The Bad Girl (Week One)

Ricardo reminded me of a lesson I learned in my Intro. to Psychology class. If one person in the relationship shows more love or adoration than the other, the relationship won’t work. The other person will feel one of three things: he or she will feel smothered, they will feel inadequate in their abilities to show affection, or they will lose interest in the relationship because their ego has been boosted and they no longer have a reason to stay with that person (they think that they can snag someone better). I think that Lily (or ex-guerrilla fighter, or ex-Madame Arnoux, or ex-Mrs. Richardson, or whoever she is- this aspect of her character reminded me very much of Conchita from "That Obscure Object of Desire") falls into the latter category. She teases Ricardo constantly about the sappy professions of love that he is constantly spewing at her. He seems pathetic to her and this reassures her that if one man can feel this way about her, then surely another (richer) man can also fall in love with her. Because he gives her no challenge, she quickly loses interest in him. Ricardo, on the other hand, loves that she mistreats him. He seems to dwell on her cruel actions, making them into overly dramatic and grossly romantic gestures. But, for Lily, he is simply a safe place to return to after she destroys one relationship after another. And in order to keep him around she gives him sex.

I first thought that Lily was just one of those girls who was so full of herself that she thought that all she had to do was lie there. She acted as if she was gracing him with her presence. She made him wait and beg for her and decided exactly when it was time to oblige. But there is something very odd about her passiveness. Lily, in many ways, likes to stay in control of the situation when it comes to her trysts with Ricardo. She decides where and when they will meet. When he finds her in London, she even pays for the hotel. So it is almost ironic that she would be so passive. It seemed, at first, that she was just being cold. She wanted to keep Ricardo at a distance; she didn't want to give any indication that she loved him. But their affairs, though fragmented, lasted for years at a time and while in London, they began to engage in pillow talk. There is a certain intimacy expressed when Ricardo talks about all of the impassioned conversations they had post-coitus. So I began to feel that her passiveness and coldness was in regards to the act of sex itself.

Ricardo mentions that it is not until after they have had sex many times that it stopped feeling like she was a virgin. She also asks him to perform oral sex on her before intercourse in which she covers her eyes with her arms in concentration. She tunes out everything as if he wasn't there. It seems that sex for her is very detached. Her pleasure is displaced from his (maybe even because of his). His part of the sexual experience acts only as “irrigation”. Which, in and of itself, is a strange choice of words. It gives the sex a sort of peculiar, practical purpose other than the pleasure of connecting two bodies.

Her passivity also acts as a catalyst of his desire. He never really obtains what he really desires- sex with Lily -because during sex, she acts as if she isn't really there.