts when the manuscript had originally landed on his desk. But he had met Vanessa Duriès and was soon convinced that not only was she the author of the story, but that it was one-hundred percent autobiographical.

  The book appeared in France in March 1993 and had an immediate impact. Vanessa appeared on various television programs and disarmed interviewers and opponents with her evident sincerity. Here was an attractive young student who had been plunged by the power of love into the most depraved depths of the S&M world, and stood proudly by her experiences unashamed, almost defiant; invigorated by her vigorous devotion for Pierre, her master, an older man who had led her into this new, shadowy life.

  One day, I would like to see video recordings of the programs Vanessa participated in on the occasion of the book’s launch. Something inside me beckons the sound of her voice, with a warm Southern regional accent—she came from Agen, not far from Bordeaux; I wish to see the way her eyes must have twinkled under the studio lights, how her body moved in fas
cinating ways, her lips opened and curled, how the curls of her dark hair fell upon her neck as she defended her experiences head held high. It will be the only chance I will ever have to see Vanessa in motion.

  I have press cuttings from her newspaper and magazine interviews from the same period. She is a year older than the back jacket photograph, twenty-one now. The curls in her hair are less evident in this blurry photocopy of a photocopy. She sits on a park bench, her winning smile shyly aimed at the camera, wearing a simple white blouse under her quiet, conservative jacket. She is holding a book, probably her own. She looks like just another pretty French student. In anther photograph, even blurrier, she sits again, pensive this time, her gaze directed downwards, her skirt hitched up to mid-thigh; it is possibly the same suit, but here she is not wearing a shirt, the jacket is buttoned and you can see a simple, sober necklace around her fragile neck. She holds her hands together. Under the jacket, I know she is not wearing a brassiere; there, peer closer, are the breasts of Vanessa, the breasts that have been whipped, beaten, the nipples that have been twisted, tortured, pulled to the limits of the skin’s endurance, licked, pierced by needles, lovingly caressed.

  Two months after her book’s publication in France, in May, 1993, Vanessa was asked, I assume by her domineering master, to pose in the nude for a skin magazine, no doubt in another test of her submission. Six more photographs of Vanessa.

  The first picture occupies two-thirds of the double-page opening spread, a loving close-up of her face, eyes peering at the lens, a spotlight reflected in her dark pupils, her delicate upturned nose, the sharply drawn eyebrows highlighted by an imperceptible scar where the bridge of her nose begins. He lustrous hair partly in frame, tousled, brown I know (although all the photographs are in black and white—yet again, cause for infinite regret, that I shall never witness the colors of Vanessa’s skin, the shades of her bare flesh). Her right cheek is partly obscured as her face lies on a blanket where the leather strands of a whip are spread-eagled touching her full lips and the underside of her nose. Vanessa watches me, the hint of a naked shoulder trimmed away, a black bra strap breaking into the frame. This is Vanessa, the abominably beautiful Vanessa who allowed utter strangers to sodomize her at will, to introduce foul foreign objects inside her body. This is my favorite shot of Vanessa, the one where she is paradoxically at her most open, naked, receptive. She looks at me from the glossy page, her features almost life size, the pores of her skin crudely magnified.