Wet Paint 02: Celluloid

'The Organising Committee of the Inaugural Etoile du Nord Festival of Serious Fetishistic Cinema cordially invites M. Joseph Exeter and Mlle Jenna Blunt to participate in its deliberations as judges and official correspondents. RSVP.'

A tastefully embossed, plain white card invitation in the mail, one to me, one to Jenna. My old friend Jean-Luc Delgado the source, and our agreement already in the bag, along with the negotiated fee to be paid to both of us, its 50-50 split more than I could have afforded to pay her for a month's work as my research assistant, less than I could probably have demanded on my own, but which I was only too pleased to share with the girl who was illuminating my late middle age with her intelligence, her libido, and her dazzlingly compatible and rare sexual tastes.

In fact, we were fucking in my study as it arrived in the downstairs mailbox. That is, she was spreadeagled forward across my desk, head sideways on a book over whose cover she was drooling slightly, her breasts pressed against the shiny walnut surface, dripping cunt blurring a page of handwritten notes directly beneath the point at which I was thrusting my cock in and out of her in rhythm with the words of the story she was telling me.

"Then she knelt on the floor and slid one head of the Amphisbaena as far up her as she could, so that she gasped and winced slightly with the sensation of it hitting her cervix, forcing it inward, as I inserted a second finger under the base of her clit and rubbed her slowly, steadily, feeling her wetness drip back down my hand, then letting her push me backward till I was on the floor, shoulder blades pressed against the cold wood, and she edged forward between my thighs, wanking me now with her spare hand, squeezing my clit so that a rush of lubricant dripped down my lips, and slowly pushing the other bulbous head of the dildo into my cunt until we were impaled on each end, on each other, moving backwards and forwards, trying to join our cunts together, our clits nearly but never quite touching, the ribbed skin of the Amphisbaena pulling the inside of me out then forcing it back in, the hard unyielding shaft of it filling me up, trying to push its way into my womb then pulling out again, making a vacuum into which lubricant and cum and piss were sucked out of me, her mouth on mine now, her freed hands grasping my tits as I grasped hers, twisting and tearing at her nipples, she pulling mine as though attempting to twist them away from me, her teeth grasping my tongue as I thrust my pelvis into hers and I could feel her gush splashing down the shaft and spattering my own cunt as I came and came and came and..."

I came, uncontrollably, my cock half out of her such that when I pushed back in, as deeply as I could, my sperm splashed out around it and dripped, mixed with her cum, over the now completely obscured page of notes beneath her.

"Fuck, Jenna, you're going to give me a heart attack one of these days!"

"Well" she said, as I stood back, a single bead of cum rolling slowly down the underside of my remaining erection, "I just hope you've named me in your will."

She rolled onto her back, tits white where they'd been compressed against the desktop, cunt a riot of shiny pink and smeared white. I kissed it.

We didn't live together. We didn't even fuck every day. She observed office hours as my researcher, but the custom had grown that the first hour she was at my flat we'd spend drinking coffee and catching up on what we'd been doing the previous night. In my case, it would be something like theatre or the opera, and she'd endure my admiring descriptions of this or that actor or singer in this or that production, occasionally even appearing genuinely interested. But the real point of these sessions was for her to tell me her latest sexual adventures with her girlfriend, Roza, a Bulgarian her own age with whom she'd been at university. Sometimes it was fingering and licking each other in the toilets at a nightclub. Others it was a close description of one or other of their bedrooms, the dirty underwear-strewn floors on which they ate each other's cunts, the variety of sex toys they used on one another, the quality and taste of Roza's cum, the energy and violence with which they brought each other to orgasm.

Inevitably, these stories would begin with us fully clothed and seated separately in my study, almost academic in our consideration of her account. Equally without fail, they would end with her reliving the detail of her and Roza's latest encounter as I licked, probed, squeezed, fisted, fucked, and drank her while creating an image of it in my own head, guts and cock. That was the game. That was the art of it.

This time it was the girls fucking each other with Roza's double-ended dildo, which Jenna called 'The Amphisbaena', after a mythical two-headed creature in Jorge Luis Borges's "Book of Imaginary Beings."

"I may be a slut, but I'm a highly intellectual slut" she said when I praised her for her wit.

Jenna was, indeed, highly educated. She called Roza 'Napoleon', after a famous letter from the erstwhile French emperor to his mistress Josephine in which he announced he was returning to her from his latest campaign and enjoined her not to wash.

"She likes me smelly" Jenna told me. "Armpits, cunt, hair, arsehole. It really turns her on. She can spend an entire afternoon sniffing and licking my sweatiest, dirtiest crevices. Strange thing is, she's so fastidious herself. She has more deodorants in her bathroom than I've got filthy thoughts in my head. I tried fucking myself with one of the cans in front of her once and she was mortified. And she's never once let me piss in her mouth either."

I felt obscurely flattered by that. Urolagnia was what had brought me and Jenna together. As a fetish only enjoyed by something like four percent of the population it felt special. I was glad I didn't have to share Jenna's piss with her other lover, although it seemed we had a lot else in common.

"How about you steal me a pair of her dirty knickers?" I said.

Admittedly I did ask this as I ejaculated into Jenna's mouth following another of our lengthy narrative fucks in my study, but it didn't seem out of the ordinary, relatively speaking. There were no rules in Jenna's and my relationship. No taboos, no strings, no assumptions. I paid her for her excellent research work, and we fucked. Frequently, imaginatively, and without the constraints of exclusivity. We both knew I was too old, and she too young for any of that sort of nonsense.

"OK" she said, once she'd swallowed my cum and licked the residue from around her mouth. "She tastes good, and her bedroom normally looks like a bombsite, but I bet she washes her underwear every day. I'll have to be quick!"

Jean-Luc's invitation was the latest iteration of a successful career in filmmaking that he continued to attribute, quite erroneously, to me. He frequently reminded me of the time we went with our then-girlfriends, Therese and Natacha, to a screening of the young Pedro Almodovar's 'Pepi, Luci, Bom', whose notorious golden shower scene Therese then recreated with me in his living-room after a night's drinking. I in turn reminded him every time that it had been his idea to see the film, and Therese's to start pissing on me. But the fact that the incident had been followed by his and Natacha's participation in a foursome with us seemed to attach the credit for his sudden conversion to fetishism and its potential in cinema firmly to me -- a fetishistic phenomenon in itself, if I thought about it.

The fact was that, inspired by the events of that day, he'd signed up to film school and subsequently dedicated himself to creating what he called 'intelligent erotica' or 'philosophical filth.' After some years devilling on other directors' work, much of it of dubious intellectuality and negligible philosophy, he'd finally achieved his initial ambition: to film the poet Guillaume Apollinaire's obscure erotic novel 'Memoirs of a Young Don Juan', which he did with great wit and ability, such that it won a special prize at Cannes and was singled out for praise by Almodovar himself, one of the judges that year.

He also married my ex, Therese. She'd acted in a number of his films, including the 'Memoirs,' some critics said with more enthusiasm than subtlety. I reserved my judgement, having come to know her too well in similar situations to be able to remain objective.

The Etoile du Nord Festival was Jean-Luc's own pet project, a forum that would both recognise the contribution of sexual fetishism to the vocabulary of film by staging screenings of acknowledged classics with such specialist content, and as a showcase for new directors keen to promote hidden or minority sexual tastes, as Almodovar and Jean-Luc Delgado had been prepared to before them.

'Etoile du Nord' had, of course, been the name of Jean-Luc's late parents' restaurant in the city of Blois. Unlike the restaurant, which specialised in southern European food from Jean-Luc's grandparents' Spain, the festival was firmly located in the north, in an unprepossessing small city called Abbeville. The reasons for this were, he explained, twofold. Firstly, everywhere else in France was already taken as the venue of a major arts festival of one kind or another. Secondly, his main sponsor was a local former porn actress who'd made a fortune out of diversifying into a regional car dealership and wanted to use the sizeable resources she'd built up in her second career as a way of justifying her first.

The first I'd heard of the festival was a request from Jean-Luc to comment on a list of classic mainstream films with fetish content that he'd drawn up as candidates for screening in the afternoons prior to the evening showings of new movies influenced by them. I am not a film critic, but I'd seen most of those on the list. The ones I hadn't I asked Jenna to source on DVD, streaming or torrent services, and we watched them together, along with those I'd previously seen but she hadn't.

There were obvious approvals. 'Pepi' was a no-brainer, given its audacity, its relentless sexual deviance, and its pivotal significance for the genesis of the Etoile du Nord Festival itself. Bunuel's 'That Obscure Object of Desire' was similarly an overt hymn to fetishism, albeit a more formalist one. My absolute favourite, Lars Von Trier's 'Nymphomaniac', had to be there, even though its one golden shower occurs only briefly toward the end of its four hours: the sheer bravado of its presentation of sex-obsession as an existential condition, its rejection of pathology, its dark humour and pathos, make it a classic film in any genre.

Pasolini's 'Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom' I counselled against. Pasolini was a tortured genius, gay, a masochist, but also a Marxist at a time when every Communist Party in the world held homosexuality to be a bourgeois deviation. By choosing a noxious text of the Marquis de Sade and transposing it to late-fascist period Italy, he was so evidently trying to obfuscate his own desires as to produce probably the only film he made that actually confirmed bourgeois values, by making the proposed alternatives seem so revolting that to be remotely aroused by them was automatically to condemn oneself to everyone, including oneself.

I can't unsee the Shit Banquet scene. I'm sure there are some who will have derived some kind of sexual satisfaction from it, but not me, pervert as I am. Jenna swiftly fast-forwarded.

I suggested if Jean-Luc wanted Pasolini he use 'Teorema' instead.

'And what about 'Ai No Corrida' or Winterbottom's 'Nine Songs'?' I wrote.

There were some odd and obscure things for which we had to look at closely before we understood the point. The Taviani Brothers' 'La Notte di San Lorenzo' contains a very brief scene in which a young woman in an Italian wartime air raid shelter squats down to piss, prompting a frenzy of masturbation by a horde of pubescent boys, but the whole scene lasts only seconds and is never referred to again. A German-financed film of an Ian McEwan novel 'The Cement Garden', made by Andrew Birkin, uncle of its lead actress Charlotte Gainsbourg -- the principal twenty years later in 'Nymphomaniac' -- incorporates a few admittedly exciting seconds in which Ms Gainsbourg's character wets herself, but as a film it's mainly interesting for other things.

Then there was Roman Polanski's 'Bitter Moon', a film so transcendently bad in almost all departments that Jenna and I were hooting with laughter even before Peter Coyote's stilted and plainly inexperienced Grand Guignol account of being uncontrollably driven to drinking Emmanuel Seignier's character's piss. That one we marked as a 'Yes' anyway. We wanted to see how a sophisticated French intellectual cinema festival judging panel would respond to it.

It wasn't until we'd emailed back the list with our recommendations and amendments that it occurred to me that I possessed a particularly rare piece of erotic footage that I knew Jean-Luc would appreciate, My dear friend the late artist Louise Stearman had made a photographic slide animation in the early 1980s entitled "Everything He Wanted To Do To Me", which consisted of a black-and-white animation made up of cleverly spliced and juxtaposed still photos taken from six different angles with stills cameras using randomly timed motordrives. It showed her having sex with an anonymised man -- his head either cropped out of the frame or his face obscured by an overprinted bar across his eyes -- and played as a continuous loop of genital, anal, and oral penetration, its soundtrack a rough tape recording of muffled French voices expressing disgust and outrage at the idea of engaging in any kind of sexual activity with a woman on her period.

It had been such a difficult piece for the art establishment, never mind the general public, to accept that it was only shown twice in the sixteen years between its creation and Louise's death. But it was nevertheless keenly absorbed into the Arts Council's national collection when her will left them the original material -- with the covenant that I, as her friend and long-standing critical champion, had the right not only to veto any proposed exhibition of the piece during my lifetime, but also to use a copy for any purpose I deemed fit.

Somewhere, I had a VHS cassette of "Everything He Wanted To Do To Me". Since her death, Louise's international reputation had been growing, and I'd have been prepared to bet a large amount that Jean-Luc would love that recording of the performance for his festival. Apart from anything else, its sheer rarity would attract a small horde of art aficionados.

Trouble was, I hadn't seen it for years. I knew it was stashed somewhere in what I called my archive, otherwise a spare bedroom in my flat piled floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes full of the detritus of sixty years. That was as accurate as my memory got.

Jenna, my faithful research assistant, volunteered to find it. I gave her some general hints as to where I remembered last seeing the relevant box, then went back to my study, ostensibly to continue some notes toward the book we were working on, but actually to be ambushed by the latest issue of 'The Jackdaw', a satirical magazine that routinely savages art establishment people like me for our pretentious attitudes toward our chosen field. I've often contributed to it under a pseudonym, and enjoy doing so far more than routinely being retained as an authority by the pompous and 'respectable' press. After about an hour I went to the kitchen to make some coffee, and thought I'd better check up on Jenna.

She was sitting on the floor of the archive room, watching a portable TV with built-in VHS player that in my younger, more fastidious days I'd stashed in the same area as my historic videotapes, then forgotten about. Her face, illuminated by the white light of Louise's monochrome slideshow, was rapt with attention, her mouth hanging slightly open as I leaned round the door and handed her a mug of coffee.

"Jesus actual fucking Christ" she said quietly. "That's you with your cock up Louise Stearman's bum!"

"Is it? I deny all allegations!" I said, creakily lowering myself to the floor next to her.

She looked sideways at me.

"That bloke is fitter than you" she said "But he's got the same mole on his shoulder, and when he takes the tool out of whichever orifice he's been shoving it in, well, let's just say it's pretty familiar."

"Sexist objectification. Reducing a man to a skin blemish and a penis."

"A very nice one. And hell, I would. I have. Lucky Louise to have had you so young."

She kissed me on the cheek.

"Thanks" I said, grudgingly.

"You admit it then? So how come you never told me you were not only best mates with one of my favourite artists but also one of her most notorious works?"

"I'm sure I've written about it. Unlike you not to do your research."

"You probably thought you had. I'm told memory plays tricks when you get old."

"Little bitch." I kissed her.

For the record, I had related the story of my meeting with Louise, my introduction to her dark sense of humour at a late-night Customs post, our first fuck in a grimy train toilet, and the making of 'Everything He Wanted' the day afterwards, in Parts 6 and 7 of my memoir 'Pisstory.' I'm still not entirely convinced Jenna hadn't read it. I think she just wanted to hear me tell her another dirty story, our habitual form of foreplay.

"What are those background voices and that crappy music?" Jenna said. "It's French, isn't it?"

"It is. All part of the concept. But if I'm going to tell you I suggest we go somewhere that can better stand getting a bit wet and messy. I really don't want you weeing all over my life history. The bathroom? Help this decrepit old man with a mole to his feet and you might get a satisfactory explanation."

Jean-Luc Facetimed me. Jenna and I took the call on my iPad in bed. Jean-Luc was French enough to accept and admire the fact that I had a 'maîtresse' less than half my age, and may well have had a similar arrangement himself, though the Therese I had known would have bitten his balls off if she hadn't been a full participant in any such ménage.

"Almodovar said yes!" he crowed. "He's going to give an introductory talk to 'Pepi' and take questions after. I'll be able to die happy after that."

"And Von Trier?"

"He said he's thinking of killing himself but will decide closer to the time. I think we can forget him."

"He'd probably only say something about Nazis that you'd have to spend the next ten years apologising for. I think you've had a narrow escape. Now, we've got some more news for you. Good, I hope."

"I'm listening."

"Joe's found an old sex tape of him and Louise Stearman" Jenna jumped in. "It's black and white and he hasn't got a head, but Louise is pretty sexy in a slightly between-the-wars German lesbian way, and there's a cumshot and everything!"

Jean-Luc's English didn't run to this. I was forced to translate.

"I'll get you for that you little trollop!" I hissed at Jenna, trying not to crack up laughing. I also explained that 'Everything He Wanted To Do To Me' was a serious, groundbreaking work of art with a legendary reputation in its field.

"And I don't remember any cumshot" I said.

"Over her face in the final frame" Jenna said. "Only occurs once in the loop. It's a kind of coda, I suppose."

"Know-all little bitch!"

"Er... When you send it to me can you make sure it's a clean digitised copy in a format I can use?" said Jean-Luc.

"Now, what kind of punishment do you suppose an impudent girl like you deserves?" I said to Jenna after we'd ended the call. "Should I spank you? Tie you up and leave you to reflect on your sins for a few hours? Arrange for you to be gang-raped by both teams, the match officials and the entire attendance of a Six Nations game at Twickenham? You choose."