The more I get to know her, the more I start to think of Anna as the best friend who understands you and everything that goes on inside you. I can tell her anything and she can tell me exactly how I’m feeling and why. It’s like we’re two heads with one brain and a shared consciousness. Sometimes she can even finish my sentences before I’ve started them.
We’re thick as thieves. And we complement each other perfectly. You could say we were made for each other. We get so close, so quickly, people say we could be sisters. I can’t see it myself. Anna has the jump on me in most things. She is everything that I’m not.
She’s the beauty. I’m the brains.
I’m the smart girl. She’s the popular one.
She just makes me laugh. She doesn’t have the filter between her brain and her mouth that most people have. She can look at some random guy in class and, apropos of nothing at all, will say cute inappropriate things like,
‘I wonder if he’s cut or uncut.’
And, ‘I’d say he hangs to the left.’
Or, ‘I bet his come tastes of lemon jelly.’
But she doesn’t think it’s at all inappropriate. Just something that needs to be said at that particular point in time. She’s so pure and uncomplicated and free in that way. Sex is as natural as breathing to her.
I’m so into Anna, and everything about her, that I contrive an excuse for Jack to pick me up from class so we can have lunch together. Because I want him to meet my new best friend.
Afterwards, I play our game.
What did you think of Anna? I say.
‘She’s nice,’ he says.
Do you think she’s cute? I say.
‘I guess,’ he says.
If you weren’t with me, would you be with her? I say.
‘I don’t think I’m her type,’ he says.
You didn’t answer the question, I say.
‘Yeah, I did,’ he says.
But is she yours? I say.
‘She could be,’ he says.
She has nice tits, don’t you think? I say.
‘Sure,’ he says.
Do you like her ass? I say.
‘Where is this going?’ he says, frustrated.
Well, would you like to fuck her? I tease.
‘Catherine, let’s talk about something else,’ he says firmly, and it’s not the answer I want.
5
Marcus has set, as homework, a screening of Belle de Jour, the Louis Buñuel movie that stars Catherine Deneuve.
I’ve never seen the movie before. I know nothing about it. I have no idea what to expect.
I sit down in the theater on campus and I’m not alone but, when the lights go down and the darkness closes in around me, I might as well be. This is how I like to experience movies. In a theater, in the dark, as a one-on-one communion between me and the screen. As something approaching the quiet contemplation you feel when standing in front of a great painting that awes you into silence.
I sit down to watch a movie and expect to be transported on a flight from reality into another world. I expect, at the very least, to be entertained, maybe enthralled, even appalled. The last thing I expect is to see myself up on the screen.
Bear with me, I’m not completely deluded. I know I’m not the star of this movie, even if I do share a name with the lead. I’m not even a supporting character. But somehow, some way, something about it connects with me deeply. Even if I only have one thing in common with its protagonist, a frigid, upper middle class, French housewife who harbors secret masochistic desires about sex.
Her name is Séverine. Latin for ‘stern’. Imagine going through life, your entire life, and having people decide they don’t like you even before they’ve met you. Just from hearing your name. Séverine. Severe. Stern.
Imagine lumbering a kid from birth with a name like that. You might as well call it, ‘No fun’.
No fun at all.
And it’s not as if that name doesn’t suit Catherine Deneuve’s character in Buñuel’s movie. In fact, there’s isn’t another name that suits her better because, to be honest, she isn’t a whole lot of fun. She’s icy-cold and dispossessed of every quality that could make you like her, stripped of almost everything that makes her human. Everything except her morbid fantasies of humiliation and punishment. Because you’re not meant to like her or even identify with her.
And yet, somehow I do.
Séverine. No fun. No fun at all. Married a year and she’s never let her husband fuck her. Married a year and she won’t even let him sleep in the same bed. Married a year and he hasn’t even seen her naked. Her husband; devoted, protective, dependable and so, so understanding.
Séverine. A virgin in reality, but a whore in her imagination. And it’s her imagination that leads her astray.