Little Birds (3 page)

I liked to see her dress up for the evening in barbaric jewelry, her face so vivid. She was not for gentle Paris, for the cafés. She was meant for the African jungle, orgies, dances. But she was a not a free being, rippling in natural undulations of pleasure and desire. If her mouth, body, voice, were made for sensuality, its true flow was paralyzed in her. Between her legs she was impaled on a rigid pole of puritanism. All the rest of her body was loose, provocative. She always looked as if she had just come from lying in bed with a lover, or as if she were just about to lie down with one. She had circles under her eyes and such a great restlessness, an energy smoking from her whole body, impatience, avidity.

She did everything to seduce me. She liked our kissing on the mouth. She held my mouth, and excited herself, and then drew away. We had breakfast together. She lay in bed and raised her leg so that from where I was sitting at the foot of the bed I could see her sex. While she dressed she dropped her chemise, pretending that she had not heard me come in, and stood naked for a moment, then covered herself.

The nights when Hans came to see me there was always a scene. She had to sleep then in the room above mine. The next morning she would awaken sick with jealousy. She made me kiss her on the mouth again and again until we got excited, and then she stopped. She liked those kisses without climax.

We went out together and I admired the woman who was singing in the little cafe. Lina got drunk and was furious with me. She said, "If I were a man, I would murder you."

I became angry. Then she wept and said, "Don't abandon me. If you abandon me I am lost."

At the same time she raved against Lesbianism, saying it was revolting, and would not permit anything but the kissing. Her scenes were wearing me out.

When Hans saw her he said, "The trouble with Lina is that she is a man."

I told myself that I would try and find out, break her resistance in some way or another. I was never very good at wooing people who resisted. I wanted them to want it, to be yielding.

When Hans and I were in my bedroom at night, we were afraid to make a noise that she might hear. I did not want to hurt her, but I hated her scenes of frustration and her negative jealousy.

"What do you want, Lina, what do you want?"

"I want you not to have lovers. I hate it when I see you with men."

"Why do you hate men so?"

"They have something I don't have. I want to have a penis so that I can make love to you."

"There are other ways of making love between women."

"But I won't have it, I won't have it."

Then one day I said, "Why don't you come with me and visit Michel? I want you to see his explorer's den."

Michel had said to me, "Bring her, I will hypnotize her. You will see."

She consented. We went up to his apartment. He had been burning incense, but an incense I did not know.

Lina was quite nervous when she saw his place. The erotic atmosphere disturbed her. She sat down on the furcovered couch. She looked like a beautiful animal, one well worth capturing. I could see that Michel wanted to dominate her. The incense was making us slightly drowsy. Lina wanted to open the window. But Michel came over and sat between us and began talking to her.

His voice was gentle and enveloping. He was telling stories of his voyages. I saw that Lina was listening, that she had ceased twitching and smoking feverishly, that she was lying back and dreaming over his endless stories. Her eyes were half-closed. Then she fell asleep.

"What did you do, Michel?" I felt quite drowsy myself.

He smiled, "I burned a Japanese incense that makes one sleepy. It's an aphrodisiac. It is not harmful." He was smiling mischievously. I laughed.

Lina was not altogether asleep. She had crossed her knees. Michel climbed over her and tried to open them gently with his hands, but they remained tightly closed. Then he inserted his own knee between her thighs and parted them. I was roused by the sight of Lina so yielding and open now. I began caressing her, undressing her. She knew what I was doing but she was enjoying it. She kept her mouth on mine and her eyes closed and let Michel and me undress her completely.

Her rich breasts covered Michel's face. He bit the nipples. She let Michel kiss her between her legs and insert his penis, and she let me kiss her breasts and caress them. She had wonderful firm round buttocks. Michel kept pushing her legs apart and biting into her soft flesh until she began to moan. She would have nothing but the penis. So Michel took her and when she had enjoyed him he wanted to take me. She sat up, opened her eyes and watched us wonderingly for a moment, then took Michel's penis out of me and would not let him insert it again. She threw herself on me with a sexual fury, caressing me with her mouth and her hands. Michel took her again from behind.

When we came out on the street, Lina and I, holding each other by the waist, she pretended not to remember anything that had happened. I let her. The next day she left Paris.

There were two young sisters. One was stocky, dark-haired, vivid. The other was graceful, delicate. Dorothy had strength. Edna had a beautiful voice that haunted people, and she wanted to be an actress. They came from a well-to-do family who lived in Maryland. In the cellar of their house their father made a ceremony of burning D. H. Lawrence's books, which betrays how far behind this family was in the development of the sensual life. In spite of this, their father, with his eyes wet and brilliant, liked to take the girls on his knees, slip his hand under their little dresses and caress them.

They had two brothers, Jake and David. Before the boys could get an erection they played at making love with their sisters. David and Dorothy were always paired off together, as were Edna and Jake. The delicate David liked his husky sister, and the rather virile Jake liked the plantlike fragility of Edna. The brothers laid their soft young penises between their sisters' legs, but that was all. This was done in great secrecy, lying on the rug of the dining room and accompanied by a feeling that they were committing the greatest of sexual crimes.

Then suddenly these games stopped. The boys had discovered the world of sex through another boy. The sisters became self-conscious and were growing up. Puritanism was asserting itself in the family. Their father thundered and fought each intrusion from the outside world. He growled at the young men who came to call. He growled at dances, at parties of all kinds. With the fanaticism of an inquisitor, he burned the books he found his children reading. He gave up caressing his daughters. He did not know that they had made slits in their panties so when they dated they could be kissed between the legs, that they sat in cars with boys, sucking their penises, that the seat of the family car was stained with sperm. Even so, he fought off the young men who called too often. He did everything to prevent his daughters from marrying.

Dorothy was studying sculpture. Edna still wanted to go on the stage. But then she fell in love with a man older than herself, the first man she had really known. The others were boys to her; they aroused a sort of maternal craving in her, a desire to protect. But Harry was forty, and he worked for a company that took rich people on cruises. As social captain of the cruise, it was his job to see that the guests were entertained, that they met one another, that their comforts were complete—and their intrigues, too. He helped the husbands to escape the vigilance of the wives, and the wives to escape their husbands. His stories of trips with these pampered rich stirred Edna.

They got married. They took a trip around the world together. What Edna discovered in their travels was that the social captain supplied a great deal of the sexual intrigue in person.

Edna returned from the trip estranged from her husband. Sexually he had not awakened her. She did not know why. Sometimes she thought it was because of her discovery of his having belonged to so many women. From the first night, it seemed that his possession was not of her, but of a woman like a hundred others. He had shown no emotion. When he undressed her he had said, "Oh, you have such thick hips. You seemed so slender, I never imagined you could have such thick hips."

She felt humiliated, she felt that she was not desirable. This paralyzed her own confidence, her own outflow of love and desire for him. Partly in a mood of revenge, she began to look at him just as coldly as he had looked at her, and what she saw was a man of forty whose hair was growing thin, who was soon going to be very fat and looked ready to retire into a familiar and stolid life. He was no longer the man who had seen all the world.

Then came Robert, thirty years old, dark-haired, with burning brown eyes like some animal that looked at once hungry and tender. He was fascinated by Edna's voice, enchanted by the softness of it. He was completely spellbound by her.

He had just won a scholarship with an acting company. He and Edna shared a love of the stage. He renewed her faith in herself, in her attractiveness. He was not even quite aware that it was love. He treated her somewhat like an older sister, until one day backstage, when everyone had gone home and Edna had been rehearsing him, listening to him, giving her impressions, they acted out a kiss that did not stop. He took her, on the sofa of the stage setting, awkwardly, hurriedly, but with such an intensity that she felt him as she had never felt her husband. His words of praise, worship, cries of wonder, incited her, and she bloomed in his hands. They fell on the floor. The dust got into their throats, but they were still kissing, caressing, and Robert had a second erection.

Edna and Robert were together all the time. Her alibi for Harry was that she was studying acting. It was a period of drunkenness, of blindness, of living only with the hands and mouth and body. Edna let Harry go off alone on his cruise. She was free now for six months. She and Robert lived together in New York, secretly. He had such magnetism in his hands that his touch, even his hand on her arm, sent warmth all through her. She lived open and sensitized to his presence. And his feeling about her voice was the same. He would telephone her at all hours to hear it. It was like a song luring him out of himself and out of his life. All other women were canceled by her voice.

He entered her love with a sense of absolute possession, security. To hide and sleep in her, take her, enjoy her, they were all the same. There were no tensions, no moments of ambivalence, hatred. The lovemaking never became wild and cruel, an animal bout in which one strives to rape the other, force one's way into the other and hurt with violence or desire. No, this was a melting together, a vanishing together into a soft, dark womb of warmth.

Harry returned. And at the same time Dorothy came back from the West, where she had been working, sculpturing. She was herself now like a piece of highly polished wood, her features firm and chiseled, her voice earthy, her legs sturdy, her very nature hard and strong, like the work she did.

She saw what had happened to Edna but did not know about her estrangement from Harry. She thought Robert had caused it, and hated him. She assumed he was a lover of the moment, just separating Harry and Edna for his own pleasure. She did not believe it was love. She fought Robert. She was cutting, biting. She herself was an impregnable virgin, though not puritanical or squeamish. She was open like a man, used lusty words, told bawdy stories, laughed about sex. But still she was impregnable to all.

She felt Robert's antagonism exultantly. She loved the fire and angry demons in him, biting, snarling at her. What she hated above all was that most men in her presence wilted, grew small and feeble. Only the timid ones approached her, as if to seek her strength. She wanted to shatter them, seeing the way they crawled toward her treelike body. The idea of letting them push their penis between her legs was like allowing some insect to crawl over her. Whereas she gloried in the struggle to push Robert out of Edna's life, to humiliate him, demolish him. The three of them would sit together, Edna hiding her feelings about Harry, Robert not offering to take her away, not thinking, living only in the romantic present—dreamer. Dorothy accused him of this. Edna defended him; all the time she sat there thinking of the fiery way Robert took her the first time, the narrow little couch on which they lay, the dusty rug on which they rolled; thinking of his hands, the they penetrated her.

Edna said to her sister, "You cannot understand. You have never been in love like this."

Then Dorothy was silenced.

The two sisters slept in adjoining rooms. There was a big bathroom between the rooms. Harry had gone again for six months. Edna let Robert come to her room at night.

One morning looking out of the window, Dorothy saw Edna leave the house. She did not know that Robert was still in her room asleep. She went into the bathroom to take a bath. Edna had left her door open, and Dorothy, thinking herself alone, did not trouble to close it. On this door there was a mirror. Dorothy came into the bathroom and dropped her kimono. She pinned her hair up, she made up her face. Her body was magnificent. Every movement she made before the mirror brought out the provocative full, taut curves of her breasts and buttocks. Her hair was full of lights; she brushed it. Her breasts danced as she moved. She stood on her toes to make up her eyelashes.

And Robert, on awakening, found himself looking at this spectacle from the bed, everything mirrored before him. Suddenly his whole body flushed with warmth. He threw off the covers. Dorothy was still visible in the mirror. She was leaning over to pick up her hairbrush. Robert could not bear any more. He went to the bathroom and stood there. Dorothy made no outcry. He was naked, his penis thrust out towards her, his brown eyes burning her.

As he made a step towards her, Dorothy was taken with a strange trembling. She felt herself craving to move towards him. They fell upon each other. He half dragged, half carried her to the bed. It was like the continuation of their struggle, for she fought him, but her every movement only made him increase the pressure of his knees, of his hands, of his mouth. Robert was wild with a desire to hurt, to bend her to his will, her resistance warming his muscles, his anger. As he took her, breaking through the virginity, he bit into her, adding pain. She was oblivious to it because of the effect of his body on hers. Wherever he touched her, she burned; after the initial pain it seemed as if her womb was inflamed too. When it was over, she craved him again. It was she who took his penis between her hands and pushed it in again, and stronger than the pain was the ecstasy of his moving inside of her.