I wasn’t sure. I permitted her to pat the ground underneath the tree where I would lay, then I sat down at full-length, hands supporting me behind my back and considered the mischievous sun. She sat beside me and sighed. I sighed back to show her that I was responsive.
“Do you know this tree?” she asked.
“This tree? How would I know it?”
“I thought maybe in your other life you would have known it. Everybody has another life, you know; there are two parts of us and they never meet, not even for a second. Somebody, somewhere right now is just the same person as you are, thinking the same thoughts that you do, but you’ll never meet. He might be a mile away or in China. But he could have seen this tree. My other person must have seen this tree because I can tell you how many apples there are on it without even looking.”
Her mysticism fascinated me. It was a new way of looking at things. It might even function as a kind of explanation for my masturbation: what was my other self doing at this precise moment? Was he readying his supplies, readying his guns, readying his hands and possibilities in a litter of magazines preparing to turn loose the jets? The metaphysics were intricate, granted their efficacy they would explain everything, even the violent turning of moods. “How many apples are there?” I asked her.
“Fifteen. Two of them are rotten and eight are very small. The rest are pretty good but you can’t tell the difference from the outside.”
I turned to count but the sun was dazzling; I decided to take her on faith. “Where would your other self be, now?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe somewhere in a bazaar in Bombay or Paris or something like that. What’s the difference; it really doesn’t matter. I know this tree in a different way, I’ve seen it myself.”
“Your other self?”
“My own self. I was here last year, right under this tree. I was with a man and we lay under it for a long time.”
“Oh,” I said, and asked pointlessly, “Who was the man?”
I thought she would slap me. But the impulse must have dissipated as soon as it had come because she only sighed, very deeply and stretched out, her arms behind her head, her small eyes well-shielded by huge dark glasses. In this position her breasts upthrust slightly and then, as if in reaction to new stresses of physics, began to settle slowly upon her body, diminishing and flattening, the more vigorous outlines receding as her dress became fuller. It occurred to me that she was not wearing a supportive garment and before I knew what I was doing—the sun had boiled my brains as well as stricken them—I had reached out a childishly curious fingertip and had begun some idiot strokes near the center of the outline in verification. She groaned slightly and twitched, then permitted me to continue. Her eyes closed.
“You’re not wearing anything.”
“Yes I am. I’m wearing a dress.”
“I mean under the dress.”
“What’s the difference? Do you mind?”
“Why should I mind? Those are your breasts.”
“Yes,” she said, “those are my breasts. What did you think they were, anyway?”
“I didn’t mean that. I never touched a breast before. I mean, I never touched anyone’s breast.”
She quivered and I thought for a moment that she was going to sit upright. But I held my palm flat against her chest and the pressure must have convinced her otherwise. She licked her lips, her small chin hard as she turned her face sideways toward me. “Why?” she said, “Why do you think I’d want to know a thing like that?”
“Well, I was just telling you—”
“Why were you telling me? What’s the difference? Who cares and who wants to know? Is there something really wrong with you?”
That made four questions in succession; it was difficult to be systematic, particularly since the slow grazing of my hand had continued unstopped and had begun to produce for the first time an answering pressure in my groin, a feeling of ominous potential growing, growing; a blind animal in the pocket of my trousers poking for an exit. It was a feeling similar to but yet entirely unlike the symptoms of self-abuse, and I was entirely discomfited by it. Her last question seemed easiest to answer so I said, “There’s nothing wrong with me as far as I know. I was just being honest with you. What’s wrong with a person being honest?”
“Squeeze harder. Squeeze harder around the tip. I want to feel your fingernail.”
“Can’t anybody tell the truth anymore?”
“I want to feel your fingers digging all around me now. Yes, like that. I don’t care, hurt me a little bit.”
“I just wanted you to know where I stand.”
Her breathing was moist and ragged. “I’ve got to get my dress off,” she said, sighing and getting off her back, putting her hands behind her to work on the zipper. “I’ve got to get it off right now. Damn you, damn you; why do you always do things like this to me? Isn’t it enough that I’m made this way that these things have to happen? Don’t rip it, just get it off gently. I can’t come home in a torn dress.”
No tailor or dressmaker, I did my amateur’s best, got the fabric down to somewhere between her diaphragm and navel and she did the rest, moving the material in slow jerks—the dress had been very tight—to her waist. I looked upon her. I looked upon the breasts of woman for the first time. My mother’s did not count, let alone the ones in the magazine. For the only time in my career I sat stricken, soundless and astounded, studying, almost with a medical precision, what was nude before me.
In retrospect, it is quite clear to me that Marie-Jean had bad breasts. They were full, yes, but of that premature pendulousness which seems to afflict the one unlucky schoolgirl out of ten; breasts that could already have nursed a battery of quintuplets, breasts that had the odd, wrinkled convoluted look of having been assaulted by an army; the nipples drawn in upon themselves, mysterious, dried, giving a bluish overcast to her flesh. Free swinging, they might have touched her navel, although this was something not to be determined; using her own feminine cleverness she had immediately settled again upon her back where her breasts fell out expressionlessly to the two sides, looking as any woman’s might have in that position, telling nothing. She raised her arms and drew me to them wearily, almost as if she had resigned herself, with a kind of foreknowledge, to a disaster before it happened. I brought my lips to her nipple with precision. I encircled it, holding back my teeth so as not to nip her. I drew her into me and I began to suck rapidly, mechanically, wondering idly all the time with a high, removed consciousness what my Other was doing at this precise moment, who he was coupled with: was it Marie-Jean’s other? More likely he was masturbating, I decided. I heard my own moans with a clinical ear; they were similar to those I made when accosting the magazines. It all appeared to be the same thing.
“Fascinating,” I observed to D’Arcy. “Your initial sexual contact and the way in which it was inaugurated. Truly, in retrospect, the auspiciousness, the sheer auspiciousness, of all this is absolutely astounding!”
“Will you keep quiet?” he said harshly. “I was only pausing for a moment. Can’t you see I’m talking?”
“But of course—”
“Sometimes,” D’Arcy said, “you can be damned offensive. Damnably offensive. Remind me of that afterwards if you will.”
I entered a timeless space, dreaming, dreaming. There is a blankness; I do not know what went on between the time my lips first touched her breasts and the moment, some suspended eons later, that I felt the urgent flapping of her hips, felt her hands descend below my belt level and begin to fumble with both my genitalia and hers. Her voice absent for so long, returned. “Get it off,” she was saying, “and hurry for God’s sake. Hurry, hurry. And don’t stop biting. Keep it up. Faster, faster.”
How I managed to dislodge myself of my lower garments while not breaking that fragile upper contact I will never know. But my masturbatory experiences had stood me well: how I was able to simultaneously fumble the pages of the magazine to the proper picture and at the same time encourage and whip out my jetstream is similarly a mystery. But, finally, I was bare below the waist, pressing my heaviness against her, against the rough fabric that lay between her legs as she moaned and twisted her hips and with several tearing sounds got her own garments down. Body to body we clung to one another and she seized her breasts in both hands, now apparently uncaring of the consequences of close examination and slammed their blue-tinted network even deeper into my frantic mouth and I felt the rising, the idiot rising against her. There was a wetness, a dripping, slippery wetness in the joining of thigh to thigh and I suspected that it had something to do with what we were doing to her breasts. I kept it on. It was perfectly all right with me. I wanted to make her happy. I didn’t have the faintest idea of what to do.
No idea whatsoever. She spread her thighs wider and wider and I tumbled between them, feeling the grittiness of her hair bouncing up and down against mine; she seized me with limp fingers and attempted to direct me toward the orifice, and still I had no idea of what she wanted. Entrance was the answer, of course, but if I achieved it, how was I possibly going to satisfy myself? And what did it mean to her? What was getting inside there going to matter to her thighs?
She answered by screaming somewhere in her throat and forcing herself further up against me so that it was either to make the connection or to fall off completely. Balancing myself gracelessly, trying to poise between one and the other, I fell off indeed, sliding off her thighs and legs to lie beside her, still squeezing and manipulating her dangling breasts, now even the more violently to make up for my faux-pas. But she fought me; she fought me bitterly; her breasts no longer an offering but a withdrawal, and as I tried to maintain the contact by closing my mouth tighter around them, even a hint of teeth, she brought both her hands up to them and dragged them away inch by inch until she were separate. I heard her voice. It was apparent that she had been talking for a long, long time. “What are you doing, will you get in there; are you crazy or something, and a pervert, too? Don’t you even know where it is or what you’re supposed to do? Stick it in there,” and then she cursed me with words that I had never known were available to women, were available to their gentle consciousness. Uneasily I attempted to wheel back over her and felt her fingers fumbling on me, then, with great difficulty and a kind of heavy, wet sobbing noise, an insertion of some kind must have been made because I felt my organ, as it were, being dragged up a clinging tunnel, much wetter than my hand and much tighter but at the same time not as well contoured, not as responsive, certainly, to its familiar needs as the hand had been. Her voice and words had passed, for the two of us, beyond comprehension and she must have stopped then, the movement of her aborted larynx being transferred down to her hips which stamped and thrashed.
I didn’t know what I was doing. It occurred vaguely to me that Marie-Jean was masturbating, was using me to masturbate with instead of her own fingers—assuming they used their fingers; I hadn’t the faintest idea of how they functioned—but if this were so, it imposed upon me the storming necessity to finish myself. But I had no idea of how it was done; impossible as it may seem, I was utterly unprepared to come off in the tent of a woman. Her breasts, forgotten and almost contemptible, sagged under my astonished eyes and then she began to moan in a voice I had never heard before; both low and simpering, idiot and uncheckable it sounded as my own mother’s did when she was in the presence of small animals. This final horror unleashed a frenzy of bucking and churning and so, in a sense, I did the best that I could for her; I did what I knew.
And as I did so I felt a strange detachment, my prick, aimlessly colliding with that long, empty tunnel seemed no longer a part of me, no longer truly grasped by my body, but only an appendage maintained at some great distance from the flesh: wholly irrelevant, wholly lost. What sensibility and attention there was seemed contrived in my skull alone, my eyes looking incuriously on a patch of grass some feet behind us, a burnt-out section where small holes suggested the infestation and passage of vermin and I fixated upon it with fascination, then, as I compared the scurrying of the vermin into their known depths with my own infestation in the nether regions. She began to slap my face raggedly, irregularly, her small palms colliding against my cheeks and began to talk again and for a moment I had no awareness of what she was saying but then meaning coalesced and the words flickered into reason: do it, you bastard, she was saying to me, can’t you come, can’t you do anything but flop there, finish, finish, finish, and her fingertip grazed, my lip and tongue and her other hand, drawing me down again in search of her breasts was only able, because of her spasmodic movements, to mesh me with her breast. To return there was to recapitulate something that was already far gone; I thought, biting, that it was pointless because I’d already been there before, nothing that had been known as I had known her breasts could ever be known again but as she shuddered and spread the flattened surfaces with her other hand so that I could take in more and more, a great flame of revelation opened up before me and suddenly I understood. I understood everything. There was a whining and whickering in my loins, the first sludge of damnation pressing and pressing, and I saw what I had to see. I knew everything.
