Affection by Krissy Kneen

Author:Krissy Kneen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Seal Press
Published: 2010-09-07T04:00:00+00:00

BECOMING CATHERINE DENEUVE

Brisbane 2008

Every day I come back to my computer. I trawl through my sex life, one post at a time. I begin to find the patterns, the back and forth clacking of the ping pong ball. I have bounced between one lover and another and I remember the sex. Most of my other memories are vague, a watercolor wash of people and places I only half recall. The sex remains strikingly clear. Visceral: I remember the sex in my body. I smell it on me when I have finished a blog post and emerge, tired and a little confused back into the real world, in my aging body. Who am I now, I wonder. Where have I left myself?

My blog posts unearth a pattern. I am growing older and the fear that I might lose my sexuality to the passing of years is palpable.

We all grow up to be somebody. We make ourselves up, one piece at a time, from all the possibilities around us. When I grow up I want to be as warm and cuddly as my mother. When I grow up I want to be as kick-ass as Batgirl. When I grow up I want to be Catherine Deneuve.

And then we grow up and we become the same person we were as a child, only with affectations gleaned from comic books and movie stars and real-life heroes. Underneath the various masks nothing much has changed.

Approaching my fortieth birthday, I look at my dirty laundry, aired publicly on my blog posts, and I know suddenly that I will not grow up to be Catherine Deneuve. I will not magically become the refined but impossibly sexy French superstar despite the hours of watching, pressing rewind, watching, longing, watching.

When I am forty I will be the same unsettled, scatty child who grew bored of climbing a tree halfway up; who could weep for the loss of a toy and, a matter of days later, not remember the toy at all. Who could turn around and start a book again from the beginning, and come to the ending as full of wonder as if I had never visited it before.

I am a middle-aged married woman. I sometimes glaze through my days in a cloud of forgetting, swept up in a hungry tide of wanting. I allow myself to wander freely amongst all of this romantic possibility forgetting that, one, I am old; two, I am not particularly attractive; three, I am married.

I am beginning to realize that when I grow up, which surely must be any day now, there will be no satisfying turnaround where my ordinary life crashes against my fantasy realm and I finally become the real me.

Christopher invites me for a beer after work and I sit with him and I try my hardest, but I can’t even conjure up a sliver of attraction toward him. I have been chatting to Paul on the Internet and now Christopher has been usurped. I don’t even remember what Paul looks likes, just a vague impression, but we talk every night.

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