“Something More Bare and More Raw Than a Man.” Constance Debré on Learning to Love Women

A woman is a very strange thing. Radically different from anything else. I don’t know when I started thinking that. Maybe when I looked at her lying there next to me that first morning, when she was sleeping and I wasn’t. I started comparing our bodies, our breasts. I knew before that I had no hips, that my breasts were small, that I was taller and thinner than most other women, but it was just a vague notion. I stood in front of the mirror at the swimming pool to try and understand. Maybe the crawl had accentuated the outline of the shoulders and canceled out the hips. My body is me, no more, no less. It’s been right in front of me all this time. I started comparing myself to her. I saw myself and I saw her, her and all the other women I’m not. The shoulders, the suppleness, the roundedness, all the things she has and they have and I don’t. I measured her up and I measured myself up too. Physically, morally. I thought, A woman is something I had never imagined. Something more bare and more raw than a man. Something perpetually verging on obscene. That’s what she made me realize. Men don’t get under your skin. Maybe they don’t have the same capacity to move you, either. But they don’t get under your skin. Yes, maybe it started the first time I saw her naked. Maybe it was later. When I saw that she didn’t want to give me anything. When I felt her dry hands on my body. When I saw her with her children, slowly devouring them, her mind at rest, her heart at peace. When I realized that she prefers things to people, not even the big things, but the small things, the most insignificant things. When I understood there was nothing she desired from the world. That’s when I thought, So that’s what a woman is, soft skin and stupidity, a narrow soul that can’t compare with the softness of the skin, sloppy caresses, a body that can’t return the reverence it inspires, an animal that knows nothing of love and desire, that knows nothing of beauty either, a bourgeois body, devoid of greatness, slightly dirty. It’s someone who cries when they’re being mean. To love a woman, is to despise her. I understood the violence of men. I wondered if that’s how they had always felt about us, if that’s how Laurent had always felt about me.

*

Paris, fall. She comes to meet me in cafés. She comes to see me often. She writes me every day. When I invite her to my place she says I can’t. Sometimes she kisses me or lets me kiss her. She doesn’t say anything, we never talk about it. She says she’s going to leave her husband. I don’t know if that has anything to do with what happened between us. Or what’s happening between us. I don’t even know what’s happening.

She says they made the decision this summer. She says they’re no longer in love. They’ve always been very free. Free, she says. They don’t sleep together anymore. They each have their own lives. She can’t understand why he hates her sometimes. They haven’t spoken about it to anyone. She doesn’t dare. It’s shame that keeps her there. She says divorce is failure.

We meet in a café. She brings me a piece of cheese, big enough to fill an entire cheeseboard, greasy, yellow, sweating, stinking, stupid.

Speaking in hushed voices, the presence of her body, right there, her every breath. Other people. In the doorway, hidden away, a look, a kiss.

Her walk, the slight sway, her back, straight as an arrow, the slight arch, the long thighs, skin that’s tanned and smoothed by the sun. It’s almost chilly out. White T-shirt under a navy-blue sweater, her mascara, her perfume.

She slides her pelvis toward the edge of the low armchair and spreads her legs slightly, in the shape of a V, legs bent, shoes beneath her knees, torso straight. I know the weight of her head in my hand, her hot palms, I know how she smells too, I know it all with my eyes closed.

She comes over to my place. She tells me her husband asked her if she’s leaving him for me. I don’t know why she’s telling me this. She won’t leave him. Kisses on my bed, fully dressed, I lean in toward her breasts, she pulls down her sweater and shakes her bangs into place. She says she doesn’t have time, she looks at herself in the mirror, she smiles, she says We’re beautiful, she’s looking at herself.

I go downstairs. She’s waiting at my door. I’m on the phone, I have my arm around her neck, the smell of her. Tepid tea, the gray light of the day, why am I putting sugar in this tea. She says Don’t look at me like that. She smiles.

She wants us to go to the gym together, I think it’s to put the secret out there in the world, I think it’s to see how much I’ll say yes to. Maybe it’s just because the subscription will be cheaper if I go with her. I say yes.

She asks to see the notebook she gave me, she stuck photos inside, tickets, a map, and a few ambiguous sentences. I’m sitting in front of her, the sun is streaming in through the windows, we’re alone, she’s in an armchair in front of me, she doesn’t look at me, she doesn’t touch me, she looks at the notebook, she smiles.

I look at her, I hesitate, she says yes, I kiss her. It’s funny how it’s always up to me to kiss her. She’s the one who decides when.

The things I don’t understand don’t exist. I suspend all curiosity regarding her absence, her ways, her reasoning. All that happens is all that exists.

She tells me to expect a letter. It’s a photo of me taken by her that comes in the mail. One sentence that could mean everything or nothing, typed up on a computer, no date, no signature.

Having lunch, in the sun. Out of nowhere, she grabs my arm, takes my face in her hands. Her hand around the back of my neck when we leave.

Every day she writes me, every day I see her, her smile never changes, her texts are all the same. I don’t ask any questions. She keeps me there at arm’s length, slightly more than a hypothesis, slightly less than reality.

She says she’s looking for an apartment. She doesn’t go to see any.

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Excerpted from Playboy by Constance Debré, translated by Holly James. Copyright © 2024. Available from Semiotext(e), an imprint of MIT Press.