Becoming Catherine Deneuve

We all grow up to be somebody. We make our self 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 sensual as Marilyn Monroe.
When I grow up I want to be as kick-arse as bat woman.
When I grow up I want to be Catherine Denueve

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.

I will not magically turn into Catherine Denueve. I will not become the refined but ultimately sexy French superstar despite the hours of watching, pressing re-wind, watching, longing, watching...

I will be the same unsettled, scatty soul that grew bored of climbing a tree, half-way up, who could weep for the loss of a play friend or a toy until, a matter of days later, I could not remember why I had been crying, who could turn around and start a book from the beginning and come to the ending 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 fug of forgetting. I am swept up in a hungry tide of romantic possibilities. I allow myself to wander freely amongst all the romantic possibilities.

How does my sexual memoir end? I ask my friend and he looks at me with a wistfully sad smile and keeps silent. He will not be the one to tell me that Santa Clause is not real. There is an ending and I am living it and it is fine and full of compromises and quite a bit of joy. There is no satisfying turn-around where my ordinary life crashes against my fantasy realm and I discover that I have a secret double life full of wild sex and gorgeous lovers.

Sometimes I feel like the little lame boy in the Pied Piper who was left behind in reality when all his friends were swallowed up by the mountain into some wonderful fantasy world. I come home to the same flat each evening. I sleep in the same bed. I make love to the same man. My wild days are long gone and I miss the roller coaster ride that they brought to me, but I love my husband who is drop-dead gorgeous and keeps me on the simmer. Every time I catch a glimpse of him doing the washing up or slipping into the shower I know I am lucky.

Not a particularly satisfying ending for a sexual memoir, not the Catherine Deneuve sexy French film noir.

It all ended in quiet boredom, a good deal of contentment and occasional unrest.

This will not be the last chapter of the memoir because my audience will yawn and groan and throw the book across the room in dissatisfaction. There must be a better denouement. If you, my audience, have other suggestions for the way you would like to see it all come to a close, please finish the story for me in the section marked 'comments'.

At the end of this story, please someone make me become Catherine Deneuve.