Vanessa Duries - The Classmate

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 snoring 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.