Delta of Venus - Anais Nin [48]
Each time Miguel left them for a moment Donald and Elena were acutely aware of the bond of sameness between them, and of a malicious feminine conspiracy to enchant and seduce and victimize Miguel.
With a mischievous glance, Donald said to Elena, ‘Talking together is a form of intercourse. You and I exist together in all the delirious countries of the sexual world. You draw me into the marvelous. Your smile keeps a mesmeric flow.’
Miguel returned to them. Why was he so restless? He went for cigarettes. He went for something else. He left them. Each time he returned she saw Donald change, become woman again, tantalizing. She saw them caressing each other with their eyes, and pressing their knees together under the table. There was such a current of love between them that she was taken into it. She saw Donald’s feminine body dilating, she saw his face open like a flower, his eyes thirsty, and his lips wet. It was like being admitted into the secret chambers of another’s sensual love, and seeing in both Donald and Miguel what would otherwise be concealed. from her. It was a strange transgression.
Miguel said, ‘You two are exactly alike.’
‘But Donald is more truthful,’ said Elena, thinking how easily he betrayed the fact that he did not love Miguel wholly, whereas she would have concealed this, out of the fear of hurting the other.
‘Because he loves less,’ said Miguel. ‘He is a narcissist.’
A warmth broke through the taboo between Donald and Elena, and Miguel and Elena. Love now flowed among the three of them, shared, transmitted, contagious, the threads binding them.
She could look with Miguel’s eyes at Donald’s finely designed body, the narrow waist, the square shoulders of an Egyptian relief figure, the stylized gestures. His face expressed a dissolution so open that it seemed like an act of exhibitionism. Everything was revealed, naked to the eye.
Miguel and Donald spent afternoons together, and then Donald would seek out Elena. With her he asserted his masculinity and felt that she transmitted to him the masculine in her, the strength. She felt this and said, ‘Donald, I give you the masculine in my own soul.’ In her presence he became erect, firm, pure, serious. A coalescence took place. Then he was the perfect hermaphrodite.
But Miguel could not see this. He continued to treat him as a woman. True, when Miguel was present, Donald’s body softened, his hips began to sway, his face became that of the cheap actress, the vamp receiving flowers with a batting of the eyelashes. He was as fluttery as a bird, with a petulant mouth pursed for small kisses, all adornment and change, a burlesque of the little gestures of alarm and promise made by women. Why did men love this travesty of women and yet elude women?
And in contradiction, there was Donald’s male fury against being taken like a woman: ‘He overlooks the masculine in me completely,’ he complained. ‘He takes from behind, he insists on giving it to me through the ass, and treating me like a woman. And I hate him for this. He will make a real fairy out of me. I want something else. I want to be saved from becoming a woman. And Miguel is brutal and masculine with me. I seem to tantalize him. He turns me over by force and takes me as if I were a whore.’
‘Is this the first time you have been treated like a woman?’
‘Yes, before this I have done nothing but sucking, never this – mouth and penis, that was all – kneeling before the man you love and taking it into your mouth.’
She looked at Donald’s small, childish mouth and wondered how he could get it inside. She remembered a night when she had been so frenzied with Pierre’s caresses that she had enveloped his penis and balls and hair in her two hands with a kind of gluttony. She had wanted to take it into her mouth, something she had never wanted to do to anyone before, and he had not let her because he liked it so much inside of her womb, and wanted it there for good.
And now she could see so vividly a huge penis – Miguel’s blond penis, perhaps, entering Donald’s small child’s mouth.