My Year With Proust - Day 58

   "But he was so shy in approaching her that, after this evening which had begun by his arranging her cattleyas and had ended in her complete surrender, whether from fear of chilling her, or perhaps reluctance to appear, even retrospectively, to have lied, or perhaps because he lacked the audacity to formulate a more urgent requirement than this (which could always be repeated, since it had not annoyed her on the first occasion), he resorted to the same pretext on the following days.  If she had any cattleyas pinned to her bodice, he would say: 'It is most unfortunate; the cattleyas don't need tucking in this evening; they've not be disturbed as they were the other night; I think, though, that this one isn't quite straight.  May I see if they have more scent than the others?  Or else, if she had none: 'Oh! no cattleyas this evening: then there's nothing for me to arrange.' So that for some time there was no change from the procedure which he had followed on that first evening, when he had started by touching her throat, with his fingers first and then with his lips, but their caresses began invariably with this modest exploration.  And long afterwards, when the arrangement (or, rather, the ritual pretence of an arrangement) of her cattleyas had quite fallen into desuetude, the metaphor 'Do a cattleya', transmuted into a simple verb which they would employ without a thought of its original meaning when they wished to refer to the act of physical possession (in which, paradoxically, the possessor possesses nothing), survived to commemorate in their vocabulary the long-forgotten custom from which it sprang. And yet possibly this particular manner of saying 'to make love' had not the precise significance of its synonyms. However disillusioned we may be about women, however we may regard the possession of even the most divergent types as an invariable and monotonous experience, every detail of which is known and can be described in advance, it still becomes a fresh and stimulating pleasure if the women concerned be - or be thought to be - so difficult as to oblige us to base our attack upon some unrehearsed incident in our relations with them, as was originally for Swann the arrangement of the cattleyas."

Marcel Proust, Swann's Way, pp. 247-248

And so, picking up from where we left off last time, we've probably moved from the sublime to the ridiculous: the establishment of the catchphrase for sex, in this case to "do a cattleya."  In some ways this is just representative of the normalization of any relationship.  At some point or another you almost inevitably move from fucking to making love, which is not necessarily a bad thing as long as you still leave room for the occasional spontaneous, wild, sweaty cattleya.  If you don't then the normal becomes the ordinary, and you end up with too many exchanges like this:

   "'No cattleyas, then, to-night?' he asked, 'and I've been looking forward so to a nice little cattleya.'

   But she was irresponsive; saying nervously: 'No, dear, no cattleya to-night.  Can't you see, I'm not well?'

   'It might have done you good, but I won't bother you.'" (288)

What I love about this exchange, beyond the universality of the sentiment, is that I suspect he didn't really want to do a cattleya either, but this allows him to grab the moral or at least emotional high ground, and the resulting relationship capital, which can be used as a negotiating chip later.

It seems to me that the establishment of the catchphrase for sex is totally organic and idiosyncratic, and does speak to a level of intimacy.  "Do you want to hang out?" This may seem like a classic come hither line between potential partners, but I've also seen long-term couples say this with the same, although I guess more definite and planned, meaning.  "Want go go upstairs?"  Classic.  What would a couple sitting downstairs watching Netflix be doing going upstairs?  Oh, and speaking of Netflix, the individual and unique catchphrase for sex can obviously be part of the larger societal lexicon as well.  "Netflix and chill."  This is, at least for the moment, the common term for casual hookups among college students, although, doubtless, it will be different next week.

And, truthfully, who doesn't need a good cattleya?

And, to be honest, I was once involved in a long-term relationship with a woman that featured lovely notes like, "Cattleya Tuesday?" As Sei Shonagon reminds us, "the rain that swells the waters."