Max went with me to see the maestro today, at the faculté de droit. He spoke before, I don’t know, a couple hundred people, mostly students training to be analysts, but also scholars in other fields, and even, I heard, some actors. He’s a man of science who speaks like a mystic. Every word has its weight, as if he were dropping iron plumbs into a sea to anchor his thoughts. He delivers his speech like he’s performing Molière at the Comédie-Française. It is often hard to follow. Today he talked about jouissance, and love, and the Other, and I stroked the inside of Max’s wrist with my finger, afraid to outright hold his hand, and then the maestro said there is no woman, and that it is the instinct of the mother that prevails in her, not her own sexual pleasure, which turns around the phallus, and that man cannot enjoy woman’s body because he is too busy enjoying his own enjoyment, and while I have known men like that, indeed sex with Henry has sometimes felt like that, it has not always been so, and I wrote it all down and put a question mark next to it and Max shrugged and I wanted to talk to him about it afterward but afterward he took me back to his office and I forgot all about the maestro and whether or not there are women with their own sexual desires because I was inside my desire, and soon Max was too.