Woolgathering

 The illumined skyscrapers shine like Christmas trees. I have been invited to stay with rich friends at the Plaza. The luxury lulls me, but I lie in a soft bed sick with ennui, like a flower in a hot house. My feet rest on soft carpets. New York gives me a fever — the great Babylonian city.

I see Lillian. I no longer love her. There are those who dance and those who twist themselves into knots. I like those who flow and dance. I will see Mary again. Perhaps this time I will not be timid. I remember when she came to Saint-Tropez one day and we met casually at a café. She invited me to come to her room in the evening. 

My lover, Marcel, had to go home that night; he lived quite fat away. I was free. I left him at eleven o’clock and went to see Mary. I was wearing my flounced Spanish cretonne dress and a flower in my hair, and I was all bronzed by the sun and feeling beautiful. 

When I arrived, Mary was lying on her bed, cold-creaming her face, her legs and her shoulders, because she had been lying on the beach. She was rubbing cream into her neck, her throat she was covered with cream.

This disappointed me. I sat at the foot of her bed and we talked. I lost my desire to kiss her. She was running away from her husband. She had married him only to be protected. She had never really loved men but women. At the beginning of her marriage, she had told him all sorts of stories about herself that she should not have told him how she had been a dancer on Broadway and slept with men when she was short of money; how she even went to a whorehouse and earned money there; how she met a man who fell in love with her and kept her for a few years. Her husband never recovered from these stories. They awakened his jealousy and doubts, and their life together had become intolerable.

  The day after we met, she left Saint-Tropez, and I was filled with regrets for not having kissed her. Now I was about to see her again.

She is being analyzed and has discovered what I sensed long ago: that she has never known a real orgasm, at thirty-four, after a sexual life that only an expert accountant could keep track of. I am discovering her pretenses. She is always smiling, gay, but underneath she feels unreal, remote, detached from experience. She acts as if she were asleep. She is trying to awaken by falling into bed with anyone who invites her.

Mary says, ‘It is very hard to talk about sex, I am so ashamed.’ She is not ashamed of doing anything at all, but she cannot talk about it. She can talk to me. We sit for hours in perfumed places where there is music. She likes places where actors go.

There is a current of attraction between us, purely physical. We are always on the verge of getting into bed together. But she is never free in the evenings. She will not let me meet her husband. She is afraid I will seduce him.

She fascinates me because sensuality pours from her. At eight years old she was already having a lesbian affair with an older cousin.

We both share the love of finery, perfume and luxury. She is so lazy, languid — purely a plant, really. I have never seen a woman more yielding. She says that she always expects to find the man who will arouse her. She has to live in a sexual atmosphere even when she feels nothing. It is her climate. Her favorite statement is, ‘At that time, I was sleeping around with everybody.’

If we speak of Paris and of people we knew there, she always says, ‘I don’t know him. I didn’t sleep with him.’ Or ‘Oh yes, he was wonderful in bed.’

I have never once heard of her resisting — this, coupled with frigidity! She deceives everybody, including herself. She looks so wet and open that men think she is continuously in a state of near orgasm. But it is not true. The actress in her appears cheerful and calm, and inside she is going to pieces. She drinks and can sleep only by taking drugs. She always comes to me eating candy, like a schoolgirl. She looks about twenty. Her coat is open, her hat is in her hand. Her hair is loose.

One day she falls on my bed and knocks off her shoes. She looks at her legs and says, ‘They are too thick. They are like Renoir legs, I was told once in Paris.’

‘But I love them,’ I say, ‘I love them.’

‘Do you like my new stockings?’ She raises her skirt to show me.

She asks for a whiskey. Then she decides that she will take a bath. She borrows my kimono. I know that she is trying to tempt me. She comes out of the bathroom still humid, leaving the kimono open. Her legs are always held a little apart. She looks so much as if she were about to have an orgasm that one cannot help feeling: only one little caress will drive her wild. As she sits on the edge of my bed to put on her stockings, I cannot withhold any longer. I kneel in front of her and put my hand on the hair between her legs. I stroke it gently, gently, and I say, ‘The little silver fox, the little silver fox. So soft and beautiful. Oh, Mary I can’t believe that you do not feel anything there, inside.’

She seems on the verge of feeling, the way her flesh looks, open like a flower, the way her legs are spread. Her mouth is so wet, so inviting, the lips of her sex must be the same. She parts her legs and lets me look at it. I touch it gently and spread the lips to see if they are moist. She feels it when I touch her clitoris, but I want her to feel the bigger orgasm.

I kiss her clitoris, still wet from the bath; her pubic hair, still damp as seaweed. Her sex tastes like a seashell, a wonderful, fresh, salty seashell. Oh Mary! My fingers work more quickly, she falls back on the bed, offering her whole sex to me, open and moist, like a camellia, like rose petals, like velvet, satin. It is rosy and new, as if no one had ever touched it. It is like the sex of a young girl.

Her legs hang over the side of the bed. Her sex is open; I can bite into it, kiss it, insert my tongue. She does not move. The little clitoris stiffens like a nipple. My head between her two legs is caught in the most delicious vise of silky, salty flesh.

My hands travel upwards to her heavy breasts, caress them. She begins to moan a little. Now her hands travel downwards and join mine in caressing her own sex. She likes to be touched at the mouth of her sex, below the clitoris. She touches the place with me. It is there I would like to push in a penis and move until I make her scream with pleasure. I put my tongue at the opening and push it in as fat as it will go. I take her ass in my two hands, like a big fruit, and push it upwards, and while my tongue is playing there in the mouth of her sex, my fingers press into the flesh of her ass, travel around its firmness, into its curve, and my forefinger feels the little mouth of her anus and pushes in gently.

Suddenly Mary gives a start — as if I touched off an electric spark. She moves to enclose my finger. I press it farther, all the while moving my tongue inside of her sex. She begins to moan, to undulate.

When she sinks downwards she feels my flicking finger, when she rises upwards she meets my flicking tongue. With every move, she feels my quickening rhythm, until she has a long spasm and begins to moan like a pigeon. With my finger I feel the palpitation of pleasure, going once, twice, thrice, beating ecstatically.

She falls over, panting. ‘Oh, Mandra, what have you done to me, what have you done to me!’ She kisses me, drinking the salty moisture from my mouth. Her breasts fall against me as she holds me, saying again, ‘Oh,Mandra, what have you done...’

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