Little Birds (4 page)

Robert had discovered a stronger sensation, a stronger flavor—the smell of Dorothy's hair, of her body, the strength of her as she enclosed him. In one hour she had obliterated his feelings for Edna.

Afterwards, Dorothy was like one possessed as she remembered Robert lying over her body, moving up so that he could rub his penis between her breasts, moving towards her mouth, and she felt the dizziness one experiences before an abyss, a sense of falling, of annihilation.

She did not know how to face Edna. She was torn with jealousy. She was afraid Robert would try to keep them both. But with Edna he only felt like becoming a child, lying at her side, putting his head on her breast and confessing everything to her, out of a need for a mother, not thinking at all of the hurt it would cause her. But he realized he could not stay. He invented a trip. He begged Dorothy to go with him. Dorothy said that she would leave later. He went to London.

Edna followed him there. Dorothy went to Paris. She was now trying to escape from Robert because of her love for Edna. She began having an affair with a young American, Donald, because he resembled Robert.

Robert wrote her that he could not make love to Edna anymore, that he had to pretend all the time. He had found out she was born the same day as his mother, and she was becoming more and more identified with his mother, which paralyzed him. He wouldn't tell her the truth.

Soon after, he went to Paris to meet Dorothy. She continued to see Donald, too. Then she and Robert went on a trip. That week together, they thought they were going to go crazy. Robert's caresses put Dorothy in such a state that she begged "Take me!" He would pretend to refuse, just to see her rolling in exquisite torture, on the verge of an orgasm and needing him only to touch her with the tip of his penis. Then she learned to tease him, too, to leave him when he was about to come. She would pretend to fall asleep. And he would lie there, tortured by the desire to be touched again, afraid to awaken her. He would edge close to her, place his penis against her ass, trying to move against it, to come just by touching her, but he couldn't, and then she would awaken and begin touching him and sucking him again. They did it so often that it became a torture. Her face was swollen from the kissing, and she had marks of his teeth on her body, and yet they could not touch each other in the street, even while walking, without jumping again with desire.

They decided to get married. Robert wrote to Edna.

On the day of the wedding, Edna came to Paris. Why? It was as if she wanted to see everything with her own eyes, to suffer the very last drop of bitterness. In a few days she had become an old woman. A month before she was glowing, enchanting, her voice like a song, like an aureole around her, her walk light, her smile inundating one. And now she wore a mask. Over this mask she had spread powder. There was no glow of life under it. Her hair was lifeless. The glaze in her eyes was like that of a dying person.

Dorothy was faint when she saw her. She cried out to her. Edna did not answer. She merely stared.

The wedding was ghostly. Donald burst in in the middle of it and behaved like a madman, threatening Dorothy for deceiving him, threatening to commit suicide. When it was over, Dorothy fainted. Edna stood there carrying flowers, a figure of death.

Robert and Dorothy left on a trip. They wanted to revisit the places they had traveled through a few weeks before, recapture the same pleasure. But when Robert tried to take Dorothy he found that she could not respond. Her body had undergone a change. The life had ebbed from it. He thought, It is the strain, the strain of having seen Edna, of the wedding, the scene made by Donald. So he was tender. He waited. Dorothy wept during the night. The next night it was the same. And the next. Robert tried caressing her, but her body did not vibrate under his fingers. Even her mouth did not answer his mouth. It was as though she had died. After a while she concealed it from him. She pretended to feel enjoyment. But when Robert was not looking at her, she looked exactly like Edna on the day of the wedding.

She kept her secret. Robert was deceived, until one day when they took a room in a rather cheap hotel, because the best ones were filled. The walls were thin, the doors did not close well. They got into bed. As soon as they put out the light they heard the springs of the bed in the next room squeaking rhythmically, two heavy bodies pounding into each other. Then the woman began to moan. Dorothy sat up in bed and sobbed for all that was lost.

Obscurely she felt what had happened to be a punishment. She knew it was related to her taking Robert from Edna. She thought she could recapture at least the physical response with other men, and perhaps free herself and return to Robert. When they went back to New York she sought adventures. In her head she was always hearing the moans and cries of the couple in the hotel room. She would not rest until she had felt this again. Edna could not cheat her of this, could not kill the life in her. It was too great a punishment for something that was not altogether her fault.

She tried to meet Donald again. But Donald had changed. He had hardened, crystallized. Once an emotional, impulsive young man, he had become completely objective, mature, searching for his pleasure.

"Of course," he said to Dorothy, "you know who is responsible for this. I would not have minded at all if you had discovered you didn't love me, left me, gone to Robert. I
knew you were attracted to him, I didn't know how deeply. But I couldn't forgive your keeping us both at the same time, in Paris. I must have taken you often a few minutes after he had. You asked for violence. I didn't know you were asking me to surpass Robert, to try to efface him from your body. I thought you were merely in a frenzy of desire. So I responded. You know how I made love to you, I cracked your bones, I bent you, twisted you. Once I made you bleed. Then from me you would take a taxi and go to him. And you told me that after lovemaking you didn't wash because you liked the smell that went through your clothes, you liked the smells that followed you for a day after. I nearly went crazy when I discovered all this, I wanted to kill you."

"I have been sufficiently punished," said Dorothy violently.

Donald looked at her. "What do you mean?"

"Ever since I married Robert I have been frigid."

Donald's eyebrows lifted. Then his face set in an ironical expression. "And why do you tell me this? Do you expect me to make you bleed again? So that you can go back to your Robert all wet between the legs, and enjoy him at last? God knows I still love you. But my life is changed. I do not go in for love anymore."

"How do you live?"

"I have my little pleasures. I invite certain choice friends; I offer them drinks; they sit in my room—where you are sitting. Then I go into the kitchen to mix more drinks, and give them a little time alone. They already know my taste, my little predilections.

"When I come back ... well, she may be sitting in your armchair with her skirt lifted, and he kneeling before her looking at her or kissing her, or he may be sitting in the chair and she...

"What I like is the surprise, and seeing them. They do not notice me. In a way, that is how it would have been with you and Robert if I could have witnessed your little scenes. Possibly a remembrance of some kind. Now if you like, you can wait for a few minutes. There is a friend coming. He is exceptionally attractive."

Dorothy wanted to leave. Then she observed something that made her stop. The door of Donald's bathroom was open. It was covered with a mirror. She turned to Donald and said: "Listen, I'll stay, but can I express a whim, too? One that will not in the least alter the satisfaction of yours."

"What is it?"

"Instead of going into the kitchen when you leave us, will you go into the bathroom for a while, and look at the mirror?"

Donald consented. His friend, John, arrived. He was a magnificent man physically, but in his face there was a strange quality of decadence, a laxity about the eyes and mouth, something on the verge of perverseness, which fascinated Dorothy. It was as if none of the ordinary pleasures of love could satisfy him. In his face there was a peculiar insatiability, curiosity—he had something of the animal. His lips bared his teeth. He seemed startled at the sight of Dorothy.

"I like women of fine breed," he said immediately and looked gratefully at Donald for the gift, the surprise of her presence.

Dorothy was all in fur from head to toe—hat, muff, gloves, even fur on her shoes. Her perfume had already filled the room.

John stood above her, smiling. His gestures were growing more festive. Suddenly he bent forward like some stage director and said: "I have something to ask you. You are so beautiful. I hate the clothes which conceal a woman. Yet I hate to take them off. Will you do something for me, something exceptionally wonderful? Please take your clothes off in the other room and come back here in only your furs. Will you? I'll tell you why I ask you this. Only thoroughbred women look beautiful in furs, and you are a thoroughbred."

Dorothy went into the bathroom, slipped out of her clothes and returned in her furs, keeping on only her stockings and little fur-trimmed shoes.

John's eyes glittered with pleasure. He could only sit and look at her. His excitement was so strong and contagious that Dorothy began to feel her breasts growing sensitive at the tips. She had a feeling that she wanted to expose them, that she wanted to open the fur and watch John's pleasure. Usually the warmth and stirring of the nipples occurred together with the warmth and stirring of the sex mouth. Today she could feel only her breasts, the compulsion to expose them, to raise them with her hands, to offer them. John leaned over and put his mouth to them.

Donald had left. He waited in the bathroom and looked into the mirror of the door. He saw Dorothy standing by John, her breasts in her hands. The fur had opened to reveal her whole body, glowing, luminous, rich in the fur, like some jeweled animal. Donald was stirred. John did not touch the body, he suckled at the breasts, sometimes stopping to feel the fur with his mouth, as if he were kissing a beautiful animal. The odor of her sex—pungent shell and sea odors, as if woman came out of the sea as Venus did—mixed with the odor of the fur, and John's suckling grew more violent. Seeing Dorothy in the mirror, seeing the hair of her sex like the hair of the fur, Donald felt that if John touched her between the legs he would strike him. He came out of the bathroom, his penis exposed and erect, and walked towards Dorothy. This was so much like the first scene of her passion for Robert that she moaned with joy, tore herself from John and turned fully upon Donald, saying: "Take me, take me!"

Closing her eyes, she imagined Robert crouching over her, tigerlike, tearing open the fur, and caressing her with many hands and mouths and tongues, touching every part of her, parting her legs, kissing her, biting her, licking her. She incited the two men to a frenzy. Nothing was heard but the breathing, the little suckling sounds, the sound of the penis swimming in her moisture.

Leaving them both drowsy, she dressed and went so quickly that they barely were aware of it. Donald cursed: "She couldn't wait. She couldn't wait, she had to go back to him just as before. All wet and juicy from other men's lovemaking."

It was true that Dorothy did not wash. When Robert arrived home a few moments after her, she was filled with rich odors, open, vibrating still. Her eyes, her gestures, her languid pose on the couch invited him. Robert knew her moods. He was quick to respond to them. He was so happy that she was as she had been long ago. She would be moist between the legs now, responsive. He plunged into her.

Robert was never quite certain of when she was coming. The penis is rarely aware of this spasm in woman, this little palpitation. The penis can feel only its own ejaculation. This time Robert wanted to feel the spasm in Dorothy, the wild little clutching. He withheld his orgasm. She was convulsed. The moment seemed to have come. He forgot his watching in his own wave of pleasure. And Dorothy carried off her deception, unable to reach the orgasm that she had had only an hour before while closing her eyes and pretending it was Robert who was taking her.

Whenever I went down to the beach in Deya I saw two young women, one small and boyish, with short hair and a round, humorous face; the other, like a Viking, with a regal head and body.

They kept to themselves during the day. Strangers always spoke to one another in Deya because there was only one food shop, and everyone met at the small post office. But the two women never spoke to anyone. The tall one was beautiful, with heavy eyebrows, thick dark hair, and light-blue eyes densely fringed. I always looked at her with wonder.

Their secrecy troubled me. They were not joyous. They lived a sort of hypnotic life. They swam quietly, lay on the sand reading.

Then came the sirocco from Africa. It lasts for several days. Not only is it hot and dry, but it travels in a series of whirlwinds, turning feverishly, encircling one, beating one, battering doors, breaking shutters, sending fine dust into the eyes, into the throat, drying everything and irritating the nerves. One cannot sleep, cannot walk, cannot sit still, cannot read. The mind is set whirling exactly like the wind.

The wind is charged with perfumes from Africa, heavy sensual animal odors. It gives a kind of fever and turmoil of the nerves.

One afternoon I had been caught by it while I still had a half-hour's walk to my house. The two women were walking ahead of me, holding on to their skirts, which the wind tried to raise around their heads. As I passed their house they saw me struggling against the dust and blinding heat and said, "Come in and wait until it calms down."

We went in together. They lived in a Moorish tower that they had bought for very little money. The old doors did not close well, and the wind opened them over and over again. I sat with them in a big circular stone room with peasant furniture.

The younger woman left us to make tea. I sat with the Viking princess, whose face was flushed by the fever of the sirocco. She said, "This wind will drive me crazy if it does not stop." She got up several times to close the door. It was exactly as though some intruder wanted to enter the room and was each time repulsed, only to succeed again in opening the door. The woman must have felt this, for she repulsed the intrusion with anger and a growing fear.