Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [40]
Her blood was fired now. By his slowness he seemed to have done this, at last. Her eyes shone brilliantly, her mouth could not leave his body. And finally he took her, as she offered herself, opening her vulva with her lovely fingers, as if she could no longer wait. Even then they suspended their pleasure, and she felt him quietly, enclosed.
Then she pointed to the mirror and said, laughing, ‘Look, it appears as if we were not making love, as if I were merely sitting on your knees, and you, you rascal, you have had it inside me all the time, and you’re even quivering. Ah, I can’t bear it any longer, this pretending I have nothing inside. It’s burning me up. Move now, move!’
She threw herself over him so that she could gyrate around his erect penis, deriving from this erotic dance a pleasure which made her cry out. And at the same time a lightning flash of ecstasy tore through George’s body.
*
Despite the intensity of their lovemaking, when he left, she did not ask him his name, she did not ask him to return. She gave him a light kiss on his almost painful lips and sent him away. For months the memory of this night haunted him and he could not repeat the experience with any woman.
One day he encountered a friend who had just been paid lavishly for some articles and invited him to have a drink. He told George the spectacular story of a scene he had witnessed. He was spending money freely in a bar when a very distinguished man approached him and suggested a pleasant pastime, observing a magnificent love scene, and as George’s friend happened to be a confirmed voyeur, the suggestion met with instant acceptance. He had been taken to a mysterious house, into a sumptuous apartment, and concealed in a dark room, where he had seen a nymphomaniac making love with an especially gifted and potent man.
George’s heart stood still. ‘Describe her,’ he said.
His friend described the woman George had made love to, even to the satin dress. He also described the canopied bed, the mirrors, everything. George’s friend had paid one hundred dollars for the spectacle, but it had been worthwhile and had lasted for hours.
Poor George. For months he was wary of women. He could not believe such perfidy, and such play-acting. He became obsessed with the idea that the women who invited him to their apartments were all hiding some spectator behind a curtain.
Elena
While waiting for the train to Montreux, Elena looked at the people around her on the quays. Every trip aroused in her the same curiosity and hope one feels before the curtain is raised at the theater, the same stirring anxiety and expectation.
She singled out various men she might have liked to talk with, wondering if they were leaving on her train or merely saying good-bye to other passengers. Her cravings were vague, poetic. If she had been brutally asked what she was expecting she might have answered, ‘Le merveilleux’. It was hunger that did not come from any precise region of her body. It was true, what someone had said about her after she had criticized a writer she had met: ‘You cannot see him as he really is, you cannot see anyone as he really is. He will always be disappointing because you are expecting someone.’
She was expecting someone – every time a door opened, every time she went to a party, to any gathering of people, every time she entered a café, a theater.
None of the men she had singled out as desirable companions for the trip boarded the train. So she opened the book she was carrying. It was Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
Afterwards Elena remembered nothing of this trip except a sensation of tremendous bodily warmth, as if she had drunk a whole bottle of the very choicest Burgundy, and a feeling of great anger at the discovery of a secret which it seemed to her was criminally withheld from all people. She discovered first of all that she had never known the sensations described by Lawrence, and second, that this was the nature of her hunger. But there was another truth she was now fully aware of.