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By Root 589 0

me when we meet and she knows. To make love she takes so much time. She locks one up in some marvelous place – it must be a marvelous place first of all, she says. Once we were driven to use a hotel room, because Mary was staying in her apartment. The lamp was too strong. She covered it with her underwear. She makes love to the breasts first. We stay for hours merely kissing. She waits until we are drunk with kissing. She wants all our clothes removed, and then we lie glued together, rolling over each other, still kissing. She sits over me as if she were on horseback and then moves against me, rubbing. She does not let me come for a long time. Until it becomes excruciating. Such long, drawn-out lovemaking, Elena. It leaves you tingling, it leaves you wanting more.’

After a while she added, ‘We talked about you. She wanted to know about your love life. I told her you were obsessed with Pierre.’

‘What did she say?’

‘She said she had never known Pierre to be anything but the lover of women like the prostitute Bijou.’

‘Pierre loved Bijou?’

‘Oh, for a few days.’

The image of Pierre making love to the celebrated Bijou effaced the image of Leila making love to Kay. It was a day of jealousies. Was love to become one long train of jealousies?

Every day Kay brought new details. Elena could not refuse to hear them. All through them, she hated Kay’s femininity and she loved Leila’s masculinity. She divined Leila’s struggle to be fulfilled and her defeat. She saw Leila donning her man’s silk shirt and silver cuff links. She wanted to ask Kay what her underwear was like. She wanted to see Leila dressing.

It seemed to Elena that, just as the passive homosexual male became a caricature of a woman for the active male homosexual, women who submitted to dominant Lesbian love became a caricature of women’s pettiest qualities. Kay was showing this, exaggerating her whims – loving herself through Leila, really. Tormenting Leila, too, as she would not have dared torment a man. Feeling that the woman in Leila would be indulgent.

Elena was sure that Leila was suffering from the mediocrity of the women she could make love to. The relationship could never be magnificent enough, with its taint of infantilism. Kay would arrive, eating candy out of her pocket like a schoolgirl. She pouted. She hesitated at a restaurant before ordering, and then changed her order, to play the cabotine, the woman with irresistible caprices. Soon Elena began to elude her. She began to understand the tragedy behind all Leila’s affairs. Leila had acquired a new sex by growing beyond man and woman. She thought of Leila as a mythic figure, enlarged, magnified. Leila haunted her.

Led by an obscure intuition, she decided to go to an English tearoom above a book shop on the Rue de Rivoli, where homosexuals and Lesbians liked to congregate. They sat in separate groups. Solitary middle-aged men looked for young boys; mature Lesbians were seeking young women. The light was dim, the tea fragrant, the cake properly decadent.

As Elena entered she saw Miguel and Donald sitting together and joined them. Donald was intent upon his whore role. He liked to show Miguel how he could attract men, how he could easily be paid for his favors. He was excited because a gray-haired Englishman of great distinction, a man who was known to pay sumptuously for his pleasures, stared at him. Donald spread his charms before him, giving oblique glances like the glances of a woman behind a veil. Miguel was half-angry. He said, ‘If you only knew what this man requires of his boys, you would stop flirting with him.’

‘What?’ asked Donald, with a morbid curiosity.

‘Do you really want me to tell you?’

‘Yes. I want to know.’

‘He only wants boys to lie under him while he crouches over their faces, and covers their face with – you can guess what.’

Donald made a grimace and looked at the gray-haired man.

He could hardly believe this, seeing the man’s aristocratic bearing, the fineness of his features. Seeing how delicately he held his cigarette holder, the dreamy and romantic expression of his eyes.