My mother came into my room and she gave me the tortured look that I had come to think her born expression. "Good night, dear," she modulated her voice which my illness had now made constantly softer, "Are you all right?"
I didn't answer her at first, but lay flat under the covers, my thin body a rebuke to all her affection.
"Are you all right, dear," she repeated, the anxiety trembling in her voice. "Yes," I said finally and quietly, the yes a sigh more than a word, the yes really a no, a loud angry no which I meant it to be. "Sleep well," she implored and soundlessly she left my room.
That night I did not want to think. Sometimes I think and then I lose all the voices of the house. I lay still still still until I could hear her humble tap on my father's door. "Dear," she called, "may I come in a moment?"
First there was no answer, then he answered as briefly as I had and I knew her fingers were on the knob of his door and her slippered feet saying, forgive my intrusion. Her voice was melancholy, she had been a gay girl. My father replied deeply, and even separated by the wall my heart jumped at the anger in its timbre. She stayed only a minute, no doubt telling him I was comfortable and almost asleep. Then I could hear her pushing open the door of the small adjoining room that had been their dressing room before.
Before. Before and after; that was how we dated everything. Before the imperfection of my mother's genes had revealed in my thirteenth year the decaying heart of her family. It was her disease that sank my body into the bed, into the grave, and gently gently, I invited her to share my death.
When the house settled into sleep, and the house was always last to rest sometimes dozing only hours after the last tossing body, I went into my reverie. The reveries of ignorance: innocence it is called. My innocence they talk about. I remember three years before the doctor standing over my bed and saying, "She is an angel." And he touched my straight white-yellow hair, "We will do everything to save her, Mrs. Ferdinand." My mother, her face a cloud said, "She is so young, and always so frail." That was all she said, but my father answered the doctor in his rich indulged voice, "My wife's," and wife came from the front of his mouth like a breath of air, his lips unmoving, "sister and mother were stricken," and again the sarcasm the contempt of stricken, "with the same disease. Of course," he added, "they were considerably older but Adrian has always been delicate." I could feel his hand on my forehead. "She has no fever."
"No," the doctor assured him, "there is never much fever. But she must be still for a long time; a very long time. If we are lucky the artery will heal; if another attack follows-and I must warn you that one is always imminent-there is little we can do."
My mother choked tears back into her throat, and my father declared blandly, "Margaret, if you think your tears will accomplish a cure please do not control them," and with that he left my room.
Mother sat a long time at my bedside. It seems to me days, because I slept and awakened tunelessly, and she was always there until the look of pain had spread like a cancer throughout her face and crept into her eyes and stayed there.
ii
My father is weak. He is much weaker than my mother because he cannot stand pain. I think, aside from convenience, that is why he stays with her. To him her suffering is so mysterious. I'm sure he is afraid that if she left the house a curse would fall on it though, of course, she brought the curse of me into his healthy disdainful life. My mother and father come from similar backgrounds-that is another thing. Though he may despise her, she is one of the few people he does not find it socially debasing to speak to. He has the same attitude toward me. My father has never given me the kind of love that I read fathers lavish on daughters. Instead he has given me acknowledgment: the unspoken assurance that if he had a dinner party I would be invited. He has also given me the right to be educated: his library is mine.
How the books are brought to me is interesting. A small cart with wheels has been built and each week an entire shelf of my father's library is transferred onto it, and Marie then rolls it to my bedside. Those books I want always at my side, I place on the permanent shelves alongside my bed. My selection has never been questioned, never observed, I think.
I live in my books and in my acute awareness of the house's life, but it is becoming not enough, and each day I sink deeper into fantasy which they call lethargy.
They all walk softly in the house, all except my father. He forgets that his daughter is dying. The cook makes a special tart for my tray, the gardener has developed a new rose, the 'Adrian Gloria' to scent my room. I'm sure they'll deck the house with them at my funeral. They all have the idea foolishly that they are bringing life to me, the house to me. How can I explain? In this house I can do anything I want, lying here in my bed, because I'm the only one who wants anything.
The house has the atmosphere of my night's sleep. The doors and windows open when I feel better, the house shuts tight, becomes my tomb when the night has been restless, I have the main guest room now. It is all gold. The ceiling is gold, the walls are thick satin gold, the floor is covered; but I remember it had a gold tapestry throw that I used to drape across my shoulders when I was young and wanted to be pope. When I got sick I had a room on the third floor. A terrible place. It was mother's dream of a child's dream of a nursery, all calico and French dolls. The present room is much more to my taste.
I told my mother that when I died I wanted a gold-covered, gold-lined coffin. Unfortunately she got distressed about it, so I never discuss it, but I've written it into my will. Of course I have a will. I've made out new ones about sixteen times. My four grandparents, somehow aware that I would be here in this bed, all left me fortunes. I don't care about what happens to my money, but I always stipulate the gold coffin. My rose is gold. The petals are yellow and red and orange and in the sun it glows.
The house began to sleep. My mother's face was probably relaxing into religious pain. My father has had his final nightcap. (I heard the glass put heavy on the marble table next to his bed). Cook and door and bottle opener were asleep at ten; the new maid is upstairs all alone. We used to have a maid who would sneak the groom into her room, but she is gone. I would hear her whispering to him up the stairway, and if I listened with complete power, I could hear the creakings in her room. It's a special listening technique I have, where I attach my ear to a solid object and noises creep to me from all the floors and walls.
I have been reading a lot about such things, and I think the reason they treat me like an angel is because they know I will die a virgin. "She is a nun," I have heard my father say, with the special pride of the debauched. It seems to me an ugly worship. If I told this to my mother, she would be more shocked than by my gold coffin.
They think, "she knows nothing about it, she need never have the disappointment."
One day I heard my father and mother speaking in the adjoining room. They were together longer than is usual and I grew nervous in the bed. My father I heard murmur, "It's a good idea," and my heart thudded thickly at his voice, deep and strangely pleasant. I quickly rang the bell at my side, urgently again and again, and in a moment my mother was in my room.
"Adrian, what is it-" her breath short and her face flushed.
I sank deep into the pillows and closed my eyes so that she would not see the glint of hate. "I hurt," I whispered.
"Where? Where?" Surely she would die before me.
I lifted my hand feebly to my heart, "I hurt here," and I let my arm drop wasted on the gold blankets. She fumbled around a melange of bottles, and found a pink pill that she placed between my lips. "Here, dear," she begged. Then she paused and studied my face. "You're very pale," she spoke more to herself than to me.
"Yes," she continued, "we shall have to do it. I hate the atmosphere it creates, but it is wisest." I opened my eyes. "What are you going to do?" and the unspoken word was "to me-what are you going to do to me; haven't you done enough ... "
"You will have to have a nurse, Adrian. One who is here night and day. It frightens me to leave you alone even a minute. We must have someone who always knows exactly what to do."
"No"-I insisted, we had had this conversation before and I did not want a white-shoed stranger hovering constantly over me. I relished the half-hours of aloneness that were given to me. I knew that with some efficient sterilized intruder always in my room, the gold luminescent decor of death I had created would be transformed into the everyday business of hospital dying. I regretted my faked attack. "-I'm better now, mother. Please, no nurse. With a nurse I would be really sicker. She'd start tiptoeing around and pulling drapes closed. A nurse would suffocate me,-" Then I started to cry genuine tears, at the prison matron being imposed on me, and for the first time in months I thought of the helplessness of my disease and the tears were drenching my face. Mother wiped my brow and I wanted her away. If only my father could be there to touch my tears and promise there would be no nurse.
My mother's lips were a thin line when she left me presumably sleeping after the exhausted bout of tears. I did sleep finally and awoke to find a strange person pulling the drapes, as I had anticipated. But she was pulling them open and the sun burst through the windows, showing my visitor's dark red hair and full figure.
"Are you awake, Adrian?" she questioned, and she walked closer to the bed, smiling plumply at me. "You've had a very long sleep," she told me.
"I feel strange," I said and, remembering my last moment with my mother, tears of self-pity again filled my eyes. "Are you my nurse?"
She sat gingerly at the edge of the bed. I studied her. Instead of the feared starched uniform she wore a soft pink sweater that outlined her breasts to the nipples. Around her waist she wore a wide leather belt, and beneath the belt there flared a rough tweed skirt. I felt delicate and ethereal next to the hearty wools and colors, next to her full breasts and the buxom hips under the skirt. She was small in the waist and her figure curved aggressively on either side of it. "I am a nurse," she answered patiently. "But could you try to think of me as a friend? I'm not that much older than you, Adrian."
I wanted to ask how she knew my name, or how she dared to use it so quickly, but instead I said, "I would like a cup of tea." I wished immediately to define that she would be a servant, not a friend to me. She got up hastily from the edge of the bed and blushed into the neck of her cardigan. "Of course," she said in a tight embarrassed voice, and I saw that she was young, no more than three years my senior, but had not spent those three years in a sickbed, thoughts sinking into her head. Had she not blushed, I would have had her dismissed that day but her self-consciousness made her pliable, and I was bored. When she brought the tea I sipped it thoughtfully, wondering if I should ask her name but not knowing the tone of disinterest I could adopt. But she made it easy for me and came again to the edge of the bed saying, "My name is Rose."
"How do you do," I said formally.
"I am here to nurse you." Really she was lost. Then I did a preposterous thing: I reached over and touched the breast under the pink sweater.
"Are you?" I laughed. And I caressed her, wanting to touch her flesh, to smell her, to eat her, to throw her away.
"What are you doing." Her confusion kept her docile under my touch.
"I am seeing what you will nurse me with." The nipple was hard as bone between my fingers and jutting at least three quarters of an inch. "I don't think you should do that," and for the first time I realized that she was stupid. But I turned her head away with my free hand, and then placed both hands on her breasts. "You feel very nice, Rose," I admired, and my hands were trembling. I did not understand what I was doing, only that I had been hungry a long time to touch. "Come closer," I commanded. She did so automatically, and I unbuttoned the fluffy sweater.
"What are you doing? What are you doing," she whimpered. I exposed her breast and kneaded my hands into the flesh. I know I hurt her because she gasped and tried to undo my clenched fists. "Nurse me," I insisted and opened my mouth for the long red teat.
iii
I did not satisfy Rose, only myself. Sucking until my mouth and throat hurt. She stood leaning over me, her breast sagging on to my face. I did not touch her with my hands, and she seemed paralyzed, poised above me. I must have hurt the tender flesh, but she did not move except to press against my head. Her eyes were closed and she opened them when I pushed her teat away. She looked at me and I laughed out loud when she swiftly crossed herself: "This is wrong," and she crossed herself again, then she covered her face. "You must never do that again, Adrian." I was content on my pillow. I wanted her to go away, but instead I said, "Call my mother, please." She started with fear.
"You wouldn't say anything. I mean, it was you, all you, who did it"
"Was it?" I questioned mildly, and I know I opened a river of doubts for her. She looked miserable and I just reached over my bed and rang the bell in my mother's room. Rose said, "You shouldn't do that," and then sat silent, waiting for my mother's tap on the door.
When my mother came into the room I looked at her breasts under her dressing gown and felt nothing. Then I looked at Rose, and remembering made me want to touch her more, but the look I gave her was surely not one of desire, if desire described the feeling.
"I see you have got your nurse," I said to my mother.
"It was necessary, my dear," she collected herself before the stranger. I knew she would have preferred to throw her body across the covers and ask forgiveness or approval.
"You are determined that I die, aren't you?" I said weakly.
"Adrian, why do you speak like that?" She embraced the room with her arms. "You're my life. I never mean to upset you. You are getting better, my dear, every day. But the nurse can do so many things for you. She can make you so comfortable. She can be the part of you that can walk around the room and fluff the pillows ... " I stopped the unbearable flow of sentimentality.
"It's all right," I agreed softly. "I know you don't want me to be alone when I die. You are always kind, Mother."
My mother turned to Rose with hatred and Rose replied with humble gaze.
"Of course," my mother touched the soft silk folds of the gown, "if it makes you ill, we will send her away. The final decision is yours. But Rose is such a nice girl. You notice I've asked her never to wear a uniform. Her father has worked for our family for many years and they are so proud to have her help you." With each word Rose turned into a gawking country girl, not the assured young woman who had called me Adrian. That was what I wanted.
"It makes no difference," I repeated, and turned my head away from both of them.
"No no," and finally my mother was begging me. "The final decision, as always, is yours."
"I am dead," I said sharply to my mother. "How can a dead person make decisions?"
"When you are dead, Adrian," she said dramatically, "I will know, because then I will be dead, too."
"Don't be ridiculous," I said peevishly, secure in my heart that it would be so. "You will have years of charity work to do, all in my name."
Her eyes filled with tears of exasperation and pain. "You take death far more lightly than I do, Adrian. You don't know (how I pray to God) what it means to a mother to see her only child sick so long. Sometimes I think you have no heart," and with that word her mouth trembled wordlessly and the room grew still.
"Maybe it is true," I said quietly. "Maybe I have no heart."
"My dear," my mother broke down. "My poor brave baby. I try so hard not to irritate you, you and your father," she said aimlessly, "but it's so difficult. The most natural things I say seem to enrage him." She looked hastily at Rose. "I must leave the decision of whether or not you stay to my daughter. Of course," she softened, "we hope she will agree, as we do, that it is best for you to be here. But she is not well, you understand, and to upset her would be more dangerous than all the good you might do."
"She may stay," I said suddenly. "I think in a week you will have no need of her-so she may stay this week."
For three days that followed Rose would wander moodily about my room, glancing at me covetously with a pained and embarrassed expression. I understood that her world had narrowed into my room, that she would have done anything to win satisfaction. They were all like that. All except my father. I spoke very little to her: only a few necessary requests. She would hop nervously when she heard my voice. The recognition she coveted all day, always came as a shock to her. As if my voice had been so much in her head, she could not distinguish the real voice from the imagined one. I watched, from my bed, the voluntary disintegration of the personality that had once been free enough to call me Adrian without my permission. Now she answered my commands with silent obedience.
I had shattered her little boundaried universe of what could happen by my hungry sucking of her breast. I could see, by her stiff next-day expression after our first meeting, that she intended never again to permit me this liberty. But that day I had no thirst for her body, and her rounded form had offended me; an aggressive statement of life that I had wanted for the one moment when she had pulled the curtains back and the sun poured into my bedroom.
She could see that now I did not desire her, and the refusal she had carefully rehearsed must have become tiny clattering sounds inside her head. I let the sounds stay there; I did nothing to disturb them. Her impotence, her inability to refuse me what I did not want was a delicious game. For three days I slept soundly and ate little, as always. I like only to eat white foods, foods that I do not have to chew. I prefer to eat rice with a square of golden butter melting into it, the beaten baked whites of eggs, spoonfuls of white sugar in golden tea, toast that is thick and white on the inside, protected by the slight glow of heat. I like bananas and pears, peeled and soft in the mouth. I drink milk and will sometimes eat plates of whipped cream, white cheese, potatoes beaten into feathers. It is three years since I tasted meat or salad, three years since I have had to turn my face away from hearty vegetables, dark slabs of wheat bread and chocolates with which my mother tried to strengthen and fatten me. My body is so beautiful, it is white and almost too thin to be soft; beneath the bleached skin is the bone, narrow as a tooth.
The three days were transforming Rose. She did not want me but her femaleness demanded that I want her and finally, her desire to be desired lost purpose, till there was no difference between her desiring me or her desiring that I want her. She was mine. I would have preferred, I thought, to watch Rose agitated and submitting to a lover or to herself; I felt indifferent to a direct experience.
On the third night my parents came into my room. It was not yet their dinner hour but they were dressed to leave the house. My mother's hair was pulled into a tight bun-her hair pulled back tight over a forehead that is like mine. Her head was covered with a thin lace veil and from her throat to the floor dropped a white ermine cape. She looked magnificent, and my father, the dark bird beside her, regarded her with pride. She was probably past the time of knowing that he watched her with anything but annoyance, and she kept her face turned constantly away from his glance. It gave her majesty, like early statues of cloaked queens that I have seen when as a child I visited Germany.
"You look so beautiful," I said, proud now of the flesh we shared. "Come closer to the bed," I asked. She moved beside me, and I reached out to touch the fur. "You must let me have the cape sometimes," I said to her. "Just to touch it and look at it."
"I hope, my dear," she answered, "that I may soon see you wear it to a ball or the theatre."
"No," I assured her. "I shall never leave the house." Her pain elevated her, and for once she did not blurt out an angering sentimentality.
"When we return," she promised, "I will throw the cape over the bed, and you may have it as long as you want."
"Where are you going?" I was suddenly petulant and did not want her, like a saint, to glide out of my room and forget my illness.
"One of your mother's ancient classmates is giving the event of the year," my father mockingly explained. "There will be awards given to the girls who have trapped the most attractive husbands or who have had at least one book published."
"Take me," I wanted to say, but my father's cool voice, convinced that everything was a bore, left me no choice but to laugh and to say as his daughter, "Mother will surely win at least one first prize. Good-night," I said and they both bent to give me stone kisses.
I was lonely when they left, destitute, jealous. I turned to Rose who as usual was near corners. "Bring me some books," I demanded. "Marie will tell you the shelf I'm up to." She left the room hurriedly, always slightly humiliated that she hadn't anticipated my requests. While she was gone I took my mirror and comb from beneath my pillow and held the mirror in front of my face. I looked hideous, blue and sharp-nosed as a corpse. I combed my long yellow hair and it spread like smoke around my shoulders. Then I combed it tight away from my forehead, and instead of the serene look of my mother, I saw the tight mean face of a young boy. I began to cry, the liquid pouring down my cheeks. My tears did not taste salty. I felt myself dead, no longer the container of taste or color.
I did not hear Rose roll the book-laden table over the heavy carpet. I became aware of her, standing over my bed, staring helplessly at my face. There were sympathetic tears in her eyes, and her cheeks, unlike mine, were flushed with repressed emotion.
"What's the matter," she implored, carefully using no name. "Is something the matter?"
I could not answer, or my tears would have turned into sobs. I looked above her head. "Read to me," I directed. "Pick up the first book and read to me."
Her voice had the soft husky hum of her body, and I listened closely as she stumbled over the Greek and Persian names in the history book she had unhappily chosen. But I heard only key words of her monologue, and pictured the bearded soldiers fighting over the beautiful young boys. I had read the book before, and remembered Xenophon talking about the strange tribes his army had encountered. There was one that fattened male children on chestnuts, tattooing their buttocks with bright colors that contrasted strongly with the pale, unhealthy skin. Then the boys were used for public demonstrations. These were people who revealed their sexuality only in public, and I thought that maybe I had descended from them, and retained this one trait. I wanted so much to watch lovers that sometimes my imagination projected a scene as distinct as a film.
Rose was really a simple girl, born to familiarities, and as she read to me she pulled her chair closer to the bed and carelessly put the heels of her feet on the mattress. Her shoes slipped to the toes and she dangled them there in an unconscious circle as she droned on about Cyrus who was born to be a king and had as a mistress the Queen of Cilicia. I know I would have been the concubine of a great man, had I been born in that age-a general who would alternate between me and a pretty youth. But there was no glory in this age, only diseases that had begun hundreds of years before and mutely traveled down the bloodstreams of old families. And yet, because it meant health, I could not bear the hearty atmosphere that Rose brought with her. I was tired from centuries of living, bored and disgusted with the fecundity that had made my mother produce me. There would be nothing after me, of that I was sure, and in an unconscious way they all bowed to me, not because I was to die young but because I was the end, and all my family waited and worshipped the end.
Rose knew I was to be obeyed, deferring to me as to a vestal virgin who could give or take away a life. At my command she would swallow a poison or get beside me in the bed to share my death. She was compelled by a force that drove those much older and wiser than she; by the fascination of cruelty of the virgin who represses her sexuality and lets out an odor of burning flesh. Rose was, I suppose, in love with me. That I was a woman was unimportant; I was a being that gave her freedom by giving her no liberty. She need not blush or stammer if I requested anything from her, since she had no separate will and no ability to experience shame. I saw in her eyes that she had been conquered in the three days that I had disdained her and though my disinterest had not been a technique, I realized that I was waiting for Rose to become sufficiently defeated-that just as she should not know shame, I should not be stopped by a mutual feeling of disgust. She still disgusted me; she would always disgust me. She had the attraction of a mole with a hair in it that we find beneath our breast: we detest it but we play with it, and when we pluck the hair we wait impatiently for it to grow back.
I stopped her reading and I said, "Rose, what age would you have liked to five in?" She looked at me questioningly. In any age she would have been the same person.
"The American Revolution," she said finally and smartly. I was really appalled, a less colorful or mysterious time of man never existed.
"Really," I said exasperated. "I think you have less imagination than a fish." Her eyes filled with tears of remorse, and I could see her searching the cavities of her mind to satisfy me. She blurted out, "I would have liked to have been in the Spanish Inquisition."
Her answer surprised me this time. Maybe this was the only other period in history that she knew. Possibly in school she'd had to write a composition on the necessary blood shed by the Christian Church. It was amusing, I asked her why her preference. "I don't know," she struggled, "but I think there must have been this funny odor in Barcelona from all the burning witches-and then you never knew if they would come to you next, and there was no way to protect yourself. Do you know," she said chattily, "that fathers gave away their wives and daughters, and then their brothers gave them to the Inquisitors, and all the Jews had to run away and change their names."
I could not imagine why this should fascinate her. "But Rose," I said, "suppose they had burned you." Then I saw the glow in her eyes.
"They would never burn me."
"Why?" I asked, knowing in a curious way that she was right, that the Roses never got burned, which was why they flourished in such an unnecessary profusion.
"The priests," she said in a glimmer of heresy, "were men like any other men. I'd have a few tricks to show them."
So Rose wanted to show her tricks. She wanted to prove that when it came to being a woman she was clever enough to prevent any man from wasting her in a fire.
"What would you do to the priests?" I cautioned. "It would depend," she stalled. "On what?"
"On what they liked. Sometimes they just like to do things to you and sometimes you have to do things to them."
"Like what?" I was being innocent, eager to drag the fantasies out of her.
"Sometimes they just want you to watch."
"Watch what?"
"Watch when they play with themselves."
"But what would they need you for?" I asked, "they could make any number of women or men watch them; it doesn't take much talent to watch."
"That's only for some of them," she explained hastily. "Others, you have to do it for them."
"Do what?"
"Oh you know," she said a little shyly, and then as an aside, "sometimes for old men-and most of the bishops were old-it's very hard. They can do it maybe once a month if you're very good."
I turned away with annoyance. "I don't understand all these its and whats. Please go away," I said. "I want to sleep."
She was a little excited now and bewildered at my impatience. She could not move away and finally she said, "Well, it's hard to explain if you've never seen a man."
"I've seen many," I lied.-actually I had seen only some photographs, found in an old book, of silly looking girls with black hair sucking at a man's stiff flesh, relishing the taste as if it was some kind of candy, looking into the man's eyes with girlish smiles of contentment. In the photographs there were also girls with their mouths and nose hidden between the thighs of other girls, and men sticking their huge prows into fronts and backs and mouths and ears and other men and animals. So I knew a lot, though I had never felt or seen a man's real virility.
I turned to Rose and I said, "What if I were your mistress in Spain, and I came to you and announced that I was going to give your name to the Inquisitor as a damned agent of the devil and the chief anti-Christ of the city. What if I had enough power to have you burned within eight hours? What would you do to me?"
"I would fall on my knees and beg you not to," she said seriously. , "I'm not interested in words," I fell into the part. "I've seen the black candles in your room."
"Never," she moaned, and understanding the game she threw her body across the bed. Her breasts pressed against my legs and she clutched at my hips. "How can I make you believe me," she looked earnest, playing the part with the excesses of an amateur thespian. "What can I do to please you, my lady?"
"What does the devil do to you?" I demanded.
"Nothing. I swear to you I have never seen the devil ... "
"You lie," I shouted, and felt my breath growing short and a dull pain in my chest. "I have seen a tall, dark, sallow man go silently to your room, then I have heard strange wails, unmistakably your voice. What does he do?"
She said to me suddenly, shortly, "Will anyone come into the room?"
"Lock the door," I directed. "They will probably knock to ask what I will have for dinner."
She was quickly across the floor, her stockinged feet silent on the gold carpet. There was an air of conspiracy in the room, and I lay rigid in the bed, like a patient in the dentist's chair who waits to see the instrument he is hiding behind his back.
She came back to the bed and looked at me, waiting for a further command. I could not speak to her. I was the master waiting to learn something from the pupil. It was dreadful for me to reveal my ignorance, and still worse to admit that the pounding of my sick heart was caused by my intense fear. I imagine that innocent boys feel the same division of sentiment when they cower in their first prostitute's bed. She sat down beside me and stared at me with hesitant desire. Then, like a nurse she covered my heart with her hand and started back in alarm when she felt its pulsations, so strong the blood could come spurting out of my split chest, geysering like a beheaded man's neck.
"I don't know," she murmured. "I'm afraid all of this harms you."
"I'm going to die anyway," I said with disdain, my words coming out in little choked phrases.
"You may live a very long time if you're careful." Her hand was still over my breast, and I arched my back so that she now cupped and caressed the breast that she had touched with medical detachment. Then I realized that she had cooled in the short distance between my bed and the door, so it was necessary to be outrageous.
"Take off your clothes," I commanded. She got up stiffly beside the bed. She was startled and budding indignant. How much control I had lost by showing the fool my desire. It left me dry and angry, and my anger defeated my ardor. I could feel the sex that had been ready to flow sliding back into the hidden pockets of my body. Her silence was able to sicken me.
"Get away from me," I hissed. "Keep yourself covered and go to another room. After tomorrow I shall see to it that I never have to look at you." My threats were not to entice her. Had I been strong enough I would have ripped the wide belt from her waist and beaten her coy body till her welted bleeding flesh would have made it impossible for her to remove the clinging garments. Still she stood beside the bed. "Get out of here," I wailed like a sick infant.
She said, "Why do you get angry so quickly? I'm going to do what you want."
"I don't want anything from you," I insisted. "You never can interest me for more than five minutes at a time. Get away," I repeated-every second she stood there my stomach and mouth were sick with nausea.
She was helpless now and though we both felt it too late, she timidly unbuttoned her thick pink sweater. She wore a French brassiere, the wires tilting and separating her firm breasts. Then she pulled her woolen skirt awkwardly over her head, and her hair and face caught in its folds; I smiled as she struggled blindly. When the skirt was finally freed, her face was bright red from exertion. I watched with curiosity as each layer fell away from her body. She wore a stiff crinoline petticoat, white, with a red ribbon looped through the embroidered hem. Her thin nylon panties pressed against a triangular tuft of hair. Her hair looked fluffy and I called her closer to me. She came with mechanical obedience, and I pressed my fingers gingerly on the generous mat. The hairs had a spongy resiliency and I played with them for a long time, never removing the thin sheath that contained the bush like a hairnet. Then I slipped my fingers between her thighs and her pressed-together flesh was as hot as my morning tea. She still wore her buff stockings, attached to a flimsy garter belt. At my direction she got on her knees beside me in the bed, and I pulled myself up on the pillows until I was sitting upright. I unfastened the stockings from the four garters. Then I unsnapped the belt and pulled it loose around her waist. Her flesh quivered and relaxed without the binding girdle. There were red marks on her plump thighs from the constant irritation of the flesh against the cloth. There was never a red mark on my body; my skin was white and smooth to the soft bottoms of my feet that never touched anything harsher than the lamb's wool lining of my slippers. Her panties I guarded; they delighted me. I pushed my hands beneath the transparent fabric and rubbed her slightly rounded belly. She moved suddenly, and I looked up at her face. She was pale now, her eyes closed as if that would prevent me from seeing her. In the dark room she created, she was unfastening the button of her brassiere. She pulled it off, thrusting it on the floor beside the bed. The same red marks, already disappearing on her hips, were etched into her ribs. She rubbed the irritation with kitten-like relaxation. Then she put thumb and fingers around each breast and funneled them, nuzzling the opening to me.
"Do you want," she said lazily. Sex transformed her. Her nervousness gave way to indolent sensuality; her one wish, as always, to satisfy. Anything you did to her, anything you desired was her gratification. I think quite a few priests would have saved her from the flames. She snuggled alongside me on the pillow and placed a spongy nipple into my mouth. "Don't bite too hard," she warned, the way a mother tells the nervous child not to eat too fast. Her teat tasted good. I was drinking in her perfume of receptivity and indulgence. She carried somehow the odor of the harem, her clothes a twentieth-century mockery. All she wanted was to play.
She said, "That feels so good," then, for the first time in my life I felt hands caress my breasts. Her strong fingers went round and round the mounds of flesh that were as miniatures of hers. I bit harder on the teat. She pulled away from me to remind me of her gentle warning. Then her hands found my pale nipples that would never attain the marvelous length of the one in my mouth. In my mouth I could feel her stiffening and extending, so that I could hold her hard flesh between my teeth and circle the point with my tongue. My face was hot with effort against her chest and her body, far from cooling me, was like a furnace. Her rolling fingers were erecting points on my breasts. I was hopeless with her hands on me. If she had touched only one breast I could escape to the other for a moment's safety and relief, but as my sensuality raced from one teat to the other, I found them both trapped, and I knew that at that moment freedom from the invisible walls pressing on me would have meant plumetting to an earth a million sensations beneath me. The drop would have killed me, like a young bird flung by the wind from a tree to a flat cold stone. Between the two of us a pressure grew as potent as the magnet created between gravity and centrifuge; our bodies were stuck together from the force we created.
I sucked and wailed against her chest grabbing the other breast and digging into her with my nails. Then, as if I had reached my peak of sensitivity in this one area of my body, the feeling began to spread like spilled honey throughout me. The honey meandered for an opening, wanting a way out. The sensation traveled thickly through my stomach down to my feet, and up again, gathering like a huge, still lake in my vagina. She knew the second that my passion grew too heavy in my thighs and between them. Her body curved away from me and the nipple to bite on and explode against was gone. Her head burrowed my thighs apart, and her tongue licked my hair and the delicate exposed flesh under my belly. She got inside, where I had never touched. She hunted for a moment with her hands, looking for the center of the shocks that were radiating from there to my head. She found the tiny hill with a grunt of satisfaction. Her fingers barely touched it and I could feel the still lake exploding like a waterfall down a steep cliff. When her fingers had given it shape, she stiffened her tongue and sought again for the gnawing insect that had been sixteen years latent in my body. She sucked and chewed. My body jerked against her face. Her ass offered shamelessly to me was rotating in excitement. I did not want her body except to grab at it desperately as I tumulted down the cliff. My hands clutched at my breasts, then, in search of a hook to hang on to, I sank my finger into her ass and my thumb into the hair-covered opening, sister to the one that she was now torturing. I couldn't hold on, my limbs trembled with the rattle that announced death. My mouth, open for my exhausting gasps, was wide and dry. All my blood and moisture had rushed to the agonized area. Then I began to fall down, down, and with joy I knew I was dying, coming at last to the flat white rock. But just at the moment when I should have been finally crushed, my body screamed a loud lustful song and I escaped up into space. She didn't move her head, her body slipped away from mine. Drowsily I came back to the yellow room and the knock on the door that must have been the announcement of the supper tray.
Rose got up quickly from beside me and called to the closed door, "one moment please." Then she reached speedily for her clothes. She moved with feverish skill, and I did not move at all. When she was dressed she pulled the covers over my exposed body, my legs fallen apart in a graceless surrender. The covers touched my belly and thighs and the fountain between them; I groaned, still so sensitive, that the slightest contact was a caress, and one I was too tired to support. "Sleep for an hour," Rose suggested, "then I will bring you something to eat." Confined in her clothes she was losing her magic. I said in a cross voice that snapped her back to servility, "I am not at all hungry. I will sleep now and do not wish to be disturbed again this evening." It was as if I were calling her intoxicating servitude a disturbance and she trembled when the insult flashed in her brain and traveled out to her nervous system.
"Of course," she said. "Good night." I did not answer her but pretended to be in a sleep that actually did not come to me for hours. I did not want to sleep, but to think and dwell upon this whole new world of experience that was opening in me. To fly and fall and flow like this every day. It made me want to live, never to leave my bed, to lie snug on the pillows all day and at night, or morning or afternoon be taken back to the top of the cliff, close to the hot sun. I could not touch myself, I felt gashed and wounded where she had centered my agony, but my heart kept floating into my throat, quivering down to my stomach as I remembered the abandon that had freed me to dig into her body and pound my own. So this was it, or part of it. This was why they worshipped me, because I contained the ability to feel these hysterical heights, but never the strength to climb to them. Well, they were wrong, they were wrong.
iv
The next morning when I woke up I lay for a few moments with the disappointed associations that dangle between the dream world and the real world, or the inside of us and the outside of us. I felt warm under the covers and the room was a dull dusk gold, the drapes were drawn against the dazzling colors on the other side of my window. I put my hands on the blankets and was startled into awakening by the soft silky thickness between my fingers. Then I saw that my mother had thrown her cape over me, as she had promised the night before, and with the touch all the moments that had followed her departure came back. I went back consciously to my dreams and remembered that I had released dark images of sex all through the night. For hours, in a black velvet mass I had rotated my hips, feeling them light and incapable of fatigue in the void that I had created. Rotating the hips seemed instinctive, like sucking. I remembered that life now offered me a new diversion, and I was happy to be alive. I envied women who awaken with lovers at their sides, and begin their days with half-aware caresses. I wanted to be kissed, to be smothered, to be kept in my feeling world for as long as possible. I began to think of novels I had read, of women who wished to be possessed by men, and only by men whom they loved. It seemed fantastic to me, to care about the agent of the feelings. I would not hesitate to get my gratification from a monkey or a turtle or a baseball or a flying saucer. So long as it happened. And I wondered about what I would do if it couldn't happen, and how far I would go to make it happen.
I reached the bell beside my bed and rang for breakfast. I was hungry, hungrier than I had been in years, and I remembered that I had slept without supper, though that was not unusual. Often I left my tray untouched, and it was my mother who found the neglected food indigestible. I would awake indifferent to another day of semi-starvation. It is fun to be rich and starve, that's the kind of contempt that my father can't understand.
Rose tapped on my door and then quickly entered. It was obviously a difficult moment for her, my coldness after our embraces had left her in that limbo of indecision where I wanted her to be. A thick line would have to be drawn between our relationship, sexual and normal, every night and every day. The day wouldn't matter, except to make the night more intense, and after a while in a secret way we would both know it.
She said to me, quite correctly, "Will you have your bath before breakfast?" I was terribly hungry and I asked for the breakfast tray. Cook, who had been brought up in Normandy, had prepared big golden butter-filled brioches. They were still hot and I began to eat them quickly, dipping them into a bowl of coffee that mostly contained hot milk. The delicious taste in my mouth brought back the feeling of attenuated contentment I had known last night, after the long journey on which Rose had been my guide. I called to her and said, "Take a brioche; they're wonderful." She picked one off the tray and I said, "Don't be so delicate, it won't burn you." At which she blushed, and it took me a few minutes to reconstruct the conversation we had had last night which would probably make fire seem like a suggestive word to the simple Rose for the rest of her life.
I was silent during breakfast, leafing through some disgusting letters that minor acquaintances were always sending to that poor sick child.
After breakfast she bathed me. The room was very warm and she pulled the fur-covered comforter down to my knees. I wore a thin full batiste gown, gathered at the neck like a choir boy's smock. The bones of my neck and shoulders revealed themselves through the thin sheath. She pulled the gown over my head as she had for the past five days and dropped it in a heap next to my bed. Every morning after my bath she drew an immaculate nightgown out of the huge linen closet in my dressing room; when I had put it on, she would roll me to one side of the bed and start the skilful business of changing the sheets without exhausting me at this hour by asking me to sit in the large comfortable chair at the side of my bed. A year before I used to sit in this chair for two hours a day, one hour in the morning and one hour at five. At these times I would receive the flow of guests who came to pay homage to the dying virgin princess. I did not mind the slight exertion of being lifted to the chair. Blankets would immediately be wrapped about my legs and a soft cashmere shawl would protect me from the draughtless room. But the procession of healers, all with their remedies and advice, disturbed me considerably. So a year ago I had given up the chair, and the pilgrims who came with it. Now only Rose would use the armchair, or on special mornings my father would sit there drinking his coffee and reading, with indignation and grunts of disapproval, the newspapers that always accompanied his tray.
She blushed as she washed me, and the subtle intimacy of the warm sponge in her hand traveling over my neck and breasts and stomach and thighs excited both of us. I behaved calmly under her touch, insisting always, with great effort, on the distinction between her labor and love. But she lingered too long at my breasts, and when she reached the fluff of my vagina she insinuated the sponge as deep as it would go into the virginal opening. I was still sensitive. She let the warm water wash away the imprint of her mouth, residing still in my churning cavity. Her tongue flipped automatically over her lips, and I knew her desire was sharp now. Her hand seemed to become paralyzed in its choice haven, and it was I who said, "Stop dreaming," and turned abruptly on my stomach offering her my back. She dipped the sponge into a peppermint-flavored alcohol to massage my back, and she kneaded the muscles in my neck till I was limp beneath her competent hands. Her head was close to the back of my neck and she timorously kissed my white hair. "Don't!" I exclaimed, really annoyed. I did not want, ever, this hesitant caressing of my head. Until she had really excited me, my head remained separate and cold from her advances. I despised being kissed on the mouth, and felt choked if she tried to part my lips to let her tongue play freely with mine. She moved away with a guilty immediacy, and let her sponge wander to my buttocks that were fuller than the rest of my body, but narrow still as a child's. She went around the mounds in a gentle curve, and I felt the muscles tense on the exposed mindless surface. She narrowed the sponge and slyly entered the delicate crack of my trembling flesh, as she had entered the mouth of what I thought was the river of my passion. But I sensed how the cliff could be reached from behind. I could not stop her, not knowing what reaction to expect and burning with a combination of curiosity and need. She slid up and down the slit until she found the shrunken aperture, tight with fear so that a thread could not pass in or out of my body. But she reached quickly to my dressing table and found the cream with which she generally soothed my skin after the fatigue of the bath. I could feel a huge cold wad of it placed on the tense hole. She massaged skillfully, slowly, giving my body a long pause to grow accustomed to the new intrusion. It opened timorously, like the eye of a sleepy child. She got past the first wedge of flesh, and still continued to massage, as if indifferent to the depth she might reach. It opened more, and I felt the pressure in my bowels, that was an urge recognizable and unrecognizable at the same time. If I squeezed against the finger, instead of emptying my body it would dig in deeper, and she crept further and further into my bowels until the fist of her hand stopped her, like the head of a nail that is flattened against wood. Her cream-covered finger stayed buried in me, and the slightest move of that finger would hollow out and extend my hidden channel like the gasping mouth of a fish. I was bound to the bed by one finger, my body conquered as if by a mysterious Japanese hold, that looks like nothing to the audience and yet pinions a strong man to the ground. The slightest turn of my body intensified the pressure and position of the finger, and at any moment it could become unbearable. But I could not know how it would be unbearable, if it would be too excruciating or too exciting to bear, if I would shriek with pain or ecstasy; and raced between the two poles of expression, which I was finding to be not separate but inseparable, I lay prisoner to her still stiff finger buried in me. There was then a knock on the door that neither of us heard, both of us entranced by the delicate deadlock. Then the knock repeated itself, and my father's voice was saying, "Adrian, your old father would like some stimulating company."
v
Rose called to him coolly, indifferent to the entire outer-world when she was busy in the contest of sex.
"One moment, Mr. Ferdinand. Adrian is just finishing her bath." It was the first time she had dared use my name, though the address was not a direct one, since her presumptuous arrival. I moved to reprimand her, but the mysterious strength of her finger arrested my body and spirit. She took a long time luxuriating in my bowels, ignoring my father who I could sense posted behind the door. He knocked again impatiently. "Adrian, you don't have to be that clean for me."
"Please," I whispered, like a little girl asking teacher's permission to leave the room, "Let me go."
Rose must have contemplated my back a long time, then she pulled out of me without warning, leaving me naked and eager again for the capture. I said to her, "He won't stay long." It was incredible for me to put her or anyone before my father. If she had not been so simple, had it not been I who had invited each intimacy, I would have found my conquest insidious. But Rose was under my command, completely governed by my whims. The first moment that I had enough, one word could banish her from the house. And it seemed to me that everything had its natural end, and that there would be the day, possibly one or two days away, when I could say "enough."
What did it matter, when the remaining days of my life could probably be counted by a child whose numerals have not reached the figure of one hundred? These spurts of mastery that Rose showed to me frightened me changing the taste of our contact. Having known the liberty of searching myself with this mute animal, I would never submit to her inferior mentality. But always, with a tightening of fear, I realized that acquiescence was not to a mind, but to a body. For three years I had carefully deteriorated my body, my emaciation and motionlessness made me an almost bodiless thing. But I had forgotten about the bodiless voyages of emotion. I thought I had narrowed all of my life-flame into my head, but the fuel had dripped to my groin, and now the wasted flames shot up to turn my brain to ashes. Rose watched me think. She could not think herself, but knew it as a physical act, and there was a frown of confusion on her lips. My absorption was the one exercise that overpowered her, and she discarded her true defiance and put on the truer mask of deference. She said not a word, but tucked in the blankets and opened the door for my father.
He was in his furious mood of the delayed king. He looked at me and said rather unkindly, "Well, my dear young lady, were you preparing for your lover?" I laughed and said, "Yes, I knew you would visit me this morning." He was assuaged immediately by a politic he had taught me, and sat in the chair in which Rose used to read to me, his humor repaired.
He hardly noticed my nurse and half acknowledging her, said, "Would you be a good girl and bring me my tea and newspapers." But the ruins of my morning tray attracted him and he turned to her, "Ahh, brioche. Wonderful. My dear child," he was in a strange temper, "I have changed my mind. Bring me coffee and brioche." She moved out of the room, silent now, at the mercy of the household. Abruptly he lifted himself from the chair as the door closed behind Rose, "Do you think she'll remember the newspapers?" he asked nervously. "It seems to me I didn't repeat them the second time. Servants," he explained to me sententiously, "have a way of forgetting everything when you tell them you've changed your mind. Then you've got to begin from scratch again. Now I should have told her milk with the coffee."
"Cook will know," I said restlessly. "It won't be Rose who prepares the tray." I enjoyed his using her. I would have liked the mockery of everyone using her, and then her using me. No, that would never happen, there would always be the class, the intelligence, the fact that it was my house, to separate us. Conviction did not come with my thoughts. There was no artifice, no separation when two bodies stretched interwoven on the bed. The separation came when one flew, and the other stayed on the ground. For the first time there glared in me the task of satisfying Rose, and I turned off that light with an internal snap.
My father was speaking. "You seem very preoccupied. Have you been reading something interesting?"
"I haven't felt like reading."
There was little else for him to suggest What could I do, innocent and alone in the bed, but read?
"How do you explain that mysterious flush in your cheeks," he asked gently. He could be so full of kindness, my father. Doubtless my mother had thought he would be that way always. She did not sense the thin line of irritation, irascible and close to the skin, that made his kindness such a veneer. I know he would have liked to be able to love me, but he was too poor for the taxation of sentiment. For the first time I wondered what kind of a lover he would be. I wondered how they had made me, those two people who hated each other. My mother hated him. I had no illusions about that. With all her saintliness she hated him, and if she sometimes craved him, she must have wished him dead. She hated him more than he ever could her. She was stronger than he, much better at the luxury of feeling.
Rose shouldered her way into the room. The tray was heavy with silver coffee urn, the heavy silver sugar dish and pitcher of hot milk with which he was traditionally served. Then there was the thin Dresden cup and saucer, the cup disturbingly light to carry to the mouth, giving a tiny shock as if gravity had stopped operating for that instant. The newspapers were not on the tray. He looked past the brioche, past the mold of butter, pained patience his attitude. "Nurse," he moaned, the sickest man in the ward. "Nurse, where are my journals?"
"They didn't arrive at the house yet," she explained, quick to clear herself. Courage and confidence were not her worldly attributes. She was essentially a servile creature. I detested the joy she took in freeing herself from blame and spreading it over the amorphic powers of the presses and delivery boys. My father, pampered from inimagine, grew red with a sudden anger. The forces that Rose appreciated, of lateness and inexplicable mistakes, were just the powers that crazed him. His breakfast was ruined, and there was no one to punish. "I shall write to the publisher," he shouted, and feeling his impotence, he added, "It's just as well that I avoid the stupidities of Eden and Dulles for one morning. Probably digest my food for once." But he pushed the tray away from him and ate nothing.
Rose said, "If you like, I'll drive to town and pick them up for you." She didn't understand that it was too late. He observed her then for the first time and said, "That won't be necessary." His sudden awareness that she was a woman, this thing that was simply to have brought him his breakfast, seemed to strike through him with the involution of a deadman's final muscular spasm. After the first rush of recollection, his reactions calmed and I watched him as he leisurely measured the sturdy hips, the upswooping breasts and the eyes that were opened to say yes yes yes. "(farming," he muttered and he turned to the cooling coffee. "Charming," he hypocritically amended to me, "to have a breakfast without the bother of world disasters." He was trying hard now to give me his attention too. "But you, my dear Adrian, for you the world is no bigger than this house, no bigger than this room." Big big, her breasts were big, her tits were long, and he'd know the spaciousness of the hairy crevice I could never enter.
"What is your name, young lady?" He couldn't neglect the interesting discovery in his daughter's dull quarters.
"Rose De Marco," she answered. Her words had the bold-shy ring of a contestant answering routine questions on a quiz program.
"De Marco, De Marco," he played with the plebian sound. "That's most familiar."
She was eager to win the sixty-four dollars. "My father and grandfather have both worked for you," she explained. "Maybe that's how you know my name?" How could he tolerate her, want to get closer to her.
"Worked for me?" he said with well-practiced modesty and surprise ... please don't get up for me ... you made this souffle" just for me. Ah madam, you shouldn't have bothered.
"Now my brother is going to work for you," she said, finishing the account of an insufferably dull family, in the midst of which she was undoubtedly below average.
"How nice," said the patriarch. "Your family sounds very devoted to me."
"You can't imagine," I interrupted. "They'd do anything to make you happy." My insinuation was not intended to be subtle. Rose did not curtsey and take off her clothes as she would have done in the fifteenth century or the twentieth if anyone had told her she might. Instead she cast down her eyes and said, "You're a good man to work for, Mr. Ferdinand." She certainly was going to find out. My father stood up and would have clapped his hands together, or slapped somebody's shoulder, he was so full of good Christmas cheer. "I must go now." He finished our conference and quite by accident brushed Miss De Marco's popping fountains. "Take good care of my daughter," he dusted her plump ass, "try to make her eat a little more," he squeezed the soft arm, "don't let her read too much," he pinched a heavy thigh.
"Daddy," I innocently interjected, "did you and mother have a good time last night?" He couldn't get back to last night, a time when Miss De Marco did not exist. "No," he replied. "Yes, it was quite what we expected."
"Mother looked magnificent." He was annoyed at my distracting him from his important purchase, most annoyed that I erected the sacred name of the mistress of the house. With apparent naivete, I was demolishing my mother's magnificence. He shook his head at the superfluous buzz that was his wife's presence in the house and said, "Your mother had a headache. She should see a doctor or stop going out socially."
"Where is she now?" I carefully set the scene, something diabolical in me demanding that he see the possibility of taking my lover now, today, while his wife nursed a headache.
"She's resting."
"Could Miss De Marco bring her anything?"
"Miss De Marco," he protected her, "has enough to occupy herself with you." So we were going to share her. Mother would lie cradled in thoughts of us, and we would share Rose. Then the idea rooted in my head, and I was eager for him to be gone, so that I could restring the puppets. He moved unwillingly out of the room, smelling the wet-earth willingness of my nurse. He paused at the door, happy to have discovered an excuse. "I'll look in to see how you are after lunch, Adrian. Is there anything I can bring you?" I thought quickly of something I might ask for, to assure his return. His passions, I imagined, died as quickly as stale flowers that the florist sprinkles with water, to give them the moment's look of dew-soaked buds.
"Bring me a surprise," I said with pretended impetuosity. He sensed me as an accomplice, and his face beamed love.
"I'll bring you a lovely surprise," he promised.
"And I'll have one for you," I wanted to add, in the sarcastic music-hall patter, where everyone in the audience can anticipate the actors' lines. He heard the words that were mute inside of me, and he chuckled, "Adrian, you are my own true daughter." My plan was infallible because it was simple, as simple as Rose.
When we were alone she came to the bed and chose some light green tablets from my row of bottles. Vitamins I supposed, or sedatives, or sugar, or anything to give her purpose in the room. She handed me the pills and a glass of water, serene angel of competence and efficiency.
"Your father is a wonderful man," she admonished, as if I had just said something against him. "He loves you very much."
I had no time to waste. "He was very fond of you, Rose."
"Of me?" Her tone was my father's when he had said, "Works for me?" They were of the same breed, the two parts that were going to adhere. And I had thought him so special. The ageing rich man and the pinchable servant girl. A classical situation, except that they wouldn't have their amour in the privacy of the servants' quarters, or behind the vacant barn. No, they'd have it here on his daughter's bed. I'd at last know the long thick bone of flesh that I had seen only in censored photographs. I would see the stem pushing in and out of her, and get wet with their sweat and come. As I watched, she would be having me, and he would be having me, and they'd be as props for each other; I would hear the impact of each thrust.
"I've never seen him take to anyone so immediately," I added, which was true. But then, I had never seen him buy a new horse for his stable.
"How nice of you to say that," she was arranging my pillows, and we were now, curiously, completely disinterested in each other. I think she too appreciated the dimension that could be added to our game.
"Rose," I said, "there's something I want you to do."
She didn't answer, working in the little space of her sensuality to find the answer for my anticipated request
"You do like my father, don't you?"
"Of course," she said willingly. "My family ... "
"Yes." I stopped her, "now I think you should really do for him what your family never could."
"What" her innocence was a penetrable shield.
"You can make him happy," I promised. "Happier than my mother has ever made him." That was my first unnecessary hint.
"How?"
"Make him feel like a man again." The tremor in my voice could have led the Greeks across the Bosphorus.
"But he is a man," her mixture of stupidity and coyness was exasperating, but I stayed patient, wanting the whole thing to be done unstintingly and my way.
"He could be a man," I amended, "and probably one of the best men," my invitation had its rewards. "I think you could show him the way," I meant it, knowing Rose's capacities.
I beckoned her closer to me, and I ran my hands down her thighs, till I found what he wanted and pressed it tight.
"You like to give it to a man, don't you," I asked in a confidential tone. Inwardly I trembled at what her answer would surely be. She had a sensuality that gave placidly, indolently, but it was a hungry sensuality. When she made love to me, she enjoyed herself by becoming me, by experiencing each quiver of my hidden parts that were so familiar to her.
"I like to please you," she answered equivocally.
"There is a way," I began, "that you can please me and my father at the same time."
She stalled. "Just taking care of you pleases your father."
I made a brief gesture of dismissal. "My father doesn't understand anything that isn't done to him." She accepted that without question, the mystery to her was that those existed who could feel vicariously. I stroked her breasts, and her mouth was opening to facilitate her breathing. She was a perfect machine: touch button A, and lever B slides open. "Rose," I said, brutalizing my voice, and yet searching for her pity, "the things I cannot do, I must imagine. Because of you, it's not enough for me to picture certain things in my mind. You must finish what you have begun." I saw that my commands would still be law. "I want you to make love to my father, and I want it to be here, in this room so that I can watch." It was said, we were both relieved.
"Oh, I couldn't!" she ill-timed her answer, a second after the sincere spontaneous refusal would have come. Her eyes were lit with a deep terrible pleasure. I considered the appointment made, and now for the details. Casually I moved away from the center of our conversation, still sauntering on the circumference, so that we could move back effortlessly to the core of our interest
"Have you ever made love in front of other people."
"Oh, I couldn't."
"I'll never be able to have a man," I said a little sadly, knowing that her responses quickened to sentimentality. "Be the woman in me, Rose."
It was as if I were giving her my femaleness, and preserving my masculinity that was part of the death in me. Without the woman part it was my complete death, but I was willing to make the bargain. It had been made a long time ago, when my only sexual egress had unbuttoned her sweater and revealed suckable, full mother-teats. It had been made when my mother gave me a body too feeble to endure a man.
I would not die without knowing the secrets of a man, and maybe it was right, if right or wrong touched my sensuality, for my educator to be my father. He was the only thing male that had ever touched my life, and his mystery was all the man mystery that I needed.
"You shouldn't even think about it," she stopped my thoughts. "You shouldn't even want it. A well-brought up girl like you. I would die before I showed you such an ugly thing."
"Is it ugly, Rose?" I demanded.
"Well, it's not pretty," she said authoritatively. "Especially for a delicate child like you. No," her eyes still agreeing, "I'll try to forget what you've asked me to do."
"You must do it," I sat half up on the pillows, and coughed my excitement. "I'll make you." The game amused her; it was a leisurely one. We both were confident of the shared victory.
"You can never force a woman to take a man," she answered pompously.
"I can," I promised her. "In this house, anything I want done is done."
"Here's one thing you can't do," she insisted, at the same time pulling away the thin folds of my gown and running her hands lightly over my punished buttocks.
"You'll do it," I said, "or my mother will be told it's already done. That will be nice," I continued cruelly, "for your father and brother."
Her face grew red with an instant's pain, though her relief was as great as mine that we had found the final barrier that left no way out.
"You're a devil," she caressed me. "It's a good thing you're stuck in this bed, or we'd have a dictatorship worse than Hitler in this country." Her humor was so heavy, so tasteless, that I squirmed away from her and said, "We've got to arrange this thing carefully." She was willing to leave all arrangements to me, as she would have to the madam of a busy house. She was an artist, interested only in her creation, not bothering with the petty essentials that made creation possible.
She tried to give me attention. "What will your father say about this?" She looked at me slyly, jealous perhaps of the theatre I was going to enjoy, anticipating her pleasure and my pleasure as an inseparable thing.
"This is what you must do," I listed my directions as if to a foreigner lost in the rush of the city. "First, when my father comes in, you must explain to him that I was very tired this afternoon and not very well. Then you must tell him that though I looked forward to his visit and to his gift, you thought it best that I take a strong sedative and sleep until dinner. Tell him that there is no possibility of my awakening. The rest," I guaranteed her, "will follow."
She liked my plan: it was uncomplicated enough for her to move around in easily. "But what," she asked me, "if he doesn't want me, or he wants me in another room?"
"It must be here," I insisted. "Here next to me on the bed. I will pretend to sleep over at this corner." I pulled myself over in a dress rehearsal that left no possibility of error.
"Good," she agreed. "I'll do my best." The fighter before the big match. I patted her shoulder and said, "You're very sweet, Rose." It was the first compliment I had given her, and she blushed as if I had thanked her for a bouquet of forget-me-nots.
We both heard the hesitant tap on the door, and I felt a moment's horror that my father had returned too soon for our plan. Rose went to the door and opened it.
It was my mother. We shared looks of relief. My mother, by being not whom we'd feared, was less than nothing. It was as if a shadow walked into the room and sat in the chair beside my bed.
"Good morning, dear," she murmured. "Did you enjoy breakfast? Cook made brioche just for you. I reminded her that you loved them."
"Thank you." I was willing to be civil, as if I had met a social enemy on the streets and was chatting pleasantly, because that evening I was giving the party of the season to which she had not been invited. "You're dead," I thought, looking at her. "Everything is going on as if you didn't exist. You've made sex impossible for me, well, I'm taking it back from you." This wave of loathing would inundate me whenever I saw my mother. I wanted to stab her body until the blood spurted out in great jets, like in the painting of the martyrdom of a saint.
"Did you have a good time last night?" I asked.
"Yes," she was always correct, "it was quite pleasant."
"Father told me you didn't feel well."
"Was he here," she started nervously as if she had just become aware of his presence.
"Yes," I said calmly, "he was annoyed that the papers hadn't arrived." She quickly, inside of herself, took the guilt of the whole organization of publishing, the guilt that Rose had thrown away and my father hadn't touched.
"Terrible," she apologized. "He's so cross when the papers don't arrive."
"It was all right," I soothed her. "He had a very interesting conversation with Rose."
Her nostrils whitened, she knew him well, "Rose?" There was a question in her voice.
"Yes." I reminded her, "the nurse you brought into the house." It was all her fault, the whole plot that I was letting her sniff. Her mind by now had completely absorbed the message I had pressed into it, but she held the realization down, letting it ache in her head. "I have a terrible headache," she said. All the whispering things I put in her head, I was surprised it didn't splinter open.
"Yes," I sympathized, "Daddy told me you had a headache all last night"
"He exaggerates," she defended herself, "Mrs. Parker entertained us with some Hungarian musicians who were much too enthusiastic for me, but otherwise I felt quite well all night." Poor mother, all those sounds and people trying to bring her to life when it was so much sweeter and kinder to be left dead.
"You look much better, Adrian," she said. "I'm happy to see such color in your cheeks."
My face was flushed with the fear that at any second I might blurt out that Rose was to have her husband, that I had arranged it all. I kept thinking that the words had already escaped, and the presence of my victim inflamed and repressed me at the same time.
She was dressed to leave the house. Downstairs in the hall was the coat and umbrella she would carry. I was disappointed that she could not be in the house for the entertainment I was preparing. But maybe it was best
Her presence, though I doubted it might have inhibited my father. In his place, it would make me ten times more passionate.
"It was a good idea to get the nurse for me," I admitted, giving her a crumb of appreciation. She gobbled it up, "I'm so glad. I knew a young companion in the house would spirit you."
"Rose is very distracting," I said suggestively. "She is just as helpful as you said she would be: the part of me that moves about."
"Excellent," she nodded, and stood up confused. My words that should have been soothing discomforted her, and as she gave credence to none of my innuendos, she would go over my words again and again and find them pleasing. She would never admit the foul wind that wafted them to her.
She looked at her watch. "I'm sorry we can't talk longer, but I must be in town for the bazaar in ten minutes." We both remembered my prophecy. I smiled and she flushed.
"Can I bring you anything, a surprise perhaps?" she suggested.
"No," I warned her. "I hate surprises."
When my mother was gone, Rose looked at me and said, "You're not very nice to your mother." She, the opposite of my mother, never bothered with words, and heard only the unspoken, like an infant who responds to the tone of a voice and knows nothing of its meaning. In that way, Rose understood everything.
"It does not concern you," I snapped. She was not to enter the universe inhabited by me and my mother, except as one of the masked henchmen.
She walked away from me and I called her back. "What are you going to do to my father," I demanded.
"Well I don't know," she answered stupidly.
"Are you going to polish his shoes?" I shouted in anger.
"No," she was growing more stupid every moment "If he-likes," she hesitated, "I'll make love to him."
"It's not love," I brutally corrected. "Have no idea that my father loves you, or even respects you. You're just an elephant he's going to climb on."
"Well," the insult flared through her, "I don't need him, you know. There's no shortage of men for me." Jealousy, a familiar nerve with many sensations, flinched in me.
"You tramp," my fury was a surprise to me. "You should feel honored to be touched by my father, just as it's an honor for you to come near me."
"Of course," she was afraid of my temper, meek at an anger she never felt.
I grabbed her breast and pinched it maliciously. "I want you to sleep with my father because it amuses me, and there's a chance that it will amuse him. But you are the most unimportant of the three of us. Do you understand?" I pinched harder and she almost pushed my hand away, so great was the pain. But she endured the pain, thinking she had no choice, and cried, "Yes, of course I know that. It's a great honor. I'm proud to sleep with your father."
"And all the time you do," my fingers were merciless, "you must remember that you're nothing-a thing to climb on. I'm important" hysteria was swamping me. "I'm my father. You understand, my father and I are the same. When he has you, I have you." I released her bruised breasts and fell back on the pillows. "Get out of here," I whispered. "I must be alone to think. You wouldn't understand," I was whimpering and crying to myself. "You don't understand what it means to think."
Rose stood confused at the bedside, unwilling to go and incapable of disobeying a direct order. Then she did the only thing she would know to do. She stretched out on the bed and took my sobbing head into the corner made by her shoulder and cheek, and caressed my forehead, almost singing the lullaby of "my poor little girl, so upset and unhappy. Tell Rose why you're so unhappy. Aren't you glad that you're going to see it at last? Or is my little girl frightened? Don't be frightened. Rose will explain everything.
"A man has a wonderful white anchor between his legs. In the hospital we called it a penis, off-duty we called it a cock or a prick or a dick. There are many names for it, according to the mood." I calmed listening to her nursery rhyme.
"When he is happy," she continued, "his penis gets very long, very thick, very stiff and almost purple at the head. Then, if he moves, it stands straight out from his belly. Once he's happy, he wants to stay happy. To help him, you must play with his great big cock." She moved her fingers down to my thighs, making them hot with the soft circling of the white flesh and went on speaking in the narcotic voice. "It's a wonderful thing, this plant that grows on a man; it looks so strange; it feels everything so sharply that at first you're afraid to touch it. But then you discover that it-likes to be squeezed hard," she reached the hidden mound that protected the corridor into my body. Deftly she found the minuscule tap that controlled the liquids that now streamed out onto her hand. She massaged quietly, there was hardly a motion on the blanket that shielded our game. Her voice was a soothing sister to her hand. "Men," she educated me, "Like you to grab their stems in the middle, get a good firm grasp, and squeeze hard until the wobbling head of their pricks mushrooms to the size of a fist. When the head is full-blown, you take it in your mouth and suck and chew, running your tongue up and down the thick vein that hides behind the rigid flesh. It's a taste you should know, Adrian," she said marveling. "You can get the tip of your tongue into the pinhole on the crown, and you suck it and suck it, dragging all the liquid out, until they can't hold back all the come that's stored in their balls."
I hardly noticed the perspiration of my body, or the river that now freed itself onto her never-still hand. She was breathing quickly, absorbed in the only science she had learned by heart.
"Then you can do what you want with them," she relished memories of her power. "Usually they beg you to let go so that they can dig into you, but if you want, you just keep sucking as if you didn't hear them. You take your hands and cushion the two hanging nuts, and rub them gently together, careful not to harm the sensitive, naked, loose-skinned sacs. For that moment they belong to you, you have them trapped in your mouth and chained by the grasp on the frightened balls. They're pressed between fear and ecstasy, and for a long time you can keep them suspended, darting back and forth between the come and the capture. Then you start to swallow the prick. You lift your head and lower it on the burning sword, you try to get our lips down to the hilt You feel the flesh choking the air out of your chest and throat and mouth, and you come up for air, but sink greedily down down the slippery pole. You go up and down and your mouth gets dry. Then you want them to come, to cover your tongue with the hot wet sticky explosion. Your head goes loosely, quickly up and down, and your hands get nervous on the fragile balls. They know you're waiting. Your sex is wet, dripping onto the sheets, but the sex will be fed next time, now you want to drink, to swallow the harsh syrup."
My body was arching up to her hand, flattening my hair onto her palm. I moved rhythmically and unconsciously to feel more deeply her inexorable fingers.
"Finally," her voice was sunk into her own memory, "you feel the first pulse in your mouth." My body twitched against hers. "It gets bigger," she explained. "Your lips can hardly get around it. You free it for one second, and it grows so fat, you can't get it back between your teeth." Nervous spasms lifted my body off the bed.
"You stick it back in, but this is the last time. He's moaning now, trying to pull away from you, and then trying to shove it down to your stomach. You catch it in your mouth, and he tries to pull out. You let it go and he grabs your head and mashes it against his middle. So you press the balls together, you swallow like a drowning man, and groaning with him you feel the choking spurt on the back of your throat." My spasms had turned into long drenching fosses of my whole body. The pressure released poured out of me, and the relaxation was beginning to creep up from my chilled toes.
"One throb, two throbs, he empties into you. You drink it down as fast as it comes, and keep sucking, hoping to get more, drawing for the last drop that tastes like blood. He falls away from you, and you still keep the trigger in your mouth. Your mouth is hot and wet now, like your sex, you don't let him rest, you keep sucking. You suck until you've got this limp soft hook in your mouth, but you don't give up. You're hungry now, like your sex; you don't let him rest; you keep you hold him prisoner. He is resting in your mouth now, lying exhausted on your tongue. You nibble at the shrunken head; you play with the relaxed root. The vein is swollen, the skin loose around it But you know what you're doing, and soon you feel the slight swell of his maleness coming back. He doesn't try to push your head away now, he leans back and lets it happen. When it's good and hard, harder than it was the first time, you let him take over, and he sinks into you as if he could get back all that milk he lost if he could reach it."
Dimly I felt her lift herself off the bed. She pulled back the covers and arranged my raised nightgown. She ran a damp piece of cotton over my face to wipe away the traces of my nervous tears. "This afternoon it's my turn," she said in a soft harsh voice. "But you just try to sleep now, we have plenty of time."
vi
We had eaten and were almost calm when we heard the knock on the door that must have been my father. Twice in the morning, I had jumped nervously to the entry that might have been my father's. And both times like a pining lover I had been sharply disappointed.
First it was the gardener bringing me a golden bouquet of roses. They filled the room now with an intoxicating heaviness. Rose said, "My God, I'll suffocate," and moved them closer to an open window. She was acting like a prima donna who must have the temperature of the theatre adjusted to her larynx. The second time it had been cook to complain that I had returned my lunch untouched. "I ate a lot of breakfast" I explained to her and would have had her pushed out of the room if she played mother with me one minute longer. But my parents were having guests for dinner that night she informed me apologizing all the time as she scurried out of the room. This third knock had to be the awaited caller and I closed my eyes and probably prayed.
"Come in," Rose said and the door opened. My father's voice said, "I'm not disturbing you, am I?"
"Disturbing," Rose repeated, as if the word was nonsense on his lips. He must have been carrying a large box, because Rose said, "Oh how lovely, you've remembered Adrian's gift. But I'm so sorry; she can't thank you for it now."
"Is anything the matter?" he asked in a voice of excessive feeling so that I knew he was using my sickness as she would be using it, but with my permission. "No," she answered musingly. "It was just that Adrian didn't sleep very well last night, and though she looked forward to your visit, I thought it best that she sleep this afternoon. She was so eager to see you," Rose was leaving no doubts in his mind, "that I had to give her an extra strong dose of sedatives. Nothing could wake her now," she finished. The scene had been carefully rehearsed, and now it was set. They were, he thought, alone.
There was a moment's silence, and I thought that Rose was going to stand there mutely-and let him leave, the fool. Or else he had already embraced her. That seemed hardly possible. Especially since we had a code, that she would knock over a book when it was safe for me to open my eyes.
"Would you tell me what you've brought for her," she finally asked. "I promise to keep it a secret."
"Well," his voice carried great relief that she had found their conversation, that he might stay. "Come right over here and I'll show you." He sat down in the comfortable chair beside my bed and said, undoubtedly looking at me, "The poor child looks so tired. You're sure I'm not disturbing her?" How sweet of him to think of me.
"Oh, she's in dreamland," Rose said coyly.
"I guess that's where she spends most of her time," he said sadly. "If she were healthy, I'm sure she'd be just like me."
"How like you?" Rose cooed invitingly.
There was a pause. He must have pinched her, then he answered, "She'd like a good time."
Foolish Rose defended me. "Adrian-likes a good time, too."
"But for the fun Adrian could have had, she would have worn these," he mysteriously answered.
"Ohhh," I heard a long sigh from Rose, "how fabulous." Her voice was so genuinely excited I almost opened my eyes and said, "What?" Maybe she was admiring a penis of incredible proportions.
Then she said, "Are they for Adrian? They're beautiful!"
"They belong to Adrian," he amended. "We've been holding them for her in the safe, for the day she might wear them, but now, I'm afraid she'll have to enjoy them in bed."
"Just looking at them should give her pleasure," Rose answered.
"That's what I thought," my father answered, and his voice was filled with love because they had both been subject to this similar momentous thought.
"This necklace," he continued, "belonged to Adrian's great-grandmother, my grandmother," he explained. "She was English, of course."
"Of course," Rose echoed him.
"This ring," he must have held it up to the light for Rose, "was the gift of the Empress Eugenia to my wife's grandmother."
"Lovely," she exploded. "May I try it on?" He hesitated, sex was sex, but the family was the family.
"Let me help you," he said suddenly, and I know he didn't release her hand. "You have an empress's hand," he commented.
"Oh go on, Mr. Ferdinand," she brilliantly countered. How could he go on? But he did.
"You also have the Spanish fire that I'm told helped Eugenia to capture Napolaon."
"Me? Spanish?" she contradicted. "Oh no, I'm Italian:"
"The Mediterranean," he tried to salvage his seduction, "flows equally into all the blood of its shores."
"Of course," the idiot was making it impossible for him, "I was born in America. But I would love to visit Italy. Florence, Rome, Naples, Venice," her voice floated on; it had a little-girl yearning.
"I'm sure you'll get to all those places," said my father who detested Italy, "a girl as beautiful as you."
"It's a great compliment, Mr. Ferdinand, to be called beautiful by a man who's seen as many lovely women as you."
"Not so many," he said modestly, which meant the figure was still beyond count. "But," he quickened, "to find a beauty here in my house, one that I hadn't known about, that's a rare experience."
I moved in the bed, and he said guiltily, "Will she wake up?"
"No," my nurse assured him. "She'll probably sleep straight through the night."
"That's not necessary," he said. "We're having people for dinner." So he was taking it for granted too. His sureness crippled the conversation. "Let's go for a walk," he suggested. "Or better, a drive. As long as she's sleeping you don't have to sit in the room."
"But I do," Rose thought quickly, "the doctor often telephones, and I must be here to give my report." The intricacies of sickness overcame my father, after the word doctor he'd not heard another word. But he was disappointed. "All right," he was getting up, "we'll make it another day."
"Make what another day?" she asked innocently.
"Our drive," he tried to be cheerful. "Remember we have a date for a drive."
"If you're not rushed now," Rose said aggressively. "I wish you could stay here and talk to me a little. It gets dull sometimes, being alone in the room while Adrian sleeps." He was appalled at the idea of talking to her, and her simplicity seemed to call for just that, talk. He sat still for a moment, and then decided to try.
"That's a pretty sweater you're wearing." He was obviously admiring the outlined woman beneath it.
"Do you like it," she asked breathlessly, on her way. "It's from England, too." So she jumbled it all together, the necklace, my great-grandmother and her pink sweater.
"It feels so soft," his voice thickened.
I felt the mattress sag slightly with Rose's weight "Don't do that," he said gruffly. "You'll wake her."
"I've told you," she answered impatiently, wanting to be finished with the first act, "that nothing could wake her." He pulled his chair closer to the bed. "You're sure?"
"If you like," Rose said bitingly, "I'll give you a few of the same sedatives, and you see if anything can wake you for twelve hours."
He laughed, "You're a sweet little thing, Rose."
"What's that?" He was sitting beside her on the bed. "You've got a necklace, too."
"It's my saint-Saint Teresa," she explained, "I've never had this medal off since my first communion."
"Lovely," he approved. Rose tipped over a book and for a few seconds I kept my eyes closed. I had a dread now of seeing the circus.
The only sound was his breathing. "Lovely, lovely," he repeated.
"Mr. Ferdinand," she resisted.
"There," he finished. "Aren't you more comfortable without that bulky sweater?" A minute before he had been enraptured by it. "And that thing," he was referring to the lacy brassiere. "Take that thing off."
She said, "You do it I'm not going to help at all."
"You just sit there," he approved. "This is the kind of work I like." He must have snapped the bra off too forcefully, because a button popped off and hit my cheek. I did not move, and my father, retrieving the button, was at last positive that 'nothing would wake her.' When he turned away I opened my eyes.
The golden room had its special afternoon glow, its favorite time of the day. When I moved my head I could see the spread of Rose's buttocks close to my face, and her back naked from the waist. I pinched her back, and with a free hand, she lovingly pressed my shoulder. She was having a good time. She could take on the whole family at the same time. She said to him, "It's better this way," and she stretched out beside me on the enormous bed. My father was indifferent to me, there was enough room left for him alongside Rose, and he lay down there. She turned over on her back, her breasts wonderfully firm, but slipping slightly away from each other.
My father's head rolled on her white chest, a nipple slipped into his ear. He was like a child playing with the first winter snowfall. He scooped up her breasts and rolled them in his hands, then he dropped them away, and smoothed his hands over the beautiful white expanse of her chest, her teats firm as my father's hidden maleness. His face was red against her pale skin, but not as red as the knob that he now fought between his lips. My lashes almost brushed his unaware hand and he caught the lengthening red erection between his teeth and moved it back and forth, nibbling and letting his teeth apart and his tongue dart out to circle the red moon that narrowed up into nipples. His expert bites were sending shivers through Rose, and I could feel each stir of her body in my neglected hollowed cave. I pressed my feet together, and the touching lips of my vagina soothed the ache, but the throbs deepened. He moved his head to the other teat, and the used and discarded one was naked beside me, very red and wet and standing straight in the air. The slump of her breasts had disappeared, they were high and firm now. I wanted to suck in rhythm to my father, and I regretted that I had barely touched Rose since our first meeting. The soaring had been for me. She reached for his hand, and placed it on the breast I had been relishing. "Do both," she whimpered. His thumb and forefinger obeyed. He tightened his fingers as if he would snap them and rolled the thick skin back and forth, pulling the nipple hard away from the breast, so that it got ridiculously long, stretching like rubber. She was hot now, letting out small sounds of Ahhh, ahh. He moved away from her and her body was glistening with sweat. Her skirt was tight around her waist, but the garters that held her stockings were exposed. He stuck his hand into the black hidden depths of her skirt. They were looking into each other's faces, flushed and eager to release their heat, but afraid to rush the mounting of the fever. His hand stayed under her skirt, his exploring fingers traveling over both of us, because I could feel each pressure of his hand deep in my groin. She was ready now to be exposed. She unbelted her skirt, un-snapped the band that held her garters, and implored his hands to free her of the garments. He pulled everything off her in one long sweep, and leaned over her on his knees to admire the small waist, the flaring hips, the heavy short thighs, her round stomach that sucked in and out with her uncontrollable breathing. He said nothing, never lifting his eyes from her, as if she would disappear if he did. He removed the shirt and white cotton pants that covered him. He stood hovering over her, but now I did not notice her, staring at the jutting erection that waved ponderously before my father.
She was staring at it too, and said, crudely, "You've really got something to work with." It was much bigger than they had looked on the photograph, and strange the way it swayed like the heavy trunk of a tree that falls to the ground by moving in one rigid mass. I could see the sacs hanging loosely behind the swollen branch, and the hairs that went in a straight line over his belly and around his sex like a fertile bush.
His legs were thin, but well-muscled. His chest was narrow, covered with hair, and his shoulders hunched forward. She was lying stretched out and happy to be looked at. As his eyes wandered to her hips, she rotated them in a mock demonstration of what his pleasure would be. He wanted to get right in and he said, "Spread your legs." He didn't want to touch her, only his erection, firm as a tower, had sense, and he wanted to bury it deep in the warm ooze of womb.
She sat up and grabbed the stiff member, her hands an immediate fist, pumping her pleasure up and down from the bulbous head to the root that disappeared into his belly. The bed was wet beneath me, and I could not have closed my eyes if he had stared into them. She darted her pink tongue from between her sensuous lips and tasted the frightening object. "Come here," she crooned. She stretched out on the bed and opened her mouth wide to invite the hot nourishment. He got on top of her, and put his belly against her chest. He spread out his thin strong legs, and she had to grab the elastic fortress with her two hands to steer it into her mouth. At that second she turned and looked into my eyes. My father's head was invisible, and all the time she held onto him with her two hands chewing at the top, she looked lazily into my eyes. She gave me no recognition, she just sucked and stared at me with the indifference of a baby who stares at strangers over his mother's shoulder. At that moment my father's mouth must have found her sex, she stiffened and turned away from me staring at the delicacy that she choked into her mouth. Her thin hands, glittering with the empress's ring, played with the unprotected bags behind the candy stick. Her hands tried to capture great gulping mouthfuls of it. My father, his head now resting on my knees, groaned. My own hand slipped between my thighs, but lay useless there. I could not satisfy myself, any more than I could have been surprised by a letter I had written to myself. My time would have to come after, and my beating heart told me that an instant's caress would satiate me.
I could still see the enormous swell of my father in her mouth, but she loosened her hold on him, her eyes glassy and distant. Her body jerked violently, and she released a long primitive howl. As the sound of her climax filled the room, my father's rod expanded and lay restless at her lips. She clutched him distractedly, digging hard into his bulbous erection, but she was not coherent enough to put the suffering thing back in her mouth. My father pulled himself roughly off the bed. He dragged her body around, and as if he were a party to our plan, he placed her so that her triangle of dark red hair mixed with my long flaxen hair. Her back and shoulders were almost upright on her body, I closed my eyes in a secret pool of terror. All that had happened, I could feel, I could understand. But now was the moment I was denied. I did not want it; all I wanted was to feel her tongue in me, not this monstrous probing weapon with which my father had captured my mother and carelessly created me.
I heard her groan, and my own agony forced my eyes open. I saw the swaying trunk brushing up and down the delicate slit buried like a path in the forest by her strong red hairs. Her hands waved in the air and his head was bullet-like against her chest, pressing, pressing with his entire body. I saw his hands separate the inflamed lips of her sex, and I could smell the overcoming stench of her heat. A hand on either side of her moist forest, he curved his hips and slipped into her, disappearing with slow relentless force. She made a pleasure-agony sound as he buried the knife, and I was sick with pain and repulsion as the senseless thing sank, until his dark hair mingled with hers and with mine. Once he was in her, her hidden cavern must have widened with the expansive givingness, that was the takingness of her sexuality. I could not see her face, but the moans now turned to pleasure, and he glided in and out of her, his speed tantalizingly slow.
This was the part I discovered to be ugly; to be pinned and helpless by the brute peg he pounded into her. His body now hammered crudely against the white spread surrendered body. I saw his face then, brutal, determined, cruel. I stared hypnotized at him, and did not realize for many seconds that he was staring at me, his face contorting into horror mixed with need. Then they were both slaves to the hook inside of her. He could not stop now, and staring into my eyes as if he were having me, he pounded faster and faster, the hook secure inside, the bulge she had swallowed and released, never reappearing.
His movements were now involuntary, the machine-like pumping of a huge wedge. She was gasping to the frantic speed of the machine, and he let it happen, never taking his glance out of my eyes, where it had buried itself. Their slapping bodies threw sweat over me, and I was deep in my loathing when her body began to twitch and my father roared an unintelligible word. At least it was a word I had never heard. His chest and shoulders and back seemed to be pumping a great jet into her womb. It smelled strongly, unbearably, and a trickle of white liquid dropped onto the blanket.
I crept away from it and turned my back to them. They were silent, their great effort stealing their ability to speak or move. Rose made little mewing sounds and then she was quiet.
After a few minutes with my back tensely to them, I heard him rise and he said briefly to her, "Get up and get dressed."
There was the sound of snapping, and the hushed hum of her skirt over her head, and his trousers pulled over his legs. He was rushing, wanting himself out of the room.
Rose was dressed and he was walking to the door when I heard that timid knock that was as unmistakable as my mother's voice. Perfect, I thought, and shouted, releasing a little of my horror, "Come in, Mother."
The smell of sex was stronger and as distinct as the roses. She stood arrested at the door, unable to take a step forward, as if the forces in the room were radiations holding her out. My father looked flushed, she undoubtedly recognized the fatigue cut into his face. Rose was plump and uncombed. I wondered if she would let herself know what we were all telling her. I saw her decision not to know form.
She said, "I hope I'm not disturbing you, Adrian. I thought you might like some tea and cakes."
My father said, "Margaret, my dear ... "
And I laughed, I laughed until there was no other sound in the room.
vii
My father acted like the ambassador of an attacking country. He seemed to dash around the room convincing everybody that everything was all right. "Adrian," he said, in a weak attempt to explain my hysterical laughter, "it's a pleasure to tell a story to you ... It's not every day I get a response like that. Margaret, I hope you agree that it's all right; I've just given Adrian the jewels we were holding for her." His words were calming him, but nobody else. My mother's eyes went hypnotically to the emerald on Rose's finger. "Miss De Marco," he explained futilely, "was just trying on Eugenia's gift."
The coward in my mother compromised her. "How nice," she said. "I hope you will enjoy them, Adrian." She only allowed herself the liberty of a rebuff to the inferior in the room. "Rose," she dared. "I think it would be best if you returned the ring to its box now." Even this slight harshness seemed to upset my mother and she added, "Don't forget Rose: this is your free evening. Adrian looks well enough to spare you, and the chauffeur is driving into town for me at five o'clock. He'll be happy to take you with him."
I hated her, coming into my room and being the mistress of the house. What did she know? What did Rose care about evening off when she could have me for the evening? The kind employer remembering the union demands. Well, Rose was indifferent to her "rights." She lived because she served me, and away from me she would wither and be nothing.
Rose answered gratefully, "Thank you, Mrs. Ferdinand. No, I hadn't forgotten." She was smiling at my mother, the whore, separate already from the man who had just taken her. My father too was rising to his familiar vantage of distance, in a moment he would forget her name. He spoke pleasantly to my mother, "Let's have that tea, Margaret. It sounds like a wonderful idea." The proper English squire and his wife left the room. He almost put his arm around her but her rigid back denied such intimacy.
When we were alone I stretched out luxuriously under the covers. The buzz in my vacant vagina could be heard, I was sure, across the room where Rose was combing her hair and straightening the details of her toilette. She looked for the first time very beautiful to me, flushed and clear-skinned, like images of shepherdesses on Greek vases. I was ready to be loved.
"Rose, come here," my voice indulgent with invitation.
Inexplicably she looked at her watch and answered, "I can't keep the chauffeur waiting."
"This is my night off," she stupidly told me. Her sweater was still not pulled straight, and I could see a patch of white stomach skin.
"You talk like a servant," I mocked her. " 'night off.' You're working for me," I threatened, "not for my mother, and I say there are no nights off."
"Oh I must," she calmly told me. "I have a date."
"A date?" I was so astounded that my voice rose and cracked like an adolescent's. "What do you mean, a date? Come here, I want you here." Again the admissions, the firsts. Never before had I admitted wanting. I had submitted to her with pretences of reluctance.
"I can't keep him waiting," she elaborated. "We're going to his mother's house for dinner, and then to the movies."
"Do you sleep with him," I demanded like a jealous wife.
A coy shrug was her answer. Rose would sleep with the picket fence if it looked willing.
"I command you not to go," my clitoris was shrinking with anxiety. In a moment I would feel nothing but my own impotence.
"Now, I'll give you some sedatives, and you'll sleep," she soothed me. "It's the best thing for you after the busy day you've had. You know," she was insensitive enough to articulate, "this sex is a strain on a delicate system like yours."
"Rose," I promised her, "I'll ruin you if you go, I swear. I'll speak to my mother the second you step out of this house, I'll spread your reputation around the city. I can do it, people come to visit me ... "
She was as disconcerted as a mouse that finds a new variety of cheese. "Now, you wouldn't do that," she assured me, calmly taking the sedatives out of the bottle and placing them on the table within reach. "You know how crazy I am about you," her language assaulted me, "and if I hadn't made this date," she lied, "I'd be real pleased to stay here and chat with you." Chat, her small-town euphemisms; I was sick and cultivating a tantrum. Yes, I knew in my sobbing womb I was nothing to her: I never gratified her. I was one-millionth of the intensity she felt with men, a task she performed while her mind traveled to other matters, to other lovers who had satisfied her. I lamented my inability to stimulate the fever in her to which she never said no.
"Rose," I coaxed. "Stay with me. I have something to show you." Only to show the skills she had taught me. I could do nothing but feebly imitate my father, suck her teats and mossy ridge. But what could I put into her. What could I substitute to achieve that delirious moment when she threw her head back and succumbed.
I would not expect her to touch me if she would just stay and let me play my father for her. She wasn't interested. The insatiable appetite, awakened by my father, wanted the real thing. And she said to me, "There's no shortage of men for me." Let me be one of them for you I wanted to cry, but pride and a sudden hatred stopped me.
"Go ahead. Go with the chauffer," I said bitterly. "You're a servant, act like one." She didn't react to my insulting dismissal, she gaily reminded me, "Now take these sedatives, have a good night's sleep. I'll see you tomorrow."
"You'll never see me again," I screamed, but the door was closing behind her. For the first ten minutes I thought that she might be playing a cruel lover's trick, and that she'd come rushing back into the room to take me in her arms and say, "Silly little thing, do you think I could leave you?" But she did not return. I could hear the car pulling away from the house. I screamed and scratched, tearing the sheets and sobbing my frustration. I heard every sound, I waited. The chauffeur would bring her back, she would reach town, and then the rope that bound us would tighten-cut and punish her-snapping her back to me.
Nobody entered my room that night The maid knocked once begging permission to serve me my dinner, I sent her away. I could hear the hum of my parents' guests in the dining room below, screening my enraged sobs. I stayed up all the night, thinking each minute she must come to me. Hysterically I fought my way into bondage. The noise of the house distracted me from intensely concentrating on the awaited footsteps. When the visitors left, there were no more footsteps, no more heart-jumping possibilities.
When the sun streamed through the windows she had neglected to cover, I succumbed to a feverish sleep.
Late I awakened to a gray day. Rose was in the room, looking at me expectantly. I was too tired to speak, sick with fatigue. The doctor, summoned, said that I was in a serious state of nervousness and exhaustion. A few more bottles were added to my vast collection, and Rose diligently fed them to me. I unnerved her as she waited for me to speak. I was determined to wear down her independence as I had during the first three days of her employ. I wanted her to creep remorsefully into my bed and chafe my frigid indifference. But though she handed me my medicines with prompt concern, she did not once approach me with a caress. I waited and waited and weakened.
The second day she was gone from my room for almost an hour. She came back looking like a pillow with ticking torn and feathers falling. She was offensively cheerful that afternoon, unaware of the consuming attention I cast on her, forgetting the passion she had awakened in me. I knew my father was having her every day, as I would have, had I been a man. But I did not allow him his maleness, understanding that his desire was akin to mine. I despised him, my father who absorbed all the pleasure in the house and grew sated and insular. Every minute she stayed away from me I went tortuously through the overtures of their embrace. The breasts, the mouth, the hips, the rigid male plant, the surrender, their frantic simultaneous drive, their bodies slapping into each other, and the point of agony reached. I wanted to kill him. I wanted to be him.
On the third day my unobserved will collapsed. I had to have her, anyway she wanted, anything she wanted. It was evening and Rose lit the fire in my room. The fireplace is high enough for a tall man to stand in, and she stood on the hearth and said to me, "Nothing warms you the way a fire can." Oh no. The flames behind her clouded her thick hair. She wore a straight skirt, tight over the hips, the hem short on her curved calves. Her sweater was tight and white, close and high around her neck, like a burlesqued nun. The fire sparked in her eyes, and I thought her perfect, savage and beautiful before the fire.
I said, "Rose, is the door locked?" She looked at me without comprehension, and then answered, "Yes, it's always locked."
I moved my knees over the bed. "What are you doing?" her alarm rang through the room.
"I'm coming to the fire."
"No, Adrian, don't please. It's dangerous for you to leave the bed." She was as shocked as if the portrait of my grandmother that hung above the mantle had suddenly yawned and removed its lace cap.
"I will come to the fire," I insisted, satisfied with her fear. I slid off the bed, and she tried to carry me back onto the warm sheets. "Don't touch me," I warned. She moved aside to watch my slow crawl to the fire. My journey exhausted me and I fell panting on the warm stones of the hearth.
"Wait," her voice full of frightened tears, and she pulled my mother's ermine cape from the foot of my bed and spread it like a picnic cloth in front of the fire. I collapsed on the soft pillowing furs and lay there panting to recapture my breath.
She knelt on the cape beside me and said softly, "Are you warm enough?" I touched her hair; I was a timid lover.
"I want you to take off your clothes. I want to see you naked before the fire. That's how you were meant to be."
"Adrian," I was thrilled now at the freedom with which she used my name, "get into bed. You must not exert yourself."
"Take off your clothes and give me life," I begged. She sensed, somehow, that my request denied would make me sicker than all the health-giving potions in the bottles. She pulled the gold fleecy blanket off and brought it to me. "Put this around your shoulders," she directed. Then she undid the snap of her skirt. With a sharp pain in my heart, I found her compliance a dutiful one, devoid of any passion. The nurse pleasing the eccentric patient.
I made her sit beside me, and with a resource of stored strength I pulled her sweater over her head. "Adrian, no," but I quieted her. I stared at her full mouth and had to explore it. My own lips were blue, dry, tinted; hers were full and red, they tasted of ripe berries. I pressed my pathetic mouth on her voluptuous one, biting, thirsty for some of her life fluid. My tongue forced the delicious lips apart and I sank into the warm privacy of her mouth. I touched her tongue, and it quivered against mine. Then it came to life and played with me. It darted away from my probing, and then came back to caress fully and expertly. I ran the tip of my tongue over the white teeth, and crept above them to the dark heat of her inside-out lips. I tasted the cheeks and strong smooth palate.
My hands were busy with her flimsy brassiere, and I heard her comfortable sigh when I released her, and let her fire-warmed breasts pour into ray open hands. I pulled the nipples hard, learning the way but not the passion from my father. Then I stiffened my fingers and let my palm wander lightly over the very tip of her teats. They grew hard against my palm. They wanted a harder assault, and gladly I pinched the tender morsels. Her body against mine was damp.
My hands fought the tight skirt, the thin undergarments that crumbled between us. When she was naked, I knelt, worshipping, and disrobed as my father had. My body was a pathetic duplicate of her womanly, languorous form. Kneeling beside her, I separated her thighs and caught the thick odor of her churning sex.
My fingers played with her dense bush, disappearing into the luxurious growth.
With timidity I slipped a finger into the boiling opening. I felt the full hairy cheeks of her vagina, and I pulled them apart to relish the wet mystery within. Then I found the long fleshy ridge, and I slowly slid my fingers up and down its delicate contours. It grew harder, and another fold of flesh seemed to open and invite me in. I followed the subtle revelations of her sex, and moved into the tiny aperture. One finger caressed a hard tip. I was drawn into her center by the flesh-suction of her sex.
I lowered my head to drink the secrets of her body. My tongue was nervous at the entrance, and I stiffened it into a point. She had a full, musty, female taste. I chewed my way inside of her, and her body ground noiselessly on the ermine floor. I knew my mouth would not hurt her, would remain obedient to her tender need. I ran my tongue round and round the button, until she moaned my name and released a throbbing, blood-tasting come into my mouth. I raised my head and she lay still watching me. Her served body sank into the fur. Though her fire-lit face glowed contentment, I was not satisfied. I was giving her a woman's love, not the hard implacable attack of my father; I hunted hopelessly for my masculinity. I could have sobbed my desire. She was silent, stretched on her back, legs apart, waiting.
I slammed the mantle, and my bouquet of roses fell noisily to the floor. The noise was startling but Rose remained motionless. The flowers fell haphazardly over her body, and she did not touch them. Her fingers encircled one bud and she played with it, tantalizing the life out of its golden petals.
The bowl lay broken on the hearth. I waited for an inquiring knock on the door, but none came. The pottery was scattered on the tile, and then I found my weapon. Standing straight as the erection I lamented, was the squat, round, leather-bound fire brush with which the ashes that escaped to the hearth were swept back behind the fender. I grabbed the brown handle and caressed it as if it were part of my body.
"This is for you, Rose." I felt as if my treasure was attached to my belly.
Without warning I thrust the warm leather into her flesh. I wanted to hurt her. The lips of her womb were dry and relaxed now, not ready for the assault, but my massaging finger made the entry possible. When it was in her, she arched her body as if she too had found the wanted male.
I moved my virility in and out of her. Her body was curved into the air, supported only by her shoulders and flattened palms.
One hand luxuriated in the firm flesh of her buttocks. When I found my other entry, I invaded it. She arched, captured between my missile and probing fingers. My hands felt like hooks, and my heart was screaming at the inhuman effort that I tore from my wasted body. But my spirit had her; my spirit and my nerves. I didn't want her ever to reach that ecstatic release that would make my delirium unnecessary. I wanted us to struggle before the fire until the flames disappeared and the coals turned gray.
She was moaning my name as if it were one word of a timeless desert song, wracking her body against the harder-than-male rod.
She screamed, "Pull it out," as her hysterical body raised off the fur. I counted seven unquenchable throbs that shook her, and then I collapsed beside her.
She touched my face like a blind man; she ran her fingers over my gasping chest, and then, when she found her strength, she gathered my thin form in her arms and carried me to the bed. She covered me with loving haste, and wiped my hot wet face. I breathed deeply and happily.
She let me lie quietly while she gathered her clothes. She dressed slowly in front of the fire, musing over her wounded mound. Her hand went many times to it, to comfort the brutalized flesh. My heartbeat slowed. I called to have her beside me to ask my libertine question.
"Was it good, Rose?" I implored. Her eyes glowed their satisfaction. "Was it good? Tell me."
She was almost shy to answer. She didn't speak her sex, but I had to hear from her that I had succeeded. She looked at me a long time, and lay down beside me. She pulled the covers back and caressed my trembling thighs. "Let me show you how good it was," she insisted.
"No," I pushed her hands away. "I don't want that. Not any more," but as I spoke my body was palpitating with the old desire I had meant to conquer. "I want to love you now," I haltingly explained, "I want to be the man for you." In my head was the ringing knowledge that I wanted to be my father.
She kissed my mouth and slipped her tongue between my lips. I was surrendering, I could not dominate her or myself. Her tongue nuzzled against mine, making words or thoughts impossible. She rubbed my heaving breast, my belly, my female hairs and cavity, that wanted hopelessly to be male.
"We can change around," she finally said in her laconic ease. "It will be fun."
I slept. When I awakened my mother came into my room carrying a letter from France. It said that a cousin I had not known of, the son of my mother's dead sister, was to stay with us one month and then go on to college. His name was Andre, and he was my age plus a few months. Mother was delighted that she should see her nephew, that I should at last have a playmate. Her happy news filled me with dread.
"Why must he come?" I questioned reproachfully. "Hell change everything."
Part Two/THE BOY
viii
My father remained with me in my cabin until the whistle warned all passengers off the boat. I knew he was dying to get off and have a drink, but he hid his eagerness to rush for the gangplank and the cafes that are so conveniently near the dock at La Havre. He shook my hand and said to me in his precise French: "Be correct with your aunt and uncle, be kind to your cousin."
He used the word gentle hesitantly as if he'd memorized it, but still had trouble with the meaning. He was moving away from me, finally, but the old money twinge prevented him from leaving unsaid what we had both been flunking since the idea of sending me to school in America had shaped.
"They are very rich people," he said with deep respect. "They have no heirs-only the young girl who I believe is sick, your cousin Adrian. It would be a great foolishness to offend them." Then he shook my hand again. "But I hope, Andre, that your schooling has taught you never to be foolish." The whistle blew again and my father still didn't leave. He didn't leave when he should have, because he didn't want to be here in the first place.
I see my father rarely. Always on boats, in train stations. He would occasionally come to England for Parents' Week, shaking hands with the masters, speaking his charming clipped English, and then looking at me with his expression of surprise, as if to say, "But didn't you die with Louise? Funny, I always forget that part of her is still alive."
My father made one of his big mistakes when he married Louise. Louise is my dead mother. He thought the rich didn't take words too seriously, so he married my mother against her parents' wishes. He figured that with all that money, my grandparents could take a trip around the world or buy Philadelphia and forget about the slight irritation of having a destitute foreign son-in-law. He forgot that very few things could still amuse them, and they must have had a lot of fun disinheriting my mother. The eternal Frenchman thought this bad joke had to end sometime; he waited. His other mistake was not to remember that my mother shared the inflexible will of her parents. She accepted being cut off, had some romantic ideas about my father working and building a little cottage for them. Now my father is not romantic. He almost went crazy knowing all that money was sitting in America, and him asked to work in an office that was bad for his respiration.
He was all for swimming across the Atlantic and throwing his body at my grandparents' feet. He would have cut his belly open and let all the guts pour out if they'd just patch him up and give Louise her share of the wealth. By now, my mother was pregnant with me, and fluttering about with the novelty of motherhood, she forgot her irate parents. Things weren't too tight yet; she had enough money in jewels to keep my father in the comfort that so quickly became his habit. Then there was the reasonable hope that with a grandchild the American monsters would relent Alas, came my father's other mistake. He never thought that she would die a short year after the glory of beholding me. Unfortunately she did die; that left me, and I was just as broke as he except for a small legacy that my mother had passed on to me, just enough to send me to good schools so long as I traveled back and forth third class.
My father did not let my presence disturb him too much; I had rich relatives, and if he could judge by my mother, they found it very simple to die. So he tolerated me; again waiting. Surely the will would mention the forgotten darling little boy in France. They must have forgotten all about forgetting me.
My mother's giant share of the inheritance was left to her only sister, Margaret. Margaret had been a good girl and married Sinclair Ferdinand, which was to say that the fortune stayed untouched; all they had to do was remember to include it in their heir's will and pay taxes.
My father never got over the thrill of thinking that when he'd married my mother he'd dived into a bottomless well of spilled diamonds. He splashed about in it, and always stayed down there looking up at the golden light at the mouth of the well. I was that light related undeniably, by blood, to the rich. It made him very polite to me.
With the disappointments, life hasn't been a Siberian with him. One rich wife and enough mistresses to keep him skiing in the winter, spear fishing in the summer, and drinking all the time. All from fucking. My father's contribution to society has been to perfect the fuck. Now he's getting old, the machine makes foul noises. He's counting on me, but he's not going to fuck me for a living.
I thought he was cemented to my cabin floor, so I took his arm and dragged him to the deck. We shook hands again at the gangplank. I hoped it was for the last time. He'd been to a lot of movies, so his eyes filled with tears, and he couldn't stop sputtering words. One minute more and he'd start moaning like old King Hamlet's father-Remember me, remember me ... remember me ... No thanks.
His last words: "Be careful of the women in America-don't get any disease." I wanted to smash his mouth, there on the boat, and push his alcoholic carcass into the filthy Atlantic. The bastard. Support him, I'd like to keep him alive as the star in a sideshow, "The Broken Fucking-machine."
He thought we were all like him. That I was like him ... just close your eyes and put it in, and tomorrow we'll all eat caviar. Well, I closed my eyes and put it in but it went in the wrong place. And I liked it. And I like to get it put in me too, in the same place. I hate women, and the womanizer he pretends to be. The phony, the phony with the well-geared tool. Telling me he enjoys all the women he lays. He'd like to get his staff in the doorman's ass but he's scared. So he lays women and insults us. All the women who've gurgled in his arms, but not before he'd emptied the safe. I admire him for that Christ, a woman would have to pay me a hell of a lot more to service her the way he does. No dark dungeons for me. I like to see where I'm going. Put it in a man, and you know you get it back.
He suspects I've never done it with a woman, that's why he gives me that connoisseur look. Don't worry, I won't get a disease, you're my disease, and I'm getting rid of you, for good.
I said goodbye to him. Maybe he expected a kiss or the filial squeeze of the hand. Maybe he'd like a good stiff one in his ass. He was all love and sympathy. "Don't forget to write; tell me everything about America. I'll be waiting," he promised.
"Wait" I said shortly, and then I turned around and went back to my cabin. Wait kept roaring in my head "wait wait wait." I lay down in the bunk. I'd be nice to the Ferdinands, I'd be lovely to them, a son to them. It was easy to be nice to rich people. My father had sent me to the right schools to learn that The first boy I'd done it with was rich. I didn't want anything from him. Just to stick it in all that precious rich flesh, just to come in the lord's hand. My snake was climbing up, thinking about him, and it was a long time before I felt the boat moving. Then I could see the jagged edge of water across the porthole.
My cabin was private. Go to America in style, a rule of the pretenders. I unbuttoned my pants and let it free. I was proud of it. Too proud to lose it in a woman. It worked-it worked beautifully. I cupped the stiff rod in my hand and squeezed gently, up and down. I put my head back on the pillows and let it happen out there. Up and down, the vein was bulging. I pretended it was another boy's hand. He pressed it lovingly. I could feel his tongue scooping the swollen head. Then his free hand grabbed my balls and crushed them together till they hurt.
"Stop," I shouted, "stop." When I sat up in the bed, I was alone and my hand was covered with the hot sticky come. Thick as blood, but white.
ix
I was sick on the boat and I cursed my father for not affording a plane ticket. He knows how I am on boats. Seven days of hell. I never left my cabin. I just let France come pouring out my mouth, and by the time we docked at New York I was empty, tired, and finished with the old beaten country.
There was a long line to join and customs was going meticulously through luggage and then another line for passport inspection. A terrible bore. The customs man moped over my trunk, picking up every article and examining it, till I told him, "They're not for sale." He said, "This is my job, bud," and went even slower. So this was America: great.
When I went into the passport office, the agent fingered my identification papers and asked me motherly questions. "How long will you be here? ... Going to school here? Very good idea, we have the best universities. Where will you be staying until the term begins?" I told him with my aunt and uncle, and then a connection brightened his face. "Oh yes, young man," he said, and checking my name, he handed me an envelope. "This has been waiting for you."
Unexpected messages frighten me. I always think they've caught up with something I took at school, or they've just decided the quota won't allow me to stay, so my hands were shaking when I opened the envelope. A ticket fluttered to the floor, and I stooped clumsily to retrieve it. It was a train ticket, and then I read the note from my aunt She said dear Andre, how happy they were that I had reached America. If I took the two o'clock train from Grand Central the chauffeur could meet me at this and this stop at five o'clock, in time for tea. And if that wasn't convenient to call at this-and-this number and say when I could join them. Love, Aunt Margaret
It was very convenient perfect, thank you. I wanted to get out of the filthy city, and I liked all the details so prettily in order. It would be very nice to be rich, I couldn't resist saying to the dull clerk. "The chauffeur will pick me up," and I held the note up stupidly, for him to corroborate the momentous news. He wasn't impressed. I guess in New York you have to have a helicopter meet the boat at New Jersey, and then they decide if it's interesting or not
He said, "Have a pleasant stay," and started stamping my papers. I wanted to tell him that I was here for good; no more papa, no more English schools, no more coal stove apartments; I preferred chauffeurs. I tucked the ticket into my wallet and I was going to throw the note away, when I suddenly discovered that I couldn't This was my invitation, my documentation to the new life. This was my proof that I was Louise's son.
I hadn't eaten for about seven days, and the note in my pocket and the ticket in my wallet brought back my appetite. There were two hours until the train and I was going to spend them in the best restaurant in town. Probably be a long time before I paid for another meal. My luggage was marked to go to my aunt's house, and I walked away from the dock surprised at how exciting it was to be in New York. I found a long line of taxis, big comfortable cars, the kind I liked. I got into a Buick and said, "Take me to the best part of town." The taxi-driver turned around and said, "Where do ya wanna go, Mack?" I saw him admiring my English tailoring and the rich look that my father taught me to cultivate. I leaned back in the seat and let him enjoy himself.
"It's a big town, bud," he told me. "Whataya looken for? If ya wanna woman, wesside. I gotta couple a hotels forya. If ya wanna man, eastside; you don't need no addresses." He laughed loud at his local humor, and like a fool, I blushed.
"I don't want a woman," I explained in my best clipped British. I thought it was better not to mention the man, as if his humor was too preposterous for me to understand. "I want a restaurant, and a good restaurant."
"You got American money?" he asked.
"Of course," I was furious that he didn't immediately recognize a man of international wealth.
"Then I'll take ya," he condescended, and pulled away from the curb with such surprising power, that my feet flew up to his head. By the time I'd adjusted myself on the seat, I didn't want any conversation, saw that Americans were a breed to be despised.
"You comin from France?" he was curious.
"Yes," I said curtly, afraid to not answer him.
"You gonna stay here?"
"Yes." I informed him, still brief, still cold.
"Gonna stay in New York?"
"No," if he hadn't been so rude I would have shown him the note from my aunt. No more taxis for me, just chauffeurs. Chauffeurs into town and back from town.
"Tough," he felt sorry for me. "Ain't no place in the world like New York."
I was looking out the windows at the crowded downtown streets, the waterfront was ugly with low red buildings and huge subway girders that cut out any light. The men all looked big and dirty, and the women were sloppy and fat. "I hope not," I whispered.
"New York's got everything," he continued. I thought he was going to go into his man-woman theme. But no, he was a citizen of culture. "We got museums," he admitted, "Libraries, restaurants, theatres, circuses, baseball, beaches, rich people," he turned away from the business of driving, and my heart sank in fear, traffic was zooming on either side of us, but confidentially he had to tell me, "All the money in the world in New York. If ya want money, this is the place to make it."
"Where were you born?" I said cuttingly. He didn't look too affluent to me.
"Right here," he said with pride. "Right in the smack middle of Sixth Avenue." Then he caught my inference, "But I didn't have no proper education. You gotta have an education in New York," he admitted. So they sold the maps for the treasure hunts in universities. I'd get my education, and I'd dig under the right tree.
"Now, you," he psychologized, "with that phony accent, and them tight clothes, you can clean up here."
I was furious. "Please watch the road," I answered.
"My son looks like you," he clucked his tongue. "I don't know why. He was such a nice kid, great basketball player, but he looks like your type," he continued to bemoan the boy's fate, "scholarships," he warned, "education," he contradicted himself, "they turn a good basketball player into some kind of water-lily." He didn't bother to speak to me again, he just shook his head and muttered to himself ducking cars and speeding up a big avenue. The sign said, FIFTH AVENUE, so this was it: where they came to spend their money. Huge stores lined the streets, the buildings looked white and I saw some women who could have passed in Paris. The taxi cut up a side street and stopped short in front of a low white building with a marquee and doorman.
"Here," the cab-driver said proudly. "Greatest Italian food in the city. Expensive," he was proud to tell me. "Plenneya snobs here; you'll like it," and he stopped the meter and pushed my door open. I hate Italian food, I always get sick in Italy, but I was afraid to get lost or remain in his taxi, so I paid the fare and gave him a fifteen percent tip to prove that it wasn't necessary for me to "clean up" here. He looked at the money in his palm as if it had a distinct and disgusting odor. He was still talking to himself when the doorman ushered me into the restaurant. "You takem to imagine joints, and you get a lousy tip" he philosophized. "Never fails, the phoneys ... "
The restaurant was all carpets and intimate tables. I had a great time, knew more about the wines than the wine Stewart, and I was able to complain legitimately about three dishes. Everybody was impressed, and I thought the manager was sincere when he said, "We hope you'll come back, sir." Then I had to dash for a taxi, and I discovered that Grand Central Station was around the corner. I walked to the station, and showing my ticket and the note (it wasn't necessary, but now I was speaking only French and pretending to be lost. I didn't want any conversations with New Yorkers, and it was pleasant to show the letter with the word "chauffeur" that glared off the thick white paper), I caught my train. I looked out the window for three hours, passing country that resembled the Midi. Out of New York, America looked rich and comfortable.
When I got off the train, the chauffeur was waiting for me. He wore high black boots and a black cap that shadowed his face. His legs were long and muscled in the leather, and I stood admiring him before I realized that he was mine, and that he was telling me that the car was just beyond the gate.
He drove a black Cadillac, wide enough for both of us to stretch out in the back seat; not a bad idea. The car was smooth on the country road and he drove with his black shoulders to me for half an hour. Then he said, "We're here," and he floated down a private path, huge oaks shrouding us from the public world. We stayed ten minutes on the road, and then I saw the house looming closer. A huge circling drive led to the doorway.
The chateau was huge, perfect, transplanted from the Loire and nourished beautifully in America. White steps stretched above us, and the chauffeur pulled to a stop in front of them. I walked up the towering steps, trying not to shrink, A footman had the door opened, and ushered me immediately into "Madam's morning room." I waited in the midst of the white walls and Louis Seize furniture until the door opened to the apologetic murmurings of my Aunt Margaret. Rich people always seem to be apologizing, as if to reassure you that their money doesn't make them flawless, only opens so many more roads to error.
"I'm so sorry," were her first words, "that we couldn't meet you at the station ... "
I stopped her. "You were most considerate to send the car for me."
Then she took the moment to study me, covertly, shielding any negative reactions.
"Welcome to America," she said gently, and held out her hand. I took the offering in mine, and bent my head and kissed it. This performance generally delights older women. I raised my lips as if regretting that it could not rest always on her delicate fingers, and looked for the sign that my technique was effective. Her face was devoid of response.
Aunt Margaret was a tall woman, almost my height She had pale hair, mixed with white, worn in a magnificent coronet around her head. Her eyes were gray, shadowed, sad. She was thin to boniness, her face sculpted of fine planes. Her cheeks were sunken and dry as if they were drenched each day in tears. The neck was long and very straight, her shoulders and back, though, curved with the invisible burden of sorrow. She had a weary, elegant, tragic, frigid air, and I decided immediately that it would be satisfactory for her to visit me at the university. She looked rich, in spite of her indifference; she dressed rich. Aunt Margaret would make a good impression. I needed her as an ally, and like a small boy I tried the first sentimental approach.
"Are you like my mother?" I asked.
First she paused, and then she caught her breath to answer. Speaking seemed to tax her, as if I had dragged her out of a vault of silence, and she had lost the ability to project her voice. She spoke too softly for me to hear, and I moved my head closer to hers.
"When we were children," she whispered, "your mother was very beautiful. I did not see her beyond her teens, but if her exquisite beauty developed, I am afraid that I am not like her. However," she continued modestly, "when we were young, people found our resemblance striking."
"You must tell me what you remember of her," I thanked her for this dull reminiscence. "I have never seen my mother," I unnecessarily explained, as if this fact haunted me. There was a knock on the door that I thought might be my uncle or cousin, but it was the butler, laden with a heavy tea tray. We sat before the fire and my aunt poured the tea. She must have noted my anticipation, and she said, "You will meet my husband this evening." Her voice remained disturbingly low, but when she said "husband" I felt as if she had mounted one of the chairs and shouted the name down to me. His presence, with the word, filled the room, and her hand shook as she handed me the fragile cup.
Either she is nuts about him, I thought, in which case it will be difficult to get around her (I've found that you can't really make too much of an impression on women who are in love with their husbands) or, I considered, she despises him, in which case I will have a hard time; but there's a chance of a knockout victory. I would know; by this evening I would have memorized the household.
I sipped the tea, and studied the brooch that pinned her blouse. A huge quivering pearl, like a tear that had slid down her cheek, was mounted in a white gold Victorian setting. I wondered if it was my mother's pearl. I could have said, "I've come for my inheritance, Aunt Margaret," and taken the money and left her to her decayed case. But I always have the theory that you should let your hostess cut the cake.
"Your cousin has been looking forward to your visit," Aunt Margaret suddenly said. "My daughter," and the imminent tears almost came, "is restricted to her bed. She is very ill," her voice quavered with pain. "I know there is no need to tell you, Andre," the first time I heard her call me by my name-maybe the handkissing was not a failure-"but you must be very gentle with your cousin. Her heart," and the word tortured her, "is weak and weakening, we must never upset her. When a child is forced into a bed" I wondered if she were explaining the disaster to me or to herself, "they often become short of temper, and almost cruel in their restlessness. Adrian," she assured me, "is a most sensitive girl, I hope you will love her, but there are moments when she is difficult and petulant. These are the moments," she taught me, "when she is probably in pain, and when we must be most thoughtful."
"Aunt Margaret," I replied, "if Adrian will permit it, she will be a sister to me. I have nobody but you and Adrian," for the moment I ignored the men, my indolent father and the ominous husband. "It will make me very happy if I can do anything for her comfort."
"Thank you," she said seriously, and then suddenly confided. "Adrian may never leave the bed." She clutched the brooch. "We cannot say for sure and, of course, we pray she will have a full life," she spoke in the collective we of the very rich. I would be delighted to be one of them, nothing would please me more than to say we and include my new uncle and aunt.
"But you will discover for yourself the whims and delicacies of Adrian," she smiled indulgently, and her delight was more agonized than her sadness. "She hates him," I thought suddenly "she'll be easy. She hates him."
"If you're finished with your tea," I had placed the saucer and cup on the marble table, "I think Adrian would meet you now."
I got up as gracefully as possible and went to meet the heir apparent.
We climbed the carpeted steps to the floor above, and my aunt paused nervously before a double embossed white door. Her knock was as muted as her voice, and I thought she caught her breath before tapping her knuckles. We heard nothing from behind the closed door, nothing to suggest that there was life in the room. And then a surprisingly hearty voice called, "Come in." Aunt Margaret opened the door, and seemed unhappy about the protocol that requires a woman to precede a man through the doorway.
The room was enormous: high ceilings and sparse furnishings. I felt as if I had wandered into the center of the moon. Everything a frigid pale glow, the carpets, the wall-hangings, the drapes, the huge bouquets of roses that rilled the room with the heavy odor of death. I saw the bed: high, receded into the wall, an immense golden chariot. At the foot of the bed, thrown with a genuine disdain, was a white ermine rug. It had about it such a look of wealth that I wanted to throw off my clothes and roll in it.
Last I saw the fairy princess, propped up in the center of the bed. Her face was buried in a book and she did not bother to acknowledge my entrance. "The bitch," I thought. Her hands, the nails a faint cardiac blue, held the book open. Beneath the blankets I could not see the human hump of her body, as if her body stopped at the waist. She reminded me of a broken French doll with which frivolous women decorate their boudoirs.
Aunt Margaret said, "Adrian, this is your cousin Andre." Only then did she place the book aside and hold out her hand to me. I had practically to sit on the bed to reach her. When I held her hand I shivered an involuntary revulsion. She barely touched me, eager to retrieve the skeleton claw I held with horror. I was quick to give it back to her, and with difficulty looked into her tiny face. Long, white Alice-in-Wonderland hair stretched over her skull, down to the narrow shoulders. Her hair, golden and rich, looked like part of the furnishing in the room.
Her eyes were gray, a lighter gray than her mother's, and beneath them she had dark blue fatigue smudges. The eyes, covering at least half of her face, made her look like enlargements of insects that I have seen. Her tiny mouth pursed petulantly under the thread-thin nose. "Rose," she called in an irritated tone, "please take this book away." It was not the voice that had beckoned us open the door. That voice, I supposed, belonged to this person, Rose. A buxom red-haired girl, about twenty years old, moved cautiously to the bed and took the book that was flung at her. This creature Rose was almost as repulsive as the girl in the bed. She wore a tight skirt and had the kind of figure my father considers sexy. A narrow waist saved her from being fat, full sticking-out tits that made you afraid to approach her, wide hips and an ass that moved freely when she walked. It was the kind of body that would be soft, swamp-like, that you could drown into. Her body was a big mouth that went open and closed, open and closed and caught you and swallowed you without noticing the taste.
I looked questioningly at my cousin, and she conceded, "Rose is my nurse," as if unwilling to give me even this morsel of intimacy. After that one phrase, she said nothing, sitting on the bed as if tortured by an amateur theatre production. So this was the delicate little angel, the fragile beauty, the issue of the Ferdinands. For her the house wore its mourning atmosphere, the servants moved noiselessly over the carpets. This insect that reclined on the pillows, indifferent to her wealth, indifferent to the fortune she had stolen from my mother, was to be indulged. The royal command, she is in pain, we must be thoughtful. A mosquito that stood between me and my inheritance, an ugly half-dead thing that was not man nor woman, this was the cousin to be loved-a small crippled mouse.
I could not stay in the coffin another moment. I stood up abruptly and said, "It's a great pleasure to meet you, cousin, but I've had seven days of traveling, and I'm very tired. If you'll excuse me now ... " I left the request hanging in the perfumed air.
"Of course," she dismissed me, "mother will show you out." With one sentence she reduced her mother to a servant and me to an intruder.
Rose led us to the door and Adrian watched without interest. I gasped the less choking air of the hall. The nurse closed the door against us, and I heard the snap of the lock. "They lock themselves into the room," my mind started. "Why should they lock the house out? What's so precious in there, that they fortify themselves?" And I longed for the day when I should carry the key to their privacy in my pocket.
x
That evening I dined with my new aunt and uncle. After the meal, I had no more unanswered questions about their marriage. They hated each other. It was interesting to observe these two remote people facing each other from opposite ends of a long refectory table. If they thought of it, they would have curved the table around the house, to avoid accidental glances throughout the simple meal.
My uncle was a handsome man, the kind of man the rich boys at school would grow into. Tall and thin, he ate little and said nothing to his timid, serious partner across the table. He seemed blandly unimpressed with my presence, and acted as if his wife had neglected to tell him that I was coming, but finding me there did not move him to anger or joy. He looked briefly at me and said how do you do, and what school will you be going to, and oh yes, it's quite a good school, went there myself, join a fraternity, it will get you through exams. He asked no questions about Paris, he knew it well, and he knew it the way he knew the cities of America. To the rich, all cities are the same: beautiful women, perfect service, comfortable rooms, fast trains. He carried his nationality in his pocket, and since my Paris or London would not be his, he did not bother to exchange impressions with me. I agreed with this arrogant distant man: I would have liked him as a father. I was bathed in a moment's envy at the spider behind the locked door who dried his blood in her veins.
We were served simple food prepared by a French cook who had learned American habits. The roast would have been rawer in France, the salad would not have been sprinkled with basil, but the cheese and fruit and gateau that completed the meal had been in America not more than twenty-four hours. My uncle chose perfect wines and he drank in obvious preference to the dishes the buder sternly exhibited to him. My aunt, not eating or drinking, was agonized, a child forced to sit through a long Sunday service. Finally she clasped her hands in front of her, looking over her plate, over her husband's head, over all the rituals that strove to keep her alive. My hunger almost embarrassed me, and their sparse appetites forced me to curb my own. Ordinarily, I eat or don't eat, it's the same, but it had been a long trip, and I knew I was home. It was the first time that I'd ever eaten a meal that I felt was prepared for me.
Halfway through the meat course, a servant walked to madam's side and set a tray before her. My aunt looked at it briefly and nodded her head approvingly. I was appalled at the pallid mixtures of food. On the tray were what looked like the beaten whites of two eggs, a bowl of cream, a slice of white cake from the table, and a bowl of tea. My aunt looked sick after the viewing and I couldn't say I blamed her. It was the most disgusting assortment of food ever gathered into one square tray. The maid scurried off with the bleached dinner, carrying still another platter filled with meat and fruit and cheese that she did not bother to show to my aunt. I assumed the second was for the cow that shared Cousin Adrian's pasture.
Pushing his plate away from him, my uncle got up from the table and reminded himself to say to his wife, "How is Adrian today?"
"You should stop in to see her," was the timid answer.
"I did not ask you to arrange my social calendar," he thundered. "I simply inquired after your daughter's health."
"She is the same," my aunt showed a spark of spirit, and then it quickly died leaving her with her head bent remorsefully over the undisturbed plate. They did not exchange another word, and shortly after his abrupt exit from the room, she excused herself. She left the table, lifting her hand tiredly to her forehead, and the gesture described a splitting headache. She was pathetic. Everything was better than I'd hoped for, all of them so wrapped up in their feeble miseries, I could set fire to all the furniture and it would be days before they noticed that they were sitting on the floor.
I climbed the stairs to my room, and stopped at the first floor to put my ear against the panels of the locked door. They didn't teach me ethics in the English schools-just when to be curious and when not to be. The door was thick, and I could hear a muffled noise within a steady slap, as if someone were beating a rug. I didn't think Adrian did her housecleaning after dinner, so I moved my eye to the keyhole ready to help with the chores if my guess was mistaken. I could see nothing but a patch of yellow carpet. The lamps were still lit, so Cousin Adrian couldn't have been having an energetic nightmare. I turned my head to crush my ear against the narrow opening. The sounds were clearer now, still the rhythmic beating, and then a girl's voice moaning a wordless song. My penis understood two seconds before my brain, and it lifted itself high as if it wanted to creep through the narrow lock. I loathed the unmistakable echoes, and in rage I pounded against the latched door. They weren't having any visitors; they weren't even finding out who was coming to call. There was a thick silence after my frantic assault of the door.
"Cousin Adrian," I called, anything to stop their pleasure or decipher the mystery, "may I say good night to you?" Now wasn't that sweet of me, making her my first concern. The insensitive ladies were not touched by my good breeding, they ignored me for a full five minutes. But they didn't appreciate my patience, and thinking I had left in cringing rejection, they started the tom-toms going again. When the sounds seemed automatic, getting closer and closer to the savage crescendo, I again pounded the door. The drums kept going for a moment, like an athelete who keeps running after the finish line. They were forced to acknowledge life within, and the breathless voice of Rose reprimanded me, "Stop that, Adrian is sleeping." Whatever my fists hadn't done to disturb the sleeping beauty, the voice could have accomplished.
"Excuse me," I was docile now, spilling out apologies, "I had no idea she slept so early, I thought she might still be eating."
"Well," the voice, still not opening the door searched for a final answer, then I heard hurried whispers, and the answer, "Adrian is asleep every night after eight thirty," Rose parroted, "after eight thirty she's not to be disturbed."
"Of course," I agreed, and then, much as she disgusted me, "Are you free after eight thirty?" There was a long pause, an almost shocked pause, and then an abrupt "No," no invitation, no explanation, just no. Rose was on a health regime, a hearty dinner, twelve hours' sleep; no wonder her skin glowed with honeymoon radiance.
"Excuse me," I repeated, "I hope you both sleep well," and then I went bounding up the other flight of stairs to my room, singing the old alma mater.
Breakfast was brought to me at nine o'clock in the morning. My night had been dreamless, toss-less, worriless, and now I was hungry. I always knew that comfort would comfort me, and I quickly forwent coffee and croissant in the morning for the wheat toast, bacon and eggs, marmalade, fruit, coffee and milk that was rolled into my room.
"Madam thought you might enjoy a full breakfast," the maid explained, and I almost pinched her dumb cheeks in my spurt of exuberance. To wake up here, the first glimpse of life a respectful servant, that was an old cherished dream.
"Tell madam," I replied formally, "that it was exactly what I had wished for, and that when she is free I should like to thank her." The old girl, I figured, could use a bath of gratitude, nobody in the house seemed to fall over her.
"Madam will be pleased," the maid murmured, and was out of my room on her diplomatic mission. I ate everything, and when I heard someone at the door I was afraid to answer, afraid it might be my father waking me out of my fantasy. But it was only an old gentleman carrying my pressed trousers and jacket over his arm, assuring me that all my wardrobe would be in order by the afternoon, and was there anything I needed now. "Just not to be pinched," I wanted to say, but copied the master of the house in saying, "No, that will be all, thank you."
Gentle hands of angels shaved and bathed and dressed me. I slid down the rainbow of Iris to reach flourishing gardens, faithful Doberman at my side, I surveyed the family grounds. Everything was in order, they'd done a good job in my absence. I circled the house with quiet pleasure. Home at last, the war had been hell. I paused beneath the arbor to find my lover's room, and I grew serious. If the entrance was there, the staircase was there, that was the stained-glass window in the hall; then the French windows with the drawn curtains, rimmed with the smallest of mock balconies had to be the chamber of the enchanted princess. Delightful, an errant knight could easily climb the twisting vines and place a stalwart foot upon the tiny ledge. With his lord's blessings, he could then swing his lithe body through the inviting doors, and be in his fan-lady's chamber.
The problem was to get into the room, from the inside of course, find my hiding place, discover when the sweet little thing was alone and asleep, and the rest would be a troubadour's delight, surprise her with my hidden presence, and sing her fair praises.
After lunch I dutifully visited my sick cousin. From the expression on her face, from her cordial greeting, I could have gotten the mistaken impression that my skin was covered with huge purple running sores. There was a mirror on the small table next to my cousin's bed, and I checked to see if the disease had suddenly developed. I was relieved to find myself looking quite fit, even a modest man with my looks would call himself handsome.
"I'm sorry I disturbed you last night," I began.
Sarah Bernhardt would have blushed. My cousin's eyes grew wide with ingenuous surprise and she said, "Did you disturb me last night?" How could a cat look at a queen?
"I knocked at your door after dinner," I meticulously explained, innocence my motto.
"Oh, yes," memory was rushing in at her. "Rose mentioned it to me this morning. I have medicines," she elaborated, "and sleep very deeply."
"How fortunate," I congratulated her.
She tried the pathetic pose, mixed two-parts with iron. "Did Rose explain to you that I was not to be bothered after nine o'clock?"
"Why no," I answered, as if delighted at the half hour extension. "She said eight-thirty."
Cousin looked very sharp indeed. "Rose-likes for me to sleep early, and she is my nurse. She knows best," she added piously. "I guess it would be best to listen to her."
"Yes," she advised with deepest pleasure, "don't come here after eight-thirty." Her frail body relaxed after the edict. I said, "Cousin Adrian, I hope never to cause you discomfort."
"Good," she approved, and was ready for me to leave. During our brief conversation I had studied the contours of the room. To the left of her bed was an open door that apparently led to the dressing room. I had to be sure. I got up as if to leave and headed straight and blindly for the open door. One glance assured me that it was what I wanted, a large closed closet would be a comfortable shelter until the early watching hour. Adrian was irritated with me. "That's not the way out," she acted as if her royal privacy was invaded. Why the poor child didn't know what invasion was. I blushed and stammered over my stupid sense of direction, and headed chastised for the correct exit. The vermin in the bed looked almost ready to smile. Then I turned to her with all deference. "And when in the afternoon may I visit you, Cousin?"
Her answer was so prompt, so genuine, so joyfully delivered that I knew it to be true. "I sleep every day from five until seven," she informed me. "Rose has her two hours free, and it would be very annoying if you came then. I'd have to answer your knock myself." Imagine, the strain of it, to raise her little snake's voice.
"I'll remember," I said seriously, and I would.
I again had tea with my aunt, it was not an unpleasant ritual. She seemed to enjoy my company and we spoke in sweeping sympathy about my dear, dead mother. Our hearts, as they say, beat as one. No one regretted more than I the misfortune that had carried away the destitute lady. I was positive, having met defeated, dear Margaret, that one word from my mother would have sent her inheritance tumbling into baby's lap.
During tea I explained to my aunt that I would be absent from dinner. She understood how eager I was to walk to and investigate the neighboring village. She described it in charming details, till it was hideously close to six. I finally delivered myself and started off on my boy-scout mission, I got as far as my cousin's window, and I'm afraid that old sexual magnetism drew me to it. Quick as a heartbeat I was up the vine, balanced precariously on the romantic balcony. I could see from the window her sunken sleeping snail's head. I swung in through the open window and tiptoed to the small adjoining room. My destination was the clothes closet, probably filled with cobwebs after three years of neglect. I was playing a good old-fashioned treasure hunt spotted with moments of hide-and-go-seek.
The closet was spacious, broad enough to comfortably seat me. Once ensconced I just leaned my head against a soft silk dress and I was so relaxed, so content to wait, that I slept along with my dear cousin Adrian.
xi
It was warm and close and quiet in the closet retreat, and when I awakened, I could not establish where I was or who I was, and slowly my surreptitious purpose flowed into me. My first thought was that I had missed the grand performance and I cursed the comfort that had lulled my vigilance. I was afraid to push open the door, afraid that I would find Rose, sword in hand, protecting the sacred gates. Through the crack in the door that enabled me to breathe, my eyes became slowly aware of a slice of light, faint enough to ascertain that it came from the bedroom, not the small dressing room that hid me. With fortified courage I pushed at the movable wall of my black cell. Immediately there were voices, and from their conversation I was relaxed to discover that I'd missed nothing. Probably my inner brain had responded to the muffled noises of Rose entering Adrian's room with the dinner tray. I heard them speak of me.
"Your cousin has gone to town tonight. He's not having dinner with your parents."
"Good," was the vindictive response. "He won't be banging on any doors tonight."
"Do you think he heard anything?"
"What do you mean?" Adrian's answer was guarded as if she sensed my concealed presence.
"Well," the cow laughed, in vulgar confidence, "we were at it again."
My cousin did not answer and I could feel her mind writhing in anger. At it again, spoken by a truly poetic soul. At it again, and her voice told me that "it" didn't mean those long hours of refreshing sleep.
"I think he's cute," Rose continued, and I winced knowing that he was my unceremonious identification. It was an insult to appeal to her coarse preferences. My cousin's tastes must have been as weak as her heart.
Adrian said, "I think you're disgusting," we were of one mind, blood is thicker than thieves.
Rose was unaffected by the insult. Language, apparently, was not the code in which she communicated. I heard the slight clattering of dishes, and Rose saying, "Oh Adrian, we've got strawberry shortcake tonight." Life was a never-ending birthday party to faithful hungry Rose. "Take the strawberries out of mine," the mistress peremptorily directed. Really they were funny, the two hideous females, one half-dead, the other half-conscious, picking the berries out of each other's twats. Rose spoke up in that mock angry voice that says, really I think you're wonderful, I'm just acting angry to let you know I'm impressed with your eccentricity. The words were, "Now Adrian, they're delicious, you should eat them." Then she said, "They'll put roses in your cheeks," and to use her own name in another sense convulsed her with laughter. Adrian was very angry. So that was how they managed it, the cow would irritate the lamb, and then they'd do it. Their inane conversation was suffocating my curiosity. That Adrian's contempt could contort into a lover's passion, and Rose's flabby deference into a conquering amazon, seemed beyond imagination. What's that saying engraved on King Tut's pyramid, WHERE THERE'S A WILL THERE'S A WAY. Two girls never heeded sweeter words. Adrian crossly advised her nurse, "You can eat my strawberries later," the words sounded uneventful until Rose blurted out, "We make our own cream, don't we."
"Don't be disgusting," Adrian's weak voice was an agonized wail. "You know it's impossible for me when you talk that way."
"You're too sensitive," the nurse offered her patented pill. "When we're doing it you like everything dirty, but when we're just talking you'd think you were confessing to a priest. I say, if you like it, admit it, talk about it." I couldn't resist seeing the statuesque pose Rose had struck to deliver her philosophy of life. I crawled hands and knees to the source of light, and sat cross-legged on the floor. I had the best seat in die house. I could see Adrian's frail head and shoulders propped up on the pillows. She carried grudging morsels of toast to her mouth, as if she resented the animal need that made food an essential. Sitting on the edge of the bed, cutting her meat with vigorous force, was the paid companion. No comedy ever had a more hilarious cast After a few moments of silence, Adrian made a grunting sound that I assume meant she'd had enough. The trained automaton jumped up from the butchery of her plate and removed the revolting assortment of creamed fish, creamed potatoes, creamed bananas, and creamed cream from under Adrian's elevated nose. She said, "Cook will be furious. You haven't touched a thing."
"I don't have to satisfy Cook," Adrian spouted with unexpected fury.
"That's right" Rose calmed her, "you just have to do that for me." She treated the word like something she had learned in a marital advice column.
Adrian fumed at the indignity. "I'll have you dismissed, I can't bear the sight of you."
"Now, honey," Rose was finished with her own meal, and she stood up to brush the crumbs that had fallen on her skirt to the golden carpet. "Why do you talk that way? I thought we were good friends." It was obvious that Rose was a little bored, or possibly complacent better describes her attitude. Undoubtedly she had struggled through this conversation many times before, and though she accepted its inevitability, she did not clearly understand the details of the ritual. It was not difficult for me to decipher the threats that Adrian threw at Rose, only to have them boomerang back to her. The fear of Rose's departure must have been so terrible to my cousin that she forced herself to mention it every day, to prepare herself for the disaster, or to prevent it. She was trying to convince Rose that her dismissal would be more dreadful for the nurse than the patient; to convince Rose that she, the pathetic weak Adrian, wrote Rose's fate. Adrian's threat was simply the throwing off of poison, the way the body sweats away an excess of alcohol. She was letting ring in the air what rang in her head. Rose could leave. Foolish girl. Rose would always do exactly as Adrian commanded, until she heard a stronger command. She was of the disgusting, docile, swallowing breed who had to be wound up every day by the specialists who understood that most humans were robots. If you could just find the motor that sent commands leaping through Rose's fleshy disguise, you'd have a perfect machine, one that made human sounds, but only the sounds you pushed into its receptors. Foolish cousin Adrian, she had to expect surprises from her fat Utile IBM or the fuck wouldn't be any fun at all. How nice for her that I was here. Now I could take all her terrors and make them real. I'd see to it that the machine went haywire. I could give orders too.
Rose stood over the bed and said, "Would you like me to give you an alcohol rub? You didn't have one this morning."
"No." Adrian was still righting herself. "I want to go to sleep." The petulant refusal didn't light on Rose's tiny switchboard. She sat down beside the dying patient and stroked her hair. "Honey," she cooed, "you've been very upset since your cousin got here."
"He's not my cousin," Adrian was adamant in her lie. "He's some fortune hunter from France that my mother and father have let into the house. Does he look like me?" she implored the negative, and I did too. I wanted the money, not the corpse that was supposed to go with it.
"Well," Rose hesitated between pleasure and pain. "I told you I think he's real cute, and he's got something like your shape of face, but he doesn't have breeding." Rose swooped on the word like a pelican.
"He'll find out there's no hope for him to come sniffling around me," Adrian declared. "I wrote a new will today stating that I did not acknowledge him as a relative and cutting him off from any money that exists in my name." That was the most interesting thing she'd said yet; the transparent little worm liked to crawl over thick paper and ooze out wills. I tucked her charming habit into the big pocket of my mind marked money. You'll write another will before I leave, dear cousin, I telepathed to her. I knew she was too young to legally play with her blocks of gold, but the dead girl's writing might have all kinds of sentimental value. The family would be so touched by her last gentle thoughts of her destitute cousin. I'd dictate a beautiful commemorative will to her, and she would trace it in her fragile hand.
Rose did not have ambition beyond the moment of the flesh, but the ability of her mistress to impart power to a piece of paper was impressive. "That's wonderful, Adrian," she commented, her ignorance radiant as cinemascope.
Adrian said suddenly, "I look awful tonight, don't I?"
"No," Rose assured her, "you look beautiful." No wonder they locked the door. It was one way to keep truth out. "Do you want the mirror?" Rose suggested. It sounded as momentous as a marriage proposal.
"Please." Adrian accepted graciously. Her willingness to examine herself seemed to delight Rose. It was a surprise to me that Adrian didn't have all the mirrors in the house smashed or covered. Rose walked toward the dressing room and I rushed for the vacant closet I panted for breath in the dark escape, and I could hear Rose switching on the light in my hiding place. I felt like a mole hunted by thousands of hunters and dogs. My fear enraged me, having to spy on the bitches. Tonight would be the end of my deception. I'd have them printing special invitations just for me.
There was a loud scraping noise, like furniture being dragged across the floor. I was eager to be out of the enclosure that cut off my cherished view.
No more sneaking around like an adulterous husband. The one night without dinner would be worth all the butter they'd be spreading for me from this night on.
. . . I bequeath to my cousin Andri all the gravy he can swallow, and the small closet in my dressing room where he first found his fortune ...
It was quiet now, and I knew it was safe to leave my hiding-place. I returned to my vacant seat beside the door, and sat like a sultan waiting for the dancing girls to begin.
Rose was holding up the mirror for Adrian and she said with exaggerated concern, "Is this all right, can you see everything?"
"That's perfect," Adrian approved. Rose pulled a chair behind the heavy mirror, and it stood tilting over the foot of the bed. Yes, they could see everything. As soon as she had the mirror adjusted, Rose started prancing about like a mountain goat except that her breasts were bouncing up and down under her sweater, and her high-heeled shoes limited her nimble dance. She kicked the shoes off, and jumped up on the huge bed. Adrian was leaning back watching her through narrow eager eyes. "I could make love all night," Rose said gaily, she hugged the delicate sterile head, "Let me brush your hair," she begged. Adrian nodded, and Rose leaned over to the table and found a silver hairbrush, the handle a long thick mold of jewel-encrusted gold. She moved closer to Adrian and lifted a handful of the hair into the air. Her mouth quickly covered the exposed ear, and I could see her tongue traveling around the lobes and disappearing into the flat shell. She sucked the air and then ran kisses across the thin neck. Adrian said, "Why are you wearing your clothes? You know I hate when you wear clothes."
Rose pressed her fingers against her mouth in mock dismay of her faulty memory. Then she amended, "Do I still have my clothes on? Why do I feel naked? All night I've felt naked." I watched the vulgar striptease. Kneeling on the bed she pulled the sweater over her head. The pins that held her hair in a prim roll fell loose with the sweater and her hair tumbled abundantly to her bare shoulders. It was the kind of hair I detest, thick and curly and whore-red. She turned her back to Adrian and said in a wifely voice, "Unsnap me."
Adrian joyfully fell to her task. She unloosened the thin strap of the brassiere, and rushed her hands to the hot full rescued breasts. Rose stayed on her knees gurgling repulsive sounds of "ahh, harder on the tips, that's right, perfect, ahh," as Adrian's invisible hands pressed the heavy bulbs. Her hands wouldn't let go, so Rose pulled the brassiere away herself. Adrian rubbed cadike against the naked back, the bones of her chest corrugated like a washboard. They were reflected in the mirror, and Rose stared greedily as the spidery hands grabbed and caressed her. Inexplicably, sick as the scene made me, my own fingers traveled to my groin and I found my sex pressing urgently against my pants. When it wants to be free, I get like an indulgent mother, and I had it out before it begged twice. It was vibrating so fast that if it were reflected, it would have cracked the mirror, dikes and all.
I watched Adrian exciting her sluttish lover and I thought what a bad comedy it all was: two ugly women go in cold and work themselves up till they think there's something they want. Rose kept staring at her reflection, and she could not see Adrian hidden behind her back. All she could see were the two hands that looked like part of her own body. With an animal grunt she pulled herself free of the hands, and standing on the bed posed like a Dior mannequin, she stripped herself of the rest of her clothes. Adrian watched, impressed, like one of the rich customers seeing the gown she'd looked for all her life. My lust descended with the mime. Rose had wide hips, and I saw slight terrible bulges just below the waist. It was the smoothness of her body that most disgusted me; what the poets call alabaster I call chalk, and her white hairless back was tempting as a turtle's egg. I would have liked to leap from the floor and strike the white nudity till I saw a less repulsive pattern of red and black. But Adrian was all admiration. She ran her fingers up and down the offered body. She knelt at the bare feet, and bent her head like a mussulman. I saw that she was kissing the flat toes, her hands clutched rapturously around the ankles. "Ah, cousin," I thought, "it's a dangerous thing to have a god." Unlike Hamlet I think there's no one more vulnerable than a man who's worshipping. Adrian lifted her body until she was kneeling. Her mouth reached the egg-smooth behind and I almost puked. But that's where she wanted to be. Her arms circled the small waist, and she tried to bury her tongue into the slender crack. From the look on Rose's face, you'd think nothing was happening to her: it was all happening in the looking glass. Dear old Alice, as if the action had all passed through to that mysterious world on the far side of reality.
Adrian's hands seemed to have died around the slim waist. The nails were that sickly blue that also tinted her busy lips. I wondered if she left slight blue smears all over Rose's spotless body. The hands seemed suddenly to sense my attention. They began to wander hectically over the statue, rippling over the thick muscleless thighs, up as far as the tips of the breasts. Then they found a haven, they slipped between the thighs. Blindly one of the hands pried open the lips of Rose's sex, and in the mirror I could see the muck running down the sides of her legs. Rose's body swayed heavily against Adrian and the fingers dug in and settled into the wet mossy opening. I could see nothing of Adrian's face, just the brush of white hair that hung long on her back, weird as an interspace species: nothing but back of head and probing hands. Rose was gasping like a pig, making helpless tortured sounds, and my cock responded to the sounds as if it were being called to dinner, up and out trying to rush to the table. I fed it myself, grabbing the swaying stem and pumping the hot throat. My hands were moving in rhythm to Adrian's fingers, up and down the greater length. Then Rose screamed, "Not so hard. I'm coming. Stop! I'm coming," but Adrian was deaf and blind, and she pushed even harder against the trembling body. The bed was making that thumping sound I'd heard on the other side of the door, when I knew they weren't taking tango lessons. Rose was flinging her arms at the mirror as if to say goodbye to all the thrills on that side of the world. Her eyes were becoming aware of the room, the bed, the kneeling girl. Her body was shaking with the plague, and with a burst of explosive strength, she pushed Adrian away from her and fell across the bed.
Their pleasure enraged me, my only solace was that dear cousin Adrian seemed to do all of the work and get the crumbs of pleasure. She was lying beside Rose like a choking fish, gasping great gulps of air into her lungs. I could see the ribbed chest sucking in and out, as if she had swallowed an artificial lung. Now, I thought, now I'll let them know I'm here. But I didn't want them to see my ponderous, unfed erection. I wanted to leap into the room master supreme. I could not expose my need, knowing there was nothing they could do to me. I wouldn't let them put their woman-wet hands on me. So I sat there, sure of my advantage, relishing my power. I tried to calm myself, to appear as a sublime sated God before the two devout worshippers.
They lay silent a few minutes. Rose was the first to move. She pulled her body around till her profile balanced Adrian's open mouth and sharp spinster nose. With her hand she pulled Adrian's motionless head closer to her, and her mouth searched the thin blue lips. I couldn't see too clearly, but I heard the smacking pouting sucking sounds. She was famished on the emaciated lips and spiteful tongue that would have made me sick to touch. I felt nausea at the softness they shared. The soft woman lips against the soft woman lips, the heavy spongy breasts against the flabby sister sacs, the white relaxed hips spreading one over the other, the long silky hairs creating a putrid pool. Rose's hands were pulling Adrian's nightgown off, and I shuddered at the skeleton exposed. It was worse than I had anticipated. She had a premature baby's body, fragile as crystal and almost as transparent, I felt as if I could see her shrunken kidneys inadequately protected by the thin, fatless layer of skin. Rose's hands were frantic on the accordion body, trying to gather handfuls of flesh, and achieving only small pinchfuls of skin. She gave up the mouth regretfully, and covered the pale face with kisses: the forehead, the cheeks, the eyes that closed behind her tongue. She was burying her fingers in the long spun gold hair, clutching and massaging the neck. She reached her head over Adrian's, and pulling back the mass of straight hair, she sank her tongue into the delicate ear of the motionless girl. Her mouth sucked the ear, the neck, the hidden crevice between breasts and arms.
Perversely, I wanted it to be good for Adrian. Something told me that this was my means, that Rose was pleasing her for me, touching what I loathed.
Rose's mouth Was ravishing the frail body, finding each hidden corner of sweating flesh delicious. I could hear her sniffing, playing feline with the trapped mouse.
She pulled Adrian's legs apart, and reflected up into the mirror was the pancake flat body with this yellow silky mound. She crept between the legs, her back a sheet of white on the golden blanket. Her, arms stretched out in adoration, kneading the small breasts, that were as undeveloped as those of a seven-year-old child, boy or girl. But her fingers stayed eager on the tips of the slight mounds, and I could see the miraculous birth of tits. Her fingers pinched and insisted, and Adrian's eyes were moist and unseeing in the mirror. Her chin was buried in her chest and she looked to be sinking under an ocean's heavy weight. She did not touch Rose now but lay back like the ladies of the court being served by their pet monkeys. Rose's face was buried in the blonde muff and she was breathing in the musty odor. She suddenly pulled her head away from her gourmet pleasure leaving her hands busy on the erect knobs. She laughed with some secret delight and whispered into Adrian's ear. Sometimes they acted as if they knew I was hiding behind the door. Adrian nodded agreement and Rose hurried to the small table where she had deposited the dinner trays. She brought the bowl of berries back to the bed and popped one into her mouth. "Delicious," she said. "I'm glad we didn't eat them all at dinner," and she giggled as if the strawberries were some kind of laughing pills. I could see her swallowing the juices, each physical act in the room clear and slow as a diagramed biology film.
Holding the bowl of red fruit, she scampered back onto the bed. She moved fast to Adrian's body. On her knees she hipped her way between Adrian's legs and lifted them with the grunt of a fishwife. She pushed herself closer pulling the legs straight into the air until Adrian's knees plopped over her shoulders. Then she prepared her dessert. She said, "Adrian, can you taste them? Do they taste good?" and Adrian did not answer her but pretended to be dead smothering her face against her chest. You look good dead, I thought. It's very becoming.
"Put my legs down," the girl said suddenly. "It's not comfortable." Rose released the two stick-thin limbs without ceremony. She grabbed Adrian by the hips and crowded her arms under her buttocks so that Adrian's belly was a hill sliding up to Rose's mouth. Then she buried her face into the womb and I could hear the first long suck. Her cheeks were muscled with eating and she gulped and chewed and swallowed with nauseating gusto. She lifted her head and ran her tongue over her red lips. Adrian's middle looked gashed, the drops of red juice falling like blood on the covers. "I told you we'd manufacture our own cream," Rose reminded Adrian and my poor sensitive cousin was so engrossed in cooking confiture that she could only nod agreement. I understood that it would be necessary to strap Rose's mouth shut in order to go through the mechanics of laying her. Something ominous and insistent in me was preparing me to have Rose to pluck the bloom away from my cousin. I cringed at the duty of taking Rose.
The berry picker was on her belly again and she smacked her lips in mock pleasure. She counted her calories one two three four five and there was nothing more to eat so she started to eat the plate. Adrian was moaning and sobbing grabbing Rose's stone heavy head and clutching it for sanity. I saw Adrian's body stretch, it seemed to me, an additional five inches and she screamed "Don't stop, don't stop." Her warning was unnecessary. Rose's faithful head was glued to Adrian's belly. Adrian stayed attenuated and motionless for a full minute and I could feel the tremendous effort of her submission. The room was soundless, my own breath stopped short and I too waited for the culmination for the heavy wall inside of her heavy as my own excitement to crack open and release the flood of energy. My cousin moaned a throaty psalm. "It's all right now" she rhythmically repeated "it's free now. I'm free now" and she was then silent as a rock grinding out her sickening orgasm. Her moisture was filling Rose's thirsty mouth. Her mouth was locked to the black well as if the inner moisture thick with salt had swelled her tongue making detachment impossible. Then they were both so still that I realized they had fallen into a momentary sleep their two wet openings suctioned together. I got up and walked toward them; they could not have heard me, dreaming their Sunday school dreams.
I stood over the bed and studied the bodies, the two floating, gorged, even-breathing bodies. Legs, breasts, hair, thighs, arms intermingled in an obscene illustration of Dante's Inferno. My hand was wet from come. I couldn't remember my own release; it had been sunk sublimated to the scene in the mirror. The thick smell of their hot gratification hovered over them, and I breathed through my mouth to avoid the stifling odor. I just stood there and watched them. I had all the time in the world. I could be cool and exacting in my demands. Demands? What did I want from them except somehow to choke their pleasure the way their pleasure was choking me now.
Rose was the first to move. She murmured something into the hollow tunnel where her mouth slept. She rubbed her head against the pale hairs feeling her way into awakening. She stretched languidly, caressing the thin form of the sleeping girl. Subserviently her tongue slipped over the tender line of the thighs that bordered the rich red pussy, pussy cat, pussy cat, where have you been ...
"Wake up," I commanded and my voice was resonant with hate. "Wake up" and I was not the cool master I wanted to be, my hate erecting my flaccid sex. Rose stirred. She opened her eyes that sunk senselessly into mine. She just lay there like a trapped creature in the jungle staring stupidly at me. I was so absorbed in her that Adrian's cry of discovery had no content, no connection with the mute play in which Rose and I starred.
"You were perfect." I applauded them, and then cruelly I insisted, "Do it again," and my order was jutting out of my belly. "Do it again," I shouted, and I pulled the untouchable Rose by her hair and threw her over the paralyzed body of Adrian.
xii
Adrian stirred first, and in her serpent's voice she hissed, "Get out of here," her hate overwhelming her fright
"Yes, I'll leave," I raged at her, hating her peaked face and the insult in her tone which called me invader rather than conqueror. I stooped over her and she cringed away from me, more in revulsion than alarm. "I'll leave," and I grabbed a handful of her tangled hair, pulling her face level with mine, "and the first person I meet will be your mother." I shook her frail body, as if to mix my message into her blood, "The second person I meet will be your father." I flung her away from me. Rose said nothing, her expression a debris of shock and admiration. She reached once to push me away from her mistress, and then fell back on the bed, her meek defense so soon exhausted. Adrian's eyes were intensely searching my face. She ignored or forgot her servile lover. The battle was with me and I was winning, I was winning. In her moment's hesitancy I saw victory crown me emperor. She was terrified that I would reveal their secret, the fool, not measuring the depth of her power. She didn't know that her parents would force me out of the house if I brought my disgusting revelation to them. She didn't know that they would refuse to interfere with the sexual tragedy that raged in their daughter. She didn't know that the locked door protected her mother and father as much as it shielded the futile passion she leveled at Rose. That her parents would themselves lock the door if she had been so careless as to open it for them. Her guilt denied her the knowledge that the halls of the house smelled and shrieked of her nocturnal trysts, and that the cowering people on the other side of the door dreaded the moment that an intruder would force them to acknowledge the stench and clamor. They would loathe my information, they would degrade, deny the informant and turn him away, the chauffeur would drive me up the long oak road, rushing me away from their soundproof world. But Adrian's cringing brain made her affair clandestine, and her illusion was my weapon.
"They'll never believe you," she warned, feebly defeating herself. As if my only problem were to convince them. I would have to tie them to her bedpost and force them to lick her running juices before they would hear my words, and still they would reject me, saying mildly, "Adrian, you shouldn't do that," and then they would leave, turning back only to add, "Don't forget to lock the door."
Maybe, just as Adrian had to delude herself that Rose would leave her, she had to convince herself that they knew nothing, that discovery and disaster were imminent, so as to crowd and intensify her pleasure between footsteps and door knocks. Any lover who waits for discovery is discovered. God is not cruel.
"What are you going to do?" At last she admitted that she was vanquished, and now she wanted peace, I was free to write my own treaty. The terms would be inscribed in her will, but I had time for that. Now I wanted to play, to watch the headless corpse run.
"I'm not going to do anything, Cousin," I promised. "It's just that I'm new in this country, I don't know many people, and I want to get to know my only cousin better. Now if you'll just give me a key to your door, so that I know you're available whenever I get lonely, I won't do anything. Everything can go on just as it always has. In fact," my generosity was touching, "I insist that anytime I happen to walk in on you, you continue whatever you happen to be doing."
"No," her voice was agony. "You pig! I hate you. Filthy disgusting faggot. You're a fairy," she screamed, using the old vulgar word, "No, never," was she fighting herself or me?
"I'll get rid of you," her courage was returning. "Rose and I will wait, and I'll get rid of you."
"Cousin," I was a calm executioner, undisturbed by the curses of the soon dead man, "Cousin, you can get rid of me right now. I'll just go upstairs and pack, then I'll find your parents, say goodbye to them, explain why I have to leave so unexpectedly ... " I watched her valiancy trickle out of her eyes and slide down her face. "No tears," I warned. "We're going to be a happy little threesome."
"You can't make us do it," Rose spoke up. I guess every woman must say that at least once in her life, just to be sure it isn't true.
"Can't I?" I finally turned to her bloated face, "can't I," and her expression was fat with sexual arrogance. "Can't I," and my hand had clutched blindly at the jeweled brush that I chose instinctively to be my phallus.
"Can't I," and I slapped the back of the brush into the palm of my hand, the two sex-bloated frogs leaped as if they felt the blow. I flung the brush at Rose.
"Love her again," I commanded, "so that she really feels it."
Adrian backed away from us on the bed. Her eyes were wide with surprise, like a native princess who suddenly finds herself a slave.
"Don't touch me with that," she warned. "Don't come near me."
"What's the matter," my voice stopped her retreat. "Are you afraid you'll like it? Afraid you'll want a man. How clever of you to know that no man would touch you, and you," I turned savagely to Rose. Adrian did not respond. I was not near her truth, near her fear, but Rose's temperament arched like a cat, and her vanity was stung with what her pride would never notice.
"I understand," discovery was sweet, "it'll hurt too-much. That's it, isn't it? Little cousin Adrian is a virgin, and if this cold gold weapon rips into her, she's going to get all bloody. So that's it, my pure little girl."
"Girl, girl, girl," she mocked me in impotent fury. "I'm sure you've never been in one. My hero," and she had the audacity to laugh, "you'd like to watch us do what you can't."
"Men who can't screw," she spat at me, "can always hit." She grabbed for my pants to verify her philosophy. For the first time I felt a woman's hand circling my penis, and I was helpless in her grasp. She pulled my flesh out of my pants, and I was cold with shock. The sensations I felt were new and incredible to me, and my manhood felt severed from my body. I looked down at her hand to see her assassin's razor, and saw instead my penis huge and swollen in her hand.
She was silent, measuring the immense docile instrument. She could not guess that the revelation was strange to me. Now the mystery ended for her and began for me.
"Don't touch me," I screamed the words and terror of my cousin. It was impossible for me to go through with it, to show them my inexperience, my panic. Her woman's hands wouldn't let go, and mechanically her fist slipped up and down my stiffening rod.
"Let's see what he can do, Adrian," she suggested, as if I were a brainless dog that had wandered into the room.
"He can't do anything," Adrian's voice was low with hate. "How can you bear to feel him."
Oh, I wished then that I could do it. That I could shove myself in her and let my mind wander out of the window. I wanted to have her with skill, not passion, with ego, the way I've always wanted to sing, attending concerts, swim when I've been at the sea, box when I've been to matches; for the glory, to overwhelm and stupefy an audience. But I've never wanted to achieve anything for an inner pleasure, just to show the loathsome sheep my mastery. I wanted to pump her until Adrian shriveled with envy. Rose was a woman who liked to get tickled deep inside. That was my first revolting discovery about her.
She was tugging at my pants, eager to demonstrate her threat.
My head spinning sickly, I saw Adrian staring fearfully at my vigorous erection. Her eyes were saying, "Can he, can he?" and she was balancing our batde in her head. She would match her discovery with mine; my clumsiness would even the score, would negate the terms I'd snapped at her. I wanted to rush out of the room, to free myself from Rose's aggressive caresses, to leave the country, to forget that I had a cousin Adrian who had drunk the sweet knowledge of my impotence. Rose knew no conflict. She felt only the lust, and to her it was a bond, not a distance, between us. So Adrian, lying motionless in her bed would have me, Rose was little more than her vehicle. The rich can even hire flesh to lay for them, the sick sniveling rat would enjoy my virility. Only Rose would be cheated. Rose and I, and the rich one, untouched, could say, "I think you'd better go now," discarding my uselessness.
"I won't," I shouted. "Don't expect me to amuse you."
"I'm already amused," Adrian insulted me. "I know you can't, so why don't you just leave like a good little boy."
"Of course he can," Rose had no allegiances, she was cooing hopefully at me, just another novice who didn't know the ropes. Her hand clutched me more tightly, and I tried desperately to pull away. My rope lengthened in her relentless grasp; it stretched and thickened and was stupidly firm. "It's wonderful," she murmured, and her naked body brushed eagerly against me. I was close to vomiting with horror and excitement. I pulled my arm back and struck her savagely across the mouth. "Get away," I demanded.
The blow shocked and then aroused me. She fell on her knees before me, then she slid on her stomach. I was looking down at her ass, standing helplessly beside the bed, my pants fallen in an ugly heap to my ankles.
Only her arms that circled my waist and searched my exposed ass, supported me. I swayed helplessly in and out of her mouth, feeling the hot wet woman's tongue licking my sensitive flesh.
"His face is getting all red," Adrian called from her perch in the bed, determined to give Rose a ridiculing account of what her buried face couldn't see. "I guess you can feel him trembling," Adrian added.
My body was shaking: tremors ran through it as if my skin had been flayed and my nerves formed a tortured surface. Her traveling hands moved incessantly up and down, between my buttocks. Her mouth was swallowing me. I screamed again for her to stop. She pulled her mouth away, but my reactions were slowed. Before I could move her mouth was on me again, this time her cheeks puffed, breathing in and out the mouthfuls of balls that she coveted. Her steady hand kept my flesh rigid. Her mouth made me a part of her as if I were a huge human-shaped balloon that she had filled. I was defeated, trembling now, and ready to scream for mercy. "Stop," I implored, and Adrian advised, "Rose, you're going to scare him to death." Rose stopped, and she climbed up my body nimbly as a monkey. I was confused now, swollen to burst, a huge terrible pain jutting out of it. The air hurt like fire. Rose clutched my hips with her strong legs, and reaching her hand between us she found my suffering erection and stuck it into the hot odorous river of her sex.
I sank into the mysterious poisonous pool. Her arms clung to my shoulders, and I stood immobile and senseless as a statue. Her body flung away from me, and I could see the hairs of my groin mingled with her red hairs. Draped grotesquely around me, she pulled her body away and then slapped against me. "Shove it in and out," she breathlessly ordered me, but watching my length disappear into her, I knew a moment's supreme anguish, and before she could swing out again I exploded into her. My head shook with the involuntary might of my release, and I thought I had fallen to the floor, as if the force that freed me was an external one, the thunder of wrath on my helpless body. I sobbed my paralyzed futile terror. The first sound I heard was the disappointed moaning of Rose, "Oh, Oh," she was crying, "you bad boy. We hadn't even begun. Oh, oh, I was just beginning." But her complaints were drowned out of my ears by Adrian's expanding laughter. Her joy shook the bed. "The great lover," she howled. "The great big boob lover."
"I'll kill you," I threatened her, trying to cut out the clacking laughter. "I'll kill you, I'll kill you," and my threat became an announcement, a verdict. "You're going to die soon, I'm going to kill you, you're going to die, I'm going to kill you ... "
xiii
I sat on the edge of the bed for a moment to regain my clarity my power. Adrian was crowding me out of the room saying, "Leave now. Please leave now. I must sleep. Would you leave," impatiently the way you dismiss a careless servant I sat stupid, motionless on the bed. "And also," Adrian added with fresh strength, "you may say anything to my parents that you wish, it will be easy for me to explain what an abominable liar you are. I'm sure," she callously developed her story "that Rose will be happy to tell them how you tried to attack her. Rose," she called and with the edge of her toe she tapped the inert body, "did the big bad boy hurt you? Poor Rose," her superiority was swelling her meager form and she smiled with pleasure as Rose continued to babble her painful disappointment, "don't worry, everything will be all right. I'll make the pain go away." I wanted to kill both of them. As if the disaster would never have occurred if both my witnesses were dead. I stood up unsteadily; at my feet was the hairbrush that I had dropped when Rose assaulted me. I stooped to pick it up and blushed at my automatic servitude. The brush seemed to retain its own memories, and it tingled in my hand with mute authority. I clutched the brush as if it could transfuse my lost power back into my veins. For Adrian it was no more a weapon, and she said shortly, "Give me my brush. I've asked you to leave." My blood begged me to kill her now, and I moved rapidly to the bed holding the glittering handle as if it were a club. Adrian cowered with the reflex of fear that her sickness made habit with her.
"Rose," she snapped, "take it from him. Call my father. Get him out of my room." Rose lifted her naked unsated body and said to me carelessly, "Here, give it to me." I went dumb with anger and I gave it to her hard on the bulging white ass. It left a mark as distinct as my fingerprint enlarged and I again banged my identity on her smooth skin.
I was naked except for the long tails of my shirt and my shoes that made me look like a caricature of Mickey Mouse. My own sense of my ridiculousness doubled my fury, and I pounded her again and again. She was shrieking with pain and shock, and Adrian was standing on the bed, crying for help. Nothing mattered, not Adrian nor Rose, only the repeated exercise of my arm that was giving me back my virility. I savagely beat the tossing body, and in defense Rose jumped from the bed and ran swiftly around the room to escape me. I turned the beating into a macabre chase, striking out with the brush that missed as many times as it struck the moving target. Her buttocks and back and thighs were burning red, and I tried to hit her again and again in the same place, as if I could stamp the impression through her flesh. She cried, "Stop, stop. I'll do anything, stop," but there was nothing she could do for me. I was beating her, I was beating Adrian; my motives jumbled incoherently. I struck the back of her head and she sprawled clumsily on the floor in front of me.
Even if she were at last dead I couldn't stop pounding her, my release filled me with joy, and with each successful blow-brutal on her body-the urge to cast two more cascaded through me. I scooped her up from the floor. She was dry with fright. So you could beat the urge out of a woman; you didn't have to satisfy it out of her. My discovery blessed me with frenzied energy, and holding her limp across my knees, I pounded the gold into her flesh. The skin was breaking and I watched with detached curiosity as the blood began to pour out.
My sex, bouncing between us, was stiff now. It was my entire body-brain and lungs and stomach-rigid with decision.
When the flesh was no longer a woman's, only a beast's, a thing's, I dropped the brush and grabbed her brutalized carcass. She gasped with pain, my hand more terrible on her than the brush had been. I entered insolently, powerfully, completely. She bounded hysterically into the air, and I held her tight against my middle.
Then she must have willed herself wider, I could feel her insides expand for me, enough for me to pull out and see the distorted head of my sex. She tightened involuntarily, and again I had to crack her open. It was easier now moving in and out of this unidentifiable hole I had dug into the squirming earth. It felt good. I stared down at my relentless erection, and I could see its swift deep entry. It reappeared when I wanted it, and disappeared to feel the tight shield close excruciatingly around it. I could go on forever, coming only when the pleasure had circulated my full body.
I didn't notice when her body started to keep rhythm with mine. She was moving faster now, sunk in her own pleasure and she came a long time before I did, the slut. So that was her story: she was turning the beating into a prelude. Any way I wanted to do it was all right with her, so long as she got it. I wanted it to hurt, and I was strong keeping it going until her body was coaxing, not answering mine, a pathetic attempt to excite me and force my orgasm. I felt her motions become more genuine. Her gasping echoed in the room. I let it out, long luxurious jets pouring into her bowels before she had time to come, and pulled out, before her insides could start chewing on me. She turned on her back and looked up at me with that slavish rapture that translates, "More more, any time, more; I'll wait for you." I rested in silence for a moment, and then walked to the bed. All my weight was in the spilled white seeds, and I held on to the bed, afraid I would float to the ceiling. I glanced abstractly at Adrian who was sullen and flushed. She suffered my victor's regard and then to challenge my power she called, "Rose, come here, come here."
She should not have been that competitive, my sweet little cousin. It was then that my actions shaped and became a plan. I turned on Rose who was limping faithfully to her master's voice.
"I warn you," I dictated to her. "You're not to satisfy Adrian." I gloated over my authority; I relished my detailed instructions. "You can take care of her," I granted. "You can do everything a nurse is supposed to do. We realize that Adrian is a very sick girl. But if you touch her, if you let her touch you, I'll really beat you, and with none of the fun that comes after." She stared at me, making a great effort to digest all of my words. I gave her a moment to let them become a part of her. Then, "Do you understand," I thundered, and I threw her a bone, "You're mine. I don't want you to fool around with anybody else." I figured that was how men said it.
"Yes," worship and obedience mingled in her answer. "I won't do anything."
"Rose," Adrian's cry was a death rattle.
Simple Rose with her primitive religion of love, looked searchingly from me to Adrian. Her mute glances begged us to make her decision, to define her fidelity. I was happy to help her. I repeated once more as I stood at the door. "No more posing in front of the mirror. Now get dressed and go to sleep."
"Yes," was all she remembered how to say.
xiv
The following night I ate again with my aunt and uncle. The meal was perfect: simple, sober, silent, the way I like things to be done in my home. My aunt asked me how I liked the village, and I said it was quite charming, then I sank into what appeared to them to be my private meditations. She was much too polite to disturb me saying only when I asked to be excused from the table, "Of course." I said, "I want to have a really long chat with Adrian tonight, to make up for my truancy yesterday."
"Adrian will be pleased," the silly woman smiled.
"Yes," I lied, "she asked me to visit her yesterday."
"How nice," my aunt blushed her pleasure, "I must admit that there are so few people Adrian takes to."
"But she's never had a brother before," I answered smoothly.
"She's never acted as if she wanted one," my uncle interrupted blandly.
"Well dear, probably every girl wants a brother," my assistant amended.
"Mine didn't," her husband said shortly. "Charlotte," he reminisced, "tried to push me over cliffs, poison my tea, crash my car, until one of her unfortunate plots backfired."
"You're not quite fair," Aunt Margaret gently defended the dead. "Charlotte adored you."
"She adored an undivided fortune more," the curt man announced, and he looked at me, stripping me of all benevolence, and leaving only the exposed hunter.
He waited for my answer, which did not come. I pretended that his words made no particular meaning for me, and I left them both still sitting at the table.
I bounded up the stairs and twisted the knob of the door. I was sure Rose hadn't locked it tonight. The knob turned tenderly under my hand, and I walked into Adrian's room with the ease of ownership.
"You could knock," she whined.
"Now cousin," I apologized, "I didn't want to disturb you in case you were sleeping."
"You disturb me more when I'm awake," she said wretchedly.
"If you prefer," I offered, "Rose and I can take a walk and leave you to rest now."
"I didn't say that," she looked pale and sickly. "I simply asked you to knock on a door before entering." And after that she said nothing, hating me so intensely and yet being afraid to inflame me.
I preferred her appearance now. She looked better able to die, the bones of her skull prominent through her tissue-thin skin; her body flat, too thin to dent the mattress. Rose was sitting in the big chair next to Adrian's bed, waiting for me to know she was there. Mary Magdalene could never have worshipped Christ with a more tender smile. I expected her to patter dog-like across the floor, brush caught between her drooling jaws, begging for her nightly caress. I walked to her and asked the unnecessary question, "Have you been near
Adrian."
"No," she was so happy to have the right answer. "No, I remembered what you said to me,"
I knew from the contorted frustration on Adrian's face that Rose was not perjuring herself, but I pretended distrust. I wanted the agonizing details.
"Didn't she ask you to fondle her?" I indelicately demanded.
"Many times," Rose rushed to her self-defense. "She cried for an hour after you left, trying to tell me that you were just using me, and that she really loved me, and that you were," she blushed at the word, "taking me just to torture her." Adrian was not stupid, only dead. "But I told her," Rose added, "that I could tell you were really interested in me, and that she didn't understand any of these things between a man and a woman." Adrian watched me, her eyes like slits of blue beads were empty on me. Then she dared, "I'm going to have my parents send you away."
"Do," I amiably agreed. "Rose and I would like to take a trip around the country."
"Andre, could we?" and my name was an obscenity in Rose's mouth.
"If Adrian doesn't need us," and I satisfied Rose by melting our names into a single pronoun, "then of course we shall take a holiday."
"Rose would not leave me," Adrian said curtly. And I was gentleman enough only to laugh.
Rose came up to me and leaned heavily on my arm. "You do like me, don't you?" she cooed with confidence. "Adrian is wrong, isn't she, when she says you hate me?"
"Who should know better," I shouted at her, angry at her doubts, her inability to realize I despised her, "you or Adrian?"
"That's what I kept saying," Rose agreed. "All the time she was offering me things just for a kiss. I told her," the beast concentrated, "that her jewels meant nothing to me if she couldn't have faith in our love." I heard the pauses between her words, "Adrian is desperate. She's in the market ready to buy her pleasure."
I decided it would be advantageous to sell. Decision was promptly made.
"Rose," I intoned, "I decided last night that it wasn't fair for me to just take you from Adrian like that, without any warning."
"But I want you to," Rose wailed. "I don't want to be unfaithful to you."
"How can I trust in your feeling," I demanded, "if I see how you can drop Adrian without thinking once of what she must be suffering. How do I know you won't fall for the next guy that walks into this room?"
"But I won't," she cried, "Andre. I'll always stay with you." My stomach squeezed at the hideous fate offered, the crudest sentence that could be read to me.
"No," I said curtly. "I think you have no feelings if you can torment Adrian without even caring about it."
"But you told me to ... "
"And what if the next man or woman tells you to torment me?. . . "
"I wouldn't!" she exclaimed. "How can you prove it?"
She fell to her knees before me and reached eagerly. "No," I pushed her away, rejecting her convincing love. "You can't excite me when I can't trust you."
"What must I do?" she wept.
"Prove to me you're a woman with a heart," the word was ludicrous on my tongue. "Make love to Adrian." Adrian was still watching me, motionless, waiting for my motive. I gave it to her. "In return for your purity, my jewel," it was fun to mock the cow. "I will expect Adrian to give me the bauble she offered to you."
"You pig," Adrian sputtered.
"If you'd rather I forgot your little problem, Cousin..." Her intense silence meant the sale was made. "Go ahead, Rose," I sent my prostitute to the bed.
"But I couldn't" she struggled to balance her meager conscience.
"You must do as you're told," I pushed her to the bed, and then questioned Adrian. "Which one of my mother's rings will you give to me?"
"Your mother," she was shocked. "They're mine. They were saved for me. They have nothing to do with your mother."
"They are my mother's," I insisted. "They're mine, that's why I take them from you."
"Will it be for me?" It was my first clue that Rose's avarice was not all sexual.
"You whore," I shouted at her. "I wouldn't let you touch my mother's property."
"Then I won't touch Adrian," she rebelled.
I struck her then, hard, with all my fury, across her ignorant face, and I threw her across the bed. "Take off your clothes," I commanded, as if I were preparing my own pleasure, "and caress your little girl-friend."
They were both silent lying across each other, and Adrian then tried to gain the advantage. "It's all right, Rose. We'll give him his filthy ring. There'll be plenty more for you." She stroked the head that had been denied her. "I didn't know you wanted anything. Why didn't you ever ask me," as if she had always been the generous mistress. "We won't need him," she consoled. "It will be cheap to get rid of him for a diamond."
Rose basked in the kind face. "I'm sorry I stayed away last night, Adrian," she said contritely, her hearty appetite regained, "but we'll make up for it now."
I sat down in the comfortable chair beside the bed, and drew it close, until the arm of the chair touched the covers. I said, "Enough," and mentally tapping my baton. I gave the order, "Begin."
Rose, proud of the beauty she imagined all men found in her body, stood up like an aroused Aphrodite and flung her tunic away. I was close to retching, but unaware she hovered over Adrian's eager body, her ass high in the air, almost in my face, meant as a mute peace offering. Her buttocks were quivering, saying for her: I forgive you; this is for you; use it if you get hot. There was very little danger of me getting hot. I slapped the stigmatized bulges harshly bruised from yesterday, until her body was entirely flat on the covers. Then I lifted my feet to the edge of the mattress, kicked off my shoes, lit one of the Gauloises I had brought from France, and relaxed to enjoy the carnival.
Adrian was so famished from her day's diet, that it was painful for her to be fed. She quivered pathetically as Rose mouthed her puny chicken breast. She bounded and shrieked, in spite of my presence which must have repressed her. Rose was tossing in a sympathetic heap, and she rolled under Adrian, so that the girl's thin hips smothered her face. I could see the red head fighting for air between the closed thighs, and she pulled Adrian's thighs apart, and her head broke through the opening, frantic-I'-, h? ins the tilted sex. Adrian's head was sunk in the pillows, her eyes glittering gimlets. She choked breath into her lungs, and exhaled explosively out of her opened mouth.
Behold, all the action began to arouse me, jerkily and steadily, like a lifeboat being filled with hydrogen. I pulled off my trousers, and greeted its awakening. My hand caressed the virility, Rose's sucking sounds: the background for our little opera.
I could have stuck my hardened rod into Rose's tight behind. Adrian was rattling with growing ecstasy, and Rose was unconscious to my need, buried deferentially beneath cousin's dancing figure. Adrian looked like a Halloween ghost on strings, and I burped my pleasure as Rose ducked for the apples. I was afraid to ask for entry, afraid that my desire would deflate. I had one of those nervous hard-ons that blow out it they're pushed too far. The little bitch was climbing an invisible wall, ready to come, and I reached over her almost-there body, and grabbed Rose's bobbing head. I dragged her from beneath the form that still rolled up and down as if with a reflex action. Rose gazed dumbly at me, like a moving shadow crossing my face. I said nothing but pointed at my stiffness.
Adrian understood first, and she moaned, "That's not fair," as if we had some kind of gentlemen's agreement. Then Rose's phallus-piety clicked, and she was greedy to worship. I fell back into the soft chair, and she belly-crawled across the bed, plopping her head into my lap and catching herself on the spike. The same noises, loud and uncontrollable, and my erection was mortar in her mouth.
Adrian's hand covered her heart, as if to soothe a sharp pain. Her legs were still apart, dropped carelessly like two struck bowling pins. Her face was a death mask upraised to the heavens. Only her hips were alive, twitching and waiting.
Rose was eating me, a rigid wound. A starving foundling of a new mommy's tit. Her hands, light as a lace-maker's, were stroking me. I watched Adrian coming down, down, down and then I poured into Rose's siphoning mouth. When the last dizzy drop was spilled, I pushed Rose away from me. She was stupid with heat, and I shoved her to Adrian.
Now I was relaxed and indifferent to their writhing bodies. I buttoned my pants and walked aimlessly, impatiently around the room. It was a large room, luxuriously decorated, and I studied my cousin's favorite books.
Across the bed, in a slight rounded depression made by a curved many-paneled window was my cousin's desk. Now she never sat at it, but her Moroccan address book, appointment book, the antique plumed quill, the ivory letter-opener, all waited importantly for her. Their sounds accompanied my snooping and when her gasps were loudest I started to pry open the drawers.
Tons of unused stationery and old letters were stuffed into the drawers, and I dumped them on the floor, looking for something, anything that might assuage my boredom. In the last drawer I found a pleasant stimulant. An Oriental teak box, laboriously engraved, opened to my malicious pressure. Adrian had had the audacity to lock the box, and I snapped it open with the convenient letter-opener. Then I brought the box to my armchair to read my mail.
Inscribed on die top sheet of paper, in a girlish scrawl was the modest tide, "My wills." I lifted the thick stack of papers out of the box, and proceeded to read. Adrian, in an agony of lust, watched me.
The first will was the working of a very little girl indeed. She must have been a mere adolescent when she composed it. She carefully left nothing to her mother, nearly everything to her father, except for her collection of dolls which she bequeathed to the cook who must have pleased her that day.
In the next will she stipulated her desire for a gold coffin, and took back the dolls from the cook. In her most recent will she left nothing to her father, nothing to her mother, nothing to Rose. She requested only that all her belongings be destroyed and that she be buried in the beloved gold coffin.
Rose was on top of Adrian now, and they were bathing in each other's arms. It was easy, it was pleasant to disturb their ablutions. I reached over and convivially tapped Rose on the shoulder. "Look, dear," I said like an affectionate husband, "did you know that Adrian had an anthology of wills?"
But I was too late. They were too far in their journey, and Adrian was pounding out the staccato rhythm of an orgasm. I was forced to wait till they descended to earth. I hate to wait for anyone; it makes me crazy as King Lear at the door-I pulled them apart as their bodies pressed in the last clinging, clutching descent. They were both groggy from their swift plummet, and I repeated my amusing discovery. Adrian, always first to respond, screamed in invaded fury, "How dare you read my private papers."
And I told her, "Now, Cousin, there must be no secrets between us."
I relished her impotent anger, "Now look, Cousin," I explained, moving quickly to my demand. "Everybody is going to think you were a nasty little girl if you don't mention one impoverished relative in your wills. Now we both know," I pressed, "that your wills are useless. No court would pay the slightest bit of attention to them. But still, for sentimental reasons, I'd like you to write one little will in which you remembered me." Her face curled in contempt, and I promptly added, "Now don't strain your tired little mind, I'll dictate the whole thing to you."
"Never," she said, her word meant to be a final pronouncement.
"And I notice," I continued, "that you haven't mentioned Rose in any of your legacies. Rose," I aroused the remote mind that wavered into a vacuous space when people around her discussed anything that invoked the written word, "Rose," I shook her, "don't you find it unkind that your dear friend Adrian, for whom you've sacrificed your youth, your morality, your identity as a woman," I was purposely climbing above her scope, "should neglect to murmur one slight dollar bill of thanks?"
Rose was immediately my ally. "It is unkind," she announced.
"I'll take care of Rose," Adrian promised, caressing her angered nurse.
"I'll take care of her," I reminded my cousin, "but just as a precious memento, I'd like to dictate these few words to you."
"No," she was stubborn in the repetition of her negatives.
"Then," I calmly decreed, "since Rose and I will never win your appreciation, I think we must leave on a little trip."
"You pig," she attacked me. "As if it would matter if you did drag a stupid will out of me. Tomorrow I write another one that would deny everything I write today."
"I want it for myself," I sounded appalled that she didn't acknowledge the purity of my request. "I want it," I explained, "as a precious, personal memory of the love we have shared in this room."
"You'll never have my money," she snarled at me. "I've taken care of that already." I knew her threat was empty.
I decided that she shouldn't waste her strength in a discussion already become ridiculous.
"Rose," I directed, "bring Adrian a sheet of paper and that beautiful feather pen on her desk." Rose was prompt on her mission, and she handed the material to me rather than to her patient. I pulled a big book from the shelf behind Adrian, and placed the mobile desk beside her on the bed. I dipped the quill into a bottle of ink, and placed it wet in her hand. The will would go into my pocket, and it would be the last one found ever recorded in the young heiress's gentle hand. The whole statement was fertile in my head, and I began: "November 27, 1956. I, Adrian Ferdinand, of sound mind and delicate body, bequeath to my beloved," we both paused, "Cousin Andre, who had made my last days the richest of my life ... "
xv
After that night there was nothing for me to do but wait for Adrian to die, if my punishing presence, if the heavy tax of jewels she paid to love Rose, or be loved by Rose, because either role seemed immensely exciting to her, made life seem a less precious illusion to cling to, the loss of my dear cousin seemed a blow I would bear well. But in her dying she grew more and more remote, more and more starved, more and more desperately alive. Her life crept into her eyes like bubbles of air in boiling water. She was determined to wait for my failure, wait for the day when Rose would dare to make love to her without my permission.
In spite of the valuable payments made for the repulsive services of my personal sheep, I forbade Rose to embrace Adrian in my absence. I would have to be there, chair pulled to the bed, feet dangling near their crouching bodies, before I would allow their mouths to search out each other's caverns. My pockets bulged with diamonds and emeralds, tiaras, necklaces, long heavy Victorian earrings. In my breast pocket I guarded the sentimental contract that called me heir to Adrian's fortune. Their feverish, sickening lovemaking could sometimes excite me, but mostly I found it tedious. To make their passion less tiresome, I would carefully study the newest gem that increased my collection.
Often I would disturb Rose in her intense labors to show her the curious light that glistened through a blood-red ruby.
Rose stayed slave to me out of a dumb allegiance that does not leave the old master until a new one brings claims. And nothing, nothing, entered that room to disturb my carefully organized triumvirate. I wondered how long the selfish, avaricious Rose could stand my rejection of her body. Since the first time I'd crammed myself into her anonymous hole, I hadn't repeated the loathsome performance. Once, I felt my time growing short, that the feverish expression on her face was a warning of rebellion. To prevent revolt, I beat her so severely that she could not walk to Adrian's room for two days. But even after the beating, when she lay near-unconscious on the floor, smashed and disfigured, I could not take her. I became more and more sensitive to her female smell and softness. The stench of her flesh acted upon me like an acid that withered my plant. My only pleasure was to stop their rapt entwining, and demand that Rose swallow a burning erection. Looking into Adrian's cheated eyes, I would capture her rage, her heat, her insanity, and gorge the blocked milk into the mute throat. I allowed Rose to touch me so rarely, that she would go into a self-induced orgasm at the sight of my offering. To let her put her mouth around it seemed almost more exciting than her devouring nature could support It kept Adrian tortured. To intensify her jealousy, I would take Rose for long exasperating walks in the gardens. I would insist that Rose take her day off and spend it alone with me. Adrian's face grew blanched with envy, thinking that it was during these times that
I satiated Rose into submission. Actually those hours were so intolerably long to me, that Rose out of frustration, and I out of ennui, would return to the room with drawn, almost agonized faces. In her lust Adrian assumed that Rose's look of exhaustion was caused by my incessant brutal demands, and not by my denial, which forced the greedy appetite to feed on its own intestines. So far it was all working. The thwarted Rose was more passionate in the serpent's arms, and she became more and more slavish toward me, searching blindly for the pose that would excite me.
But nothing could excite, nothing but to draw the nauseating creature away from Adrian's grinding body.
Every night I ate with my aunt and uncle. There was no conversation at the table, except for one time, when my uncle grudgingly granted that I must be a superior person for Adrian to allow me constantly into her room. Aunt Margaret said, "I knew it would be nice for her to have a relative, an equal as her friend." Initiating me firmly into the family, my uncle was so obviously worried about Adrian's rapid decline that he vulgarized, "I bet Adrian has a crush on you. She looks paler and thinner every day." I think he was jealous, imagining that that horrible plant of bones had elected another male into her brief universe.
All I said was, "Adrian is a rare person. It's an honor that she lets me sit with her." And they both melted in agreement.
It was my schedule to go immediately to Adrian's room after dinner. I would find Rose still eating her generous portions of steak and asparagus. Adrian's tray would be on the side of the bed, white and undisturbed. She was now so thin that I could see the blue abstraction of veins close to the surface of her transparent skin. Her hair seemed to grow longer and straighter and more flaxen on her shrunken skull, and I know that she hoarded her draining strength for Rose's nightly embrace. It was now difficult for her to satisfy Rose, to lift her head or suck the boiling beverage out of Rose's neglected body. The nurse's face was daily more sharp, and had she been intelligent the new expression created would have been an ambitious one. My entrance into the room would knock the breath out of Rose's lungs, and in her undisguised anticipation she would gasp like an asthmatic. Adrian tried to ignore me, pretending that her retina could not reflect my form. Only when I pulled the chair to the bed and shoved my hands between their bodies, pulling them apart and disturbing them when in their intensity they forgot me, would she acknowledge my ubiquity. I kept her in a frantic, almost hysterical pitch of nerves, by making her ritual orgy a tentative, an interrupted one. It was my one drop of pure humor in the scrupulously directed comedy. That I should stop her pleasure for my pleasure, when mine was not one-millionth of hers. To arbitrarily put my need before hers, when my need was an artificial one, was in fact dependent on, created out of cheating her. I liked the maddened erotic air that Rose wore around her head like a nimbus, the martyred deference of the penitent. They were eating each other up, and I would have the next course all to myself.
I pulled my chair to the bed the way the head of the family brings his chair closer to the fire. I kicked off my shoes and placed my feet on the edge of the bed with the ease that a tired man rests his warming toes on the hearth. Tonight I told them exactly how they were to perform.
"Rose, you kneel over Adrian's head," I arranged them carefully, choosing like a set designer the most attractive location for the objects. "That's right-no, further back. NO!" I screamed as Adrian reached up for the white ass, "you'rt not to touch her until I say." Then I got finicky as a couturier with awkward models. "No, that's not right: you can't keep your hands off her; that's not what I want. Lie down flat, Adrian." I reorganized my performers, "Flat, flat, don't you know what flat means. Rose, start sucking her, now Adrian, I want you to grab your tits and squeeze them till I see them getting bigger. I want you to really stretch them." And Adrian lay immobile with the indignity, unwilling to fondle herself.
"Stop, Rose," I commanded. Rose was punctilious as a stop watch. Adrian was beginning to pant now with the increased desire for the familiar wet tongue. "As soon as you begin, Adrian," I suggested, "Rose will continue." My cousin really was sick tonight, great hollows sunk beneath her eyes, in her temples and cheeks. The hands that she lifted in defeat to her shrunken chest were brittle as sun-bleached shells. I sat back and watched them. Rose was wading in the running stream, and Adrian pinched herself with unconscious tenderness. "Enough," I wanted to be stiff tonight. I wanted to play with the pigs myself. But deep in my head, deep in my dreams, I knew I was becoming less and less potent, that the women were destroying me.
I stopped Rose with a violent thrust at her head, and she pulled blindly away from the approaching climax.
My lust was suddenly as thick as a bull's. "Ahh," she groaned, and lunged for it. I let her push it in, it felt so big and stiff and able to take care of itself. From the bed I heard Adrian scream, "Rose, Rose, come to me. Rose, I feel strange," and over Rose's pounding shoulders I could see Adrian clutching at her heart. The more she clutched and screamed the harder I got, and Rose, clinging to my waist twirled on the edge of my rod like a circus queen. I don't think she heard the tortured girl, but it was all I heard, and the shrieks were like virility pouring into my ears and down to the steel hammer that smashed into Rose.
"Wait," Rose implored, "Wait," her voice an erotic release, "wait, let me have it-don't be selfish," and the word selfish, the revelation of Rose's narrow world of right and wrong-clung in the air and smothered Adrian's crescendo of agony.
Her face had all the animation Adrian's had lost, and my rage and bitterness transferred to her. There was a purity, a sanctity in Adrian's inflexible final escape. She took the glow, the game, with her and left me stupidly coupled with the grotesque.
Only her sudden quiet, which blanketed us like heavy burying snow, released me.
The silence in the room was so heavy that my ears felt an inner pressure. It was as if a motor that has always been running had suddenly stopped, and in the sudden emptiness we imagine ourselves dead, or the world a vacuum. I said, "Rose, what is it?" throbbing with the fear of having fallen off the earth, and spinning through the void.
She looked stupidly about her, and then silence invaded her world and we went quickly to the bed. She held the still girl's wrist for a moment, and then she turned and looked at me.
I was beside the bed staring at the mocking shell that Adrian had left for us. She had been my partner in my journey through space, only she had kept going, she had escaped, and I was back in the room with Rose.
Rose was conscientiously pulling the sheets over the wax face, and I said, "Don't, you're wrong, she's not ... " and I was too frightened to say dead.
The nurse was proud of her professional ability to recognize death. "She's dead," she said coolly, and then, imprisoning my darting mind: "This is what you wanted, isn't it? That's what the will was about, and the jewels ... " Her face was vicious now, possessive, captor, as Adrian's face was thoughtless, empty, as if all the players had rushed off the stage and changed their masks. "Don't worry," her reassurance was a chain around my panic. "As long as we're together, there'll be no trouble."
She'd talk. She'd tell them. She was flushed with the final seeds of my maleness; she was all my power, all my plan taken away from me.
"But I don't want her to be dead," I wailed in terror. "Adrian, stop this, Adrian, you're not dead, here Adrian," and I flung the will at her rigidifying legs. "Here," and the jewels poured out of my pockets, "take them, take them, take, take ..."
